This apparatus for developing and training the future artists of England has been accompanied with an increasingly lavish expenditure by the State when a chance has occurred of permanently adding to its artistic wealth. Thus, during the early eighties the Treasury paid for a single painting from the Blenheim collection, the Ansidei Madonna of Raphael, exactly the same sum that, thirty years earlier, had been voted for the entire collection of Sir Robert Peel.[85]
The transformation effected during the Victorian age in the position of English art is illustrated by the statistics of visitors to the Royal Academy exhibitions not less significantly than by the increase of prices itself. Only within the last few years has what is called the ‘private’ view of the Royal Academy become a fête day of fashionable society;—a promenade for the display of the latest devices in Parisian or Bond Street toilettes. Long after the great Exhibition or even the Prince Consort’s death, it was that the view of the critics, from being confined strictly to the judges of the press, began to be transformed into an immense meeting of authors, scholars, divines, novelists of both sexes, art fanciers of every degree; all of them able to produce some credentials of critical aptitude or profession, and of some slight connection with periodical letters. The figures themselves shall tell their tale. To the earliest exhibition at the Academy rooms, then in Trafalgar Square, of the Queen’s reign, the admissions were less than 79,000. Ten years later they just fell short of 91,000. Between 1846 and 1866 the increase was 94,000. The additions steadily continued till in 1879 the high water mark of 391,197 was reached. Since that date they have fluctuated: depending, as one might naturally expect, upon the state of trade in the country, upon the weather in town, or upon the general character of the London season. Thus, in 1896, which was not a very brilliant season, the admissions were 10 less than in the preceding year, or in the Queen’s jubilee year of 1887.
The mutual relations of art and wealth are probably for the most part beneficial to each. The painter, during the latter half of the whole Victorian age, has been the chief educator of the plutocrat, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti shrewdly anticipated must prove the case. If the intellectual teaching of the brush were not easily apprehended, there would, for the representatives of the new wealth, have been no special training in the humanities at all. As it is, the aristocracy of wealth, following the creditable example of the aristocracy of birth, in England as well as Italy, has secured for itself mental culture not less than social distinction by its patronage of the creators of the nation’s art. To that rôle it brings the shrewdness already displayed in making its fortune. Such a patron may be a generous paymaster; he insists on having value for his money; he is quick to detect scamped work, or shortcomings in technical detail; he no longer, as he was once fabled to do, buys his canvases at so much per square foot any more than he fills his library shelves by the yard. That no meritorious artist in Victorian England is now likely to live and die so miserably as Haydon is due to the fact that the newest wealth finds its natural outlet in the encouragement of the oldest art. No aggregate of spiritual or intellectual interests has ever been firmly established in England without being subject to some great organic movement as a test of vitality before its roots struck deep in the soil of British minds. Literature experienced many such phases. So did science. So also, in the Oxford Anglican movement and in others since then, did religion. Before, therefore, the new art was firmly enthroned in our midst, it was at once shaken and quickened by that nineteenth century revolution known as pre-Raphaelite; about this so much has been written by recent experts as to absolve one from the duty of dwelling on it in detail here. Art in the hands of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt, and other men of genius entered upon this ordeal as a sectional and limited pursuit. It came forth a new national interest or rather one of European concern as well. Without that severe process of discipline, Leighton and Millais, to mention only two typical names, would not have taken their place as masters of the brush for a continental as well as for an insular public. Nor would the fame of the English school first known through the Paris Exhibition of 1855, extended by the Paris Exhibition of 1868, have secured for English artists representation in all the great galleries of the world, and have added to British painters or to their national themes the crown of foreign recognition and of cosmopolitan esteem. Later chroniclers of the Victorian age may be able to record the same progress in the sculptor’s, as in the painter’s art. Our climate is not favourable to the out of door triumphs of the plastic art. But those who have examined the statue of Outram in Pall Mall; who have gazed upon the effigy of the great Duke of Wellington by Alfred Stevens in St Paul’s; or have noted the growing power as well as popularity of Hamo Thornycroft, still a young man, cannot doubt that, apart from the successful labours of a naturalized but most patriotic foreigner and his school, Sir Edgar Boehm, the English chisel is in a fair way of emulating the progress of the English brush.
Commercial prosperity in art, as in other things, moves in cycles. The years between 1870 and 1885 were very prosperous to English painters. The lean years followed then, and are still being experienced while these lines are written. As to the high prices given at Christie’s and set forth elsewhere in this volume, they have been generally for the works of old and departed masters. With very few exceptions, the decade between 1886 and 1896 has witnessed none of those prices for contemporary artists which marked the preceding period. This, too, notwithstanding the standard of artistic work to-day is infinitely higher than it was; and that the paintings which were hung on the line and were the talk of the town thirty years ago, would have a very slight chance of being accepted at all to-day.[86]
CHAPTER XXVI
POPULAR CULTURE IN THE CRUCIBLE
Translation into fact of ideals not less than transformations seen in the People’s Palace, Whitechapel, and in the free libraries, originated by the Ewart Act, affecting as they do all contemporary life. The working of these in town and country. Proved connection between popular education and morality; what books free libraries like best. Analogous work for upper classes done by Mudie’s, and by the London Library. Their progress traced. Help rendered by these to public servants and literary producers. Carlyle, Thackeray, etc. Eclectic and educating influences of these shown in detail. The new public and the new magazines. General review of influences at work. Great services of minor poets and prophets of the period.
Not only transformations, but translations of ideals into fact, mark our age. A popular novelist gave a fancy sketch of a palace in which art, pleasure, and instruction should meet together to gladden the lives of the London poor. Almost as soon as could have been done by the genius of Aladdin’s Lamp, the People’s Palace shoots up in the Mile End Road.