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The Art of England.

LECTURES GIVEN IN OXFORD,

BY

JOHN RUSKIN, D.C.L., LL.D.,

HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, AND HONORARY FELLOW OF CORFUS-CHRISTI COLLEGE,

DURING HIS

SECOND TENURE OF THE SLADF. PROFESSORSHIP.

LECTURE I.

REALISTIC SCHOOLS OF PAINTING.

GEORGE ALLEN,
SUNNYSIDE, ORPINGTON, KENT.

1883.

LECTURE I.

REALISTIC SCHOOLS OF PAINTING.
D. G. Rossetti and W. Holma?i Hunt.

THE ART OF ENGLAND.

Lecture I.

REALISTIC SCHOOLS OF PAINTING.

D. G. ROSSETTI AND W. HOLMAN HUNT.

I AM well assured that this audience is too
kind, and too sympathetic, to wish me
to enlarge on the mingled feelings of fear and
thankfulness, with which I find myself once
again permitted to enter on the duties in which
I am conscious that before I fell short in too
many ways ; and in which I only have ventured
to ask, and to accept, your farther trust, in the
hope of being able to bring to some of their
intended conclusions, things not in the nature
of them, it seems to me, beyond what yet
remains of an old man's energy ; but, before,
too eagerly begun, and too irregularly followed.
And indeed I am partly under the impression,

2 The Art of England.

both in gratitude and regret, that Professor
Richmond's resignation, however justly motived
by his wish to pursue with uninterrupted thought
the career open to him in his profession, had
partly also for its reason the courtesy of con-
cession to his father's old friend; and his own
feeling that while yet I was able to be of
service in advancing the branches of elementary
art with which I was specially acquainted, it
was best that I should make the attempt on
lines already opened, and with the aid of old
friends. I am now alike comforted in having
left you, and encouraged in return; for on all
grounds it was most desirable that to the im-
perfect, and yet in many points new and untried
code of practice which I had instituted, the
foundations of higher study should have been
added by Mr. Richmond, in connection with
the methods of art-education recognized in
the Academies of Europe. And although I
have not yet been able to consult with him
on the subject, I trust that no interruption of
the courses of figure study, thus established,

/. Rossetti and Holman Hunt. 3

may be involved in the completion, for what
it is worth, of the system of subordinate
exercises in natural history and landscape,
indicated in the schools to which at present,
for convenience' sake, my name is attached ;
but which, if they indeed deserve encourage-
ment, will, I hope, receive it ultimately, as
presenting to the beginner the first aspects
of art, in the widest, because the humblest,
relation to those of divinely organized and
animated Nature.

The immediate task I propose to myself is
to make serviceable, by all the illustration I
can give them, the now unequalled collection
possessed by the Oxford schools of Turner
drawings and sketches, completed as it has
been by the kindness of the Trustees of the
National Gallery at the intercession of Prince
Leopold ; and furnishing the means of progress
in the study of landscape such as the great
painter himself only conceived the scope of
toward the closing period of his life. At
the opening of next term, I hope, with Mr.

IA

4 The Art of England.

Macdonald's assistance, to have drawn up a
little synopsis of the elementary exercises which
in my earlier books have been recommended
for practice in Landscape,— a subject which, if
you look back to the courses of my lectures
here, you will find almost affectedly neglected,
just because it was my personal province. Other
matters under deliberation, till I get them either
done, or determined, I have no mind to talk
of; but to-day, and in the three lectures which
I hope to give in the course of the summer
term, I wish to render such account as is
possible to me of the vivid phase into which
I find our English art in general to have
developed since first I knew it: and, though
perhaps not without passing deprecation of
some of its tendencies, to rejoice with you
unqualifiedly in the honour which may most
justly be rendered to the leaders, whether passed
away or yet present with us, of England's
Modern Painters.

I may be permitted, in the reverence of
sorrow, to speak first of my much loved

/. Rossetti and Holman Hunt. 5

friend, Gabriel Rossetti. But, in justice, no
less than in the kindness due to death, I
believe his name should be placed first on
the list of men, within my own range of
knowledge, who have raised and changed
the spirit of modern Art : raised, in absolute
attainment; changed, in direction of temper.
Rossetti added to the before accepted systems
of colour in painting, one based on the
principles of manuscript illumination, which
permits his design to rival the most beautiful
qualities of painted glass, without losing
either the mystery or the dignity of light
and shade. And he was, as I believe it is
now generally admitted, the chief intellectual
force in the establishment of the modern
romantic school in England.

Those who are acquainted with my for-
mer writings must be aware that I use the
word c romantic ' always in a noble sense ;
meaning the habit of regarding the external
and real world as a singer of Romaunts
would have regarded it in the middle ages,

6 The Art of England,

and as Scott, Burns, Byron, and Tennyson
have regarded it in our own times. But, as
Rossetti's colour was based on the former
art of illumination, so his romance was based
on traditions of earlier and more sacred
origin than those which have inspired our
highest modern romantic literature. That
literature has in all cases remained strongest
in dealing with contemporary fact. The
genius of Tennyson is at its highest in the
poems of c Maud,' c In Memoriam,' and the
1 Northern Farmer ' ; but that of Rossetti, as
of his greatest disciple, is seen only when on
pilgrimage in Palestine.

I trust that Mr. Holman Hunt will not
think that in speaking of him as Rossetti's
disciple I derogate from the respect due to
his own noble and determined genius. In
all living schools it chances often that the
disciple is greater than his master ; and it
is always the first sign of a dominant and
splendid intellect, that it knows of whom to
learn. Rossetti's great poetical genius justified

/. Rossetti and Holman Hunt. 7

my claiming for him total, and, I believe,
earliest, originality in the sternly materialistic,
though deeply reverent veracity, with which
alone, of all schools of painters, this brother-
hood of Englishmen has conceived the cir-
cumstances of the life of Christ. And if I
had to choose one picture which represented
in purity and completeness, this manner of
their thought, it would be Rossetti's ' Virgin
in the House of St. John.'

But when Holman Hunt, under such
impressive influence, quitting virtually for
ever the range of worldly subjects, to which
belonged the pictures of Valentine and Sylvia,
of Claudio and Isabel, and of the i Awakening
Conscience,' rose into the spiritual passion
which first expressed itself in the c Light
of the World,' an instant and quite final
difference was manifested between his method
of conception, and that of his forerunner.
To Rossetti, the Old and New Testaments
were only the greatest poems he knew ;
and he painted scenes from them with no

8 The Art of England.

more actual belief in their relation to the
present life and business of men than he
gave also to the Morte d' Arthur and the
Vita Nuova. But to Holman Hunt, the
story of the New Testament, when once his
mind entirely fastened on it, became what it
was to an old Puritan, or an old Catholic
of true blood, — not merely a Reality, not
merely the greatest of Realities, but the only
Reality. So that there is nothing in the
earth for him any more that does not speak
of that; — there is no course of thought nor
force of skill for him, but it springs from
and ends in that.

So absolutely, and so involuntarily — I use
the word in its noblest meaning — is this so
with him, that in all subjects which fall short
in the religious element, his power also is
shortened, and he does those things worst
which are easiest to other men.

Beyond calculation, greater, beyond com-
parison, happier, than Rossetti, in this sin-
cerity, he is distinguished also from him by

/. Rossetti and Holman Hunt. 9

a respect for physical and material truth
which renders his work far more generally,
far more serenely, exemplary.

The specialty of colour-method which I
have signalized in Rossetti, as founded on
missal painting, is in exactly that degree
conventional and unreal. Its light is not
the light of sunshine itself, but of sunshine
diffused through coloured glass. And in
object-painting he not only refused, partly
through idleness, partly in the absolute want
of opportunity for the study of nature in-
volved in his choice of abode in a garret at
Blackfriars, — refused, I say, the natural aid of
pure landscape and sky, but wilfully perverted
and lacerated his powers of conception with
Chinese puzzles and Japanese monsters, until
his foliage looked generally fit for nothing
but a fire-screen, and his landscape distances
like the furniture of a Noah's Ark from the
nearest toy-shop. Whereas Holman Hunt, in
the very beginning of his career, fixed his
mind, as a colourist, on the true representation

io The Art of England.

of actual sunshine, of growing leafage, of
living rock, of heavenly cloud ; and his long
and resolute exile, deeply on many grounds
to be regretted both for himself and us, bound
only closer to his heart the mighty forms and
hues of God's earth and sky, and the mysteries
of its appointed lights of the day and of the
night — opening on the foam — " Of desolate
seas, in — Sacred — lands forlorn."

You have, for the last ten or fifteen years,
been accustomed to see among the pictures
principally characteristic of the English school,
a certain average number of attentive studies,
both of sunshine, and the forms of lower
nature, whose beauty is meant to be seen by
its light. Those of Mr. Brett may be named
with especial praise ; and you probably will
many of you remember with pleasure the
study of cattle on a Highland moor in the
evening, by Mr. Davis, which in last year's
Academy carried us out, at the end of the first
room, into sudden solitude among the hills.
But we forget, in the enjoyment of these

/. Rossetti and Holman Hunt. 1 1

new and healthy pleasures connected with
painting, to whom we first owe them all.
The apparently unimportant picture by
Holman Hunt, ' The strayed Sheep,' which
— painted thirty years ago — you may perhaps
have seen last autumn in the rooms of the
Art Society in Bond Street, at once achieved
all that can ever be done in that kind : it
will not be surpassed — it is little likely to
be rivalled— by the best efforts of the times
to come. It showed to us, for the first time
in the history of art, the absolutely faithful
balances of colour and shade by which actual
sunshine might be transposed into a key in
which the harmonies possible with material
pigments should yet produce the same im-
pressions upon the mind which were caused
by the light itself.

And remember, all previous work what-
ever had been either subdued into narrow
truth, or only by convention suggestive of
the greater. Claude's sunshine is colourless,
— only the golden haze of a quiet afternoon;

1 2 The Art of England.

— so also that of Cuyp: Turner's, so bold in
conventionalism that it is credible to few of
you, and offensive to many. But the pure
natural green and tufted gold of the herbage
in the hollow of that little sea-cliff must
be recognized for true merely by a minute's
pause of attention. Standing long before the
picture, you were soothed by it, and raised
into such peace as you are intended to find
in the glory and the stillness of summer,
possessing all things.

I cannot say of this power of true sun-
shine, the least thing that I would. Often
it is said to me by kindly readers, that
I have taught them to see what they had
not seen : and yet never — in all the many
volumes of effort — have I been able to tell
them my own feelings about what I myself
see. You may suppose that I have been all
this time trying to express my personal feel-
ings about Nature. No ; not a whit. I soon
found I could not, and did not try to. All
my writing is only the effort to distinguish

/. Rossetti and Holman Hunt. 13

what is constantly, and to all men, loveable,
and if they will look, lovely, from what is
vile, or empty, — or, to well trained eyes and
hearts, loathsome ; — but you will never find
me talking about what / feel, or what /
think. I know that fresh air is more whole-
some than fog, and that blue sky is more
beautiful than black, to people happily born
and bred. But you will never find, except
of late, and for special reasons, effort of mine
to say how I am myself oppressed or com-
forted by such things.

This is partly my steady principle, and
partly it is incapacity. Forms of personal
feeling in this kind can only be expressed in
poetry; and I am not a poet, nor in any
articulate manner could I the least explain to
you what a deep element of life, for me, is in
the sight merely of pure sunshine on a bank
of living grass.

More than any pathetic music, — yet I love
music, — more than any artful colour — and yet
I love colour, — more than other merely material

14 The Art of. England.

thing visible to these old eyes, in earth or sky.
It is so, I believe, with many of you also, —
with many more than know it of themselves;
and this picture, were it only the first that cast
true sunshine on the grass, would have been in
that virtue sacred : but in its deeper meaning,
it is, actually, the first of Hunt's sacred
paintings — the first in which, for those who
can read, the substance of the conviction and
the teaching of his after life is written, though
not distinctly told till afterwards in the sym-
bolic picture of ( The Scapegoat.' " All we
like sheep have gone astray, .we have turned
every one to his own way, and the Lord hath
laid on Him the iniquity of us all."

None of you, who have the least acquaint-
ance with the general tenor of my own
teaching, will suspect in me any bias towards
the doctrine of vicarious Sacrifice, as it is
taught by the modern Evangelical Preacher.
But the great mystery of the idea of Sacrifice
itself, which has been manifested as one
united and solemn instinct by all thoughtful

/. Rossetti and Holman Hunt. 1 5

and affectionate races, since the wide world
became peopled, is founded on the secret
truth of benevolent energy which all men
who have tried to gain it have learned — that
you cannot save men from death but by
facing it for them, nor from sin but by
resisting it for them. It is, on the contrary,
the favourite, and the worst falsehood of
modern infidel morality, that you serve your
fellow-creatures best by getting a percentage
out of their pockets, and will best provide
for starving multitudes by regaling yourselves.
Some day or other — probably now very soon,
— too probably by heavy afflictions of the
State, we shall be taught that it is not so;
and that all the true good and glory even of
this world — not to speak of any that is to
come, must be bought still, as it always has
been, with our toil, and with our tears. That
is the final doctrine, the inevitable one, not of
Christianity only, but of all Heroic Faith and
Heroic Being; and the first trial questions of
a true soul to itself must always be, — Have

1 6 The Art of England,

I a religion, have I a country, have I a
love, that I am ready to die for?

That is the Doctrine of Sacrifice ; the
faith in which Isaac was bound, in which
Iphigenia died, in which the great army of
martyrs have suffered, and by which all vic-
tories in the cause of justice and happiness
have been gained by the men who became
more than conquerors, through Him that
loved them.

And yet there is a deeper and stranger
sacrifice in the system of this creation than
theirs. To resolute self-denial, and to adopted
and accepted suffering, the reward is in the
conscience sure, and in the gradual advance
and predominance of good, practically and to
all men visible. But what shall we say of
involuntary suffering, — the misery of the poor
and the simple, the agony of the helpless
and the innocent, and the perishing, as it
seems, in vain, and the mother weeping for
the children of whom she knows only that
they are not ?

/. Rossetti and Holman Hunt. 17

I saw it lately given as one of the incon-
trovertible discoveries of modern science,
that all our present enjoyments were only
the outcome of an infinite series of pain. I
do not know how far the statement fairly
represented — but it announced as incapable of
contradiction — this melancholy theory. If such
a doctrine is indeed abroad among you, let
me comfort some, at least, with its absolute
denial. That in past aeons, the pain suffered
throughout the living universe passes calcu-
lation, is true ; that it is infinite, is untrue ;
and that all our enjoyments are based on it,
contemptibly untrue. For, on the other hand,
the pleasure felt through the living universe
during past ages is incalculable also, and in
higher magnitudes. Our own talents, enjoy-
ments, and prosperities, are the outcome of
that happiness with its energies, not of the
death that ended them. So manifestly is this
so, that all men of hitherto widest reach in
natural science and logical thought have been
led to fix their minds only on the innume-

1 8 The Art of England.

rable paths of pleasure, and ideals of beauty,
which are traced on the scroll of creation,
and are no more tempted to arraign as unjust,
or even lament as unfortunate, the essential
equivalent of sorrow, than in the seven-fold
glories of sunrise to deprecate the mingling of
shadow with its light.

This, however, though it has always been
the sentiment of the healthiest natural philo-
sophy, has never, as you well know, been
the doctrine of Christianity. That religion,
as it comes to us with the promise of a
kingdom in which there shall be no more
Death, neither sorrow nor crying, so it has
always brought with it the confession of
calamity to be at present in patience of
mystery endured ; and not by us only, but
apparently for our sakes, by the lower crea-
tures, for whom it is inconceivable that any
good should be the final goal of ill. To-
wards these, the one lesson we have to learn
is that of pity. For all human loss and pain,
there is no comfort, no interpretation worth

i". Rossetti and Holman Hunt, 19

a thought, except only in the doctrine of the
Resurrection; — of which doctrine, remember,
it is an immutable historical fact that all the
beautiful work, and all the happy existence
of mankind, hitherto, has depended on, or
consisted in, the hope of it.

The picture of which I came to-day
chiefly to speak, as a symbol of that doctrine,
was incomplete when I saw it, and is so still;
but enough was done to constitute it the most
important work of Hunt's life, as yet ; and
if health is granted to him for its completion,
it will, both in reality and in esteem, be the
greatest religious painting of our time.

You know that in the most beautiful
former conceptions of the Flight into Egypt,
the Holy Family were always represented
as watched over, and ministered to, by at-
tendant angels. But only the safety and
peace of the Divine Child and its mother
are thought of. No sadness or wonder of
meditation returns to the desolate homes of
Bethlehem

2A

20 The Art of England.

But in this English picture all the story
of the escape, as of the flight, is told, in
fulness of peace, and yet of compassion.
The travel is in the dead of the night, the
way unseen and unknown; — but, partly stoop-
ing from the starlight, and partly floating
on the desert mirage, move, with the Holy
Family the glorified souls of the Innocents.
Clear in celestial light, and gathered into
child-garlands of gladness, they look to the
Child in whom they live, and yet, for them
to die. Waters of the River of Life flow
before on the sands : the Christ stretches out
His arms to the nearest of them; — leaning
from His mother's breast.

To how many bereaved households may
not this happy vision of conquered death
bring in the future, days of peace !

I do not care to speak of other virtues
in this design than those of its majestic
thought, — but you may well imagine for your-
selves how the painter's quite separate and, in
its skill, better than magical, power of giving

/. Rossetti and Holman Hunt. 21

effects of intense light, has aided the effort
of his imagination, while the passion of his
subject has developed in him a swift grace of
invention which for my own part I never
recognized in his design till now. I can say
with deliberation that none even of the most
animated groups and processions of children
which constitute the loveliest sculpture of the
Robbias and Donatello, can more than rival
the freedom and felicity of motion, or the
subtlety of harmonious line, in the happy
wreath of these angel-children.

Of this picture I came to-day chiefly to
speak, nor will I disturb the poor impression
which my words can give you of it by any
immediate reference to other pictures by our
leading masters. But it is not, of course,
among these men of splendid and isolated
imagination that you can learn the modes of
regarding common and familiar nature which
you must be content to be governed by — in
early lessons. I count myself fortunate, in
renewing my effort to systematize these, that

22 The Art of England.

I can now place in the schools, or at least
lend, first one and then another — some exem-
plary drawings by young people — youths and
girls of your own age — clever ones, yes,— but
not cleverer than a great many of you : —
eminent only, among the young people of the
present day whom I chance to know, in
being extremely old-fashioned ; — and, — don't
be spiteful when I say so, — but really they all
are, all the four of them— two lads and two
lassies — quite provokingly good.

Lads, not exactly lads perhaps — one of
them is already master of the works in the
ducal palace at Venice ; lassies, to an old
man of sixty-four, who is vexed to be beaten
by them in his own business — a little older,
perhaps, than most of the lassies here, but
still brightly young ; and, mind you, not
artists, but drawing in the joy of their hearts
— and the builder at Venice only in his play-
time— yet, I believe you will find these, and
the other drawings I speak of, more helpful,
and as I just said, exemplary, than any I

/. Rossetti and Holman Hunt. 23

have yet been able to find for you ; and of
these, little stories are to be told, which bear
much on all that I have been most earnestly
trying to make you assured of, both in art
and in real life.

Let me, however, before going farther,
say, to relieve your minds from unhappily too
well-grounded panic, that I have no intention
of making my art lectures any more one-
half sermons. All the pieces of theological
or other grave talk which seemed to me a
necessary part of my teaching here, have been
already spoken, and printed ; and are, I only
fear at too great length, legible. Nor have I
any more either strength or passion to spare
in matters capable of dispute. I must in
silent resignation leave all of you who are
led by your fancy, or induced by the fashion
of the time, to follow, without remonstrance
on my part, those modes of studying organic
beauty for which preparation must be made
by depriving the animal under investigation
first of its soul within, and secondly of its

24 The Art of England,

skin without. But it chances to-day, that the
merely literal histories of the drawings which
I bring with me to show you or to lend,
do carry with them certain evidences of the
practical force of religious feeling on the
imagination, both in artists and races, such as
I cannot, if I would, overlook, and such as
I think you will yourselves, even those who
have least sympathy with them, not without
admiration recognise.

For a long time I used to say, in all my
elementary books, that, except in a graceful
and minor way, women could not paint or
draw. I am beginning, lately, to bow myself
to the much more delightful conviction that
nobody else can. How this very serious change
of mind was first induced in me it is, if not
necessary, I hope pardonable, to delay you by
telling.

When I was at Venice in 1876 — it is
almost the only thing that makes me now
content in having gone there, — two English
ladies, mother and daughter, were staying at

/. Rossetti and Holman Hunt. 25

the same hotel, the Europa. One day the
mother sent me a pretty little note asking if
I would look at the young lady's drawings.
On my somewhat sulky permission, a few were
sent, in which I saw there was extremely
right-minded and careful, work, almost totally
without knowledge. I sent back a request
that the young lady might be allowed to
come out sketching with me. I took her
over into the pretty cloister of the church of
La Salute, and set her, for the first time in
her life, to draw a little piece of gray marble
with the sun upon it, rightly. She may have
had one lesson after that — she may have had
two ; the three, if there were three, seem to
me, now, to have been only one ! She seemed
to learn everything the instant she was shown it
— and ever so much more than she was taught.
Next year she went away to Norway, on one
of these frolics which are now-a-days necessary
to , girl-existence ; and brought back a little
pocket-book, which she thought nothing of,
and which I begged of her: and have framed

26 The Art of England.

half a dozen leaves of it (for a loan to you,
only, mind,) till you have enough copied them.
Of the minute drawings themselves, I
need not tell you — for you will in examining
them, beyond all telling, feel, that they are
exacdy what we should all like to be able to
do ; and in the plainest and frankest manner
show us how to do it — or, more modestly
speaking, how, if heaven help us, it can be
done. They can only be seen, as you see
Bewick vignettes, with a magnifying glass,
and they are patterns to you therefore only
of pocket-book work; but what skill is more
precious to a traveller than that of minute,
instantaneous, and unerring record of the
things that are precisely best? For in this,
the vignettes upon these leaves differ, widely
as the arc of heaven, from the bitter truths of
Bewick. Nothing is recorded here but what
is lovely and honourable: how much there is
of both in the peasant life of Norway, many
an English traveller has recognized; but not
always looking for the cause or enduring the

I. Rossetti and Holman Hunt, 27

conclusion, that its serene beauty, its hospitable
patriotism, its peaceful courage, and its happy
virtue, were dependent on facts little resem-
bling our. modern English institutions; — namely,
that the Norwegian peasant "is a free man
on the scanty bit of ground which he has
inherited from his forefathers ; that the Bible
is to be found in every hut; that the school-
master wanders from farm to farm; that no
Norwegian is confirmed who does not know
how to read; and no Norwegian is allowed
to marry who has not been confirmed." I
quote straightforwardly, (missing only some talk
of Parliaments ; but not caring otherwise how
far the sentences are with my own notions,
or against,) from Dr. Hartwig's collected de-
scriptions of the Polar world. I am not
myself altogether sure of the wisdom of
teaching everybody to read : but might be
otherwise persuaded if here, as in Norway,
every town had its public library, " while in
many districts the peasants annually contribute
a dollar towards a collection of books, which,

28 The Art of England.

under the care of the priest, are lent out to
all comers."

I observe that the word c priest ' has of late
become more than ever offensive to the popular
English mind; and pause only to say that in
whatever capacity, or authority, the essential
function of a public librarian must in every
decent and rational country be educational ;
and consist in the choosing, for the public,
books authoritatively or essentially true, free
from vain speculation or evil suggestion : and
in noble history or cheerful fancy, to the
utmost, entertaining.

One kind of periodical literature, it seems
to me as I study these drawings, must at all
events in Norway be beautifully forbidden, —
the " Journal des Modes." You will see evi-
dence here that the bright fancying alike of
maidens' and matrons' dress, capable of prettiest
variation in its . ornament, is yet ancestral in
its form, and the white caps, in their daily
purity, have the untroubled constancy, of the
seashell and the snow.

/. Rossetti and Holman Hunt. 29

Next to these illustrations of Norwegian
economy, I have brought you a drawing of
deeper and less imitable power: it is by a girl
of quite peculiar gift, whose life has hitherto
been spent in quiet and unassuming devotion
to her art, and to its subjects. I would fain
have said, an English girl, but all my preju-
dices have lately had the axe laid to their
roots one by one, — she is an American ! But
for twenty years she has lived with her mother
among the peasants of Tuscany — under their
olive avenues in summer — receiving them, as
they choose to come to chat with her, in
her little room by Santa Maria Novella in
Florence during winter. They come to her
as their loving guide, and friend, and sister
in all their work, and pleasure, and — suffering.
I lean on the last word.

For those of you who have entered into
the heart of modern Italy know that there is
probably no more oppressed, no more afflicted
order of gracious and blessed creatures — God's
own poor, who have not yet received their

30 The Art of England.

consolation, than the mountain peasantry of
Tuscany and Romagna. What their minds
are, and what their state, and what their
treatment, those who do not know Italy may
best learn, if they can bear the grief of
learning it, from Ouida's photographic story
of £A Village Commune'; yet amidst all this,
the sweetness of their natural character is
undisturbed, their ancestral religious faith
unshaken - — their purity and simplicity of
household life uncorrupted. They may perish,
by our neglect or our cruelty, but they can-
not be degraded. Among them, as I have
told you, this American girl has lived —
from her youth up, with her (now widowed)
mother, who is as eagerly, and which is the
chief matter, as sympathizingly benevolent as
herself. The peculiar art gift of the younger
lady is rooted in this sympathy, the gift of
truest expression of feelings serene in their
Tightness; and a love of beauty — divided
almost between the peasants and the flowers
that live round Santa Maria del Fiore. This

/. Rossetti and Holman Hunt. 31

power she has trained by its limitation, severe,
and in my experience unexampled, to work
in light and shade only, with the pure pen
line : but the total strength of her intellect
and fancy being concentrated in this engraver's
method, it expresses of every subject what
she loves best, in simplicity undebased by
any accessory of minor emotion.

She has thus drawn, in faithfullest por-
traiture of these peasant Florentines, the love-
liness of the young and the majesty of the
aged : she has listened to their legends, written
down their sacred songs ; and illustrated, with
the sanctities of mortal life, their traditions of
immortality.

I have brought you only one drawing
to-day ; in the spring I trust you shall have
many, — but this is enough, just now. It is
drawn from memory only, but the fond
memory which is as sure as sight — it is the
last sleep from which she waked on this
earth, of a young Florentine girl, who had
brought heaven down to earth, as truly as

32 The Art of England.

ever saint of old, while she lived, and of
whom even I, who never saw her, cannot
believe that she is dead. Her friend, who
drew this memorial of her, wrote also the
short story of her life, which I trust you
will soon be able to read.

Of this, and of the rest of these draw-
ings, I have much to say to you ; but this
first and last, — that they are representations of
beautiful human nature, such as could only
have been found among people living in the
pure Christian faith — such as it was, and is,
since the twelfth century ; and that although,
as I said, I have returned to Oxford only to
teach you technical things, this truth must
close the first words, as it must be the sum
of all that I may be permitted to speak to
you, — that the history of the art of the Greeks
is the eulogy of their virtues ; and the history
of Art after the fall of Greece, is that of the
Obedience and the Faith of Christianity.

There are two points of practical import-
ance which I must leave under your con-

/. Rossetti and Holman Hunt. 33

sideration. I am confirmed by Mr. Macdonald
in my feeling that some kind of accurately
testing examination is necessary to give con-
sistency and efficiency to the present drawing-
school. I have therefore determined to give
simple certificates of merit, annually, to the
students who have both passed through the
required course, and at the end of three
years have produced work satisfactory to Mr.
Macdonald and myself. After Easter, I will
at once look over such drawings as Mr.
Macdonald thinks well to show me, by
students who have till now complied with
the rules of the school ; and give certificates
accordingly ; — henceforward, if my health is
spared, annually : and I trust that the advan-
tage of this simple and uncompetitive exami-
nation will be felt by succeeding holders of
the Slade Professorship, and in time commend
itself enough to be held as a part of the
examination system of the University.

Uncompetitive, always. The drawing cer-
tificate will imply no compliment, and convey

3

34 The Art of England,

no distinction. It will mean merely that the
student who obtains it knows perspective, with
the scientific laws of light and colour in
illustrating form, and has attained a certain
proficiency in the management of the pencil.

The second point is of more importance
and more difficulty.

I now see my way to making the col-
lection of examples in the schools, quite
representative of all that such a series ought
to be. But there is extreme difficulty in
finding any books that can be put into the
hands of the home student which may supply
the place of an academy. I do not mean
merely as lessons in drawing, but in the for-
mation of taste, which, when we analyse it,
means of course merely the right direction of
feeling.

I hope that in many English households
there may be found already — I trust some
day there may be found wherever there are
children who can enjoy them, and especially
in country village schools — the three series of

I. Rossetti and Holman Hunt, 35

designs by Ludwig Richter, in illustration of
the Lord's Prayer, of the Sunday, and of the
Seasons. Perfect as types of easy line drawing,
exquisite in ornamental composition, and refined
to the utmost in ideal grace, they represent
all that is simplest, purest, and happiest in
human life, all that is most strengthening
and comforting in nature and in religion.
They are enough, in themselves, to show that
whatever its errors, whatever its backslidings,
this century of ours has in its heart understood
and fostered, more than any former one, the
joys of family affection, and of household
piety.

For the former fairy of the woods, Richter
has brought to you the angel on the threshold;
for the former promises of distant Paradise,
he has brought the perpetual blessing, " God
be with you": amidst all the turmoil and
speeding to and fro, and wandering of heart
and eyes which perplex our paths, and betray
our wills, he speaks to us continuous memorial
of the message — " My Peace I leave with you."

The Art of England.

LECTURES GIVEN IN OXFORD,

BY

JOHN RUSKIN, D.C.L., LL.D.,

HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, AND HONORARY FELLOW OF CORPUS-CHRISTI COLLEGE,

DURING HIS

SECOND TENURE OF THE SLADE PROFESSORSHIP.

LECTURE II.

MYTHIC SCHOOLS OF PAINTING.

GEORGE ALLEN,
SUNNYSIDE, ORPINGTON, KENT.

1883.

LECTURE II.

MYTHIC SCHOOLS OF PAINTING.
E. Burne- Jones and G. F. Watts,

Lecture II.
MYTHIC SCHOOLS OF PAINTING.

E. BURNE-JONES AND G. F. WATTS.

IT is my purpose, in the lectures I may
be permitted henceforward to give in
Oxford, so to arrange them as to dispense
with notes in subsequent printing ; and, if I
am forced for shortness, or in oversight, to leave
anything insufficiently explained, to complete
the passage in the next following lecture, or
in any one, though after an interval, which
may naturally recur to the subject. Thus the
printed text will always be simply what I have
read, or said ; and the lectures will be more
closely and easily connected than if I went
always on without the care of explanatory
retrospect.

It may have been observed, and perhaps
with question of my meaning,, by some readers,

40 The Art of England.

that in my last lecture I used the word
"materialistic" of the method of conception
common to Rossetti and Hunt, with the
greater number of their scholars. I used that
expression to denote their peculiar tendency
to feel and illustrate the relation of spiritual
creatures to the substance and conditions of the
visible world; more especially, the familiar, or
in a sort humiliating, accidents or employ-
ments of their earthly life; — as, for instance,
in the picture I referred to, Rossetti's Virgin
in the house of St. John, the Madonna's being
drawn at the moment when she rises to trim
their lamp. In many such cases, the incidents
may of course have symbolical meaning, as,
in the unfinished drawing by Rossetti of the
Passover, which I have so long left with you,
the boy Christ is watching the blood struck
on the doorpost; — but the peculiar value and
character of the treatment is in what I called
its material veracity, compelling the spectator's
belief, if he have the instinct of belief in him
at all, in the thing's having verily happened ;

//. Burne-Jones and JVatts. 41

and not being a mere poetical fancy. If
the spectator, on the contrary, have no
capacity of belief in him, the use of such
representation is in making him detect his
own incredulity, and recognize that in his
former dreamy acceptance of the story, he
had never really asked himself whether these
things were so.

Thus, in what I believe to have been in
actual time the first — though I do not claim
for it the slightest lead in suggestive influence,
yet the first dated example of such literal and
close realization — my own endeavour in the
third volume of c Modern Painters ' to describe
the incidents preceding the charge to Peter, I
have fastened on the words, " He girt his
fisher's coat about him, and did cast himself
into the sea," following them out with, "Then
to Peter, all wet and shivering, staring at
Christ in the sun;" not in the least supposing
or intending any symbolism either in the
coat, or the dripping water, or the morning
sunshine ; but merely and straitly striving to

42 The Art of England,

put the facts before the readers' eyes as
positively as if he had seen the thing come
to pass on Brighton beach, and an English
fisherman dash through the surf of it to the
feet of his captain, — once dead, and now with
the morning brightness on his face.

And you will observe farther, that this way
of thinking about a thing compels, with a
painter, also a certain way of painting it. I
do not mean a necessarily close or minute way,
but a necessarily complete, substantial, and
emphatic one. The thing may be expressed
with a few fierce dashes of the pencil ; but it
will be wholly and bodily there ; it may be
in the broadest and simplest terms, but nothing
will be hazy or hidden, nothing clouded round,
or melted away : and all that is told will be
as explanatory and lucid as may be — as of a
thing examined in daylight, not dreamt of in
moonlight.

I must delay you a little, though perhaps
tiresomely, to make myself well understood
on this point ; for the first celebrated pictures

//. Burne-yones and Watts. 43

of the pre-Raphaelite school having been
extremely minute in finish, you might easily
take minuteness for a speciality of the style,
—but it is not so in the least. Minuteness I
do somewhat claim, for a quality insisted upon
by myself, and required in the work of my
own pupils; it is — at least in landscape —
Turnerian and Ruskinian — not pre-Raphaelite
at all : — the pre-Raphaelism common to us all
is in the frankness and honesty of the touch,
not in its dimensions.

I think I may, once for all, explain this
to you, and convince you of it, by asking
you, when you next go up to London, to
look at a sketch by Vandyke in the National
Gallery, No. 680, purporting to represent
this very scene I have been speaking of, —
the miraculous draught of fishes. It is one
of the too numerous brown sketches in the
manner of the Flemish School, which seem to
me always rather done for the sake of wiping
the brush clean than of painting anything.
There is no colour in it, and no light and

44 eFhe ^rt °f England.

shade ; — but a certain quantity of bitumen is
rubbed about so as to slip more or less greasily
into the shape of figures ; and one of St. John's
(or St. James's) legs is suddenly terminated by
a wriggle of white across it, to signify that
he is standing in the sea. Now that was the
kind of work of the Dutch School, which I
spent so many pages in vituperating throughout
the first volume of 'Modern Painters' — pages,
seemingly, vain to this day ; for still, the
brown daubs are hung in the best rooms of
the National Gallery, and the loveliest Turner
drawings are nailed to the wall of its cellar, —
and might as well be buried at Pompeii for
any use they are to the British public ; — but,
vain or effectless as the said chapters may
be, they are altogether true in that firm
statement, that these brown flourishes of the
Dutch brush are by men who lived, virtually,
the gentle, at court, — the simple, in the
pothouse; and could indeed paint, according
to their habitation, a nobleman or a boor,
but were not only incapable of conceiving,

II. Burne-Jones and Watts. 45

but wholly unwishful to conceive, anything,
natural or supernatural, beyond the precincts
of the Presence and the tavern. So that
they especially failed in giving the life and
beauty of little things in lower nature ; and
if, by good hap, they may sometimes more or
less succeed in painting St. Peter the Fisher's
face, never by any chance realize for you the
green wave dashing over his feet.

Now, therefore, understand of the opposite
so called 'Pre-Raphaelite,' and, much more,
pre-Rubensite, society, that its primary virtue
is the trying to conceive things as they
are, and thinking and feeling them quite
out: — believing joyfully if we may, doubting
bravely, if we must, — but never mystifying,
or shrinking from, or choosing for argu-
ment's sake, this or that fact; but giving
every fact its own full power, and every
incident and accessory its own true place, —
so that, still keeping to our illustrations from
Brighton or Yarmouth beach, in that most
noble picture by Millais which probably

46 The Art of England,

most of you saw last autumn in London, the
'Caller Herrin',' — picture which, as a piece
of art, I should myself put highest of all yet
produced by the Pre-Raphaelite school; — in
that most noble picture, I say, the herrings
were painted just as well as the girl, and
the master was not the least afraid that,
for all he could do to them, you would
look at the herrings first.

Now then, I think I have got the manner
of Pre-Raphaelite c Realization ' — ' Verification -
— ' Materialization ' — or whatever else you
choose to call it, positively enough asserted
and defined : and hence you will see that it
follows, as a necessary consequence, that Pre-
Raphaelite subjects must usually be of real
persons in a solid world — not of personifi-
cations in a vaporescent one.

The persons may be spiritual, but they
are individual, — St. George, himself, not the
vague idea of Fortitude ; St. Cecily herself,
not the mere power of music. And, although
spiritual, there is no attempt whatever made

II. Bume-yones and Watts. 47

by this school to indicate their immortal nature
by any evanescence or obscurity of aspect.
All transparent ghosts and unoutlined spectra
are the work of failing imagination, — rest
you sure of that. Botticelli indeed paints
the Favonian breeze transparent, but never
the angel Gabriel ; and in the picture I was
telling you of in last lecture, — it there be a
fault which may jar for a moment on your
feelings when you first see it, I am afraid it
will be that the souls of the Innocents are a
little too chubby, and one or two of them, I
should say, just a dimple too fat.

And here I must branch for a moment
from the direct course of my subject, to
answer another question which may by this
time have occurred to some of my hearers,
how, if this school be so obstinately realistic,
it can also be characterized as romantic.

When we have concluded our review of
the present state of English art, we will
collect the general evidence of its romance ;
meantime, I will say only this much, for you

48 The Art of England,

to think out at your leisure, that romance
does not consist in the manner of represent-
ing or relating things, but in the kind of
passions appealed to by the things related.
The three romantic passions are those by
which you are told, in Wordsworth's aphor-
istic line, that the life of the soul is fed.

"We live by Admiration, Hope, and Love."
Admiration, meaning primarily all the forms
of Hero Worship, and secondarily, the kind
of feeling towards the beauty of nature, which
I have attempted too feebly to analyze in the
second volume of ' Modern Painters ' ; — Hope,
meaning primarily the habit of mind in which
we take present pain for the sake of future
pleasure, and expanding into the hope of
another world; — and Love, meaning of course
whatever is happiest or noblest in the life
either of that world or this.

Indicating, thus briefly, what, though not
always consciously, we mean by Romance, I
proceed with our present subject of enquiry,
from which I branched at the point where it

//. Burne~yones and Watts. 49

had been observed that the realistic school
could only develope its complete force in
representing persons, and could not happily
rest in personifications. Nevertheless, we find
one of the artists whose close friendship with
Rossetti, and fellowship with other members
of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, have more
or less identified his work with theirs, yet
differing from them all diametrically in this,
that his essential gift and habit of thought
is in personification, and that, — for sharp
and brief instance, had both Rossetti and he
been set to illustrate the first chapter of
Genesis, Rossetti would have painted either
Adam or Eve — but Edward Burne- Jones, a
Day of Creation.

And in this gift, he becomes a painter,
neither of Divine History, nor of Divine
Natural History, but of Mythology, accepted
as such, and understood by its symbolic figures
to represent only general truths, or abstract
ideas.

And here I must at once pray you, as I have

50 The Art of England,

prayed you to remove all associations of false-
hood from the word romance, so also to clear
them out of your faith, when you begin the
study of mythology. Never confuse a Myth
with a Lie, — nay, you must even be cautious
how far you even permit it to be called a fable.
Take the frequentest and simplest of myths for
instance — that of Fortune and her wheel. Enid
does not herself conceive, or in the least intend
the hearers of her song to conceive, that there
stands anywhere in the universe a real woman,
turning an adamantine wheel whose revolutions
have power over human destiny. She means
only to assert, under that image, more clearly
the law of Heaven's continual dealing with
man, — "He hath put down the mighty from
their seat, and hath exalted the humble and
meek."

But in the imagined symbol, or rather let
me say, the visiting and visible dream, of this
law, other ideas variously conducive to its clear-
ness are gathered ; — those of gradual and
irresistible motion of rise and fall, — the tide of

//. Burne-yones and Watts. 51

Fortune, as distinguished from instant change
or catastrophe; — those of the connection of the
fates of men with each other, the yielding and
occupation of high place, the alternately ap-
pointed and inevitable humiliation : — and the
fastening, in the sight of the Ruler of Destiny,
of all to the mighty axle which moves only as
the axle of the world. These things are told
or hinted to you, in the mythic picture, not
with the impertinence and the narrowness of
words, nor in any order compelling a mono-
tonous succession of thought, — but each as
you choose or chance to read it, to be rested
in or proceeded with, as you will.

Here then is the ground on which the
Dramatic, or personal, and Mythic — or personi-
fying, schools of our young painters, whether
we find for them a general name or not,
must be thought of as absolutely one — that,
as the dramatic painters seek to show you
the substantial truth of persons, so the mythic
school seeks to teach you the spiritual truth
of myths.

52 The Art of E?igland.

Truth is the vital power of the entire
school, Truth its armour — Truth its war-
word ; and the grotesque and wild forms of
imagination which, at first sight, seem to be
the reaction of a desperate fancy, and a
terrified faith, against the incisive scepticism
of recent science, so far from being so, are
a part of that science itself: they are the
results of infinitely more accurate scholar-
ship, of infinitely more detective examination,
of infinitely more just and scrupulous in-
tegrity of thought, than was possible to any
artist during the two preceding centuries ;
and exactly as the eager and sympathetic
passion of the dramatic designer now assures
you of the way in which an event happened,
so the scholarly and sympathetic thought of
the mythic designer now assures you of the
meaning, in what a fable said.

Much attention has lately been paid by
archaeologists to what they are pleased to call
the development of myths : but, for the most
part, with these two erroneous ideas to begin

//. Burne-Jones and Watts. 53

with — the first, that mythology is a temporary
form of human folly, from which they are
about in their own perfect wisdom to achieve
our final deliverance ; the second, that you
may conclusively ascertain the nature of these
much-to-be-lamented misapprehensions, by the
types which early art presents of them ! You
will find in the first section of my c Queen of
the Air,' contradiction enough of the first super-
cilious theory; — though not with enough clear-
ness the counter statement, that the thoughts
of all the greatest and wisest men hitherto,
since the world was made, have been expressed
through mythology.

You may find a piece of most convincing
evidence on this point by noticing that when-
ever, by Plato, you are extricated from the play
of logic, and from the debate of points dubitable
or trivial; and are to be told somewhat of his
inner thought, and highest moral conviction, —
that instant you are cast free in the elements
of phantasy, and delighted by a beautiful myth.
And I believe that every master here who is

5

54 7he Art of England.

interested, not merely in the history, but in
the substance, of moral philosophy, will confirm
me in saying that the direct maxims of the
greatest sages of Greece, do not, in the sum of
them, contain a code of ethics either so pure,
or so practical, as that which may be gathered
by the attentive interpretation of the myths
of Pindar and Aristophanes.

Of the folly of the second notion above-
named, held by the majority of our students of
'development' in fable, — that they can estimate
the dignity of ideas by the symbols used for
them, in early art; and trace the succession of
thought in the human mind by the tradition
of ornament in its manufactures, I have no
time to-day to give any farther illustration
than that long since instanced to you, the
difference between the ideas conveyed by
Homer's description of the shield of Achilles,
(much more, Hesiod's of that of Herakles,) and
the impression which we should receive from
any actually contemporary Greek art. You
may with confidence receive the restoration

//. Burne-jfones and Watts, 55

of the Homeric shield, given by Mr. A. Murray
in his history of Greek sculpture, as authorita-
tively representing the utmost graphic skill which
could at the time have been employed in the
decoration of a hero's armour. But the poet
describes the rude imagery as producing the
effect of reality, and might praise in the same
words the sculpture of Donatello or Ghiberti.
And you may rest entirely satisfied that when
the surrounding realities are beautiful, the
imaginations, in all distinguished human in-
tellect, are beautiful also, and that the forms
of gods and heroes were entirely noble in
dream, and in contemplation, long before the
clay became ductile to the hand of the potter,
or the likeness of a living body possible in
ivory and gold.

And herein you see with what a deeply
interesting function the modern painter of
mythology is invested. He is to place, at the
service of former imagination, the art which
it had not — and to realize for us, with a
truth then impossible, the visions described

56 The Art of England.

by the wisest of men as embodying their
most pious thoughts and their most exalted
doctrines: not indeed attempting with any
literal exactitude to follow the words of the
visionary, for no man can enter literally into
the mind of another, neither can any great
designer refuse to obey the suggestions of
his own : but only bringing the resources
of accomplished art to unveil the hidden
splendour of old imagination; and showing
us that the forms of gods and angels which
appeared in fancy to the prophets and saints
of antiquity, were indeed more natural and
beautiful than the black and red shadows on
a Greek vase, or the dogmatic outlines of
a Byzantine fresco.

It should be a ground of just pride to
all of us here in Oxford, that out of this
University came the painter whose indefati-
gable scholarship and exhaustless fancy have
together fitted him for this task, in a degree
far distinguishing him above all contemporary
European designers. It is impossible for the

//. Burne-Jones a?id Watts. 57

general public to estimate the quantity of
careful and investigatory reading, and the
fine tact of literary discrimination, which are
signified by the command now possessed by
Mr. Burne-Jones over the entire range both
of Northern and Greek mythology, or the
tenderness at once, and largeness, of sympathy
which have enabled him to harmonize these
with the loveliest traditions of Christian legend.
Hitherto, there has been adversity between the
schools of classic and Christian art, only in
part conquered by the most liberal-minded of
artists and poets : Nicholas of Pisa accepts
indeed the technical aid of antiquity, but
with much loss to his Christian sentiment ;
Dante uses the imagery of iEschylus for the
more terrible picturing of the Hell to which,
in common with the theologians of his age,
he condemned his instructor; but while Minos
and the Furies are represented by him as
still existent in Hades, there is no place in
Paradise for Diana or Athena. Contrariwise,
the later revival of the legends of antiquity

58 The Art of Rngla?id.

meant scorn of those of Christendom. It
is but fifty years ago that the value of the
latter was again perceived and represented
to us by Lord Lindsay : and it is only
within the time which may be looked back to
by the greater number even of my younger
auditors, that the transition of Athenian mytho-
logy, through Byzantine, into Christian, has
been first felt, and then traced and proved, by
the penetrative scholarship of the men belong-
ing to this Pre-Raphaelite school, chiefly
Mr. Burne-Jones and Mr. William Morris, —
noble collaborateurs, of whom, may I be
forgiven, in passing, for betraying to you a
pretty little sacredness of their private lite —
that they solemnly and jovially have break-
fasted together every Sunday, for many and
many a year.

Thus far, then, I am able with security to
allege to you the peculiar function of this
greatly gifted and highly trained English
painter ; and with security also, the function
of any noble myth, in the teaching, even of

//. Burne-Jones and Watts. 59

this practical and positive British race. But
now, when tor purposes of direct criticism I
proceed to ask farther in what manner or with
what precision of art any given myth should be
presented — instantly we find ourselves involved
in a group of questions and difficulties which
I feel to be quite beyond the proper sphere of
this Professorship. So long as we have only to
deal with living creatures, or solid substances,
I am able to tell you— and to show — that they
are to be painted under certain optical laws
which prevail in our present atmosphere ; and
with due respect to laws of gravity and move-
ment which cannot be evaded in our terrestrial
constitution. But when we have only an idea
to paint, or a symbol, I do not feel authorized to
insist any longer upon these vulgar appearances,
or mortal and temporal limitations. I cannot
arrogantly or demonstratively define to you
how the light should fall on the two sides of
the nose of a Day of Creation ; nor obstinately
demand botanical accuracy in the graining of
the wood employed for the spokes of a Wheel of

60 The Art of England,

Fortune. Indeed, so far from feeling justified
in any such vexatious and vulgar requirements,
I am under an instinctive impression that
some kind of strangeness or quaintness, or even
violation of probability, would be not merely
admissible, but even desirable, in the delineation
of a figure intended neither to represent a
body, nor a spirit, neither an animal, nor a
vegetable, but only an idea, or an aphorism.
Let me, however, before venturing one step
forward amidst the insecure snows and cloudy
wreaths of the Imagination, secure your confi-
dence in my guidance, so far as I may gain it
by the assertion of one general rule of proper
safeguard ; that no mystery or majesty of
intention can be alleged by a painter to justify
him in careless or erroneous drawing of any
object — so far as he chooses to represent it at
all. The more license we grant to the audacity
of his conception, the more careful he should
be to give us no causeless ground of complaint
or offence : while, in the degree of importance
and didactic value which he attaches to his

II. Bume-jfones and Watts. 61

parable, will be the strictness of his duty to
allow no faults, by any care avoidable, to
disturb the spectator's attention, or provoke
his criticism.

I cannot but to this day remember, partly
with amusement, partly in vexed humiliation,
the simplicity with which I brought out,
one evening when the sculptor Marochetti
was dining with us at Denmark Hill, some
of the then but little known drawings of
Rossetti, for his instruction in the beauties of
Pre-Raphaelitism.

You may see with the slightest glance at
the statue of Coeur de Lion, (the only really
interesting piece of historical sculpture we have
hitherto given to our City populace), that
Marochetti was not only trained to perfectness
of knowledge and perception in the structure
of the human body, but had also peculiar
delight in the harmonies of line which express
its easy and powerful motion. Knowing a
little more both of men and things now,
than I did on the evening in question, I

62 The Art of England.

too clearly apprehend that the violently
variegated segments and angular anatomies of
Sir Lancelot at the grave of King Arthur must
have produced on the bronze-minded sculptor
simply the effect of a Knave of Clubs and
Queen of Diamonds ; and that the Italian
master, in his polite confession of inability
to recognize the virtues of Rossetti, cannot but
have greatly suspected the sincerity of his
entertainer, in the profession of sympathy
with his own.

No faults, then, that we can help, — this
we lay down for certain law to start with ;
therefore, especially, no ignoble faults, of
mere measurement, proportion, perspective,
and the like, may be allowed to art which
is by claim, learned and magistral ; therefore
bound to be, in terms, grammatical. And
yet we are not only to allow, but even to
accept gratefully, any kind of strangeness
and deliberate difference from merely realistic
painting, which may raise the work, not only
above vulgarity, but above incredulity. For

//. Burne-yones and Watts, 63

it is often by realizing it most positively that
we shall render it least credible.

For instance, in the prettiest design of
the series, by Richter, illustrating the Lord's
Prayer, which I asked you in my last lecture
to use for household lessons; — that of the
mother giving her young children their dinner
in the field which their father is sowing, —
one of the pieces of the enclosing arabesque
represents a little winged cherub emergent
from a flower, holding out a pitcher to a
bee, who stoops to drink. The species of
bee is not scientifically determinable ; the
wings of the tiny servitor terminate rather in
petals than plumes ; and the unpretentious
jug suggests nothing of the clay of Dresden,
Sevres, or Chelsea. You would not, I think,
find your children understand the lesson in
divinity better, or believe it more frankly,
if the hymenopterous insect were painted so
accurately that, (to use the old method of
eulogium on painting,) you could hear it buzz;
and the cherub completed into the living like-

64 The Art of England.

ness of a little boy with blue eyes and red
cheeks, but of the size of a humming-bird.
In this and in myriads of similar cases, it is
possible to imagine from an outline what a
finished picture would only provoke us to
deny in contempt.

Again, in my opening lecture on Light
and Shade, the sixth of those given in the
year 1870, I traced in some completeness the
range of ideas which a Greek vase-painter
was in the habit of conveying by the mere
opposition of dark and light in the figures
and background, with the occasional use of a
modifying purple. It has always been matter
of surprise to me that the Greeks rested in
colours so severe, and I have in several
places formerly ventured to state my convic-
tion that their sense of colour was inferior to
that of other races. Nevertheless, you will
find that the conceptions of moral and physical
truth which they were able with these narrow
means to convey, are far loftier than the utmost
that can be gathered from the iridescent delicacy

//. Burne-yones and Watts. 65

of Chinese design, or the literally imitative
dexterities of Japan.

Now, in both these methods, Mr. Burne-
Jones has developed their applicable powers
to their highest extent. His outline is the
purest and quietest that is possible to the
pencil ; nearly all other masters accentuate
falsely, or in some places, as Richter, add
shadows which are more or less conventional.
But an outline by Burne-Jones is as pure as
the lines of engraving on an Etruscan mirror ;
and I placed the series of drawings from the
story of Psyche in your school as faultlessly
exemplary in this kind. Whether pleasing or
displeasing to your taste, they are entirely
masterful ; and it is only by trying to copy
these or other such outlines, that you will
fully feel the grandeur of action in the moving
hand, tranquil and swift as a hawk's flight,
and never allowing a vulgar tremor, or a
momentary impulse, to impair its precision, or
disturb its serenity.

Again, though Mr. Jones has a sense of

66 The Art of England.

colour, in its kind, perfect, he is essentially
a chiaroscurist. Diametrically opposed to
Rossetti, who could conceive in colour only,
he prefers subjects which can be divested
of superficial attractiveness, appeal first to the
intellect and the heart ; and convey their
lesson either through intricacies of delicate
line, or in the dimness or coruscation of
ominous light.

The heads of Medea and of Danae, which
I placed in your schools long ago, are repre-
sentative of all that you need aim at in
chiaroscuro ; and lately a third type of his
best work, in subdued pencil light and shade,
has been placed within your reach in Dr.
Acland's drawing-room, — the portrait of Miss
Gladstone, in which you will see the painter's
best powers stimulated to their utmost, and
reaching a serene depth' of expression unattain-
able by photography, and nearly certain to
be lost in finished painting.

For there is this perpetually increasing
difficulty towards the completion of any work,

//. Burne~yones and Watts. 67

that the added forces of colour destroy the
value of the pale and subtle tints or shades
which give the nobleness to expression ; so
that the most powerful masters in oil painting
rarely aim at expression, but only at general
character — and I believe the great artist whose
name I have associated with that of Burne-
Jones as representing the mythic schools, Mr.
G. F. Watts, has been partly restrained, and
partly oppressed by the very earnestness and
extent of the study through which he has
sought to make his work on all sides perfect.
His constant reference to the highest examples
of Greek art in form, and his sensitiveness to
the qualities at once of tenderness and breadth
in pencil and chalk drawing, have virtually
ranked him among the painters of the great
Athenian days, of whom, in the sixth book
of the Laws, Plato wrote : — " You know how
the anciently accurate toil of a painter seems
never to reach a term that satisfies him ; but
he must either farther touch, or soften the
touches laid already, and never seems to reach

68 The Art of England.

a point where he has not yet some power to
do more, so as to make the things he has
drawn more beautiful, and more apparent.
koXXlco re Kat (pavepcorepa.

Of course within the limits of this lecture
there is no possibility of entering on the
description of separate pictures ; but I trust
it may be hereafter my privilege to carry
you back to the beginning of English historical
art, when Mr. Watts first showed victorious
powers of design in the competition for the
frescoes of the Houses of Parliament — and
thence to trace for you, in some completeness,
the code of mythic and heroic story which
these two artists, Mr. Watts and Mr. Burne-
Jones, have gathered, and in the most deep
sense written, for us.

To-day I have only brought with me a
few designs by Mr. Burne-Jones, of a kind
which may be to some extent well repre-
sented in photograph, and to which I shall
have occasion to refer in subsequent lectures.
They are not to be copied, but delighted in,

//. Burne-Jones and Watts. 69

by those of you who care for them, — and,

under Mr. Fisher's care, I shall recommend

them to be kept out of the way of those

who do not. They include the Days of

Creation; three outlines from Solomon's Song;

two from the Romance of the Rose ; the

great one of Athena inspiring Humanity;

and the story of St. George and Sabra. They

will be placed in a cabinet in the upper

gallery, together with the new series of

Turner sketches, and will by no means be

intruded on your attention, but made easily

accessible to your wish.

To justify this monastic treatment of them,

I must say a few words, in conclusion, of the

dislike which these designs, in common with

those of Carpaccio, excite in the minds of most

English people of a practical turn. A few

words only, both because this lecture is already

long enough, and besides, because the point

in question is an extremely curious one, and

by no means to be rightly given account of

in a concluding sentence. The point is, that

6

70 The Art of England.

in the case of ordinary painters, however
peculiar their manner, people either like them,
or pass them by with a merciful contempt or
condemnation, calling them stupid, or weak,
or foolish, but without any expression of
real disgust or dislike. But in the case of
painters of the mythic schools, people either
greatly like them, or they dislike in a sort
of frightened and angry way, as if they had
been personally aggrieved. And the persons
who feel this antipathy most strongly, are
often extremely sensible and good, and of
the kind one is extremely unwilling to offend;
but either they are not fond of art at all,
or else they admire, naturally, pictures from
real life only, such as, to name an extremely
characteristic example, those of the (I believe,
Bavarian) painter Vautier, of whom I shall
have much, in another place, to say in praise,
but of whom, with the total school he leads,
I must peremptorily assure my hearers that
their manner of painting is merely part of our
general modern system of scientific illustration

//. Burne-Jones and Watts. 71

aided by photography, and has no claim to
rank with works of creative art at all : and
farther, that it is essentially illiterate, and can
teach you nothing but what you can easily
see without the painter's trouble. Here is,
for instance, a very charming little picture
of a school girl going to her class, and
telling her doll to be good till she comes
back; — you like it, and ought to like it,
because you see the same kind of incident
in your own children every day ; but I
should say, on the whole, you had better
look at the real children than the picture.
Whereas, you can't every day at home see
the goddess Athena telling you yourselves to
be good, — and perhaps you wouldn't alto-
gether like to, if you could.

Without venturing on the rudeness of
hinting that any such feeling underlies the
English dislike of didactic art, I will pray
you at once to check the habit of carelessly
blaming the things that repel you in early or
existing religious artists, and to observe, for

72 The Art of England.

the sum of what is to be noted respecting
the four of whom I have thus far ventured
to speak — Mr. Rossetti, Mr. Hunt, Mr. Jones,
and Mr. Watts, that they are in the most
solemn sense, Hero-worshippers ; and that,
whatever may be their faults or shortcomings,
their aim has always been the brightest and
the noblest possible. The more you can
admire them, and the longer you read, the
more your minds and hearts will be filled
with the best knowledge accessible in history,
and the loftiest associations conveyable by the
passionate and reverent skill, of which I have
told you in the ' Laws of Fesole,' that " All
great Art is Praise."

The Art of England.

LECTURES GIVEN IN OXFORD,

BY

JOHN RUSKIN, D.C.L., LL.D.,

HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, AND HONORARY FELLOW OF CORPUS-CHRISTI COLLEGE,

DURING HIS

SECOND TENURE OF THE SLADE PROFESSORSHIP.

LECTURE III.

CLASSIC SCHOOLS OF PAINTING.

GEORGE ALLEN,
SUNNYSIDE, ORPINGTON, KENT.

1883.

LECTURE III.

CLASSIC SCHOOLS OF PAINTING.
Sir F. Leighton and Alma Tadenta.

Lecture III.

CLASSIC SCHOOLS OF PAINTING.

SIR F. LEIGHTON AND ALMA TADEMA.

I HAD originally intended this lecture to be
merely the exposition, with direct reference
to painting and literature, of the single line
of Horace which sums the conditions of a
gentleman's education, be he rich or poor,
learned or unlearned :

" Est animus tibi, — sunt mores et lingua, —
fidesque,"

c animus ' being that part of him in which
he differs from an ox or an ape ; ' mores,' the
difference in him from the c malignum vulgus';
c lingua,' eloquence, the power of expression;
and < fides,' fidelity, to the Master, or Mistress,
or Law, that he loves. But since I came to

76 The Art of England,

London and saw the exhibitions, I have
thought good to address my discourse more
pertinently to what must at this moment
chiefly interest you in them. And I must at
once, and before everything, tell you the
delight given me by the quite beautiful work
in portraiture, with which my brother-professor
Richmond leads and crowns the general splen-
dour of the Grosvenor Gallery. I am doubly
thankful that his release from labour in Oxford
has enabled him to develope his special powers
so nobly, and that my own return grants me
the privilege of publicly expressing to him the
admiration we all must feel.

And now in this following lecture, you
must please understand at once that I use
the word c classic,' first in its own sense of
senatorial, academic, and authoritative ; but,
as a necessary consequence of that first
meaning, also in the sense, more proper
to our immediate subject, of Anti-Gothic ;
antagonist, that is to say, to the temper in
which Gothic architecture was built : and not

77Y. Sir F. Leighton and Alma Tadema. 77

only antagonist to that form of art, but
contemptuous of it ; unforgiving to its faults,
cold to its enthusiasms, and impatient of its
absurdities. In which contempt the classic
mind is certainly illiberal ; and narrower than
the mind of an equitable art student should be
in these enlightened days : — for instance, in
the British Museum, it is quite right that the
British public should see the Elgin marbles to
the best advantage ; but not that they should
be unable to see any example of the sculpture of
Chartres or Wells, unless they go to the miscel-
laneous collection at Kensington, where Gothic
saints and sinners are confounded alike among
steam thrashing-machines and dynamite-proof
ships of war ; or to the Crystal Palace, where
they are mixed up with Rimmel's perfumery.
For this hostility, in our present English
schools, between the votaries of classic and
Gothic art, there is no ground in past history,
and no excuse in the nature of those arts
themselves. Briefly, to-day, I would sum for
you the statement of their historical continuity

j 8 The Art of England.

which you will find expanded and illustrated
in my former lectures.

Only observe, for the present, you must
please put Oriental Art entirely out of your
heads. I shall allow myself no allusion to
China, Japan, India, Assyria, or Arabia: though
this restraint on myself will be all the more
difficult, because, only a few weeks since, I
had a delightful audience of Sir Frederick
Leigh ton beside his Arabian fountain, and
beneath his Aladdin's palace glass. Yet I
shall not allude, in what I say of his designs,
to any points in which they may perchance
have been influenced by those enchantments.
Similarly there were some charming Zobeides
and Cleopatras among the variegated colour
fancies of Mr. Alma Tadema in the last
Grosvenor ; but I have nothing yet to say
of them : it is only as a careful and learned
interpreter of certain phases of Greek and
Roman life, and as himself a most accom-
plished painter, on long-established principles,
that I name him as representatively £ classic'

///. Sir F. Leighton and Alma Tadema. jq

The summary, therefore, which I have to
give you of the course of Pagan and Gothic
Art must be understood as kept wholly on
this side of the Bosphorus, and recognizing
no farther shore beyond the Mediterranean.
Thus fixing our termini, you find from the
earliest times, in Greece and Italy, a multitude
of artists gradually perfecting the knowledge
and representation of the human body, glorified
by the exercises of war. And you have, north •
of Greece and Italy, innumerably and incor-
rigibly savage nations, representing, with rude
and irregular efforts, on huge stones, and ice-
borne boulders, on cave-bones and forest-stocks
and logs, with any manner of innocent tinting
or scratching possible to them, sometimes beasts,
sometimes hobgoblins — sometimes, heaven only
knows what ; but never attaining any skill
in figure-drawing, until, whether invading or
invaded, Greece and Italy teach them what
a human being is like ; and with that help
they dream and blunder on through the cen-
turies, achieving many fantastic and amusing

8o The Art of England.

things, more especially the art of rhyming,
whereby they usually express their notions of
things far better than by painting. Neverthe-
less, in due course we get a Holbein out of
them ; and, in the end, for best product
hitherto, Sir Joshua, and the supremely Gothic
Gainsborough, whose last words we may take
for a beautiful reconciliation of all schools
and souls who have done their work to the
best of their knowledge and conscience, — -"We
are all going to Heaven, and Vandyke is of
the company."

" We are all going to Heaven." Either
that is true of men and nations, or else
that they are going the other way ; and the
question of questions for them is — not how
far from heaven they are, but whether they
are going to it. Whether in Gothic or Classic
Art, it is not the wisdom or the barbarism
that you have to estimate — not the skill nor the
rudeness ; — but the tendency. For instance,
just before coming to Oxford this time, I
received by happy chance from Florence the

77Y. Sir F. Leighto?i and Alma Tadema. 81

noble book just published at Monte Cassino,
giving facsimiles of the Benedictine manu-
scripts there, between the tenth and thirteenth
centuries. Out of it I have chosen these four
magnificent letters to place in your schools —
magnificent I call them, as pieces of Gothic
writing ; but they are still, you will find on
close examination, extremely limited in range
of imaginative subject. For these, and all the
other letters of the alphabet in that central
Benedictine school at the period in question,
were composed of nothing else but packs
of white dogs, jumping, with more contortion
of themselves than has been contrived even by
modern stage athletes, through any quantity
of hoops. But I place these chosen examples
in our series of lessons, not as patterns of
dog-drawing, but as distinctly progressive
Gothic art, leading infallibly forward — though
the good monks had no notion how far,
— to the Benedictine collie, in Landseer's
1 Shepherd's Chief Mourner,' and the Benedictine
bulldog, in Mr. Britton Riviere's 'Sympathy/

82 The Art of England.

On the other hand, here is an enlarge-
ment, made to about the proper scale, from
a small engraving which I brought with
me from Naples, of a piece of the Classic
Pompeian art which has lately been so much
the admiration of the aesthetic cliques of
Paris and London. It purports to represent
a sublimely classic cat, catching a sublimely
classic chicken ; and is perhaps quite as
much like a cat as the white spectra of
Monte Cassino are like dogs. But at a
glance I can tell you, — nor will you,. surely,
doubt the truth of the telling, — -that it is art
in precipitate decadence; that no bettering or
even far dragging on of its existence is possible
for it ; — that it is the work of a nation
already in the jaws of death, and of a school
which is passing away in shame.

Remember, therefore, and write it on the
very tables of your heart, that you must
never, when you have to judge of character
in national styles, regard them in their deca-
dence, but always in their spring and youth.

77Y. Sir F. Leighton and Ahna Tadema, 83

Greek art is to be studied from Homeric
days to those of Marathon ; Gothic, from
Alfred to the Black Prince in England, from
Clovis to St. Louis in France ; and the com-
bination of both, which occurs first with
absolute balance in the pulpit by Nicholas
of Pisa in her baptistery, thenceforward up to
Perugino and Sandro Botticelli. A period of
decadence follows among all the nations of
Europe, out of the ashes and embers of which
the flame leaps again in Rubens and Vandyke;
and so gradually glows and coruscates into
the intermittent corona of indescribably various
modern mind, of which in England you may,
as I said, take Sir Joshua and Gainsborough
for not only the topmost, but the hitherto
total, representatives ; total, that is to say,
out of the range of landscape, and above that
of satire and caricature. All that the rest
can do partially, they can do perfectly. They
do it, not only perfectly, but nationally ; they
are at once the greatest, and the Englishest,
of all our school.

84 The Art of England.

The Englishest — and observe also, there-
fore the greatest : take that for an universal,
exceptionless law ; — the largest soul of any
country is altogether its own. Not the citizen
of the world, but of his own city, — nay, for
the best men, you may say, of his own village.
Patriot always, provincial always, of his own
crag or field always. A Liddesdale man, or
a Tynedale ; Angelico from the Rock of
Fesole, or Virgil from the Mantuan marsh.
You dream of National unity ! — you might as
well strive to melt the stars down into one
nugget, and stamp them small into coin with
one Caesar's face.

What mental qualities, especially English,
you find in the painted heroes and beauties
of Reynolds and Gainsborough, I can only
discuss with you hereafter. But what external
and corporeal qualities these masters of our
masters love to paint, I must ask you to-day
to consider for a few moments, under Mr.
Carlyle's guidance, as well as mine, and with
the analysis of ' Sartor Resartus.' Take, as

///. Sir F. Leighton and Alma Tadema. 85

types of the best work ever laid on British
canvas, — types which I am sure you will
without demur accept, — Sir Joshua's Age of
Innocence, and Mrs. Pelham feeding chickens;
Gainsborough's Mrs. Graham, divinely doing
nothing, and Blue Boy similarly occupied ;
and, finally, Reynolds' Lord Heathfield mag-
nanimously and irrevocably locking up Gibraltar.
Suppose, now, under the instigation of Mr.
Carlyle and 'Sartor,' and under the counsel
of Zeuxis and Parrhasius, we had it really in
our power to bid Sir Joshua and Gainsborough
paint all these over again, in the classic
manner. Would you really insist on having
her white frock taken off the Age of Inno-
cence; on the Blue Boy's divesting himself of
his blue ; on — we may not dream of any-
thing more classic — Mrs. Graham's taking
the feathers out of her hat ; and on Lord
Heathfield's parting, — I dare not suggest, with
his regimentals, but his orders of the Bath,
or what else ?

I own that I cannot, even myself, as I

86 The Art of England,

propose the alternatives, answer absolutely as
a Goth, nor without some wistful leanings
towards classic principle. Nevertheless, I feel
confident in your general admission that the
charm of all these pictures is in great degree
dependent on toilette ; that the fond and
graceful flatteries of each master do in no
small measure consist in his management of
frillings and trimmings, cuffs and collarettes ;
and on beautiful flingings or fastenings of
investiture, which can only here and there be
called a drapery ', but insists on the perfectness
of the forms it conceals, and deepens their
harmony by its contradiction. And although
now and then, when great ladies wish to be
painted as sibyls or goddesses, Sir Joshua
does his best to bethink himself of Michael
Angelo, and Guido, and the Lightnings, and
the Auroras, and all the rest of it, — you will,
I think, admit that the culminating sweet-
ness and Tightness of him are in some little
Lady So-and-so, with round hat and strong
shoes; and that a final separation from the

///. Sir F. height on a?id Alma Tadema. 87

Greek art which can be proud in a torso
without a head, is achieved by the master who
paints for you five little girls' heads, without
ever a torso !

Thus, then, we arrive at a clearly in-
telligible distinction between the Gothic and
Classic schools, and a clear notion also of
their dependence on one another. All jesting
apart, — I think you may safely take Luca
della Robbia with his scholars for an exponent
of their unity, to all nations. Luca is brightly
Tuscan, with the dignity of a Greek ; he
has English simplicity, French grace, Italian
devotion, — and is, I think, delightful to the
truest lovers of art in all nations, and of all
ranks. The Florentine Contadina rejoices to
see him above her fruit-stall in the Mercato
Vecchio : and, having by chance the other
day a little Nativity by him on the floor
of my study (one of his frequentest designs
of the Infant Christ laid on the ground, and
the Madonna kneeling to Him) — having it, I
say, by chance on the floor, when a fashion-

88 The Art of England.

able little girl with her mother came to see
me, the child about three years old — though
there were many pretty and glittering things
about the room which might have caught
her eye or her fancy, the first thing, never-
theless, my little lady does, is to totter quietly
up to the white Infant Christ, and kiss it.

Taking, then, Luca, for central between
Classic and Gothic in sculpture, for central
art of Florence, in painting, I show you the
copies made for the St. George's Guild, of the
two frescoes by Sandro Botticelli, lately bought
by the French Government for the Louvre.
These copies, made under the direction of
Mr. C. F. Murray, while the frescoes were
still untouched, are of singular value now.
For in their transference to canvas for carriage
much violent damage was sustained by the
originals ; and as, even before, they were not
presentable to the satisfaction of the French
public, the backgrounds were filled in with
black, the broken edges cut away ; and, thus
repainted and maimed, they are now, dis-

iTY. Sir F. Leighton and Alma Tadema. 89

graced and glassless, let into the wall of a
stair-landing on the outside of the Louvre
galleries.

You will judge for yourselves of their de-
servings ; but for my own part I can assure
you of their being quite central and classic
Florentine painting, and types of the manner
in which, so far as you follow the instructions
given in the c Laws of Fesole,' you will be
guided to paint. Their subjects should be
of special interest to us in Oxford and Cam-
bridge, as bearing on institutions of colleges
for maidens no less than bachelors. For these
frescoes represent the Florentine ideal of edu-
cation for maid and bachelor, — the one baptized
by the Graces for her marriage, and the other
brought to the tutelage of the Great Powers
of Knowledge, under a great presiding Muse,
whose name you must help me to interpret ;
and with good help, both from maid and
bachelor, I hope we shall soon be able to
name, and honour, all their graces and virtues

rightly.

8

90 The Art of England.

Five out of the six Sciences and Powers
on her right hand and left, I know. They
are, on her left — geometry, astronomy, and
music ; on her right — logic and rhetoric.
The third, nearest her, I do not know, and
will not guess. She herself bears a mighty
bow, and I could give you conjectural inter-
pretations of her, if I chose, to any extent ;
but will wait until I hear what you think
of her yourselves. I must leave you also to
discover by whom the youth is introduced
to the great conclave ; but observe, that, as
in the frescoes of the Spanish Chapel, before
he can approach that presence he has passed
through the ' Strait Gate,' of which the bar has
fallen, and the valve is thrown outwards.
This portion of the fresco, on which the
most important significance of the whole
depended, was cut away in the French
restoration.

Taking now Luca and Sandro for standards
of sweet consent in the feelings of either
school, falling aside from them according to

///. Sir F. Leighton and Alma Tade77ia. 91

their likings or knowledge, you have the two
evermore adverse parties, of whom Lord
Lindsay speaks, as one studying the spirit, and
the other the flesh : but you will find it more
simply true to say that the one studies the
head, and the other the body. And I think
I am almost alone among recent tutors or
professors, in recommending you to study both,
at their best, and neither the skull of the one,
nor skeleton of the other.

I had a special lesson, leading me to this
balance, when I was in Venice, in 1880.
The authorities of the Academy did me the
grace of taking down my two pet pictures of
St. Ursula, and putting them into a quiet
room for me to copy. Now in this quiet
room where I was allowed to paint, there
were a series of casts from the iEgina marbles,
which I never had seen conveniently before ;
and so, on my right hand and left, I had,
all day long, the best pre-Praxitelite Classic
art, and the best pre-Raphaelite Gothic art :
and could turn to this side, or that, in an

92 The Art of England.

instant, to enjoy either ; — which I could do,
in each case, with my whole heart ; only
on this condition, that if I was to admire
St. Ursula, it was necessary on the whole to
be content with her face, and not to be too
critical or curious about her elbows; but,
in the iEgina marbles, one's principal atten-
tion had to be given to the knees and elbows,
while no ardent sympathies were excited by
the fixed smile upon the face.

Without pressing our northern cherubic
principle to an extreme, it is really a true
and extremely important consequence that all
portraiture is essentially Gothic. You will
find it stated — and with completely illustrative
proof, in i Aratra Pentelici,' that portraiture
was the destruction of Greek design ; certain
exceptions being pointed out which I do not
wish you now to be encumbered with. You
may understand broadly that we Goths claim
portraiture altogether for our own, and con-
tentedly leave the classic people to round
their chins by rule, and fix their smiles by

///. Sir F. Leighton and Alma Tadema. 93

precedent : we like a little irregularity in
feature, and a little caprice in humour — and
with the condition of dramatic truth in pas-
sion, necessarily accept dramatic difference in
feature.

Our English masters of portraiture must
not therefore think that I have treated them
with disrespect, in not naming them, in these
lectures, separately from others. Portraiture
is simply a necessary function of good Gothic
painting, nor can any man claim pre-eminence
in epic or historic art who does not first
excel in that. Nevertheless, be it said in
passing, that the number of excellent portraits
given daily in our illustrated papers prove
the skill of mere likeness-taking to be no
unfrequent or particularly admirable one ;
and that it is to be somewhat desired that
our professed portrait-painters should render
their work valuable in all respects, and
exemplary in its art, no less than delightful
in its resemblance. The public, who are
naturally in the habit of requiring rather the

94 1 he Art of England.

felicity and swiftness of likeness than abstract
excellence in painting, are always ready to
forgive the impetuosity which resembles force ;
and the interests connected with rate of
production tend also towards the encour-
agement of superficial execution. Whereas
in a truly great school, for the reasons given
in my last lecture, it may often be in-
evitable, and sometimes desirable, that works
of high imaginative range and faculty should
be slightly traced, and without minuteness
finished ; but there is no excuse for imper-
fection in a portrait, or failure of attention
to its minor accessories. I have long ago
given, for one instance of perfect portraiture,
Holbein's George Guysen, at Berlin, quite
one of the most accomplished pictures in
the world ; and in my last visit to Florence
none of the pictures before known in the
Uffizii retained their power over me so
completely as a portrait of a lady in the
Tribune, which is placed as a pendant to
Raphael's Fornarina, and has always been

77T. Sir F. Leighton and Alma Tadema. 95

attributed to Raphael, being without doubt
by some earlier and more laborious master;
and, by whomsoever it may be, unrivalled
in European galleries for its faultless and
unaffected finish.

I may be permitted in this place to
express my admiration of the kind of por-
traiture, which without supporting its claim
to public attention by the celebrity of its
subjects, renders the pictures of Mr. Stacy
Marks so valuable as epitomes and types of
English life. No portrait of any recognized
master in science could be more interesting
than the gentle Professor in this year's
Academy, from whom even a rebelliously
superficial person like myself might be con-
tent to receive instruction in the mysteries
of anatomy. Many an old traveller's remem-
brances were quite pathetically touched by
his monumental record of the c Three Jolly
Postboys ' ; and that he scarcely paints for
us but in play, is our own fault. Among
all the endeavours in English historical paint-

g6 The Art of England,

ing exhibited in recent years, quite the most
conscientious, vivid, and instructive, was Mr.
Marks' rendering of the interview between
Lord Say and Jack Cade ; and its quiet sin-
cerity was only the cause of its being passed
without attention.

In turning now from these subjects of
Gothic art to consider the classic ideal,
though I do so in painful sense of trans-
gressing the limits of my accurate knowledge,
I do not feel entirely out of my element,
because in some degree I claim even Sir
Frederick Leighton as a kindred Goth. For,
if you will overpass quickly in your minds
what you remember of the treasures of Greek
antiquity, you will find that, among them all,
you can get no notion of what a Greek
little girl was like. Matronly Junos, and
tremendous Demeters, and Gorgonian Minervas,
as many as you please ; but for my own
part, always speaking as a Goth, I had much
rather have had some idea of the Spartan
Helen dabbling with Castor and Pollux in

///. Sir F. Leigh ton and Alma Tadema. 97

the Eurotas, — none of them over ten years
old. And it is with extreme gratitude, there-
fore, and unqualified admiration, that I find
Sir Frederick condescending from the majesties
of Olympus to the worship of these unappalling
powers, which, heaven be thanked, are as
brightly Anglo-Saxon as Hellenic; and painting
for us, with a soft charm peculiarly his own,
the witchcraft and the wonderfulness of child-
hood.

I have no right whatever to speak of the
works of higher effort and claim, which have
been the result of his acutely observant and
enthusiastic study of the organism of the
human body. I am indeed able to recognize
his skill ; but have no sympathy with the
subjects that admit of its display. I am
enabled, however, to show you with what
integrity of application it has been gained,
by his kindness in lending me for the Ruskin
school two perfect early drawings, one of a
lemon tree, — and another, of the same date,
of a Byzantine well, which determine for you

98 The Art of England.

without appeal, the question respecting necessity
of delineation as the first skill of a painter.
Of all our present masters, Sir Frederic Leighton
delights most in softly-blended colours, and his
ideal of beauty is more nearly that of Correggio
than any seen since Correggio's time. But
you see by what precision of terminal outline
he at first restrained, and exalted, his gift of
beautiful vaghezza.

Nor is the lesson one whit less sternly
conveyed to you by the work of M. Alma
Tadema, who differs from all the artists I
have ever known, except John Lewis, in the
gradual increase of technical accuracy, which
attends and enhances together the expanding
range of his dramatic invention ; while every
year he displays more varied and complex
powers of minute draughtsmanship, more espe-
cially in architectural detail, wherein, somewhat
priding myself as a specialty, I nevertheless
receive continual lessons from him; except
only in this one point, — that, with me, the
translucency and glow of marble is the prin-

///. Sir F. Leighton and Ahna Tadema. 99

cipal character of its substance, while with
M. Tadema it is chiefly the superficial lustre
and veining which seem to attract him ; and
these, also, seen, not in the strength of
southern sun, but in the cool twilight of
luxurious chambers. With which insufficient,
not to say degrading, choice of architectural
colour and shade, there is a fallacy in his
classic idealism, against which, while I respect-
fully acknowledge his scholarship and his
earnestness, it is necessary that you should be
gravely and conclusively warned.

I said that the Greeks studied the body
glorified by war ; but much more, remember,
they studied the mind glorified by it. It is
the drives '^4^X770?, not the muscular force,
which the good beauty of the body itself
signifies ; and you may most strictly take
the Homeric words describing the aspect
of Achilles showing himself on the Greek
rampart as representative of the total Greek
ideal. Learn by heart, unforgettably, the seven
lines —

ioo The Art of England,

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' fl/AOLS l(p6LjuLOLCTL {3a\ Alyl8a dvo-o~avoeo~(jav'
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which are enough to remind you of the
whole context, and to assure you of the
association of light and cloud, in their terrible
mystery, with the truth and majesty of human
form, in the Greek conception ; light and cloud,
whether appointed either to show or to conceal,
both given by a divine spirit, according to
the bearing of your own university shield,
" Dominus illuminatio." In all ancient heroic
subjects, you will find these two ideas of light
and mystery combined ; and these with height
of standing — the Goddess central and high in
the pediment of her temple, the hero on his
chariot, or the Egyptian king colossal above
his captives.

Now observe, that whether of Greek or

///. Sir F. Leighton and Alma Tadema. 101

Roman life, M. Alma Tadema's pictures are
always in twilight — interiors, viro o~u/jLfuyel ctkicl.
I don't know if you saw the collection of
them last year at the Grosvenor, but with that
universal twilight there was also universal
crouching or lolling posture, — either in fear
or laziness. And the most gloomy, the most
crouching, the most dastardly of all these
representations of classic life, was the little
picture called the Pyrrhic Dance, of which the
general effect was exactly like a microscopic
view of a small detachment of black-beetles,
in search of a dead rat.

I have named to you the Achillean
splendour as primary type of Greek war ;
but you need only glance, in your memory,
for a few instants, over the habitual expres-
sions of all the great poets, to recognize the
magnificence of light, terrible or hopeful ;
the radiance of armour, over all the field of
battle, or flaming at every gate of the city ;
as in the blazoned heraldry of the seven
against Thebes, — or beautiful, as in the golden

102 The Art of England.

armour of Glaucus, down to the baser bright-
ness for which Camilla died: remember also
that the ancient Doric dance was strictly the
dance of Apollo ; seized again by your own
mightiest poet for the chief remnant of the
past in the Greece of to-day —

" You have the Pyrrhic dance as yet ;
Where is the Pyrrhic phalanx gone ? "

And this is just the piece of classic life
which your nineteenth century fancy sets forth
under its fuliginous and cantharoid disfigure-
ment and disgrace.

I say, your nineteenth century fancy, for
M. Alma Tadema does but represent — or
rather, has haplessly got himself entangled in,
— the vast vortex of recent Italian and French
revolutionary rage against all that resists, or
ever did resist, its licence ; in a word, against
all priesthood and knighthood.

The Roman state, observe, in the strength
of it expresses both these ; the orders of

77Y. Sir F. Leighton and Alma Tadema. 103

chivalry do not rise out of the disciplining
of the hordes of Tartar horsemen, but by the
Christianizing of the Roman eques ; and the
noble priesthood of Western Christendom is
not, in the heart of it, hieratic, but pon-
tifical. And it is the last corruption of this
Roman state, and its Bacchanalian phrenzy,
which M. Alma Tadema seems to hold it his
heavenly mission to pourtray.

I have no mind, as I told you, to darken
the healthy work I hope to lead you into by
any frequent reference to antagonist influ-
ences. But it is absolutely necessary for me
to-day to distinguish, once for all, what it
is above everything your duty, as scholars in
Oxford, to know and love — the perpetual
laws of classic literature and art, the laws
of the Muses, from what has of late again
infected the schools of Europe under the
pretence of classic study, being indeed only
the continuing poison of the Renaissance, and
ruled, not by the choir of the Muses, but by
the spawn of the Python. And this I have

i 04 The Art of England.

been long-minded to do ; but am only now
enabled to do completely and clearly, and be-
yond your doubt, by having obtained for you
the evidence, unmistakable, of what remains
classic from the ancient life of Italy — the
ancient Etruscan life, down to this day; which
is the perfection of humility, modesty, and
serviceableness, as opposed to the character
which remains in my mind as the total
impression of the Academy and Grosvenor, —
that the young people of this day desire to
be painted first as proud, saying, How grand
I am ; next as immodest, saying, How beau-
tiful I am ; lastly as idle, saying, I am able
to pay for flunkeys, and never did a stroke
of work in my life.

Since the day of the opening of the
great Manchester exhibition in 1851, every
Englishman, desiring to express interest in the
arts, considers it his duty to assert with
Keats, that a thing of beauty is a joy for
ever. I do not know in what sense the
saying was understood by the Manchester

///. Sir F. Leighton and Alma Tadema. 105

school. But this I know, that what joy may
remain still for you and for your children —
in the fields, the homes, and the churches
of England — you must win by otherwise
reading the fallacious line. A beautiful thing
may exist but for a moment, as a reality ; — it
exists for ever as a testimony. To the law
and to the witness of it the nations must
appeal, "in secula seculorum"; and in very
deed and very truth, a thing of beauty is a
law for ever.

That is the true meaning of classic art
and of classic literature ; — not the license of
pleasure, but the law of goodness ; and if, of
the two words, /cakos Kwyadog^ one can be left
unspoken, as implied by the other, it is the
first, not the last. It is written that the
Creator of all things beheld them — not in
that they were beautiful, but in that they
were good.

This law of beauty may be one, for
aught we know, fulfilling itself more per-
fectly as the years roll on ; but at least it

9

106 The Art of England.

is one from which no jot shall pass. The
beauty of Greece depended on the laws of
Lycurgus ; the beauty of Rome, on those of
Numa ; our own, on the laws of Christ. On
all the beautiful features of men and women,
throughout the ages, are written the solem-
nities and majesty of the law they knew,
with the charity and meekness of their
obedience ; on all unbeautiful features are
written either ignorance of the law, or the
malice and insolence of the disobedience.

I showed you, on the occasion of my
first address, a drawing of the death of a
Tuscan girl, — a saint, in the full sense of that
word, such as there have been, and still are,
among the Christian women of all nations.
I bring you to-day the portrait of a Tuscan
Sibyl, — such as there have been, and still are.
She herself is still living ; her portrait is
the first drawing illustrating the book of
the legends of the peasantry of Val d'Arno,
which I obtained possession of in Florence
last year ; of which book I will now read you

///. Sir F. Leighton and Alma Tadema. 107

part of the preface, in which the authoress
gives you the story of the life of this Etrurian
Sibyl.

" Beatrice was the daughter of a stonemason
at Melo, a little village of not very easy access
on the mountain-side above Cutigliano ; and
her mother having died in Beatrice's infancy,
she became, from early childhood, the com-
panion and assistant of her father, accompanying
him to his winter labours in the Maremma,
and as she grew stronger, helping him at his
work by bringing him stones for the walls
and bridges which he built — carrying them
balanced on her head. She had no education,
in the common sense of the word, never
learning even the alphabet; but she had a
wonderful memory, and could sing or recite
long pieces of poetry. As a girl, she used
in summer to follow the sheep, with her
distaff at her waist, and would fill up her
hours of solitude by singing such ballads as
c The War of St. Michael and the Dragon,'
c The Creation of the World, and the Fall

108 The Art of England.

of Man,' or, c The History of San Pelegrino,
son of Romano, King of Scotland : ' and now,
in her old age, she knows nearly all the
New Testament history, and much of the Old,
in a poetical form. She was very beautiful
then, they say; with curling black hair and
wonderful inspired-looking eyes, and there
must always have been a great charm in her
voice and smile ; so it is no great wonder
that Matteo Bernardi, much older than herself,
and owner of a fine farm at Pian degli
Ontani, and of many cattle, chose rather to
marry the shepherd girl who could sing so
sweetly, than another woman whom his family
liked better, and who might perhaps have
brought him more increase of worldly pros-
perity. On Beatrice's wedding day, according
to the old custom of the country, one or two
poets improvised verses suitable to the occasion;
and as she listened to them, suddenly she felt
in herself a new power, and began to sing the
poetry which was then born in her mind,
and having once begun, found it impossible

///. Sir F. Leighton and Alma Tadema. 109

to stop, and kept on singing a great while,
so that all were astonished, and her uncle,
who was present, said — " Beatrice, you have
deceived me ! if I had known what you were,
I would have put you in a convent." From
that time forth she was the great poetess of
all that part of the country ; and was sent
for to sing and recite at weddings, and other
festivals, for many miles around: and perhaps
she might have been happy, but her husband's
sister, Barbara, who lived in the house, and
who had not approved of the marriage, tried
very wickedly to set her brother against his
wife, and to some extent succeeded. He tried
to stop her singing, which seemed to him a
sort of madness, and at times he treated her
with great unkindness ; but sing she must,
and sing she did, for it was what the Lord
made her for, and she lived down all their
dislike ; her husband loved her in his old
age, and Barbara, whom she nursed with
motherly kindness through a long and most
distressing illness, was her friend before she

iio The Art of England.

died. Beatrice is still living, at a great age
now, but still retaining much of her old
beauty and brilliancy, and is waited on and
cared for with much affection by a pretty
granddaughter bearing the same name as
herself."

There are just one or two points I want
you to note in this biography, specially.

The girl is put, in her youth, to three
kinds of noble work. She is a shepherdess,
like St. Genevieve; a spinner and knitter, like
Queen Bertha ; chiefly and most singularly,
she is put to help her father in the pontifical
art of bridge-building. Gymnastic to purpose,
you observe. In the last, or last but one,
number of your favourite English chronicle,
the proud mother says of her well-trained
daughters, that there is not one who could
not knock down her own father : here is a
strong daughter who can help her father — a
Grace Darling of the rivers instead of the sea.

These are the first three things to be
noted of her. Next, the material of her

V7T. Sir F. Leighton and Alma Tadema. 1 1 1

education, — not in words, but in thoughts,
and the greatest of thoughts. You continually
hear that Roman Catholics are not allowed
to read the Bible. Here is a little shepherdess
who has it in her heart.

Next, the time of her inspiration, — at her
wedding feast ; as in the beginning of her
Master's ministry, at Cana. Here is right
honour put upon marriage; and, in spite of
the efforts made to disturb her household
peace, it was entirely blessed to her in her
children : nor to her alone, but to us, and
to myriads with us ; for her second son,
Angelo, is the original of the four drawings
of St. Christopher which illustrate the central
poem in Miss Alexander's book ; and which
are, to the best of my knowledge, the most
beautiful renderings of the legend hitherto
attained by religious imagination.

And as you dwell on these portraits of a
noble Tuscan peasant, the son of a noble
Christian mother, — learn this farther and final
distinction between the greatest art of past

H2 The Art of England.

time, and that which has become possible
now and in future.

The Greek, I said, pourtrayed the body
and the mind of man, glorified in mortal war.
But to us is given the task of holier portraiture,
of the countenance and the heart of man,
glorified by the peace of God.

Whether Francesca's book is to be even-
tually kept together or distributed I do not
yet know. But if distributed, the drawings
of St. Christopher must remain in Oxford,
being, as I have said, the noblest statements
I have ever seen of the unchangeable meaning
of this Ford of ours, for all who pass it
honestly, and do not contrive false traverse for
themselves over a widened Magdalen Bridge.
That ford, gentlemen, for ever, — know what
you may, — hope what you may, — believe or
deny what you may, — you have to pass bare-
foot. For it is a baptism as well as a ford,
and the waves of it, as the sands, are holy.
Your youthful days in this place are to you
the dipping of your feet in the brim of the

///. Sir F. Leighton and Alma Tadema. 113

river, which is to be manfully stemmed by
you all your days ; not drifted with, — nor
toyed upon. Fallen leaves enough it is strewn
with, of the flowers of the forest ; moraine
enough it bears, of the ruin of the brave.
Your task is to cross it ; your doom may be
to go down with it, to the depths out of
which there is no crying. Traverse it, staff
in hand, and with loins girded, and with
whatsoever law of Heaven you know, for your
light. On the other side is the Promised
Land, the Land of the Leal.

10

The Art of England.

LECTURES GIVEX IN OXFORD,

JOHN RUSKIN, D.C.L., LL.D.,

H'»t{(.>R\RY STTDP.ST OF CHRIST CHl'RCII, AND HONORARY FELLOW OF COKHSCKRISTl COU.RGK,

DURING HIS

SECOND TENURE OF THE SLADE PR0FESS0RSI1IF,

LECTURE IV.
FAIRY LAND

GEORGE ALLEN,
SCNXYSIDE, ORPINGTON, KENT.

1883.

LECTURE IV.

FAIRY LAND.
Mrs. Allingham and Kate Greenaway.

1 1

Lecture IV.
FAIRY LAND.

MRS. ALLINGHAM AND KATE GREENAWAY.

WE have hitherto been considering the
uses of legendary art to grown
persons, and to the most learned and powerful
minds. To-day I will endeavour to note with
you some of the least controvertible facts
respecting its uses to children ; and to obtain
your consent to the main general principles
on which I believe it should be offered to
them.

Here, however, I enter t on ground where
I must guard carefully against being misled
by my own predilections, and in which also
the questions at issue are extremely difficult,
because most of them new. It is only in
recent times that pictures have become familiar
means of household pleasure and education :

1 1 8 The Art of England.

only in our own days — nay, even within the
last ten years of those, that the means of
illustration by colour-printing have been brought
to perfection, and art as exquisite as we need
desire to see it, placed, if our school-boards
choose to have it so, within the command of
every nursery governess.

Having then the colour-print, the magic-
lantern, the electric-light, and the — to any
row of ciphers — magnifying, lens, it becomes
surely very interesting to consider what we
may most wisely represent to children by
means so potent, so dazzling, and, if we will,
so faithful. I said just now that I must guard
carefully against being misled by my own pre-
dilections, because having been myself brought
up principally on. fairy legends, my first im-
pulse would be to insist upon every story we
tell to a child being untrue, and every scene
we paint for it, impossible. But I have been
led, as often before confessed, gravely to doubt
the expediency of some parts of my early
training ; and perhaps some day may try to

IF. Mrs. Ailing ham and K. Greenaway. 119

divest myself wholly, for an hour, of these
dangerous recollections ; and prepare a lecture
for you in which I will take Mr. Gradgrind
on his own terms, and consider how far,
making it a rule that we exhibit nothing but
facts, we could decorate our pages of history,
and illuminate the slides of our lantern, in a
manner still sufficiently attractive to childish
taste. For indeed poor Louise and her brother,
kneeling to peep under the fringes of the
circus-tent, are as much in search after facts
as the most scientific of us all ! A circus-
rider, with his hoop, is as much a fact as the
planet Saturn and his ring, and exemplifies
a great many more laws of motion, both
moral and physical; nor are any descriptions
of the Valley of Diamonds v or the Lake of the
Black Islands, in the ' Arabian Nights,' anything
like so wonderful as the scenes of California
and the Rocky Mountains which you may find
described in the April number of the 'Cornhill
Magazine,' under the heading of c Early Spring
in California'; and may see represented with

120 The Art of England,

most sincere and passionate enthusiasm by the
American landscape painter, Mr. Moran, in
a survey lately published by the Government
of the United States.

Scenes majestic as these, pourtrayed with
mere and pure fidelity by such scientific
means as I have referred to, would form a
code of geographic instruction beyond all
the former grasp of young people ; and a
source of entertainment, — I had nearly said,
and most people who had not watched the
minds of children carefully, might think, —
inexhaustible. Much, indeed, I should myself
hope from it, but by no means an infinitude of
entertainment. For it is quite an inexorable
law of this poor human nature of ours, that
in the development of its healthy infancy, it
is put by Heaven under the absolute necessity
of using its imagination as well as its lungs
and its legs ; — that it is forced to develope its
power of invention, as a bird its feathers of
flight; that no toy you can bestow will super-
sede the pleasure it has in fancying something

IV. Mrs. Allingham and K. Greenaway. 121

that isn't there ; and the most instructive his-
tories you can compile for it of the wonders
of the world will never conquer the interest
of the tale which a clever child can tell
itself, concerning the shipwreck of a rose-leaf
in the shallows of a rivulet.

One of the most curious proofs of the
need to children of this exercise of the in-
ventive and believing power, — the besoin de
croire, which precedes the besoin d^aimer^ you
will find in the way you destroy the vitality
of a toy to them, by bringing it too near the
imitation of life. You never find a child make
a pet of a mechanical mouse that runs about
the floor — of a poodle that yelps — of a tumbler
who jumps upon wires. The child falls in
love with a quiet thing, with an ugly one —
nay, it may be, with one, to us, totally devoid
of meaning. My little — ever- so - many- times -
grand — cousin, Lily, took a bit of stick with
a round knob at the end of it for her doll
one day; — nursed it through any number of
illnesses with the most tender solicitude ; and,

122 The Art of Eng/and.

on the deeply-important occasion of its having
a new nightgown made for it, bent down her
mother's head to receive the confidential and
timid whisper — " Mamma, perhaps it had better
have no sleeves, because, as Bibsey has no arms,
she mightn't like it."

I must take notice here, but only in pass-
ing,— the subject being one to be followed
out afterwards in studying more grave branches
of art, — that the human mind in its full
energy having thus the power of believing
simply what it likes, the responsibilities and
the fatalities attached to the effort of Faith
are greater than those belonging to bodily
deed, precisely in the degree of their voluntari-
ness. A man can't always do what he likes,
but he can always fancy what he likes ; and
he may be forced to do what he doesn't like,
but he can't be forced to fancy what he
doesn't like.

I use for the moment, the word 'to fancy'
instead of \ to believe,' because the whole
subject of Fidelity and Infidelity has been

IV. Mrs. Allingham and K. Greenaway. 123

made a mere mess of quarrels and blunders
by our habitually forgetting that the proper
power of Faith is to trust without evidence,
not with evidence. You perpetually hear
people say, c I won't believe this or that
unless you give me evidence of it.' Why, if
you give them evidence of it, they know it, —
they don't believe, any more. A man doesn't
believe there's any danger in nitro-glycerine ;
at last he gets his parlour-door blown into
next street. He is then better informed on
the subject, but the time for belief is past.

Only, observe, I don't say that you can
fancy what you like, to the degree of receiving
it for truth. Heaven forbid we should have
a power such as that, for it would be one of
voluntary madness. But we are, in the most
natural and rational health, able to foster the
fancy, up to the point of influencing our
feelings and character in the strongest way ;
and for the strength of that healthy imagi-
native faculty, and all the blending of the
good and grace, " richiesto al vero ed al

124 The Art of England.

trastullo,"* we are wholly responsible. We
may cultivate it to what brightness we choose,
merely by living in a quiet relation with
natural objects and great and good people,
past or present ; and we may extinguish it to
the last snuff, merely by living in town, and
reading the c Times ' every morning.

" We are scarcely sufficiently conscious,"
says Mr. Kinglake, with his delicate precision
of serenity in satire, " scarcely sufficiently
conscious in England, of the great debt we
owe to the wise and watchful press which
presides over the formation of our opinions;
and which brings about this splendid result,
namely, that in matters of belief, the humblest
of us are lifted up to the level of the most
sagacious, so that really a simple Cornet in
the Blues is no more likely to entertain a
foolish belief about ghosts, or witchcraft, or
any other supernatural topic, than the Lord
High Chancellor, or the Leader of the House
of Commons."

* Dante, Purg. xiv. 93.

IV. Mrs. Allingham and K. Greenaway. 125

And thus, at the present day, for the edu-
cation or the extinction of the Fancy, we are
absolutely left to our choice. For its occupation,
not wholly so, yet in a far greater measure
than we know. Mr. Wordsworth speaks of it
as only impossible to " have sight of Proteus
rising from the sea," because the world is too
much with us ; also Mr. Kinglake, though,
in another place, he calls it " a vain and
heathenish longing to be fed with divine
counsels from the lips of Pallas Athene," —
yet is far happier than the most scientific
traveller could be in a trigonometric measure-
ment, when he discovers that Neptune could
really have seen Troy from the top of Samo-
thrace: and I believe that we should many of
us find it an extremely wholesome and useful
method of treating our ordinary affairs, if
before deciding, even upon very minor points
of conduct admitting of prudential and con-
scientious debate, we were in the habit of
imagining that Pallas Athene was actually in
the room with us, or at least outside the

126 The Art of England.

window in the form of a swallow, and per-
mitted us, on the condition always of instant
obedience, to ask her advice upon the matter.

Here ends my necessary parenthesis, with
its suspicion of preachment, for which I crave
pardon, and I return to my proper subject of
to-day, — the art which intends to address only
childish imagination, and whose object is
primarily to entertain with grace.

With grace: — I insist much on this latter
word. We may allow the advocates of a
material philosophy to insist that every wild-
weed tradition of fairies, gnomes, and sylphs
should be well ploughed out of a child's
mind to prepare it for the good seed of
the Gospel of — Z)/Vgrace : but no defence
can be offered for the presentation of these
ideas to its mind in a form so vulgarized as
to defame and pollute the masterpieces of
former literature. It is perfectly easy to
convince the young proselyte of science that
a cobweb on the top of a thistle cannot be
commanded to catch a honey-bee for him,

IV. Mrs. Allingham and K. Greenaway. 127

without introducing a dance of ungainly fairies
on the site of the cabstand under the West-
minster clock tower, or making the Queen of
them fall in love with the sentry on guard.

With grace, then, assuredly, — and I think
we may add also, with as much seriousness as
an entirely fictitious subject may admit of —
seeing that it touches the border of that higher
world which is not fictitious. We are all
perhaps too much in the habit of thinking
the scenes of burlesque in the c Midsummer
Night's Dream ' exemplary of Shakespeare's
general treatment of fairy character : we
should always remember that he places the
most beautiful words descriptive of virgin
purity which English poetry possesses, in the
mouth of the Fairy King, and that to the
Lord of Fancies he entrusts the praise of the
conquest of Fancy, —

"In maiden meditation, — Fancy free."

Still less should we forget the function of

128 The Art of England,

household benediction, attributed to them
always by happy national superstition, and
summed in the closing lines of the same
play,—

" With this field-dew consecrate,
Every fairy take his gait ;
And each several chamber bless,
Through this palace, with sweet peace."

With seriousness then, — but only, I repeat,
such as entirely fictitious elements properly
admit of. The general grace and sweetness
of Scott's moorland fairy, i The White Lady,'
failed of appeal to the general justice of
public taste, because in two places he fell
into the exactly opposite errors of unbecoming
jest, and too far-venturing solemnity. The
ducking of the Sacristan offended even his
most loving readers ; but it offended them
chiefly for a reason of which they were in
great part unconscious, that the jest is carried
out in the course of the charge with which

IV. Mrs. Allingham and K. Greenaway. 129

the fairy is too gravely entrusted, to protect,
for Mary of Avenel, her mother's Bible.

It is of course impossible, in studying
questions of this kind, to avoid confusion
between what is fit in literature and in art;
the leading principles are the same in both,
but of course much may be allowed to the
narrator which is impossible or forbidden to
the draughtsman. And I necessarily take
examples chiefly from literature, because the
greatest masters of story have never disdained
the playfully supernatural elements of fairy-
tale, while it is extremely rare to find a
good painter condescending to them, — or, I
should rather say, contending with them, the
task being indeed one of extreme difficulty.
I believe Sir Noel Paton's pictures of the
Court of Titania, and Fairy Raid, are all we
possess in which the accomplished skill of
painting has been devoted to fairy-subject;
and my impression when I saw the former
picture — the latter I grieve not yet to have seen
— was that the artist intended rather to obtain

130 The Art of England.

leave by the closeness of ocular distance to
display the exquisite power of minute de-
lineation, which he felt in historical painting
to be inapplicable, than to arrest, either in
his own mind or the spectator's, even a
momentary credence in the enchantment of
fairy-wand and fairy-ring.

And within the range of other art which
I can call to mind, touching on the same
ground, — or rather, breathing in the same
air, — it seems to me a sorrowful and some-
what unaccountable law that only grotesque
or terrible fancies present themselves forcibly
enough, in these admittedly fabling states of
the imagination, to be noted with the pencil.
For instance, without rating too highly the
inventive powers of the old German outline-
draughtsman, Retsch, we cannot but attribute
to him a very real gift of making visibly terrible
such legend as that of the ballad of Leonora,
and interpreting, with a wild aspect of veracity,
the passages of sorcery in ' Faust.' But the
drawing which I possess by his hand, of the

IV. Mrs. Allingham and K. Greenaway. 131

Genius of Poetry riding upon a swan, could
not be placed in my school with any hope of
deepening your impression either of the beauty
of swans, or the dignity of genii.

You must, however, always carefully distin-
guish these states of gloomy fantasy, natural,
though too often fatal, to men of real imagi-
nation,— the spectra which appear, whether
they desire it or not, — to men like Orcagna,
Durer, Blake, and Alfred Rethel, — and dwelt
upon by them, in the hope of producing some
moral impression of salutary awe by their
record — as in Blake's Book of Job, in Durer's
Apocalypse, in Rethel's Death the Avenger
and Death the Friend, — and more nobly in his
grand design of Barbarossa entering the grave
of Charlemagne ; — carefully, I say, you must
distinguish this natural and lofty phase of
visionary terror, from the coarse delight in
mere pain and crisis of danger, which, in
our infidel art and literature for the young,
fills our books of travel with pictures of

alligators swallowing children, hippopotami

12

132 The Art of England.

upsetting canoes full of savages, bears on
their hind-legs doing battle with northern
navigators, avalanches burying Alpine villages,
and the like, as the principal attractions of
the volume ; not, in the plurality of cases,
without vileness of exaggeration which amounts
to misleading falsehood — unless happily pushed
to the point where mischief is extinguished
by absurdity. In Strahan's c Magazine for the
Youth of all Ages,' for June 1879, at Page
328, you will find it related, in a story
proposed for instruction in scientific natural
history, that " the fugitives saw an enormous
elephant cross the clearing, surrounded by
ten tigers, some clinging to its back, and
others keeping alongside."

I may in this place, I think, best introduce
— though again parenthetically — the suggestion
of a healthy field for the labouring scientific
fancy which remains yet unexhausted, and I
believe inexhaustible, — that of the fable, ex-
panded into narrative, which gives a true
account of the life of animals, supposing them

IV. Mrs. Allingham and K. Greenaway. 133

to be endowed with human intelligence,
directed to the interests of their animal life.
I said just now that I had been brought up upon
fairy legends, but I must gratefully include,
under the general tide of these, the stories in
1 Evenings at Home ' of • The Transmigrations
of Indur, The Discontented Squirrel, The
Travelled Ant, The Cat and her Children,
and Little Fido ; and with these, one now
quite lost, but which I am minded soon to
reprint for my younger pupils, — The History
of a Field-Mouse, which in its pretty detail is
no less amusing, and much more natural, than
the town and country mice of Horace and
Pope, — classic, in the best sense, though these
will always be.

There is the more need that some true
and pure examples of fable in this kind should
be put within the reach of children, because
the wild efforts of weak writers to increase
their incomes at Christmas, and the unscru-
pulous encouragement of them by competing
booksellers, fill our nurseries with forms of

1 34 The Art of England.

rubbish which are on the one side destructive
of the meaning of all ancient tradition, and
on the other, reckless of every really inter-
esting truth in exact natural history. Only
the other day, in examining the mixed contents
of a somewhat capacious nursery bookcase, the
first volume I opened was a fairy tale in
which the benevolent and moral fairy drove
a "matchless pair of white cockatrices." I
might take up all the time yet left for this
lecture in exposing to you the mingled folly
and mischief in those few words ; — the pan-
dering to the first notion of vulgar children
that all glory consists in driving a matchless
pair of something or other, — and the implied
ignorance in which only such a book could
be presented to any children, of the most
solemn of scriptural promises to them, — " the
weaned child shall lay his hand on the
cockatrice' den."

And the next book I examined was a
series of stories imported from Japan,* most of

* Macmillan, 1871.

IF. Mrs. Allingham and K. Greenaway. 135

them simply sanguinary and loathsome, but
one or two pretending to be zoological — as,
for instance, that of the Battle of the Ape
and the Crab, of which it is said in the
introduction that " men should lay it up in
their hearts, and teach it as a profitable
lesson to their children." In the opening of
this profitable story, the crab plants a " per-
simmon seed in his garden" (the reader is not
informed what manner of fruit the persimmon
may be), and watches the growth of the tree
which springs from it with great delight;
being, we are told in another paragraph, " a
simple-minded creature."

I do not know whether this conception of
character in the great zodiacal crustacean is
supposed to be scientific or aesthetic, — but I
hope that British children at the seaside are
capable of inventing somewhat better stories of
crabs for themselves; and if they would farther
know the foreign manners of the sidelong-
pacing people, let me ask them to look at the
account given by Lord George Campbell, in

136 The Art of England.

his ' Log Letters from the Challenger,' of his
landing on the island of St. Paul, and of the
manner in which the quite unsophisticated
crabs of that locality succeeded first in stealing
his fish-bait, and then making him lose his
temper, to a degree extremely unbecoming in
a British nobleman. They will not, after the
perusal of that piquant — or perhaps I should
rather say, pincant, — narrative, be disposed,
whatever other virtues they may possess, to
ascribe to the obliquitous nation that of
simplicity of mind.

I have no time to dwell longer on the
existing fallacies in the representation either
of the fairy or the animal kingdoms. I must
pass to the happier duty of returning thanks
for the truth with which our living painters
have drawn for us the lovely dynasty of little
creatures, about whose reality there can be no
doubt; and who are at once the most powerful
of fairies, and the most amusing, if not always
the most sagacious ! of animals.

In my last lecture, I noted to you, though

IV. Mrs. Allingham and K. Greenaway. 137

only parenthetically, the singular defect in
Greek art, that it never gives you any con-
ception of Greek children. Neither — up to
the thirteenth century — does Gothic art give
you any conception of Gothic children ; for,
until the thirteenth century, the Goth was
not perfectly Christianized, and still thought
only of the strength of humanity as admirable
in battle or venerable in judgment, but not
as dutiful in peace, nor happy in simplicity.

But from the moment when the spirit of
Christianity had been entirely interpreted to
the Western races, the sanctity of womanhood
worshipped in the Madonna, and the sanctity
of childhood in unity with that of Christ,
became the light of every honest hearth, and
the joy of every pure and chastened soul.
Yet the traditions of art-subject, and the vices
of luxury which developed themselves in the
following (fourteenth) century, prevented the
manifestation of this new force in domestic
life for two centuries more; and then at last
in the child angels of Luca, Mino of Fesole,

138 The Art of England,

Luini, Angelico, Perugino, and the first days
of Raphael, it expressed itself as the one pure
and sacred passion which protected Christendom
from the ruin of the Renaissance.

Nor has it since failed; and whatever disgrace
or blame obscured the conception of the later
Flemish and incipient English schools, the
children, whether in the pictures of Rubens,
Rembrandt, Vandyke, or Sir Joshua, were
always beautiful. An extremely dark period
indeed follows, leading to and persisting in
the French Revolution, and issuing in the
merciless manufacturing fury, which to-day
grinds children to dust between millstones,
and tears them to pieces on engine-wheels,
— against which rises round us, Heaven be
thanked, again the protest and the power of
Christianity, restoring the fields of the quiet
earth to the steps of her infancy.

In Germany, this protest, I believe, began
with — it is at all events perfectly represented by
— the Ludwig Richter I have so often named;
in France, with Edward Frere, whose pictures

IV. Mrs. Allingham and K. Greenaway. 139

of children are of quite immortal beauty.
But in England it was long repressed by the
terrible action of our wealth, compelling our
painters to represent the children of the poor
as in wickedness or misery. It is one of the
most terrific facts in all the history of British
art that Bewick never draws children but in
mischief.

I am not able to say with whom, in Britain,
the reaction first begins, — but certainly not in
painting until after Wilkie, in all whose works
there is not a single example of a beautiful
Scottish boy or girl. I imagine in literature,
we may take the 'Cottar's Saturday Night' and
the 'toddlin' wee things' as the real beginning
of child benediction ; and I am disposed to
assign in England much value to the widely
felt, though little acknowledged, influence of
an authoress now forgotten — Mary Russell
Mitford. Her village children in the Low-
lands— in the Highlands, the Lucy Grays and
Alice Fells of Wordsworth — brought back
to us the hues of Fairy Land ; and although

1 40 The Art of England.

long by Academic art denied or resisted, at
last the charm is felt in London itself, — on
pilgrimage in whose suburbs you find the
Little Nells and boy David Copperfields; and
in the heart of it, Kit's baby brother at
Astley's, indenting his cheek with an oyster-
shell to the admiration of all beholders ; till
at last, bursting out like one of the sweet
Surrey fountains, all dazzling and pure, you
have the radiance and innocence of reinstated
infant divinity showered again among the
flowers of English meadows by Mrs. Allingham
and Kate Greenaway.

It has chanced strangely, that every one
of the artists to whom in these lectures I
wished chiefly to direct your thoughts, has
been insufficiently, or even disadvantageously,
represented by his work in the exhibitions of
the season. But chiefly I have been dis-
appointed in finding no drawing of the least
interest by Mrs. Allingham in the room of the
Old Water-colour Society. And let me say
in passing, that none of these new splendours

IV, Mrs. Allingham and K. Greenaway. 141

and spaces of show galleries, with attached
restaurants to support the cockney constitu-
tion under the trial of getting from one end
of them to the other, will in the least make
up to the real art-loving public for the loss
of the good fellowship of our old societies,
every member of which sent everything he had
done best in the year into the room, for the
May meetings; shone with his debited measure
of admiration in his accustomed corner ; sup-
ported his associates without eclipsing them ;
supplied his customers without impoverishing
them ; and was permitted to sell a picture to
his patron or his friend, without paying fifty
guineas commission on the business to a
dealer.

Howsoever it may have chanced, Mrs.
Allingham has nothing of importance in the
water-colour room; and I am even sorrowfully
compelled to express my regret that she should
have spent unavailing pains in finishing single
heads, which are at the best uninteresting
miniatures, instead of fulfilling her true gift,

142 The Art of England.

and doing what (in Miss Alexander's words)
£ the Lord made her for ' — in representing the
gesture, character, and humour of charming
children in country landscapes. Her ' Tea
Party/ in last year's exhibition, with the little
girl giving her doll its bread and milk, and
taking care that she supped it with propriety,
may be named as a most lovely example of
her feeling and her art ; and the drawing
which some years ago riveted, and ever since
has retained, the public admiration, — the two
deliberate housewives in their village toyshop,
bent on domestic utilities and economies, and
proud in the acquisition of two flat irons for
a farthing, — has become, and rightly, a classic
picture, which will have its place among the
memorable things in the art of our time,
when many of its loudly trumpeted magni-
ficences are remembered no more.

I must not in this place omit mention,
with sincere gratitude, of the like motives in
the paintings of Mr. Birkett Foster ; but with
regret that in too equal, yet incomplete,

IF, Mrs. Allinghafn and K. Greenaway. 143

realization of them, mistaking, in many instances,
mere spotty execution for finish, he has never
taken the high position that was open to him
as an illustrator of rustic life.

And I am grieved to omit the names of
many other artists who have protested, with
consistent feeling, against the misery entailed
on the poor children of our great cities, — by
painting the real inheritance of childhood in
the meadows and fresh air. But the gracious-
ness and sentiment of them all is enough
represented by the hitherto undreamt-of, and,
in its range, unrivalled, fancy, which is now
re-establishing throughout gentle Europe, the
manners and customs of fairyland.

I may best indicate to you the grasp
which the genius of Miss Kate Greenaway
has taken upon the spirit of foreign lands, no
less than her own, by translating the last
paragraph of the entirely candid, and inti-
mately observant, review of modern English
art, given by Monsieur Ernest Chesneau, in
his small volume, c La Peinture Anglaise,' of

144 ^ne ^rt °f England.

which I will only at present say, that any of
my pupils who read French with practice
enough to recognize the finesse of it in exact
expression, may not only accept his criticism
as my own, but will find it often more careful
than mine, and nearly always better expressed ;
because French is essentially a critical language,
and can say things in a sentence which it would
take half a page of English to explain.

He gives first a quite lovely passage (too
long to introduce now) upon the gentleness
of the satire of John Leech, as opposed to
the bitter malignity of former caricature.
Then he goes on : " The great softening of
the English mind, so manifest already in John
Leech, shows itself in a decisive manner by
the enthusiasm with which the public have
lately received the designs of Mr. Walter Crane,
Mr. Caldecott, and Miss Kate Greenaway.
The two first named artists began by address-
ing to children the stories of Perrault and of
the Arabian Nights, translated and adorned
for them in a dazzling manner; and, in the

IV. Mrs. Allingham and K. Greenaway. 145

works of all these three artists, landscape
plays an important part ; — familiar landscape,
very English, interpreted with a c bonhomie
savante' :" (no translating that), "spiritual, deco-
rative in the rarest taste, — strange and precious
adaptation of Etruscan art, Flemish and
Japanese, reaching, together with the perfect
interpretation of nature, to incomparable chords
of colour harmony. These powers are found
in the work of the three, but Miss Greenaway,
with a profound sentiment of love for children,
puts the child alone on the scene, companions
him in his own solitudes, and shows the in-
fantine nature in all its naivete, its gaucherie,
its touching grace, its shy alarm, its discoveries,
ravishments, embarrassments, and victories ;
the stumblings of it in wintry ways, the
enchanted smiles of its spring time, and all the
history of its fond heart and guiltless egoism.

" From the honest but fierce laugh of the
coarse Saxon, William Hogarth, to the delicious
smile of Kate Greenaway, there has past a
century and a half. Is it the same people

146 The Art of England.

which applauds to-day the sweet genius and
tender malices of the one, and which applauded
the bitter genius and slaughterous satire of the
other ? After all, that is possible, — the hatred
of vice is only another manifestation of the
love of innocence."

Thus far M. Chesneau — and I venture only
to take up the admirable passage at a question
I did not translate: "Ira-t-on au dela, fera-
t-on mieux encore ? " — and to answer joyfully,
Yes, if you choose ; you, the British public,
to encourage the artist in doing the best she
can for you. She will, if you will receive
it when she does.

I have brought with me to-day in the first
place some examples of her pencil sketches
in primary design. These in general the
public cannot see, and these, as is always the
case with the finest imaginative work, contain
the best essence of it, — qualities never after-
wards to be recovered, and expressed with
the best of all sensitive instruments, the pencil
point.

IV, Mrs, Allingham and K, Greenaway, 147

You have here, for consummate example,

a dance of fairies under a mushroom, which

she did under challenge to show me what

fairies were like. " They'll be very like

children," she said ; I answered that I didn't

mind, and should like to see them, all the

same ; — so here they are, with a dance, also,

of two girlies, outside of a mushroom ; and

I don't know whether the elfins or girls are

fairyfootedest : and one or two more subjects,

which you may find out; — but, in all, you

will see that the line is ineffably tender and

delicate, and can't in the least be represented

by the lines of a woodcut. But I have long

since shown you the power of line engraving

as it was first used in Florence ; and if you

choose, you may far recover the declining

energies of line engraving in England, by

encouraging its use in the multiplication,

whether of these, or of Turner outlines, or

of old Florentine silver point outlines, no

otherwise to be possessed by you. I have

given you one example of what is possible

13

148 The Art of England.

in Mr. Rolfe's engraving of Ida; and, if all
goes well, before the autumn fairy rings are
traced, you shall see some fairy Idas caught
flying.

So far of pure outline. Next, for the en-
richment of it by colour. Monsieur Chesneau
doubts if the charm of Miss Greenaway's
work can be carried farther. I answer, with
security, — yes, very much farther, and that
in two directions : first, in her own method
of design; and secondly, the manner of its
representation in printing.

First, her own design has been greatly
restricted by being too ornamental, or, in
your modern phrase, decorative ; — contracted
into any corner of a Christmas card, or
stretched like an elastic band round the
edges of an almanack. Now, her art is
much too good to be used merely for illu-
mination ; it is essentially and perfectly that
of true colour-picture, and that the most naive
and delightful manner of picture, because, on
the simplest terms, it comes nearest reality.

IV, Mrs, Allingham and K. Greenaway, 149

No end of mischief has been done to modern
art by the habit of running semi-pictorial
illustration round the margins of ornamental
volumes, and Miss Greenaway has been wasting
her strength too sorrowfully in making the
edges of her little birthday books, and the
like, glitter with unregarded gold, whereas her
power should be concentrated in the direct
illustration of connected story, and her pic-
tures should be made complete on the page,
and far more realistic than decorative. There
is no charm so enduring as that of the real
representation of any given scene; her present
designs are like living flowers flattened to
go into an herbarium, and sometimes too
pretty to be believed. We must ask her for
more descriptive reality, for more convincing
simplicity, and we must get her to organize
a school of colourists by hand, who can abso-
lutely facsimile her own first drawing.

This is the second matter on which I have
to insist. I bring with me to-day twelve of
her original drawings, and have mounted

150 The Art of England.

beside them, good impressions of the pub-
lished prints.

I may heartily congratulate both the pub-
lishers and possessors of the book on the
excellence of these ; yet if you examine them
closely, you will find that the colour blocks
of the print sometimes slip a little aside, so
as to lose the precision of the drawing in
important places ; and in many other respects
better can be done, in at least a certain
number of chosen copies. I must not, how-
ever, detain you to-day by entering into
particulars in this matter. I am content to
ask your sympathy in the endeavour, if I can
prevail on the artist to undertake it.

Only with respect to this and every other
question of method in engraving, observe
farther that all the drawings I bring you
to-day agree in one thing, — minuteness and
delicacy of touch carried to its utmost limit,
visible in its perfectness to the eyes of youth,
but neither executed with a magnifying glass,
nor, except to aged eyes, needing one. Even

IF, Mrs. Allingham and K. Greenaway. 151

I, at sixty-four, can see the essential qualities
of the work without spectacles ; though only
the youngest of my friends here can see, for
instance, Kate's fairy dance, perfectly, but they
can, with their own bright eyes.

And now please note this, for an entirely
general law, again and again reiterated by
me for many a year. All great art is
delicate , and fine to the uttermost. Wherever
there is blotting, or daubing, or dashing, there
is weakness, at least ; probably, affectation ;
certainly, bluntness of feeling. But, all deli-
cacy which is rightly pleasing to the human
mind is addressed to the unaided human
sights not to microscopic help or mediation.

And now generalize that law farther. As
all noble sight is with the eyes that God
has given you, so all noble motion is with
the limbs God has balanced for you, and all
noble strength with the arms He has knit.
Though you should put electric coils into
your high heels, and make spring-heeled
Jacks and Gills of yourselves, you will never

152 The Art of England.

dance, so, as you could barefoot. Though
you could have machines that would swing
a ship of war into the sea, and drive a rail-
way train through a rock, all divine strength
is still the strength of Herakles, a man's
wrestle, and a man's blow.

There are two other points I must try to
enforce in closing, very clearly. "Landscape,"
says M. Chesneau, "takes great part in these
lovely designs." He does not say of what
kind ; may I ask you to look, for yourselves,
and think?

There are no railroads in it, to carry
the children away with, are there ? no tunnel
or pit mouths to swallow them up, no league-
long viaducts — no blinkered iron bridges ?
There are only winding brooks, wooden foot-
bridges, and grassy hills without any holes
cut into them !

Again, — there are no parks, no gentle-
men's seats with attached stables and offices !
— no rows of model lodging houses ! no
charitable institutions ! ! It seems as if none

IV, Mrs. Allingham and K. Greenaway. 153

of these things which the English mind now
rages after, possess any attraction whatever
for this unimpressionable person. She is a
graceful Gallio — Gallia gratia plena, and cares
for none of those things.

And more wonderful still, — there are no
gasworks ! no waterworks, no mowing machines,
no sewing machines, no telegraph poles, no
vestige, in fact, of science, civilization, eco-
nomical arrangements, or commercial enter-
prise ! ! !

Would you wish me, with professorial
authority, to advise her that her conceptions
belong to the dark ages, and must be reared
on a new foundation ? Or is it, on the other
hand, recommendably conceivable by you^ that
perhaps the world we truly live in may not
be quite so changeable as you have thought
it; — that all the gold and silver you can dig
out of the earth are not worth the kingcups
and the daisies she gave you of her grace ;
and that all the fury, and the flutter, and
the wonder, and the wistfulness, of your lives,

154 The Art of England.

will never discover for you any other than
the ancient blessing : " He maketh me to lie
down in green pastures, He leadeth me beside
the still waters, He restoreth my soul " ?

Yet one word more. Observe that what
this unimpressionable person does draw, she
draws as like it as she can. It is true that
the combination or composition of things is
not what you can see every day. You can't
every day, for instance, see a baby thrown
into a basket of roses ; but when she has
once pleasantly invented that arrangement for
you, baby is as like baby, and rose as like
rose, as she can possibly draw them. And
the beauty of them is in being like. They
are blissful, just in the degree that they are
natural ; and the fairyland she creates for
you is not beyond the sky nor beneath the
sea, but nigh you, even at your doors. She
does but show you how to see it, and how
to cherish.

Long since I told you this great law of
noble imagination, It does not create, it

IV. Mrs. Allingham and K. Greenaway. 155

does not even adorn, it does but reveal^ the
treasures to be possessed by the spirit. I
told you this of the work of the great
painter whom, in that day, everyone accused
of representing only the fantastic and the
impossible. I said forty years ago, and say
at this instant, more solemnly, All his magic
is in his truth.

I show you, to-day, a beautiful copy
made for me by Mr. Macdonald, of the
drawing which, of all the Turners I gave
you, I miss the most. I never thought it
could have been copied at all, and have
received from Mr. Macdonald, in this lovely
rendering of it, as much a lesson as a con-
solation. For my purpose to-day it is just
as good as if I had brought the drawing
itself.

It is one of the Loire series, which the
engravers could not attempt, because it was
too lovely ; or would not attempt, because
there was, to their notion, nothing in it. It
is only a coteau, scarce a hundred feet above

14

156 The Art of England.

the river, nothing like so high as the Thames
banks between here and Reading, — only a
coteau, and a recess of calm water, and a
breath of mist, and a ray of sunset. The
simplest things, the frequentest, the dearest;
things that you may see any summer evening
by a thousand thousand streams among the
low hills of old familiar lands. Love them,
and see them rightly, — Andes and Caucasus,
Amazon and Indus, can give you no more.

The danger imminent on you is the de-
struction of what you have. I walked yesterday
afternoon round St. John's gardens, and found
them, as they always are in spring time, almost
an ideal of earthly Paradise, — the St. John's
students also disporting themselves therein in
games preparatory to the advent of the true
fairies of Commemoration. But, the afternoon
before, I had walked down St. John's Road,
and, on emerging therefrom to cross the
railway, found on my left hand a piece of
waste ground, extremely characteristic of that
with which we now always adorn the suburbs

IV. Mrs. Allingham and K. Greenaway. 157

of our cities, and of which it can only be
said that no demons could contrive, under the
earth, a more uncomfortable and abominable
place of misery for the condemned souls of
dirty people, than Oxford thus allows the
western light to shine upon — c nel aer dolce,
che dal sol s'allegra.' For many a year I
have now been telling you, and in the final
words of this first course of lectures in which
I have been permitted again to resume work
among you, let me tell you yet once more,
and if possible, more vehemently, that neither
sound art, policy, nor religion, can exist in
England, until, neglecting, if it must be, your
own pleasure gardens and pleasure chambers,
you resolve that the streets which are the
habitation of the poor, and the fields which
are the playgrounds of their children, shall
be again restored to the rule of the spirits,
whosoever they are in earth, and heaven,
that ordain, and reward, with constant and
conscious felicity, all that is decent and orderly,
beautiful and pure.

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