The Crown of Wild Olive
with it as a means of livelihood; the useful direction of myriads of
inferior talents, now left fading away in misery. Conceive all this, and
then look around at our exhibitions, and behold the "cattle pieces," and
"sea pieces," and "fruit pieces," and "family pieces;" the eternal brown
cows in ditches, and white sails in squalls, and sliced lemons in
saucers, and foolish faces in simpers;--and try to feel what we are, and
what we might have been.
Take a single instance in one branch of archaeology. Let those who are
interested in the history of religion consider what a treasure we should
now have possessed, if, instead of painting pots, and vegetables, and
drunken peasantry, the most accurate painters of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries had been set to copy, line for line, the religious
and domestic sculpture on the German, Flemish, and French cathedrals and
castles; and if every building destroyed in the French or in any other
subsequent revolution, had thus been drawn in all its parts with the
same precision with which Gerard Douw or Mieris paint bas-reliefs of
Cupids. Consider, even now, what incalculable treasure is still left in
ancient bas-reliefs, full of every kind of legendary interest, of subtle
expression, of priceless evidence as to the character, feelings habits,
histories, of past generations, in neglected and shattered churches and
domestic buildings, rapidly disappearing over the whole of
Europe--treasure which, once lost, the labor of all men living cannot
bring back again; and then look at the myriads of men, with skill
enough, if they had but the commonest schooling, to record all this
faithfully, who are making their bread by drawing dances of naked women
from academy models, or idealities of chivalry fitted out with Wardour
Street armor, or eternal scenes from Gil Blas, Don Quixote, and the
Vicar of Wakefield, or mountain sceneries with young idiots of Londoners
wearing Highland bonnets and brandishing rifles in the foregrounds. Do
but think of these things in the breadth of their inexpressible
imbecility, and then go and stand before that broken bas-relief in the
southern gate of Lincoln Cathedral, and see if there is no fibre of the
heart in you that will break too.
But is there to be no place left, it will be indignantly asked, for
imagination and invention, for poetical power, or love of ideal beauty?
Yes; the highest, the noblest place--that which these only can attain
when they are all used in the cause, and with the aid of truth. Wherever
imagination and sentiment are, they will either show themselves without
forcing, or, if capable of artificial development, the kind of training
which such a school of art would give them would be the best they could
receive. The infinite absurdity and failure of our present training
consists mainly in this, that we do not rank imagination and invention
high enough, and suppose that they _can_ be taught. Throughout every
sentence that I ever have written, the reader will find the same rank
attributed to these powers,--the rank of a purely divine gift, not to be
attained, increased, or in any wise modified by teaching, only in
various ways capable of being concealed or quenched. Understand this
thoroughly; know once for all, that a poet on canvas is exactly the same
species of creature as a poet in song, and nearly every error in our
methods of teaching will be done away with. For who among us now thinks
of bringing men up to be poets?--of producing poets by any kind of
general recipe or method of cultivation? Suppose even that we see in
youth that which we hope may, in its development, become a power of this
kind, should we instantly, supposing that we wanted to make a poet of
him, and nothing else, forbid him all quiet, steady, rational labor?
Should we force him to perpetual spinning of new crudities out of his
boyish brain, and set before him, as the only objects of his study, the
laws of versification which criticism has supposed itself to discover in
the works of previous writers? Whatever gifts the boy had, would much be
likely to come of them so treated? unless, indeed, they were so great as
to break through all such snares of falsehood and vanity, and build
their own foundation in spite of us; whereas if, as in cases numbering
millions against units, the natural gifts were too weak to do this,
could any thing come of such training but utter inanity and spuriousness
of the whole man? But if we had sense, should we not rather restrain and
bridle the first flame of invention in early youth, heaping material on
it as one would on the first sparks and tongues of a fire which we
desired to feed into greatness? Should we not educate the whole
intellect into general strength, and all the affections into warmth and
honesty, and look to heaven for the rest? This, I say, we should have
sense enough to do, in order to produce a poet in words: but, it being
required to produce a poet on canvas, what is our way of setting to
work? We begin, in all probability, by telling the youth of fifteen or
sixteen, that Nature is full of faults, and that he is to improve her;
but that Raphael is perfection, and that the more he copies Raphael the
better; that after much copying of Raphael, he is to try what he can do
himself in a Raphaelesque, but yet original, manner: that is to say, he
is to try to do something very clever, all out of his own head, but yet
this clever something is to be properly subjected to Raphaelesque rules,
is to have a principal light occupying one-seventh of its space, and a
principle shadow occupying one-third of the same; that no two people's
heads in the picture are to be turned the same way, and that all the
personages represented are to possess ideal beauty of the highest order,
which ideal beauty consists partly in a Greek outline of nose, partly in
proportions expressible in decimal fractions between the lips and chin;
but partly also in that degree of improvement which the youth of sixteen
is to bestow upon God's work in general. This I say is the kind of
teaching which through various channels, Royal Academy lecturings, press
criticisms, public enthusiasm, and not least by solid weight of gold, we
give to our young men. And we wonder we have no painters!
But we do worse than this. Within the last few years some sense
of the real tendency of such teaching has appeared in some of
our younger painters. It only _could_ appear in the younger ones,
our older men having become familiarised with the false system,
or else having passed through it and forgotten it, not well knowing
the degree of harm they had sustained. This sense appeared, among our
youths,--increased,--matured into resolute action. Necessarily, to exist
at all, it needed the support both of strong instincts and of
considerable self-confidence, otherwise it must at once have been borne
down by the weight of general authority and received canon law. Strong
instincts are apt to make men strange, and rude; self-confidence,
however well founded, to give much of what they do or say the appearance
of impertinence. Look at the self-confidence of Wordsworth, stiffening
every other sentence of his prefaces into defiance; there is no more of
it than was needed to enable him to do his work, yet it is not a little
ungraceful here and there. Suppose this stubbornness and self-trust in
a youth, laboring in an art of which the executive part is confessedly
to be best learnt from masters, and we shall hardly wonder that much of
his work has a certain awkwardness and stiffness in it, or that he
should be regarded with disfavor by many, even the most temperate, of
the judges trained in the system he was breaking through, and with utter
contempt and reprobation by the envious and the dull. Consider, farther,
that the particular system to be overthrown was, in the present case,
one of which the main characteristic was the pursuit of beauty at the
expense of manliness and truth; and it will seem likely, _a priori_,
that the men intended successfully to resist the influence of such a
system should be endowed with little natural sense of beauty, and thus
rendered dead to the temptation it presented. Summing up these
conditions, there is surely little cause for surprise that pictures
painted, in a temper of resistance, by exceedingly young men, of
stubborn instincts and positive self-trust, and with little natural
perception of beauty, should not be calculated, at the first glance, to
win us from works enriched by plagiarism, polished by convention,
invested with all the attractiveness of artificial grace, and
recommended to our respect by established authority.
We should, however, on the other hand, have anticipated, that in
proportion to the strength of character required for the effort, and to
the absence of distracting sentiments, whether respect for precedent, or
affection for ideal beauty, would be the energy exhibited in the pursuit
of the special objects which the youths proposed to themselves, and
their success in attaining them.
All this has actually been the case, but in a degree which it would have
been impossible to anticipate. That two youths, of the respective ages
of eighteen and twenty, should have conceived for themselves a totally
independent and sincere method of study, and enthusiastically persevered
in it against every kind of dissuasion and opposition, is strange
enough; that in the third or fourth year of their efforts they should
have produced works in many parts not inferior to the best of Albert
Durer, this is perhaps not less strange. But the loudness and
universality of the howl which the common critics of the press have
raised against them, the utter absence of all generous help or
encouragement from those who can both measure their toil and appreciate
their success, and the shrill, shallow laughter of those who can do
neither the one nor the other,--these are strangest of all--unimaginable
unless they had been experienced.
And as if these were not enough, private malice is at work against them,
in its own small, slimy way. The very day after I had written my second
letter to the Times in the defence of the Pre-Raphaelites, I received an
anonymous letter respecting one of them, from some person apparently
hardly capable of spelling, and about as vile a specimen of petty
malignity as ever blotted paper. I think it well that the public should
know this, and so get some insight into the sources of the spirit which
is at work against these men--how first roused it is difficult to say,
for one would hardly have thought that mere eccentricity in young
artists could have excited an hostility so determined and so
cruel;--hostility which hesitated at no assertion, however impudent.
That of the "absence of perspective" was one of the most curious pieces
of the hue and cry which began with the Times, and died away in feeble
maundering in the Art Union; I contradicted it in the Times--I here
contradict it directly for the second time. There was not a single error
in perspective in three out of the four pictures in question. But if
otherwise, would it have been anything remarkable in them? I doubt, if
with the exception of the pictures of David Roberts, there were one
architectural drawing in perspective on the walls of the Academy; I
never met but with two men in my life who knew enough of perspective to
draw a Gothic arch in a retiring plane, so that its lateral dimensions
and curvatures might be calculated to scale from the drawing. Our
architects certainly do not, and it was but the other day that, talking
to one of the most distinguished among them, the author of several most
valuable works, I found he actually did not know how to draw a circle in
perspective. And in this state of general science our writers for the