They see the shadow of the Cross upon the holy Child, and their passionate life quivers before the Death to be. The same brooding sense of mystery, the same large and intense compassion for the “world-sorrow,” yet mingled with a certain austerity of outlook upon its strife, is the dominant note of Leonardo’s masterpiece of a later date, “La Gioconda” (“Our Lady of the Rocks”); often compared with that triumph of a more modern Renaissance, Albrecht Dürer’s “Melancholia,” with which it shares in the attainment of perfect harmony between classic and romantic art.
Yet the return of art in the fourteenth century from the angelic to the human world did not go far enough to affect the ideals of womanhood beyond this single aspect—the aspect of maternity. The early Renaissance painters did indeed humanize, in conception and presentment, the virgins and the venerable mother-saints of Christendom; but their imagination never concerned itself with what may be termed the independent humanity of womanhood. They painted always under the sway of that central and dominant motif of the Christian mythology,—the idea of woman as the receptive and passive vehicle of the God-man; and never presented woman as daughter, sister, lover, or wife, apart from the concurrent idea of potential motherhood. This limitation—unfortunately for art—instead of being removed by a further broadening of thought and vision as the Renaissance proceeded, was emphasized in the fifteenth century by the influence of Raphael, who cultivated and stereotyped his own ideal of the “for-ever-motherly” until—so subtle is the influence of fixed types in pictorial art upon the current standards of truth and beauty—the maternal function came to be regarded as the sole and sufficient object of a woman’s existence; and the conventional Madonna-face of Raphael became a bondage from which Christianity has taken more than three centuries to set itself free.
For the advent of Raphael into Italian art marked the beginning of the degradation of the pure and wholesome naturalism achieved in the Renaissance into a coarse materialism which in its turn degenerated into a false and shallow conventionality, and had an effect infinitely mischievous upon Italy, still more so upon France, and through France upon the England of the Stuart and Hanoverian periods. It might almost be said that the greatness of Raphael was the weakness of modern art. The immediate result of a triumph in technique—of a great success in the wedding of perfect utterance to noble thought—is sometimes to produce, in the moral atmosphere around it, a sense of finality, a relaxing of tension, in which the soul is overpowered by its own conquest of the medium, and loses itself in the facile freedom thus attained. The disciples of Raphael, counting him to have achieved the highest perfection, modelled themselves upon his manner, and thence upon his mannerisms, without question or reserve; just as, in metaphysics and philosophy, the schoolmen argued from Aristotle without any reference to the external world, and, bound in the thrall of his genius, followed implicitly the narrow trend of his reasoning, until, entangled in theoretical cobwebs of their own spinning, they lost altogether the use of the inductive method, founded upon observation and experiment, which is the only true basis of knowledge. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it is sometimes a fatal hindrance to progress. Its maleficence in the world of mental science is not greater than the mischief wrought in art by a spirit which does as much harm to the work of the copyist as to the reputation of the model. As Ruskin says, “All that is highest in art, all that is creative and imaginative, is formed and created by every great master for himself, and cannot be repeated or imitated by others.” Raphael at first-hand was always great, often sublime. Raphael second-hand,—stereotyped, formalized, degraded by three centuries of imitations, each more laboured than the last,—became vapid, artificial, meaningless. The original inspiration was destroyed. Art lost its hold on Nature; and, severed from that sole source of power, fell into inevitable decay.
History repeats itself, but with a difference. Man’s struggle, as we have said, for balance, for self-adjustment to the forces around him, and to the greater forces within, recurs in every age of the world’s life, but under conditions ever new. The nineteenth century supplied such new conditions for the old task. The ground that had long lain fallow was not wasted in its time of barrenness, but made ready in unfruitful autumns for fresh seed; prepared by silent and secret forces for a new harvest. Shaken by social revolution, roused by the pressure of intellectual problems on every side, Art was confronted once more with the great realities of life and death, good and evil, and turned for guidance to the witness of the past: as a soul, once quick to action but long sunk in apathy, awakes again to the mystery of the ideal, and gathering itself together for fresh strife, calls urgently upon the old wisdom and the remembered strength of yore.
In such a spirit did Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his comrades turn from the dull abstractions of academic tradition, and lift their eyes towards that golden age whose dawning answered their own cry for light. Not to the material and redundant splendours of Raphaelesque art did they look for the inspiration of the hour; not to the pseudoclassicism of the later Renaissance, but to the pristine freshness and purity of its youth: just as we now look for the true significance of the romantic revival, not to the Postlethwaite of fashionable society, or to the weak sensuality of a drawing-room æstheticism; not to the latter-day apotheosis of lust which is but a gross travesty of the vigorous naturalism of Hellenic and early Renaissance art, but to the gracious innocence and seriousness of Rossetti’s “Virgin,” the noble beauty and pathos of his dying “Beatrice,” and the austere tenderness of Hunt’s sore-tempted “Isabella,” confronting Claudio’s painful face with the set resolve of her impregnable womanhood. So, seeking and following all that was best in the past, and facing, with vision clarified by that high discipline, the intellectual, social, and moral strife of the nineteenth century, the young painters set themselves “to disengage,” as Sainte-Beuve says, “the elements of beauty,” and to put them forth in some sort of order and lucidity, even if it were but in a tentative formula, yet to be subjected to the tests of time.
CHAPTER III.
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD.
The Revolt from the Raphaelesque—Influence of Keats and the Romantic Poets—The Pre-Raphaelite Brothers and their Early Work—Travels of Rossetti with Hunt—Publication of “The Germ”—Hunt and Millais in the Royal Academy—Ruskin’s Letters to the “Times”—Pre-Raphaelitism at Liverpool—The Pre-Raphaelites as Colourists.
The impulse thus given by Ruskin, in the minds of the young painters, towards the larger spiritual life and vision of the Pre-Raphaelite period, was strengthened, as Mr. Holman Hunt has told us, by the almost accidental sight of a book of engravings from the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa, which fell into the hands of Rossetti and his friends while spending an evening together at Millais’s house. To such aspirants as they, “crying bitterly unto the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create,” the work of the early Italian masters here set forth, though already partially known to them in the National Gallery, opened up a new world to be conquered and explored. In the suggestive rather than successful achievements of Cimabue, Giotto, Ghiberti, and Masaccio, they discerned the wealth of thought to which Ruskin had directed them, though the language was still in the course of adjustment to the meaning within. One cannot but think with a half-amused tenderness of the eager experimentalism of the young schismatics, shaking off from their feet the dust of academic propriety, and wandering back, half in jest, half in earnest, in the buoyant prowess of their youth, to the free fields wherefrom
—“the harvest long ago
Was reaped and garnered in the ancient barns.”