The Legendary Art of the Middle Ages sprang out of the legendary literature of the preceding ages. For three centuries at least, this literature, the only literature which existed at the time, formed the sole mental and moral nourishment of the people of Europe. The romances of Chivalry, which long afterwards succeeded, were confined to particular classes, and left no impress on Art, beyond the miniature illuminations of a few manuscripts. This legendary literature, on the contrary, which had worked itself into the life of the people, became, like the antique mythology, as a living soul diffused through the loveliest forms of Art, still vivid and vivifying, even when the old faith in its mystical significance was lost or forgotten. And it is a mistake to suppose that these legends had their sole origin in the brains of dreaming monks. The wildest of them had some basis of truth to rest on, and the forms which they gradually assumed were but the necessary result of the age which produced them. They became the intense expression of that inner life, which revolted against the desolation and emptiness of the outward existence; of those crushed and outraged sympathies which cried aloud for rest, and refuge, and solace, and could nowhere find them. It will be said, ‘In the purer doctrine of the Gospel.’ But where was that to be found? The Gospel was not then the heritage of the poor: Christ, as a comforter, walked not among men. His own blessed teaching was inaccessible except to the learned: it was shut up in rare manuscripts; it was perverted and sophisticated by the passions and the blindness of those few to whom it was accessible. The bitter disputes in the early Church relative to the nature of the Godhead, the subtle distinctions and incomprehensible arguments of the theologians, the dread entertained by the predominant church of any heterodox opinions concerning the divinity of the Redeemer, had all conspired to remove Him, in his personal character of Teacher and Saviour, far away from the hearts of the benighted and miserable people—far, far away into regions speculative, mysterious, spiritual, whither they could not, dared not follow Him. In this state of things, as it has been remarked by a distinguished writer, ‘Christ became the object of a remoter, a more awful adoration. The mind began, therefore, to seek out, or eagerly to seize, some other more material beings in closer alliance with human sympathies.’ And the same author, after tracing in vivid and beautiful language the dangerous but natural consequences of this feeling, thus sums up the result: ‘During the perilous and gloomy days of persecution, the reverence for those who endured martyrdom for the religion of Christ had grown up out of the best feelings of man’s improved nature. Reverence gradually grew into veneration, worship, adoration: and although the more rigid theology maintained a marked distinction between the honour shown to the martyrs, and that addressed to the Redeemer and the Supreme Being, the line was too fine and invisible not to be transgressed by excited popular feeling.’[1]
‘We live,’ says the poet, ‘through admiration, hope, and love.’ Out of these vital aspirations—not indeed always ‘well or wisely placed,’ but never, as in the heathen mythology, degraded to vicious and contemptible objects—arose and spread the universal passion for the traditional histories of the saints and martyrs,—personages endeared and sanctified in all hearts, partly as examples of the loftiest virtue, partly as benign intercessors between suffering humanity and that Deity who, in every other light than as a God of Vengeance, had been veiled from their eyes by the perversities of schoolmen and fanatics, till He had receded beyond their reach, almost beyond their comprehension. Of the prevalence and of the incalculable influence of this legendary literature from the seventh to the tenth century, that is, just about the period when Modern Art was struggling into existence, we have a most striking picture in Guizot’s ‘Histoire de la Civilisation.’ ‘As after the siege of Troy (says this philosophical and eloquent writer) there were found, in every city of Greece, men who collected the traditions and adventures of heroes, and sung them for the recreation of the people, till these recitals became a national passion, a national poetry, so, at the time of which we speak, the traditions of what may be called the heroic ages of Christianity had the same interest for the nations of Europe. There were men who made it their business to collect them, to transcribe them, to read or recite them aloud, for the edification and delight of the people. And this was the only literature, properly so called, of that time.‘
Now, if we go back to the authentic histories of the sufferings and heroism of the early martyrs, we shall find enough there, both of the wonderful and the affecting, to justify the credulity and enthusiasm of the unlettered people, who saw no reason why they should not believe in one miracle as well as in another. In these universally diffused legends, we may recognise the means, at least one of the means, by which a merciful Providence, working through its own immutable laws, had provided against the utter depravation, almost extinction, of society. Of the ‘Dark Ages,’ emphatically so called, the period to which I allude was perhaps the darkest; it was ‘of Night’s black arch the key-stone.’ At a time when men were given over to the direst evils that can afflict humanity,—ignorance, idleness, wickedness, misery; at a time when the every-day incidents of life were a violation of all the moral instincts of mankind; at a time when all things seemed abandoned to a blind chance, or the brutal law of force; when there was no repose, no refuge, no safety anywhere; when the powerful inflicted, and the weak endured, whatever we can conceive of most revolting and intolerable; when slavery was recognised by law throughout Europe; when men fled to cloisters, to shut themselves from oppression, and women to shield themselves from outrage; when the manners were harsh, the language gross; when all the softer social sentiments, as pity, reverence, tenderness, found no resting-place in the actual relations of life; when for the higher ranks there was only the fierce excitement of war, and on the humbler classes lay the weary, dreary monotony of a stagnant existence, poor in pleasures of every kind, without aim, without hope; then—wondrous reaction of the ineffaceable instincts of good implanted within us!—arose a literature which reversed the outward order of things, which asserted and kept alive in the hearts of men those pure principles of Christianity which were outraged in their daily actions; a literature in which peace was represented as better than war, and sufferance more dignified than resistance; which exhibited poverty and toil as honourable, and charity as the first of virtues; which held up to imitation and emulation, self-sacrifice in the cause of good and contempt of death for conscience’ sake: a literature, in which the tenderness, the chastity, the heroism of woman, played a conspicuous part; which distinctly protested against slavery, against violence, against impurity in word and deed; which refreshed the fevered and darkened spirit with images of moral beauty and truth; revealed bright glimpses of a better land, where ‘the wicked cease from troubling,’ and brought down the angels of God with shining wings and bearing crowns of glory, to do battle with the demons of darkness, to catch the fleeting soul of the triumphant martyr, and carry it at once into a paradise of eternal blessedness and peace!
Now the Legendary Art of the three centuries which comprise the revival of learning, was, as I have said, the reflection of this literature, of this teaching. Considered in this point of view, can we easily overrate its interest and importance?
When, after the long period of darkness which followed upon the decline of the Roman Empire, the Fine Arts began to revive, the first, and for several ages the only, impress they received was that of the religious spirit of the time. Painting, Sculpture, Music, and Architecture, as they emerged one after another from the ‘formless void,’ were pressed into the service of the Church. But it is a mistake to suppose that in adroitly adapting the reviving Arts to her purposes, in that magnificent spirit of calculation which at all times characterised her, the Church from the beginning selected the subjects, or dictated the use that was to be made of them. We find, on the contrary, edicts and councils repressing the popular extravagances in this respect, and denouncing those apocryphal versions of sacred events and traditions which had become the delight of the people. But vain were councils and edicts; the tide was too strong to be so checked. The Church found herself obliged to accept and mould to her own objects the exotic elements she could not eradicate. She absorbed, so to speak, the evils and errors she could not expel. There seems to have been at this time a sort of compromise between the popular legends, with all their wild mixture of northern and classical superstitions, and the Church legends properly so called. The first great object to which reviving Art was destined, was to render the Christian places of worship a theatre of instruction and improvement for the people, to attract and to interest them by representations of scenes, events, and personages, already so familiar as to require no explanation, appealing; at once to their intelligence and their sympathies; embodying in beautiful shapes (beautiful at least in their eyes) associations and feelings and memories deep-rooted in their very hearts, and which had influenced, in no slight degree, the progress of civilisation, the development of mind. Upon these creations of ancient Art we cannot look as those did for whom they were created; we cannot annihilate the centuries which lie between us and them; we cannot, in simplicity of heart, forget the artist in the image he has placed before us, nor supply what may be deficient in his work, through a reverentially excited fancy. We are critical, not credulous. We no longer accept this polytheistic form of Christianity; and there is little danger, I suppose, of our falling again into the strange excesses of superstition to which it led. But if we have not much sympathy with modern imitations of Mediæval Art, still less should we sympathise with that narrow puritanical jealousy which holds the monuments of a real and earnest faith in contempt. All that God has permitted once to exist in the past should be considered as the possession of the present; sacred for example or warning, and held as the foundation on which to build up what is better and purer. It should seem an established fact, that all revolutions in religion, in government, and in art, which begin in the spirit of scorn, and in a sweeping destruction of the antecedent condition, only tend to a reaction. Our puritanical ancestors chopped off the heads of Madonnas and Saints, and paid vagabonds to smash the storied windows of our cathedrals;—now, are these rejected and outraged shapes of beauty coming back to us, or are we not rather going back to them? As a Protestant, I might fear lest in doing so we confound the eternal spirit of Christianity with the mutable forms in which it has deigned to speak to the hearts of men, forms which must of necessity vary with the degree of social civilisation, and bear the impress of the feelings and fashions of the age which produced them; but I must also feel that we ought to comprehend, and to hold in due reverence, that which has once been consecrated to holiest aims, which has shown us what a magnificent use has been made of Art, and how it may still be adapted to good and glorious purposes, if, while we respect these time-consecrated images and types, we do not allow them to fetter us, but trust in the progressive spirit of Christianity to furnish us with new impersonations of the good—new combinations of the beautiful. I hate the destructive as I revere the progressive spirit. We must laugh if any one were to try and persuade us that the sun was guided along his blazing path by a ‘fair-haired god who touched a golden lyre;’ but shall we therefore cease to adore in the Apollo Belvedere the majestic symbol of light, the most divine impersonation of intellectual power and beauty? So of the corresponding Christian symbols:—may that time never come, when we shall look up to the effigy of the winged and radiant angel trampling down the brute-fiend, without a glow of faith in the perpetual supremacy and final triumph of good over evil!
It is about a hundred years since the passion, or the fashion, for collecting works of Art, began to be generally diffused among the rich and the noble of this land; and it is amusing to look back and to consider the perversions and affectations of the would-be connoisseurship during this period;—the very small stock of ideas on which people set up a pretension to taste—the false notions, the mixture of pedantry and ignorance, which everywhere prevailed. The publication of Richardson’s book, and Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, had this advantage,—that they, to a certain degree, diffused a more elevated idea of Art as Art, and that they placed connoisseurship on a better and truer basis. In those days we had Inquiries into the Principles of Taste, Treatises on the Sublime and Beautiful, Anecdotes of Painting; and we abounded in Antiquarian Essays on disputed Pictures and mutilated Statues: but then, and up to a late period, any inquiry into the true spirit and significance of works of Art, as connected with the history of Religion and Civilisation, would have appeared ridiculous—or perhaps dangerous:—we should have had another cry of ‘No Popery,’ and acts of parliament forbidding the importation of Saints and Madonnas. It was fortunate, perhaps, that connoisseurs meddled not with such high matters. They talked volubly and harmlessly of ‘hands,’ and ‘masters,’ and ‘schools,’—of ‘draperies,’ of ‘tints,’ of ‘handling,’—of ‘fine heads,’ ‘fine compositions;’ of ‘the grace of Raphael,’ and of the ‘Correggiosity of Correggio.’ The very manner in which the names of the painters were pedantically used instead of the name of the subject, is indicative of this factitious feeling; the only question at issue was, whether such a picture was a genuine ‘Raphael?’ such another a genuine ‘Titian?’ The spirit of the work—whether that was genuine; how far it was influenced by the faith and the condition of the age which produced it; whether the conception was properly characteristic, and of what it was characteristic—of the subject? or of the school? or of the time?—whether the treatment corresponded to the idea within our own souls, or was modified by the individuality of the artist, or by received conventionalisms of all kinds?—these were questions which had not then occurred to any one; and I am not sure that we are much wiser even now: yet, setting aside all higher considerations, how can we do common justice to the artist, unless we can bring his work to the test of truth? and how can we do this, unless we know what to look for, what was intended as to incident, expression, character? One result of our ignorance has been the admiration wasted on the flimsy mannerists of the later ages of Art; men who apparently had no definite intention in anything they did, except a dashing outline, or a delicate finish, or a striking and attractive management of colour.