239. Now if these two carvings are ever put in due relative position, they will constitute a precise and permanent art-lecture to the museum-visitants of Liverpool-burg; exhibiting to them instantly, and in sum, the conditions of the change in the aims of art which, beginning in the thirteenth century under Niccolo Pisano, consummated itself three hundred years afterwards in Raphael and his scholars. Niccolo, first among Italians, thought mainly in carving the Crucifixion, not how heavy Christ's head was when He bowed it;—but how heavy His body was when people came to take it down. And the apotheosis of flesh, or, in modern scientific terms, the molecular development of flesh, went steadily on, until at last, as we see in the instance before us, it became really of small consequence to the artists of the Renaissance Incarnadine, whether a man had his head on or not, so only that his legs were handsome: and the decapitation, whether of St. John or St. Cecilia; the massacre of any quantity of Innocents; the flaying, whether of Marsyas or St. Bartholomew, and the deaths, it might be of Laocoon by his vipers, it might be of Adonis by his pig, or it might be of Christ by His people, became, one and all, simply subjects for analysis of muscular mortification; and the vast body of artists accurately, therefore, little more than a chirurgically useless sect of medical students.
Of course there were many reactionary tendencies among the men who had been trained in the pure Tuscan schools, which partly concealed, or adorned, the materialism of their advance; and Raphael himself, after profoundly studying the arabesques of Pompeii and of the palace of the Cæsars, beguiled the tedium, and illustrated the spirituality of the converse of Moses and Elias with Christ concerning His decease which He should accomplish at Jerusalem, by placing them, above the Mount of Transfiguration, in the attitudes of two humming-birds on the top of a honeysuckle.
240. But the best of these ornamental arrangements were insufficient to sustain the vivacity, while they conclusively undermined the sincerity, of the Christian faith, and "the real consequences of the acceptance of this kind (Roman Bath and Sarcophagus kind)" of religious idealism were instant and manifold.[45]
So far as it was received and trusted in by thoughtful persons, it only served to chill all the conceptions of sacred history which they might otherwise have obtained. Whatever they could have fancied for themselves about the wild, strange, infinitely stern, infinitely tender, infinitely varied veracities of the life of Christ, was blotted out by the vapid fineries of Raphael: the rough Galilean pilot, the orderly custom receiver, and all the questioning wonder and fire of uneducated apostleship, were obscured under an antique mask of philosophical faces and long robes. The feeble, subtle, suffering, ceaseless energy and humiliation of St. Paul were confused with an idea of a meditative Hercules leaning on a sweeping sword; and the mighty presences of Moses and Elias were softened by introductions of delicate grace, adopted from dancing nymphs and rising Auroras.
Now no vigorously minded religious person could possibly receive pleasure or help from such art as this; and the necessary result was the instant rejection of it by the healthy religion of the world. Raphael ministered, with applause, to the impious luxury of the Vatican, but was trampled underfoot at once by every believing and advancing Christian of his own and subsequent times; and thenceforward pure Christianity and "high art" took separate roads, and fared on, as best they might, independently of each other.
But although Calvin, and Knox, and Luther, and their flocks, with all the hardest-headed and truest-hearted faithful left in Christendom, thus spurned away the spurious art, and all art with it (not without harm to themselves, such as a man must needs sustain in cutting off a decayed limb), certain conditions of weaker Christianity suffered the false system to retain influence over them; and to this day the clear and tasteless poison of the art of Raphael infects with sleep of infidelity the hearts of millions of Christians. It is the first cause of all that pre-eminent dullness which characterizes what Protestants call sacred art; a dullness not merely baneful in making religion distasteful to the young, but in sickening, as we have seen, all vital belief of religion in the old. A dim sense of impossibility attaches itself always to the graceful emptiness of the representation; we feel instinctively that the painted Christ and painted apostle are not beings that ever did or could exist; and this fatal sense of fair fabulousness, and well-composed impossibility, steals gradually from the picture into the history, until we find ourselves reading St. Mark or St. Luke with the same admiring, but uninterested, incredulity, with which we contemplate Raphael.
241. Without claiming,—nay, so far as my knowledge can reach, utterly disclaiming—any personal influence over, or any originality of suggestion to, the men who founded our presently realistic schools, I may yet be permitted to point out the sympathy which I had as an outstanding spectator with their effort; and the more or less active fellowship with it, which, unrecognized, I had held from the beginning. The passage I have just quoted (with many others enforcing similar truths) is in the third volume of Modern Painters; but if the reader can refer to the close of the preface to the second edition[46] of the first, he will find this very principle of realism asserted for the groundwork of all I had to teach in that volume. The lesson so far pleased the public of that day, that ever since, they have refused to listen to any corollaries or conclusions from it, assuring me, year by year, continually, that the older I grew, the less I knew, and the worse I wrote. Nevertheless, that first volume of Modern Painters did by no means contain all that even then I knew; and in the third, nominally treating of "Many Things," will be found the full expression of what I knew best; namely, that all "things," many or few, which we ought to paint, must be first distinguished boldly from the nothings which we ought not; and that a faithful realist, before he could question whether his art was representing anything truly, had first to ask whether it meant seriously to represent anything at all!
242. And such definition has in these days become more needful than ever before, in this solid, or spectral—which-ever the reader pleases to consider it—world of ours. For some of us, who have no perception but of solidity, are agreed to consider all that is not solid, or weighably liquid, nothing. And others of us, who have also perception of the spectral, are sometimes too much inclined to call what is no more than solid, or weighably liquid, nothing. But the general reader may be at least assured that it is not at all possible for the student to enter into useful discussion concerning the qualities of art which takes on itself to represent things as they are, unless he include in its subjects the spectral, no less than the substantial, reality; and understand what difference must be between the powers of veritable representation, for the men whose models are of ponderable flesh, as for instance, the "Sculptor's model," lately under debate in Liverpool,—and the men whose models pause perhaps only for an instant—painted on the immeasurable air,—forms which they themselves can but discern darkly, and remember uncertainly, saying: "A vision passed before me, but I could not discern the form thereof."
243. And the most curious, yet the most common, deficiency in the modern contemplative mind, is its inability to comprehend that these phenomena of true imagination are yet no less real, and often more vivid than phenomena of matter. We continually hear artists blamed or praised for having painted this or that (either of material or spectral kind), without the slightest implied inquiry whether they saw this, or that. Whereas the quite primal difference between the first and second order of artists, is that the first is indeed painting what he has seen; and the second only what he would like to see! But as the one that can paint what he would like, has therefore the power, if he chooses, of painting more or less what also his public likes, he has a chance of being received with sympathetic applause, on all hands, while the first, it may be, meets only reproach for not having painted something more agreeable. Thus Mr. Millais, going out at Tunbridge or Sevenoaks, sees a blind vagrant led by an ugly child; and paints that highly objectionable group, as they appeared to him. But your pliably minded painter gives you a beautiful young lady guiding a sightless Belisarius (see the gift by one of our most tasteful modistes to our National Gallery), and the gratified public never troubles itself to ask whether these ethereal mendicants were ever indeed apparent in this world, or any other. Much more, if, in deeper vistas of his imagination, some presently graphic Zechariah paint—(let us say) four carpenters, the public will most likely declare that he ought to have painted persons in a higher class of life, without ever inquiring whether the Lord had shown him four carpenters or not. And the worst of the business is that the public impatience, in such sort, is not wholly unreasonable. For truly, a painter who has eyes can, for the most part, see what he "likes" with them; and is, by divine law, answerable for his liking. And, even at this late hour of the day, it is still conceivable that such of them as would verily prefer to see, suppose, instead of a tramp with a harmonium, Orpheus with his lute, or Arion on his dolphin, pleased Proteus rising beside him from the sea,—might, standing on the "pleasant lea" of Margate or Brighton, have sight of those personages.