AMONG THE MANY DEBTS which we owe to the supreme aesthetic faculty of Goethe is that he was the first to teach us to define beauty in terms the most concrete possible, to realise it, I mean, always in its special manifestations. So, in the lecture which I have the honor to deliver before you, I will not try to give you any abstract definition of beauty, any such universal formula as was sought for by the philosophy of the eighteenth century; still less to communicate to you that which in its essence is incommunicable, the virtue by which a particular picture or poem affects us with a unique or special joy; but rather to point out to you the general ideas which characterise the great English renaissance of art in this century.
The English renaissance has been described as a mere revival of the Greek modes of thought, and again as a mere revival of mediæval feeling; rather, I would say, that to these forms of the human spirit it has added whatever artistic value the intricacy and complexity and experience of modern life can give. It is from the union of Hellenism in its breadth, its sanity of purpose, its calm possession of beauty, with the adventive, the intensified individualism, the passionate colour of the romantic spirit, that springs out of the nineteenth century in England, as from the marriage of Faust and Helen of Troy sprang the beautiful Lady Euphonia. In the womb of the French revolution, and in the storm and terror of that wild time, tendencies were hidden away that the artistic renaissance bent to her own service when the time came. And that desire for perfection which lay at the base of the revolution found in a young English poet its most complete and flawless realisation. Phidias and the achievements in Greek art are foreshadowed in Homer. Dante prefigures for us the passion and colour and intensity of Italian painting. The modern love of landscape dates from Rousseau, and it is in Keats that one discerns the beginning of the artistic renaissance of England. He was the forerunner of the pre-Raphaelite school, and so of the great romantic wave of which I will speak. Speaking of the pre-Raphaelites, what are they? If you ask nine-tenths of the British public, what is the meaning of the word aesthetic, they will tell you that it is the French for affectation or the German for a dado.
ea If you inquire about the pre-Raphaelites, you will hear something about an eccentric lot of young men to whom a sort of divine crookedness and holy awkwardness is drawing all the chief objects of art. To know nothing about their great men is one of the necessary elements of English education.
THE ORIGIN OF THE ART REVOLUTION.
In 1847 a number of young men in London, all admirers of Keats, were in the habit of meeting together and discussing art. They had determined to revolutionise poetry and painting. To do so was to lose, in England, all their rights as citizens. They had those things which the English public never forgives—youth, power and enthusiasm. Satire paid the usual homage which mediocrity yields to genius, blinding the British public to what is noble and beautiful, but harming the artist not at all. To disagree with three-fourths of England on all points is one of the first elements of vanity, which is a deep source of consolation in all moments of spiritual doubt.
These young men called themselves pre-Raphaelites because, as opposed to the facile abstractions of Raphael they thought they had found a stronger realism of imagination, a more careful realism of technique, an individuality more intense. But of all things was it a return to Nature. Later on, there came to the old house by Black-friars Bridge, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, who added a more exquisite spirit of choice, a more faultless devotion to beauty, and more intense seeking for perfection. Morris felt that the close imitation of Nature was a disturbing element in imaginative art. To him we owe poetry the perfect precision of which, and the clearness of word and vision, have not been excelled in the literature of our country.
Great eras in the history of arts have been eras not only of increased feeling, but also of new technical improvements. The revolution in modern music has been due to the invention of new instruments entirely. The artist may trace the depressed revolution of Bunthorne simply to the lack of technical means. So it has been with this romantic movement of ours. The painting of Burne-Jones shows a far more intricate wonder of design and splendour of color than English imaginative art had ever shown before. The poetry of Morris, Rossetti and Swinburne shows a sustaining consciousness of the musical value of each word which Theophile Gautier’s advice
eb to the young poet, to read his dictionary every day as being the only book worth a poet’s reading, admirably expresses. And yet, what people call the poet’s inspiration has not lost its wings; but we have accustomed ourselves to count their innumerable pulsations, to estimate their limitless strength, and to govern their ungovernable freedom.
THE CHOICE OF SUBJECTS.
And now I would point out to you the operation of the artistic spirit in the choice of subject. Like the philosopher of the platonic vision, the poet is the spectator of all time and all existence. For him no form is obsolete, no subject out of date; rather, whatever of life and passion the world has known in the desert of Judea or in Arcadian valley, by the ruins of Troy or Damascus, in the crowded and hideous streets of the modern city, or by the pleasant ways of Camelot, all lies before him like an open scroll, all is still instinct with beautiful life. He will take of it what is salutary for his own spirit, choosing some facts and rejecting others, with a calm artistic control of one who is in possession of the secret of beauty. It is to no avail that the muse of poetry be called even by such a clarion note as Whitman’s to migrate from Greece and Ionia and to placard “removed” and “to let” on the rocks of the snowy Parnassus. For art, to quote a noble passage of Mr. Swinburne’s,
ec is very life itself and knows nothing of death. And so it comes that he who seems to stand most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best, because he has stripped life of that mist of familiarity which, as Shelley used to say, makes life obscure to us.
Whatever spiritual message an artist brings to his age, it is for us to do naught but accept his teaching. You have most of you seen probably that great masterpiece of Rubens which hangs in the gallery of Brussels, that swift and wonderful pageant of horse and rider, arrested in its most exquisite and fiery moment, when the winds are caught in crimson banner and the air is lit by the gleam of armour and the flash of plume. Well, that is joy in art, though that golden hillside be trodden by the wounded feet of Christ; and it is for the death of the Son of Man that that gorgeous cavalcade is passing.
CHANNELS THROUGH WHICH THE SOUL IS TOUCHED.
In its primary aspect a painting has no more spiritual message than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass. The channels by which all noble and imaginative work in painting should touch the soul are not those of the truths of lives. This should be done by a certain inventive and creative handling entirely independent of anything definitely poetical in the subject, something entirely satisfying in itself, which is, as the Greeks would say, in itself an end. So the joy of poetry comes never from the subject, but from an inventive handling of rhythmical language.
THE PLACE OF CRITICISM.
What place has criticism in our culture? I think that the first duty of an art critic is to hold his tongue at all times and upon all subjects. You have listened to “Patience”
ed for a hundred nights, and you have only heard me for one. It will make, no doubt, that satire more piquant by knowing something about the subject of it. But you must not judge of aestheticism by the satire of Mr. Gilbert, any more than you judge of the strength and splendour of sun or sea by the dust that dances in the beam or the bubble that breaks on the wave. Don’t take your critic as any sure test of art. For artists, like the Greek gods, are only revealed to one another. As Emerson says somewhere, their real value and place time only can show. The true critic addresses not the artist ever, but the public. His work lies with them. Art can never have any other aim but her own perfection. I have no reverence, said Keats, for the public, or for anything in existence but the Eternal Being, the memory of great men, and the principle of beauty.
Such, then, is the spirit which I believe to be guiding and underlying our English Renaissance, a Renaissance many-sided and wonderful, promotive of strong ambitions and lofty personalities; yet for all its splendid achievements in poetry and the decorative arts, and in painting, for all the increased comeliness and grace of dress and of furniture of houses, not complete. For there can be no great sculpture without a beautiful national life, and the commercial spirit of England has killed that; no great drama without a noble national life, and the commercial spirit of England has killed that, too.
THE NOVEL AND THE DRAMA.
The novel has not killed the play, as some critics would persuade us. The romantic period of France shows that the work of Balzac and of Hugo grew up side by side together—nay, more, were complementary to each other, although neither of them saw it. The drama is the meeting place of art and life; it deals, as Mazzini said, not merely with man, but with social man, with man in relation to God and to humanity. It is the product of a period of great, national, united energy. It is impossible without a noble public, and it belongs to such ages as the age of Elizabeth, at London, Pericles, at Athens. It is part of such lofty moral and spiritual ardour as came to Greece after the defeat of the Persian fleet, and to Englishmen after the wreck of the Armada of Spain.
Shelley
ee felt how incomplete our movement was in this respect, and has shown in one great tragedy by what terror and pity he would have pacified our age; but in spite of the “Cenci,” the drama is one of the artistic forms through which the genius of England seeks in vain an outlet and an expression.
AMERICA TO COMPLETE THE MOVEMENT.
It is rather, perhaps, to you that we would turn to complete and perfect this great movement of ours, for there is something Hellenic in your air and world, something that has a quicker breath of the joy and power of Elizabeth’s England about it than our ancient civilisation can give us. For you, at least, are young; no hungry generations tread you down, and the past does not mock you with the ruins of a beauty, the secret of whose creation you have lost. That very absence of tradition which Ruskin
ef thought would rob your rivers of their laughter and your flowers of their light may be rather the source of your freedom and strength. To speak in literature with the perfect rectitude of the movement of animals, and the unimpeachableness of the sentiments of trees and the grass by the roadside, has been defined by one of your poets as the flawless triumph of art; it is a triumph which you above all other nations may be destined to achieve. For the voices that have their dwelling in sea and mountain are not the chosen music of liberty only. Other messages are there, if you will but listen to them—may yield you the splendour of some new imagination, the marvel of some new liberty.
If, then, this is so, and the materials for a civilisation lie all around you, what profit, you will ask me, will all this study of our poets and painters bring you? I might answer that the intellect can be engaged without a direct, didactic object, on an artistic and historical problem—that the demand of the intellect is merely to feel itself alive. I think such a study will bring you something that is the knowledge of real strength in art, not that you should imitate the works of great men, but their artistic spirit.
WHERE MORALITY IS NOT IN QUESTION.
In nations, as in individuals, if the passion for creation be not accompanied by the critical, the aesthetic faculty also, it will be sure to waste its strength. It is not an increased moral sense or moral supervision that your literature needs. Indeed, one should never talk of a moral or immoral poem. Poems are either well written or badly written; that is all. Any element of morals or implied reference to a standard of good and evil in art is often a sign of a certain incompleteness of vision. All good work aims at a purely artistic effect. But as in your cities so in your literature, it is an increased sensibility to beauty that is lacking. All noble work is not national merely, but universal. Spiritual freedom your own generous lives and liberal air will give you. From us you will learn the classical restraint of form. Love art for its own sake and then all things that you need will be added to you. This devotion to beauty, and to the creation of beautiful things, is the test of all great civilisations; it is what makes the life of each citizen a sacrament and not a speculation. For beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, a possession for all eternity.
Wars there must be always; but I think that creating a common intellectual atmosphere might make men brothers. National hatreds are always strongest where culture is lowest. Great empires there must be as long as personal ambition and the spirit of the age are one; but art is the only empire which a nation’s enemies cannot take from her. We in our Renaissance are seeking to create a sovereignty that will still be England’s, when her yellow leopards have grown weary of wars, and the rose on her shield is crimsoned no more with the blood of battle. And you, too, absorbing into the heart of a great people this pervading artistic spirit, will create for yourselves such riches as you have never yet created, though your land be a network of railways, and your cities the harbours of the galleys of the world.
THE REASON OF DECORATIVE ART.
I know indeed that the divine prescience of beauty is not our inheritance. For such an informing and presiding spirit of art to shield us from all harsh and alien influences, we of the Teutonic and Saxon races must turn rather to that strained self-consciousness of the age which is the keynote of all our romantic art, and must be the source of all or nearly all our culture. I mean that intellectual curiosity of the nineteenth century which is always looking for the secret of the life that still lingers around old and bygone forms of culture. The truths of art cannot be taught. They are revealed only—revealed to natures which have made themselves receptive of all beautiful impressions by the study of and the worship of all beautiful things. Hence the enormous importance given to the decorative arts in our English Renaissance; hence all that marvel of design that comes from the hand of Edward Burne-Jones; hence all that weaving of tapestry, the staining of glass, and the beautiful working in clay and metal and wood.
THE SUNFLOWER AND THE LILY.
You have heard, I think, a few of you, of two flowers connected with the aesthetic movement in England, said (I assure you, erroneously) to be the food of some aesthetic young men. Well, let me tell you that the reason we love the lily and the sunflower, in spite of what Mr. Gilbert may tell you, is not for any vegetable fashion at all; it is because these two lovely flowers are in England the two most perfect models of design, the most naturally adapted for decorative art—the gaudy leonine beauty of the one and the precious loveliness of the other giving to the artist the most entire and perfect joy. And so with you: let there be no flower in your meadows that does not wreathe its tendrils around your pillows, no little leaf in your Titan forests that does not lend its form to design, no curving spray of wild rose or briar that does not live forever in carven arch or window of marble, no bird in your air that is not giving the iridescent wonder of its colour, the exquisite curves of its wings in flight, to make more precious the preciousness of simple adornment; for the voices that have their dwelling in sea and mountain are not the chosen music of liberty only. Other messages are there in the wonder of wind-swept heights and the majesty of silent deep—messages that, if you will listen to them, will give you the wonder of all new imagination, the treasure of all new beauty. We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in art.