The Unity of Western Civilization

by Unknown

I do not think I need say much about the classical movement in art and literature, for we all know that it was international. It was begun by Petrarch, not indeed the Petrarch of the sonnets, for these are only a later form of the Troubadour lyric, and do not show any special trace of the classical influence, but the Petrarch whose letters were the first summons of Europe to a new and indefatigable work of the rediscovery of the ancient world. It was an Italian with whom the classical movement began, but it was only in the hands of two northern artists that it achieved a satisfying development in literature: the one a Frenchman, Racine, the other an Englishman, Milton. Neither are, I imagine, really classical at all, but of the two, Milton, as he was by far the more learned in ancient art, was also probably nearer to the ancient world both in form and in spirit.

Nor need I say anything about the deplorable ravages of the movement of good taste and common sense, which produced Boileau and, in some measure, Pope. It did some good, but far more evil, but happily it is long past and dead and done with, and we can afford to remember the little good and to forget the evil. Good or evil, it was at least very clearly a European and not a national movement.

I must ask you now to consider the extraordinary changes which passed over Europe in the eighteenth century, to trace the beginnings of that change which culminated in what we generally call the Romantic movement.

We all know, though not as well as we should, the work of Defoe, and beside Defoe there stands a painter whom also we all know, the great Hogarth. We all at least have read Robinson Crusoe, and we have probably all seen Hogarth's engravings of the good and bad apprentices, and the series of paintings in the National Gallery known as the 'Marriage à la mode'.

What is it now that we find in Defoe and Hogarth? An infinite multitude of detail—we all remember the 'three Dutch cheeses' and the 'fowling-pieces' which Robinson carefully ferried on his raft from the wreck to the island—an unsparing presentation of all the ugly and sordid realities of life; you might almost say, by preference the ugly realities, the squalid vices, the stupid and brutal ferocity of human nature. It is not a pretty or a pleasing world which we see in Hogarth or in Defoe's Colonel Jack. But they are great artists. If you see human nature often on its most repulsive side, in its harshest and most repellent form, at least you see in their novels or pictures, the world as they saw it in the streets and taverns, in the police courts and prisons of their day, as for that matter you can still see it everywhere in town or country. The world which they see may often, perhaps usually, be ugly, but at least there is no conventional prettiness, there is no smug veneer of an artificial good taste which refuses to call a spade a spade, and which deliberately turns away from those things in life which are irritating to its sense of decorum and propriety.

Here there is something new, and we can imagine a defender of the nationalist conception of art saying that here at last we have an obvious example of the revolt of northern realism against the southern or classical grace. But there could not be a greater delusion. For though it is true that the new realism was not fully developed all over Europe until the eighteenth century, it had its beginnings in the sixteenth century, and not in the 'cold' north, but in the 'romantic' south. The first signs of the new movement are to be found not in England or in Flanders, but in Spain in the sixteenth century. It was the Lazarillo de Tormes, the first of the Picaresque novels which struck the new note, which turned from the fantastic and conventional world of the romances in which Don Quixote had nourished his soul, and from the heroic world of beauty and grace of the dramatists, to the bare and hard reality of the life of the beggar and the vagabond. Not even Defoe himself ever surpassed the clearness and precision of the Lazarillo, and it was the first work of a type, whose slow development can be traced in almost every country in Europe: in England, in the realistic attempts of Greene and Nash and Deloney, in Germany in Simplicissimus, in France in the Roman comique of Scarron and in the Gil Blas of Le Sage, who was an almost exact contemporary of Defoe.

And all this can be traced just as clearly in the history of painting. The great Italian painting had ended with the gorgeous magnificence of the Venetian school, with Giorgione and Titian and Tintoretto, and its mastery passed for a few years to Flanders, to Rubens and Vandyck; but in the painting of Spain and of the Low Countries in the later seventeenth century we find ourselves in another world. The little beggar boys of Murillo may perhaps show a somewhat mannered realism, but the Spanish painting, as a whole, while it would be absurd to try to describe it under any one phrase, shows very clearly the determination to present the reality of the world under terms which are very different from those of the great Italians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. And when we turn to the art of the Low Countries in the latter part of the seventeenth and in the eighteenth centuries, leaving for the moment out of account the new art of landscape painting, we find ourselves in the same world as that of Defoe and Hogarth.

What was this, then, that had come to European art and literature? Clearly what we see is the transition from the heroic world of the tragedy, from the splendid beauty and force of the Italian painters, from the infinite grace of the romantic comedy, to some other artistic apprehension of the world. The movement was not indeed wholly dependent upon a reaction, but in its development it corresponds with the reaction against the continuance of a great tradition which had become merely a convention, when it had lost its vitality and sincerity. The best examples of this may perhaps be found in Dryden's attempt to carry on the heroic tradition in English tragedy, and in Voltaire's strenuous and meritorious efforts to continue the work of Racine and Corneille. They meant well, and their tragic dramas are not without merit, but it is clear enough that they could not bend the bow of Ulysses. They were great artists, as we can see clearly enough in Absalom and Ahitophel, or in Candide, but their genius lay in other directions. 'Il faut cultiver notre jardin' is a great judgement of life, one very wholesome and necessary for all time, but it was not the mood of Othello or of Hamlet.

European art had to come down from the empyrean, and though the descent was great, yet it gained new life by once again touching mother earth.

No doubt, however, the harsh reality of Hogarth and Defoe was not the whole of life, and, by a strange transition, before the middle of the eighteenth century we find the novelists and, though they are less important, the dramatists, turning from the faithful and minute study of the outward appearance and form of things to the study of sensibility and emotion, and the world, which had seemed so hard and unmoved, was dissolved in tears.