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Yale Center for British Art and British Studies

Lord Leighton's Addresses

Addresses
Delivered to the Students
of
The Royal Academy
By the late
Lord Leighton

Second Edition

London
Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner Gf Co. Ltd.
Paternoster House, Charing Cross Road
1897

PREFACE
I REGRET the inconvenience to which the readers
of this book have been exposed by its appearance
in the first edition without any guide to its con
tents ; and I trust they will believe that the
omission has been due to no carelessness on my
part, but to an honest desire to efface myself in
the publication. I knew that the Addresses,
whatever fault they might have, had been very
carefully prepared ; they represented my brother's.
best thought and most conscientious endeavour ;
each complete in itself, they formed together a
harmonious whole ; they seemed to need no intro
duction or explanation. I, as my sister also,
regarded the prospective volume as simply a
reprint, not justifying the intrusion of an editor,
least of all one so incompetent as myself to deal
with the subject-matter of the work ; our pub
lishers kindly assented to my wish that no addition
to it should be made which called for the introduc
tion of my name. It was a mistaken humility ;,
for the lectures, reprinted so long after their first
appearance, were the lifeless copy of a once living
thing. The ring of a human voice had gone from

vi PREFACE
them. They still held its echo for those who had
heard or felt it. For the larger public, which first
knew them in their posthumous form, they could
only be a silent document, the contents of which
must, by the usual editorial methods, be made to
speak for themselves. This would have been
more effectually done in the first printing of the
book ; but I trust the most necessary help has
now been supplied.
The diffidence with which I approached my
brother's work naturally inspired me with an
earnest wish to leave the text as far as possible
untouched. When a kind friend, Mrs. Courtenay
Bell, undertook to relieve my then overtaxed
eyesight by passing the collected Addresses
through the press, we agreed that they should be
subjected to no correction of which we could not
be quite sure that the author himself would have
made it. I ventured to recast one or two un
usually lengthy passages ; the whole had been
insufficiently, I need hardly say, never wrongly
punctuated ; a few slight verbal improvements
were required. The process has been repeated,
though sparingly, since my recent more responsible
study of the book. 1 believe that neither the first
revision nor the second will have resulted in any
conspicuous change. But it is difficult to limit
what my brother might have done if he had lived
to re-edit his discourses for the new literary
conditions in which they were to appear ; for they
were originally intended to be heard rather than

PREFACE vii
read ; and though his public always included many
readers, he unconsciously submitted their require
ments to the test of his own voice and ear. When
Mrs. Bell remarked to me on his scanty employ
ment of stops, she added, "Your brother must have
relied largely on tone values." The reliance on
" tone values " or vocal expression was also, I am
convinced, answerable for the tendency to verbal
exuberance, the occasional lengthiness and invo
lution of phrase, so foreign to his known habit of
speech and writing, which have been charged
against the work. The fault was primarily due to
excess of material : to the mass of emotionalised
thought and fact which had gathered round his
subject during its period of incubation, and which
was still too much part of himself to be quite
amenable to literary form. He would have handled
it more freely if the contents of his MS. had been
brought before him in the extraneous character of
a proof; but he did not see them in proof; and as
he conscientiously read and re-read (curtailing and
correcting wherever the necessity struck him), his
faults of construction effaced themselves. His
own expression, his own values, increasingly
imposed themselves on the words, and deceived
his literary sense for the time being.
He was not free from misgiving in regard to
the substance of the discourses. On this point
his judgment never misled him. He could not be
blind to the exceptional merits of his work, but he
knew they were not of a nature to command

viii PREFACE
general interest and appreciation. He often feared
that what he had to say was beyond the immediate
grasp of the students to whom it was addressed ;
and if this did not impel him to change his course,
it was because no other way was open to him.
His intellectual conception of the subject with
which he dealt, his emotional attitude towards it,
alike rendered a less serious treatment impossible.
The didactic quality inevitably present in the
lectures may justify me in alluding to a touching
characteristic of my brother's nature which,
prominent though it was, cannot have been very
widely known. The admonitions contained in
the book before us deal rather with the motives
than with the methods of art, and have little direct
bearing on the question of artistic execution ; but
wherever Frederic Leighton directly taught, he
was qualified to do so by his persistent attitude as
a learner. His great gifts were equalled by his
humility. I am not writing a chapter of remini
scences, and will not multiply proofs of what
constitutes the truth of this assertion : his habitual
depreciation of his own work, his patience under
criticism or disparagement of it by others. One
short phrase, spoken on his deathbed, resumes
them all. He had often, in earlier years, expressed
his dread of unconscious artistic deterioration, of
the unconscious failing of sight and judgment
which the work of older artists too often reveals ;
and had been comforted during his last working
days by the assurance of some of his colleagues

PREFACE ix
that the pictures then on his easels were as
powerful as anything he had yet produced, that
they showed signs of improvement rather than of
decline. There was a moment in the course of
his last brief illness in which he was led to believe
that a favourable crisis had taken place, and that
life with renewed health was returning to him.
He had much to live for : affection, friendship,
and worldly honours of that best kind which means
the recognition of worth. The fancied reprieve
was welcome. But the one boon involved in it in
regard to which he claimed our sympathy was the
restored opportunity for improved work. "Would
it not,'' he exclaimed, " have been a pity, if I had
had to die just when I was going to paint
better ? "
This modest estimate of himself had its natural
counterpart in the often admiring and always
ungrudging sympathy which he gave to the work
of others. He welcomed every evidence of
vitality in art, every expression of individual
artistic impulse, however alien it might be to the
character of his own genius. The wide justice
thus combined with passionate personal preposses
sions formed an essential attribute of his art life,
and no quality perhaps of Leighton's richly
endowed nature impressed itself so strongly on
his official career.
In departing from the merely personal apology
or explanation which this preface required, I have
not addressed myself to the narrower public to

X PREFACE
whom my brother was personally known. Within
its social, literary, and artistic circles, both he and
his performance have been weighed and measured,
sometimes with scant justice, more often, I believe,
with true and generous appreciation. In regard
to these, my testimony is belated, and may easily
be considered superfluous. But I trust the
Addresses are finding many readers to whom their
author was little more than a name ; and if a
word of mine can bring the man as he lived and
worked but one step nearer to their retrospective
knowledge and sympathy, it will surely have its
excuse. A. ORR.
March 1897.

CONTENTS

Address, December ioth, 1879
The Position of Art in the World, 3. The Artistic Spirit, its
Vicissitudes, 4-5. The Evolution of Art : Architecture, Sculp
ture, Painting, 6-7. Perplexities of the Modern Student of Art,
10. Ephemeral Character of Successive Artistic Forms, 10.
Permanence of Underlying Artistic Motive, 13. Emotional
Origin of Art : its varied Appeals to Esthetic Sensibility, 14.
Man its Central Interest and Inspiration, 16-20. Personal
Temperament the ControlUng Medium of Artistic Emotion
and its Reproduction, ao. Individuality the Stamp of Genuine
Art, 21. The Importance of Discipline, 23. Summary, 25-28.
Sincerity the First Condition of Artistic greatness, 33.

Address, December ioth, 1881
Relation of Art to Morals and Religion, 37-38. Importance of its
Just Appreciation, 38. Its Special Prominence for the Eng
Ush Mind, 38-39. Ethical or Didactic Theory of Art, 39-40.
.Esthetic Theory of Art: its Erroneous Application, 41-42.
Didactic Theory Examined by the Light of History : Resulting
Evidence Unfavourable, 4-2-52. Further Disproof supplied by
Music, 53-54. The Language of Art not the appointed
vehicle of Abstract Moral Truths, 55. The Emotions its
Proper Sphere, 56. Its MoraUty to be sought in the associa
tion -with Ethic and Intellectual Suggestion, and in the Ethical
Tone of the Artist, 56-60, Summary, 60-62.

CONTENTS

Address, December ioth, 1883
Relation of Art to Time, Place and Racial Conditions ; Under
lying mystery of its Growth and Decay, 65-69. Increasing
Complexity of Formative Influences ; their most simple illus
tration suppUed by the Art of Ancient Egypt, 69-70. The
Egyptian People ; effect on it of Soil and CUmate ; its Piety ;
its Consciousness of Strength ; its Turanian Inertness and
Tenacity ; corresponding quahties of its Sculpture and Archi
tecture, 70-76. Egyptian Painting, 76-77. Art in Chaldea
and Assyria; non-Semitic attitude of their Peoples towards
Art ; Religious Temper of the Chaldeans ; its traces in their
Art; WarUke Character of the Assyrians; their Passion for
the chase and love of Splendour ; Palatial Character of their
Architecture, 78-82. Mode of Decoration ; Skill in the Repre
sentation of wild beasts ; Building Materials, 82-84. Observa
tory Temples, 85. Artistic Inheritance of the East gathered
up in the Art of Greece ; Oriental Inertness contrasted with
Greek Vitality, 85-86. Outline of Early History of the Country,
86-87. Assyrian and Egyptian influences in its earliest build
ing Art, 97-98. Aryan Ideal of Human Form, 89. Influence
on Greek character of Scenery and Climate, 89-90. Worship
of Natural Forces ; Deification of Human Life, 90. Develop
ment of the Individual in the Greek State ; its Union of Intel
lectual and Physical Training, 92. Greek Sculpture especiaUy
favoured by the Conditions of National Life ; its Embodi
ment of the highest qualities of the Greek Mind, 92. Greek
Painting, 93. Simplicity and Truth of Greek Art recom
mended to the Emulation of Students, 93.

Address, December ioth, iSS.s
Summary of Foregoing Lecture, 97-98. The Phcenicians, 99.
Art in Ancient Italy ; the Etruscans ; various theories of their
Origin, loo-ioi . Racial type difficult to reconstruct from their
Art ; Constant presence or influence of Greek workmanship
in their Painting, 101-104 ; National Temperament plainly
stamped on ReUgion, Language, and Native Art; their Un-
couthness and Gloom aUied to weird Magnificence of Concep
tion ; Decay of Virility under Roman Conquest ; finer Artistic

CONTENTS xiii
quaUty evidenced in Etruscan Goldsmiths' work ; Skill of the
Etruscans as building engineers, 104-112. Art of Rome ; its
close relation to the National Temper ; Kinship and Contrast
between the Peoples of Greece and Rome, 112-114. The
Intellect of Rome ; Subjection of the Individual to the State ;
Religion ; Ethical Tone ; Spirit of self-sacrifice nourished by
War, 1 14-1 17. Concomitant literary barrenness; Contempt
for the Drama, 118-120. Etruscan influence in Art and In
dustry, 120-122. Hellenising of Rome through the Conquest of
Syracuse, 122-123. Rich Results in Literature, but real or
affected indifference to Art, 122-125. Conditions of Ideal
Sculpture entirely wanting ; no authentic Remains of Painting
extant ; Roman Genius favourable to Art in two directions
only ; Impulse in either case Ethical rather than .^Esthetic ;
Portraiture ; Architecture ; Contrast of Roman Architecture
with that of Greece, 126-130. Corrupting effects of Luxury on
Life and Art, 131.

Address, December ioth, 1887
Art in Mediasval and Modern Italy ; Tuscany ; the Renaissance ;
Ancient Attitude towards Art maintained in Etruria and
Rome ; continued double current in Tuscan Art, 136-139.
Unequal distribution of the Artistic Gift ; Venice, Genoa, the
two SicUies, 140-141. Revolution in Art effected by Christ
ianity ; its hostility to old Greek Ideals ; causes of reaction
against it ; its survival in the Doctrine of Human Sympathy,
141-145. Rise of the Italian Republics ; Florence ; affinity
between Florentines and Athenians ; Creative and Assimila
tive movements leading up to the Renaissance ; Lorenzo the
Magnificent, 145-150. Character of the Renaissance; its
double inspiration; Dante, Petrarch, Boccacio, the Humanists,
150-157. The influence of the Renaissance on Art ; Transi
tional periods ; Cimabue, Giotto ; Sense of Expressiveness in
form ; Ignorance of the facts of Nature ; reaction against this
Ignorance; Scientific Spirit introduced into the Arts; new
delight in Landscape, 157-162. Modification of subject matter ;
mingUng in Art of Pagan and Christian inspiration ; Poliziano,
BotticelU, 162-163. Scientific and Classic Spirit of the Re
naissance illustrated by Leonardo, Raphael, Michael Angelo,
165-168. Benvenuto Cellini, the last embodiment of Florentine

xiv CONTENTS
Genius ; Migration of Art to Venice, i68. Corrupting effect of
the new Classic Spirit in ItaUan Literature ; Disintegration of
Faith and Morality, 168-170. Exceptions to this rule, 170-
171. Sustained Purity of Tuscan Art ; Salutary influence of
the Study of Nature, 171-172. Tuscan Art, like that of
Greece, the Purest Image of the Spirit of the People, 172.

Address, December ioth, 1889
Relation of Artistic Production to Surrounding Conditions con
sidered in reference to Spain ; Composition of its People ;
OutUne of its Early History, 175-177. Invasion by the Moors ;
Prolonged Struggle for their Expulsion ; Growth of National
Self-consciousness; Civilizing influences of Arab rule, 177-181.
Respective Characteristics of Castilian and Catalan ; Contrast
of CastiUan and Andalusian, 181-183. Crusading Spirit ofthe
Castilian; Catholic Orthodoxy identified with Patriotism,
Poetry, and Art ; Idealism; Realism; Strong Dramatic Sense ;
Element of Humour, 184-188. Correspondence of Spanish
Art with its Literature ; its Ethical Character and Absence of
iEsthetic Ideals ; its Imported Elements ; Lack of Fusion ;.
Exceptional Initiative of Diego Velasquez, 188-190. Architec
ture ; Foreign Influences ; that of France predominant until the
sixteenth century ; Lack of Originating Impulse ; Exceptions
to be found in Local Developments of the Gothic style ; its
Constructive Spirit more firmly grasped in Spain than in
Italy, 190-194. Early Simphcity of Spanish Churches ; subse
quent Excess in Ornamentation ; Retablos and Rejas ; Splendour
relieved by Artificial Gloom, 194-196. Effect of the Renais
sance ; Confusion of Classic and Gothic styles ; Rococo, 197—
198. Sculpture ; its Realism ; Dramatic Spirit ; Expression
of the Grotesque ; its Development through the Retablos, 198-
203. Painting ; Obscurity of its History up to the close of the
eighteenth century ; the Flemish School, its Merits ; French
and Italian influences ; Blighting Effects of the Renaissance ;
Comparison of Spanish with Italian Art, 203-210. Intermit
tent Revival of Spanish Genius ; the elder Herrera, MuriUo ;
its complete embodiment in Zurbaran ; more limited expres
sion in Diego Velasquez, 203-210. Superiority of Velasquez
as a Painter; his lack of Poetic Feeling; Moral QuaUties;.
bis sacrifice of Art to the pursuit of Royal Favour, 210-215.

CONTENTS XV
Address, December ioth, 1891
The Art of France ; its Uninterrupted Development ; its Wide
Field ; Eminent achievement in Architecture ; the Gothic style,.
219-222. Keltic Races in France : Absorption into the Roman
Empire ; final Frankish occupation ; Clovis ; Prankish Ele
ment infused into Gallic stock ; Characteristics of the Gaul,
222-226. Awakening of Architecture through Charlemagne ;
Venetian influences ; Its vigorous promotion by the Benedic
tine Orders, 227-229. Modification of the BasiUca for
Christian Use ; Romanesque style ; Evolution of the Gothic
principle ; its systematic application by Suger, Abbot of Saint-
Denis, 230-233. Great Cathedrals in France ; sense of Decora
tive Effect ; Love of perpendicular Parallelism ; gradual sup
pression of the Wall ; increasing importance of Stained Glass ;
Effacement of Horizontal Line illustrated by the Cathedral of
Clermont-Ferrand ; wealth of Carving, 234-240. Encroach
ment of Mathematics on Art ; Choir of Beauvais ; Attenuation
of Structure ; Saint-Urbain at Troyes ; the " Flamboyant "
in exterior decoration ; Adoption of the Circular East-end,
240-244. The Renaissance ; French kings in Italy ; Italian
Architecture moulded by French Genius ; Church building
superseded by that of Palaces ; some noted French architects ;
Conservative attitude of Bourgeoisie and Church, 244-250.
Conflict between Classic Orders and Gothic Forms ; Decoration
in Relief; Jean Goujon, Germain Pilon ; "Ordre Colossal,"
Jean BuUant ; "Ordre Frangais,'' Philibert de I'Orme; De
cline of Art during the reign of Louis XIV. ; Pomp and Artifi-
ciaUty, 250-254. Retrospect of Sculpture and Painting ; per
nicious Italian influence ; Primaticcio and others ; Enamelling;
Glass-painting; keen Sensitiveness to effects of Colour; Pot
tery; Palissy, H^lfene de Hangest, 254-259. Revulsion of Taste
after the Death of Louis XIV. ; Watteau, 260-262. Gothic
Forms unsuitable to Modern Life ; the Gothic spirit worthy of
Emulation, 262. Address, December 9TH, 1893
The Art of Germany ; its high QuaUties ; deficient .^Esthetic In
spiration, 266-267. Character of the German people ; its in
fluence on their Artistic Development, 268-269. Charlemagne ;;

xvi CONTENTS
his Artistic Initiative ; Maturing of National Style in Architec
ture at the period of the Hohenstaufdn ; German Romanesque ;
its Beauties and Defects; Apostel-kirche in Cologne, 269-275.
French ascendency ; Importation of Gothic Art ; Erroneous
conception of that Art as indigenous to Germany ; E-vidences
of its e'xtraneous character ; Incongruities and excesses, in
creased by the Secularisation of Architecture; Sebaldus
Kirche at Nuremberg; Cathedral of Augsburg ; Rothenburg ;
St. Leonard's Church, Frankfort, 275-282. Some favourable
examples of German Gothic ; St. Lorenz at Nuremberg ;
Cathedral of Strasburg ; the Cathedral at Cologne ; its Con
struction, a triumph of Intellect rather than of Art, 282-285.
Brick Architecture in the Northern Provinces, 285-286. Per
sistence of the Gothic style in Germany; its causes; Civic
character of German Renaissance Architecture ; its Splendour,
its Picturesqueness ; continued Lawlessness of Fancy ; Artistic
adornment of private houses, 286-292. German Sculpture, its
Ethic Qualities and ^Esthetic Defects; Carving in Ivory ; use of
Bronze. Doors of the Dom at Hildesheim ; Sculpture of Stras
burg and Bamberg Cathedrals ; reaction of Sculpture against
the Restraints of Architecture ; its occasional Redemption by
Men of Genius ; Adam Kraft ; Veit-Stoss, 292-299. Higher
levels reached in Painting; its large employment in Mural
Decoration of Romanesque Churches ; Phases of Easel
Painting; the Rhenish School; Schools of Franconia and
Swabia ; Albert Diirer, Holbein, 299-307. Striking Produc
tiveness in the Minor Arts. Skill in Design appUed to objects
of household use ; characteristic profusion and beauty of Iron
Work. Paralysis of Art life during the Thirty-years' War,
307-309.

Address, December ioth, 1879

POSITION OF ART IN THE WORLD

Students of the Royal Academy,
Addressing you for the first time, at some
length, on the threshold of those relations which
my office establishes between us, and which a
deep and sympathetic interest in your artistic
growth and welfare makes especially weighty in
my eyes, I am impelled to set aside, for once at
least, all purely practical and technical matters,
and to ask you, rather to look with me for a
moment into a wider and deeper question — that
of the position of Art in its relation to the world
at large in the present and in the past time, that
we may gather if possible from this survey some
thing of its prospects in the future.
I wish in so doing to seek with you the solu
tion of certain perplexities and doubts which will
often, in these days of restless self-questioning
in which we live, arise in the minds and weigh
on the hearts of students who think as well as
work. These perplexities, which few are fortunate
enough wholly to escape, arise sooner in some
and later in other organisations, and present them
selves only at a certain stage of advancement in

4 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
the artist's mental development ; for the gift of
artistic production manifests itself in the young in
an impulse so spontaneous and so imperative, and
is in its origin so wholly emotional and indepen
dent of the action of the intellect, that it at first,
and for some time, entirely absorbs their energies.
The student's first steps on the bright paths of his
working life are obscured by no shadows save
those cast by the difficulties of a technical nature
which lie before him ; and these difficulties, which,
indeed, he only half discerns, serve rather to whet
his appetite than to hamper or discourage him,
for his heart whispers that when he shall have
brushed them aside the road will be clear before
him, and the utterance of what he feels stirring
within him will be from thenceforward one long
unchecked delight. This spirit of spontaneous,
unquestioning rejoicing in production, which is
still the privilege of youth, and which, even now,
the very strong sometimes carry with them through
their lives, was, indeed, when Art herself was in
her prime, the normal and constant condition of
the artistic temper, and shone out in all artistic
work. It is this spirit which gave a perennial
freshness to Athenian Art— the serenest and most
spontaneous men have ever seen. And when
again, after many centuries, another Art was born
out of the night of the Dark Ages, and shed its
gentle light over the chaos of society, this spirit
once more burst through it into flame. All forms
of Art were alike fired with it. Architecture first.

i879 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 5
exulting in new flights of vigorous and bold crea
tion ; then Sculpture ; last Painting, virtually a
new Art, looked out on to the world with the
wondering delight of a child, timidly at first, but
soon to fill it with the bright expression of its joy.
Those were halcyon days; the questions "Why
do I paint ? " " Why do I model ? " " Why should
I build beautifully ? " " What— how shall I build,
model, paint ? " had no existence in the mind of
the artist. "Why," he might have answered,
" does the lark soar and sing ? "
We need not follow the vicissitudes of this
spirit, which, born anew in every true artist, ever
fights hard for its life ; it is enough to say that in
the days in which we live it is subjected to an
ordeal of which it knew nothing in the past ; the
questioning spirit is now abroad, it asserts itself
on all sides, and is paramount ; it leaves nothing
unassailed, takes nothing for granted, calls every
belief to account, casts everything into the balance.
I will not complain that this is so, for, of a cer
tainty, whatever deserves to live will survive the
ordeal ; but the present result is this, that uncon
scious work has become and will be henceforth all
but impossible ; the critical intelligence stands by
the imagination at her work, and Fancy no longer
walks alone. We are the children of our time, we
breathe perforce the intellectual atmosphere in
which we move, we could not if we would close
our hearts to the questions which arise within us ;
they force themselves upon us, we must face them,

6 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
we must seek to answer them ; and so at some
period of our lives most of us will be led to ask
themselves, "What is Art in the world? is it a
lasting, living thing, or is it an ephemeral appari
tion ? has it still power of growth within it, and
capability of further expansion ? or has it reached,
already, its full and final developments ? If it has
power of growth, what form may we expect that
growth to take ? "
These queries, indeed, meet us at every turn
when we meditate on the past history of civilisa
tion ; they meet us when we compare the growth
and steady evolution of Art in the periods of its
greatness with the eclectic instability and indefi-
niteness of purpose of our own day ; they meet us
when we consider the circumstances and surround
ing conditions, material and intellectual, in the
midst of which it grew and throve, noting the
impulse and the impress imparted to it by those
circumstances, and then compare them with the
atmosphere in which it fights for life in the present
time. Let us take one or two illustrations of these
points drawn from the several Arts.
In Architecture we find the most striking ex
ample of organic evolution in the outcome of that
mighty wave of energy which in the Middle Ages
swept over the greater part of Europe, by the
agency of the Germanic races, and through which
certain principles, sesthetic and scientific, worked
out their development, with such variations as

i879 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 7
varying external conditions determined, but with
a logical force and a central continuity of purpose
wholly unrivalled.
In Sculpture the most memorable evolution is
that which the fifth century saw in Greece. Greek
Sculpture, indeed, was so dazzlingly swift and so
suddenly triumphant in its eclosion that we are
apt to think of it as having risen like the sun full-
orbed and supreme out of the antecedent dark
ness ; but this is not so, the growing process,
though prodigiously rapid, is yet distinctly to be
followed. The difference between the rigid war
rior carved on the monumental stele which bears
the name of Aristocles, and the godlike forms
which on the eastern pediment of the Parthenon
once caught the first flush of morning over the
shoulder of Hymettus, is greater than that which
separates the works of the early Tuscan sculptors
from the Moses of Michael Angelo; it is also more
startling because the period within which they
were produced was infinitely shorter; nevertheless,
the evidences of gradual progression are plainly
visible, and its tide marks are to be traced in
monuments of its successive stages.
The evolution of Painting in Italy was as spon
taneous and consistent as that of Architecture in
Central Europe and England, and it is, if not
richer or more multiform, at least more striking
in its many-sidedness on account of the close
proximity to one another in which we see its
various offshoots rise, expand, and reach to full

8 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
maturity ; and this proximity brings vividly before
us an instance of that influence on the develop
ment of Art of surrounding conditions at which I
have already hinted ; for if we are impressed with
the continuous evolution of the School — an evolu
tion which we pursue in singular fulness of grada
tion, from Giotto and his followers, through the
quattro-centisti and the forerunner Leonardo, to
the triumphant days of Raphael, Titian, and
Correggio — we are not less struck and fascinated
by the varieties of local flavour and distinctive
characteristics which enrich and diversify it. In
all the chief artistic centres of Italy we find Art
in its growth ever taking its mould from the
local characteristics of the race, and everywhere
these characteristics demanding expression in the
form of Art. In Venice, for example, we see
the strenuous fervour of the people, its keen and
peculiar sense of Beauty, its pride of power, its
love of splendour, finding due expression in the
works of its great masters, from Carpaccio to
Titian. But it is, perhaps, in Tuscany, and
notably in Florence, that we see the national
temperament most clearly declared in its Art, as
indeed in all its intellectual productions ; here we
see that strange mixture of Attic subtlety and
exquisiteness of taste, with a sombre fervour and
a rude Pelasgic strength which marks the Tuscans,
sending forth a Dante, a Brunellesco, and a
Michael Angelo — a Fiesole, a Boccaccio, and a
Botticelli, and we find that eagerness in the pur-

i879 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 9
suit of the knowledge of men and things which
was so characteristic of them, summed up in a
Macchiavelli and a Leonardo da Vinci.
I need not further follow this connection, which
may be traced in every country and age in which
the Arts have flourished, and which is, of course,
as constant in Architecture and Sculpture as in
Painting ; enough has been said to illustrate the
second fact which is manifest to the student who
turns his thoughts to ancient Art, namely, that
whilst its growth has always been organic and
continuous, it has also been in harmony with the
ethical, the intellectual, and the sesthetic charac
teristics of the societies in the midst of which it
arose ; and that it was therefore homogeneous and
sincere, treading in security on definite paths,
ministering, as a matter of course, to a love of
the beautiful and the stately which was instinctive
and universal.
But when the student, awakening from the
contemplation of an Art growing a mighty
growth in a genial soil and a favouring atmo
sphere, turns to the days and places in which his
lot is cast, how different a spectacle is revealed
to him ; the whole current of human life setting
resolutely in a direction opposed to artistic pro
duction ; no love of beauty, no sense of the
outward dignity and comeliness of things calling
on the part of the public for expression at his
hands, and, as a corollary, no dignity, no comeli
ness, for the most part, in their outward aspect ;

IO ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
everywhere a narrow utilitarianism which does
not include the gratification of the artistic sense
amongst things useful ; the works of artists
sought for indeed but too often as a profitable
merchandise or a vehicle of speculation, too often
on grounds wholly foreign to their intrinsic worth
as productions of a distinctive form of human
genius with laws and conditions of its own. All
this he sees, and a chilling doubt may well
sometimes creep to his heart whether he has in
modern society a lawful place, a meaning, and a
justification. That in such an absence of directing current
in the general mind that definiteness of flow and
harmony of onward impulse which he noted in
ancient Art should not be evident does not
surprise him. But if, thus thrown on his own
resources and trusting to his own strength, he
seeks to shape for himself a course along the sure
paths of tradition, fresh perplexities await him,
for he becomes aware that every one of the great
productive bursts of energy which have borne
such noble fruit in the past has, on reaching a
given point, shown signs of being spent ; it had
touched the full height of its power of expansion,
its supreme expression had been found, and as
if to show that its mission was achieved, collapse,
atrophy, and decay, more or less complete, swiftly
followed, after living force hollow pedantry, pre
tentious mannerism — then the end.
Yet more bewildering to the student than this

i879 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES ii
reflection — for, indeed, the notion of decay finds
slow and difficult access to the minds of the
young — is the infinite variety of examples which
Time has set before him. The fortunate but
bewildered heir to a boundless inheritance of
artistic treasure, he finds himself frequently in
the presence, almost at the same moment, of
various works, each of high excellence, all bear
ing the impress of genius, and yet wholly different
one from the other in the manner of their excel
lence, each apparently preaching to him a different
doctrine and beckoning to him in a different direc
tion. He will see on the same day a work by
Phidias and a work by Michael Angelo — a por
tion of the Parthenon and a fragment from Lincoln
Cathedral — a canvas signed by Titian and one
from the hand of Albert Diirer — a Rembrandt,
and a Masaccio ; all noble works, yet all how
different ! Whom then shall he follow ? whom
out of so many giants shall he propose to himself
as his model ?
But with this question a further misgiving mixes
itself, and he is forced to ask himself whether the
great masters of old, if they could live again in
our day, would not produce works in many ways
different from those which they have left us, and
whether to follow them in the letter would not be
to wander from them in the spirit.
If he then turns for light to contemporary Art
he is again, and finally, baffled ; for whilst, in the
past, he saw wide differences between school and

12 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
school, between age and age, he finds in his own
time all these divergences asserting themselves
side by side and simultaneously in each several
country ; brilliant gifts he sees, indeed, in his
own and in foreign lands, but cohesion, consent,
or concurrence of effort, none either here or there.
Let us, before going further, just sum up in a
few words these various stumbling-blocks, partly
theoretical and partly practical, which I have
shown you standing on the paths of the inquiring
student. They are as follows : the apparent
absence in the present day first of that inner
organic growth, and secondly of those fostering
outward conditions which are seen in and around
Art in the old times ; then the perplexing col
lapse of the several exhibitions of artistic force
successively put forth in the past ; both circum
stances leading to the question how far Art, torn
from the parent stem of continuous tradition, can
survive otherwise than spasmodically ; and lastly,
the doubt, how in the conflict of counsel and high
example he shall find guidance for himself. The
first two of these considerations connect them
selves, as we said, with that fundamental question
to which 1 alluded at the outset : Is Art an
ephemeral thing, a mere passing flower of the
human intellect, or is it fed by constant deep-
lying forces, from the stability of which we may
expect new forms of development ? And the last
of them suggests this further inquiry : Does not
some common bond underlie all genuine manifes-

i879 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 13
tations of artistic excellence, however diverse in
their specific form ?
To the first of these questions we shall, I think,
presently see the answer to be this : That Art is
fed by forces which lie in the depths of our nature
and which are as old as man himself; of which
therefore we need not doubt the durability ; and
to the question whether Art, with all its blossoms,
has not one root, the answer we shall see to be :
Assuredly it has ; for its outward modes of expres
sion are many and various, but its underlying
vital motives are the same.
The level sapphire in which I have seen a
Greek fisherman's boat mirror its amber sides is
not more unlike the blue anger of the Atlantic
chafed by the storm, or the dim grey of the wash
that laps the shores of the Zuyder Zee, than the
pure Elysium of Beato Angelico is unlike the
Hell of Michael Angelo or the placid home-scenes
of the Dutch ; yet they are but moods and changes
of the great deep that flows for ever about the
skirts of our habitable earth.
In order to test the soundness of these asser
tions we must for a moment look beyond the
creations of artistic genius themselves, and inquire
into the sources of our delight in them. Now,
what are these sources ? Primarily the source of
all Art whatsoever — of Poetry, of Music, of
Architecture (as distinct from building), of
Painting, of Sculpture, and I might add of
Dancing, once intimately allied with and in-

14 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
separable from Poetry as well as from Music — is
the consciousness of emotion in the presence of
the phenomena of Life and Nature. This con
scious emotion, this momentary intensification of
life it was which, seeking for a vent either through
some direct form of personal utterance, ejaculation,
or movement of the body, or through the endea
vour to imitate the object which aroused it, called
Art into existence ; for Art is based on the desire
to express and the power to kindle in others
emotion astir in the artist, and latent in those to
whom he addresses himself
The channels through which the several Arts
gain access to our feelings are various : — Poetry
and Music, twinborn sisters and long undivided,
play on a sense of rhythm and melody universal
in men. Painting and Sculpture appeal to other
sides of our sesthetic sensibility : the perception of
Form and Colour, which latter has in its action
upon us much in common with melody, of propor
tion, which is to intervals of space what rhythm
is to intervals of time, and of light and shade.
Architecture, whilst playing upon the same per
ceptions as Painting and Sculpture, differs from
them and from Literature, and is, on the other
hand, akin to Music in this, that her instrument is
not, except when she allies herself with Sculpture,
the direct imitation or reproduction of outward
facts. Let us confine our attention to the Arts which
more especially concern ourselves.

1879 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 15
On the antiquity of the impulse to express
delight in visible objects by direct imitation of
their forms, it is needless to insist, the prehistoric
cave-bones are there to witness to it. The more
abstract pleasure in form and colour, for their own
sakes and independently of imitation, is no less
ancient. Man, as far back as we can trace his
habits, has found satisfaction in covering his body,
his abode, his garments, his weapons, his utensils,
with arrangements of colour and form which,
where imitation was not attempted, could have no
significance save in the gratification arising out of
those forms and colours in themselves, or out of
their combinations. The blind, untutored instinct
which found satisfaction in these rude adornments
is the first dawn of that conscious and now highly-
cultivated sensibility on which Art in its highest
development plays as upon an instrument. This
is not the moment to consider specially, nor is it
necessary in addressing a body of artists, to insist
on the numerous phenomena through which this
sensibility is aroused ; but in estimating its range
we must bear in mind that its activity is im
measurably heightened by the operation of asso
ciated ideas working on the imagination ; through
that operation a given combination of form and
colour will convey infinitely more to us than is
contained in the simple sensation, however delight
ful, directly produced by it on our nervous system.
It is this power to excite certain sides of our
sesthetic sensibility, and not its power of imitation,

i6 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
in which the strength of our Arts regarded as a
language, lies — which enables them to stir man
kind in depths and recesses of its being wholly
inaccessible through any other channel, and to
acquaint it with joys which without them would
have no existence.
The simplest and most unmixed expression of
the dehghtfulness of abstract form in Art is found
in pure ornament of a conventional character ;
ornament, that is, from which direct imitation of
natural objects is excluded ; as, for instance, to
take its, perhaps, most beautiful exemplification, in
Arab or Persian decoration ; and those who are
familiar with this decoration will acknowledge the
charm and the fascination of its exquisite intrica
cies. The loftiest and gravest expression of this
quality is seen in Architecture, in which, con
spiring with other sources of expression such as
dimension, stability, spaciousness, nobility of
material, it lays the most powerful hold on our
imagination. In Painting, however — if we except for the
moment that branch of it of which landscape is the
subject — and in Sculpture, we find ourselves at once
face to face with another element of absorbing in
terest. In the emotion aroused by the phenomena of
life, which we said was at the root of all Art, the
central and culminating fact is our interest in Man ;
he is, and must always be, the end and the means
of whatever is greatest in the plastic Arts — as in
every Art that tells of him ; in the Art of Phidias,

1 879 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 17
in the Art of Leonardo, in the Art of Homer, in
the Art of Shakespeare.
This passionate interest, which is as warm now
as at any period of the life of mankind, and which
shows itself alike in the popularity of the Drama
and its extraordinary power to rivet and stir the
masses, and in the not less remarkable fascination
exercised by works of fiction, is a factor which
asserts itself imperatively as soon as man appears
upon the stage of Art. The sincerity and direct
ness of its expression is in Art an irresistible
charm, and suffices to us in works in which the
purely artistic quality is still feeble and unde
veloped. The most deeply impressive works are
those in which the human interest and the aesthetic
quality are most fully blended. Decay is immi
nent when the expression of this interest ceases to
be sincere, and man no longer recognises his
humanity in Art.
As far back as we find traces of the working of
men's minds we recognise this absorbing interest in
man and man's life. The earliest monuments of
Literature reveal the anthropomorphic impulse
which made men see in the planets that rule the
day and the night, beings after their own image,
and in all the phenomena of the universe — in the
waxing and waning of the year, in the procession
of the months and of the days, in the rising and
setting of the sun — scenes of a great cosmic drama,
inflamed with every human passion and not un
stained with blood.

i8 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
And this instinctive tendency to see our own
image everywhere, and to project it over all created
things still lives on, need I remind you? in the
chambers of the imagination, and expresses itself
in the form of metaphor. The poets in their
glowing imagery have never ceased to clothe
Nature and her forces in the attributes of men ; in
their language the firmament and the heavenly
bodies, the sea and its storms, the earth and the
flowers that clothe it, the revolving seasons, the
hours of the day, still assume a personality, and
the moods and passions of humanity. Hear the
Psalmist :
"The floods have lifted up their voice."
" The waters sa'w Thee; they were afraid."
And again :
" The earth sain and trembled."
Dante sees in darkness the silence oi the sun — " la
dove il sol tace!' Day, Shakespeare tells us,
"jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty moun
tain-top." To the "wild west wind" Shelley
exclaims, " Thine azure sister of the spring shall
blow her clarion o'er the dreaming earth."
Numberless similar metaphors will occur to
your minds.
But beyond this transforming activity of the
imagination there is a deeper and more intimate
sentiment which mixes with our perception of the
aspects of Nature, a sense of their direct relation
to man and of the influence on our consciousness

1879 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 19
of his presence or absence in their midst. I will
give you an instance which is probably within the
experience of you all. You have been contem
plating somewhere, far away in the falling day
light, some broad sweep of empty, uninhabited
moor, such as Mason might have loved to paint ;
you are impressed with its silent solitude, it weighs
upon you ; presently you discover in the gloom a
glimmering streak, winding towards the horizon ;
it is a path ; the footprints of men have suddenly
lit up the loneliness of the scene, a vague image of
the narrow stream of life that comes and goes
along that solitary track is stirred within you and
has quickened and greatly heightened the poetic
force of your emotions.
And as in some cases the trace of man's presence
is a source of sympathetic stirrings, so also in others
will the sense of his absence affect the imagina
tion ; inaccessible regions strike us with a vague
awe, the desolation of a once inhabited city moves
us profoundly ; and, again, when Shelley speaks
of the " Deep's untrampled floor," he lays bare one
of the sources of the impressiveness of the wide
pathless ocean.
In each of these instances, whether through his
absence or through his intervention, the haunting,
ever-present thought of Man is the underlying
fact ; and as in Poetry, so in Painting and Sculp
ture, this central importance of man is ever assert
ing itself Man's strength and beauty, his acts,
heroic or homely, his gladness and his sorrow, his

20 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
life and his death — these are the materials in which
painters and sculptors have ever found unfailing
inspiration. But human sympathy operates also in
another and a very vital manner in our apprecia
tion of Painting and of Sculpture, for in a Painting
or a Statue our enjoyment, irrespective of the
satisfaction of our purely artistic sense, is derived,
not merely from our general human sympathy,
but from the reflection in the work of the artist's
self This is a most important fact ; I should wish to
make it clear.
We saw a short time back that, in common with
all Art, Painting and Sculpture were an expression
of emotions excited in the artist by the outward
facts of nature and life. Such emotions are of a
necessity personal to the artist ; they vary in
definitely according to the infinite varieties of
artistic temperament and sensitiveness, much as
the same note will vary in richness and quality of
sound according to this or that peculiarity of make
or material in the instrument from which it is
drawn. Every emotion that reaches us through
the channels of an artist's temperament comes to
us coloured and determined by the idiosyncrasy of
that temperament, and we get the man added to
the thing. The impression produced on us is of a
sensation of which we recognise the germs within
ourselves, but which is modified and controlled by
another sensation more or less new to us, but
evidently spontaneous in the artist, who com-

1879 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 21
municates it to us, and who is thus himself re
vealed to us in his work. This is the secret of
the fascination of that work; and an ineffable
weariness seizes us in the prolonged contempla
tion of all Art which is devoid of this stamp of
personality. If we cast a glance over what of greatest
Ancient Art has left to us we shall see how uni
versally present is this source of interest.
To a superficial observer it is for obvious reasons
least strikingly evident in its manifestation in Greek
Sculpture. At Athens, where the public concern
was the care of all, and where the individual was
merged in the Athenian, and where, further, Art
dealt almost wholly with the ideal presentment of
the human body in its prime, the difference be
tween the works of one artist and those of another
would necessarily not be so abruptly marked as
that which we note in the works of artists of the
Renaissance and of the Middle Ages. Neverthe
less, the characteristics of the several Greek artists
were defined and recognised ; and we must further
remember that no shade of difference, however
subtle, escaped the unapproached and amazing
delicacy of Athenian perception.
But it is in Italy, with the dawn of the Renais
sance, that the triumph of individuality most loudly
declares itself The dignity of man — and, as a
corollary, the worth of man according to his in
dividual achievement — was the inspiring idea of
that great revulsion of humanity. This idea

22 J?OYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
asserted itself in every form of human energy, and
not least conspicuously in Art. We saw just now
that each province had its distinct artistic stamp ;
but within the broader distinction of the schools
again, what a triumphant development of the in
dividual ! I need not weary you with many
examples ; innumerable names will occur to you
in illustration of what I have said ; take any four
or five at random — Fiesole, Leonardo, Mantegna,
Michael Angelo, Raphael. How intimately we
know in all its tenderness the pure and reverent
soul of Fiesole ; how thoroughly penetrating a
personality pervades every work of Leonardo da
Vinci ; how distinctive is the sculpturesque severity
of Mantegna ; how hauntingly does the sad ascetic
soul of Michael Angelo breathe through the whole
range of his Dantesque creations ; and the chaste
serenity of the stately forms with which Raphael
filled the world in days obscured with crime and
foul with every filth, was it not indeed begotten
within his "mind's internal heaven?" Again,
turning to other countries and more recent times,
what a contrast of individualities is offered to us
within a narrow strip of land, between the re
dundant pomps and exorbitant rejoicings of
Rubens and the deep pathos which hides in the
fantastic glooms of Rembrandt's visionary world ?
Or, to come yet nearer home, what personality
was ever imparted with an effect more witching
and irresistible than that of our own countryman,
Thomas Gainsborough ? What genius was ever

1879 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 23
more spontaneous or more magnificently individual
than the genius of that other great English painter,
Joseph Mallord William Turner ? And the men
tion of this supreme name leads me to remind you
in passing that if there is no form of Art more apt
to sink into the depths of platitude and insignifi
cance, none is also more capable than landscape of
reaching the highest flights of imaginative ex
pression in the hands of a man of high poetic
personality. Here a word of caution is necessary. It might
seem at the first glance that this doctrine of
personality in Art furnishes a cloak to every
eccentricity and an allurement to egotistic display.
I would therefore ask you to understand at once
and clearly that if the impress on a work of Art of
a noble personality is its greatest charm, so the
traces of a disordered or a vulgar temperament
are wholly and fatally repellent. Indeed, a few
moments' reflection will make it evident that in
proportion to the prominence of the part played
by idiosyncrasy in Art will be the importance of
the quality and temper of that idosyncrasy ; we
demand of it that it be sincere, that it have power
to stir our aesthetic sense, to move our humanity
and to excite our imagination, and we require in it
dignity and self-control ; and without some or all
of these latter qualities the first, great as it is, will
fail to satisfy us, though it win our esteem ; as you
shall see by an illustration. If you chance upon
a work of Denner, or of Seibold — a head, say, of

24 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
an old man or woman — you will be forced to re
cognise in it certain undeniable qualities ; a
singular power of preserving general relations of
light and shade in the midst of a multitude of
microscopic details ; you will find one aspect, at
all events, of a human countenance brought before
you with extraordinary truth and accuracy — and
through all, a transparent sincerity. But you will
feel at once that the man who can cheerfully
devote absorbing care through countless hours to
the minute rendering of an undelightful network of
pockmarks and pimples has no emotions to com
municate to you that you are anxious to share ; —
you wonder — yawn — and pass on.
Again, the finest idiosyncrasy when not under
healthy self-control may affect us painfully. Take
as an illustration the case of the most powerful and
splendid artistic individuality this country has pro
duced, that of Turner, to whom I have just alluded;
it is undeniable that his stamp is set even, if pos
sible, more distinctly on his latest and most eccen
tric works than on those produced in the balanced
fulness of his powers, but we see in them the
traces of " a noble mind o'erthrown," and the most
reverent of his admirers must, sometimes, turn
away from them in sorrow.
I have not, in what I have hitherto said, touched
on the question of the ethical aspects of Art, or
asked how far the mission of the artist is, or
whether it is at all, a definitely didactic one.
This is a wide subject, and would lead me too far

i879 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 25
to-day. I may, perhaps, consider it on some future
similar occasion ; I mention it merely lest I should
seem to you to ignore it.
Meanwhile, let us pause a moment and recapi
tulate. What have we so far established ? First,
in our endeavour to trace the feeding springs of
Art, we found ourselves led back to the furthest
dawn of human existence, as far as we know any
thing of it ; we saw men rejoicing in or awed by
the phenomena of life and of nature, and seeking
to express that delight or that awe, and we saw
that the endeavour to reproduce these emotions
and to communicate them to others was the
common spring of all forms of Art ; and, further,
that the impulse to reproduce them, partly by the
direct visible imitation of outer objects and partly
by the presentment of forms and colours, or of
certain combinations of forms and colours in which
men were conscious of delighting, was the special
source of the plastic Arts ; and we noted that this
faculty of receiving emotion through the organ of
sight from certain properties of matter had received
by degrees an incalculable accretion of strength
and scope through the association of ideas and the
action of the imagination ; then we were struck by
the absorbing interest of men in their kind, and
the paramount influence it exercises over our
appreciation of all Art in which man is the prota
gonist. And we found this interest working in
two ways. We saw it giving value to a work of
Art, on the one hand as a vivid outward present-

26 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
ment of man and of his life as we know them, and
on the other as a revelation of the inward man in
the artist himself
In sum we recognised that Art was as old as
man, and that its life-springs leap from the inmost
recesses of our human nature ; and we shall there
fore confidently infer that they are perennial, and
that this ancient stream of pure and lofty joys will
not dry up or fail from us in the future.
And, secondly, we were aware that the difference
between the various aspects under which Art has
manifested itself to us is not due to the complexity
of its sources — for its stream, fed by various tribu
taries, is yet one — but simply to the fact that it is
poured out to us through innumerable channels of
varying human temperaments, and comes to us
impregnated and transformed by them ; and from
this reflection, again, we shall infer that its con
stant streams, flowing through ever new channels
of sincere artistic souls, may, and will, continue to
delight us in new and ever-varying ways.
That surrounding circumstances should always
be equally favourable to the life and growth of
Art is indeed not to be expected. At various
periods in the development of humanity the dif
ferent bents and forces of human intelligence will
assert a varying sway. Certain periods will be
favourable to artistic production, periods in which
the sesthetic sensibility will be in the ascendant,
and will, by the constant demand for what is beau
tiful, so act on and transform the outer aspect of

1879 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 27
things that they will offer more food for the artistic
temper, and richer material for it to work on.
There will be periods also in which the proclivity
of men's minds will set in other directions and the
current of progress will seek other channels,
periods in which the artist searching for beauty
will glean but in a meagre field ; such a period is
that through which we are now passing, but I
know no more striking testimony to the vitality of
Art than the fact that it was never more tenaciously
pursued than it is at present ; assuredly it was
never more needed, it never was, perhaps, so great
a boon, and the privilege of holding high the
torch in the passing darkness is one of which you
may well be proud.
But if the days on which we have fallen are un-
propitious in various ways, it would be blindness
to assert that there is not in the midst of much
and great artistic energy also some distinct artistic
current to be traced. There is, on the contrary, a
very definite current observable, and one which is
the more undeniable that it is perceptible in a
more or less degree all over Europe. It tends in
the direction of a more intimate fidelity to nature
in its outward aspects, partly through a closer
rendering of certain effects of light and atmo
sphere, and partly through a more accurate and
delicate observance of gesture and motion. This
movement has evidently great elements of good ;
it is the outcome of sincerity, and the phase of it
last alluded to indicates a nearer and more sympa-

28 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
thetic insight into human nature ; but it has also
its alloy, for an excessive absorption of the atten
tion in the most superficial aspect of things tends
to the over-development of the simply imitative
faculty, which is the lowest gift of the artist, at
the cost of his sesthetic faculty and of his imagina
tion, which are the noblest, and tends therefore
also to triviality and loss of that which gives to
Art its high place amongst the elements of
civilisation. The question, what development Art may be
expected to assume in the future, naturally con
nects itself with the foregoing considerations ; on
which point only the most general surmises are
possible to us. It seems, however, probable that
in the absence of a strong welding impulse from
without, isolated individual effort will continue to
be, as it now is, more marked than collective on
ward movement. Whether the loss of concen
trated energy in each individual school will be
compensated by a greater development of well-
balanced personalities remains to be seen. For
some time we shall no doubt find the various ten
dencies of the artistic force sharply divided. On
one end of the scale there will be men vividly im
pressed with and moved by all the facts of life, and
a powerful vitality will lend charm and light to
their works ; on the other we may expect to find
men who are more strongly affected by those
qualities in which Art is most akin to Music, and
in their works the poetry of form and colour will

i879 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 29
be thrown as a lovely garment over abstract ideas
or fabled events. Many links will no doubt con
nect these extremes, and by degrees, perhaps, a
weaving under-current will, by its silent action
throughout the world, draw them more closely to
gether, to their mutual strengthening. Realism,
no longer a thing of to-day, will confess with
gratitude the magnificent inheritance to which it
is born, and will be raised and purified by its
teaching ; Idealism will gain, perchance, in con
tact with the real a yet fuller and richer life and a
more penetrating expressional force ; and Art,
acknowledging the present without relinquishing
the past, will, it may be, find in the future new and
noble developments of its Protean splendour.
What I have said in this hasty glance at the
aspects of contemporary Art and its capability of
development, applies in an especial manner to
Painting ; but it embraces Sculpture no less, though
with some modifications, for the two Arts move
within different conditions. Sublime as is Sculp
ture in the altitude of its flight, it is of a necessity
more limited than Painting in its range and more
fettered in its expression. Certain conditions also
are imperatively imposed on it by the nature of
the materials in which it works. These subjects
will be no doubt fully developed in the lectures of
your professors of Sculpture ; for me it is enough
here to say that of the three aspects under which
life presents itself to our eye, namely, Form,
Action, and Colour, Sculpture dealing with the

30 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
two first only, it will rise or sink according to the
dignity and interest it imparts to the form and
action it puts before us, and that its merits will be
further gauged by the mode in which it develops
the resources and conforms to the character of the
several materials in which it works. Of its general
tendency this may, perhaps, be conjectured, that it
will take an increasingly wide view of the quality
of Beauty ; it will think of that word not as the
label only of one or two types corresponding to
certain immovable ideas, but will conceive Beauty
rather to be an attribute common to many of the
moulds in which the spirit is cast, and of which
one chief characteristic is absolute consent and
harmony of component parts. No two things
could be more dissimilar than a hero from the
hand of Phidias and a prophet carved by Michael
Angelo ; yet under the high serenity of the one
and the half-lulled storm of the other this internal
harmony and absolute consent of parts is equally
conspicuous, and, prefer which you will, both as
suredly are supreme and immortal works. And so
we may, perhaps, find this chastest of the Arts,
not indeed descending from its high estate, but
drawing up to itself, in this way amongst others,
the elements of a wider life.
Of Architecture I have said nothing in the
latter part of this discourse ; it has not been an
oversight, but, in fact, in spite of the close and
radical kinship which exists between Architecture
and the Arts which work by imitation, it is impos-

1 879 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 31
sible to speak of the three in terms absolutely
applicable to all. The developments of Architec
ture are more immediately determined and more
profoundly modified than those of Painting and
Sculpture by circumstances external to it. Far,
indeed, be it from me to say that personality, and
even a very pronounced personality, finds no scope
in the works of the Architect — it would be a bad
day for Art in which that were true — but he
moves under restraints not imposed on his brother
of the brush, or even of the chisel. The practical
wants of his day and of the land in which he lives,
the particular conditions put before him in each
individual case with which he has to deal, the
nature of the materials at his command, the various
purely scientific problems which arise out of them,
all these are bonds from which he cannot with
draw himself It must not, however, be assumed
that the necessity of conforming to certain exi
gencies and external conditions is to Architecture
an unalloyed evil ; it is, on the contrary, a constant
and vivifying incentive to intellectual activity, and
has given rise to some of the boldest and most
brilliant of its flights, Certain it is that architects
may look with a proud confidence into the future,
for they practise an Art raised on an immovable
basis of Science, clothing itself in forms of abstract
beauty, enriched by the co-operation of Sculpture,
and made yet lovelier, when it chooses, by the
charm of colour. And though no man shall invent
a new style, as the foolish phrase goes — for styles

32 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
are not invented but evolved — I do not doubt but
that in due time the tentative and eclectic phase
through which Architecture seems now to be pass
ing, will give place to more homogeneous develop
ments in which, whilst the individuality of the
artist finds free room to assert itself, the require
ments, physical and intellectual, of each particular
country will achieve a more definite and distinctive
expression. And so, my young fellow-artists, if there be any
among you, as probably there are, on whose hearts
the doubts at which I have glanced this evening
have at any time fallen, and have not been burnt
up like idle straw in the flame of their youthful
energies, I would say to them : put those doubts
confidently away ; have faith that the stirrings
which you feel within you are not the last spent
waves of a retreating tide, but the pulses of a
living force, now indeed fuller and now more
feeble, but as old as our humanity, and of which
the days are not numbered. Do not, in giving
utterance to them, vex yourselves with the ques
tion whom you shall follow, for if following means
imitation you shall follow none. Study with deep
and reverent admiration — and that admiration
cannot be too deep or too reverent — the works of
the great men who have gone before you ; brace
and fortify yourselves in the contemplation of
their strength ; catch what you may of the fire
that was in them ; walk in their light, enrich and
enlarge your powers by the knowledge and under-

1879 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 33
standing of the means by which they move us ;
but never forget that the common greatness of
them all is their sincerity, and that it is only
through sincerity that you can hope to emulate
them even from afar ; be assured that your work,
in order that it may live, must be the direct and
truthful reproduction of your own individual emo
tions, not the echo of the emotions of others.
Without sincerity of emotion no gift, however
facile and specious, will avail you to win the last
ing sympathies of men, for, as Goethe has truly
said,
" The chord that wakes in kindred hearts a tone.
Must first be tuned and vibrate in your own."

Address, December ioth, 1881

RELATION OF ART TO MORALS
AND RELIGION

Students of the Royal Academy,
When, at our last biennial gathering, I
addressed you from this place, it was my endeavour
to indicate to you, with what conciseness so wide
a subject permitted, a solution to certain doubts
and perplexities concerning the position of Art in
the Modern World, which, as I said, are apt in
these days to assail the minds of students who
think as well as work.
I sought to show you, in answer to these doubts,
that we have no cause for misgiving in regard to
the continued vitality of the Arts we follow, inas
much as they have their root in deep needs and
undying instincts in our common nature ; and I
exhorted you to work on in unwavering faith that
the day is not at hand when the expression of
sesthetic emotion through the forms of Art shall
fail for lack of answering echo in the hearts of
men. There is, however, a grave question connected
with the imitative arts of Painting and Sculpture
to which, on that occasion, I only passingly
alluded, and to which I purpose to devote a few
words this evening ; a question on which widely

38 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
divergent opinions stand opposed one to the other,
and are upheld with equal tenacity ; namely, the
question: "What is the relation in which Art
stands to Morals and to Religion ? "
The solution of this question has a twofold
bearing on the young artist who is about to submit
his work to the ordeal of publicity — a direct and
an indirect bearing ; on the one hand, the answer
to it which he frames for himself will determine
the direction into which he will incline to bend his
energies ; but he will, on the other, be hardly less
powerfully affected by the view which prevails in
regard to it in the general mind, that is to say, in
the intellectual atmosphere which he breathes and
by which he is, though he be unconscious of it,
largely moulded ; for on the conception enter
tained of the aims and ends of Art must depend
the mode in which its achievements are judged ;
and it is evident that a mistaken view of those
aims and ends must taint the appreciation of the
qualities exhibited in the production of a work of
Art, and tend to the subversion of all sound
criticism, as well as to the bewilderment of those
young artists whose native instincts are not
sufficiently imperative to carry them unswervingly
along their path.
And the problem of the relation of Art to
Ethics is one which assumes in this country
exceptional prominence from the mental and
moral peculiarities of our race. There is, I
suppose, no country in the world, unless it be the

i88i ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 39
sister-land beyond the Atlantic, in which the
religious sense has exercised an influence so
definite and so controlling as it has in our own on
the development of the intellectual, as well as of
the ethical, tone of the nation. In the moral
order this sense has added incalculably to the
strength and dignity of the national character ; in
the intellectual order its overmastering influence
has too often tended to cramp and impede that
full and equal play of the intelligence without
which our nature cannot yield its fullest harvest
or bear its finest fruit.
There is, therefore, no country in which the
task of unravelling the complex question of the
true relation of Morality and Religion to Art is
one of greater delicacy.
Now, what are the doctrines between which the
perplexed student finds himself tossed hither and
thither on a sea of controversy ?
On the one side it is asserted that the first duty
of all artistic production is the inculcation of a
moral lesson, if not indeed of a Christian truth ;
and that the worth and dignity of a work of Art
are to be gauged by the degree in which it
performs this duty. Unless it preach, as from a
pulpit, the cardinal doctrines of the Faith, or de
clare — whether by an ambiguous symbolism, or by
definite embodied example — the loftiness of virtue
and the deadliness of sin ; unless a very gospel
made more eloquent by form and colour cry aloud
to us from the canvas or from the marble — then,

40 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
we are told, the artist has laboured in vain, for his
work fails in the fulfilment of the highest function
of Art. With this contention connects itself
naturally, if not necessarily, this other — that as a
man is mirrored in his work, so the noblest work
can be, and has in fact been, produced only by
the most pious and God-fearing men, of the moral
level of whose nature it is indeed the test, and, as
it were, the tide-mark.
These views, of which, whatever their intrinsic
and final value, the moral elevation is very attrac
tive to certain natures, and which have been
supported, if not substantiated, by impressive
illustrations, have found many advocates, and
have been proclaimed with the passionate elo
quence of an overmastering conviction.
And they have been pushed to strange lengths ;
some men, carried away by an unrelenting logic
working on an ascetic temperament, have been
impelled to assert that the application of Art to
any save a definite religious end is little less than
an act of moral depravity ; and a great and nobly
gifted artist, Friedrich von Overbeck, has not
hesitated to declare his opinion that when Raphael
painted his famous Galatea in the Farnesina the
Lord had abandoned him.
A further, and the strangest, development of
this frame of mind, one with which I have myself
in my youth, come into contact in Germany, is
that which sees in the excessive love of colour an
almost culpable indulgence of the senses. Such

i88i ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 41
views, indeed, are not likely to find favour or
acceptance in the country of Gainsborough and
Sir Joshua Reynolds ; they are, nevertheless,
interesting as showing to what extremes the
doctrine of the dependence of Art on Religion
may, and sometimes does, lead its followers.
In opposition to this doctrine it is maintained,
on the other hand, that the function of Art, as
such, whatever may be its incidental operation,
and whatever it may include in the broad verge of
its sphere of action and appeal, is absolutely
unconnected with Ethics, and that its distinct and
special province is to satisfy certain cravings, and
excite certain emotions in our nature to which it
alone has access ; and that without Art not a few
of our keenest and deepest capabilities of emotion
would lie unaroused and barren within us.
The corollary generally attached to this pro
position is this, that, as artistic production springs
from esthetic and not from ethic impulses within
the artist, so the character of that production is
independent of his moral attitude and unaffected
by it.
These two theories, which stand arrayed one
against the other, are in appearance so consistent
in themselves, their respective propositions seem
to flow so naturally one from the other, that the
student who sees them distinctly formulated is
tempted to fling himself without further question
into the arms of one or of the other, accepting it
unreservedly and in all its parts. My task to-

42 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
night is to give you reason, so far as the limits of
our time may allow it, to doubt the wisdom of
such a course, and to ask you, rather, to believe
that, whilst Art is indeed, in its own nature, wholly
independent of Morality, and whilst the loftiest
moral purport can add no jot or tittle to the merits
of a work of Art, as suck, there is, nevertheless,
no error deeper or more deadly, and I use the
words in no rhetorical sense, but in their plain and
sober meaning, than to deny that the moral com
plexion, the ethos, of the artist does in truth tinge
every work of his hand, and fashion, in silence,
but with the certainty of Fate, the course and
current of his whole career.
Let us look more closely into these assertions.
The theory which, for convenience, we may call
the didactic theory is founded on a priori reason
ing, and is supported by reference to facts.
It is, in effect, postulated somewhat arbitrarily,
by its advocates, that every higher expression
of our emotional nature must, in order to merit
the favour of mankind, aim directly at moral
edification, and that this moral edification is to be
achieved only by the inculcation of moral lessons ;
and it is further asserted by them that this has
been in fact the character and tendency of all the
greatest Art the world has seen.
There can be no doubt that the evidence which
is marshalled in support of this view seems, at
first sight, formidable and even overwhelming.
Modern painting, using the word modern in the

i88i ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 43
wider sense and to distinguish it from that of the
Ancient World, was reared, we are bid remember,
on the lap of Christianity and received its loftiest
themes from the Church, of which it was, as we
are constantly reminded, the faithful handmaid ;
and, accordingly, from the hour of its dawn to the
high noon of its strength, a continuous host of
divinely endowed artists is shown to us, testifying
in unnumbered masterpieces to the glory of the
Almighty and of his Saints. We see them handing
down, undimmed, from generation to generation,
the lamp of their steadfast Faith, and from the
harmonious concert of their works, as from a
vast consenting choir, does not a solemn anthem
seem to roll across the centuries, crying from a
thousand throats " Hosannah ! Hosannah in the
Highest!"? With the decline of Faith, on the other hand,
we are taught to connect that downward course of
Art which begins to manifest itself towards the
close of the sixteenth century ; and, in the absence
of any religious affiatus in the great Dutch and
Flemish Masters of the seventeenth century, we
are invited to see cause, even though one of them
be called Rembrandt and the other Rubens, for
placing them in a rank lower than the foremost.
Nay more, turning to the Ancient World, the
greater loftiness of Greek Sculpture in the Periclean
than in the succeeding ages is attributed to the
primitive piety which prevailed up to that period,
which breathes throughout the pages of the great

44 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
Historian of Halicarnassus, and burns on the lips
of the Titan .^Eschylus.
Time would fail me to-night to test minutely
the value of the evidence which I have here
summarily indicated. I will limit myself to the
consideration of two or three points which suggest
themselves on a closer examination of this array
of facts, or rather, of assertions.
It can be argued, in the first place, that they do
not comprise the whole body of evidence to which
we must look, if we would form an impartial con
ception and take a comprehensive view of the
question ; secondly, that the evidence adduced is
not, even where it seems strongest, so accurately
corrobative of the theory as is contended, and as
may, at the first glance, seem ; and thirdly, that
through the whole contention lurks the fallacy of
mistaking a coefficient for a — nay for the — primary
cause. As a striking instance of evidence that must be
either omitted by the upholders of the didactic
theory, or admitted by them to be hostile to their
contention, Spanish Art will at once suggest itself
to you. There is probably, in the history of the
world, no such illustration as that afforded to us
by Catholic Spain of the absolute, irresistible, all-
embracing supremacy of religious faith as a con
trolling influence in a national life, whether public
or private ; and assuredly the lurid fervour of
that faith had not waned in the days of Spanish
greatness in the field of Art. That the Church

1 88 1 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 45
should exert her influence in that field, also, and
more dictatorially even than elsewhere, was a
matter of course, and accordingly we find in the
Iberian Peninsula a School of religious Painters
of an ascetic type, men of a stern piety, and note
worthy if not great — a Morales, for instance, who
earned for himself, the surname " El Divino," a
Juanes, a Luis de Vargas, who wrought in the
intervals of fasting, of prayer, and of self-flagella
tion, and lived in the constant contemplation of
death and of the grave. Yet who will seriously
claim for these men the same level of artistic
excellence with that which is held by the great
painters of the seventeenth century, by a Murillo,
whose religious works have, with few exceptions,
so little of real religious inspiration, or a Velasquez,
the most mundane of painters, and Shakespearian,
almost, in the width of his mental objectivity ?
Again, we need not linger on the sweeping dis
paragement of the later Dutch and Flemish
Masters, which is logically involved in the didactic
theory, and which carries with it the exclusion
from the highest place of that supreme painter who
revealed to the world the poetry of twiHght and
all the magic mystery of gloom, Rembrandt of the
Rhine. Let us consider rather, for a few moments,
the more specious argument drawn from the
growth of painting in Italy, and let us first once
again call to mind the position assumed in the
didactic theory ; it is that the moral edification of
men being the, highest duty of Art, those produc-

46 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
tions of Art will take the highest rank which
teach, with sincerity and of a definite purpose, the
greatest number of moral truths ; and that the
Painter who, the gift being, of course, postulated,
aims most constantly at the inculcation of these
truths, will produce the greatest works. You will
at once feel that these assumptions, if accepted
without reservation, sap at the roots of all free
criticism, practically substituting for it a foregone
conclusion. A critic who approaches a work of
Art under their influence will instinctively gauge
it in accordance with them, however inclined he
may be in the abstract to weigh it with a more
scientific impartiality.
We must be careful, therefore, in testing this
doctrine by the light of facts, to bear in mind, in
weighing these facts, the general verdict of en
lightened opinion ripened and confirmed by Time.
Now if, on a review of Italian Art from its rise
to its zenith, we ask ourselves which works have
by the consent of the vast majority of the intelli
gent been pronounced the most mature and perfect,
we shall not find that verdict harmonising with one
which should be built up on the axioms of the
didactic theory ; we shall, on the contrary, find
that the evolution of Art in Italy, an evolution
singularly organic and continuous, bears no ratio,
unless it be an inverse ratio, to the religious life
and development in the midst of which it ran its
course. It is a matter of notoriety that with the
more general spread of Classic Literature through-

i88i ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 47
out Italy in the fifteenth century, partly through
the Italian Humanists, and partly by the agency
of Greek refugees fleeing westward before the
conquering hordes of Mohammed II., a disinteg
rating effect was produced on the religious beliefs
of that country. For more than a century already
a seething restlessness had obtained possession of
the minds of men ; Nature was fast rising within
them in rebellion against the ascetic teaching of
the Church ; and when to minds so prepared the
revelation was suddenly offered of a Literature
fearless in speculation, and broadly based on the
equal development of all the human faculties — a
Literature, furthermore, of which the Latin branch
breathed, in every line, of that distant national
greatness to a sense of which, in the previous cen
tury, the friend of Petrarch, Cola di Rienzo, had
sought not vainly to kindle and inflame his country
men — a revulsion, long prepared, was operated
amongst the Italian people, and from one end of
the land to the other a thrill, as of a newly
awakened life, ran through them, stirring within
them as the sap stirs within the wintry trees under
the first mild sweet breath of spring.
But not Ancient Literature alone roused them
to a new consciousness and a feverish emulation ;
fragments of Antique Statuary, few as yet, but
sufficient, were exhumed under their wondering
eyes, and, behold, the frame of man, that tene
ment of clay which they had been taught till now
to regard as a thing to be mortified and held in

48 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
contempt, suddenly arose before them in a new
born dignity, transformed by an ideal — their shame
no longer, but their pride. So, under the influence
of this awakening, this Renaissance as we call it.
Art, like Letters, put on a new physiognomy ;
with the vindication of human nature and the
newly accepted view of life as a thing wherein
to rejoice, the forms in which life reveals itself
became a source of absorbing interest, and
a worthy subject of study for their beauty's
sake. The young scientific spirit which at the same
time flamed up in a very passion of enthusiasm
came powerfully to the aid of the artist. The study
of Anatomy emerged from its hiding-places, and
was practised in the open day ; Perspective was
eagerly studied, and exercised on the minds of
artists a fascination which, in our day, seems
strange enough, obtruding its problems every
now and then in their works in the most un
expected and naively far-fetched ways. A more
healthful cast of Beauty was by degrees developed,
and we thus see Art gradually expanding, and
rising to a fuller dignity and a loftier level, through
causes wholly foreign to, and not coincident with,
religious growth. In fact, with the rising tide of
the humanistic and scientific spirit the religious
spirit was not gaining in strength and fervour ;
on the contrary, the powerful revulsion of feeling
of which we have just noted the effects in the
world of the intellect and of the imagination,

1 88 1 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 49
operated also, as might have been expected, on
the beliefs of the cultivated masses, and loosened
the hold on them of that religious teaching which
men could not dissociate in their minds from the
intellectual thraldom in which the Church had
hitherto sought to hold them. The cause of
Morality undoubtedly suffered with that of doc
trinal Religion, and those who value most highly
the precious boon conferred on the world by Italy
in the fifteenth century cannot but recognise with
sorrow that it came alloyed with much dross, and
touched with much taint of corruption. So low
was the moral tone of a large number of the
Humanists, that we recall with a sense of relief
as well as of gratitude the names of such men,
for instance, as Vittorino da Feltre, Guarino, the
countryman of Catullus, Giannozzo Manetti, Pom-
ponio Leto, or Pico della Mirandola, in whom
wisdom and learning went hand in hand with
every Christian virtue.
And if it be not true that Italian Art owed its
highest unfolding to the impulse of Religion, and
the purifying atmosphere of Faith, neither is it
true that its decadence was the result of the
waning of Faith and Religion to which I have
just alluded. Nor was it coincident with it in
point of time : nay, that malarious moral taint
which hung about the footsteps of the Renaissance
in the day of its complete ascendency, and pol
luted so much of its Literature, is not traceable —
and then in a far less degree— till a century later
D

so ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
in the plastic Arts ; so purifying, I had almost
said so antiseptic, are those arts in their very
nature, and in their influences.
Indeed, the causes of the downward tendency
of Art towards the close of the sixteenth century
must be sought less in the failing of the religious
faith among artists than in the excessive and too
exclusive faith in mere Science. Artists had now
drunk deeply of the springs of knowledge, and
were intoxicated in the strength of this rich new
vintage ; they had investigated the wondrous
mechanism of the human frame, with a scientific
thoroughness never till then brought to bear upon
it ; they had explored the science of composi
tion, and measured the expressional resources of
abstract Form ; but they too often forgot that the
province of Art is to speak to the emotional sense,
not to make vain exhibition of acquired know
ledge, and that work which reveals in the work
man no impulse warmer or higher than vanity, or
a thirst for display, will for ever fail to move the
hearts of men.
Accordingly, the gradual supersession of senti
ment by scientific pedantry marks faithfully the
decline in sterling artistic nobility. Correggio,
who indeed still rides on the crest of this great
wave of Art, combines no doubt a true artistic
passion with the most consummate knowledge,
but we seem conscious in him already of the last
moment of perilous poise ; in the Caraccis and
their School, pedantry too often triumphs ; in

i88i ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 51
Tiepolo, the last of the Venetians, the acrobat
lurks everywhere in the man of genius.
I have, in the foregoing remarks on Italian Art,
turned my attention to Painting exclusively ; I
have done so because, just as Sculpture is in an
emphatic manner the characteristic expression of
the Greeks, so Painting was pre-eminently the
Art of the Italians ; and because, further, the
upholders of the didactic theory lean habitually
more on the Painting of Italy than on her Sculp
ture. Nevertheless, the growth of that Art on
Italian soil, fed as it was from the same sources,
fostered by the same influences, and breathing the
same intellectual and moral air, followed the same
course as Painting, and though it culminated in
the hands of a man as sternly religious as his
great spiritual predecessor, Dante, in the main
the plastic Art rose on the same pinions, flew with
the same flight, and fell at last stifled in the same
lethal fumes as did her sister Painting.
One word concerning Greece before leaving
this part of our subject ; since Greece, too, is, as
I said, not infrequently quoted in support of the
views I am combating to-night.
We are tempted, when the bearing of Religion
on Greek Art is pressed upon us, to ask which
Religion is here alluded to ; for in Greece, as
elsewhere in the heathen world, there was a
Religion of the few, the purer and the more
abstract, and the Religion of the many, the more
tangible and the less pure; the faith in one

52 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
supreme God, great amongst all gods, free from
sin, and wholly unlike men ; or the faith in that
joyous fellowship of gods and goddesses, loving
and hating, scheming and boasting, founders of
dynasties on the earth, whom the Greek race, if
it borrowed the first conception of them from far-
off ancestors in a dimly remembered East, had
finally moulded, as was their nature, after their
own living likeness and image. Of the former,
however strong the impress with which it has
stamped the Poetry of Greece, it would be diffi
cult to show its direct influence on the plastic
Arts. It seems to me to be far-fetched in the
extreme to trace any definite ethical purpose or
high religious character even in those sculptures,
the noblest of all known to us and unapproached
as yet in their lonely greatness, which have come
down to us under the name of Phidias.
Of the popular religion of Greece, it would
perhaps be safer to say that it owed much to Art,
than that Art was strongly influenced by it. The
gods as they were conceived by the masses, were
in the main the embodiment of that exuberant
sense of life and that overmastering love of
Beauty, which was the distinctive privilege of
their race no less than the life-breath of their
Art. In sum, then, we may, I think, say that, as far
as we have seen, a cursory glance at a few of the
points adduced in evidence for the didactic theory
does not seem to justify the use made of them, and

i88i ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 53
rather shows us Art not, in truth, uninfluenced by
the moral characteristics of those who practise it,
but withal growing its own growth as a distinct
organism with its own principles of life, and fed by
conditions in which intellectual, moral, and physical
causes each play their appointed part.
But if the illustrations by which it is sought to
buttress this theory do not in fact uphold it, let us
see how it stands with the doctrine itself viewed
on its own intrinsic merits.
Now the reasoning on which the didactic theory is
built up would seem to be this : the moral sense is
the highest attribute and the distinctive appanage
of man ; its strengthening must therefore be man's
noblest aim, and the dignity of all human intel
lectual achievement must be according to the
degree in which this end is primarily and pro
fessedly subserved by it.
But here a difficulty at once meets us ; for the
consistent application of these views involves,
amongst other consequences, one in which we
may, I venture to think, see the reductio ad ab-
surdum of the whole theory ; it involves the de
thronement of an Art closely akin in many ways
to those we follow, like them a language common
to all races, like them from Time immemorial a
channel of purest emotion, an Art divine, if a divine
Art there be : the Art of Music. The dignity of
Music has indeed, strange though it may seem,
not remained unchallenged ; such heresies may,
however, safely be left to their own foolishness.

54 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
It is given to the supreme few who occupy the
solitary mountain-tops of Fame to be able to
express, without incurring the charge of vanity,
their high consciousness of the value to the world
of the gifts they bestow upon it ; one of these few
was Beethoven, and his proud words are there to
show us in what esteem he, at least, held the
power of the Art on which he has risen to im
mortality : " He to whom my music reveals its
whole significance is lifted up," these are his words,
" is lifted up above all the sorrow of the world."
And assuredly the Art which has borne up, and
daily bears up, in oblivious ecstasy so many weary
souls, which has lulled and cheated if only for a
moment so many aching hearts, and which in its
endless plasticity has a response for every mood
of the imagination and a voice for every phase of
feeling, is rooted too deeply in the general love
and reverence to fear the onslaughts of any logic-
ridden crochet-monger. Yet, let me ask, what
definite moral truth is taught by it with all its
universality? What ethical proposition can it
convey ? What teaching or exhortation is in its
voice ? None, absolutely none.
Meanwhile we may safely affirm that a doctrine
which should lead in its logical application to the
exclusion of this Art from the first rank amongst
the intellectual agents which raise mankind is
tainted with grave fallacies. What, then, are
these fallacies ? They are, I think, the following :
first, the assumption that the pursuit of moral

i88i ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 55
edificatibn can alone confer a claim to the respect
of men ; secondly, the assumption that moral
edification can attach only to direct moral teach
ing ; and thirdly, the assumption that any mode
of expression by which appeal is made to the
emotional faculty and the imagination can be
exercising its highest office except in the applica
tion and development of its own distinctive re
sources, and in seeking to convey those emotions
of which it is the proper and especial vehicle.
And this last fallacy lies at the root of the matter.
Now the language of Art is not the appointed
vehicle of ethic truths ; of these, as of all know
ledge as distinct from emotion, though not
necessarily separated from it, the obvious and
only fitted vehicle is speech, written or spoken —
words, the symbols of ideas. The simplest spoken
homily, if sincere in spirit and lofty in tone, will
have more direct didactic efficacy than all the
works of all the most pious painters and sculptors
from Giotto to Michael Angelo, more than the
Passion Music of Bach, more than a Requiem by
Cherubini, more than an Oratorio of Handel.
It is not, then, it cannot be the foremost duty
of Art to seek to embody that which it cannot
adequately present, and to enter into a com
petition in which it is doomed to inevitable
defeat. On the other hand, there is a field in which she
has no rival. We have within us the faculty for
a range of emotions of vast compass, of exquisite

56 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
subtlety, and of irresistible force, to which Art
and Art alone amongst human forms of expres
sion has a key ; these then, and no others, are the
chords which it is her appointed duty to strike ;
and Form, Colour, and the contrasts of Light and
Shade are the agents through which it is given to
her to set them in motion. Her duty is, therefore,
to awaken those sensations directly emotional and
indirectly intellectual which can be communicated
only through the sense of sight, to the delight of
which she has primarily to minister. And the
dignity of these sensations lies in this, that they
are inseparably connected by association of ideas,
with a range of perceptions and feelings of infinite
variety and scope. They come fraught with dim
complex memories of all the ever-shifting spectacle
of inanimate Creation, and of the more deeply
stirring phenomena of Life ; of the storm and the
lull, the splendour and the darkness of the outer
world ; of the storm and the lull, the splendour
and the darkness of the changeful and transitory
lives of men. Nay, so closely overlaid is the
simple sesthetic sensation with elements of ethic
or intellectual emotion by these constant and mani
fold accretions of associated ideas, that it is difficult
to conceive of it independently of this precious
overgrowth. I cannot here enter at any length on this most
interesting subject, but a moment's reflection
will furnish you with illustrations of it. You will
find, for instance, that, through this operation of

188 1 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 57
Association, lines and forms and combinations of
lines and forms, colours and combinations of colours
have acquired a distinct expressional significance,
and, so to speak, an ethos of their own, and will
convey, in the one province, notions of strength,
of repose, of solidity, of flowing motion and of life,
in the other sensations of joy or of sadness, of heat
or of cold, of languor or of health.
It is this intensification of the simple aesthetic
sensation through ethic and intellectual suggestive
ness that gives to the Arts of Architecture, Sculp
ture, and Painting so powerful, so deep, and so
mysterious a hold on the imagination. And here
also we find the answer to the second of those
fallacies to which I just now alluded ; to wit, that
moral edification can attach only to direct moral
teaching. The most sensitively religious mind may indeed
rest satisfied in the consciousness that it is not on
the wings of abstract thought alone that we rise
to the highest moods of contemplation, or to the
most chastened moral temper ; and assuredly Arts
which have for their chief task to reveal the inmost
springs of Beauty in the created world, to display
all the pomp of the teeming earth and all the
pageant of those heavens of which we are told
that they declare the Glory of God, are not the
least eloquent witnesses to the might and to the
Majesty of the mysterious and eternal Fountain of
all good things.
We should thus find ourselves abundantly

58 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
armed, were it needful to be so armed, to meet
those who affirm that to convey moral edification
can alone give the highest status to an intellectual
pursuit. But we have no need of defence against
a fallacy so palpable, a fallacy of which the adop
tion contains the disparagement of every form of
pure Science with all its marvellous achievements —
achievements more marvellous than the dreams of
Fancy, and in their results unspeakably beneficent.
On the absurdity of such an attitude it is needless
to dwell.
In fact, the nature of man is a complex organism
in which are many and various germs of growth,
and only in the full and balanced development of
these several elements can that organism achieve
in this world its perfect maturity. To Art belongs
the development of one group of these rich and
fruitful germs, a sufficient and, surely, no ignoble
task. Much would indeed remain to be said in further
elucidation of this part of our subject, but the
limits of my time warn me to draw to a close.
It remains to me to say, in conclusion, a few
words on the bearing of the ethical tone of the
Artist on his work and on his career.
At the beginning of this address I drew your
attention to the fact that of those who claim for
Art a separate and independent sphere — a claim
which we have just seen to be founded and un
assailable — many tend further to assert that, there
fore, artistic production receives no colour from

1 88 1 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 59
the moral temper of the producer. This I called
a dangerous error, and affirmed, on the contrary,
that the man is stamped on his work, and his
moral growth or lessening faithfully reflected in
the sum of his labours. I believe this to be a
cardinal truth, the disregard of which may bear
fatal fruits in an Artist's life, and I have no warmer
wish than to stir in you and leave with you, if it
may be, to-night, some sense of the grave impor
tance of its bearing upon each and all of us.
The more closely you consider this subject the
more clearly will you feel, for instance, the mis
chief to us as Artists which must infallibly attend
a tolerant indulgence within ourselves of certain
moral weaknesses and failings to which nature is
too often prone. Of these failings some are
palpably ignoble and in the long run debasing ;
others are not, on the surface, so evidently mis
chievous. Amongst such as are palpably ignoble, I will
instance the greed for gain. I believe no evil to
be more insidious, none more unerring in its
operation than this sordid appetite. Its poisonous
taint creeps into the moral system ; numbs by
degrees all finer sense ; dulls all higher vision ; is
fatal to all lofty effort. No worse snare lies across
our path.
Another such deadening taint is the vulgar
thirst for noisy success, the hankering of vanity
for immediate satisfaction ; of this the outcome is
a deliberate sacrifice of the abiding appreciation

6o ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
of the intelligent for the transitory and noisy
clamour of the unintelligent and shallow, with the
fatally sure result of a paralysis of the sense of
self-respect, a lowering of standard and, in the end,
an impotent disinclination for every sustained and
serious effort.
Other failings there are of which, as I said, the
bearing is not so immediately evident, but of which
the dangers are scarcely less. As one instance of
these I will quote the indulgence in a narrow, un-
sympathising spirit, a spirit ever awake to carp
and to cavil, feeding its self-complacency on the
disparagement of others. This spirit stunts and
shrivels those who yield to it, and by blinding
them more and more to the worth and Beauty
that are in the work which is not their own,
deprives them of the priceless stimulus of a noble
emulation. Let me urge you to avoid this pitfall
also, and rather to keep alive within you a
generous temper, ever keen to see the good wher
ever it may be found, finding and fastening on it
as by an instinct in the least promising surround
ings, even as a divining rod strikes on the hidden
spring under a parched and weary wilderness of
sand ; for of this temper you will gather the
fruits tenfold in the work of your own hands.
And now, before closing, let me recapitulate the
points on which, in this rapid and too summary
glance at the bearing of Ethics on Art, we seem
to have established our position.
We have laid down as an unassailable axiom

i88i ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 6i
that the special function of a mode of expression
is to convey those ideas, emotions, or impressions
of which it is the fittest vehicle, and we have
recognised that the proper vehicle of purely ethical
ideas is Speech. Art, on the other hand, we said,
being the proper and only channel for impressions
of another order, namely, sesthetical impressions,
cannot have for its highest duty the conveying of
ethic truths. We saw, further, that though the
impressions which it is the exclusive privilege, and
therefore the proper function, of Art to convey,
are primarily sesthetic, they are very complex in
their nature, and receive an incalculable accession
of strength through the operation of associated
ideas ; and, again, we saw that these complex im
pressions, in which intellectual and ethical elements
are thus added to the fundamental sesthetic sensa
tion, having, like those stirred in us by Music, the
power to raise us to the highest regions of poetic
emotion, deserve to rank amongst the noblest
delights of men.
And, lastly, we have seen that, whilst the incul
cation of Moral and Religious truths must be
admitted not to be the object of Art, as such, nor
moral edification its appointed task, it is not there
fore true, as some would have us believe, that the
Artist's work is uninfluenced by his moral tone,
but rather that the influence of that tone is, in fact,
upon it, and controls it from the first touch of the
brush or chisel to the last.
And once again, I say, I would fain stamp this

62 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
vital fact deeply in your minds. Believe me,
whatever of dignity, whatever of strength we have
within us will dignify and will make strong the
labours of our hands ; whatever littleness degrades
our spirit will lessen them and drag them down.
Whatever noble fire is in our hearts will burn also
in our work, whatever purity is ours will chasten
and exalt it ; for as we are, so our work is, and
what we sow in our lives, that, beyond a doubt,
we shall reap for good or for ill in the strengthen
ing or defacing of whatever gifts have fallen to
our lot.

Address, December ioth, 1883

RELATION OF ART TO TIME, PLACE,
AND RACIAL CIRCUMSTANCE.
EGYPT. CHALDEA AND GREECE

Students of the Royal Academy,
The subject on which two years ago, on a
like occasion, I addressed you from this Chair was,
you may remember, the Relation in which Art
stands to Morality and to Religion. I shall ask
you this evening to consider with me a subject
not, I think, less interesting, namely, the relation
of Artistic Production to the conditions of time
and place under which it is evolved, and to the
characteristics of the races to which it is due.
Do not be unduly alarmed at such a prospect.
In the very vastness of the subject is your greatest
safety ; for it is needless to say that the limits of
our time, were there no other hindrance, will not
suffer me to deal with more than a fragment of so
wide a topic, or to present to you that fragment in
other than baldest outline.
It will be enough if, by putting before you a few
suggestive facts, I am able to quicken your in
terest in and to lead you to explore for yourselves
a very fascinating and far-reaching field of
thought. This is my sole and sufficient aim to
night. If in your study of the works of Painting or of

66 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
Sculpture to which you have had access either in
permanent galleries or in temporary Exhibitions,
or of the numberless Architectural works at home
and abroad which Photography brings within the
reach of those to whom it is not given to travel,
you have passed from the examination of indivi
dual examples to a more comprehensive considera
tion of the broad groups into which they fall
according to the countries which have produced
them, and to the period of their production, you
cannot fail to have noticed the definite and distinc
tive physiognomy, the family air, as it has been
well called, which marks these several groups ;
and if, pursuing further this train of thought, you
have endeavoured to penetrate the nature of this
distinctive physiognomy, you have perhaps been
led to note the harmony which, in each case, exists
between it and the atmosphere, mental and moral,
within which it took shape. This will have become
equally clear to you whether you have compared,
one with the other, the Art of different countries
or the Art of different epochs. So, for instance,
in passing from a work by Rubens to one by
Velasquez, the opulent splendour of the one and
the concentrated gravity of the other will have,
maybe, brought before you, more vividly than could
many words, the deeply contrasted characteristics
of national temper by which Nature had divided
two peoples long united in unnatural bonds of
political union — Spain and Flanders.
Of again, if in the comparison of the Ogival

i883 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 67
Architecture of England with that of France or of
Germany you have discovered in each school the
expression of distinct national characteristics, you
will have felt not less clearly in the contrast
between the solemn and mystic gloom of a
Northern Cathedral and the radiant serenity of a
perfect Grecian Temple, the antithesis which
exists between the Mediseval and the Hellenic
World. And no doubt the sense will have grown
upon you that this harmony between the work and
its surroundings is not fortuitous, but rather that
Art is an organism fed and formed by the same
forces which shape the current of the general
Spiritual Life, of which it is, indeed, but one
amongst many forms of expression.
You may have observed, in the next place, how
vitally one of the Arts especially. Architecture, is
affected by the physical conditions of the country
in which it is practised ; and lastly, in following
the stream of Art to its remoter sources, you have
perhaps been struck with its continuity and with
the part played in its evolution by inheritance or
by example ; from land to land, from age to age,
you may have traced through their various vicissi
tudes certain recurring ideas and forms ; nay, if
you have descended from the higher regions of
Art to the humbler sphere of design which is
called industrial, you will have found in more than
one commonplace of contemporary decoration de
vices conceived dim ages ago in the land of the
Pharaohs or on the plains of Shinar. So, for one

68 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
instance only, the not too formidable animal whose
toothless and trunkless head seems to " roar ye
an't were any nightingale " from the back of your
armchair or on the handle of your teapot, and
whose feet so fitly end the legs of your sofa or of
your sideboard, has its prototype in carvings in
spired on the quick in far Assyrian days, and is
the last transmitted counterfeit of lions that once
writhed on the spears or yawned round the golden
throne of a Sargon or a Sennacherib.
Well, it is on these formative influences of sur
roundings in time and place, and of inheritance or
example that I wish to say a few words to you
to-night — mere suggestions, I repeat, of an outline
which you may, if you so care, fill in at your leisure
for yourselves.
But here a word of caution is necessary. The
further you penetrate into this subject the more, I
make no doubt, will you feel its fascination ; but
with this fascination will come also the risk of
overrating or misinterpreting the bearing of each
new fact that seems to throw light upon your in
vestigations — the danger will arise of unconsciously
fitting fact into theory, instead of testing theory
by fact, and of forgetting, in the neatness of a
chain of reasoning wrought from materials too
partially selected, the darkness which shrouds, for
all our seeking, the inmost springs of the sesthetic
life in nations and in men. We must content our
selves, as we watch that life in its intermittent
flow, with noting the affluents which feed it, the

i883 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 69
banks which mould its current, and the elements
which tinge its waters ; confessing that the initial
forces which determine the hour and the place of
its birth, and the times of its fulness and of its
failing, remain indeed a mystery of which the key
is still withheld from us.
The influences which determine the bent and
growth of Art are these : first, and primarily, the
temper and genius of a race ; then, the social and
intellectual state ofa community or nation at a given
moment ; thirdly, example, whether by unbroken
transmission of inheritance, by the resuscitation of
a tradition, or through a stimulating contact with
other nations ; and lastly, the influence, partly
moral and partly material, of surrounding physical
conditions. These several agencies overlap, no doubt, as
well as co-operate ; it is, however, if not strictly
philosophical, convenient for our purpose to speak
of them as separate.
Let us now endeavour to see them at work. It
is evident that of these various influences the third,
namely example by contact or inheritance, will be
less and less perceptible as we ascend the stream
of time. As we leave ever further behind us the
complex life of modern nations with their unceas
ing interaction one on the other and that burden
of intellectual inheritance which is not always an
unmixed blessing to their Art, we see the problem
of Growth becoming more simple, till we reach, at
last, a period in which external impulses are all

70 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
but inappreciable, and in which Art, shaping itself
closely on the wants and the conditions of the
land and the people from which it springs, is the
faithful and unalloyed expression of the genius of
that people and the resources of that land.
Such a land we find on the banks of the Nile,
and such a period in the unrecorded dawn df
Egyptian civilisation. Here, at least, the problem
of evolution is reduced to the simplest form known
to us west of the cradle of our race, though not to
the simplest form conceivable ; for although one
branch of Egyptian Art, Sculpture, had reached a
very high — perhaps its highest — level between
3000 and 4000, or, according to Mariette and
Maspero between 4000 and 5000 years before the
Christian era, the Egyptians were not, it is believed,
indigenous on the Nile.
For our present purposes, however, they may be
considered practically a primitive race.
What manner of people were they ? They were
a people endowed with brilliant gifts, and of whom
a prominent characteristic was their piety. " The
Egyptians are religious," says Herodotus, " far
beyond any other race of men." Piety was printed
on all their works. They believed in an after life,
and on that after life their thoughts were chiefly^
bent. They traced to the heavens the origin of their
royal throne, and believed that in a far, unchronicled
past the gods themselves had ruled within their land;
the right hand of the immortals was extended over
them in protection ; their Pontiff- Kings visibly

i883 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 71
represented the Godhead upon earth, and at their
death were in their turn taken up into the heavenly
ranks. They were a race which during long cen
turies — those early centuries in which its Arts took
shape and ripened — grew up in unchallenged peace
to strength and conscious greatness, knowing as yet
no rivals, drinking in daily the deepening sense of
a security unassailable and immemorial. Visibly
favoured in a climate beyond example steadfast
and serene, and in a soil lavish of every gift, they
were above all made confident in the sight, genera
tion after generation, of the ever-renewed blessing
of the great stream in whose waters that soil was
each autumn born anew ; and so to the sense of
abidingness would add itself that of unexhausted
wealth and plenty,
!< said that they were pre-eminently pious —
dwelling constantly in thought on the life of which
the gate is Death. We need not enter here into
their complex creed concerning the Soul and the
Intelligence, the body and its double ; it is enough
for us to note that in their belief a material form
was needed after death, as a home and resting-
place, until the day of doom, for that surviving
" double," that eidolon, which was an incorporeal
counterpart of the body. To furnish this tene
ment for the double was, therefore, a sacred duty,
and it was accordingly provided in two ways :
first, by embalmment of the corpse itself, and,
further, for the event of injury to the mummy, by
the manufacture of stone or wooden counterfeits

72 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
made in its exact image — and for greater safety
these were frequently very numerous.
Such, then, being the mental attitude and such
the custom of a race with strong plastic and
building instincts, what sort of Art should we look
for in it ? Should we not look for an Art in which
the temples of the Gods and the abodes of the
Dead were the most salient feature ? And should
we not further expect of such a people that what
ever connected itself with the glorification of those
Gods, or with the exaltation of earthly rulers
scarcely less divine, or with the service of the
departed, would be the inspiring motive of their
graphic and plastic Art, as well as of their Archi
tectural production ? And this Art being an
entirely spontaneous and sincere expression of the
national temper, should it not convey to us a sense
of strength, of dignity, of stability, and of repose ?
And would not the consciousness of unlimited
resources find expression in a tendency to the
excessive in size ? Well, these are precisely
the characteristics which we never fail to find in
the monuments of Egypt, and in so much of her
plastic Art as is not purely domestic in character
and descriptive of private life.
Those whose fortune it has been to stand by
the base of the Great Pyramid of Khoofoo and
look up at its far summit flaming in the violet sky,
or to gaze on the wreck of that solemn watcher of
the rising sun, the giant Sphynx of Gizeh, erect,
still, after sixty centuries, in the desert's slowly

i883 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 73
rising tide, or who have rested in the shade
of the huge shafts which tell of the pomp and
splendour of hundred-gated Thebes, must, I
think, have received impressions of majesty and
of enduring strength which will not fade within
their memory.
But if the general character of these monuments
bears the impress of the moral temper of the
Egyptian people, we shall find a special require
ment of their faith exercising a direct and vital
effect on the development of their sculpture and of
their painting ; in the case of the former first for
good, and afterwards, indirectly, for mischief I
mean the duty, which as I have told you they held
sacred, of supplementing the embalmed corpses in
the tombs with images of the deceased in stone or
wood. Out of this duty arose necessarily a vast
activity in the field of sculpture ; but the object of
the Artist was to produce, I said, in these images,
an exact counterfeit of the outward form and
features of the departed, in order that the second
life — the life in the shadow of the tomb — might
mimic as faithfully as possible the old life in the
light of day ; and the result was, as might be
expected, a remarkable development of individual-
isation in treatment of form and figure ; in fact, a
vigorous and uncompromising school of portraiture.
This view of the causes which influenced Egyptian
Sculpture in its origin is very lucidly set forth in
the admirable work of Messrs. Perrot and Chipiez,
which I commend to your study, and in which

74 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
you will find it supported by a series of most
excellent illustrations.
Whilst, however, so large a demand for works
of sculpture had a very stimulating and at first a
very wholesome effect on plastic Art, the very
extent of that demand became eventually a source
of harm, and we may safely attribute to it some
not small share of the stagnation and eventual
decline of this branch of Art on the banks of the
Nile. For in exact proportion to the necessity for
rapid and almost unlimited production would the
obstacles to thoughtful treatment and a close study
of Nature increase ; the Sculptor would fatally
tend to become a mere manufacturer and purveyor,
and, in the speed to which he was compelled, life
and character would more and more surely dis
appear from his work. Be this as it may, we see
in Egypt this strange thing, that the earliest
efforts of sculpture which have come down to us
are in general the best. Certain wooden panels,
for instance, carved in low relief, which are pre
served at Boulaq and which display a delicacy of
workmanship and a spontaneity of treatment
seldom equalled in Egyptian Art, are believed
by Monsieur Maspero, under whose guidance I
had the good fortune to see them, to date back
to the third dynasty ; that is to say, to over
forty centuries before the Christian era. And
the qualities which distinguish the most perfect
phase of this Art are precisely a subtler per
ception of individuality and a more unreserved

i883 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 75
obedience to Nature than we see at any subse
quent period.
Our acquaintance with this epoch of Egyptian
Art is of very recent date, and it had been till
quite lately much the custom to take an exaggerated
view of the stagnancy of Egyptian Sculpture to
which I just now alluded. A truer appreciation
both of the achievements of that Art, and of the
phases through which it passed, is now beginning
to prevail ; meanwhile we must, I think, be on our
guard lest we now fall into an opposite error;
ignoring unduly the limitations from which the
Sculpture of Egypt never freed itself, and for
getting that if in fifty times a hundred years it
underwent marked and considerable modifications,
those changes did not bring improvement with
them after a certain early period. Of this arrested
growth the causes must in great part remain
obscure ; the explanation which I have suggested,
and of which I would not overrate the bearing,
applies only to funereal Art ; and though, no doubt,
the whole current of plastic production would be
affected by the vicissitudes of its main affluent, we
must look for other causes to account for the
strange and pulseless monotony which we see in
the treatment of the statues of the Gods.
One of these Monsieur Perrot is inclined to
seek in the necessity imposed on the Artist of
representing those Gods as a monstrous compound
of man and beast, a necessity which shut him out
from any inspiring ideal ; much, again, of the

76 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
absence of action in Egyptian statues, and of the
empty smoothness which so often characterises
their modelling, he attributes to the extreme hard
ness of the material in which they are habitually
wrought, and which, while lending itself to a high
polish, was extremely difficult to carve. To these
causes we may add the absence of any fecundat
ing contact with other races. But behind and
beyond them all we must recognise as the primary
agent a certain peculiarity and inertness of the
race, a narrow but tenacious spirit, of which,
whatever may be its sources, we find the perfect
counterpart only in the great Turanian Empire of
the East, the not less ancient land of China.
I could have wished to say also in this place a
word on the harmony which exists between
Egyptian building and the scenery in which it is
set, but for this, time leaves me no leisure ; I have
yet, before passing to other lands, to glance briefly
at Egyptian Painting.
Of this our knowledge is drawn, wholly, from
the tombs. Like Sculpture, it owed its chief im
pulse to the views of the Egyptians in regard to a
suspended life within the grave ; for not only were
meat and drink laid for their sustenance before
the dead, but, just as to the mummy were added
supplementary semblances of the body, so also
was the painted semblance of food placed about it
in its long abode ; nay more, as the ghostly inmate
could no longer wander forth into the world, the
world was piously brought in effigy to him in the

i883 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 77
tomb, and on the walls around him he saw un
folded each scene of daily and domestic life, in the
sight of which he might once more seem to him
self to sow and to reap, to count his hoarded gain,
to carouse, and to rehearse in all things his van
ished earthly days. Here, more than elsewhere,
we find the Egyptian Artist untrammelled by
material, and we are accordingly struck with an
increased vivacity of dramatic treatment and the
greater freedom with which he handles the human
form ; here, too, we note a certain cheerful bon
homie which was a characteristic of the race. I
have spoken of these designs as paintings, but
they would be more accurately described as out
lines filled in with colour ; for throughout Egyptian
Art colour appears solely as a flat tint. It is a
prevalent opinion that the Egyptians were colorists,
skilful harmonisers, that is, of subtle tints. In
this opinion, though not unmindful of the har
monious effect of some of their enamels, in which
the original tints are still preserved, I find some
difficulty in concurring ; faded and bleached by
the sun, the coloured hieroglyphs which still
enliven some of their buildings are no doubt very
delightful in their play of tones, and to many
paintings on papyri, or on mummy cases, decay or
golden resins have given the delicacy of fresco or
a glow as of mosaics ; but the sight of well-pre
served paintings of comparatively recent discovery
has left grave doubts in my mind in regard to the
coloristic aptitudes of the people which produced

78 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
them. This, however, is worthy of notice, that we
see in Egyptian Painting the first use of that
combination of green and blue which was to be
the dominant note of so much that is most beauti
ful in Eastern coloured decoration.
Next to Egyptian Art in order of antiquity and
closely connected with it, is that of the two great
Semitic empires which had their seat by the waters
of the Tigris and the Euphrates : to these I now
turn. And here a perplexity awaits us ; we have learnt
to think of the Semitic race as marked out scarcely
more by its monotheism than by its lack of gift
for the plastic Arts. Void of artistic impulse, the
Jews, we know, saw in the second commandment
not only a warning against idolatrous worship,
but a distinct decree of the Almighty against the
production of graven images even for purposes of
teaching or of delight.
Renan, in his " History of the Semitic Lan
guages," says on this subject much that is
suggestive and interesting. "The desert,'' he
writes, " is monotheistic ; sublime in its immense
uniformity, it revealed to man the idea of the
Infinite, but not the sense of an incessant creative
activity which more fertile regions breathed into
other races." " Nature," he adds elsewhere, of
the Jew, "had little place in his thoughts" ; and
further on : " Music, the subjective Art par excel
lence, is the only one he knew." It is to a brood
ing and introspective habit of mind that he

i883 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 79
attributes the absence in this race of any craving
for plastic expression, which is, we know, in its
essence a desire to recall sensations aroused by
outward objects.
Here then is our pexplexity : for if, turning
from the Jews, we look to their kindred Semites
in their own ancestral Chaldea, we see them under
skies as broad and in more unbroken plains,
amidst pursuits, too, originally similar, moulded
to a temper wholly different ; to them the wilder
ness was not monotheistic, to them the sky's
unclouded span brought no lesson of one Lord,
supreme and solitary ; it led them rather to the
complex science of the stars, and to that belief in
their influence over the destinies of men which
has played so great a part in the annals of
mankind ; and finally we see them evolving in
due course an Art full of power and of objective
vitality, an Art of which the fruitful seeds were to
fall one day on the lap of Greece herself These,
I say, are perplexing facts, and show with what
caution we must, even at this early stage of the
world's history, handle the ethnological test.
Their partial explanation we must no doubt seek
in the fact that the Jews were of far more unmixed
Semitic blood than were the Chaldeans and As
syrians, who are, when first we meet them, already
blended with an Accadian, that is to say a
Turanian stock. Meanwhile, we shall not find
on closer inspection that the landmarks of race
have been as wholly removed as might at first sight

8o ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
seem ; and the foremost sign of this is the com
plete absence amongst this Semitic folk, in As
syria at least, of the monumental tomb — the
outward mark of the absorbing prominence of the
subject of death in the Turanian mind ; and we
shall further find that striking as are the achieve
ments of the sculptors of Nineveh, those artists
did not practically get beyond the carving of flat
surfaces, and that nothing in the shape of an
Assyrian or Chaldean statue has come down to
us for which any serious merit can be claimed.
The more than summary sketchiness which is im
posed upon me forbids my dealing separately with
Chaldean and Assyrian Art ; it will suffice to say
that if the fortune of war gave alternate supremacy
to Babylon and to Nineveh, the Art of the two
nations was practically one growth ; we may note,
too, that as power gravitated from the gentler
Chaldean to his ruder brother in the North, the
religious spirit of the former yielded to the warlike
genius of the latter, and whilst what remains to us
of the first Chaldean empire is of a religious
character, the architecture of Assyria is mainly
palatial and expressive of the power of a ruthless
race of kings ; for Assyria in the days of its great
ness was as a vast camp spread about the throne
of a fighting monarch, and the Assyrians a breed
of warriors fierce and without fear, casting down
their enemies, in the words of Isaiah, "as a
tempest of hail and a destroying storm." And
the pride of splendour, too, was strong within

1883 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 8r
them. Would you see an Assyrian king in all his
love of luxury and in his lust of blood ? Then
look where Assur-ban-habal sits with his queen,
carved on an alabaster slab now in the British
Museum. Amongst the palm-trees of the Royal
Gardens, his weapons laid aside, but at hand ; he
reclines on a sumptuous couch, curiously wrought,
and spread with stuffs from the famous looms of
Babylon ; opposite to him, on a throne, sits the
queen ; each of them has taken, from a dainty
table which divides them, a cup of wine, and is
about to drink ; the feast is spread in the
chequered shadow of a vine, for the sun is fierce
overhead, and attendants placed at each end of
the couch strive with long fans to simulate a
breeze ; the birds seek refuge in the branches ;
minstrels are not wanting, and the sound of harps
thrills through the summer stillness ; over all a
drowsy peace. And now look closer ; on what is
the great king gazing across the bubbles of his
wine ? Not at the golden date-palms, not at the
purple grapes, not at the simmering plain, not at
the sky's blue tent — not even, I fear, on the
features of the queen. His eye rests, in placid
contemplation, upon an object hung full in view
on a bough before him, the sweetest sight of all ;
a ghastly fruit plucked newly from its trunk : his
enemy's hated head, dangling, dishonoured, upside
down !
With such a people and with such a line of
kings, what artistic expression shall we look to
F

82 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
find? We shall look for an Art masculine and
somewhat truculent, in which the prowess of the
sovereign in war and in the chase — for were not
the sons of Nimrod great huntsmen before the
Lord .'' — shall be the leading theme : official annals,
so to speak, of high royal deeds ; we shall expect
no domestic subjects, none of the quaint idylls of
homely life which the Egyptians loved even after
they, too, had begun to blazon butchery on their
walls — few scenes prompted by piety. And such
is, in fact, the Art we find ; and the execution of it
is strikingly expressive of its spirit, for the hand
of the Artist found in the yielding alabaster in
which he mainly worked, a fitting substance
wherein to plough and hack the thews and sinews
which he loved to mark with such uncompromising
vigour. And, here, in comparing the grim ac
centuation of these Assyrian sculptures with the
vacant polish of so many images of Egyptian
workmanship, in which the limbs remain engaged
within the granite block, you will do well again to
note the bearing of material on the development
of Art in early days.
I alluded just now to the royal hunting pieces in
the Assyrian sculptures. That these should be good
was natural in a people passionately fond of sport ;
but it is not easy to account for the immeasurably
greater dramatic insight here displayed in the
representation of wild beasts than in the rendering
of the human form ; in all essentials I know nothing
quite equal to the portrayal by Assyrian artists of

i883 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 83
lions maddened or struck down in the chase.
Their lesser skill in the treatment of human beings
has, indeed, been attributed to the fact that they
never saw their subjects except closely draped
from head to foot ; but this explanation, though
ingenious, seems to me wholly inadequate, and we
must in this case, as in so many others, be content
to wonder in doubt and ignorance.
One word on Assyrian Architecture, in so far as
it touches our subject of to-night. Stone, if not in
great quantities, was accessible to the builders of
Nineveh ; nevertheless, they built in brick, for
their Architecture, like all their Art, had its origin
in Chaldea — that is, in a country where there was
no stone, but where, on the other hand, clay
abounded for the making of bricks and tiles.
Meanwhile the broad and empty surfaces of their
buildings, surfaces almost wholly unrelieved by
mouldings — for this form of enrichment did not,
with such a material, readily suggest itself in so
early a stage of Art — required profuse adornment
to satisfy Assyrian love of splendour and to be
worthy of Chaldean tradition ; here stone found its
opportunity ; and soon colossal monsters, human
headed, but limbed like a bull and winged — types
of strength and wisdom — took post at gateways
and approaches, whilst long lines of sculptured
frieze ran, level with the eye, along the inter
minable walls. To this enrichment of the ground
line of their palaces the use of stone by the
Assyrians was limited; above this line another

84 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
mode of adornment was chiefly used, namely, a
casing of glazed and coloured tiles ; wherein you
see the origin of that marvellous decoration which
to this day in the same regions throws its enchant
ment over fields of wall-space hardly less flat and
free from moulded features. For internal embel
lishment and for detached structural supports
Assyria had wood and metal, a combination,
indeed, which lies at the origin of all decorated
columnar forms ; of such piers or columns material
evidence no longer exists except it be in charred
fragments, but other reasons besides structural
requirements would suffice to convince us that
they had existed. In the first place, as is acutely
argued by Mr. Fergusson in his most suggestive
and valuable work on Architecture, it is no doubt
of these supports that we see the reproduction in
stone in the wholly borrowed Art of Persia ;
secondly, their use in tents and sedicules, and as a
decorative feature in windows, practically involves
their application to a more important function ;
and, lastly, the deep influence on Ionic Art of this
amongst many Assyrian forms implies in itself its
large and general use. Thus this architectural
feature, which attains its highest beauty of abstract
form in the porch of the Erechtheum, has for its
first rude ancestor a cedar pole and a curl or two
of copper.
Two or three more points may be noted here in
passing : the first is that Astronomy determined
the shape and colour of one type of Assyrian

i883 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 85
Temples — Temples which were also Observatories.
Their stories were seven in number, the sacred
seven ; and each story bore the colour proper to
one of the heavenly spheres. Another is, that in
Assyria we for the first time see the Arch used as
an important decorative and decorated feature.
Another, that we first discover in an Assyrian bas-
relief an instance of a new constructive feature —
the gabled roof
In Egypt and in the Mesopotamian kingdoms
we have seen two forms of Art, akin in some
respects but nevertheless separate and individual,
both bearing strongly the stamp of the race, the
country, and the times which gave them to the
world, both marked by a strange inertness and
persistency. Let us now look, for a moment, and
in conclusion, at an Art in which whatever was
best in them rose to a fuller and nobler life, an
Art which we can compare no longer to a broad
and sluggish stream, but which is as the sudden
upleaping of a living source, reflecting and scatter
ing abroad the light of a new and a more joyous
day ; a spring at which men shall drink to the end
of all days and not be sated : the Art of Greece.
Nothing that I am aware of in the history of
the human intelligence is for a moment comparable
to the dazzling swiftness of the ripening of Greek
Art in the fifth century before Christ ; and we
marvel at it the more from the contrast it presents
to the secular torpors of the races from which it
drew its alphabet. I fear, too, that when we have

86 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
ascribed this lightning speed of growth to a
peculiarly happy balance and interaction of various
elements of race and to not less favouring circum
stances of place and time, we shall not have gone
far on the road to understanding it ; and we shall
perhaps here more vividly than ever feel our
ignorance of the mysterious affinities — the occult
Chemistry of Nature, if I may so call it — through
which certain racial ingredients produce in varying
combinations results so strangely different.
Nevertheless, it will not be without interest to
apply for a moment to this evolution the same
methods of inquiry which have guided us hitherto
this evening. The earliest historic records of
Greece are but recent as compared with those of
Egypt or of Chaldea, and it is only in occasional
glimpses that we discern the footprints of civilisa
tion in this chosen land during the obscure cen
turies which preceded the Dorian invasion, or
indeed, as far as Art is concerned, the Era of the
Olympiads. Looking back to the age in which
we first descry them, we find the land occupied by
a race which we call Pelasgic, and which seems to
have held not only all the lands washed by the
.^gean from Lydia to Cape Tsenaron, but to have
pushed round the head of the Adriatic and spread
itself out over Italy. This race was, perhaps, the
earliest wave poured by the Aryan tide from Asia
into Europe; but it preceded the later immigrants
into Greece by such an interval as to form a very
distinct stock ; and, whether or not by an assimila-

i883 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 87
tion with earlier occupants of the soil, they appear
before us in the three lands with certain of the
attributes of a Turanian people : that is to say, as
mighty builders, and notably builders of tombs.
They were followed on the scene by a purer Aryan
race which, descending from the Phrygian heights
to settle first on the western skirts of Asia Minor,
overflowed towards the fifteenth century in all
directions, southward even to Egypt, but especially
westward, by the islands, to Greece, there so
blending with the Pelasgic stock that they soon
learn to boast themselves Autochthons. Lastly,
another offshoot of the same family, after making
its way across the Hellespont to settle in the
Thessalian Highlands, burst forth in the eleventh
century and swept, conquering, over the land.
These two races, akin in origin, and yet pro
foundly unlike, were known as the Ionian and
Dorian peoples ; and their rivalry is the history of
Greece. Of the earlier Pelasgic or Pelasgo-Ionic race
few, but important, vestiges are preserved to us,
the most remarkable being sepulchral monuments
such as the tombs, or so-called Treasure-houses,
of Orchomenos and Mycenae ; walls, also, and
gateways, of massive style and masonry, reveal
them to us as a great building people : and in all
these remains we trace a distinct Assyrian in
fluence, either due to the lonians themselves, or
to Phoenician middlemen, or, perhaps, to both.
With the rule of the Dorians a complete para-

88 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
lysis seems to have fallen on the artistic life of the
country as far as Architecture is concerned, and to
have held it in abeyance for several centuries ;
whether or not this lethargy is directly attribut
able to the genius of the dominant race — a race of
soldiers and of lawgivers, and averse to Art — it is
difficult to say ; this much, however, is beyond
doubt, that although the Dorians made their own
and gave their name to a style of architecture
without a rival for dignity of chastened form, in
the region in which their race and spirit were
more than elsewhere seen pure and paramount —
the Spartan State — the Arts, if we except martial
music, had absolutely no existence ; and it is,
therefore, the more difficult to evade the convic
tion, combated though it has been by weighty
opinion, that the Doric style was not of Doric
origin, but was indeed in great measure borrowed,
about the days of Psammetik, or earlier, from pro
totypes still seen at Karnak and at Beni-Hassan.
However this may be, when Greece emerges at
last into historic light we find her Building Art
born, so to speak, anew ; of the old Pelasgic form
we see no trace, but in its place two stately styles
— the one, indeed, Asiatic, and the other Egyptian
in its aspect, but, both, purified and made nobler
in the alembic of the new Greek spirit.
And here we may note in passing an interesting
circumstance which had much bearing on the
plastic Art of Greece : in the slow welding pro
cess from which resulted that perfect poise of

1 883 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 89
intellectual and bodily gifts which we associate
with the Greek name, the elements of race seem
to have distributed themselves differently in the
spiritual and in*' the physical order ; for whilst in
the former the Aryan type was strongly modified,
it prevailed wholly in the latter ; in the Art of the
Periclean age, of which the high truthfulness was
one of its noblest attributes, no vestige survives of
the Pelasgic type, as we see it, for instance, in
Etruscan Art, or where its last trace lingers on
the marbles of .^gina — a tradition, perhaps, even
there, rather than a record ; in its stead we find a
new ideal of balanced form wholly Aryan, and of
which the only parallel I know is sometimes found
in the women of another Aryan race — your own.
But if the Greek spirit is, as I said, the outcome
of a subtle balance and interaction of various
elements of race, let us see how far Art, which is
perhaps its most characteristic outcome, was
further favoured by external circumstances.
And first a word or two of the land. Let us
look at the map. Here are no vast alluvial plains
such as those along which, in the East, whole
empires surged to and fro in the throng of battle ;
no mighty flood of rivers, no towering mountain
walls ; instead, a tract of moderate size ; a fretted
promontory thrust out into the sea — far out, and
flinging across the blue a multitude of purple isles
and islets towards the Ionian, kindred, shores. In
scale nothing excessive ; everywhere measure and
moderation. And of this sobriety which is equally

90 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
removed from all extremes, this nv^tv ayav which
is the keynote of all things Greek, you find no
completer type than in the famous little land
where Athens rose and reigned. Spread out to
the sun within a girdle of nobly simple heights,
and sweeping gently to the sea to catch the
western breeze, it was blessed in an atmosphere
of which you must have felt the breath to under
stand its penetrating sweetness. Attica was not
in those times parched and thirsty as we see it
now ; the dusty olive groves which to-day are
white along the arid track where Kephissus should
flow are not the " thousand fruited " bowers ring
ing with the nightingale, of which Sophocles sang
so lovingly : nevertheless, as compared, for in
stance, with Southern Italy, Athens was not
exceptionally favoured in her soil. It was a soil
liberal but not lavish, demanding labour but re
warding it — a fit surrounding for a joyous, whole
some, active life.
Such was the Greek land. On this land we
have a race built up as we just now saw, and
whose religion was rooted partly in Ancestor
worship, but mainly in the worship of the per
sonified forces and phenomena of Nature ; distinc
tively, it was a race whose dominant thought was
not Death but Life, an intense Life in which Gods
and Goddesses shared, but with a higher and
ampler vital energy ; for these Gods, whom they
made in their own image, however Xenophanes
might chide, walked freely among them, mixing in

1883 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 91
human aifairs, met at every turn, each the ideal of
a particular type. Behind these bright divinities,
dimly seen, the Moirse loomed, asserting and em
bodying those instincts of Order and inexorable
Law which found such noble utterance in the
mouth of ^schylus.
And this race, very limited in numbers, was
further divided into yet smaller communities ;
when we think, for instance, of Athens, with which
our chief concern is, the idea of multitude never
presents itself to our minds ; we think of a handful
of free men ; and indeed restriction of numbers
was part of its own ideal of the perfect state.
Now, a first result of these moderate numbers
would be the increase in dignity and importance
of the unit ; and, given, of course, the peculiar in
tellectual vivacity of the race, we should be pre
pared to see for the first time in history the spec
tacle of a free State, and of that only true concep
tion of such a State which associates its collective
greatness with the worth of the individual citizen.
Out of this conception a race, enamoured in a
manner till then undreamt of with the pursuit of
ideas for their own sake, would be led to form an
ideal of a citizen who, whilst he should be merged
in the State in which he is a living force, should
render himself worthy to serve it by the fullest
and most evenly balanced development of his
being in all its varied capabilities ; and this full
and evenly-balanced development we see in
Athens. How Athenian education was based on

92 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
this ideal you know ; you know that a noble train
ing of the body went hand in hand with the dis
cipline of the mind ; you know how high a place
was assigned to athletic sports, and that an athlete
three times crowned had claim to the public tribute
of a statue. And you have learnt what was in the
eyes of Greeks the dignity of that bodily frame,
which they shared with the Gods themselves — a
body not, in their simple view of life, at war with
the spirit, but working harmoniously with it
towards one common central ideal of perfection.
Now, the bearing of these things upon our train
of thought has not escaped you ; you have felt, no
doubt, that in a society so constituted and so com
posed, Art, but more especially the Sculptor's Art,
would find a favouring atmosphere such as had
never before existed nor can ever exist again.
You understand in it the abundance and high level
of production, and do not wonder at the multitude
of statues which thronged the Altis and the pre
cincts of holy Delphi. And you feel perhaps with
fresh force how faithfully in its nobility and its
serenity, in its exquisite balance, in its searching
after truth, and in its thirst for the Ideal, Greek
Sculpture mirrored at its best the Mind of Greece.
That these attributes were not less conspicuous in
Grecian Painting we may confidently assume,
however limited and indirect our knowledge of it
is. It is, perhaps, in that painted earthenware
which has been preserved to us in such profusion,
chiefly in Etruscan tombs, that we waylay the

i883 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 93
Greek draughtsman in his most spontaneous mood.
I need not remind you how inexpressible a charm
his simplicity, his sincerity, and his unfailing dig
nity of vision have cast over these precious relics
which we have gathered at the hands and in the
homes of the dead.
And here I must, for the present, leave the sub
ject of which I have to-night roughly sketched the
outline of a fragment — to resume it, perhaps, at
some future time.
I have brought you to the culminating point of
Art in Ancient days, the loftiest in many respects
to which it has ever risen, and in following its
course through various lands have endeavoured to
illustrate, as I had promised, its organic connection
with the temper of the times and of the races which
have produced it. In doing so I have sought only
to interest you, I have aimed at no moral lesson ;
nevertheless, it may be well, in taking leave of the
Art of Greece, to remember that if of the attributes
which went to make it supreme some are indeed
beyond the control of men, two, and not the least
bright, are within the reach of all : Simplicity, I
mean, and Truth.

Address, December ioth, 1885

ART IN ANCIENT ITALY ; THE
ETRUSCANS; ROME

Students of the Royal Academy,
I propose to resume this evening, where I
relinquished them just two years ago, the threads
of an inquiry in which I sought at that time, and
from this place, to enlist your interest. In doing
so I cannot but feel that I am placing you at some
disadvantage. Many of those whom I now see
before me were no doubt present at our last
biennial celebration ; others, and not a few, are
here to-day for the first time. In the minds of the
former the words to which they listened on that
occasion linger, I fear, if at all, as dim and faded
memories ; to the latter the bearing of what I
shall say to-night may, without its context, not seem
as clear as I should wish. That I may remove
in some measure this twofold stumbling-block,
let me, before going further, recall succinctly and
rapidly the main purport of my last Discourse.
The subject, then, of that Discourse was the
relation of Artistic Production to the moral and
physical conditions within which it is evolved ; it
was my aim to lead you to see in Art, through all
its various phases of energy or of decay, not an
isolated phenomenon tossed on the hands of
G

98 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
chance, but a phenomenon organically developed
and closely interwoven with the inner life of the
races in whose midst it grows or fails. I pointed
to some of the influences which we trace in study
ing its growth : such as the temper and genius of
a race-; the social and intellectual condition of a
community at a given moment, example, tradition,
and geographical circumstances.
Of the operation of these formative causes, I
offered you certain examples from among the
nations of the ancient world ; and I sketched out
for you in simplest outline the conditions under
which three great phases of Art rose into life and
flourished — the Arts of Egypt, of Assyria, and of
Greece : the first an Art of strange dignity and of
limitations not less strange, the Art of a race
deeply pious, dwelling much on the thought of
Death — a race imbued with a deep sense of
national stability, counting its annals in centuries
of decades, building for eternity. The second an
Art in some respects derived from that of Egypt,
but developed amongst a people of different stamp
and stock ; like that people harsh, but filled with
the pride of life, and taking little thought of the
dead. Lastly, turning to the land of Greece, I
pointed out to you that in its serenity, its direct
ness, its measure, and its lofty idealism, Hellenic
Art was the expression and faithful image of what
was best in the Hellenic mind and spirit.
So far we had carried our subject : let us here
resume it.

1 88s ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 99
We cannot leave the eastern half of the Medi
terranean without at least brief mention of that
great Semitic people which, from its narrow seat,
sent forth for many centuries its shrewd and rest
less sons to trade and to discover over every sea,
embracing within their scope the far grey Orcades
and the golden headlands of Malacca — the carriers
of the Ancient World, the ubiquitous Phcenicians.
Their growth and greatness as a people, the
extension of their sway, the pride of Punic Car
thage and her fall, these things do not concern us
here ; but the Phoenicians have this interest in
connection with the History of Art^ — that they
afford to us the spectacle of a race which, having
more than any other contributed to the scattering
of the seeds of Art, remained itself absolutely
barren in regard to it. Works innumerable of
Egyptian, of Assyrian, of Greek Art were carried
on Phoenician keels to every land washed by the
Mediterranean Sea ; beauty in every shape lay
heaped on the full hands of this trading folk, but
it kindled in them no responsive spark of artistic
fire, stirred in them no chord of sesthetic sensibi
lity : there is no Phoenician Art worthy the name.
Much, indeed, that purported to be artistic work
was turned out in Phoenician workshops. A brisk
trade in forgeries, mainly of Egyptian Art — a
trade wherein I have heard it whispered that they
are not without their modern rivals — was carried
on to the great gain of the Punic pocket ; but Tyre
and Sidon have left no monuments to perpetuate

IOO ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
the memory of their greatness, and the splendour
of Carthage clothed itself, as far as we know any
thing of it, in a bastard garment of Roman shape
and origin.
We need not linger amongst this inartistic
people, but will note in passing that neither
wealth, nor opportunity, nor stimulating contact,
will avail with those in whom the germs of artistic
power are not found implanted.
And now let us turn to the land which, next to
Greece, has played the greatest part in the History
of the Western Arts — to Italy ; and, first, to that
northern and central portion of it in which artistic
activity was earliest manifested by a non- Hellenic
people, to the home of the Etruscans.
Who, you will ask, were the Etruscans, and
whence did they come ? Well, of all the riddles
which the Sphinx of History has propounded to
modern ingenuity, none is perhaps more perplex
ing than that to which you have just asked an
answer : who were the Etruscans and whence did
they come ?
That so casual and ill-equipped a gleaner in the
fields of knowledge as I am, has no authoritative
answer to offer, will not surprise you when I tell
you that men of deep learning and keen insight
have tried in vain to solve it in such a manner as
to carry conviction beyond a more or less limited
group of co-religionists. But see yourselves over
how wide a field hypothesis is rife : the Etruscans,
say some, are an unmixed race — a mixed race, say

1885 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES loi
others ; Turanians, some affirm, Pelasgians, others
contend ; others, again, assert that they are
Lydians — do not Herodotus and the Latin writers
support this view ? Was it not their own belief?
but they are not, it is retorted, for Xanthus, a
Lydian historian, repudiates this tradition ; they
came from Greece— see their alphabet, which is
Archaic Greek ; they are Trojans ; they came by
land — they came by sea — they came both ways ;
they are Pelasgo-Umbrians ; they are Tyrrhene-
Pelasgians ; they are a Germanic race — did they
not use amber in profusion, were they not called
Rasena, which is what but Rhsetians ? they are
Scandinavians ; they are Jews ; they are Kelts ;
were ever such divided counsels ?
I have said that I have no quality to offer you
with confidence a solution of this riddle ; never
theless, that you may not taunt me with leading
you into a labyrinth and there forthwith forsaking
you, I will say this, in general terms — that if you
regard the Etruscans as an amalgam of two or
more elements amongst which the dominant
eilement was not the most artistic, and in which
the traces of Eastern affinities are strong, and such
as it is difficult to account for without some degree
of consanguinity, you will find much in the study
of Etruscan Art to support this view.
But if it is impossible to determine with precision
who the Etruscans were, can we at least form a
distinct idea what manner of folks they were ? Can
we reconstruct for ourselves the outward sem-

102 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
blance of the race ? On this head, also, it is diffi
cult to feel any certainty ; first, on account of the
discrepancies we note in the artistic documents
which have reached us, and, secondly, on account
of the problematic value of those documents as
testimony in this particular matter. Amongst
these, the most numerous are the painted vases of
every kind, which have been found in extra
ordinary numbers in Etruscan tombs. But of
these vases the overwhelming majority is Greek ;
they were for the most part either imported
directly from Corinth and other parts of Greece,
or produced by Greek artists settled in Etruria.
It is clear that the racial type exhibited on these
vases cannot be accepted as evidence on the
Etruscan side ; nor do such as reveal native
workmanship come to our aid, so completely are
they plagiarised from their Greek models.
In wall-painting, indeed, the Etruscans achieved
a more individual development, yet even here they
lay strangely under foreign bondage, and give us
little clue to the physiognomy of their race.
We probably approach most nearly to some
insight into that physiognomy, in its earlier phase
at least, through certain archaic sepulchral monu
ments which have been brought to light in recent
times, inasmuch as here portraiture seems to have
been in some measure attempted ; but neither do
these monuments witness consistently one with
the other, for whilst the terra-cotta sarcophagus,
with which you are familiar in the British Museum,

i88s ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 103
reveals a curiously Mongolian type, other works
of, probably, a like date — such, for instance, as a
very remarkable sarcophagus at Perugia — show a
type wholly different, and, in my eyes, distinctly
Semitic. A third type, again, is found in certain head-
topped jars, of partly Egyptian form, called
Canopi, which have been found chiefly, but not
exclusively, in the district of Chiusi. This type is
the reverse, in every respect, of that seen on the
Museum sarcophagus ; the head is square, the jaw
broad, the eyes are not oblique, the nose is short
— a type which has something of a Keltic char
acter. Nor can this absolute divergence from the
other types to which I have alluded be ascribed
exclusively to rudeness of workmanship ; it is too
consistent and distinctive to be so accounted for.
We have yet one more type to note, if type it be,
in our endeavour to call up the Etruscans before
our minds : the type which oppresses us with its
ponderous dulness on the sarcophagi of the Roman
period, and which is in its structure more analo
gous to that of which I have last spoken than to
either of the others. The discrepancy between
this type and those of the archaic monuments is so
fundamental, that we must either infer from it a
corresponding radical modification of the race, or
we must assume that the element represented in
the earlier works of more Oriental character is not
the element which ultimately prevailed in Etruria.
This, meanwhile is certain : that the obese and

I04 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
unattractive male personages who take their ease
and toy with their prodigious necklaces, and not
less the lolling ladies who lie lazily curled in their
last slumber on the sepulchral urns of the later
Art, by no means belie in their suggestiveness the
character bestowed on their prototypes by Greeks
and Romans alike — the character of gluttons and
of sluggards.
Having thus tried with but little success to
evoke the outward appearance of the Etruscan
people, let us now see what their national temper
and characteristics were. And, here, though their
language is yet an unsolved mystery to us ; though
no literary work from their hands comes, even in
translation, to our assistance — no poem ; no his
tory ; no written creed — we yet feel solid ground
under our feet ; we know from other sources what
their religion, what their form of government was ;
and on their Art, borrowed though it be, their
native temper is written large and plain.
If it be true, as has been said, that belief in
beneficent gods is a mark of the Aryan stock,
then assuredly the Etruscans can lay no claim to
a pure descent from it. A superstitious people,
with which, as with the Egyptians, all that con
cerned the dead was an absorbing pre-occupation,
they were held in thraldom under a rigid creed of
terror and of gloom, a creed obscured by mystic
rites and stained in its origin with human blood.
Worshipping, amongst many gods, some that
were common to them and to the Greeks, they

1885 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 105
imparted to these gods a grimness which was their
own. No less than nine of their deities wielded the
thunder ; Tinia, their Zeus, held, alone, three of
the deadly bolts ; Mantus, the god of the Kingdom
of the Dead, was horrid with writhing snakes and
hooded with the skin of a wolf Serpents wreathed
the head of Mania his queen. Charun, who with
the Etruscans corresponded to Hermes, the silent-
footed leader of departed souls, the Psychopompos,
was made by them repellent with every grotesque
horror. Their rugged realism drew Fate, the in
exorable, in the act of driving home with uplifted
hammer the iron nail of doom. Over all other
gods, removed, inexorable, supreme, sat shrouded
deities, the Involuti, whose number was unknown,
before whom Tinia himself bowed in submission.
But this was not enough of haunting mystery ;
the air was thick with demons and with genii ; to
one of these, an elf-child, but with an old man's
head, Tages by name, they owed the sacred
volumes which held their rule and discipline of
Faith. To such a faith the Art of Divination, an
Etruscan art, the interpretation of the flight of
birds, of entrails, of the skies, of prodigies of
every kind, added a fitting complement. And
this religion held the Etruscans within a doubly
formidable grip, for civil and religious authority
went hand in hand in the policy of their State.
The Overlords of the federated communities, the
princely Lucumones, were augurs as well as
warriors. Great fighters were these proud Etrus-

io6 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
cans ; shrewd men, too, keen tradesmen, bold
navigators, jealous, suffering no rival settlements
on their coasts. Like the Assyrians, they were
prone to pomp and splendour, enamoured of cere
monial, lovers altogether of the good things of the
world, very assiduous at the banquet ; and if the
martial Lydian trumpet was given by them to
Rome, so also was the Lydian flute, the com
panion of the feast. And here let us, in passing,
note a suggestive fact : so long as their national
self-respect endured, so long were their opulent
carnalities held in some check by their manly
fibre ; but as by degrees they crumbled under the
iron hand of Rome into national decay, the flood
gates of their vices were loosened and they were
submerged in the tide of their own corruption.
To sum them up, they were a fierce, strong people,
imbrued in superstition, taking grim views of the
unseen world, views anything but grim in regard
to the visible world ; nevertheless, industrious,
acute, speculative, learned ; and withal loving and
fostering Art with a sustained passion which can
not but surprise us, for, as a race, they were
endowed with little artistic genius.
And what was the character of the Art they
produced, and how shaped by the mental and
ethical conditions I have just described ? I have
said that great as was their propensity to Art, the
inborn gift was not strong within them ; they
initiated nothing ; they assimilated and modified
the Art of others ; modified it, indeed, so that

1 885 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 107
their productions are marked with a strong and
unmistakable national stamp. Nevertheless, this
stamp, even when their Art was at its best, was,
it must be admitted, always a stamp of inferiority
and the sign of an uncouth people.
I have told you that the Etruscan tongue is
still a riddle to us ; but the Etruscan alphabet being,
as I also told you, in fact Greek, we are able, by
means of bilingual inscriptions, and in other ways,
to see how they deal with Greek names, and also
what their own names are, and we thus obtain an
idea of what I may call the physiognomy of the
language. Here are some of these names — native
and borrowed ; you shall judge of their euphony : —
the Greek Persephone became in a Tuscan mouth
Phersipnei, Alkestis — Alksti ; the twin brother of
Castor was called by them Pultuke ; but stranger
and yet more crabbed were their homespun
appellations. What do you say to Tinkvil? to
Phluphluus ? And yet all these yield in their turn
to certain other names with which my plain
British organs have vainly sought to cope. I offer
you one of these to take home for private experi
ment and discipline — the following letters compose
it: PHLERTHRKE.
Now these things are not, as you might perhaps
fancy, foreign to our subject — they lie, on the
contrary, at the root of it. That crabbed harsh
ness which we have noted in Etruscan speech —
like all speech, the mirror of the people who
fashioned it — is precisely the quality which

io8 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
Etruria imparted to all her artistic work, and
which taints in a greater or less degree even the
happiest achievements of her decorative Art. Of
this, perhaps no more delightful examples can be
quoted than the two lovely bronze mirrors, pre
served respectively at Perugia and at Berlin,
representing — one, Helen between Castor and
Pollux ; the other, Bacchus, Semele, and Apollo.
In either case the design is distinctly Greek ;
nevertheless, a certain ruggedness of form and
handling is felt in both, betraying a temper less
subtle than -the Hellenic, and we read without
surprise on the one " Pultuke," and " Phluphluus"
on the other. This peculiarity, this certain boorish-
ness of which I speak, manifests itself, as you
would expect, more especially in those portions of
a work in which the Etruscan artist was most
thrown on his own resources — I mean the purely
ornamental portions. So, for instance, Etruscan
scrollwork is peculiarly rude and uncouth. But if
we trace these characteristics in works which at
the first glance might almost seem to come from
an Athenian studio, they are of course most
strikingly present in works of more purely native
stamp ; they mark accordingly the paintings
which surround the chambers of the Tuscan
tombs ; but nowhere perhaps are they more
vividly asserted than in that most striking relic of
Etruscan Art — the bronze lamp in the Museum of
Cortona. In this magnificent work foreign in
fluence is, indeed, present, an influence distinctly

1 885 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 109
Asiatic as well as Greek. In the main, however,
the work is typically Etruscan ; it is Etruscan in
its rude magnificence and weird conception, in its
array of winged harpies and of alternate satyrs,
huddling naked round its rim, its rugged row of
heads of horned, bearded Bacchus ; Etruscan in
the glaring Gorgon, whose tusks and out-thrust
tongue make hideous the lower centre of the
lamp ; Etruscan in the ingenious ordering of the
whole ; Etruscan in the unfaltering sharpness of its
execution. Such was Etruscan art as long as it retained its
virility. What it became when sloth and self-
indulgence had sapped the vanquished nation's
manhood, we see in the dull wilderness of clumsy
sculptured urns of the Roman period, which repels
us in museums of Etruscan antiquities, works in
which, as a rule, nothing of the old strenuous
temper still lives on, except that Assyrian edginess
of touch which marks the Etruscan chisel. And
yet, even in this period, once and again a lingering
echo may be caught of past, more noble days ;
once and again the dawn may be descried of yet
more noble days to come ; and I doubt whether
there is in the art of Etruria anything so strangely
grand, so solemnly suggestive, as a small monu
ment of this date in the vault of the Volumnii,
near Perugia, the tomb of Volumnus Violens, the
son of Aulus and Calfatia. The recumbent effigy
of the Volumnian is, indeed, rude and of little
merit ; rude also in execution is the monument on

IIO ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec lo
which it rests, but in conception and design of a
dignity almost Dantesque. Facing the visitor,
as he enters the sepulchral chamber, this small
sarcophagus — small in dimensions, but in im
pressiveness how great ! — rivets him at once
under the taper's fitful light. Raised on a rude
basement, the body of the monument figures the
entrance to a vault ; in the centre, painted in
colours that have nearly faded, appears a door
way, within the threshold of which four female
figures gaze wistfully upon the outer world ; on
either side two winged genii, their brows girt with
the never- failing Etruscan serpents, but wholly
free from the quaintness of early Etruscan treat
ment, sit cross-legged, watching, torch in hand, the
gate from which no living man returns. Roughly as
they are hewn it would be difficult to surpass the
stateliness of their aspect or the art with which they
are designed ; Roman gravity, but quickened with
Etruscan fire, invests them : a new artistic mood
seems to be struggling in them for expression,
and our thoughts are irresistibly carried forward
to the supreme sculptor whom the Tuscan land
was one day to bear, and in the furnace of whose
genius all the elements of Etruscan art were to be
fused into a new type of unsurpassed sublimity.
But, you will ask, if in the higher plastic and
pictorial arts the old Tuscan rudeness is every
where revealed, how shall we account for its
absence in so much of that Etruscan goldsmith's
work, of which the fame extended even to

i88s ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES iii
Athens, in Periclean days ? I answer that this
work, so much of it, at least, as is foreign in
spirit to the Art which we have just been con
sidering, is not, in fact, Etruscan work — I mean,
not the product of that element in the Etruscan
body which became dominant, and of which the
character is so distinctly coined. The eminent
jeweller, Signor Augusto Castellani, by whom I
believe this view was first put forward, has well
pointed out that some of the more exquisite
specimens of this jewellery have been found in non-
Etruscan towns, as, for instance, at Prseneste, and
that they are identical in character with work of
the same class, and hardly less beautiful, found in
the Crimea.
Whether this work, which he calls Tyrrhenian,
is, as he holds, more ancient than the Etruscan
Art which I have described to you, or whether it
is in part the contemporary work of the surviving
Pelasgic element in the Etruscan amalgam, may
be doubted ; meanwhile, this twofold element in
the Art of Tuscany seems to me to have a signifi
cance bearing on the eventful development of that
Art in the days of its revival, a bearing which I
may consider with you at some future time.
Of the Architecture of the Etruscans, in the
strict sense of the word, we know little beyond
what we gather in the pages of Vitruvius. This,
however, we may note, that, whilst their temples
appear to have offered a modification of the Doric
order, their rock-cut tombs present, in more than

112 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
one instance, constructive features identical with
those which mark the so-called treasure-houses of
Mykenae and Orchomenos, and the Tumulus of
Tantalais on the Gulf of Smyrna. The Etruscans
would not seem to have been a race of Architects ;
they were, on the other hand, unsurpassed as
building engineers. Their city walls and gates
and their great works of drainage attest, to this
day, in their massive strength, the vigour and the
boldness of their authors ; and it is to the engineers
of Etruria that European Architecture owes pri
marily a feature which lies at the root of all its
modern developments — the Arch. And here, again,
we come upon a fact not without suggestiveness
in its bearing upon the problem of the origin of
the Etruscan stock : the arch — the constructive,
radiating arch, I mean — was known, it is true, at
a very remote date in Egypt ; but it is in Asia, in
the palaces of the Assyrian Kings, that we first
find it rising to the dignity of a prominent archi
tectural feature.
With this bald and inadequate sketch, I must
leave the consideration of Etruscan Art in connec
tion with Etruscan folk, and hurry on to the
second portion of my subject, the Art of Rome.
Viewed from the standpoint of our present
inquiry, the development of Art in Rome has a
twofold interest : no more pointed example could,
on the one hand, be found of the influence exer
cised by the temper of the people over its artistic
production ; nothing, on the other, could be more

i885 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 113
suggestive than the contrast it affords with the
growth of Art in kindred Greece ; nor could any
thing more vividly than this contrast illustrate the
profound and radical divergence, moral and intel
lectual, which time and circumstances may effect
between twin offshoots of the same stock : I say
twin offshoots, for it would seem that the fore
fathers of the Greek and Roman races continued
to dwell together at some distant period, after
breaking away from their ancestral home.
They had in common a worship which was
common to them only : the worship of the Goddess
ofthe Hearth: Hestia — Vesta; ideas of wrong
and retribution were expressed by them in words
of common origin ; they had common terms of
agriculture, a common system of mensuration,
similar views on marriage and on the maternal
dignity, and not a few other points of contact.
These two races, thus closely kin, settled down,
severally, in two lands, not indeed identical in
geographical and climatic conditions, but neither
widely dissimilar, lands lying side by side, divided
— should I not rather say, united ? — by a narrow
strip of sea ; but the one stretching out to the
regions of the rising sun, the other turned toward
that western world which it was one day to mould
and to fashion ; and each, for all this consanguinity
and neighbourhood, as far as east and west asunder
from the other in the blossoming of its genius, and
in the work and the career which were the fruit
and outcome of that genius. H

114 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec lo
If we turn to republican Athens, in which the
Hellenic spirit reached its fullest expansion, we
see a people gifted with an intellect supple, mobile,
fearless, beyond all precedent ; a race unwearied
in its pursuit of the ideal, rejoicing in the exercise
of abstract reason, withal full of the joy of life ;
striving after the fullest and freest development of
the individual, in body and in mind ; a radiant
people, scattering its light abroad, and subduing
the world under the sway of its ideas — and yet,
with no thought of, nor aptitude for, material
empire over that world ; eager, indeed, in the
management of its own affairs, but with little
genius for managing the affairs of others, having
small instincts of national cohesion — a race which,
before even it had emerged on the horizon of
historic times, had sent forth into the grey twi
light of ambiguous days the effulgence of an
undying poem ; a race from which we who are
Artists must ever seek supreme examples when
we strive after the noblest embodiment of the
noblest thoughts, and amongst which the plastic
Arts leapt to their full stature in fewer years than
are wont to divide the cradle from the grave of
men. In republican Rome, amongst their next of kin,
we find this picture point for point reversed ; not,
here, a swift and joyous intellect, but an intellect
of tardy growth, grave, without spontaneity ; a
temper not tuned to the ideal, bent on the practi
cal ; not seeking the beautiful, grasping at the

i88s ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 115
useful ; intent not on the joys of life, but on its
duties ; receiving illumination, not illuminating.
We find the individual not expanding freely in
unfettered spiritual growth, but sternly merged
into the obliterating State ; we find the imperial
sense supreme, science and letters for centuries
non-existent as a native product ; the Arts not
springing from the soil, but imported, like letters,
first from the north and then from the south.
Such is the contrast presented by the two
peoples. Let us now see how far in Rome the com
plexion of the race, being what we find it, con
spired with other circumstances to determine the
character and growth of Roman Art. A word,
first, as to the religion of the Romans. The
Roman creed honoured many gods worshipped
also by the Greeks, but honoured them in a wholly
different spirit. With Romans the favoured deity
was not the luminous goddess who embodied the
Athenian mind, and reigned on the Acropolis,
but the strong Lord of strife, Mavors, the great
Sabellic fighting god. Restraining awe was the
atmosphere which clothed the gods of Rome ; the
joyous piety of the Greeks was unknown to them ;
there was, for several centuries at least, no mirth
in anything that was Roman. To the Roman
every object, every event, had a special deity — a
spiritual counterpart, so to speak : his gods were
without number, their ranks were constantly re
cruited. I have said the Romans knew no mirth ;

1x6 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec lo
looking to the manner in which they created to
themselves gods, I am tempted to add that they
had no sense of humour ; over their house-doors
alone not less than four divinities presided ; one
for the threshold, one for the lintel, for each door
post one. Did they introduce a silver coinage ?
at once a god issued from the mint beside it — the
God Argentinus, the son of .^sculanus, of him of
the copper coin. Does Hannibal turn back before
the walls of Rome ? a god is evoked to com
memorate his turning back, and a shrine raised to
Rediculus Tutanus — as who should say the " God
ofthe Narrow Escape."
Meanwhile, their ethic tone was high. Of this
no better proof can be found than the deference
in which their women were held among them.
Here is an instance of that deference : When
Coriolanus, yielding to the entreaties of the Roman
women, desisted from the threatened siege of
Rome, the grateful Senate offered to the deliverers
of the city the choice of their reward. They asked
permission to raise on the spot where they had
prevailed a temple to the Fortune of Women,
where they might for all time, once in each year,
celebrate the triumph of their pleading ; and this.
privilege was conceded to them. There could be
no better witness to their social influence than such
a concession. The Roman people, I said, was reared in the
ordeal of constant war : from the day on which it
rose against its last king, Tarquin the Haughty,.

1885 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 117
and flung him and his vicious brood from their
gates, to the days when Carthage and Corinth fell ;
from the days of the Sabine Junius Brutus to the
days of the Scipios, its record is a record of con
tinuous deadly war, at home and abroad — wars
with the Etruscans, wars with the Samnites, wars
with all the rival Latin tribes, wars with the Gauls,
Punic wars, wars with Greece, with Pyrrhus, with
Hannibal, with Philip, with Antiochus — war in
cessant through these three centuries. During
this period, or the greater part of it, the struggle
was for national existence ; it was during this
period that Roman citizens were trained to that
absolute, unquestioning effacement of the indivi
dual before the community, that unfaltering spirit
of self-sacrifice in the hour of public need and
danger, which was their strength, and fitted them
for the headship of the world. Of this rugged and
lofty type a characteristic embodiment was seen,
that I may quote one, in the elder Cato ; a man
marred, no doubt, in some degree by narrowness
and rigidity of mind, but compelling respect from
his austere purity, his single-mindedness, his pris
tine simplicity ; a little unattractive it must be
owned, and I fear the young ladies among my
hearers will not be drawn to him in much kind
ness when they are told that he vehemently up
held against the Roman ladies a certain law — the
Oppian Law — which, amongst other sinister provi
sions, debarred them from the wearing of coloured
dresses. Those same young ladies will, however.

ii8 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
learn with satisfaction that the great Censor was
worsted in the fight ; that the hateful law was
abrogated ; and colour — indeed, I fear, from what
we know of Roman taste, every colour of the rain
bow — resumed, under his eyes, its previous pride
of place.
Now, it will be evident to you that, the life of
the Roman people being for so long a period such
as I have described it, neither the growth of
Science among them, unless it be of military
science, nor the growth of Letters and of Art were
to be expected. The Roman during these cen
turies was in effect but as a sentinel always under
arms, ever alert and at his post, and the pleasant
paths of learning and of culture were unknown to
him, or known only to be despised, or at best
tolerated. Accordingly we find amongst Romans,
till a comparatively late date, a barrenness over
the whole intellectual field which is simply start
ling. The fifth century of Rome was the period
of its highest moral level and its purest fame. At
this time, some three hundred years before Christ,
every name that was to make Athens glorious,
for all time, in Literature and Art, had been
inscribed upon the roll of fame: — Homer, Hesiod,
Pindar ; -^schylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and
Aristophanes ; Herodotus and Thucydides ; So
crates and Plato ; and, more dear to us, Phidias
and Praxiteles, Polygnotus and Apelles ; all these
had come and gone and were immortal. Now,
what had Rome in that day? In native Art nothing

1885 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 119
but a few frescoes by an amateur ; in Letters
practically nothing. No History, no Drama, no
Epic, no Poetry of whatever kind. The Twelve
Tables, that was about the extent of their Litera
ture. Is it not characteristic that the first book
produced by the greatest lawgivers of the world
should be precisely a body of laws ?
Nearly a century later, when Scipio the African
had vanquished at Zama the greatest military
genius of his age, Hannibal, the Hymn of Praise
in which this great deed was sung had, not a
Roman, but a Tarentine Greek, Livius Androni
cus, for its author. Nsevius, who, still later, wrote
in rude verse the Chronicles of Rome, was not a
Roman ; Ennius, who strove to cast in Epic form
the Annals of the City, was of Messapian birth ;
Fabius Pictor, the father of Roman History,
wrote in Greek. Cato's "Origines" were the
first attempt at Roman History, written in the
vernacular, proceeding from a Roman pen.
With the Drama things fared no better ; till
Nsevius wrote his tragedies, and, like .^Eschylus,
sang wars in which he himself had fought, Roman
actors had been their own playwrights. Would
you like to know what a Roman audience could
be in days when Rome was already the greatest
power in the world ? Hear this story : About
the year 1 69 before Christ, an impresario, looking
about him for some attraction wherewith to fill his
theatre, and at the same time to raise the tone of
his bill of entertainment, bethought himself of

120 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
certain exceptionally accomplished Greek flute-
players. These he accordingly engaged and
introduced to a Roman public. Imprudent and
foolhardy innovator ! his flautists were received
with howls and hisses and cries for the manager,
who, coming before the curtain in the vain hope
of allaying the storm, was peremptorily requested
to make his musicians fight. The Greeks bowed
to necessity, and fought accordingly, scoring, it is
believed, an unparalleled success ! It need, per
haps, not be added that actors lived at that date
in an atmosphere of much contempt.
If Literature was at a low ebb in the first
centuries of Rome, things stood no better with
Artistic production. Gifted with no innate apti
tudes for the Arts — although in one of them, as
we shall see, they eventually achieved considerable
things — the Romans lay, until the tide of Greek
Art broke on them after the fall of Syracuse,
wholly under the influence of the Etruscans.
This complete supremacy of Etruscan Artistic
production will not surprise you, when you reflect
how largely beholden the Romans were to Etruria
under almost every head. Etruria gave them
kings, augurs, doctors, mimes, musicians, boxers,
runners ; the royal purple, the royal sceptre, the
fasces, the curule chair, the Lydian flute, the
straight trumpet, and the curved trumpet. The
education of a Roman youth received its finishing
touches in Etruria. Tuscan engineers had girt
Rome with walls ; Tuscan engineers had built the

1885 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 121
great conduit through which the swamp, which
was one day to be the Roman Forum, was drained
into the Tiber. What wonder, then, that in
Architecture, also in Painting, in Sculpture, in
Jewellery, and in all the things of taste, Etruscans
gave the law to the ruder and less cultured race ?
Accordingly, Etruscan architects adorned Rome
with temples. So, also, the Etruscans gave to
the dwelling-houses of the Romans their most
characteristic feature, the Atrium, with its portico
and its tank. So, again, Sculpture in Rome was
wholly in the hands of the Etruscans. The terra
cotta figures which, even in the days of Cato,
adorned the pediments of the Roman temples
were of Etruscan workmanship. For bronzes,
wherein Etruria was famous, Rome was again
beholden to her. In the minor, and purely
decorative Arts and Industries, Rome was fur
nished from the same source : the booths in the
Tuscan street, under the Palatine Hill, were gay
with artistic manufactures of every kind ; here
Etruscan tradesmen displayed their famous mirrors,
smooth, graven, and embossed, their lamps, their
candelabra, their cups and vases, their weapons,
their musical instruments ; here the Roman ladies
indulged their passion for those masterpieces of
the Goldsmith- Art for which Etruscan Artificers
were famous. As in carving, casting, and chasing
so also in painting, Etruscans led the way. Mural
painting it was, no doubt, chiefly, that they prac
tised : in this their fame was ancient ; Pliny,

122 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
indeed, in describing certain wall-paintings still
preserved in his day at Ardea and at Lanuvium,
places them before the foundation of Rome ; as,
however, he adds that the nudes were, in one of
them, of remarkable beauty, we must, I think,
even after making a liberal allowance for his defi
cient connoisseurship, entertain grave doubts on
the score of his chronology. And this Etruscan
supremacy in the things of Art lasted for some
four or five centuries — lasted, in fact, until it was
first sapped, and then finally swept aside, by a
counter-current of influence which, about the
third century before Christ, began to filter through
Campania into Rome from the opposite end of
the peninsula, and, after the fall of Syracuse,
triumphantly invaded and possessed the Roman
world — the direct influence of Greece. From
that day, from the day on which Marcellus
brought home in triumph the spoils of the great
Sicilian city, an inextinguishable craving for works
of Grecian Art, for Grecian marbles, Grecian
bronzes, Grecian pictures, Grecian gems, seemed
to inflame the wealthy magnates, the nobles, and
the nouveaux riches of Rome ; from that day on
ward we see arise and multiply the great tribe of
depredators which, settling like a locust-cloud
over all the Grecian lands, spoiled and bared them
of all their hoarded treasure, till the works of
Grecian Artists crowded in the imperial city were
counted not in hundreds but in hundreds of
thousands. There were various types of these

1885 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 123
depredators — some, like Mummius, ravaged in
stupid ignorance ; some, like Pompey, plundered
for vain display ; some in a frenzied but en
lightened lust of acquisition, like Verres. Of the
unbridled greed of this last — the supreme type of
the insolent despoiler — to whom no temple was
sacred, to whom his plighted word was nothing,
and who made robbery more insulting by affecting
to buy what none durst refuse to part with, you may
see a startling picture in Cicero's famous oration
" de Signis." Togetherwith Greek Art, Greek in
fluence in every other form of intellectual activity
assumed absolute lordship in Rome. Greek
became the fashionable language among the higher
classes. The bon ton made it necessary to
Hellenise all things. Youths were sent to Athens
to complete their education ; ladies talked Greek
to the Greek servants who reared their children ;
Greek had precedence of Latin in the schools ;
conspicuous Romans affected to write in Greek.
Amongst others, for instance, Cicero, who asks
Atticus, in one of his delightful letters, to look
over for him a history he had just been writing, in
Greek, of his own Consulate, and takes occasion
to allude to a like work by Lucullus.
But how different was the outcome of this
influence in the realm of Literature and in that of
Art ! In the one the seed fell on soil rich in
noble germs, bringing forth in due time a noble
harvest : in History, in Poetry both lyric and
epic, in Satire, in Oratory, Roman genius counts

124 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
a long roll of famous names. In the field of Art
what do we see ? The profusion of perfect works
that was poured into the lap of Rome elicited
amongst her people little or no creative life, and
except in one or two forms of Art, as we shall
presently see, little fruit was yielded by her ; nay
more, indirectly its effects were harmful : speaking
to no ideal sense — for no aesthetic sense was
there, stirring no emulative impulse — its main
effect was, in the great majority of cases, only to
minister to vulgar vanity, to nourish that craving
for display and luxury which pervaded Roman
society already in the last century of the Republic,
and, merging in the general appetite for unbridled
self-indulgence, helped to bring about under the
Empire that moral turpitude and putrescence on
which the wrath of Juvenal and shameless Martial's
jibes have thrown so fierce a light.
But what, in the midst of this constant and
multitudinous influx of artistic wealth, was the
attitude of the Roman people at large towards Art
itself? It was an attitude of more or less sincerely
contemptuous indifference. The pursuit of Art was
regarded as one little becoming the dignity of a
Roman citizen : a frame of mind not perhaps very
unintelligible in a race of a coarse fibre, which, for
centuries, had lived wholly in one order of ideas :
to fight, to subjugate, to rule — this had been their
engrossing thought, this even Virgil reminded
them was their supreme mission. So wise a man
as Seneca described Art as a pursuit not worthy

1885 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 125
to rank among liberal studies. It was an amuse
ment fit for children, said Cicero— "oblectamenta
puerorum " ; a pursuit good enough for frivolous
Greeks, the Romans thought — starveling little
Greeks — " Graeculi esurientes " — as Juvenal called
them; crazy little Greeks — "Graeculi delirantes"
— as Petronius makes one of his personages call
Apelles, if you please, and Phidias !
Here is a characteristic touch : Cicero, in that
long and vehement indictment against Verres, to
which I have already alluded, is describing,
amongst other misdeeds, the robbery, or enforced
purchase for a nominal sum, of certain statues by
Greek Artists of the first rank, and is seeking to
convey the impression that he has, for the re
quirements of his brief, made himself acquainted
with the names of a few Greek Artists — "a foolish
subject enough," he says, apologetically — nescio
quid nugatorium — nor has he, indeed, quite mas
tered them ; " one statue," he says, " is by Myron,
another by — by — let me see " — and, turning to
his scribe — " Ah ! quite so — Polycletus — thank
you! — Polycletus." In this strain did it seem neces
sary to Cicero to allude, before a Roman audience,
to two of the foremost among Greek sculptors.
Now, two circumstances cast an amusing side
light on this little episode. One is that the fourth
"Verrine" was never delivered; the failure of
memory, the appeal to the scribe, the recognition
of the forgotten name — all these were a carefully
prepared piece of acting, a rhetorical artifice.

126 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
The second is that Cicero was himself a keen and
passionate collector.
Strange views on Art peep out occasionally in
the writings of Latin authors. Listen, for in
stance, to the younger Pliny : " Behold," he says,
"how much statues, images, pictures, men, too,
and animals of various kinds — nay, even trees, so
they are handsome ones — are enhanced by size"
In all this jumble of men, animals, pictures, and
trees is not the emphasis on size very characteris
tically Roman ? We are not surprised, amongst
such a people, to find Nero ordering his portrait
150 feet high. But, if you would sound the depth
of Roman barbarism in artistic matters, I com
mend to your attention Claudius, the Emperor, a
man, mind, of refinement and learning, who, being
the possessor of two portraits of Alexander the
Great by Apelles — I say, Apelles — caused the
heads in these pictures to be painted out, to make
room for the features of the divine Augustus !
Such then, being the conditions and the atmo
sphere which surrounded the growth of Art in
Rome, we shall not wonder if we find its develop
ment both limited and, except in one or two direc
tions, barren of great results. For the practice of
ideal sculpture, indeed, the first conditions were
wanting in them ; the subtle sense of form, so
brilliantly displayed in their best literary work,
failed them wholly in the plastic Arts. Neither
the character of their religion, the habit of their
minds, nor the nature of their customs, led them

1885 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 127
to this mode of expression. As regards their paint
ing, we are absolutely in the dark. What may
have been the value of the commemorative wall-
pictures of the patrician amateur, Fabius Pictor —
pictures of which Valerius Maximus appears to
have blushed that so fine a gentleman should
have descended to produce them — it is difficult to
conjecture ; nor are we better able to represent
to ourselves the painted works of the poet Pacu-
vius, which were said to be second only to those
of Fabius. A painting, purporting to be the work
of a Roman, has come down to us under the name
ofthe " Nozze Aldebrandine." It is an overrated
work, in which, again, Greek influence is every
where, and of which, for that matter, we have no
certainty that it is not the work of a Greek crafts
man residing in Rome. This meanwhile is cer
tain, that painting struck no roots among the
Romans. It is already described as dying, by the
Elder Pliny ; and, by another writer of the same
period, as having disappeared without leaving a
trace. Art, as such. Art, as sesthetic expression,
nowhere, in fact, held to the roots of the Roman
temperament. Nevertheless, its practice found
¦on two sides favouring elements in the Roman
genius ; and in two of its phases, accordingly, it
did achieve memorable things : but in either case
the impulse was ethic rather than sesthetic. It
-was from the earliest days a characteristic custom
of the Romans that they surrounded themselves
and decorated their atria with the effigies of their

128 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
ancestors. These effigies were originally, it
would seem, wax moulds of the countenances of
the deceased, but eventually works of Art,
modelled or painted, took the place of these pri
mitive masks. These images, duly decked and
draped, it was in each family the custom to carry
in solemn procession at every funeral ceremony.
The Roman was buried, as he had lived, under
the eyes of his forefathers. You see at once how
powerful a moral leverage lay in this custom.
Speaking of these effigies, Pliny exclaims, " What
a mighty stimulant was here ! The very walls
reproached, day by day, the craven owner that
intruded amongst trophies not his own." Some,
indeed, seem to have thought that this example
should be for the common profit, not for private
advantage only ; for he alludes, in another pas
sage, to a magnificent speech by Agrippa — from
which, by-the-by, I should like to prefix a quota
tion to the Catalogues of our Winter Exhibitions
— wherein he descants on the far greater use of
Works of Art when seen in public places than
when exiled in far-off" country houses. But I am-
digressing. You perceive what an impulse was
here furnished to the Art of Portraiture — to a
vivid and faithful record of the lineaments of
those in the light of whose example every Roman,
as long as Roman virtue lasted, strove to live his
life. Accordingly, we find that the one branch of
Sculpture in which Rome achieved any excellence
is precisely this — vivid and faithful portraiture.

i885 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 129
And in this development of Art the impulse was,
I repeat, ethic, not aesthetic.'
We shall notice the same circumstance in the
other and far more important development of Art
in Rome to which I have alluded. It may, I
think, safely be said that, among the characteris
tics of the Roman national temper, none was
more marked than the imperial instinct, the un
questioning belief in a mission to conquer and to
rule. And here we come upon the second point
at which Art found a nourishing principle in the
genius of the Roman people. I speak of its
achievements in Architecture. This high impe
rial sense, this conscious calling to rule and reign,
demanded outward and visible expression — not in
Rome alone, but even to the furthest verge of
Rome's ever-spreading sway ; symbols of its might
and its magnificence were needed to impress the
subject races, and to speak to their eyes of the
sovereign majesty of the imperial people. This
function Architecture stepped in to fulfil, and ful
filled nobly. It is not my province, nor is it
within my grasp, to follow out in detail the for
tunes ofthe building-craft in Rome. It is enough
here to note that, by the adoption from the Tus
cans, and the wider development, ofthe vault as a
constructive principle, the Romans evolved a new
phase in Architectural Art, and filled the world
with buildings in which their strength always,
their dignity sometimes, the coarseness of their
fibre not infrequently, find striking expression, and

I30 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
in which we read, as on a written page, in due
order of time, the rise, the exaltation, the down
fall, and the decay of the great Roman race. This
also, finally, is worthy of notice, that whilst the
Architecture of Rome reflected in a stately man
ner enough certain characteristics of its people,
nevertheless, not being the spontaneous utterance
of an sesthetic instinct, but the outcome of material
needs and of patriotic pride, it was only an incom
plete expression of Roman civilisation. Of the
Athenians I have said that every best attribute of
their minds lives and is revealed in their match
less buildings. Power, dignity, measure, precision,
elegance, suppleness, serenity, and the rapture of
the ideal — these attributes are gathered up in one
perfect organism, and made manifest in the stain
less marble of their temples. It is not so with
Roman Architecture. That Architecture is, I said,
an incomplete expression. There are in the master
pieces of Roman Literature, here a perfection
of finish, there a sparkling vivacity, and there
again a subtle charm and grace, of which their
buildings showed but slender signs. To them, in
brief. Art was not vernacular : their purest taste,
their brightest gifts of mind, found no utterance
in it.
Here time warns me that I must leave these all
too bald and fragmentary reflections on Roman
Art. Yet bear with me, for a last moment, while
I remind you of one lesson at least which each of
us may gather from them.

1885 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 13 1
We have seen Art — such Art as it was given
to Rome to achieve — rise and fall with the virtues
of the Roman people. From the lips of the most
seeing of its sons we know the solvent in which
those virtues perished : that solvent was the
greed, the insatiate greed, of gold — "auri sacra
fames" — the rot of luxury. " More deadly than
arms," Juvenal magnificently exclaims, "luxury
has swept down upon us, and avenges the con
quered world."
. . . . " Saevior armis
Luxuria incubuit, victumque ulciscitur orbem."
Here, then, is our lesson and our warning ; for
assuredly, to an Artist, the day on which the
deadening fumes of this insidious lust for gold
cast their first blurring mists across the pure light
of his ideal is the herald of a struggle on which
hang, not only the wreck or the triumph of his
better self, but the marring or the maintaining in
his Art of whatever is that better self's reflection.

Address, December ioth, 1887

ART IN MODERN ITALY ; TUSCANY.
THE RENAISSANCE

Students of the Royal Academy,
Those among you who have followed with
any interest the inquiry which formed the purport
of my two latest addresses — an inquiry, namely,
into the relation of artistic production to the
moral and physical conditions within which it is
evolved — may, perhaps, remember what point we
had reached in that inquiry when last we left it,
and over what portion of its field we had travelled.
They may remember that, surveying briefly in
the first of those addresses the evolution of Art in
Egypt, in Assyria, and in Greece, and, in the
second, its evolution in Etruria and in Rome, we
did not fail to note its organic connection with the
moral fibre and with the national life of the
peoples among which it flourished.
Italy, then, last occupied our thoughts ; to that
region we will turn them again to-night. But to
an Italy how changed 1 Not to the Italy of the
Csesars, but to that other Italy which rose out of
the ashes of their empire ; no longer a land of
which the centred might was gathered up in the
august name of one Sovereign city ; a land no
longer the home of an Imperial race sending forth
its armed hosts to subdue the world, building up,

136 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
for the control of a perishable state, an imperish
able system of jurisprudence ; yet for its inspira
tion in all the graces of culture the tributary of an
alien people, and all but barren in every art
except the art of building. It is not such a land
or such a people that we have before us to-night.
It is a land not homogeneous, but split up and
parcelled out into numberless communities, divided
against itself; sending forth no armies beyond
the bastions of the Alps, and whence no fleet
went out on either sea except in the service, or in
the defence, or for the ends of trade, yet destined
once again to draw to itself with magnetic force
the gaze of all the nations ; and this land we shall
see strong in every intellectual gift and grace,
shaking off" first among the people of Europe the
torpor of the Dark Ages, revealing man once
more to himself and the world to man, and herald
ing the dawn of a wider, freer, intellectual life.
Our special concern will be to see how Art
fared in this great movement towards the light,
and to note where its course consented with, and
where it diverged from, the general current of
mental and moral evolution. The subject is, how
ever, so wide and complex that I shall be forced
this evening by the limits of our time, and by
some decent regard for the patience of my young
hearers, to confine my attention, apart from a few
remarks of a general character, mainly to one
portion of it, to that which bears on Tuscan Art ;
not, indeed, in forgetfulness of the pomp and glow

1887 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 137
of the Venetian school, or of the great achieve
ments of the other schools of Northern Italy, but
because Tuscany presents to us the most homo
geneous and the most comprehensive image of
Italian culture in all its aspects from the fourteenth
to the sixteenth century ; and is, therefore, best
suited to illustrate our present inquiry. And
within the range of Tuscan Art, again, I shall, for
further brevity, ask your attention chiefly to that
branch of it which was as characteristically an
Italian form of expression as sculpture had been
the pre-eminently characteristic expression of the
genius of the Greeks — the art of painting.
Before addressing ourselves to the general
aspects of the intellectual evolution of Italy in the
second period of her supremacy, let us glance at
the human material on which it worked, and see
what the race was which occupied Italian soil
some eight centuries after the fall of the Empire
of the West. No doubt during the later years of
Imperial rule no inconsiderable modification had
been slowly taking place in the lower strata of the
population, through the wholesale settling on the
soil of barbarian prisoners of war. But it was
not until, in the fifth century, the Roman Empire
crumbled under the heel of one of the many bar
barian hordes which had long furnished it with
soldiers, and often with rulers — it was not until
Odoacer and his Herules had contemptuously
brushed aside the last descendant of Romulus and
Augustus, ftiat a state of things began such as

138 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
must materially affect the complexion of the
Italian race, though in degrees varying according
as, in various regions, submersion under the suc
ceeding floods of invasion was general or partial.
For several centuries after the collapse of Imperial
Rome, wave after wave of foreign hosts rolled
along the face of prostrate Italy, assailing her now
from this side and now from that ; Ostrogoths,
Lombards, Huns, Franks, and Germans poured in
succession into the Cisalpine plains, and pushed
east and west of the great mountain-spine of Italy,
far into the heart of the land. Whatever modifi
cation the Italian races underwent must, there
fore, be sought chiefly in the northern and central
portions of the Peninsula. From the sea, it is
true, came Saracens and Normans, of whom the
latter carved for themselves a kingdom, and in
stalled a dynasty on the south-western coast ; but
in neither case were the numbers of the invaders
sufficient to affect the characteristics of the races
among which they settled ; and here let us at once
note a marked instance of the persistency of racial
characteristics. Unconquered by the Lombards,
occupied for a short space only by the Goths,
strengthened by the influx of Italian refugees,
Rome herself sustained little modification in the
characteristics of her inhabitants ; and, accord
ingly, the well-knit, stately type which marked
them, a noble vessel which had once contained
Imperial souls, was preserved as we see it even
in our own day; but, together with this bodily

1887 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 139
type endured also the old sterility in the things
that concern the graphic Arts ; and even in the
days when, enthroned once more, Rome wielded
the sceptre of the Christian world, at a time when
she gathered within her walls all that was great
in Art and Letters, no solitary flower of native
genius rose to grace her name, unless the word
genius may be used — whereto I should demur — in
connection with the name of a brawny and prolific
plagiarist of Raphael, known to fame as Giulio
Romano. Another instance of heredity is offered to us in
Tuscany. Sheltered though she was within the
folding arms of the Apennines, her race did not,
it is true, escape the alloy brought by foreign
immigration. Nevertheless, it seems to me that,
while in the field of Art the new amalgam pro
duced an infinitely nobler and more exquisite
flower than had grown on her soil in the old
Etruscan days, the two distinct elements in Etrus
can Art to which I drew your attention in my last
address — one delicate and graceful, the other
harsh and almost Assyrian in its rudeness — assert
themselves curiously in the Art of Christian
Etruria. Of the subtle graces which breathe in
that Art, from Giotto to Lionardo, it is needless
to speak ; and surely in the rugged angularities of
a Verocchio, a Signorelli, or a Donatello, and in
the shadow of sadness which broods over so much
of the finest Florentine work, the more sombre
phase ofthe Etruscan temper still lives on.

140 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
Meanwhile, with whatever curiosity we may
scan the history of a people, however carefully
we may seek in it the fecundating or the sterilis
ing influences of certain sets of conditions, the
source of the artistic gift, the secret of its perma
nence or its periclitation, will ever remain obscure.
Of which obscurities here are two illustrations : In
Venice, a seafaring Italian race, stimulated and
inflamed by the sight of the splendour and the
spoils of Byzantium, developed to its last limits
the wealth and witchery of colour, and summed
up in the Basilica of St. Mark all the glow and
glamour of the East. To the galleys of Genoa
the waters of the Bosphorus were as well known
as to the galleys that sailed under Dandolo ; from
the round tower which still bears their country's
name, Genoese traders looked down upon the
same magic picture of profuse splendour as that
which had dazzled their rivals from the Rialto ;
contact with the Orientals, whose craft in the
interweaving of many colours was vaunted already
by Dante, was common to them and to the
Venetians ; and yet what creative artistic impulse
was called forth within them ? None, absolutely
none ; the seed had fallen on a naked rock to be
swept away by the next passing wind. The
Ligurian was not an artist, the Venetian was ;
who shall say why ? Again, if ever a country was
blessed with natural resources, it is the region of
which we speak as the Two Sicilies. Blessed in
its climate, prodigal in its fertility, inhabited by a

i887 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 141
race strongly tinged with Greek blood, it abounded
in artistic vitality in the days of Hellenic great
ness, and was saturated still with artistic feeling in
the days when the younger Pliny lived. What
has been the native production in art of this
enchanted land in Christian times ? What artist
of really conspicuous mark has it sent forth ?
Again I have to say — none, absolutely none ; for
we shall scarcely give that title to Salvator Rosa,
a painter harsh and gloomy like the Spanish rule
under which he was born, whose painted work
seems almost in scorn of the bright heavens
under which he wrought ; albeit an artist to
whom we are drawn in sympathy by certain
wild sweet songs in which he has, as I think,
uttered his more artistic and his more Italian
self Let us now glance at the various formative
influences under which Italian Art, and here more
particularly that portion of it which concerns us
this evening, rose and became supreme. Of these
influences, the first which claims our attention,
though one which was common to Italy and all
the nations of Europe, is the great spiritual
revolution which severs the ancient from the
modern world, and has transformed the face of
the countries of the West — I mean, of course, the
revolution produced by the advent and triumph of
the Christian faith. At what points did this great
moral revolution vitally affect and mould the
development and character of Art ? For it is not

142 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
simply in the substitution of one class of subjects
for another that we must look for those effects,
but in a modification more profound and perma
nent. The Christian spirit could not express
itself through the same artistic form as the spirit
of pagan antiquity ; and the antagonism of these
two spirits, as expressed in Art, made itself
especially felt during those earlier centuries
wherein the ascetic temper, which the Christian
creed opposed to the corruption of the heathen
world, was in the ascendant. Of the charac
teristics which the new faith stamped upon Art,
the impress of this asceticism was the first and the
most strikingly in contrast with the vOog of ancient
Art. For consider the spirit of the religion of the
Greeks, of which spirit the quintessence is
gathered up in the radiant beauty of their
sculpture ; it was a joyous and an exulting spirit,
full of the pulse of life, shunning the thought of
death, little concerned with the pale Beyond
which might await those whose hearts had ceased
to beat ; a bold spirit, knowing no terrors, self-
centred, and somewhat loveless ; it carried a belief
that to be a god was but to be a more beautiful
man, leading a yet fuller life with yet richer
faculties and physical equipment, divine, therefore,
only as being the ideal of a man in his comeliness,
in his wisdom, and in his strength. It is evident
that a serene and luminous embodiment of human
perfections would be the natural artistic expression
of such a spirit, wholly turned as it was towards

i887 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 143
this life and the perfectibility of man within it and
in reference to it only.
To this attitude the spirit of Christianity offered
the completest antithesis. The faith of the Chris
tian, drawing his gaze away from the present life,
taught him to see in this fair world a temporary
dwelling, a scene of trial only and of preparation ;
lifted for him the veil of a life beyond the grave,
towards the undying joys of which he was taught
to strain his spiritual gaze — a life which was within
the reach of all, and of which the alternative was
everlasting punishment. Christians were taught
that a fount unquenchable of love was poured out
upon them from on high, a love binding them in
a common bond of brotherhood, a love of which
the reflection should go out again from each of
them upon his fellow-men. He was taught, further,
that the things of this world are a mirage and a
snare, and the enjoyment of them culpable, a bar
to the purifying of the spirit to salvation.
These doctrines, then, it became the function of
Art to proclaim and to embody, and they were for
centuries the sole theme of the painter and the
sculptor. What a transformation is here implied !
All the old matter on which they had worked
banished and branded! The gods, the genial
smiling gods, cast down from their golden thrones,
though not, indeed, to their annihilation, for the
gods of one religion are wont to become the
demons of its successor. The great god Pan
himself, the all-pervading spirit of the fruitful

144 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
earth. Pan with his "jolly Satyrs," is no longer
heard along the mountain-tops ; his pipes are no
longer "sweet, piercing sweet, by the river" ; he
descends, Satyrs and all, with horns, hoofs, and
tail, into the nether regions, to personate hence
forth the Arch Tempter with his infernal crew,
under which guise he duly reappears on canvas
and carven gable, or maybe as a grinning gargoyle
in the Gothic ages. The black dogs of Hecate
assume his livery, and you have recently, in a
place of entertainment not far from here, seen one
of them figure as the forerunner of Mephisto in
the cell, and at the bidding of Dr. Faustus of
mediseval renown.
But with the glad gods fled for a time all the
gladness of Art ; the divinely pathetic figure of the
Man of Sorrows became the central object of its
efforts ; and in the place of joy in the ideals of
bodily perfection as the most faithful mirrors of
the perfect human spirit, loathing of the body and
its beauty, as of the vehicle of all temptation, a
yearning for a life in which the flesh should be
shaken off, a spirit of awe, of pity, and of love,
became the moving forces that shaped its creations.
The outward change was correspondingly com
plete ; the forms of classic Art were an embodied
heresy ; and henceforth a gaunt ungainliness of
form was to express the doctrine of the depravity
of the flesh. Causes which we shall see at work
eventually restored a truer balance and a clearer
insight, but the influence of Christianity, if under

1887 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 145
a more subtle and penetrating guise, did not cease
to prevail in Art in the form of the spirit of human
sympathy. These considerations are, as I have said, of
general application in modern Art, and are not
therefore special to our subject. It was, however,
impossible here to omit a brief allusion to them.
Let us now narrow our attention to Italy, and
particularly to that part of it which corresponds
roughly to ancient Etruria. We have here, as
always, to take for our postulate that unfathomable
compound — the genius of the race. Of that mar
vellous race, bred, as it was, in an atmosphere of
which the quickening purity was a boast of the
Tuscans — aria generativa Dino Compagni calls it
— -great intellectual brilliancy, suppleness, and
balance were characteristic. In these qualities
the Florentines approached more nearly to the
Athenians than, perhaps, any other people before
or since their day ; and they rivalled them also in
their overmastering sesthetic sense, though that
sense was of a wholly different complexion. I
say overmastering, because it penetrated every
fibre of their nature, and was a dominant impulse
always seeking expression. Perhaps, as I have
compared them in their mental gifts to the Greeks,
I ought to hint at points of contact of a less
satisfactory character — to a certain mutability of
temper, for instance ; they were a fickle folk, says
Machiavelli, varia e volubile cittadinanza. And
perhaps, also, I should glance at some laxity in
K

146 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
the matter of that virtue of truthfulness which this
same Machiavelli vaunts so much in the Germans,
but thought so unnecessary — not to say more — in
an ideal Italian prince. The Greeks reverenced
as almost godlike that Lord of Lies, Odysseus ;
and a little touch from the pen of Vespasiano da
Bisticci is not without suggestiveness in regard to
the citizens of Florence. He is telling a story of
Poggio Bracciolini : " Messer Poggio," says he,
" not knowing the nature of the Florentines,
thought they were speaking the truth."
So much for the race. It is no part of our task
to follow its political vicissitudes before or during
the centuries which are the frame of our subject.
It is, however, essential that you should possess
some notion of the general character of those
vicissitudes, which are not without important
bearing on the intellectual development we have
to consider ; and although I would caution you
against accepting the view of Sismondi, that
government alone, and not race or climate, is the
moulding agency in the formation of national
character, and that tout fut donnd a tous, you can
not do better than turn to that writer's authorita
tive volumes to obtain this knowledge. You will
there read how in the towns which had survived
the wreck of the Roman Empire, grew up free
and strong communities, born of and welded by
the necessity of resisting the frequent shock of
barbarian onslaught and the raids of freebooters ;
and you will at once note here, in the limited

i887 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 147
scale of these communities, and in their freedom
from the numbing sense of a colossal levelling
mechanism of central power, one element making
for that free expansion of the individual which
was a central fact in Italian national development.
And you will further discern, in the stimulating
suggestion of past greatness which haunted the
ancient walls of these once powerful cities, one of
the circumstances which favoured the rapid growth
of their inhabitants in conscious strength, and
fitted them for the part of precursors, in the modern
world. There also you will follow the growth of
these free communities in every civic virtue, and
you will see them reaching, before the middle of
the thirteenth century, a level of prosperity and
civilisation unknown in any other country. You
will see them raising in their cities splendid edi
fices, sacred and civil, public and private, and
carrying out great engineering works in their
subject territories. And, as in external dignity of
life, so also in Letters and in Art, you will see
them in advance of the rest of the world.
Among these young commonwealths, Florence
was the most conspicuous. Passionately tenacious
of equality— a tenacity justified by the conscious
ness of widespread political capacity — the Floren
tines had flung themselves with ardour into every
form of public life and every outlet of intellectual
energy. Idleness was held by them in scorn.
Every, or nearly every citizen was in some
form or other engaged in business, and not the

148 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
burgesses only, but in many cases also the nobles.
Meanwhile a nobleman, merely as such, was
precluded from holding office ; no one not a
member of a guild was qualified to hold a public
post. Dante was enrolled in the Guild of
Apothecaries. Public functionaries were unpaid,
and the magistrates were elected for their terms
of service by lot from a list of qualified citizens.
What an average of political aptitude is here
implied! In this general stir of bracing civic life
the genius of the Florentines had expanded on
every side, and the harvest of this wide fecundity
was reaped with full hands. In Art, Andrea
called Pisano, though not a native of Pisa, Arnolfo
di Lapo, Cimabue, Giotto, and a host of others
placed, within the thirteenth century, the name of
Florence on a pinnacle from which it has not been
dethroned. In history the way was shown by
the two Villanis and Dino Compagni ; and, chief
glory of all, in the midst of a group of minor
singers, Dante Alighieri had tuned his lyre for
the sublime song by which his fame was to re
sound unsurpassed through the centuries.
But the days of golden freedom were not of
long duration in the cities of Italy ; and once more
I must refer you to the writers who have recorded
their history, that you may learn how by degrees
these communities, ever armed in strife one
against the other, rent by faction within, and
worn by ruthless civil feud, fell, one by one,
under the rule of despots who by prowess, or by

i887 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 149
craft, or both, had seized the reins of power, so
that when in the fateful year 1494, the floodgates
of foreign invasion were once again opened on
Italy, to her ruin, a truly free people nowhere
stood upright and intact to oppose its deadly
inroads. Among these Republics, Florence, where the
democratic spirit had struck the deepest roots,
was the last to keep a semblance of liberty ; and
it was only by covert acts, and a rare blending of
talent and cunning, that a great family of money
lenders, the Medici, gradually rose in the fifteenth
century to a height of fame from which, without
leaving the counter, it gave its name to an epoch,
and, finally, flung gilded chains on the liberties of
its native city.
The span of Italian history at which we have
glanced contains, then, two epochs — that of the
Republics, and that of the Despots ; epochs,
however, which cannot be marked off by any
common date, as some of the Republics forfeited
their freedom much sooner than others. But if
in the sphere of politics this span of time is
marked by momentous changes, it saw, as we
shall note, changes not less momentous and far-
reaching in the domain of Art and Letters. The
period embraced between the close of the thir
teenth and the first quarter of the sixteenth cen
tury falls into three distinct divisions : The first is
the age of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, an age
of creative production ; the second, the age of the

I50 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
first triumphs of the Humanists, one of reception
and assimilation, for, as Voigt has well said, the
humanistic movement was eminently a process of
reception ; and the third, ushered in by Lorenzo
Magnifico and Poliziano, once more a period of
productiveness, spontaneous and national, but
bearing the stamp of the revived spirit of antiquity.
To this revival of the spirit of antiquity the name
New Birth, or Renaissance, is given ; and as this
great intellectual revolution profoundly affected
the course of Italian Art, it is important that you
should form some idea of the history of its rise
and growth, and we will look at it first, for pur
poses of future comparison, in its bearing on
literature. Now I wish here to impress upon you a fact,
in the light of which you will better understand
certain divergences between the respective evolu
tions of Art and of Letters. The Renaissance
movement is the result of two distinct currents of
force. One was the spirit of intellectual revolt
against the bonds of Scholastic Theology, and
that extreme attitude of asceticism which saw in
the flesh nothing but the devil, and especially
regarded as a snare whatever in the outer world
ministered to the aesthetic sense ; out of this
revolt grew the rehabilitation of man and the
emancipation of his intelligence; and it inaugurated
in all things the scientific spirit. The other
motive force was the rekindled consciousness
among the Italians of their past historic greatness,

i887 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 151
and this reawakened sense led them to a passionate
glorification of all that pertained to that past great
ness, to an insatiate desire for the knowledge of
the works and for the reconquest of the wisdom of
their ancestors ; and not of their ancestors only, but
also of that other people from whom those ancestors
had themselves drawn inspiration — the Greeks.
These two forces, then — the impulse to reassert
the dignity of man and to rehabilitate the world,
and a new-stirred consciousness of a great intel
lectual inheritance — were the elements out of
which the Renaissance movement was com
pacted. These forces, it should, however, be added, if
through a long period they had been fettered and
restrained, had never been wholly inert. The
spirit of protest against the extreme doctrine of
the depravity of man had at no time been entirely
silent, and through centuries, during which the
pious raptures of the hymnologists had soared in
solemn tones towards heaven, a voice of rebellious
gladness had rung, defiantly enough, in the songs
of the wandering clerics, the Carmina Burana.
Neither, on the other hand, had the dim image of
a mighty national past ceased altogether to glimmer
in the memory of the people of Italy. Certain
famous names had never wholly faded in the twi
light of their minds ; up to the thirteenth century
Boethius was held in odour of sanctity at Pavia,
and Virgil, now as a saint and now as a wizard,
had retained a hold on the popular imagination

152 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
from Mantua to Posilippo. Among the more
learned a knowledge of his works, of those of
Ovid, Juvenal, Cicero, and a few others, was kept
alive, half apologetically, and Aristotle, or such an
Aristotle as had survived translation, first into
Arabic and then from Arabic into Latin, and
liberal tampering in the operation, was held in high
honour. Up to the thirteenth century the language of
literature was Latin ; Latin in its mediaeval form
was common to a Pietro Damiano and to the
Goliardic Strollers. Within that century, how
ever, the new tongue — the lingua volgare — became
gradually the vehicle of poetic inspiration. In it
St. Francis of Assisi poured out his infinite Chris
tian tenderness ; in it Jacopone clothed his burning
love of Christ ; in it Guido Cavalcanti and Cino
da Pistoja sang of terrestrial love ; and in the
" Divina Commedia " it received its highest sanc
tion. Thus the same century, the century of
Dante and of Giotto, saw the birth ofa new Italian
Literature and of a new Italian Art.
With Dante we reach the threshold of the
Renaissance. He stands on the verge of the
Middle Ages ; in him the old order ends. With
Petrarch the new order begins. But it is not as
a poet, not by the songs in which he embalmed
the innumerable moods of an ideal love, that he
moulded his generation, and opened the gates of
a new era. It was by the audacity of initiative
with which he pushed aside the veil that hung

i887 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 153
over the pagan world, and led the way in an eager
study of its intellectual production, and to a fearless
appreciation of its greatness. He was the first
Humanist, the first of those who, believing in the
dignity of the unfettered human spirit, found the
fullest manifestation of that spirit in the works of
the great classic writers. From his early youth,
Virgil and Cicero had fastened on his highly
strung artistic nature by the stately cadence of
their language, and it was at the streams of their
eloquence that he drank that almost superstitious
reverence for antiquity which coloured his whole
life, and which he bequeathed to the generations
that followed him. The accumulation of classic
lore and its dissemination became the central pre
occupation of his life ; he travelled far and wide in
quest of manuscripts, hunting them down in the
dust and rust of convent libraries and cupboards,
carrying off what he could, copying laboriously
what he could not carry off".
But, together with every draught of ancient lore,
Petrarch drank in, also, a quickened sense of
glorious national heirship. Rome, now dethroned
from her place of power, loomed in all his thoughts.
We understand how irresistibly he was drawn to
visit the widowed city where he was one day to
receive, on the Capitol, the poet's crown ; we see
him wandering, side by side with his old college
friend, Giacomo Colonna, among those ruins of
which the sight has so often wrung the heart of
Italian patriots. But these witnesses of Roman

154 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
grandeur drew from him no tragic note like that
which dominates the sublime invocation of Leo-
pardi to his fallen country ; his pulses throbbed
with hope ; he dreamt of the return of the ancient
greatness, and shared, with ardour, in the ambi
tious dreams of that ill-balanced fanatic Cola di
Rienzo. Nor shall we think it strange that the
contemplation of so many glorious memories and
of such a heritage of fame should have set on fire,
in a mind of extraordinary vitality and unbounded
self-trust, a keen desire that his fame also might
survive in the memory of men ; and in a burning
thirst for earthly fame, again, he was, as in so
many things, the prototype of that host of
Humanists which, even within his own time,
sprang up under the rays of his enthusiasm.
If to Petrarch belongs the initiative in what
concerns the lore and letters of Rome, to Boc
caccio, his friend and pupil, belongs the earliest
systematic promotion of the study of Greek ;
through him a chair of Greek literature — the first
— was founded ; and thus both the gates to the
wonder-world of old stood open to the eager
throng. Of the great army of Humanists whose ranks
grew and were replenished during more than a
hundred years, it is, apart from my complete lack
of quality to do so, needless that I should speak
in other than general terms. What concerns
us here is the spirit common to them, of which
what little is left for me to say is only in ampli-

i887 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 155
fication of what we have noted in the case of
Petrarch. I have spoken of the eagerness for the collec
tion of manuscripts, of which he set the example ;
this eagerness became almost a mania among the
Humanists. Was an envoy despatched across the
Alps on a diplomatic mission, his first care was to
add, either by transcripts or by originals, to his
store of texts. Others were urged in this quest
by no motive but their learned curiosity. No
dangers deterred them. Filelfo did not shun a
sea voyage to Constantinople, though at the cost
of a five months' sail between the Golden Horn
and the Rialto. These men were in deadly
earnest ; you have heard the story of Guarino,
whose hair was bleached in a single night on
hearing of the loss at sea of certain cases of books
despatched to him from the East. Now, on these
journeys their shrewd eyes took in many things
about men and manners. Poggio, for instance,
on his return from a visit to Cardinal Beaufort,
had good stories to tell about English manners,
notably about certain dull and lengthy dinner
parties to which he was bidden in our country.
Cosmography, too, received a new impulse. Enea
Silvio, afterwards Pope Pius 1 1., has left descrip
tions of England and Scotland ; and I give it you
on the authority of Villani that under the head of
Vienna he is to this day quoted in Baedeker.
For various reasons the Humanists soon rose
to great power and importance. Two subjects

156 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
absorbed their attention — one, which, from the
days of Petrarch to those of Bembo, had a special
fascination for them, was the art of writing letters ;
rhetoric was the other. An uncontrollable mania
for the delivery of set orations exorbitantly long
seems to have possessed them in the fifteenth
century. Now, both these accomplishments gave
to the Humanists a special value as state secre
taries and political envoys ; and accordingly, all
the most prominent among them served, at some
time, either at the Vatican, or at one, if not more,
of the other seats of Government in Italy. Their
services were jealously courted and highly paid,
and the consideration in which they were held is
illustrated by a saying of Gian-Galeazzo Visconti
to the effect that Coluccio Salutato, the great
Florentine Chancellor, was more formidable to him
than a thousand horse.
Meanwhile, the humanistic movement, if it had
set free the minds of men and grafted upon the
new world the spirit of the old, had, for more
than half a century a disastrous effect on original
production, and, while it widened immeasurably
the knowledge of Latin letters, for a time wholly
thrust aside — for purposes of culture — the verna
cular tongue. Latin for a time brooked no rivalry.
The great Niccolo Niccoli did not fear to speak in
terms of scorn of Dante himself for his use of the
vulgar speech. " Leave him to the cobblers," he
exclaimed, "and to the bakers, since he has
chosen to write for them and for their like."

1887 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 157
Petrarch, as a lad, had been soundly rated by his
father for devouring Virgil instead of reading law.
Within a century Varchi narrowly escaped expul
sion from school for reading Petrarch in secret.
But, while the language of the " Divina Com
media " and of the " Canzoniere " was spurned by
the learned, the sweet Tuscan tongue still clung
to the lips of the lowly, in popular ditties and in
pious lauds, and throve and was handed down, till,
in the second half of the fifteenth century, it was
called again into the light by Lorenzo Magnifico,
and burst forth ripe and ringing in the melodious
verse of Angelo Poliziano, "the Lord ofthe Au-
sonian lyre," to reign once more in the writings
of a Machiavelli and a Guicciardini, a Pulci, a
Bojardo and an Ariosto, a Sadoleto, and a
Bembo. Let us now consider how far the general course
of intellectual development which I have sketched
out is reflected in the development of Art during
the same period. The production, both in sculp
ture and painting, of the middle period of the
thirteenth century has a character of transition.
In painting, the works, for instance, of Cimabue
and of Duccio are still impregnated with the By
zantine spirit, and occasionally reveal startling
reminiscences of classic dignity and power, to
which justice is not, I think, sufficiently rendered.
In sculpture, the handiwork of Nicolo Pisano is
full of the amplitude, the rhythm, and virility of
classic Art. I see in it, indeed, the tokens of a

158 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
new life in Art, but little sign of a new artistic
form — it is not a dawn ; it is an after-glow,
strange, belated, and solemn. In the Art of
Giotto and the Giottesques, the transformation is
fulfilled. It is an art lit up with the spirit of St.
Francis, warm with Christian love, pure with
Christian purity, simple with Christian humility ;
it is the fit language of a pious race endowed with
an exquisite instinct of the expressiveness of form,
as form, but untrained as yet in the knowledge of
the concrete facts of the outer world ; an Art fresh
with the dew and tenderness of youth, and yet
showing, together with this virginal quality of
young life, a simple forcefulness prophetic of the
power of its riper day. Within the outline of these
general characteristics, individuality found suffi
cient scope. Awe of the doom of the wicked, and
a sense of inexorable retribution inspired, in minds
of a certain stamp, works full of a Dantesque
severity and force ; to others, militant Christianity
and theological allegory furnished a grateful field.
Local particularities of temperament were reflected
in local artistic production ; in the work of the
Florentines we trace that grave sobriety which so
strongly marked them in the early days of their
Republican freedom, and of which, later on,
Angiolo Pandolfini was to draw an interesting
picture. Among the Siennese, on the other hand,
the love of splendour and luxury peculiar to them,
translated itself in the gay profusion of gold
adornments which, in their pictures, bespangled

i887 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 159
and enriched the gorgeous raiment of their virgins,
saints, and angels.
The main external characteristics of this early
phase of Art, however, are, I repeat, a keen sense
of the expressiveness of form, which translates
itself in beauty and flow of line ; ignorance of the
facts of Nature, resulting in drawing empty
as well as inaccurate ; and, we must add, a
complete indifference to landscape, with which,
in fact, it deals symbolically rather than by
imitation. Soon, however, the agencies which were at
work in the world of general culture made them
selves felt also in Art. You will remember that I
pointed out to you a twofold current in the intel
lectual evolution. On the one hand, a reaction
against the fetters of monkish rule and the doc
trine of the inherent depravity of humanity, to
gether with a growing interest in man and in the
phenomena of Nature ; and, on the other, an
ever-increasing interest in the achievements of
the pre-Christian ages, and especially the age of
the supremacy of Rome. Now these two agen
cies merged to a great extent one into the other
in the general intellectual movement ; but in Art,
at least in the arts of painting and sculpture, for
some lapse of time only one of them made itself
felt — to their great gain — namely, the impulse to
study man and the world he inhabits ; the im
pulse, in fact, to study Nature. The Humanists,
in their almost superstitious reverence for the

i6o ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
masterpieces of classic literature, were pursued by
the temptation to repeat, like parrots, words which
clothed ideas not their own, and expressions which
corresponded to nothing in their minds. The artists
were more fortunate : of ancient painting nothing,
of ancient sculpture little only, was before them ;
and after the date of Nicolo Pisano that little
seems for a considerable period to have exercised
small influence on them. And so it happened
that while men of letters were thrown into the
pursuit of knowledge, which they found clothed
in a perfect artistic form, at a time when their
heads were, so to speak, hardly strong enough to
carry the intoxicating draught, artists, unhampered
by the crushing example of a past perfection, were
flung, straight on to the bosom of Nature — where
safety is.
Other circumstances also helped to shape their
course. One of the most distinctive features in
the economy ofthe Italian Republics was the free
and unchecked development of the individual.
The age was one in which every individual was
gauged exactly according to his intrinsic worth ;
every capable man got the full value of his capa
bility ; to every capable man all things were open.
Accordingly, the study of the individual forced
itself upon the artist, and the acuteness of obser
vation, which was innate in the Tuscans, became
manifest in a marvellous subtlety in the rendering
of individual character. Such portraits as those
of Mellini and Palmieri, the medals of Pisanello,.

i887 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES i6i
and the frescoes of Masaccio and Ghirlandajo will
at once occur to you. Whether they use the pen,
the pencil, or the chisel, the Florentines of the
Renaissance are unsurpassed in their vivid por
trayal of individual men.
In its turn the scientific spirit took possession
of the Arts. The once forbidden, now frequent,
representation of the nude human form led to
a desire for the knowledge of its marvellous
mechanism and its secret structure. Anatomy,
accordingly, was pursued with zeal. Perspective,
too, was keenly studied, a science especially indis
pensable to men whose love of architecture as an
adjunct to figures amounted almost to a passion ;
it was no doubt, in great measure, the outcome
of the haunting impression of architectural gran
deur produced in them by the sight, or by the
accounts that reached them, of the stupendous
ruins of ancient Rome. And in the train of per
spective the cognate mysteries of foreshortening
claimed their votaries, and exercised a fascination
of which, indeed, the results were sometimes not
a little ludicrous. The prophet of foreshortening
was Paolo U cello. There is in Florence, among
other works of his that might be described to
much the same effect, a battle-piece, in which a
strictly foreshortened warrior and his charger —
foreshortened for the last time, for they lie stark
and dead in the forefront of the canvas and the
fight — a horse kicking the spectator, and a pile of
lances disposed upon the ground, with unblushing

i62 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
intent to display the artist's science, have an alto
gether comic eff'ect.
By the side of this scientific fever the joy in
rediscovered Nature manifested itself in a new
delight in landscape. The summary indication of
earth and vegetation, which sufficed to the school
of Giotto, soon gave way to an almost undisciplined
exuberance of treatment. Who does not remember
the riot of hill and dale, of tree and shrub, of
vineyard and pleasaunce, of birds and beasts, in
which, on certain walls of the Campo Santo of
Pisa, Gozzoli, for instance, celebrated the joyous
spectacle of the world ? And when to this spirit
of simple gladness is added the spirit of science of
which I have spoken, we get such amazing studies
of leaf and flower as Lionardo loved to draw.
Thus to Tuscan artists the new movement brought
the love of Nature and the light of science.
I have said that the revived classicism for some
considerable period affected but little the outer
form of their Art. It did, however, at an early
date largely modify the subject-matter with which
artists dealt. Mythology had laid a powerful hold
on the Humanists. The objects of pagan and of
Christian worship were mixed in a strange pro
miscuity within their minds. The attributes of
heathen gods were given to the Almighty, of
whom they loved to speak as Jupiter Altitonans —
high-thundering Jove. But over the artists also
the heathen fables cast their spell ; gods and
goddesses, satyrs and fauns, dryads and nereids,.

1887 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 163
invaded their fancies and once again impelled
their hands ; and pagan myths took their place in
the studio by the side of Christian verities, objects
of equal homage.
You foresee, however, that under Tuscan pen
cils these pagan themes will assume a thoroughly
changed complexion ; and it may be interesting to
compare, in passing, one with another, by a
special instance, the treatment of kindred subjects
by a Florentine painter and a Florentine poet.
Some portions of the famous picture of Spring, by
Botticelli, in the Gallery of the Belle Arti in
Florence, recall certain stanzas in the "Giostra"
of Poliziano so vividly as to suggest that the
painter must have had them in his mind when he
conceived the picture. Yet, see how wholly dif
ferent they are in the order of emotion they
evoke ! How luminously joyous, how serenely
sweet, and, in this sense, how classic is the
sentiment exhaled from the music of Politian's
lines ! How full of twilight and of subdued
strange sadness is this loveliest of Botticelli's
works ! The matter is classic, the spirit modern
and Christian. The Renaissance has laid a
stronger grip on the poet than on the painter.
But, as is natural, the action of this complex
movement on artistic development varied in its
conflict with the mediaeval spirit, according to the
human stuff on which it worked. Before the close
of the fourteenth century the exclusively religious
and didactic phase of Art had spent itself The

164 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
days were past when the doctrines of the Faith,
its comfort and its terrors, the science of govern
ment and the precepts of morality, spoke to the
masses, in unripe but lofty artistic language, from
the walls of church and council-chamber. Giotto
had clothed in forms of Art the spirit of St.
Francis, and had gone to the grave. Simone
Memmi, the champion of militant orthodoxy, hot
with the fire of St. Dominic, and the far greater
painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti, whose solemn
frescoes in the Communal Palace of Siena are a
great sermon on the virtues which build up the
well-ordered State, both these had ceased to live ;
and now a period had begun in which worldly
subjects and classic mythology were to invade
Art ; a period in which it lost for a time much of
its ethical elevation, but during which the nourish
ing elements of knowledge were being eagerly
absorbed and assimilated, which alone could
equip it for its final and its highest triumphs.
Yet even when the flood-tide to which Petrarch
had opened the gates of mediseval civilisation was,
as it seemed, sweeping everything before it, the
old flame of religious fervour was not everywhere
spent. Even in the middle of the fifteenth century
you might, turning aside from the turmoil of the
streets of Florence, have seen, in his silent cell, a
pious monk, absorbed in his work, catching no
echo of the outer din, gazing with rapt eyes on a
world of love and ecstasy, the radiant creation of
his own pure and reverent soul. And if the

i887 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 165
ecstatic spirit survived in Beato Angelico alone,
perhaps, in this undimmed serenity, the graver
spirit of religion, the Christian sadness, still
touched and tinged the mind of a Signorelli, a
Botticelli, a Perugino, cast a tender light over the
first youth of Raphael Sanzio, and at last found its
fullest expression in the sublime creations, and its
saddest cry in the rugged sonnets of Michael
Angelo Buonarroti.
But perhaps the various operations in the pro
vince of Art of the two main motive forces of the
Renaissance — the impulse towards the scientific
study of Nature, and the impulse to reinstate the
classic spirit — may be best illustrated by more
special reference to the work of three typical
artists whom I have already named — Lionardo da
Vinci, Raphael, and Michael Angelo. Of the
scientific impulse we see the fullest expansion in
that miracle of many-sidedness — Lionardo. A
never-sated hunger for knowledge in every form,
a desire, ever burning, to lift up the veil from
every secret of creation, possessed and marked
him through life. The hidden mechanism of the
bodies of men and of animals, the structure of
plants, the ways of rushing waters and of wander
ing winds, and every riddle in the book of Nature
were objects of his ardent curiosity and unwearied
study. How far beyond the horizon of his day
his prescient spirit carried him, along the fields of
science in which Art is not involved, others, better
than I, can tell you. But we cannot, in this

i66 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
strange man, separate the scientific investigator
from the artist. In his moody and fitful spirit,
unrestingly straining forward in the quest of some
intangible, new perfection, it was the same haunt
ing sense of mysteries unsolved that led him, now
towards scientific prophecy, and now to the creation
of a type of human beauty more subtle and com
plex than any the world had seen before.
The influence of the revival of classicism, both
in its spirit and as a form of sesthetic expression,
is seen at its meridian in Raphael. To him the
knowledge of such masterpieces of ancient sculp
ture as were brought again to the light in his day,
came when his precocious gifts were already about
to reach maturity ; and their example found a
fruitful soil in his singularly well-poised genius,
filled as it was with a stately sense of beauty and
chastened by a mind of rare refinement. What
ever was best in the classic spirit was absorbed
and eagerly assimilated by him, and imparted to
the work of his best day that rhythm, that gentle
gravity, and that noble plenitude of form which
are its stamp, and proclaim him the brother of
Mozart and of Sophocles.
In these two artists, then, we see the afflatus of
the Renaissance in two distinct forms — in its
avidity of research with Lionardo, in its classic
serenity with Raphael. It remains for me to
speak of one, the greatest, far, of all, on whom,
as an artist, the old world had no direct hold or
influence, though it coloured his intellect by blend-

i887 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 167
ing into his Christian orthodoxy some tinge of
that Platonic mysticism which, since Marsilio
Ficino first taught it, had fascinated the choicest
spirits of the age. I speak, of course, of Michael
Angelo. His contact with the Renaissance as an
artist is traceable only in the scientific spirit and
its interest in man ; for to Michael Angelo the
artist, who saw in the human form a dim re
flection of the Divine beauty — man was the
all-absorbing and exclusive object of study. All
else was indifferent to him; to him a plain mass
of green or grey sufficiently signifies the earth.
Only once, and because the subject — the tempta
tion of Eve — demands it, does a melancholy-
looking trunk, with a few leaves, intrude into his
work to represent the green glory of the forest.
Giotto himself is not more scornful of its charms.
And this I wish you to note of Michael Angelo,
as distinguishing him from Raphael : the type of
human form which he lifted to the fullest expres
sional force is the last development of a purely
indigenous conception of human beauty, whereas
the type which we know as Raphaelesque is a
classic ideal warmed with Christian feeling. Sub
limely alone as Buonarroti's genius stands, tower
ing and unapproached, like some unsealed, heaven
ward mountain-peak, it does but mark the highest
summit reached, in the magnificent continuity of
its evolution, by the purely native genius of Tus
can Art. Reaping, with full hands, all the know
ledge of his day, and conscious of its worth,

i68 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
Michael Angelo flung that knowledge as fuel into
the furnace of his mediaeval ardour, and in him
we see, at the height of the Renaissance, the
supreme type of a mediaeval artist ; yet, be it
remembered, a type which without the Renais
sance could not have been. As firm in his faith,
and of a soul as high, he was the spiritual son of
Dante, and his peer ; a Tuscan, a Christian, and,
in the language of his Art, an immortal poet. In
his grave the Art of Tuscany was buried ; no
flower grew over it. When he died, in 1564, one
Florentine of genius was still alive, wild Ben
venuto, to whom a short span was yet allowed.
For a few years longer a Venusti, a Bronzino, a
Daniele da Volterra remained to show how dull a
thing Art may become when the soul has gone
from it and rhetoric replaces feeling. For a few
years yet good Giorgio Vasari, King of Chroni
clers, strutted in garments which he believed to
be his master's, and then final night closed over
the Art of Florence. The light of Italian Art
passed from the valley of the Arno to Venice, the
city on the sea.
One last point, and one, I think, not without
interest for us as artists, has to be here briefly
noted. It is a remarkable fact that whatever
noxious influences crept in under the cover of the
humanistic movement fastened far less on the Art
than on the literature of Italy. In its first incen
tives that movement was wholly worthy and pure.
Petrarch nourished none but noble ideas, and in

i887 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 169
his dreams wisdom ever waited on virtue. For
some time the character of the revival was one of
simple joy in a newly-discovered world, of pas
sionate curiosity concerning the broad field of
knowledge which the widening dawn was daily
revealing, of exultation in a new consciousness of
recovered dignity. Soon, however, the seeds of
mischief were seen to germinate. The indiscrimi
nate deification of all things classic led by degrees
to a widespread loosening of Christian belief, and,
in the absence of anything to replace it, often to
a complete disintegration of the moral nature.
Everything, no doubt, conspired to turn the heads
of the Humanists — the keen competition among
the great to obtain their services ; the unbounded
admiration entertained for their acquirements.
Does not Vespasiano tell us of a young Spaniard
who, being sent by his king to visit Leonardo
Bruno, flung himself at the feet of the sage in a
paroxysm, of reverence? Their belief and boast
that fame and shame were in their giving, and
that with a drop of their ink they could make or
mar a man — these things, I say, conspired to breed
in them, gradually, a pride and a license which
knew no bounds. Shaken in their own faith, and
unsustained by the moral tone of a Plato or a
Virgil, they absorbed indifferently, with the artistic
beauties, the moral blemishes also of some of the
less pure among the Roman writers. The example
of Catullus or of Martial was, in the eyes of a
Poggio, a Filelfo, and a Beccadelli, a shield and a

170 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
justification for the untold foulness in which they
would, on occasion, vie one with the other. And
what controlling influence was there about them ?
Did not Guarino — venerable Guarino — defend the
elegant filth of Poggio? Was not Filelfo received
with open arms by that worthy Pontiff Nicholas
V ? Or, indeed, where was the moral atmosphere
so tainted as within the Curia? Where was
morality more shamelessly trodden under foot
than within its walls, against which the scathing
wrath of Savonarola went up in vain ? " This
obligation," bitterly exclaims Machiavelli, "this
obligation we owe to the Church and to the priests
— that we have become void of religion, and are
bad." What an atmosphere was that in which a
Filelfo — nay, even an Aretino — did not think it
outrageous to aspire to the Hat? What correc
tive was here furnished to men already so prone
to laxity and indulgence ?
It must not, it is true, be forgotten that some
of the foremost .spirits of the Renaissance were
marked by the highest moral tone. Who was
more pious, who conceived more nobly of the
dignity of man, than Pico, Christian and Platonist?
What is more elevated than the words in which
Baldassare Castiglione, through the mouth of
Bembo, discourses of ideal love ? What more
venerable image can we evoke than that of Fabio
Calvi, whom Raphael loved as a father, or of
Niccolo Niccoli, or of Manetti? What more ad
mirable picture has biography put before us than

1887 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 171
that of old Vittorino da Feltre, teaching side by
side, under his own roof, the sons of powerful
rulers and the sons of the poor and lowly — the
latter for the love of God ? And other names
might be added to the number. But it is not the
less true of the great mass of the Humanists, that
in the days of the middle life of Michael Angelo,
their profession had become a synonym for cor
ruption, and their contact a taint in the eyes of
decent folk.
How different a spectacle is afforded to us in
the field of Art ! The Renaissance was to it a
new birth, indeed, and profoundly affected it ; but
affected it, in the main, to its strengthening, never
to its ethic degradation. By the reinstatement of
the study of Nature it gained a precious source of
life and health, and an ampler tenement was given
to it, in which its soul could move at ease. The
material on which the new spirit impelled it to
work often lacked, it is true, the moral elevation
of that which had inspired the Art of Giotto and
of Lorenzetti ; but if, as in literature, the world
of pagan myth engrosses the canvas here and
there, if more of the love of life and less of con
trition breathes in it than heretofore, how dainty
and how decent is the mirth, how pure and free
from every taint the joy of life appears ! I call up
before my mind, in bright procession, the profuse
treasures of Etruscan Art, and in vain I look, in
all that varied pageant, for one unwholesome
work. Rather, I see in it dignity, throughout

172 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
unfailing ; often a vein of sadness ; here and there,
among the most impressive of its triumphs, a male
severity and a sublimity of strain such as had not
winged Italian poetry since the death of Dante.
In the most joyous of them I find the limpid
beauty of Poliziano's lines, and in the humblest
something of the grace and tender charm of that
sweet, spontaneous undergrowth of verse which
has from a remote time not ceased to perfume the
humbler paths of Tuscan Literature — the Ballate,
the Rispetti, the Stornelli. These things I see in
Tuscan Art, of which it may be said, as truly as
of the Art of Greece, that whatever was highest
and purest in the spirit of the people from which
it flowed found in it a faithful image and an ade
quate expression. Let it be our care, my young
friends, that one speaking at some future time of
this our English Art may say a like thing with
equal truth.

Address, December ioth, 1889

ART IN SPAIN

Students of the Royal Academy,
I have in successive addresses from this
chair asked you to consider with me how, amongst
various peoples, the character and current of
artistic production has been influenced by sur
rounding conditions, material, moral, and intellec
tual ; and in the development of this inquiry,
Italy, you may remember, occupied our thoughts
when last we met. I propose this evening to put
before you some reflections on the Art of a people
once closely bound up with Italy, and belonging
to the group of so-called Latin races — the
Spaniards. I say advisedly "so-called," for the
name always seems to me to be in some degree
misleading, and nowhere more so than in the
present case. The country of the Celtiberians
was indeed, after long and strenuous resistance,
subdued by Rome ; it bowed to the laws and
assumed the tongue of the conquerors, receiving
also, no doubt, some considerable admixture of
their blood ; it accepted their civilisation, enriching
it in turn with bright reciprocated gifts of genius ;
with Seneca's wisdom, with the song of Lucan,
with Quintilian's eloquence ; and Bilbilis, which
gave to Rome's soldiers their sharpest blades.

176 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
tempered also the yet keener wit of Martial : nay,
conquered Spain gave in due time masters to her
masters ; Trajan and Hadrian were her sons, and
in the veins of Marcus Aurelius ran Spanish
blood. But whatever traits may have marked
the race that occupied the soil of Spain before the
Empire of the West crumbled and fell, the people
which in the fifteenth century first appears on the
stage of history as a political unity under Ferdi
nand and Isabella, shows, to my thinking, but faint
traces of Latin kinship, and offers, as we shall
presently see, the most thorough contrast to the
Italians of the same period.
Nor need this surprise us, for seldom was a
race, if the Spaniards may be spoken of as one
race, composed of elements more heterogeneous.
Let us see what these elements were. The earliest
inhabitants of Spain known to history were the
Iberians ; who these Iberians were, whether or not
they were one with the race whose descendants
survive in the Basque Provinces, is an interesting
question which we fortunately are not here con
cerned to answer. It is sufficient for our purposes
to know that in remote times already the occu
pants of Spanish soil bore that name, and that we
have to regard the Iberian stock as the underlying
element of the various amalgams which, together,
make up the Spanish nation. To this basis was
added at an early date, in all but the eastern
region of Spain, a large infusion of Celtic blood,
whilst in its eastern and southern provinces,

1889 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 177
Greeks, Phoenicians, and Carthaginians contri
buted yet further foreign elements. Rome, in her
turn, as I have already reminded you, laid strong
hands on the Spanish land, absorbing the con
quered country into her Empire, and retained her
grasp on it till the beginning of the fifth century —
the epoch of that great migration of the Germanic
peoples which so deeply modified the ethnic con
stitution of Europe. At this period the Visigoths,
a warlike race, pushed southward into Spain, and,
brushing aside gradually the enfeebled sway of
Rome, sat down and fastened finally upon the soil.
Thus was founded a powerful State embracing
the larger portion of the Peninsula, and a wide
tract in the south of France — a State having for
its royal seat Toulouse, and in Toledo a centre
for Spanish politics. With the advent of this
Gothic race the modern history of Spain begins.
And in their union with the Celtiberian people we
may see the source of much that is distinctive in
the Spanish character as future ages were to
reveal it. Under the Gothic kings bigotry and
intolerance rose and throve unchecked, and laid
broadly the foundations on which the Inquisition
was one day to rise ; under them also ripened that
haughty jealousy of temper which, raising up
every man in strife against his neighbour, was
destined to prove through centuries the bane of
an heroic people.
But another element, yet, was to be added to
the rich compound of the Spanish race, and this
M

178 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
element was furnished by those African tribes
which, first seizing on Spanish soil 400 years after
the advent of the Goths, swept on, at once and
unresisted, with the swiftness of a rising tide, till
they had covered and submerged the land from
the Mediterranean to the Asturian Hills. A
conquest pregnant with far-reaching results : for
while the great and famous kingdom founded by
the Moors shed, during its first centuries of
prosperity, the light of a high culture over a
¦wondering world, handing on to modern nations
the torch of the wisdom of the ancients, the metal
of Spanish character was to be fused and welded
in the fiery struggle to cast off their yoke. Arab
rule had been carried at one bound from the
Guadalete to the glens of Cangas. The tide
which bore it filled long centuries with its inter
mittent ebb. Its poise was of only brief duration.
The war of deliverance in which the Spaniard
never paused or swerved through over 700 years
began almost on the morrow of the planting of
the northern boundary of the Moorish kingdom.
The seventh year after the fight by the vineyards
of Xeres saw its first heroic deed. Issuing from
the Cave of Covadonga, "the cradle of Spanish
freedom," Pelayo the Goth hurled, in that year, on
an eventful day, a handful of resolute men on the
Arab hosts, and struck the first link from the
chain of Spanish enslavement. The signal once
given, warriors, springing to arms on all sides,
gathered to his standard, and the nucleus of a

i889 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 179
fighting State was soon formed. Pelayo's grand
son already saw himself master of a realm reaching
from Galicia to the Douro ; within two centuries
this dominion had broadened into a Kingdom of
Leon, which, in the thirteenth century, was further
extended under Ferdinand the Saint by union with
Castile. How in the fifteenth century Castile and
Aragon, the two most powerful States in the
Peninsula, were, by the marriage of Ferdinand and
Isabel, united never to be again divorced, you
know ; you know, too, that one of the first fruits of
this union was the final expulsion of the Moors,
and the crowning of the long and bloody labour of
Spanish liberation.
And here you will at once note one of the main
causes of that deep and radical difference which
divides the development and character of the
civilisation of Italy from that of Spain. Italy,
indeed, was wrung not less than Spain with
intestine feuds ; but whereas the history of Italy
¦during the period of her greatest intellectual
vitality was, for all the splendid prowess of her
sons, the history of a repeatedly invited foreign
yoke — a running record fatal to national con
sciousness — the annals of Spain up to the end of
the fifteenth century are the recital of one long,
stern, and finally triumphant struggle to shake off
an alien master — a story of constantly growing
and intensified national consciousness and national
pride. But to return for a moment to the Moors. It

i8o ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
is not to be expected that a people so brilliant and
so chivalrous should have left behind it no traces
of its rule and presence beyond the faded walls of
mosques and palaces ; and, indeed, such other
traces are many and indelible. Innumerable Arab
words enrich the Spanish language ; the very war-
name of the great national hero, Ruy Diaz de
Bivar, the Cid, was given to him by Moorish lips.
Wherever in Spain we see the blessing of abundant
water spread like a silver net over the face of the
land, wherever mills are busy along the streams,
we acknowledge the craft and science of the Moor.
In Andalusia we see the trace of the Moors in
the blood of the people, in their supple grace, in
the Eastern glow which suffuses their poetry ; in
this garden of the Hesperides strange, plaintive
chants, and dances weird and serpentine, still
breathe the spirit of the East ; the jasmine still
haunts the fragrant courts of Cordoba, and the
carnation, which is the soul of Eastern ornament,
is, in the song of Andalusian singers, the typical
flower of beauty. The Muslim brought and
bequeathed to Spain the giving of alms and the
courteous treatment of the mendicant ; he brought,
also, two other things — religious tolerance and a
wholesome devotion to the bath ; the first of these,
at least, he did not, unfortunately, implant there.
In Art, too, the Arabs left many a mark behind
them ; many an Eastern form and feature is found
adopted in the architecture of Spain — the ajimez
window, for instance, a type of dainty elegance.

i889 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES i8i
the deep architraves of their circular-headed doors,
their woodwork, their treatment of plaster, and
their decorative use of tiles ; nay, indeed, a new
style, the Mudejar, was built up of Muslim and
Christian forms. We have, however, this curious
fact to note, that whatever of Eastern elegance
and charm was absorbed into the Andalusian
nature, found little, if any, expression in Spanish
Art ; that spirit of exquisiteness which breathes in
every work of Arab hands was ever foreign to the
Spanish artist.
Now, the component elements of the Spanish
race being such as we have seen them, and the
cardinal fact of its historic evolution such as I have
in a few words indicated to you, what was the
national temper which was engendered in it ? and
how did that temper affect the general develop
ment of Spanish culture ?
In considering Christian Spain we have broadly
to distinguish, apart from the Andalusians, between
two peoples of very opposite character : the Cas-
tilians, the dominant race, and the Catalans, a
hardy, bustling people, jealous (to this day) of its
racial individuality — an individuality into which
much less of the Celtic, and more of the Roman
and Punic, element is combined with the Iberian
stock than is the case with any other member of
the Spanish family — a people long united poli
tically with its neighbours north of the Pyrenees,
with whom it had a literature in common, and
customs of which even in our time a trace .survives

i82 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
in Valencia in the "joes florals," the ancient poetic
contests in which flowers were the victor's crown.
One chief difference which in spirit separated this
people as by a gulf from its Castilian neighbours
will not surprise you in men dashed with Car
thaginian blood. It is this, that whereas to the
true Spaniard the taint of trade was deep dis
honour, to the Catalan barter was the obvious
business of life. He bought and sold, and thought
no more shame of his bargain than did the Italian
traders across the water who shared with him the
marts of Alexandria, and who gave to the world,
without thought of incongruity, their silks and
their woollens, their Dante and their Michel-
Angelo. I have already pointed to certain historic
circumstances which had their part in shaping the
stern Castilian character, but it is not to such
circumstances alone that we must look for its
sources ; and if no people was, during the lapse of
many centuries, more visibly tempered in the
current of its history, neither was any race from
the outset more definitely moulded by surround
ing material conditions than the inhabitants of
Central Spain. Let us look at those material sur
roundings. Imagine a vast table-land raised high on the
shoulders of great chains of hills, and stretching
across the Peninsula from the Biscayan provinces
to the Garden of Andalusia. Imagine this region,
in great part of its extent, alternately scorched by
fierce suns and swept by icy winds, parched and

i889 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 183
treeless and without the song of birds ; its blistered
soil, seldom soothed by the grateful shadow of a
cloud, blotched here and there with stunted shrubs,
strewn with bleached boulders as if of great
mountains shaken into fragments — a gaunt spec
tacle, but not without much melancholy grandeur ;
and you see before you the cradle of the Castilian
race. Frugal, rugged, resolute, shrewdly practical,
a people could not fail to become, whose days and
seasons were spent in continued struggle with such
conditions of soil and climate ; and such in fact was
the race which, in the fifth century, the fighting
Germans found on the high Spanish plains, and
which, subsisting side by side with them in pro
bably only partial fusion, furnished its share in
those strange contrasts which we shall have
occasion to note in the Spanish character.
In how different a region was the lot of the
Andalusian cast ! On every side a land lovely as
Paradise was spread before him ; a grateful soil,
rich and red, fed first by the waters of noble
rivers, and later also by the science of the Moor,
yielded in profusion every fruit of the earth.
Here the vine wreathed over the sunny acres, and
the dusky olive in serried ranks diapered the
rolling hills ; here the orange vied with the
crowned pomegranate, the date-palm lifted its
fiery lamps into the blue ; here the lips of every
mountain stream were rosy with the oleander's
bloom. Such was the contrast between these
two regions — the one a land of love and

i84 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
song, the other a fit cradle for conquerors and
ascetics. Let us now, fixing our eyes on this latter land,
the land north of the Sierra Morena, consider
more closely the distinguishing features of the
Spanish character as evolved under the conditions
at which we have been glancing ; and first, we
have to lay hold of this central fact : that for seven
centuries the Spaniard was a Crusader within his
own land ; we have to conceive him with his sword-
hilt ever in his grasp, the Cross ever before his
eyes, and within his breast the ever-burning thirst
to wash in the blood of the heathen at once the
shame of his conquered country, and the stain of
his outraged faith. His sword is consecrated, his
ideals as a soldier are hallowed by religion ; he
strikes in the name of Christ ; the Patriot and the
Catholic are one ; Country and Faith are twin
conceptions in his mind, paramount and exclusive.
And it is only in the light of this fact that we can
understand the history of this strange race, the
protection extended to the Inquisition by Isabel
the Catholic, than whom no nobler sovereign ever
graced a throne : the Inquisition itself, Torque-
mada, Philip, Alva, can only be rightly judged
with this fact before our eyes. The end and aim
which to the Spaniard hallowed every act was the
glorification and spread of his faith in its untainted
purity. The significance in the eyes of Isabel of
the discovery of the New World was mainly that
it extended to another hemisphere the sway and

i889 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 185
lordship of the Cross. The fervour of orthodoxy
inspired . in Spain the highest flights of poetic
genius, and found its loftiest and most charac
teristic expression in such plays as "La Vida es
Sueno," " El Principe Constante," and " La De-
vocion de la Cruz " of Calderon ; whilst in the
region of Art it was, till the days of Velasquez,
the one exclusive inspiration. Impelled by it,
men of letters and artists entered in numbers into
holy orders ; thus, to name only a few. Lope de
Vega went into the Church at the age of forty-
seven ; Calderon became a Canon of Toledo ;
Tirso de Molina was a monk ; Juanes took the
vows as a Franciscan ; Alonzo Cano had his stall
in the Cathedral of Granada. Again, seeing in
what honour fighting was held among the
Spaniards, we are not surprised, amongst them,
to find the sword often in hands which the pen
has immortalised. Gentle Lope sallied forth with
the Armada that was to crush, in British seas, the
enemy of his faith ; Cervantes fought at Lepanto ;
melodious Garcilaso fell, a youth, on the field of
battle. Altogether fiery, powerful, very human
persons were these Spanish poets — fighting, pray
ing, loving, and writing immortal verse. Very
human, I say, and here we touch on another
Spanish trait. As a knight and as a Christian,
your Spaniard was an idealist, but only as a knight
and as a Christian ; by the side of the Goth, if I
read the matter rightly, you have in him the
Iberian ; by the side of aristocratic ideals, you

i86 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
have a strain of practical shrewdness and clear-
eyed common-sense ; by the side of Don Quixote,
immortal Sancho, the realist, with his sententious
saws and racy sayings. Meanwhile, one quality
was common to the whole race, and from it the
Spaniards gathered the greatest of their peaceful
triumphs. The delight in action which necessity,
the rigours of their soil, and the stern discipline of
their early history had bred in them, bore fruit in
its turn, in a vivid sense of the reality of things, a
stirring interest in human doings ; the sense of the
dramatic, in fact, which dominates the whole range
of their intellectual production, the craving to see
rehearsed before their eyes or their minds, the
deeds and the adventures of their forefathers and
their fellows. Of this appetite, the earliest out
come was that magnificent burst of ballad poetry
in which the Cid is the central figure, the
Romancero ; and the next, a dramatic literature of
the highest order, intensely national, independent,
of prodigal fertility — a dramatic literature in
which, by the side of a transcendent fervour of
piety and a chivalrous ideal such as no other
country offers, we have the most vivid pictures of
Spanish life, handled with amazing power and
pungency ; and throughout as great a freedom
from Aristotelian scruple about the unities as in
our Shakesperian drama ; yet a freedom not due
to ignorance of classic precepts ; on which head
Lope de Vega mixes wisdom with much humour
in a poem called "El arte nuevo de hacer

i889 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 187
Comedias." And here, again, in the possession
of a national Drama, we mark another feature in
the contrast between Spain and Italy. But, with
this keen relish for the spectacle of human action,
a strong and uncompromising realistic tendency
was not unnaturally bred ; and by the side of the
heroic dramas and religious plays which gave
scope to the ideal and mystic impulses of the
Spaniard, we get not only the class of plays called
"de capa y espada," in which not kings and
exalted personages, but simple gentlefolks, bring
their intrigues and duels on the stage ; but in
prose a whole category of tales known as
" Novellas Picarescas " — such, for instance, as
" Lazarillo de Tormes" or " El Gran Tacafio" —
wherein description of the lowest and most dis
reputable classes, in all the wild picturesqueness
of their twofold filth, is carried to the last extreme
of realism. In all these fantastic narratives lurks
also a delightful spice of humour, another Spanish
quality which flavours, with many other virtues,
that popular poetry wherein Spain is so rich, and
in which, as in all popular song, we seem to lay
our ear on the very heart of the humble folk
whose voice it is. Tenderness and passion we
find in these "coplas" and "refranes," if not the
exquisiteness ofthe "rispetti" and "stornelli" of
Italy ; we find playfulness at times, and at times
tragedy and black despair, often a glow of Eastern
imagery, a frequent strain of piety, much humour,
as I have said, and now and then an amusing

i88 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
jumble of feelings not obviously kin ; whereof I
cannot refrain from giving you an instance that
seems to me characteristic as well as droll. A
youth is invoking St. Sebastian: "Oh! glorious
Sebastian," he exclaims, "pierced through with
many arrows ! would that thy soul were mine !
would that thy body were — my mother in-law's ! " ¦
Now, the characteristic features which we have
just noted in the Literature of Spain, we shall
find also in her Art. To that Art it is time to
turn. The subject is one on which, as far at
least as Painting is concerned, it is no easy task
to speak, partly because a large and important
category of Spanish Art is, as we shall see, sur
rounded with almost complete obscurity, and
partly on account of the strangely exaggerated
estimate of Spanish painters of a certain period
which has been allowed to gain currency. As far
as English readers are concerned, two works are
especially responsible for this state of things,
one a book of unsurpassed charm and brilliancy,
which has long passed from the hands of the
tourist to the shelves of the lover of Literature — I
speak, of course, of Richard Ford's " Handbook " ;
the other, a work of great elegance and much
research, but, in its too indiscriminate enthusiasm,
a very unsafe guide — Stirling's " Annals of the
Artists of Spain." A valuable corrective to the
teaching of these two works may be found in an
attractive book published last year in Germany,
called " Velazquez und sein Jahrhundert," by Carl

i889 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 189
Justi — a sound and trustworthy piece of work, in
which the school is more judicially dealt with than
in the case of our two distinguished countrymen.
Now, viewing Spanish Art as a whole, accord
ing to the knowledge we possess of it, what is the
final impression we gather from it regarding the
sesthetic organisation of the people who produced
it ? To me it seems to be this — that it is the
expression of a great and masculine race, fervid
in temper, perhaps, beyond any other, but with
little creative artistic impulse, little sensitiveness
of artistic fibre ; a race possessed with noble
instincts and lofty ideals, but ideals solely ethic
— sesthetic ideals are entirely wanting among
Spaniards. And this view we shall, I think, find
substantiated on closer investigation. We shall
see, for instance, that the Art of Spain was, at the
outset, wholly borrowed, and from various sources ;
we shall see heterogeneous imported elements
assimilated sometimes, in a greater or less degree,
frequently flung together in illogical confusion,
seldom, if ever, fused into a new, harmonious
whole by that inner welding fire which is genius ;
and we. shall see in the sixteenth century a foreign
influence received and borne as a yoke — because
no living generative force was there to throw it
off — with results too often dreary beyond mea
sure ; and, finally, we shall meet this strange
freak of nature, a soil without artistic initiative
bringing forth the greatest initiator — observe, I
do not say the greatest artist — the greatest ini-

190 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
tiator perhaps since Leonardo in modern Art —
except it be his contemporary Rembrandt — Diego
Velasquez. Let us now glance briefly, and in order, at the
fortunes of the several Arts in Spain ; and first
let us consider its Architecture. The limits of
our time must necessarily restrict me to the merest
outline of our subject. We are, however, con
cerned not so much with special examples as with
general phenomena of artistic evolution, and these
may, I hope, be made fairly clear without exces
sive elaboration. Fortunately, also, those who
desire further acquaintance with the Architecture
— at least with the Gothic Architecture — of Spain,
have access to it in the work of an artist of genius
and a man of learning, in whom the Academy,
not long ago, lost an honoured member, Mr.
Street. In using his work, nevertheless, you
must make allowance for a vehement impatience
of whatever does not fall within certain forms of
Art, and must not be unduly terrified by the word
"Pagan." You will there read how from the
earliest times a foreign influence was stamped on
the work of the church-building Spanish race, an
inspiration, sometimes Romanesque and some
times Byzantine in character, sometimes Aquita-
nian and sometimes Burgundian ; Lombard Italy,
too, we shall find here and there contributing a
feature. In Leon we see, later on, a cathedral
more purely French in character and design than
any other in Spain ; yet later, German elements,

1 889 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 191
especially in ornament, are everywhere met.
Finally, the Renaissance movement, to Italy the
source of her highest achievements, but to Spain
a baneful influence enough, asserted itself here as
elsewhere. Now you have observed in this sum
mary enumeration that the dominant influence in
Spanish Architecture up to the sixteenth century
was French, and this early French supremacy will
not surprise you when you consider that the
boundary of Spain was not then, as now, the
Pyrenean range, and that the Spanish clergy was
largely recruited from France. I call your atten
tion to this circumstance as contrasting with the
preponderating influence of Flemish Art which
we shall note when we speak of Spanish Painting,
and as marking the absence of any definite indi
genous impulse. And of this want you will be
made further conscious when, on closer examina
tion of the chronology of Spanish . Architecture,
you mark the simultaneous erection of buildings
denoting in their character different periods, and
when you see details of different and antagonistic
styles picturesquely but incongruously elbowing
one another in the same edifice, and become
aware of the absence of any such continuous and
organic development of a style as you witness,
for instance, in the Gothic Architecture of your
own country. Nevertheless, while the Spaniards
lacked the originating impulse in Art, their eccle
siastical architecture was even at an early date
often beautiful and always striking. Palomino —

192 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
pious man ! — lays down in his " Museo Pictorico "
a proposition concerning the origin of Art in
Spain which may here find a place, a proposition,
however, on which you may feel disposed to
suspend your judgment in the absence of further
evidence. " St. James, the Apostle," he says,
"when he came to preach Christianity in Spain,
brought with him a number of images, the work
of the glorious Evangelist St. Luke ; although
those," he continues, "which were carved or in
the round were, it is said, from the hand of Nico
demus, tinted, only, by the Evangelist, of whom
authors affirm " — and here, in a note, a long array
of Patristic authority—" that he was only a
painter, though I see no difficulty in his having
been a sculptor also." Well, whatever may be
the extent of our direct obligation to St. James,
we owe to him indirectly the earliest of the great
Cathedrals which are the just boast of Spain, the
Church of Santiago de Compostella, the work,
however, not of a Spanish, but of a French archi
tect, and, in fact, the twin design of St. Sernin at
Toulouse. A cast of its famous " Portico de la
Gloria " is familiar to you at the South Kensing
ton Museum. I have drawn your attention to the
fact that we much miss in Spain any definite pro
cess of architectural evolution ; an exception
should, however, to some extent be made in
Catalonia, where a local style of pointed Gothic
was formed of a distinctive and striking character.
Again, there is in Castile a group of churches in

i889 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 193
which the addition of external open arcades —
sometimes, as in the case of San Vicente at Avila,
on one flank, sometimes, as in the churches of
Segovia, on two — has the happiest effect, and may
be said to constitute a type proper to this region.
And it should be added that the Spaniards, what
ever their aesthetic limitations, seized with an
incomparably more powerful grip on the Gothic
idea than ever did the Italians. I know of few
things more curious than the absolute inability of
the latter — the most shrewd and subtly gifted
people of their day, and saturated with the artistic
sense — to grasp the spirit of Gothic Architecture.
Certain Gothic forms, indeed, they adopted ; they
pointed the openings with which, in obedience to
their native instincts, they sparsely pierced the
broad spaces of their walls ; they made liberal use
of crockets and unmeaning pinnacles ; they ac
cepted the vault, which is called the formative
principle of Gothic building ; but to the seed of
life that lay in the principle of the vault they re
mained blind. An organism sustained by the
balance of living forces, clothed in forms arising
out of and expressing its constructive principle,
and enriched with decoration emphasising it, must
not be sought at the hands ofthe Italians; indeed,
in the matter especially of external decoration, the
use of the style seemed at times to paralyse their
wits ; for let no delight of mellow marbles, no
glamour of age, no perfume of pleasant associa
tion, blunt your sense to the unfathomed foolish-
N

194 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
ness, for instance, of their too frequent treatment
of the fagades of churches — witness amongst
others that of San Michele at Lucca, which, tower
ing by a third of its height above the building it
masks, fitly expresses the vertical division of that
building by innumerable rows of small colonnades
piled in horizontal profusion one on the top of
the other. Well, though you do not find in Spain
the superbly logical development of this Frankish
style that characterises the country of its birth,
you do find the Spaniard alive to its vital condi
tions, and treating it as a plastic, malleable thing ;
and you find him further imparting to it — for
good or for evil — a strong impress of his own
idiosyncrasy. The churches which mark the first
centuries of the partially recovered independence
of his country are instinct with the gloomy fer
vour and the masculine sobriety of his race. I
know no two churches in any land in which this
quality of masculine sobriety has more powerfully
impressed me than the Cathedrals of Tarragona
and of Avila. The former is artistically the com
pleter work in its more perfect balance of vigour
and elegance, of unadorned spaces and enrich
ment ; but it may be doubted whether the church
in Avila with its apsidal end carved bodily out of
a bastion of the old town wall is not even more
impressive. The simplicity of these early churches is, of
course, missed in the churches raised or completed
during the days of heightened national self-con-

i889 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 195
sciousness and greater material prosperity, and
gives place often to an unpruned exuberance of
ornamentation in which the craving for the exces
sive — a craving, unchastened by restraint of deli
cate taste, which was rapidly becoming a distinc
tive Spanish attribute — is strikingly displayed.
We feel, however, that if in their sacred edifices
the Spaniards fell into decorative incontinence,
they were prompted in part at least by the impulse
to give without stint whatever they thought their
best to the exalting of their faith ; and if their
tendency to extreme enrichment led to regrettable
excesses — to the abuse of gold, for example, and
to absolute orgies of gigantic bosses, of flaming
crockets, and of exorbitant armorial bearings — we
owe to it a decorative feature unique in its kind,
always striking, and often of great splendour — the
Retablo. These structures, rising tier upon tier
from the back and flanks of the consecrated table,
present in their blending of Architecture, Sculp
ture, and Painting a decoration sometimes no
doubt barbarous, but often in a high degree im
pressive. To this tendency also we owe the de
velopment of the Rejas, the noble metal screens
which in a Spanish church close not only the choir
and the " capilla mayor," but also every recessed
lateral chapel. These screens, frequently admir
able in design, rich and elegant in form, and judi
ciously relieved with colour and the precious
metals, are an absolutely original creation of
Spanish Art, and conspire with the sumptuous

196 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
retablos to give to Spanish cathedrals that gor-
geousness of aspect in which all others lag far
behind them. But if the churches of Spain are
gorgeous in their aspect, their splendour is often
tempered with a solemn gloom. The withholding
of light seems to me to have been an object of
study with the Spanish ecclesiastical architects,
for it would, I think, be a very superficial view to
regard the darkness of their churches as aiming
solely at shady coolness. And I must, even at the
risk of seeming fantastic, believe that, under an
impulse both characteristic and poetic, this gloom
was occasionally produced and gathered up with
definite intent to enhance the mystery of the sacri
fice at the high altar. In the Cathedral of Barce
lona, a church in which, according to Catalan
custom, the lights are very restricted, a lantern is
raised over the western bay of the nave, which
bay, being made square in order to carry the
octagon, is, of course, larger than the others.
The result is that the worshipper, entering from
the west, finds himself in a broad illuminated
space, beyond which, as his gaze is drawn on
towards the capilla mayor, brooding shadows
seem to increase and thicken, intensifying that
deep solemnity of coloured darkness which marks
this church amongst the most impressive even in
Spain. Nor is this the only instance I could
quote of a similar effect produced, as I must
believe, intentionally.
But 1 may not linger unduly over one branch

i889 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 197
of my subject, and, with a few words on the effect
of the Renaissance movement in Spain, I will pass
on to other topics.
This movement resulted first in a style known
as the " Plateresque," the silversmith's style,
which bore fruit in some very picturesque if not
very pure specimens of Architecture, but did not
supersede the intricate half-German Gothic at
that time in force. On the contrary, the two
styles jogged on side by side, often by a friendly
compromise, and in most admired confusion, on
the surface and in the structure of the same build
ing. Later on a more severely classic style
began to assert itself, but never with results
wholly satisfactory ; its efforts were frequently
feeble, and generally unscholarly. One artist,
Diego de Siloe, sought in a vast cathedral to
blend classic forms with Gothic construction, and
those who wish to see what disastrous results may
attend such an attempt in the hands even of a
capable man are referred to the Cathedral of
Granada. On the other hand, if you would see
how much a man of mediocre gift, obeying, per
haps unconsciously, the spirit of his age, may
embody of that spirit in a pile of stone, you will
be inclined to view with more interest than is
generally vouchsafed to it by artists the Palace-
Convent of the Escorial. A huge, forbidding
block of buildings, turning a blind, blank back on
the world which seems to stretch out indefinitely
below it, raised on a slope hemmed in on three

198 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
sides by an amphitheatre of barren rocks, admit
ting light through fewer and smaller openings than
ever pierced so large a surface, rigorously bare of
any adornment, it seems to me to gather up in its
expression the very essence of crushing, silent, in
exorable tyranny. When in due course the
" Rococo " in Art began everywhere to reign, the
Spanish itch for the excessive seized on it with
avidity, and in the Palace of the Marques de dos
Aguas, in Valencia, you may see the supreme
effort of its most insane vagaries.
And now, having glanced at the spirit of the
Architecture of the Spaniards, let us turn to their
Sculpture, a form of Art wherein, as was natural
in a people .without aesthetic ideals, or delicate
sense of form, their achievements never reached
the highest level, and in which, on the other hand,
that strong realistic impulse, which we have seen
to be so powerful with them, exercised a fatal
influence. This tendency is sometimes startlingly
manifest in the carved ornament of their buildings.
I have seen on a porch of the fourteenth century
a string of roses copied from nature with absolute
realism, and flung haphazard along the hollow of a
moulding. Nevertheless, the bane of realism did
not lay complete hold on the higher forms of
Sculpture till a later period, and if there is in the
earlier work as a rule little refinement of work
manship or dignity of style, the vitality of the
Spaniard and his dramatic sense have full scope in
it. Whatever may be the character of its purely

1889 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 199
artistic inspiration — whether French, Flemish, or,
may be, Italian — a marked originality of dramatic
treatment is constantly found in it, and with it
often a warm touch of pathos and humanity. I
have at this moment in my mind a certain most
striking sepulchral monument of the fourteenth
century at Zaragoza, in which a row of stumpy ill-
wrought little figures is made delightful by the
spirit of pathetic tenderness which breathes through
it. As another instance of poetic feeling I would
quote certain angels in the spandrels of the north
porch of Barcelona Cathedral. Clumsily com
posed enough within a trefoiled panel, and wholly
barbarous in workmanship, their purely artistic
value is nil ; yet as they leap out from the wall,
flinging their heads back and upwards, turning
rapt, yearning faces with ecstasy towards Heaven,
whilst they sing and strike their lutes, they seem
to fill the air with their soaring song of praise.
The hand that carved them was without cunning,
but the mind in which they were born was the
mind of a poet.
Of the Sculpture produced in Spain in the
fifteenth century, the most marvellous examples
known to me are the retablo and the tombs which
adorn the Cartuja at Burgos. These works, the
masterpieces of Gil de Siloe, are miracles of
ingenious intricacy and delicate workmanship, and
withal extremely fine in design. They are, how
ever, absolutely German in character, and can
therefore only be regarded as sources, not as

200 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
specimens of Spanish Art. It is, indeed, sought
to establish a claim of Spanish nationality for the
elder Siloe, but these works, apart from their
Germanic character, imply, in my opinion, a
training and an artistic inheritance not to be
looked for in Spain in those days. In another
branch of Sculpture again, to wit in their gur-
goyles and grotesques, the Spaniards found a
vent for their sense of the humorous. Quevedo,
drawing in his " Gran Tacafio " a group of
truands which might have moved the envy of
Victor Hugo, and dwelling on the fantastic
postures they assumed, says that Bosch himself
(the Flemish artist) had never painted their like.
The Spanish satirist does here scant justice to his
countrymen ; indeed, for quaint and genuine
hurnour in their conception of a grotesque (and by
this word I do not mean a combination of, say, an
ostrich's &^^, a teapot, a pair of spectacles, and
the legs of a fowl, such as passes muster amongst
Flemish painters, but a real, organic, conceivable
monster) your Spaniard seems to me to excel
most other folks.
I spoke just now of the sumptuous retablos
which form so marked a feature in Spanish
churches. It is to them I think, in large measure,
that we have to trace during the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries the peculiar development of
Spanish Sculpture, the greater part of which has
wood for its material. A few Spanish Sculptors,
it is true, worked in marble, but none rose to a

i889 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 201
high degree of excellence. Alonzo Berruguete,
indeed, a pupil of Michel- Angelo, has a great
reputation, but one which his lumbering and
mannered works assuredly do not justify.
The two most famous monuments executed in
Spain in the Renaissance period are, perhaps, the
royal tombs at Granada, and that of young Prince
Juan in Avila. They are, however, the work of
foreigners. But to return to our retablos. These elaborate
storied structures, of which the South Kensington
Museum is fortunate in possessing a most interest
ing early specimen, were sometimes, as in this
case, a mere framework for paintings ; more often,
however, they were filled with carvings in low or
high relief These sculptured pieces, which were
intended to affect the worshipper in the same way
as the painted scenes, but, through their relief,
with a greater vividness, were invariably painted
with the most absolute realism in regard to hair
and flesh-tints, and were in the draperies made
resplendent by elaborate and profusely gilded
patterns. Now, reliefs so treated were obviously
far more effective with the crowd, as objects of
worship, than the flat painted surfaces which they
to a large extent superseded ; the Scripture
subject, the episode from the life of a tutelary
saint, assumed in the eyes of the devout a bodily
reality which rivetted their gaze and stirred their
emotions ; and accordingly we see the relief and
scale of these representations growing constantly

202 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
bolder, till the figures, detaching themselves
wholly from their background, reach, and indeed
sometimes exceed, the size of life. At last we
find entire scenes from the New Testament —
such, for instance, as the Descent from the Cross
— standing out bodily to the whole depth of the
group, rising above the altar, but blended, so to
speak, with the retablo by means of intermediate
figures in diminishing relief, merging in their turn
in a modelled' landscape. It cannot be denied
that, sobered and toned as they now are by the
smoke of several centuries, these groups have
about them a certain dignity ; nor, indeed, that
some of them — the works, for instance, of Roldan,
a sculptor of the seventeenth century — show
considerable force and ability, though marred by
clumsy forms and theatrical gesture. Realism, so
dear to the Spanish nature, came more and more
to be regarded as a main excellence in Art ; and a
form of Sculpture was, as we see, developed
which, even when redeemed to some extent by
the refinement of a Montanez and the dignity of a
Hernandez, could in the very nature of things
never rise to the highest levels. One more name
should be mentioned before leaving this branch of
our subject, mainly because its bearer has been
described as the Spanish Phidias — the name of
Juan de Juni, in whom Cean Bermudez suspects
an Italian, while Palomino calls him, with more
probability, a Fleming, and of whom, without
denying to him a certain power, I will briefly say

1889 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 203
that he is the most turgid contortionist (this
Phidias) whose work it has been my fortune to
see. A willing exponent of the more offensive
sides of realism, he surpasses himself in a figure
of the dead Christ at Valladolid, a spectacle of
gore and decomposition which I refrain from
describing. It is, however, right to add that this
coarse enhancing of the tragedy of the Atone
ment by the display of wounds and blood, com
mended itself to natures of more dignity than
belonged to Juni, and a figure of the Saviour on
the Cross by Gregorio Hernandez, a pious ascetic,
much given to self-flagellation and penance,
exhibits all the appearance of a victim of the
Inquisition after the worst horrors of the rack.
So far we have seen the natural temper of a
keen and strenuous race manifesting itself unmis
takably in its Plastic and Architectural Art. Let
us now, in conclusion, see how far its Painting tells
the same tale.
And here at once we find a formidable diffi
culty lying across our path, for an impenetrable
mystery hangs over the history of Spanish Paint
ing till the end of the fifteenth century. A not
inconsiderable catalogue of names has, indeed,
been handed down to us, and in a few cases a
signature or a document enables us to connect
one or the other of them with a particular work ;
but beyond this, all is more or less vague conjec
ture. The invasion of Italianism in the sixteenth
century had the effect of blotting out, so to speak.

204 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
all that had been till then achieved. Before the
end of the century everything in Painting that
was not Italian in its inspiration, or bore the
marks of the old Northern tradition, was repu
diated as barbarous, with the result that to this
day the great majority of the paintings of the
fifteenth century which enriched the churches or
cloisters of Spain, are indifferently and half con
temptuously tossed over to the category known
as the "Escuela Flamenca." I cannot but earn
estly hope that in view of the great interest
and of the remarkable merit of many of these
nameless or misnamed paintings, some learned
Spaniard may be impelled to unravel for us, as
far as possible, this perplexing riddle ; to bring
to light a wealth of work of which much must
be indigenous, and whatever is not Spanish
is more or less Hispaniolised ; and thus redeem
from neglect and oblivion the names of men
whose labours confer more real honour on their
country than those of many whom the blind tradi
tions of a vitiated taste have forced on the world's
too facile acceptance. I say " Hispaniolised," for
it is the peculiarity of this powerful Spanish race
that it steeped in the indelible dye of its own
idiosyncrasy whatever was wrought in its midst,
so that it is often almost impossible to pronounce
whether a work is due to the hand of a Spaniard,
or to a foreigner stamped with the Spanish seal.
Whatever of Pictorial Art may have been pro
duced in Spain previous to the fifteenth century,

1 889 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 205
very little indeed of it has been preserved, and
that little, as far as I have been able to observe,
mainly in Catalonia. In the specimens I have
seen of the work of this period a remarkable ten
dency, already, to intensity of tone and vehemence
of colour has struck me, a quality which is uni
versal in Spanish Art up to the sixteenth century.
With regard to the foreign influence that may be
traced in them, it would be difficult to generalise
with confidence. When, however, we reach the
end of the fifteenth century, our task, though still
a delicate one, becomes much easier. Of French
influences it may, I think, be broadly said that
outside Catalonia they are mainly traceable in the
northern region of the Peninsula ; so, for instance,
some extremely remarkable frescoes, or rather
ghostly traces of frescoes, in the cloisters of the
Cathedral of Leon, and a picture by the same
hand in the Sala Capitular, adjoining that church,
point, in my opinion, clearly to the inspiration of
France. On the other hand, I should confidently
claim for them Spanish authorship ; on this head
their rugged originality and force, and the blunt-
ness to beauty, not to say more, which is manifest
in them, leave me no sort of doubt. Again, in
the work of that admirable Catalan artist, Luis
Dalman, the same inspiration is at least mingled
with that of Flanders. Ofthe influence of Italy,
although, as we know, Stamina, and, later on,
Dello, amongst other Italian artists, resided in
Spain, I find, beyond certain frescoes at Toledo,

2o6 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
but few traces. Flemish example, on the' other
hand, was paramount. In Castile at this period it
was, in fact, in a manner official. Three Flemish
artists were, according to Justi, employed at the
Court of Isabel Catolica, where also Cardinal
Mendoza for a time, and after him his successor,
Ximenes, zealously encouraged Art. Not only
were Flemish painters patronised in high places,
but Flemish works of art were largely imported
into Spain, and a wholly Northern, Gothic cha
racter was stamped on the Spanish school. Men
of vigorous personality bowed submissively to the
yoke. Pedro de Cordoba, Sanchez de Castro,
Fernan Gallegas (if the works tentatively assigned
to him are his), Alejo Fernandez himself, proclaim
in every stroke their debt to the Low Countries ;
nevertheless, here also a strong racial spice and
flavour was in every case added to the Flemish
basis, and we are tempted to wonder, with some
thing of regret, what new development might
have ripened in Spanish Painting if it had known
how to withstand an influence so foreign to its
instincts as that of the Italian Renaissance. Most
conspicuous among these Gothic painters is in my
eyes — and I am not forgetting the Catalan Dalman
— the artist to whom I have last alluded, Alejo
Fernandez. In Santa Ana in Triana, at Seville,
you may see a Virgin and Child from his hand,
which in its splendour of tone and general majesty
of aspect is a work of a very high order. An ex
ception, perhaps, to the general rule of Flemish

1889 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 207
affiliation may be noted in a striking series of pic
tures in the Madrid Gallery, assigned to Pedro
Berruguete, the father of the sculptor, which,
though strongly Spanish in spirit, are Venetian
rather than Flemish in tone and aspect, roughly,
indeed, reminding us of the works of Carpaccio.
Let us, before dismissing this phase of Spanish
Art, compare it for a moment with the Art of
contemporary Italy. First, then, we see that the
Art of Italy, being purely vernacular, displays an
incomparably greater suppleness and variety of
expression than can be found in Spain. Such
contrasts as are suggested by the names, say, of
Fiesole and Verrochio, of Lippino and Carpaccio,
of Mantegna and Leonardo, to speak of men who
lived in the same half-century, have there no
parallel. Nevertheless, in certain qualities which
are common to all works in the respective coun
tries, we have the materials of a comparison. In
Spanish Art, then, we are conscious, in the main,
of the utterance of a more fiery race — a race with
more dramatic instincts and of a gloomier faith ;
and we see the fervour of its temper translating
itself almost uniformly in a glow and gravity of
tone, and a certain pomp of colour such as we
find in Italy only among the earlier Venetians.
Of any ideal of form, on the other hand, or of any
sense of exquisiteness, we vainly seek a trace.
The Spaniards had neither the suave serenity nor
the high stateliness of the Italian quattrocentisti ;
but then neither did they ever fall into a certain

2o8 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
languid elegance from which the Tuscans, at least,
were not wholly exempt. But the most significant
contrast between the Art of Spain and that of
Italy is seen in the effect on them respectively of
the spirit of the sixteenth century. Under its
impulse Italian Art put on a greater amplitude, and
rose to a higher majesty ; Signorelli became
Michel-Angelo, Perugino blossomed forth into
Raphael, for the rise of the Renaissance spirit
was in Italy an organic evolution. But to Spain
that spirit came as a contagion from without, and
as a blight. Under it the simple directness of the
earlier days was for a time obscured ; and a dreary
mass of work was thrown upon the world, dull,
often, without dignity, and academic without real
scholarship. Yet it is important to observe that
even here the national accent, as I will call it, was
never obliterated. The foreign influence was
assimilated by various individuals with varying
results, and, throughout, the personality of each
painter remained unmistakable and distinct.
Whatever may be our estimate of such men as
Pablo de Cespddes, Juanes, Morales, Vargas,
Roelas, or El Mudo, the personal distinctiveness
of their works cannot be challenged. To one
Spanish painter alone did Italy bring unquestion
able gain — namely, to Ribera, a powerful artist,
very incompletely known on this side of the Pyre
nees. Meanwhile, in the most Italianising days,
the sturdy, rugged Spanish spirit was not dead in
every breast ; nay indeed, it burnt with, even in

1889 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 209
some respects undue, vehemence in the bosom of
a certain iracund and turbulent individual called
the Elder Herrera: one little commendable as a
man, but interesting here, not in that, as some
would have it, he was the creator of the more
modern Spanish school, but that he more stoutly
perhaps than any other resisted the foreign spirit
and handed on the old territorial grit and temper.
It was, by a grim irony of things, in the handi
work of this man's son that the most extravagant
and debased form of pseudo- Italian mannerism
was reached. Old Herrera is said to have been
a harsh and brutal parent : let us not forget that
he had seen his son's pictures ! His real spiritual
successor — though in fact never his pupil — in so
far that through him the true Spanish genius was
transmitted, was Zurbaran, a man of whom we have
in this country but little knowledge, a painter of
conspicuously powerful personality, in whom, more
than in any of his contemporaries, the various
essential characteristics of his race were gathered
up — its defiant temper, its dramatic bent, its in
difference to beauty, its love of fact, its imagina
tive force, its gloomy fervour, its poetry, in fact,
and its prose. Ribera was, as an artist, an Italian;
Alonzo Cano was an eclectic with a Spanish
accent ; Murillo the unequal, now entrancing us
with the fused glory of his tones, now repelling us
by harshness and commonplace, was truly Spanish
no doubt, but had neither the imagination nor the
sustained virility of style of the son of the peasant
o

210 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
from Estremadura, the completest representative
in Art, I think, of the genius of his race.
For a long period Italian Painting did not cease
to enjoy the favour of the Court ; it ceased, how
ever, towards the beginning of the seventeenth
century to exercise that paralysing influence which
had marked its first advent ; and the ground was
cleared for a new impulse from within. At this
conjuncture a man of commanding genius and
fearless initiative was given to Spain in the person
of Diego Velasquez. It may perhaps have sur
prised you that with such a name before my mind
I should have spoken of Zurbaran, a man so vastly
his inferior in the painter's gift, as perhaps the
most representative of Spanish artists. I have
done so because beyond any other artist he sums
up in himself, as I have pointed out to you, all the
complex elements of the Spanish genius. In Velas
quez, Spanish as he is to the finger-tips, this
comprehensiveness is not found. Of Velasquez
all was Spanish, but Zurbaran was all Spain.
Viewed simply as a painter, the great Sevillian
was, as I have just said, vastly the superior of the
Estremefio. He was in more intimate touch with
Nature, and none, perhaps, have equalled the
swift magic of his brush. On the other hand,
depth of feeling, poetry, imagination were refused
to him. The painter of the " Lanzas," the " Hilan-
deras," the " Meninas " — works in their kind un
approached in Art by any other man — painted
also, be it remembered, the Coronation of the

i889 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 211
Virgin and the Mars of the Madrid Gallery —
types of prosaic treatment. In one work, indeed.
Religion seems for a moment to have winged his
pencil ; but striking and pathetic as is his famous
Crucifixion, it does not equal in poignancy and
imaginative grasp the presentment of the same
subject by Zurbaran in Seville. But if we miss
in Velasquez the higher gifts of the imagination,
we find him also free from all those blemishes of
extravagance which we have so often noted in this
land of powerful impulses unrestrained by tact.
Whatever gifts may have been refused to Velas
quez, in his grave simplicity he is unsurpassed.
If fancy seldom lifts him above the level of inti
mate daily things, neither does she obstruct for
him with purple wings the white light of sober
truth. In days in which the young Herrera could
find favour ; in a country in which Churriguera
was possible, and euphuism was applauded, he
never overstepped the modesty of Nature, nor
forgot in Art the value of reticent control. I
have not here to follow his career, nor the evolu
tion of his unique and dazzling genius. Still less
need I, before young artists of the present day,
dwell on the wizardry and the luscious fascination
of the brush of this most modern of the old
Masters. I will only, in conclusion, touch briefly
on one or two points that are of interest, and one
that is, perhaps, of warning.
First, I would notice the purity and decorum of
his Art, a decorum not, I think, due to the charac-

212 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
teristically Spanish laws under which the Inquisi
tion visited with heavy penalties every semblance
even of impurity in a work of Art, but to a spirit
dwelling in the people itself, of which those laws
were but the somewhat exaggerated expression.
It may be worth while also to note that yet
another virtue of the Spaniards is, in one of his
works, reflected in an unexpected manner, namely,
their sobriety. It is a curious thing that in a cer
tain class of Spanish Literature a peculiar relish
is shown for the portraying of moral squalor and
the grovelling criminality of social outcasts. In
Spanish Art, on the other hand, the picturesque
ness alone of low life seems to have sought
expression. You know what gentle Murillo made
of his melon-eating beggar boys. Again, you saw
not long ago upon these walls, in the " Water
Carrier of Seville," how at the outset of his career
Velasquez turned his thoughts to subjects drawn
from humble life, and you know how to the end
he dwelt with peculiar gusto on the fantastic
physiognomy of the privileged buffoons, dwarfs,
and hombres de placer who haunted the Palace in
his day. You know further that one of the most
powerful works painted by him before reality of
atmospheric effect had become his chief pre
occupation, and when he sought exclusively after
truth of character, a picture known as " Los
Borrachos," represents a group of drunkards doing
homage to Bacchus. It is a work of the most
naked realism. Bacchus (Dionysos !), showing in

i889 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 213
his repulsive vulgarity what a blank to Velasquez
was the poetic side of classic myths, is surrounded
by a circle of kneeling rascals, rude and ragged
enough, and supposed, no doubt, to be carousing ;
but here is the strange peculiarity of this work —
in spite of all the accessories of a revel, and the
flash of grinning teeth, we are unable to persuade
ourselves that any one of the disreputable crew
could ever be drunk. Imagine the subject treated
by a Fleming !
And now, though I am loth to touch one leaf
of the laurels of so dazzling and so great an artist,
I cannot pass in silence a circumstance which must
be weighed in estimating Velasquez as a man, and
which is not without bearing on his Art. The
virtues of his race, as we have seen, purified his
work and gave it dignity ; a Spanish foible, though
it could not dim his genius, cramped no doubt and
curtailed its production, namely, a tendency to sub
ordinate everything to the pursuit of royal favour.
I said a Spanish foible ; for a superstitious render
ing up of will and conscience to the sovereign,
such as is, I believe, without example, had long
been a growing characteristic of the Spaniard.
On a memorable occasion Gonzalo de Cordoba
himself, one of the noblest figures recorded in
Spanish history — a man of a mind so fearless that
he was bold to rebuke Pope Borgia himself face
to face in the Vatican for the scandals of his life —
did not scruple to break, in deference to what he
considered this higher duty of obedience to his

2X4 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
king, his solemn pledge and oath to the unfor
tunate young Duke of Calabria. So all but divine
did majesty appear to the Spaniards that divinity
and majesty became almost as one in their eyes,
and they spoke, in all solemnity, as " Su Majestad,"
not only of the Divine persons of the Trinity, but
also of the sacrificial wafer. The prevalence of
this feeling must plead to some extent in mitiga
tion of the tenacity with which Velasquez can
vassed — with success, alas ! — to obtain at Court
a post of an onerous and wholly prosaic character
— the office of " Aposentador Mayor," a sort of
purveyor and quartermaster, who, when his
Majesty moved from one place to another, had
to convey, to house, and to feed, not the sovereign
only, but all his suite — a post demanding all his
attention, says Palomino, who goes on to deplore
that this exalted office (which he has just told us
any one could fill) should have deprived the world
of so many shining samples of the painter's genius.
We shall agree with our sententious friend not,
perhaps, in the satisfaction he derived from the
honour conferred, as he imagines, on his calling,
but in his sorrow over the loss we have sustained !
And in the sight of canvases in which the execu
tion of a sketch is carried out on the full scale of
life we shall at once bow before the product of a
splendid genius, and regret the signs of haste, the
evidence of too scanty leisure, by which its expres
sion has been marred. Truly has it been said,
"Art requires the whole man."

i889 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 215
And now I must conclude, and I do so with
more even than my usual consciousness of a task
inadequately performed. The picture I have
traced before you is crowded inevitably, and I
fear to confusion, and yet much has been omitted
which might have helped to its better understand
ing had time furnished me with a larger canvas.
It must suffice to me if I have in any way
stimulated you to the further consideration of a
deeply interesting chapter in the history of Art —
a chapter which, if we read it aright, teaches us
this lesson : that nations not less than individuals
may, by the insincere pursuit of what is foreign to
their temper, be turned from the true path of their
artistic development, and may also by sincerity be
righted and restored.

Address, December ioth, 1891

ART IN FRANCE

Students of the Royal Academy,
Pursuing the subject which I have for
some years past proposed to myself in these ad
dresses to you, namely, the relation between
artistic production and its surrounding conditions,
I dealt with it, you may remember, at our last
biennial gatherings, in connection with two mem
bers of the so-called Latin group — the Italian and
the Spanish peoples. I purpose to-night to com
plete our survey of that group by speaking to you
of its third member — the people of France. The
task is one which I approach with no small mis
giving ; in the first place because, the evolution
of the artistic genius of the French having been
uninterrupted from the days of Charlemagne to
the days in which we live, an account which shall
stop short, as this account needs must, on the
threshold of modern times, can offer but a muti
lated picture ; and in the second, because that
genius, which is in the very life-blood of the race,
has found vent over so wide a field that it is not
possible within the limits of an address, even
though I draw largely on your patience, to do
more than indicate in the most summary manner
the forms it has assumed, and the fruit it has

220 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
borne. Indeed, I shall be forced to lay stress on
one form only of its manifestations, touching but
incidentally on others ; and the topic on which I
shall chiefly dwell is one which plainly imposes
itself by its paramount interest.
Vast, indeed, is the field over which the creative
genius of the French has been active ; not archi
tecture, sculpture, and painting have alone ab
sorbed its energies ; every form of industrial
production has furnished material for its exercise,
and has received its stamp. But among its nobler
manifestations there is one — its achievement in
architecture in the Middle Ages — to which France
owes a position of pre-eminence that until the
present century she could not claim in either of
the sister Arts. Fortunately for our inquiry there
is nothing from which we may learn more of a
race in its days of spontaneous artistic production
than its expression in architecture. Famous and
considerable sculptors the French have assuredly
had at all times ; their school of carvers in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries was brilliant and
beyond example fertile ; the Renaissance gave
them men of high mark, and even in the artificial
days of Louis XIV, they had at least one sculptor
of true and powerful genius ; but high as was the
average of their achievement, they nowhere in the
exercise of the plastic art reached those summits
in which the loftiest imaginative quality is married
to consummate artistic power. In spirit the
nearest approach to that level was seen in the

J 89 1 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 221
mediaeval days, when, however, the knowledge of
the human form was still unripe and inadequate.
During and after the Renaissance period, man
nerism mars, too frequently, work else in many
ways admirable ; the element of dignity is often
wanting ; the grave solemnity, the majestic sad
ness which breathe, as from the verse of Dante, in
the recumbent guardians of the Medicean tombs
in Florence would be sought in vain in the whole
range of the sculpture of the French. In paint
ing, also, in the past — for I remind you that the
present century, with its magnificent outburst of
artistic production, is outside the scope of this
address — in painting, I say, they reached a high
standard ; but in this form of art, again, we are
not lifted out of ourselves by their greatest
achievements as we are — how frequently ! — by the
works of Italian Masters. Where is, here, the
haunting charm of Lionardo ; where the large
serenity of Raphael ; where the ardour of Titian's
colour ; where the weird force of Tintoretto's
fancies? These things we look for in vain. In
architecture, on the other hand, the French have
a supreme claim on our admiration ; for on the
very dawn of modern days they conceived, and
evolved with an unerring certainty of logical pro
cession, and with a swiftness surpassed only by
the sudden ripening of Greek sculpture in the fifth
century before Christ, a style of architecture based
on a principle wholly new, not only differing from
but directly opposite to that which had governed

222 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
the builders of Rome and Athens respectively, a
style which spread rapidly and triumphantly over
the whole of Western and Central Europe, and
which has in its unity, its flexibility and its varied
splendour, found no peer since the days of its
decline. I mean, of course, the style which, more
rightly spoken of once as "Frankish," "¦opus
Francigenum," is now known by a name given to
it at first in scorn, the "Gothic" style. To the
evolution of this style and to its gradual superses
sion in the sixteenth century under the influence
of the revival of classic feeling, I propose to devote
mainly to-night such few considerations as the
limits of our time admit.
But first let us glance at the composition and at
the home of this great unrestful, initiating race. It
occupies a broad and fertile region blessed with a
temperate climate, fanned on three sides by the
breath of the sea, favoured with bright skies and
a light keen air which quickens the wit and glad
dens the spirit. In this land is bred a mercurial
light-hearted race — one, now, and united, but built
up of varied elements, and for a long time fiercely
divided within itself What are these various ele
ments ? As far back as sure knowledge reaches
— for of those earliest artists, the aboriginal cave-
dwellers, but little can be known — we find the
country unequally divided between Keltic tribes
and an Iberian race, which latter sat on the slopes
of the Pyrenees and was spread over the Spanish
Peninsula. Now the Keltic tribes which occupied

1891 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 223
respectively the north and centre of what was one
day to be France, represented, speaking broadly,
two successive immigrations ; the earlier that of the
Gauls, the later that of the Kymri ; and these two
tribes, or groups of tribes, furnished different
elements to the national character, the Gaul being
the more mercurial and indocile — "/^ Celte indo
cile" Michelet calls him — the Kymri more staid
and open to discipline. Along the southern sea
board the ubiquitous Phoenician, need it be said,
set up his counting-houses, penetrating thence to
some distance into the interior. Greeks, too,
traded with and colonised the region known to us
as Provence, founding Phocaean Massilia in the
sixth century before Christ, and if they have left
behind them no tangible relic of their sojourn,
they exercised that spiritual influence which they
ever brought to bear on those with whom they
came into contact.
Till the middle of the first century before Christ,
however, no important infusion of foreign blood
came to modify the characteristics of the Keltic
races, a riotous folk whose exuberant vitality was
ever driving its hosts like a wayward torrent to
and fro over the face of the world. We see them
in a remote past bursting through the Iberians
and pouring across the Pyrenees into Spain ; we
see them driving the Siculi before them in Italy,
and founding an Empire, of which the name still
survives — Umbria, the land of the Ambrons.
Later they set the torch to the Imperial Capital

224 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
of the world ; they pillage Delphi ; the Danube
echoes with their war-cry ; the plains of Troy are
alive with their tents ; the shores of the Baltic
know them ; in the sands and cities of northern
Africa their presence is felt ; their span is from
Galway and Galicia in the West to far Galatia in
the East.
It was in the sixth century before Christ that
this fighting race first came into conflict with its
future masters, the Romans. In the first century
it succumbed after a fierce struggle to its mighty
foe, and was absorbed into the Roman Empire ;
and eagerly embracing the Latin civilisation — a
civilisation already, indeed, planted in the south
of Gaul by the Roman settlements of Narbonne
and of Aix — gradually abandoned its native
tongue and thus identified itself with the Imperial
people. As might have been expected, the Gauls
soon rose, through the brilliancy of their natural
parts, to a high level of culture and to a position
of influence in the State ; and it is noteworthy
that they displayed already then special aptitudes
which have not ceased to characterise them. They
shone as skilled physicians, as fluent orators ; they
shone in letters and on the stage ; Gauls sat in
the Senate, they rose to the purple ; Claudius,
Antoninus Pius, and Constautine were Gauls.
But if this people contributed a striking element
to the life of the Roman Empire, it shared also
in the gradual exhaustion and decay of that once
overshadowing fabric, and when in the fifth cen-

i89i ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 225
tury the Germanic hosts began to press on them
from the north and east, they could oppose no
valid resistance to the advance ofthe newcomers,
and sank before them into subjection and slavery.
Early in the next century Clovis the Frank, a
ruthless rascal, having gbt rid, by force or by
fraud, first of a rival Gothic tribe, and then of
some inconvenient relations, founded modern
France ; and this final settlement of a Germanic
element on Gallic soil, an element which came to
represent official France, if I may so call it, and,
imposing its foreign name for all time on the
land, not only exercised a vital influence on its"
history, but modified necessarily the racial charac
teristics of the vanquished people. However
much for some time the haughty and barbarous
Franks may have held themselves aloof from the
subject Gauls, a fusion of blood gradually took
place, and it is, beyond doubt, to this eventual
fusion that is due that particularly happy com
plexion of genius that we shall presently see at
work precisely in that region in which Frankish
rule was, from the first, most firmly rooted. Thus
the genius of Keltic France was early fed and
strengthened by foreign elements : " Toutes les
races du monde," Michelet finely says, "ont con-
tribue pour doter cette Bandore." Nevertheless
we must not lose sight of the fact that the Gallic
stock, of which an unquenchable vitality is the
primary characteristic, remained, in numbers
greatly superior to the foreign infusion, though

226 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
probably the estimate of Amedee Thierry, that
nineteen-twentieths of modern Frenchmen descend
from them, must be taken with much reserve ; the
Gauls never in their thraldom forgot their blood,
and in the great upheaval of 1789 the old undying,
smouldering consciousness burst into lurid flame.
" For more than thirteen centuries," says Guizot
" the conquered people had struggled to shake off
the yoke of the conquering race ; our history is
the history of that struggle ; " and this duality
within the French race is the key to much that is
perplexing in the evolution of its intellectual life.
Well, what are the main characteristics of this
Gaulish people ? They are a love of fighting and
a magnificent bravery, great impatience of control,
a passion for new things, a swift, brilliant, logical
intelligence, a gay and mocking spirit — for "to
laugh," says Rabelais, "is the proper mark of
man " — an inextinguishable self-confidence. The
best French writers — whom I may not contradict
— add, an excessive vanity. And to this native
fund were brought from without modifying
elements of discipline and control ; we shall pre
sently see with what result.
The first centuries of Teutonic dominion have
left no traces of artistic activity on French soil ;
for 300 years Art slumbered amidst the din and
devastation of intertribal war ; but if in these dark
days the memory of Roman splendour became
dim, and all tradition of methods of buildingf was
effaced, the inborn genius of the Gallic race

1891 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 227
ripened during this period of incubation towards
a freer, a more personal, and a more vigorous life
than would have been perhaps compatible with a
continuous tradition.
It was that great ruler, Charlemagne, who first
called Architecture out of its sleep. Filled with
his large conception of an Empire of the West,
the heir to the greatness of Rome, his mind turned,
as was natural, to the restoration of Gallo- Roman
splendour. To this end he called around him
artists and skilled workmen from the South and
East. The Roman basilica was taken as the
model of the new churches which, under his
encouragement and with his aid, the monastic
communities began to raise through the land ; and
thus Roman architecture became the starting-
point of the new development of the art of
building. Nevertheless, other foreign influences
became early active, through contact, direct or
indirect, with other races. An illustration of the
profound modifications which such contact could
bring about may be found in a comparison, for
example, between the sculptured fagade of the
church of St. Gilles, in Provence, a region much
under Roman and Greek influences, and the
church of St. Front at Perigueux. The latter
church was begun, according to Viollet le Due,
towards the end of the tenth century, a few years
after St. Mark's in Venice, and practically on the
same plan ; the former is of much later date, yet
the southern example is still strongly impregnated

228 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
with classic tradition, whilst the Acquitanian church,
with its five domes, is wholly Byzantine in its
general character. Here the inspiration is derived
undoubtedly from the Venetians, who, at an early
period, had established a trade route through
France to the western seas, and had an important
mart at Limoges ; and it is an interesting fact that
during the eleventh and twelfth centuries it is in
Acquitania alone — that is, in the province within
more immediate touch of Venetian influence —
that domical churches were built. Now, both these
instances, illustrating as they do in a marked manner
the receptivity of the Gallic intelligence, exhibit,
also, conspicuously the freedom with which it
fashioned foreign elements to its uses. This free
dom is almost startlingly displayed at St. Gilles,
where classic material is handled with an audacity
which, if leading in some points to an almost
barbaric incongruity, produces a result in the last
degree impressive and stimulating. The work is
thoroughly southern ; it has none of that logical
and orderly cogency which was already at that
date the mark of the work of the Gallo-Franks
in the north ; but it is a work of true genius, and
to me infinitely fascinating. At Perigueux, also,
we find the fire of native genius fusing and
fashioning material not indigenous. In ground
plan, as I have said, St. Front is almost identical
with St. Mark's, and in its general structural
features has much analogy with the Venetian
church ; nevertheless, the impression produced —

i89i ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 229
I speak, of course, of the form, for the colour is
now, from floor to roof, that of stone newly and
sacrilegiously flayed and scraped— is wholly dif
ferent : that love for slender and soaring forms
which was to mark French architecture in the
future is already evident ; forms which in the
Venetian model are sturdy and squat, are elon
gated here almost to slimness ; the whole pro
portion, and, therefore, the whole character, is
changed ; the Venetian idea has been, so to
speak, translated into French.
The impulse towards a revival of architecture
was, we saw, given by Charlemagne, but it was
not till the tenth and eleventh centuries that the
movement reached its full force ; and its develop
ment was due mainly to the great monastic
community which, founded by St. Benedict early
in the sixth century, had poured from the heights
of Monte Cassino its beneficent influence over
Western Europe. This famous order had become
a mighty power in France, controlling from the
central foundation at Cluny not less, it is affirmed,
than three hundred and fourteen monasteries and
churches over the face of the country, and had
offered in days when the land, half wilderness and
half shambles, was given over to fire and sword, a
sacred refuge and a stronghold to whatever of
refinement, of knowledge, and of culture still
struggled to live. Under the protection of the
Crown, the convents long remained the sole
centres of intellectual light ; and if, in the second

230 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
half of the twelfth century, building passes, owing
to the development of municipal institutions,
mainly into the hands of lay craftsmen — though
under the influence of kings and bishops — it
was nevertheless in the days of paramount
monastic influences that the Ogival style was
initiated and evolved. Let us see by what
steps. The model first adopted in the greater part of
France for the uses of the Christian church was, I
said, the basilica of the Romans, with its nave
and its aisles, its narthex and its apse ; in this
model, however, certain modifications were needed
to meet the requirements of Christian worship and
ritual, or for safety, and out of them grew the type
of church known as Romanesque. Of these
modifications one, the substitution of wagon-
headed vaults for flat timber roofs, a change made
necessary by the frequent occurrence of fires, led
to momentous consequences, for it is, as we shall
see, in the problems of vaulting that the so-called
Gothic style had birth. In the vaulted buildings
of the Romans stability was obtained through
inert resistance ; the solid weight of their vaults
was taken up by solid masses of brickwork and
concrete— you may, in fact, regard these edifices
as virtually hewn out of a solid block. The
substitution of the principle of a balance of active
forces for this principle of inert resistance is
probably the greatest revolution ever introduced
in the science of building : you have here the

1891 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 231
generative principle of Gothic architecture, its
essence and its life.
How this revolution was brought about I can,
of course, only indicate to you in summary outline.
Let us first note in passing that the presence of a
pointed arch, except as a structural form, does not
constitute Gothic architecture. Isolated radiating
pointed arches have been built in ages and
countries in which the Gothic style was not
dreamt of; a building might be thoroughly Gothic
in structure and principle without showing a
pointed opening anywhere ; it is through the roof,
not through the window, that the formative Gothic
idea entered. Let us try to follow rapidly some
of the main steps by which it reached its ultimate
development. The earliest substitute for the
discarded timber roof was the wagon vault,
thrown first, tentatively, over the aisles, then over
the nave ; and here an element of weakness soon
made itself felt ; the walls of the nave carried on
piers, and of no great thickness, were not equal to
, the outward thrust of the vault and gave way.
Various expedients were resorted to ; buttresses
were added at the points corresponding with the
piers, a transverse band or rib was flung across
the nave from pier to pier, the vault from being
circular was, in some cases, broken and made
pointed, rendering the thrust more vertical, but
leaving it continuous ; the problem was yet not
solved ; a counteracting force, in which we see the
germ of the flying buttress, had, in certain regions,

232 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
been applied, namely, a half-wdLgon vault above
the side aisles, taking up the pressure of the
central vault ; but this arrangement condemned to
practical darkness the upper part of the nave
which, instead of windows, showed a cavernous
gallery. In Acquitania, as we have already seen,
a succession of cupolas on pendentives was early
adopted — an arrangement which though, as in the
case of the cathedral of Le Puy, it yields grand
and impressive effects, is in many respects un
satisfying. An important step in the new direction
was next taken at Vezelay, where intersecting
vaults, but without ribs, were substituted for the
continuous wagon-head ; the thrust of the vaulting
being thus directed to the supporting piles. This
arrangement was, however, still found unsatisfac
tory, and on a narthex being added, or rebuilt on
a larger scale, the same disposition of vaults was
retained, but they were made pointed. A few
vears later, in the early middle of the twelfth
century, a Benedictine monk, feeble of frame, but
of a lofty spirit, Suger, the great Abbot of St.
Denis — who has on sculptors, by-the-bye, this
special claim, that he boldly withstood the bitter
denunciations launched by St. Bernard against the
sculptural decoration of churches — began the erec
tion of a church in which the tentative groupings
at which I have just hinted gave place to the
systematic and logical application of a new and
fruitful conception ; the idea of stability based on
the balance of active forces expressed in a self-

1891 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 233
sustaining combination of upright supports and
vaulting-ribs, with detached buttresses bringing
their action to bear exactly on the points at which
the thrust of the vaults is gathered up. So late
as the days in which Viollet le Due wrote his
great dictionary of architecture, it was believed,
and he endorsed the belief, that this far-reaching
conception had arisen suddenly and spontaneously
in the brain of one man ; more recent investiga
tion, in which Monsieur L. Gonse, in his sump
tuous work on Gothic Art, has, so far, said the
last word, has brought our knowledge more into
harmony with the general analogy of things. To
the famous abbot belongs, it is true, as I have
said, the honour of the first systematic application
of the new principle, and his great work must ever
remain a landmark in the history of architecture ;
but it was, in fact, only the last and most complete
of a series of experiments, covering a period of
nearly half a century ; experiments of which the
earliest is seen in the church of a Benedictine
Monastery at Morienval. This church is in the
heart of the group of provinces called the Domaine
Royal, of which Paris, the seat of Royalty, was the
centre, and it is within this Frankish region that
the various other tentatives to which I have
alluded are to be traced ; it is in this region, also,
that it reached its fullest development, and left its
most perfect achievements.
External conditions were, doubtless, favourable
to that growth ; the wealth and patronage of kings

234 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
and bishops were propitious to the builders of the
day ; but to these incentives from above was added
another which had a deep and lasting bearing
upon the revolution which was taking place in
architecture, namely, the development of the
communes. This development, fostered not only
by the kings, but by the bishops, who viewed
uneasily the strength and independence of the
monastic bodies, gave, by laicising it, if I may use
the word, a new direction to the art of building.
Cathedrals, not abbeys, were now built ; wider
and loftier structures, breathing an air of larger
freedom and expressing a fuller public life. From
this day forward the trammels of antique tradition
were wholly cast aside, and whilst French archi
tects constructed in a style born on their own
soil, they looked at home henceforth also for its
decoration, in the lanes and fields of their native
country. In a tumult of creative energy Gothic archi
tecture leapt to its height in an amazingly short
space of time. Between the great reign of
Philippe Auguste and that of Louis the Saint,
nearly all the great cathedrals of France were
begun or reached completion. But, indeed, the
epoch was in many ways favourable to a great
intellectual movement in France. Paris was, in
the thirteenth century, a famous centre and focus
of intellectual activity ; the French language was
widely known in Europe ; Brunetto Latini, the
master of Dante, wrote his "Tresor" in that

iSgi ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 235
tongue on the ground that it was, beyond all
others, "delitable et commune a toutes gens."
But if these general conditions of intellectual
energy favoured the growth of the new phase of
art, the peculiar aptitudes of the race were singu
larly calculated to promote it. The rise and
evolution of Ogival architecture is proper, we
said, to the Domaine Royal, the north and centre
of France. Well, what was the race that occupied
this region ? It was a race of which the basis was
Kymric, formed, therefore, from the more stable
and disciplinable of the two Keltic groups ; but,
on this root, enriched already by a Latin element,
was grafted a considerable Teutonic growth which
must of necessity have exercised an important
modifying influence. Now, this combination would
seem well suited to produce that admirably poised
compound which we see in the French genius at
its best — a genius which, if it is conspicuous for
the restless energy, the fearlessness of intellect,
and the eager grasp of new ideas which mark the
native Gaul, reveals also a sense of measure, a
precision, a sobriety, and a balance which point to
the chastening influences of other blood.
By the side of these general characteristics we
have to note certain purely artistic peculiarities.
There is, for instance, a sense of the decorative in
form in which the French have remained un
rivalled. But I would draw your attention espe
cially to a characteristic bent which has played no
small part in the development of their architecture

236 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
— namely, a strong leaning to long ascending lines,
to slimness of proportion, and to perpendicular
parallelism. You may see a curious illustration of
this propensity in a seemingly insignificant matter,
the timbering of the rural architecture in the north
and centre of France. The cottages on which
you will note what I am about to point out are, of
course, mostly of modern date, but they represent
a tradition of which you may trace the source in
the oldest parts of those towns in which timbered
structures of an early period are still preserved.
If you look at the timbering of a cottage or house
in a purely Teutonic country, in Germany or
German Switzerland, you will find that the spaces
left between uprights and horizontals are approxi
mately square, and crossed with rather frequent
diagonal lines ; in the French examples, on the
contrary, whilst the diagonal lines are very few,
the perpendicular line is absolutely dominant ; one
horizontal line generally sufficing for a whole wall
or gable front, and the vertical timbers being
brought so close that the space between them is
often no wider than the timber itself To this
strong leaning I shall have occasion to draw your
attention again further on. Now, it seems to me,
I repeat, that the race at whose attributes and
physiognomy we have just glanced was peculiarly
fitted to conceive and develop the new style of
building — a style in which inertness is replaced by
active force, a style which, while in its absolute
plasticity it offered the widest scope for innovat-

1 89 1 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 237
ing genius, required, nevertheless, for its fullest
development the logical clearness and grasp of
ideas which were conspicuous in the mental equip
ment of that race ; a style in which liberty and
restraint, audacity and prudence, science and emo
tion, were so marvellously blended.
It was through the balance of these opposite
qualities that Gothic building reached its highest
level ; it was in the disturbance of that balance,
in the encroachment of mathematics on sound
artistic feeling, that the seed of its decline was
sown. From the moment that all the forces of which
the poise and stability of a structure was the
result were gathered up into a system of ribs,
shafts, buttresses, and pinnacles, forming a com
plete self-sustaining skeleton carrying a roof, not
of concrete, but having the play and life of
masonry, it became evident that, structurally, the
wall had become superfluous ; it was but a screen,
and to be dealt with as such : and accordingly, the
Frankish architects proceeded with constantly
increasing boldness to its suppression, gradually
restricting the solids almost wholly to constructive
functions ; manifest construction became thus a
leading feature of the style.
You see at a glance how, apart from the primary
statical motive, the broken arch became in vault
ing almost a necessity ; the sides of a square being
shorter than its diagonal, it is evident that a
round arch struck diagonally across it must be

238 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
higher than the arches spanning its sides, and if
the field to be vaulted is a parallelogram or irre
gular in plan, the number of unequal levels at the
key of the arches is further multiplied ; and those
levels can only be brought into even approximate
harmony either by stilting the smaller ones, as was
done at first, or by breaking the arches ; and this
latter course soon became universal. The pointed
arch having thus asserted its place in the con
struction of a building, the desire to suppress all
superfluous wall space, allied to a sense of fitness,
prompted its adoption in the case of the windows,
which presently reigned over the whole space
between pier and pier ; and this expansion of the
field of light was further demanded for the display
of stained glass, to which growing importance
was constantly given as an element of effect in
the internal decoration of churches ; and with
glorious results. No one who has not seen, as
one still may see in France, a cathedral of which
the glass is preserved throughout, or nearly so,
can form an idea of the effulgent magnificence
and poetic charm which attach to this flinging of
a heaven of colour about the majesty of the House
of Prayer. I may note, by the way, that in
France this effect is often heightened by the
glazing of the triforium, which is opened out by
the substitution of a ridge-roof for a lean-to over
the aisles. But whilst the germs of this architec
tural growth found favouring soil in the intellec
tual temper of the race that initiated it, the pecu-

1891 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 239
liar aesthetic bent to which I have called your
attention, the love of slim and aspiring lines, had
special scope in a style in which the operative
forces might be gathered up in increasingly
slender channels, and in which horizontal lines
had no necessary place except to satisfy the eye
with a sense of binding between the parts ; and,
in truth, the horizontal line rapidly dwindled,
almost in some cases to effacement. So, for
instance, in the Cathedral of Clermont Ferrand —
I quote it because it is peculiarly happy in its
elegant proportions — the only horizontal in the
whole building, if we except the window-sills, is a
very narrow string along the base of the triforium,
and this does not go round the pier shafts, which
spring, absolutely unbroken, from floor to roof
The supremacy of the vertical line is here further
emphasised by carrying the shafts of the clere
story windows — as is not infrequent in France
— down through the triforium, which thus becomes,
in a manner, one with the upper lights. The
total eff'ect is extremely dignified, and gives that
sense of satisfaction which is inseparable from the
spectacle of a consistently developed dominant
idea. I spoke just now of the peculiar charm and
splendour which is bestowed on the French
churches by their stained glass windows. But
another element of dignity was added to them by
a wealth of sculpture, on which time will not allow
me to dwell. It must suffice to say that, while

240 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
the carver's art in France was during the Gothic
age prolific beyond example, it early reached and
throughout maintained a high standard of excel
lence. It was everywhere full of sincerity and
freshness, often of great beauty and stateliness,
and always in its application marked with a strong
sense of fitness and artistic propriety. Sparingly
used in the interior of the churches, in which a
noble restraint invites to grave and silent contem
plation, it spread with unstinted, though well-
marshalled, profusion over their external features.
The sacred edifice thus challenged the passer-by
through its manifold magnificence ; andvthis allur
ing wealth was most widely spread about the
portals through which the faithful were to be
drawn. But even as the stability of a Gothic church
rested on a nice poise of mutually counteracting
forces, so the maintenance of the style itself at
its perfect point depended on a due balance of the
intellectual forces which had generated it. This
balance was soon to be disturbed. The fascina
tion of the statical tour de force, the craving to
bring down to an irreducible minimum the amount
of material that would suffice to the stability of a
building extravagantly lofty, was irresistible.
Mathematical calculation played a daily more
absorbing part, and resulted in the rearing of such
a structure as the Choir of Beauvais ; which, pre
suming too much on abstract calculation, was so
lacking in solidity that it gave way within a few

1 89 1 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 241
years of its erection ; was rendered relatively stable
only by doubling the number of its supports ; and
is held together to this day only by a network of
iron ties — a building which distresses by its stilted
and meagre aspect, and lifts its vault to such a
height that the eye cannot be directed to its
summit without considerable physical discomfort.
Another church, no doubt in its way beautiful,
which exemplifies the training down of construc
tive forms to the last extreme of attenuation is
St. Urbain of Troyes, in which the flying but
tresses have the skeleton meagreness of iron
girders, and the principle of external props is
carried so far that two tiny vaulted porches at the
north and south entrances think it necessary to
provide themselves with flying buttresses standing
out at either angle on the pavement. This build
ing has the further peculiarity that it seems by
some fissiparous effort to have split its substance
into two layers, as though the outer church had
been shed, so to speak, leaving another inner one
intact and complete.
Again, you will see that, by the elimination of
all idle portions in a structure of which the active
portion is a skeletqn, line becomes dominant
through the omission of planes ; lines were soon
needlessly multiplied ; narrow ridges first ran up
the faces of the shafts, and then, as if convexity of
surface was in itself a culpable waste, what had
been a shaft was hollowed into furrows divided by
an arris ; concavity and rigidity invaded everything Q

242 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
with an exasperating angularity of effect. Of
this you may see an illustration in the Cathe
dral of Auxerre, where the choir retains the fuller
forms and those of the nave shrivel into con
cavity. But if the causes we have noted led, in struc
tural forms, to a rigid multiplicity of vertical lines,
exterior decoration, which rapidly grew in exuber
ance, gave scope to that love of sinuous serpentine
forms, born of a sense of the grace of motion,
which has always marked the French ; and, whilst
vertical constructive lines multiplied themselves in
the interior of the churches, an incontinent pro
fusion of fantastic curves began to spread over
their exterior surface, clothing them with an
embroidery of wildest decorative fancies. In this
development of what became in the end an un
controlled orgy of the chisel, the first step was a
breaking up of the tracery of the windows, and a
substitution for geometric forms of a flame-like —
"flamboyant" — arrangement of curves, both pic
turesque and graceful, but wanting in the dignity
and fitness of the earlier device.
Meanwhile, into whatever excesses the French
carvers were betrayed at this period of Gothic art,
the vivacity and spontaneity of their genius ever
light up their work and disarm criticism. We
feel throughout that, with whatever redundancy
and mannerism, they are expressing themselves
sincerely and in their own vernacular. How
necessary to all excellence is this cardinal virtue

i89i ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 243
of sincerity will be borne in upon you if from the
facade of this Cathedral of Troyes you turn to a
famous rood-loft in the Church of the Madeleine
in the same city, the work of one Giovanni
Gualdo, an Italian who, being buried beneath it,
declares in his epitaph, not without some boldness,
that he will not be found crushed when he is
called to Judgment. This rood-loft is of extrava
gantly flamboyant character ; but whilst the work
of the French carvers at the Cathedral is instinct
with living grace and power, the genuine expres
sion of something spontaneously conceived, the
work of this Italian, which was not a natural
utterance, is, like all Italian Gothic detail, intoler
ably clumsy and coarse ; to a degree which would
be perplexing, in view of the amazing beauty and
subtlety of Italian handling in Renaissance orna
ment, if we did not remember that the latter was
with them a sincere and natural mode of expres
sion. Gothic Architecture, though it continued till
late to produce fine work, had lost its perfect
balance already before the close of the thirteenth
century ; it had forfeited also some of that rich
personality which marked it before it had become
to some extent a matter of receipt in the hands of
the Freemasons; nevertheless, however little scope
it found during the disastrous period of the English
wars, it held its own with the vitality of an indi
genous growth, and, as we shall see, fought long
and manfully with the new ideas in the days of

244 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
the sudden swinging back to Italian influence of
which I shall now have to speak. But, before
leaving this branch of our subject, I will venture
to note an instance, as I think it, of the fine tact
of the French church-builders, namely their adop
tion, which I cannot regard as fortuitous, of the
circular east end, the " Chevet." Mr. Fergusson,
indeed, sees the source of the French ground-plan
in the addition of a nave to an original circular
building ; this ingenious explanation does not, I
think, offer an adequate solution. It seems to me
but just to give full credit to the French builders
for the higher fitness of any form they adopted.
How beautiful a square east end may be we, in
this country, abundantly know, but it is difficult to
divest oneself of the feeling that a church so
terminated is a more or less arbitrarily truncated
arcade which might be produced indefinitely ; in
the circular arrangement, on the contrary, not
only is the design more visibly closed but every
limb of the encircling bays strives back, and is
gathered up into a key suspended immediately
above, and emphasising the holiest spot, the Altar
of the Sacrifice.
And now we turn to a wholly new phase in
French Art, the expression of a new order of
ideas and of materially altered social conditions.
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the
prestige of the fighting nobility had suffered much
through the introduction of artillery and the
reverses of the English wars ; the middle classes

1891 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 245
on the other hand, had under the favour of the
kings steadily risen in importance. Before the
end of the fifteenth century the printing-press had
begun to scatter knowledge far and wide. The
discovery of a new continent across the Atlantic
was stirring the imagination of the Old World.
But it was a discovery within that Old World
which was to exercise the deepest influence on the
intellectual condition of France, the discovery of
Italy, through the expeditions of Charles VIII.
and Louis XII. — for a discovery it may be called,
though it must not be assumed that Italian
influence was entirely absent in France until that
period. Already in the middle of the fifteenth
century Rene of Anjou, himself a painter and the
friend of the leading Humanists of his time, had
made his Court at Tarascon a centre of culture
and of Art, and employed the labour of Italian
artists. Within the first half of the century, too, a
great painter, Jean Fouquet, had brought back
from Italy a marked leaning to the new classic
spirit. Nevertheless it was not until the return of
the romantic stripling Charles VIIL, with the
flower of the French nobility, from his futile and
fantastic campaign, that the desire for all things
Italian took wide and lasting hold ofthe French —
at least among the nobility — and this enthusiasm,
further whetted during the chequered campaigns
of his successor Louis XII., grew at a rapid
pace. It was not, however, till the second decade of

246 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
the sixteenth century, that through the example of
that brilliant dilettante, Francis I., the Italian
contagion showed important results. Within the
thirty-five years of his reign a host of palatial
buildings were raised in a new style which, if it
had not, as had the style it pushed aside, the
virtue of indigenous growth, was certainly marked
by extreme charm and beauty. It was not, I say,
of spontaneous growth, but neither was it a wholly
alien product, for the people from which it was
adopted had in past times left on the more
vivacious Gallic stock distinct traces of its blood,
and the French have not ceased to this day to
claim kinship with the Imperial race. Mean
while, borrowed though the new style was, the
French at once moulded it to their own genius,
and produced a result distinctly personal to them
selves ; and the modifications they introduced in
the Italian style were just such as you would
expect from the different temper of the race. The
restrained and sweet gravity which delights us in
the purest examples of trans- Alpine Rennaissance
is, it must be admitted, too often wanting in the
French work of the same class ; and if, as I believe,
the rank of a work of art is according to the
dignity of the emotion it stirs in the beholder, then
the creations of the great Italians rise to a higher
level than those of the artists of the French
Renaissance. For vitality and variety, on the
other hand, for exuberance of fancy, for resource
ful ingenuity of construction, and for a delicate

1 89 1 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 247
sense of rhythm and proportion, the superiority of
the work of the French is, in my opinion, con
spicuous. Above all things it is their own ; and
for this reason, it seems to me that the jealous
investigation which has been noticeable in recent
times in France as to how far Italian artists have
been unduly credited with the building of certain
of the masterpieces of the Renaissance in that
country, is, however valuable in the interests of
truth, of no great moment to the dignity of French
Art. Close study of documents has led, as is
well shown, for instance, in Palustre's beautiful
instalment of a history of French Renaissance,
to the dismissal of claims hitherto advanced in
various cases in favour of Italian Artists : it is
bringing into greater prominence the names of
native " maistres massons " whose claims had been
underrated, men who had inherited traditions
which made them greatly superior as builders, at
all events, to the artists who came amongst them
from beyond the Alps. But, apart from such
enquiries, it is patent that all but every work of
the French Early Renaissance, however it may
have originated, bears the unmistakable stamp of
the fusing energy of French genius. That the
style was not born in France is a fact no one can
challenge ; that it was recast in that country into
a distinctly French thing no narrowness could
dispute. The keynote of the Renaissance movement
being the assertion of the beauty of life and the

248 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
dignity of man, its influence was naturally most
felt in connection with secular life. The great
era of church building was past, and, indeed, for a
population reduced by long and wasting wars, the
existing places of worship were not insufficient.
The main determining motive of artistic activity
under Francis I. was the ambition of the king and
his nobles to multiply places of delight for their
residence, especially in the country, and to replace
by sights of beauty, such as they had learnt to
love and covet in Italy, the moated gloom of the
ancestral chateaux, built and well suited for pur
poses of protection and defence, but little in
harmony with the tastes of the pleasure-loving
Court and the light-hearted young king who led
it. Prodigious and breathless was the activity
with which chiteaux were raised, first in the Royal
province watered by the Loire, and then in and
about Paris. It would be fruitless to enumerate
at length even the chief of the stately buildings
which, from that time to the death of Henri IV.,
occupied the energies of French architects ; nor
can I do more here than name a few of the fore
most of these architects, such as, in the first
line, Jean Bullant and Philibert de I'Orme, and in
the second, Colin Biart, Pierre Chambiges, Pierre
Nepveu, alias Trinqueau, Gadier, Le Prestre, and
Hector Sohier. It will be more profitable to note
a few points in connection with the evolution of
the style itself
Although the great outburst of activity in the

i89i ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 249
new direction coincides with the reign of Francis,
Italian influence had already, as I have said, begun
to assert itself in architecture, as in other things, in
the preceding century; through Charles VIII. at
Amboise, for instance, and more effectually under
his successor, who built the east wing at the
Ch&teau de Blois, and whose great minister,
Cardinal d'Amboise, raised near Rouen the mag
nificent Chateau of Gaillon, known to us now
through a few fragments only, and the precious
work of du Cerceau. In these buildings, however,
the French and the Latin elements are jumbled
into a pasticcio rather than blended to a whole.
As an interesting example of this confusion I will
instance the portal of the Ducal Palace at Nancy,
in which the decorative magnificence of the whole
design palliates the maddest marriage of hetero
geneous forms ever conceived in an artist's brain.
It is interesting to observe the attitude of a people
possessing great building traditions and very
definite sesthetic propensities, in the face of an
innovation imposed on it, in a manner, from
without, but stimulating to its sense of beauty,
and its appetite for the new. Two influences
were averse to the new fashion ; first, the spirit of
the men of the burgher class, who clung sturdily
to a style identified in their minds with their
nationality and the growth of their liberties ; and
secondly, the conservative attitude of the Church,
jealous of an art so secular in its inspiration,
tenacious, too, of a tradition of building closely

250 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
bound up with its history, and exactly moulded
on its needs. We see, accordingly, on the one
hand, the municipalities continuing for some time
to build their public halls on the old lines, and, on
the other, the clergy erfecting Gothic churches well
into the sixteenth century, and retaining the
structural dispositions of Ogival architecture even
after the outer forms of the Renaissance had been
accepted for sacred buildings. It is indeed not a
little curious to see so logical a people, while
holding firmly to their old methods of construc
tion, consenting to abandon forms which had
grown out of those methods, and were in fact the
emphasised expression of that construction. We
see with amazement edifices constructed on the
basis of a predominance of the vertical line, piled
up painfully with tier upon tier of parts taken
from a style based on the opposite principle. No
talent can redeem so deliberate a violation of
every fitness.
As might be expected, in the first efforts of
Renaissance building in France, the classic orders
were used in no very scholarly fashion ; they were,
however, it must be owned, handled and applied
with a delightful sense of the picturesque, and if
severity and simplicity are often wanting, an
altogether surprising alertness of idea and fertility
of resource are manifest on every hand. In the
case of secular buildings the transition from the
later Gothic was facilitated by the fact that square-
headed openings prevailed already in that style, of

i89i ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 251
which, too, the incontinence in ornament was
acceptable to the exuberant spirit of the new Art.
The character of that ornament, however, was
entirely changed ; fantastic, foreign arabesque took
the place of the floral decoration which had been
one of the glories of the French school.
Meanwhile the love for aspiring forms lived on,
and the tendency to complexity died hard. The
wealth of sky-line produced by spires and pinnacles
was perpetuated in high-pitched roofs, turrets, and
tall, buttressed dormer-windows. The sky-line of
Chambord could have been conceived only by an
architect having Gothic tradition in his blood. In
other matters, too, we find the Gothic habit
surviving. The external winding-staircase, for
instance, was long preserved, and you may see on
a dainty fagade of the time of Francis I. the
survival of the grouped shaft in a fanciful colon-
nette engaged on the face of a pilaster. But most
interesting to observe is the tenacious struggle
of the vertical line throughout French Renaissance
architecture. "The orders" with their bold en
tablatures did, it is true, compel some stress on
horizontal lines ; though we shall see, later, how
this restraint was in part evaded ; but their effect
was at once balanced by an emphasised vertical
grouping and uniting of the openings in the
different stories, and by projecting wings, towers,
and pavilions, which marked with perpendicular
lines of shadow the elevation of the French
buildings.

252 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
Of the first period of the style, the finest example
is undoubtedly the south-west angle of the Court
of the Louvre [by Pierre Lescot, a great artist,
though he may not wholly justify Ronsard's
hyperbolic eulogy], a building made doubly stately
by the fact that the reliefs, which so richly clothe
it, are due to the hand of Jean Goujon, who, with
Germain Pilon, marks the highest level of French
plastic art in the sixteenth century. These reliefs
display, like those from the same hand on the
Fontaine des Innocents, in a marked degree, that
conspicuously French quality, the sense of the
decorative properties of line and form.
By this time the knowledge of classic art was
becoming more thorough, and the application of
its features more correct, and with a more
Romanising spirit, if I may so call it, a tendency
to larger forms grew up ; so, at Ecouen first, and
later at Chantilly, we find Jean Bullant introducing
what was called the " ordre colossal," an order,
that is, embracing the whole height of a fagade.
A greater aspect of strength and stateliness no
doubt attached to this new disposition, and the
dying out of Gothic traditions of common-sense
blinded him to its inherent incongruity. But even
in adopting this purely Roman device his Gallic
blood prompts him irresistibly to a flouting of the
horizontal line. He does so with curious thorough
ness in the pavilion which bears his name at
Chantilly. Not only does he here omit any line
hinting even at a division into floors, but of the

1891 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 253
windows in the upper and lower stories, which are
compacted into groups of vertical designs, the
lower plunge downwards through the base which
carries the order, and the upper breaking audaci
ously through the broad entablature of that order,
lifts itself bodily and to nearly half its height into
the roof A most corrupting spectacle, my young
friends, I fear, for justice bids me add that the
effect is very pleasing. Thus genius, but genius
only, redeems what in mediocrity would seem a
sin. But Bullant was yet to be outdone, for in
the design of the inner court of Charleval, a work
begun under Charles IX., but never carried out,
and known to us only through du Cerceau, who
speaks of it with extravagant praise (Lubke
suggests that he may have designed it himself),
we see not only the same omission of floor-line,
but, actually, niches with statues so introduced
that they cut across the exact spot where the
floor lies, so that an effort of reflection is required
to assure us that a floor can exist there. Philibert
de I'Orme, the learned and courtly engineer,
architect, and writer, was, as far as we can judge
from the fragments of his work which survive, and
the knowledge we have from du Cerceau of his
designs for Anet and the Tuileries, an artist of
well-balanced mind and scholarly training, whose
conceptions are marked by dignity and refinement,
but in whom the stamp of genius is not so evident
as in the less cultured Bullant. Anet with its wide
courts, its palatial distribution, and its rather frigid

254 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
triumphal archway, must have been impressive
and stately ; of the design for the Tuileries, on the
other hand, I am unable to form a favourable
opinion. On either side of a pavilion, not itself I
think very happy in design, abuts without evident
connection a low building in which a crowded
attic of unfortunate proportions rests immediately,
nothing intervening, upon an arcade, very hand
some and dignified in itself, but calculated to
carry a palace, and not a highly-decorated garret.
It is as if you should place a hat on a pair of legs
and offer the result as a man.
To de I'Orme is due the introduction of what is
called the "ordre Fran9ais" — a column of which
the fluted drums are divided by ornamental bands.
But the days were near when the light of creative
genius in Art was to burn low. The days of civil
strife and butchery, in which so many noble lives
were quenched in blood, the dark days of the
Huguenot persecution, were not auspicious for the
growth of Art, and with the close of the century
we find life and spontaneity at a low ebb — little
production, a tendency now to heavy monotony
and now to barocque redundancy, and a lack of
sense of fitness which admitted of masking with a
ponderous classic fagade churches built on the
scheme, if not with the forms, of Ogival architec
ture. Officialism, too, in artistic matters was at
hand, and soon that implacable organiser Colbert,
was to regulate the arts, also, by royal decree, and
to found an Academy which admitted only one

1891 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 255
saving creed ; the frigid pomp, the artificial graces
of the structures inspired by the " Roi Soleil " —
majestic in the many-storied wig which encircled
his retreating brow — how far are they from the
radiant daintiness, the joyous freedom of the
palaces and plaisaunces which sprang up in the
days and at the beck of that truly sunny sovereign
Francis the First !
To that period let us for one brief moment
revert, to notice, however summarily, the parallel
development of painting and sculpture. In the
latter Art we have already recorded the names of
Jean Goujon and Germain Pilon. These great
artists were not without forerunners, of whom, no
doubt, Michel Columbe was the most gifted,
though his works lack both suppleness and
definiteness of artistic purpose. I should name
also Nicholas Bachelier, and the Giusti, a family
of Italians settled in Tours, but true to their
nationality in the character of their work. These
latter artists, even more than Michel Columbe,
seem to me overrated, and whilst not denying
their ability, I cannot subscribe to the prevalent
estimate of their chief work, the clumsy statuary
which huddles round the tomb of Louis XII., at
St. Denis. In Germain Pilon we already see, in
a more marked degree than in Goujon, the per
nicious influence of Primaticcio and the school of
Fontainebleau. Graceful his work is, and accom
plished, but it does not often attain to a very high
standard. From this judgment, however, I must

256 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
except his portraiture ; here the mannerism of his
ideal work is controlled by the sincerity of his love
of nature and his perception of character : he is
working here rather from his heart than from his
brain. His bronze effigy of the Chancelier de
Birague in the Louvre is a work of surprising
merit. And, indeed, it is instructive to observe how,
in the exercise of their great gift of portraiture,
stimulating contact with Nature, and, through
that contact, the temporary suppression of self-
consciousness and conventional pre-occupations,
have enabled French sculptors throughout the
most corrupt period of Art to produce works of
startling merit and subtlety — I will only instance
the masterpieces of Coysevox, and amongst them
the breathing bronze of the Grand Condd
Turning now briefly to painting, we find in the
sixteenth century but little to rejoice us — yet a
few considerable names redeem it from barrenness.
When Francis I. began to build he did not find
amongst his countrymen painters to whom he
could entrust the decoration of his numerous
palaces. The elder Clouet was, it is true, already
prominently known, but both he and his more
famous successor in the nickname of "Janet"
were specially and exclusively painters of portraits.
There were, of course, at the time a number of
painters in the country ; but whilst it may be
admitted that Francis in his keen admiration for
everything Italian may in some measure have
overlooked native talent, it is difficult to believe

1891 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 257
that any very marked personality could have failed
to assert itself in spite of the crushing incubus of
the Italian influence — a baneful influence be it
said in passing, for it was not the influence of
Raphael or of Lionardo, of Andrea del Sarto or
of Titian, with all of whom the King was in more
or less direct contact, but the influence of Cellini,
mischievous for all his genius, and especially,
through their long sojourn in the country, that of
Primaticcio, il Rosso, and Nicolo dell' Abate,
which weighed on the Art of France. Nor does
the sixteenth century in France boast in painting,
apart from the Clouets, any name of much calibre,
except perhaps that of Perreal, and certainly
that of Jean Cousin, a man whose dignity of
artistic temper preserved him in great measure
from the excesses of the school of Parmigiano.
His most notable triumphs are, however, achieved
in painted glass ; as a painter of easel pictures his
most ambitious work is " The Last Judgment,"
now in the Louvre, which, though scholarly and
dignified, is a rather dreary effort. His "Eva
Prima Pandora " at Sens places him in a far more
favourable light.
By the side of oil-painting and illumination the
art of enamelling flourished greatly in France.
In this category the great School of Limoges is
known to you, the names of P^nicaud, Leonard
Limousin, Reymond, and Pierre Courtois are
familiar to all. In the art of glass painting you
have first the great anonymous " verriers " of the
R

258 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. io
Gothic period, and then during the Renaissance
such men as Cousin, whom I have named, Pinai-
grier, Le Pot, and Engrand le Prince, of whom
the first-named is the greatest.
And here a reflection suggests itself on the
nature of the French gift of colour as manifested
during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Speaking broadly, it seems to me to be based less
on a sense of harmony and subtle combination
than on a keen sensitiveness to luminous splendour
and intensity of hue ; and it is, further, curious to
note that in much of the earlier glass the sump
tuous results obtained are largely due to scientific
combinations — of which, indeed, the outcome is
not always equally happy. The effect almost
exclusively aimed at at first was a purple effulgence
of hue ; and this was produced by a scientific
juxtaposition of very small fragments of red and
blue glass, corrected by a sparing interspersion of
other colours, and controlled, of course, by the
close network of the lead-lines. Now these reds
and blues, which produce together the dominant
tone, are not seldom in themselves crude and
harsh in the extreme, though generally yielding in
combination a most gorgeous hue ; and it is
suggestive that when, departing from this scien
tific scheme of balanced gem-like spots of colour
— a scheme which involved, of course, designs
very small in scale — the glass-painters from time
to time introduced larger figures : they seem to
have cut themselves adrift from a sure anchorage.

1891 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 259
Their instinct of harmony was not an infallible
guide ; certain it is that the colour is in these
cases not seldom disastrously discordant. This
uncertainty of instinct is seen even more clearly
in the later works, in which a larger scale was
uniformly adopted ; and by the side of a window
by Jean Cousin, limpid with hues of amethyst,
sapphire and topaz, and fair as a May morning, or
a window of the thirteenth century, deep and
fervid as a midsummer night, your eye may fall
too often on another, or a whole row of others, of
almost ferocious garishness and crudity. The
colour-sense was, I repeat, not unerring. The
enamels of Limoges, of which some are so admir
able and some so harsh, suggest similar reflec
tions. And here I must take leave of this great and
teeming century, naming only, lest I seem to
forget them, the Huguenot martyr, Bernard de
Palissy, the famous potter, and H^lene de
Hangest, to whom is now ascribed the exquisite
ware of Oiron, known as "faience Henri II."
How architecture fared in the following century,
the " Grand Siecle," I have already suggested.
The same taint of inflated monotony which pre
vailed in the works of the builders, spread also to
painting. Dull, already, in the hands Simon
Vouet and Sebastien Bourdon, it reaches the
height of turgid pomposity with Charles le Brun,
a mighty personage in his day, who controlled
autocratically nearly all the artistic production of

26o ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec io
the France of Louis XIV., and whose magnificent
energies, it must be owned, seem in these punier
days to border on the fabulous. Let us not forget,
however, that the gentle Lesueur worked also in
those days, and that during the epoch of which
the towering wig seems the symbol and the
epitome, an artist like Nicholas Poussin found in
the large, sad silences of the Roman Campagna,
the inspiration of his grave and noble works, and
that, far from Paris, Claude Lorrain enshrined on
canvases that will not die, the poem of the setting
sun. In the sculpture of the great reign the
mannerism caught from Bernini prevailed, but it
cannot hide from us, though it sorely mars the
fiery genius of the Provencal, Pierre Puget.
Time suffers me to do no more than glance at
the revulsion which followed the death of Louis
XIV. The reign of his successor is not one of
great architectural activity ; it is best mirrored in
the minor arts that minister to the comforts of life.
The doctrine of discipline and restraint yields now
to a new gospel — the gospel of indulgence and
ease. A sprightly daintiness presides over all
artistic production. The difference between the
two reigns is the difference between Madame de
Maintenon and Madame du Barry ; and the utter
relaxation of all restraint in life is curiously
featured in the forms imparted throughout to^
every inanimate thing which is capable of receiving
shape. The sinuous curves which already in the
days of the flamboyant style had pushed aside the:

1891 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 261
severer and more noble lines df the perfect Gothic,
and had, in their turn, been held in check by the
Latin spirit in the earlier days of the Renaissance,
broke bonds when the grave closed over the
solemn monarch, and, first in France, and then
throughout the width of a mimicking Europe, ran
riot in the domain of the applied arts. A sense
less writhing of unmeaning curves held carnival
from that date over every object of use or orna
ment, and so identified have these forms become
with a certain elegance of social ton that the
most favoured classes, all the world over, see in
them, to this day, the last word of elegance and
taste. You could have no better example of the
lack of all sense of the congruous in decoration
than this adoption by society in our time of a style
which is the exact mirror of a time so widely
different. Yet even in those days of vapid
mannerism there were men who escaped the
general taint. In architecture a noble severity
commends the works of Soufflot and Servandoni,
and, in painting, Chardin employed his delicate
gift in the rendering of simple scenes of homely
life. But the truest interpreter of whatever was
gracious and dainty in this artificial epoch was
that greater painter, though not truer artist, J. B.
Watteau, whose name is the last I shall bring
before you to-night. We find in his work, indeed,
no high ideal, no strong imaginative fire — how
should we find them, seeing what he portrayed ?
— but in the vivacity and grace of his drawing, in

262 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES
the fascination of his harmonies, rich and suave
at once, in the fidelity with which he reflected his
times without hinting at their coarseness, this
wizard of the brush remains one of the most
interesting as he is one of the most fascinating
masters of his country's art.
Is there any lesson that we may draw from this
hurried survey of artistic evolution among the
French? I have dwelt with emphasis on the
genius of their mediseval builders ; do I advocate
— the young architects for whom I have spoken
mainly to-night, may ask — do I advocate the
adoption of Gothic forms for the purposes of our
own lives ? I have spoken to little effect if my
answer can be doubtful. Artistic forms are the
vesture of ideas and the expression of mental
conditions ; the ideas and mental conditions
of our day are widely removed from those of
the Middle Ages : the modern mind cannot with
fitness put on the garb which was moulded on
the mind of a day long past. But if we may
not fitly adopt those forms, we cannot too rever
ently note the spirit which presided over their
development, for a like spirit brought to bear on
other material and under other conditions may yet
bear new and noble fruit. And the characteristics
of that spirit are — a masculine independence, a
tenacious grasp of central principles, a fearless
sincerity in expression, a scorn of shams, and trust
in Truth.

Address, December 9th, 1893

ART IN GERMANY

Students of the Royal Academy,
On the last three occasions on which I
have asked you to follow me in a brief inquiry
into the relation of artistic production to the con
ditions under which it is evolved, I dealt, succes
sively, with the three principal races commonly
described as Latin, namely, the Italian, the
Spanish, and the French races. To-night, I pro
pose to ask you to pass with me from the Latin
world into a world offering to it the abruptest con
trast, ethical and intellectual, I mean the Teutonic
world ; and on this occasion I shall consider espe
cially the portion of it now known as Germany —
not the narrower Germania of Tacitus, hemmed
in on the west by the Rhine, by the Danube on
the south, and divided, as he quaintly tells us, on
the east from the land of the Sarmatians by the
valid bulwark of mutual fear — nor on the other
hand the vast Germanic Empire ruled over by
Charlemagne, but the Germany of modern maps,
together with the German portions of the Austrian
Empire. Nevertheless, in forming an estimate of
the German genius, we may not shut out from
view its early influence beyond these limits ;
neither that of the Ostrogoths, and, after them.

266 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. 9
of the Longobards in Italy, nor that of the Franks
in Gaul, to which country they bequeathed a
name, and where, leavening a more numerous in
digenous Keltic stock, they produced that happy
racial compound to which we owe, amongst other
things, the highest flight of Christian architecture.
In considering the subject we have before us
to-day, we shall find ourselves confronted with a
strangely perplexing phenomenon ; for we are
brought face to face with a people possessed during
many centuries with a strong craving for artistic
expression, and reaching on occasions to achieve
ment of a very high order, and yet, as a whole,
much wanting, it seems to me, in qualities which
we connect with the artistic temper, and which
are no doubt indispensable for the attainment of
supreme excellence — a people which, through the
exceptional fruitfulness of its sesthetic impulses, or,
more accurately, perhaps, of its desire for expres
sion through form and colour, and in virtue of the
power, the thoroughness, and the masculine sin
cerity which stamp its handiwork, establishes a
just claim to a prominent place in the wide
Republic of the Arts, and has nevertheless put
upon the world, by the side of many and noble
masterpieces, a quite curious amount of ungainly
and at times all but repellent work. Certain
qualities, I said, seem to be wanting in the sesthetic
constitution of the race, and these are, as I think,
the instinct — I mean, of course, in the Graphic
Arts — of congruity and fitness, the sense of rhythm,

i893 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 267
and a perception of the value of restraint and of
repose, attributes in the absence of which the
highest sense of beauty would be sought in vain.
It is impossible indeed to survey, however cur
sorily, the immense field of German activity in
Art without being powerfully impressed by the
high qualities revealed in every part of it ; never
theless the final impression left by such a survey
is of a people amongst which the ethic sense is
constantly predominant over the sesthetic impulse ;
and we are made conscious that if we have been
frequently moved to respectful appreciation and
admiring wonder, it is but seldom that we have
been conscious of that sweet, that enveloping,
that sufficing sense which has its springs only in
the sesthetically beautiful. Surely the noblest and
the fullest expression of the deep elements of
poetry which lie at the roots of the German nature
has not been conveyed to the world through the
means of form and colour : it is not on waves of
light but on waves of sound that it has been given
to Germans to carry us into the purest region of
aesthetic joy.
It will be my endeavour, in the rapid sketch to
which the limits of our time restrict me, to make
good this criticism, and whilst doing full justice to
the admirable achievements of German Art, to
show you by examples how it has been, in my
view, affected by the flaws to which I have
pointed. In the vivid picture of the Germans spread

268 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec 9
before us by Tacitus, one peculiarity of tempera
ment is noted which had a powerful influence on
their eventual development in Art, to wit, their
intense feeling of personal independence ; a feeling
of which he gives an amusing illustration : " Their
warriors," he says, "when summoned to meet for
deliberation in public assembly, will loiter by the
way even to the second and third day, lest it
should seem that they had met under compulsion."
Now, strong as were from the earliest times the
external influences to which German Art was
beholden, its national characteristics were never
forfeited, and a sturdy independence and local
flavour marked it throughout. In the aspect of
the country itself, also, the description given by
the same historian points to a feature which had
no small influence over the future of the Art of
Germany, namely the presence of vast tracts of
forest : wood early became and ever remained a
favoured material with the Germans ; carpentry
and carving were at all times a passion with them,
and in the latter they achieved prodigies of in
genuity and skill. Meanwhile, whatever other
modifications may have been effected by the great
shifting of the Germanic tribes when, under the
pressure of the encroaching Huns in the begin
ning of the fifth century of our era, they flooded
the western and southern lands of Europe, the
Germans are, when we first meet them in the
C^rlovingian era and even earlier, in one respect
radically unlike the men whom Tacitus presents

1893 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 269
to us, as without care for the precious metals
and devoid of taste for adornment. At this
time a very different spectacle is offered to us.
A love of splendour and of personal decoration —
a love fed by the spoils of Italy, and fired by the
sight of Italian pomp — had, on the contrary,
become general amongst German warriors and
chiefs, as is attested by the extraordinary abun
dance of ornaments, and especially of brooches of
rich design and precious material, which has been
yielded up by their tombs throughout the country.
This love of magnificence and of adornment of
the person has, it may be observed, never wholly
left the Germans ; it gave in the Middle Ages a
most precious impulse to what they call the lesser
Arts, die Kleinkiinste ; and may still be noted in
the taste for pageantry and processions which
survives amongst them and their Teutonic kins
men in Flanders to our day.
The first great impulse to Art in Germany
proper was given by Charlemagne, a prince, as
you know, of vast and noble ambition, whose
dream, in a large measure fulfilled in his own time,
was of a great, broadly-based Christian empire of
the west, which should rival pagan Rome herself
in splendour, and who sought to establish the
greatness of that empire, not on military supremacy
alone but on intellectual culture and artistic de
velopment. I say in Germany proper, because on
Italian soil Theodoric the Ostrogoth had already,
early in the sixth century, adorned the capital of

270 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec 9
his dominions, Ravenna, in emulation of Imperial
Rome, and under strong Roman influence, with
buildings — churches, palaces, and a mausoleum, in
which was sown the seed of the future and finest
development of German architecture ; and this
building activity which marked the Ostrogoths
was maintained under their successors, the Longo
bards, who were famous as architects through the
Middle Ages, and who, from the ruder efforts of
the Duomo Vecchio of Brescia, were to rise to
such achievements as Sant' Ambrogio at Milan
and San Zeno at Verona. If of the palaces of
Charlemagne but vague traces have been pre
served we are fortunate in possessing, in almost
its original form, though modified in aspect and
not improved by a choir added to it in the four
teenth and fifteenth centuries, a stately tomb-
church which he raised for himself at Aachen in
the last years of the eighth century, and for which
he drew his inspiration, through Ravenna, from
ancient Rome ; and this building became in its
turn the great prototype of the circular churches
subsequently erected in Germany.
Just as this circular plan, which came to be used
not for churches only, but also for baptisteries,
was drawn from the South, so also the other, and
predominant, model for Christian churches, the
basilica form, came, as did every gift of civilisation,
from beyond the Alps.
It has been necessary to allude here to the
artistic initiative of Charlemagne, not only because

i893 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 271
he was a purely German prince, but because the
centre of his empire and his chief residence were
in German Aachen ; but you are to remember
that Germany proper, i.e. the kingdom of East
Franconia and Saxony, only comes into existence
at the treaty of Verdun, by which the Empire of
Charlemagne was divided amongst his sons. We
have not to trace the history of the new German
State, but it is necessary here to note that whilst
the division between the Eastern and Western
Frankish Kingdoms was henceforth maintained,
the Southern portion of the Carlovingian dominion
which carried the imperial title became eventually
merged into the German States, and under Otho
the First we find the " Holy Roman Empire "
coming into existence to the infinite bane of Ger
many. With it grew dreams of a vast Imperial
dominion of which the centre of gravity should be
in Rome, like that of the empire whose purple it
had assumed, dreams that led to that deadly
struggle between Emperors and Popes in which
the great House of Hohenstaufen finally fell,
dragging down with it in its fall the supremacy of
Germany in the western world. Meanwhile the
days of the Hohenstaufen had been for Germany
days of great splendour and fame, days filled with
the fervour of the Crusades and gracious with
high and chivalrous ideals. In those days Ger
man poetry, fired by contact with France, reached
the highest level it was to attain previous to its re
awakening at the end of the last century. Then

272 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec 9
it was— a hundred years before Dante — that the
knightly mystic. Wolfram von Eschenbach, sang
of Parsival and the Quest and Winning of the
Holy Grail ; then it was also that another tuneful
knight, Walter von der Vogelweide, struck his
harp, singing blithely of the love of women —
boldly, too, of wrong at Rome ; at this time, also,
were brought together, in one great National Epic,
the ancient legends of the deeds and death of
Siegfried, of Brunhilda's wrath and of Criemhild's
revenge ; and during this favouring age it was
that in Architecture a vigorous national style
reached maturity, and prevailed until, with the
advent of French supremacy, French influence
profoundly affected throughout Europe the spirit
of the builder's Art.
It was in the region watered by the Rhine that
Art in Germany reached its earliest maturity, a
region in which, apart from the close neighbour
hood of a richly gifted Keltic race, everything
conspired to favour its growth ; but especially the
wealth and power of the cities that rose along the
river's bank — seats of mighty bishoprics, vieing
one with the other in pomp and splendour, such as
Mayence, Cologne, and Spires. Accordingly. the
churches of the Rhineland form, as a whole, the
most imposing group in the Romanesque Archi
tecture of Germany. But if we see in such
churches, for instance, as the Doms of Spires,
Worms, and Mayence, the Apostel- Kirche and
St. Martin the Great in Cologne, the completest

i893 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 273
specimens of the style in its earlier and transitional
phases, as well as the most interesting illustration
of the freedom of treatment which it admitted, the
harvest of Architecture was rich also in other pro
vinces of the kingdom, in Swabia, in Franconia,
in Westphalia, in Nether Saxony ; it will suffice
to name such noble buildings as the Scotch
Church of St. James at Ratisbon, the Doms of
Bamberg, Brunswick, and Osnabruck, and the
Godehardi and Michael's churches at Hildesheim ;
noting, by the way, that the sculpture of caps,
friezes, and mouldings in Franconia and North
Germany is, as far as I have seen it, superior to
that produced in the Rhenish Provinces. This
German- Romanesque style — for I must adhere,
with the Germans themselves, to this appellation,
for which Fergusson prefers to substitute " Early
Gothic," because the word Gothic seems to me to
attach emphatically to certain principles rather
than to certain forms, and to be therefore unsuited
to a style in which those principles are not em
bodied — this German- Romanesque then, I say,
has distinctive characteristics of which some con
tain elements of great beauty ; such, for example,
as the great octagonal dome-like towers that
crown the crossings of their cathedrals — a noble
feature which might have reached yet more strik
ing developments had not the style succumbed to
the invading French influence in the thirteenth
century. These octagonal domes, rising broadly
above the intersection of nave and transept, and
s

274 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec 9
grouped with flanking towers to which an elegant
external gallery frequently unites them, majesti
cally gather up the whole design in a culminating
feature adding emphasis where taste and construc
tion alike suggest it. Another characteristic fea
ture, on the other hand, appears to me to involve
a violation of every fitness, and to illustrate,
therefore, the indictment on which I ventured just
now : I mean the almost invariable presence in
the churches of this period of a western as well as
an eastern apse. This arrangement, whatever its
first determining cause, whether, as has been
variously said, the desire to do equal honour to
the relics of two saints of like dignity, or the
necessity of absorbing into an enlarged structure
a mausoleum or a baptistery previously indepen
dent of it, is of considerable antiquity, and is
already fully adopted in the interesting ground-
plan of a Benedictine convent in the ninth century
now existing in the library of the old Irish founda
tion of St. Gallen in Switzerland. Its permanent
retention, however, must be laid to the account of
the German builders. Externally, the effect of
this disposition is monotonous and perplexing, but
it is in the interior that it chiefly jars on our sense
of artistic propriety, and the jar is made more
sensible by the fact that the choirs being built over
crypts are, by an arrangement in itself very
dignified and impressive, raised to a considerable
height above the floor of the nave, from which
they are approached either on the sides, or in the

1893 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 275
centre, by broad flights of steps. The entrance to
these churches is in the majority of cases at the
side, and the eye of the spectator, controlled as he
enters by no dominant object, is solicited simul
taneously and distressingly in two diametrically
opposite directions — each individual group of apse
and dome suffers by rivalry with the other, and,
to crown the special unfitness of the arrangement
in a sacred building, neither apse can be faced at
such a distance as permits of grasping its design
as a whole, in its connection with the nave, without
turning the back full and immediately on that
before which no Catholic passes without reverent
genuflexion. I am bold to say that such a dispo
sition could not have found general acceptance
among a people in which a sense of aesthetic fit
ness was congenital and strong. Another sin
against propriety in design is exemplified in the
otherwise beautiful Apostel- Kirche in Cologne,
namely the placing of a transept at the western
extremity of a church, which, for an exception, is
entered from that quarter. You feel at once that
the scattering of the attention to the right and to
the left at a point from which it should, on the
contrary, be gathered up and directed to the
eastern apse involves a palpable flaw in the com
position. I would fain after these strictures dwell on some
of the many beauties of these churches ; but the
limits of your time forbid my doing so, and I must
now pass on to the second stage of German

276 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec 9
Architecture, to which Art I will for convenience
and continuity momentarily confine my attention.
With the downfall of the Hohenstaufen dynasty
and the advent of French ascendency, a great and
far-reaching change came over the builder's Art in
Germany ; not, indeed, by evolution and organic
growth, as in the Isle de France, but solely by
contagion ; an importation from without, not a
development from within, and, therefore, without
normal inner life ; Gothicism supplanted that
national form of Art in which Germany had till
then expressed her powerful idiosyncrasy. I know
no more striking instance of the growth of sound
criticism in Art within the last generation or two
— or, perhaps, it would be more accurate to say,
of its shallowness in certain matters till very recent
times — times within my own vivid recollection —
than that it was up to that date an article of faith
through the length and breadth of Germany — and
this in spite of history and internal evidence — that
the Gothic style was par excellence the national,
home-born style of Germany, and a deluded
patriotism has had, no doubt, much to do with the
retention in Germany of " black letter," the Gothic
character, though its crabbed angularities and the
licence of its flourishes found, it is true, especially
favouring soil in the peculiarities of the aesthetic
temper of the people. Nay, if we go back to the
end of the last century, we find Goethe himself
almost angrily asserting not only that this style in
architecture was indigenous in Germany, but that

1893 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 277
no other nation had an indigenous style at all,
"for," he says, "the Italians have none, and still
less the Frenchmen " — the Frenchmen, its only
true begetters ! Now the slightest study of the
style in Germany shows us — and I say this in full
consciousness of the prodigious achievement em
bodied in the Cathedral of Cologne, and with
ungrudging recognition of the many and great
beauties of certain other isolated examples — that
the Germans, as a race, were, speaking broadly,
never at one in spirit with Ogival architecture.
The result was such as you would expect ; in the
use of a form of architecture which was not of
spontaneous growth in their midst, and unre
strained, moreover, as they were by a sound,
innate instinct of aesthetic fitness, German builders
were often led into solecisms, incongruities and
excesses, from which in the practice of their native
style they have been largely free. As an instance
of this lack of a perception of fitness and organic
harmony, I would point to their frequent favouring
of a square box-like shape in the shell of churches
of which the detail is Gothic, a shape produced by
making nave and aisles of equal height, thus
restoring the predominance of the horizontal line,
while professedly using a style of which the funda
mental lineal character is vertical and upward-
striving. Again, of the lack of delight in rhythmic
variety which I have imputed to them, no more
marked instance can be given than the not
infrequent equalisation of the width, also, of the

278 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. 9
aisles and the nave ; or, what is even worse, an
approximate equalisation, so that to the discomfort
arising out of the crushed aspect of the nave
between the encroaching aisles, a perplexity is
added as to the exact relative width of the central
and lateral areas. An intolerable example of this
vagary, and not this vagary only, is furnished in
the Sebaldus- Kirche in Nuremburg. Again, the
surprising clumsiness with which the style was
sometimes used is seen in the rude fashion in
which occasionally enlarged east ends are clapped
on — ^I can find no other word — to an earlier and
narrower nave. I will take for an illustration the
Cathedral of Augsburg, and observe that this
church was erected and tolerated in a great and
famous centre of artistic activity, whence, later
on, many fine works of every kind went forth to
the honour of the Swabian school. In this
church — I shudder as I remember its exterior — a
choir at least half as high again as the nave and
of the usual cubic shape is stuck on to, or against,
that nave, exabrttpto, without a trace of an attempt
at articulation and transition, and with an effect I
leave you to imagine : but what you hardly can
imagine is the aspect presented here by a circular
east end and ambulatory crushed round a square
choir. In this wonderful structure the work
manship vies with the design ; one shaft at the
north-east end of the choir — and, by the way,
all the shafts rise without bases from the floor —
stands truncated and vacant at the top, because,

1893 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 279
apparently, it did not work out so as to meet
the adjacent vaulting-rib which it was destined
to carry. Such solecisms, I repeat, do not occur
when the Germans build, if you will allow me the
expression, in their own language. And this
foreign invasion had further curious effects. We
saw on a previous occasion how, in the Ogival
style in France, line became, by a natural process,
predominant over plane. Now the love of lines
(and especially, as we shall see later on, of curved
and curling lines) was strong amongst the Germans,
and, with it, a delight in intricacy and involution,
and a curious fondness for seeing through and
behind things to other and yet other things beyond
— a trait, perhaps, not confined to the aesthetic
side of the organisation — and these tendencies,
uncurbed and fed by an ingenuity that exulted in
manual tours de force, found peculiar scope in
Gothic Architecture. Let us look at one or two
instances. We noted in France a tendency here
and there in certain over-ripe specimens of the
style to treat the external decoration of a wall, in
part, as an independent open screen, and this ten
dency found, as you will expect from what I have
said just now, congenial soil in the German
temper ; sometimes, in gifted hands, with results,
let it be owned, that seduce us while we criticise
them. As an example take that portion of the
west end of Strasburg Cathedral that is due to
Erwin von Steinbach, and which shows over a
facade, complete already in itself, an independent

28o ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec 9
and lace-like screen of arcades and colonnettes of
unbelievable attenuation, of a slimness, indeed
which suggests iron rather than stone, and illus
trates that want of consent between material and
design which is not infrequent in German- Gothic
—not least markedly, I think, in their famous
open-work spires. You will not be surprised to
hear that this dainty veil of stone, which covers
the whole height of Erwin's fagade, has to be held
together from top to bottom by a net of innumer
able iron ties. Of tliis passion for veiling orna
ment with ornament in accumulated intricacy
abundant instances are to be found in Germany,
and it reached, perhaps, its extreme expression in
those late Gothic pulpits, in the erratic tracery of
which the eye is carried on through layer beyond
layer of fantastic scroll-work, only not worthy of a
Chinese carver inasmuch as it lacks the elegance
and restraint of the Mongolian work. But in
nothing are we made more conscious of the fact
that in Gothic work, the German — I speak, of
course, of the average German architect — was
handling an Art with which he had, so to speak,
no inward spiritual connection, than in his treat
ment of tracery, of pinnacles, and of vaulting-ribs,
wherein a clumsy dulness alternates with unbridled
caprice ; and this unrestrained extravagance is,
perhaps, most curiously displayed in internal work,
and in the treatment of pinnacles, which German
carvers habitually twist and twirl according to
their wayward fancy, and in utter oblivion of the

1 893 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 281
original function, constructive and decorative, of
this particular feature. An acute example of this
disordered propensity is offered in a carved
reredos at Rothenburg, due to the hand of Tilman
Riemenschneider — a carver, by the way, of super-
' lative skill, and conscious of it : here the pinnacles,
not content with swaying and curling in a strange
delirium, intertwine and embrace, and shoot out
to exorbitant and sinuous lengths, snake-like and
armed with forked tongues, then finally pass
frankly over into the form of briars, adorned here
and there with a few shrivelled curling leaves.
But not less remarkable developments may occa
sionally be observed in the use of the vaulting-
ribs, a feature of which the primary constructive
significance might have been expected to shield
¦it from a too lawless treatment. An instance,
extreme I admit, is to be seen in the Church of
St. Leonard in Frankfurt ; here, in a small side-
chapel, you will be startled to find a knot of
vaulting-ribs tangled in a wild debauch, at a
distance of a yard, more or less, from the vault
.itself, with which, indeed, they disclaim all
connection, plunging right and left, at different
levels, now into a bare wall, and now into a
window panel, according to their own wild will.
I have often wondered at the strange contrast
between the reticent and grave sobriety of the
Architecture of Germany before the fall of the
Hohenstaufens, and its erratic self-indulgence in
the Gothic period. One cause amongst others

282 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. 9
was, no doubt, the passing of Architecture more
and more out of the hands of ecclesiastics into
those of masons who were laymen. Amongst
people possessed as the French were throughout
with a delicate and restraining artistic instinct, a
similar transition wrought for good rather than for
harm : in Germany, with the less subtle and less
safe aesthetic instincts of its people, the undeniable
gain in variety and individuality was outweighed
by the growth of mere handicraftsman's dexterity,
and by the prevalence of the uncouth spirit of
the bourgeois with his absorbing delight in a
puzzle. Let me not, however, convey to your minds the
impression that, apart from three or four famous
examples, the Gothic churches of Germany are
devoid of charm. This would be, indeed, to mis
lead you ; nevertheless where charm is found it
arises mainly, not in architectural purity and finish,
but in qualities of colour, of variety and of sug
gestion — qualities which we painters should surely
be the last to underrate. I will quote as an
example the church of St. Lorenz in Nuremberg.
Nothing could well be more delightful than the
impression which you receive on entering it ; the
beauty of the dark brown stone, the rich hues of
the stained glass, the right relation of tone value,
to use a painter's term, between the structure and
the lights — a relation sometimes wanting in French
work, where the untempered lightness of the stone
leaves us almost in doubt to which side the balance

1 893 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 283
of tone leans — the sombre blazoned shields which
cluster along the walls, the succession on pier
beyond pier of pictures powerful in colour and en
hanced by the gleaming gold of fantastic carven
frames, above all the succession of picturesque
objects in mid-air above you, a large chandelier, a
stately rood-cross, and, to crown all, Veit Stoss's
masterpiece, the Annunciation, rich with gold and
colour ; all these things conspire to produce a
whole, delightful and poetic, in spite of much that
invites criticism in the architectural forms them
selves. The same may be said of the interior of
the far larger, statelier and more famous Stephan's-
Kirche in Vienna, which, however, while it is even
more solemn in its mellow gloom, is a building of
much more individual character, and in many
respects of far higher merit. In the Strasburg
Cathedral we approach, as is natural in the valley
of the Rhine, much more closely* to the French
type, and have a far more perfect expression of
Ogival Art, though of a less distinctive phy
siognomy. Whilst, however, its internal eff'ect
is very impressive and delightful, it must be
conceded that it owes a large part of its majesty
and power to its choir and transepts, which are
Romanesque, and magnificent examples of that
style. Well, after all that I have ventured to
advance in criticism of German Gothic churches,
in which the true spirit of the style has not
seemed to me to be assimilated, something has
yet to be said concerning that stupendous achieve-

284 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec 9
ment, the Cathedral of Cologne, a monument of
indomitable will, of science and of stylistic ortho
doxy. Imposing as it is externally from its
colossal magnitude, its full impressiveness is to be
felt in the interior. Based closely, but not
slavishly, upon one of the noblest examples in
France — Robert de Luzarches' masterpiece at
Amiens — its beautiful rhythm, its noble consis
tency and unity, its soaring height, rivet the
beholder's gaze, and fill him with that sense of
uplifting of the spirit which breathes from the
unbroken upward striving lines of a lofty Gothic
nave ; nevertheless, the sum of sensation pro
duced by this marvellous structure as a whole is
not, I think, entirely satisfying. We feel that we
are in the presence and under the spell of a
powerful will, grasping serenely and solving with
unfailing intellectual resource a scientific problem ;
we bow, accordingly, before a triumph of science
and volition ; we are not, as it seems to me,
thrilled by the kindling touch of Genius. And it
is especially in the contemplation of the exterior
that the sense of something wanting possesses us ;
the repetition ad infinitum of almost identical
forms, and particularly of a fabulous multitude of
vertical lines of extraordinary tenuity in compari
son with the bulks over which they are strung,
impart an arithmetical aridity to the whole that
to me smacks, 1 must own, of prose and poverty
of inspiration. I should wish, before leaving this
church and the style of which it is the supreme

i893 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 285
example in Germany, to invite you to share with
me a lesson which I learnt from it on the value
of sobriety in the distribution of ornament, a lesson
which may, perhaps, at this time, not be valueless
to my young architectural friends. The choir of
Cologne Cathedral is a model of unadorned sim
plicity ; caps to the shafts and a simple string
course below the triforium are its sole enrichments.
The rather later nave is identical with the choir
in all respects save one ; the architect conceived
the idea — at the outset an unsound one — of making
it, though further from the main focus of interest,
a little richer in decoration, and accordingly he
added on the shoulders of the arches a cresting of
crockets (not in themselves objectionable), and at
their springing a row of grotesque birds ; a slight
addition, you will say, in so vast an edifice, yet
startlingly and most instructively detrimental to
the unity and chastity of the design. So important
are seeming trifles in this great and stately Art.
Time does not allow me to do more than allude
to the Brick Architecture of the North German
Provinces, interesting as it is. Of the churches
known to me the most remarkable is the Marien-
kirche at Lubeck, which, however, with all its
merits leaves again beyond every other impression
that of a style and a material not consenting one
with the other. Very striking and absolutely
original and of the soil are the civic buildings,' in
glazed and coloured bricks, of these northern
cities ; buildings of which the eff'ect is in some

286 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. 9
ways very pleasing, though rather toy-like, and
marred at times by the excessive thickness of the
mortar-bed between the bricks, and the obtrusive
conscientiousness of the pointing.
It is curious to observe how, in spite of the
exotic nature of the Gothic style, its outer forms
took in the end so strong a hold on German
artists that they clung to them, with all the
tenacity of their race, for some time after they had
been generally abandoned in Europe, so that,
in Art, the movement known as the Renaissance
did not finally prevail in Germany till nearly a
hundred years later than in Italy from whence
it emanated. Various causes besides Teutonic
tenacity contributed to this circumstance. For
some considerable time, Art, as we have already
observed, had passed into the hands of the
burghers and artisans, and not the practice of Art
only, but all love and care for it ; for in the upper
classes culture had disappeared, the days of chivalry
and its knightly singers were buried in oblivion,
coarseness and brutality reigned unchallenged. In
the world of intelligence the burgher class was
supreme ; its sturdy truthfulness, its earnest
morality, its broad humour were well represented
by the pedestrian Muse of the famous Meister-
singer Hans Sachs, cobbler and poet, and assuredly
also its untiring industry ; did he not boast, and
that some years before his death, of having written,
between plays and poems, 6028 works, say 500,000
lines ? Now, we have further to remember that

i893 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 287
the great upheaval in the religious world called
the Reformation, which convulsed Germany early
in the sixteenth century, coincided in time with
the recasting of the ideals of Art and Letters
known as the Renaissance, and, as was natural in
a people more strongly endowed on the ethic than
on the aesthetic side, the moral upheaval over
shadowed the artistic revolution, and imparted to
Art in Germany a more than ever didactic tone.
Again, the modification or, rather, reversal of
artistic ideas was brought about under conditions
wholly different from those which made the
awakening to the dignity of Nature among the
Italians truly a Renaissance, for the spirit that
stirred in the Southern race was indeed the spirit
of their own great past, born once more within
them. Amongst a purely Germanic race, on the
other hand, free from all mixture of Latin blood,
these impulses were not at work ; neither were
the Germans impelled towards more gracious
ideals by that sense of beauty which was so vivid
among the Italians ; whilst, therefore, they gradu
ally assimilated the new forms of Art that came
to them from beyond the Alps, they were slow to
abandon, and, indeed, long concurrently retained,
those more crabbed forms to which their hands
had grown accustomed, and which the conserva
tive spirit of the Guilds strove to uphold. It was,
as we shall presently see, in the less trammelled
Art of Painting that the new forms made their
earliest mark, and though these forms had from

288 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec 9
the beginning of the century crept tentatively into
Architecture, it was not until after the religious
peace of Augsburg, and, therefore, after Diirer
and Holbein had carried German Painting to its
highest point of development, that the Builder's
Craft, under the impulse given by powerful princes
and wealthy merchants, adopted frankly the spirit
of the Renaissance.
The Architecture of the period is mainly civic,
and expressive not only of great public opulence
and private prosperity, but of a widespread love
of outward splendour, and it may be added, by
the way, of considerable self-consciousness ; the
number and the prodigious ornateness of the
sepulchral monuments belonging to this period
which fill the churches of Germany, are nothing
short of amazing. Princely residences, civic halls,
private houses were rebuilt with new magnificence
— in the Southern Provinces under Italian, in the
North and West under Netherlandish inspiration.
Seldom, indeed never, very pure in style, not infre
quently coarse in execution, sometimes, especially
in the treatment of the human figure, even bar
barous, these buildings are unfailingly picturesque
and delightful in their general scenic aspect.
Amongst the relatively pure examples I would
cite the two, now ruined, fagades in the court of
the Castle of Heidelberg, and especially that built
by the Elector, Otto Heinrich, though I am
unable to accept fully the very high estimate of
it current in Germany ; and, on a smaller scale,

1893 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 289
such structures as, for instance, the portico of the
Cologne Town Hall and the bay-windows of the
Maximilian Museum at Augsburg. In the treat
ment of ornament in this style you will find, in
Germany, the same peculiarities as you noticed in
the case of Gothic carving ; you will find the same
want of measure and restraint, the same rugged
individuality and tendency to artistic licence, but
with them also the same inexhaustible and vigor
ous fancy. Here, indeed, a fine field lay open for
the German love of the curling and redundant
in line and form, and it was eagerly occupied.
Amongst the first-fruits of this love for swelling
curves we find that bulging out into bulbous forms
of the lower portion of the shafts of columns which
is characteristic of the school, and is, indeed, not
without a certain fantastic charm ; but would that
the love of excessive curves had never been
carried further ! Here and - there we come, as
lawlessness grows, on truly startling phenomena ;
so, for instance, on the fa9ade of the Castle Chapel
at Liebenstein, near Heilbronn, you may see,
springing out from the face of the columns which
flank its handsome door, two huge excrescences
in the shape of projecting scrolls, modelled on the
type of a tea-pot handle, or a sign of interroga
tion, adjuncts of which the purpose baffies con
jecture, and the beauty is at least open to
question. About this time also floral and vege
table forms in ornament disappear almost entirely,
and are supplanted mainly by those cartouche- t

290 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec 9
forms that seem as if punched out of metal of
uniform thickness and then curled abruptly at the
edges— forms with which you are familiar in our
own Tudor work, and which appear to have well-
nigh exhausted the decorative fancies of our
architects of that period. I have spoken also of
a lack, in German architects, of subtle delight in
varied rhythm, and this is felt no less in the phase
of Art now before us than in that which preceded
it, not only in monotony in the mapping out of
spaces, but in monotony also in relief This is
especially noticeable in the treatment of the
pilasters which play so great a part in the Archi
tecture of the Renaissance, and on which the
ornament, instead of that exquisite play and alter
nation of crisp projection and gradual evanescence
in its relief which mark the best Italian work,
shows here, too often, a dull uniformity of bulk
and a too clumsy rudeness in its execution.
Meanwhile, if it is easy to criticise these various
failings, it behoves us to recognise one fact which
stands out above them all, a fact which must com
mand the warm, nay the envying, sympathy and
admiration of every artist in our time, and espe
cially in this land, namely the universal and
imperious desire which possessed the Germans in
those days to surround themselves, each according
to his means, with the delights of Art in every
form. Of the extent of this passion for the
adornment of their houses, travel along the more
conventional highways of Germany conveys no

1893 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 291
adequate idea. Very many, indeed, have seen
the beautiful faQade of the Salzhaus in Frankfurt,
of the Kammerzell House at Strasburg, or of
the house in Hanover where Leibnitz lived and
worked ; but it is only in such towns, for example,
as Brunswick, or even better, Hildesheim, where
house after house in long succession has some
enrichment of carving or painting, or both, that
one can appreciate to the full the universality of
this taste, as well, no doubt, as its aesthetic limita
tion ; and whilst we see in these towns profoundly
interesting examples of the external aspects of a
German town of the Renaissance, we shall find,
for instance, at Lubeck examples of internal
decoration of remarkable effectiveness and splen
dour, and of high artistic quality, in the wains
coting of the War-Council Room of the Town
Hall, and in the yet more beautiful adornment of
a room in the house of a merchant of that city,
one Fredehagen. In this room, which is not very
spacious, the walls are clothed up to the ceiling
with most elaborate, and, for the school, excep
tionally pure and daintily wrought decoration,
well fitted to the scale of the apartment ; columns,
panels, niches, statues, caryatides, rich and deli
cate white marble reliefs happily contrasting with
the carved and inlaid woods ; altogether a little
masterpiece. Again, at the other extremity of
the country, in Swabian Augsburg, the famous
family of the Fugger had, at a somewhat earlier
date, decorated their palace hardly less sump-

292 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec 9
tuously, but giving preponderance, after the
Southern fashion, to painting, and in this case
using the hand of foreigners. Well might that
enlightened dilettante, traveller, and future Pope,
Enea Silvio, record his admiration of the internal
appointment of the houses of the Germans.
But it is now time to consider briefly how the
Arts of Painting and of Sculpture were, in their
turn, affected by the conditions and circumstances
of which we have so far taken note. And first of
Sculpture, a subject on which I need not dwell at
length, amongst other reasons because, whereas
in speaking of Architecture much can be referred
to broad sesthetic principles, in the case of Sculp
ture of which the human figure is the subject,
criticism, except of the most general kind, is
impossible, or at least ineffectual, in the absence
of the work alluded to. Of German Sculpture it
may be said, speaking broadly, that in spite of
considerable individual achievement it cannot be
regarded as often, if, indeed, ever reaching the
highest level of excellence. What we have
already observed of the peculiarities of the aesthetic
organisation of the German race prepares us to
find this so, whilst on the other hand its fine
sincerity and its intensity of purpose lead us to
expect, in the frequent absence of subtle delight-
fulness or reposeful dignity, a never-failing vigour,
and an uncompromising, if unselecting, pursuit of
Truth, and in this expectation we shall not be
deceived. The first thing which would, I think„

1893 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 293
strike you on a general survey of German Sculp
ture is the superiority of its early promise to its
eventual accomplishment, and the sharp contrast
between the work of the Middle Ages and that of
the period which synchronises with the Renais
sance in other lands. As far back as the Carlo
vingian days, and, indeed, still earlier, great
activity was displayed in a form of plastic Art
which remained in much favour till the twelfth
century, namely carving in ivory, an Art inherited
directly from the Romans, whose richly decorated
consular tablets served as a model for those
massive and often beautiful covers of missals and
Gospel-books which are to be found in profusion
in the Museums of Europe. These carvings,
generally rude in execution, reveal at times sur
prising vitality and dramatic feeling. For vigour
and freedom, combined with a certain classic
dignity and restraint, an ivory in the library of St.
Gallen may be cited. It is ascribed to one Tutilo,
a monk of the tenth century, who seems in his
amazing versatility of genius, married to excep
tional bodily strength, to have been a sort of
prototype ot Leonardo da Vinci. Bronze came
early into use for church furniture and for doors,
under which head it may be interesting to you to
note, by the way, a peculiarity in the treatment of
relief on the famous doors of the Dom of Hildes
heim. They are divided as usual into panels
containing Biblical subjects. The figures in these
panels are in low relief up to the height of the

294 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec 9
chest, at which point they bend suddenly and
boldly forward, and detach themselves at a very
open angle from the background, producing by
the strong shadows thus cast a very original, and
I may add, an unexpectedly agreeable effect.
Monumental sculpture was during the great
building ages in Germany, as elsewhere, mainly
called into activity and largely controlled by
Architecture, and the increasing attenuation of
the figures which peopled porches and decorated
shafts is the natural corollary of the increasing
narrowness of the vertical features in the Architec
ture of the day ; and it is amusing to note that the
restraint and control which were, so to speak,
taken in good part and with a sense of their fitness
by the sculptors of France, seem frequently to
have been resented by the more rugged and self-
assertive Germans, and led to an angular obtru
sion of elbows, and an irritable thrusting out of
hips, in excess of anything we find in the Gothic
sculpture of France, and which German Art,
indeed, never quite shook off Amidst not little
that is clumsy and rude in the mediaeval sculpture
of Germany, there is yet much also to admire. I
would quote, among many instances, the carvings
on the exterior of Strasburg Cathedral, especially,
perhaps, the statues and reliefs added in the
thirteenth century to the beautiful Romanesque
south porch — works full of dignity and pathos,
ascribed to a sculptress, Sabina Ijy name, who has
been held, with little regard to dates, to be the

i893 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 295
daughter of Erwin von Steinbach. Amongst the
most interesting examples of sculpture of the
thirteenth century are the effigies of Henry the
Lion and his English wife, Mathilda, in Brunswick
Cathedral. In this work are seen a calm and
placid beauty and a stately breadth of form which
I have hardly found anywhere under a later date,
and incline one to feel that other things besides a
Royal House suffered eclipse in the days of the
decline of the Hohenstaufens. More than one
other work of this period seems to me to justify
some such feeling. There are, for instance, in
the Cathedral of Bamberg, so remarkable for its
sculptural enrichment, two statues, one a Virgin,
the other a Sibyl, both beautiful, but the latter
almost antique in its character, and stamped with
a stateliness and nobility to which the days of the
Minnesanger were surely more propitious than
those of the rugged burghers who were soon to
rise to power and to rule in the Art-producing
world. Nor would it be difficult to add to the
list of works which seemed to point to a loftier
standard than was eventually to be reached in
German sculpture.
During the thirteenth century, as in Architec
ture so in Sculpture, French influence made itself
increasingly felt, and it prevailed largely during
the fourteenth and part of the fifteenth centuries,
in which period good, if not superlative, work was
produced— at Freiburg, for example, at Nurem
berg, at Brunswick, at Cologne and elsewhere.

296 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. 9
As, however, the fifteenth century advanced, that
tendency to realistic and individualising treatment
of form which was to bring about, as we shall
presently see, so vital a change in painting, began
to assert itself strongly also in Sculpture, and this
at a time when German carvers, impatient of
control, were daily more shaking off the un
welcome and restraining yoke of Architecture ; and
in the shape of carved shrines and altars, richly
gilded and brightly coloured, a class of work came
into vogue in which the artist, for the first time
absolutely free, and having to deal with themes of
a purely narrative and didactic character, indulged
to the full that passion for telling a story in Art
which is characteristic of the Teutonic peoples. I
cannot but feel that this class of work elicited, in
a majority of cases, little of the best, much of the
less good in the artistic organisation of the people.
In the engrossing desire to narrate dramatically,
all sense of beauty and aesthetic propriety was
obscured, the love of multiplicity, the lack of
the sense of measure led, in the treatrrient of
relief, to a crowding and a confusion which are
often deplorable ; a crowding in all directions, so
that not only is the field filled from angle to angle,
but figures further huddle in detached relief one
in front of the other — three, indeed sometimes
four, deep. Again, an innate leaning to the
angular, and a reaction against the lengthened
clinging lines once imposed on Sculpture by the
controlling architect, led to a vehement crinkling

i893 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 297
and tossing of draperies, which bore no relation,
except in their rocky angularity, to the gaunt and
bony limbs they clad ; whilst the want of care for
variety of emphasis brought about a spotty rest
lessness of aspect which distresses the eye in the
absence of any controlling feature or restful in
terval. That these general blemishes were at
times redeemed throu'gh the genius of individual
artists is undeniable. Among such artists in the
Gothic period, the first place is generally assigned
to Adam Kraft, the author of the famous but, in
my opinion, over-rated tabernacle — the Sakra-
mentshauschen as it is called— in the Lorenz-
kirche in Nuremberg, and of other well-known
and meritorious works in that city, such as the
Pergersdorf Monument in the Frauenkirche, and
the reliefs on the exterior of the church of St.
Sebaldus. Far more attractive, however, to me
personally is Veit-Stoss, whose beautiful work in
the Lorenzkirche I have already noted, and to
whom is ascribed a Madonna rapt in Adoration,
now seen in the Germanic Museum in Nuremberg,
a work which in its dignity and sweetness stands
alone in German Gothic Sculpture ; a work, too,
which, wrought as it was by a worthless, dis
reputable fellow, shows in its elevation, pathetically
enough, how purifying a thing within itself is this
Art of yours to those who love it nobly. In the
works of which I have so far spoken no trace
is visible of Italian forms ; in those, however, of
the renowned bronze founder, Peter Vischer, who.

298 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec 9
though somewhat younger than Kraft, produced
his best known work only a score of years after
the completion of that artist's shrine in the church
of St. Lorenz, their fascination is early seen to
assert itself ; and if in his tomb of Saint Sebaldus
the constructive idea is Gothic, the forms are
almost wholly those of the Italian Renaissance.
This interesting monument, which can be studied
by you, as can also Adam Kraft's Entombment,
at the South Kensington Museum, is in its con
ception elegant, original, and full of fancy, a fancy
rather unpruned, especially in the treatment of
the base, which shows much licence and confusion
in its design. It is impossible not to be charmed
with this rich and fantastic work, on which honest
Peter Vischer, whose quaint image in his simple
working garb confronts you at the foot of his
masterpiece, laboured, with his five sons, lovingly,
for a dozen years, and it is only on a close inspec
tion — and reluctantly — that we become aware of
the really curious rudeness of much of its work
manship, which we cannot help mentally com
paring with the admirable finish of, for instance,
the thirteenth-century effigy in Cologne Cathedral
of Conrad von Hochstaden, its founder. Before
leaving the subject of German sculpture, I should
like to give you one illustration, and an amusing
one, of a marked characteristic of German Art,
namely the comprehensive love it evinces for all
animal creation, not for birds only — they sweeten
with their presence all mediaeval Art — but for

i893 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 299
every kind of beast also, and of insect. In the
Stephan's-Kirche in Vienna there is a very fine
and stately monument erected to the memory of
the Emperor Frederic the Third — I will not dwell
here on its considerable merits, but will confine
myself to the point in question. Round its base
there runs, between vigorous mouldings, a sort of
shallow trough, in which wallow and disport them
selves beasts of various kinds, real and imaginary.
Prominent amongst them is a dog, bent, as is the
wont of dogs, and only too successfully, on the
quest of fleas about his person. Now, deceived
by the humble position in the design of this
inquiring animal, I first saw in the placing of the
incident a symbolic allusion to the leaving here
below in death of the unclean things of the world ;
but — alas for my illusions ! — I presently discovered
a precisely similar episode on the very crown of
the upper cornice, and above a series of sculp
tures treating, all of them, subjects from Holy
Writ. And now, in conclusion, a word on the subject
of Painting, in which branch of Art Germany rose,
in the persons of two consummate artists, to levels
not reached by her in Sculpture. In those early
days in which we just now noted such marked
activity in plastic Art, Painting also, both in the
shape of illumination and of mural decoration,
was widely practised, and indeed, for this latter
form of Art, Romanesque churches were peculiarly
adapted ; the broad expanse of naked wall which,

300 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec 9
in the general absence of a triforium, separated
the aisle arches from the upper windows, calling
imperatively for pictorial adornment. There is in
fact little doubt that every important church of
the Romanesque period was enriched, more or
less, with mural painting ; some churches, indeed,
from end to end, as in the case of that most beau
tiful and suggestive example, St. Mary on the
Capitol in Cologne, in which there is not a single
sculptured ornament and hardly a moulding any
where, the entire surface, walls, piers and ceiling,
being clothed in one many-coloured garment. Of
the paintings ot this period the great majority has
unfortunately disappeared, and those that have
escaped destruction have suffered in most cases
such ruthless renovation that it is difficult to form
any judgment as to their quality. The best
example amongst those that I have seen, and a
fairly preserved one, is on the roof of the nave of
the Michael's- Kirche at Hildesheim, a rich and
powerful design, along the centre of which is un
folded in successive fields a colossal tree of Jesse,
a work of the middle of the fourteenth century.
With the introduction of the Gothic style, and the
resulting curtailment of wall-space, the place of
wall-painting in the architectural scheme was
usurped, as in France, by painting on glass, of the
achievements of which, in Germany, forced as I
am to a condensation less than just to so wide a
subject, I can say here no more than that I feel
unable to endorse fully the high opinion formed of

1893 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 301
it by German critics. Some extremely fine, and,
especially in the matter of tone, very powerful
specimens I have indeed seen, but in too many
cases I have found colour harsh and crude, some
times to a distressing extent. I have before my
njind, amongst others, certain windows in the
clerestory of a great cathedral, in which a vicious
green, a virulent yellow, and a ruthless red unite
in a consent which recalls, in the region of sound,
the harmonies that greet us within the cockatoo
house of the Zoological Gardens. Meanwhile, if
mural painting was thus starved and pushed aside,
easel painting blossomed vigorously forth, and,
not seldom, with admirable results, as we shall
presently see. It is customary, on grounds which
are not obvious to me, to include in a survey of
German painting the works of the school of
Slavonic Bohemia, the earliest to spring into pro
minence and the first to die out. Bowing to this
custom I will say here that such works of this
school as I have seen in Prague and in Vienna
are, in the depth of their colour and in a certain
forceful dignity, very striking, and suggest high
promise of eventual development. A rather
curious circumstance may be noted in regard to
them, namely, that they bring before us what we
do not expect among Slavs, a type of very long-
nosed men. An early seat of activity in painting
was also Nuremberg, but that Art reaches, during
the Middle Ages, its highest level in the Rhine-
land, and notably and admittedly in pious and

302 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec 9
opulent Cologne. " No limner of Cologne or of
Maestricht," exclaims Wolfram von Eschenbach
in describing Parsival, radiant in his knightly
armour, " could paint him more beautiful than he
was." Here two masters especially stand forth in
the close of the fourteenth and the beginning of
the fifteenth centuries, Meister Wilhelm, and,
after him, Meister Stephan Lochner, both artists
of a high order. Great suavity and dignity
marked their Art — an Art which reflected the
mystic fervour that reigned in those days at
Cologne. It was an Art from which character
and individualisation were almost wholly absent,
and of which the unreal aspect was emphasised by
the habitual omission of any indication of sky or
landscape, and by the relief of the figures against
a background of gold, often stamped with a richly
decorative pattern. In the second half of the
fifteenth century, the transformation which we
have already observed in statuary gradually
asserted itself in painting also, under influences
drawn from Flanders ; for it is to Flanders and
not to Italy that young German artists were wont
at that period to turn for inspiration and for train
ing. Fired by the example of the Van Eycks, of
Rogier van de Weyde and of others, painters in
Germany betook themselves to a closer observa
tion of Nature, and a more realistic tone was soon
manifest in their works. Landscape now began
to assert itself, but so deep-rooted was the habit
of the traditional background of gold that some

1893 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 303
further time elapsed before a blue sky was suffered
to take its place behind tree, and hill and city.
In the paintings of this second phase of the
Cologne School much life and a facile invention
are seen, but, nevertheless, in every quality of
technical perfection, they fall far short of their
Flemish prototypes ; it is further south, at Col-
mar, in the region of the Upper Rhine, and in
the great centres of Franconia and Swabia, that
we must look for the fullest development of the
new school and for its highest achievements. The
greatest precursor of the riper and more accom
plished Art of Albert Diirer was without doubt
Martin Schongauer of Colmar, whose " Madonna
in the Rose-Bower," now in the Church of St.
Martin of that city, is a work of strange nobility
and force, a painting Flemish, indeed, in its in
spiration, but with something also of Southern
gravity and repose which is never absent from his
work, and which we shall miss in the far completer
Art of his famous successor, Diirer. In the chief
city of Franconia, and the centre, in that day, of
the trade of Europe, in Nuremberg, where we
have already seen Architecture and Sculpture
flourish, was also a school of painters, of which
the patriarch, if we may so call him, was Michael
Wohlgemuth, the master of Diirer, an able, a
vigorous, a prolific, and, I fear we must add, a
rather prosaic and humdrum wielder of the brush,
whose virtues and defects, no doubt, mirrored in
the main those of the majority of his and Hans

304 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. 9
Sachs' fellow-townsmen. It is curious, by the
way, to note that in the age in which intellectual
life throve exclusively among the burgher class,
and at a time when there was an enormous
demand for works of Art, either for delight, or as
an outward sign of worldly prosperity, or for
didactic purposes, the general status of an artist
was as humble as his remuneration was small.
Even the most conspicuous painters, Albert Diirer
himself not excepted, lived, when in their own
country, largely by designs for engraving on wood
or copper, and were, in fact, more widely known
through this channel than through any other.
Holbein had to leave Bale because he could not
make an adequate living there, and nothing struck
Diirer more in Venice than the high social esteem
in which painters were held. " Here," he writes
to his friend Pirkheimer, " I am a gentleman ; at
home I am but a vagabond."
I am not here attempting any enumeration of
German artists or their works ; I am simply seek
ing to trace in its general features the develop
ment of Art in Germany. I shall therefore not
dwell on the career of the great artist whom I
have last named : his magnificent gifts, his in
exhaustible fecundity of invention, his never-
faltering power of work are known to you, if in
no other way, through numberless woodcuts and
engravings bearing his name and reproducing his
drawings, for you have, unfortunately, in this
country, little access to his painted works. A

i893 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 305
word or two will suffice as to the main character
istics of his genius. Albert Diirer may be regarded
as par excellence the typical German artist — far
more so than his great contemporary Holbein.
He was a man of a strong and upright nature,
bent on pure and high ideals, a man ever seeking,
if I may use his own characteristic expression, to
make known through his work the mysterious
treasure that was laid up in his heart ; he was a
thinker, a theorist, and, as you know, a writer ;
like many of the great artists of the Renaissance,
he was steeped also in the love of Science. His
work was in his own image ; it was, like nearly
all German Art, primarily ethic in its complexion ;
like all German Art it bore traces of foreign
influence — drawn, in his case, first from Flanders
and later from Italy. In his work, as in all
German Art, the national character asserted itself
above every trammel of external influence.
Superbly inexhaustible as a designer, as a
draughtsman he was powerful, thorough, and
minute to a marvel, but never without a certain
almost caligraphic mannerism of hand, wanting
in spontaneous simplicity — never broadly serene.
In his colour he was rich and vivid, not always
unerring as to his harmonies, not alluring in his
execution — withal a giant.
Hardly less important than Nuremberg as a
centre of wealth and commerce, or in its love of
of Art, was the great Swabian city, Augsburg,
the home of those princes among the merchants U

3o6 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec 9
of this day, the Fuggers ; and of the genius of
the Swabian School, Hans Holbein the younger,
the only other painter to whom time allows me to
make special allusion, is the noblest product and
the supreme glory. I say the Swabian School ;
for although the name of Holbein is closely con
nected with Bale, where he long resided, he was
born at Augsburg, in which town his father, him
self an artist of great gifts, lived and worked.
In Holbein we have a complete contrast to the
great Franconian of whom I have just spoken ;
a man not prone to theorise, not steeped in specu
lation, a dreamer of no dreams ; without passion
but full of joyous fancies, he looked out with
serene eyes upon the world around him ; accept
ing Nature without preoccupation or afterthought,
but with a keen sense of all her subtle beauties,
loving her simply and for herself. As a draughts
man he displayed a flow, a fulness of form, and
an almost classic restraint which are wanting in
the work of Diirer, and are, indeed, not found
elsewhere in German Art. As a colourist, he
had a keen sense of the values of tone relations,
a sense in which Diirer again was lacking ; not
so Teutonic in every way as the Nuremberg
master, he formed a link between the Italian and
the German races. A less powerful personality
than Diirer, he was a far superior painter. Proud
may that country be indeed that counts two
names so great in Art. I am loth to pass over in
silence the many other men, some of them justly

i893 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 307
known to fame, that adorned the schools of which
I have spoken, and others of which I have
made no mention ; but what I have said may,
perhaps, suffice to illustrate the subject of our
enquiry. Meanwhile, in an estimate of the artistic pro
duction of Germany some mention — if brief — must
find a place of its surprising fruitfulness in the
field of those minor Arts which subserve more
immediately the material needs of men. I have
spoken already of the great wealth of jewelry and
goldsmith's work which has been preserved to us
from very early days, and in exceptional abun
dance from the Carlovingian age, at which period
there were great schools of the goldsmith's craft
both at Cologne and at Aachen. The magnifi
cence of the shrines, reliquaries, chalices, and the
like produced at that time is indeed truly astonish
ing. A love of work in the precious metals con
tinued to burn through the Middle Ages, and the
Renaissance yielded some of its most beautiful
fruit at the hands of the goldsmiths and jewellers,
for whom Diirer, the Behams, and Holbein,
amongst others, furnished designs that have not
since been surpassed. Throughout the Middle
Ages it was in the service of the Church that the
goldsmiths chiefly laboured, but not the gold
smiths only ; and such works at the great seven-
armed candelabra at Brunswick, and the large
chandelier which spans the nave of the Cathe
dral of Hildesheim, are there to show us what,

3o8 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec. 9
already in the eleventh century, the brassfounders
of Germany could achieve. Gradually, however,
with the growing prosperity of the cities, and the
increasing wealth which a world-wide commerce
poured into the pockets of the burghers. Art found
more and more scope in the adornment of civic
and private life. More and more it seized upon
every object, not of mere display but of daily use ;
everywhere we see manifest that constant and
consistent desire that everything which has form
and colour and is capable of adornment shall be
ennobled by the touch of Art, which is such a
lesson and rebuke to us, who are of kindred blood,
in this day of desultory dilettantism or vague in
difference. For not the paraphernalia of State
alone, not alone the armour of the knight or the
chain of the patrician were thought, in that more
favoured day than ours, to call for the added
grace of Beauty, but every humblest, household,
necessary thing ; the platter though of lead, the
spoon albeit of wood, the knife, the mug, the jug,
the housewife's key, the dresser, the cupboard —
all these called forth in turn delightful manifesta
tions of designing skill ; and on few objects, per
haps, were loving care and abounding adornment
more freely lavished than on that symbol in the
eyes of every German of the sheltered peace of
home — the earthen stove. On all these things
we read the stamp of the race ; we trace in
them its virtues of vigour, of industry, and

1893 ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES 309
of inexhaustible intellectual fertility ; we trace
in them also its shortcomings : the lack of deli
cacy of touch, and of a controlling sense of
Beauty. One more craft remains yet to be noticed which
is very characteristic of Germany, and one which
gave exceptional scope to the German love of
the intricate and fantastic, namely the beautiful
craft of the workers in iron. Gates, chapel rail
ings, railings round fonts in churches, railings
round those many public fountains with which
German streets are gay, attest everywhere their
skill in a profusion of rich and fanciful designs,
often of great charm and felicity — invariably of
much character.
Such then was, during the Renaissance period,
the activity of German craftsmen over every field
of Art. A great national convulsion was soon
to paralyse and arrest it. In the eighteenth
year of . the seventeenth century the ruthless
war broke out which, in the name of religion,
ravaged the land for thirty years, bringing ruin
to Germany and a long eclipse to its intellec
tual life.
Here, therefore, I leave this too fragmentary
and inadequate outline of a great subject, with the
hope only that I may have made clear, in some
few points at least, the bearing of the facts I
have brought before you in the elucidation of the
problem with which for some years past these

3IO ROYAL ACADEMY ADDRESSES Dec 9
addresses have been concerned. And, surely, in
no country have the fundamental attributes of a
race more vividly stamped themselves for good
or for not good on its artistic production, than in
the land of the strong and strenuous race which
has occupied our thoughts to-night.

the end

Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson &' Co.
London and Edinburgh

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