* * * * *
SONNET.
The brave old Poets sing of nobler themes
Than the weak griefs which haunt men's coward souls.
The torrent of their lusty music rolls
Not through dark valleys of distempered dreams,
But murmurous pastures lit by sunny streams;
Or, rushing from some mountain height of Thought,
Swells to strange music, that our minds have sought
Vainly to gather from the doubtful gleams
Of our more gross perceptions. Oh, their strains
Nerve and ennoble Manhood!—no shrill cry,
Set to a treble, tells of querulous woe;
Yet numbers deep-voiced as the mighty Main's
Merge in the ringdove's plaining, or the sigh
Of lovers whispering where sweet streamlets flow.
ART.
THE BRITISH GALLERY IN NEW YORK.
To speak of English Art was, ten years ago, to speak of something formless, chaotic, indeed, so far as any order or organization of principles was concerned,—a mass of individual results, felt out, often, under the most glorious artistic inspiration, but much oftener the expression of merely ignorant whim, or still more empty academic knowledge,—a waste of uncultivated, unpruned brushwood, with here and there a solitary tree towering into unapproachable and inexplicable symmetry and beauty. Hogarth, Gainsborough, and Turner are great names in Art-history; but to deduce their development from the English culture of Art, one must use the same processes as in proving Cromwell to have been called up by the loyalty of Englishmen. They towered the higher from contempt for the abasement around them. If there was greatness in measure in English Art, it was greatness subjected to tradition and conventionalism. The three artists we have just named were the only great freemen, in the realm of Art England had known down to the close of the first half of the nineteenth century; and of these, Turner alone has left his impress on the Art succeeding his.
With the commencement of the present half-century there began a systematic movement in revolt from the degradation of Art in England, which, unfortunately, so far as significance was concerned, assumed the name of Pre-Raphaelitism. It extended itself rapidly, absorbing most of the young painters of any force or earnestness, and attracting some who already held high places in public esteem. Being something new, it was sure of its full measure of derision while it was considered unimportant, and of bitter and violent antagonism when it became evident that it was strong enough to make its way. This hostility, beaten down for the moment by the rhetoric of Ruskin and the inherent earnestness of the new Art, is, however, as sure to prevail again as the English character is at once conservative of old forms, reverential of authorities, and subject to enthusiasms for new things, whose very extravagance tends to reaction. If Pre-Raphaelitism now holds its own in England, it is simply because it is neither thoroughly understood nor completely defined. It is an absolutely revolutionary movement, and must, therefore, be rejected by the English mind when seen as such,—and this all the more certainly and speedily because Ruskin with his imaginative enthusiasm has raised it to a higher position than it really deserves at present. That cause is unfortunate which retains as its advocate one whose rhetoric persuades all, while his logic convinces none; and the too readily believing converts of his enthusiasm and splendid diction, their sympathetic fire abated, revert with an implacable bitterness to their former traditions. With all our respect for Ruskin, we think that he has asserted many things, but proved next to nothing. He has utterly misunderstood and misstated Pre-Raphaelitism, which will thus be one day the weaker for his support.
But, pending this inevitable decline in favor at home, Pre-Raphaelitism colonizes. During the past year, some lovers of Art in England organized an association, having as its purpose the introduction of English Art to the American public,—partly, it was to be expected, with the view of opening this El Dorado to the English painter, but still more with the desire to extend the knowledge of what was to them a new and important revelation of Art. In its inception the plan was almost exclusively Pre-Raphaelite, but extended itself, on after-consideration, so far as to admit the worthiest artists of the conventional stamp. We have the first fruits of the undertaking in an exhibition which has achieved a success in New York, and which will probably visit the principal cities of the Union before its return home in the spring to make way for a second which will open in the autumn.
It is not as a collection of pictures merely that we purpose to notice this exhibition. Out of nearly four hundred pictures, the great proportion are mere conventionalisms,—many of them choice, but most of them in no wise to be compared with the pictures of the same class by French and German painters, since neither just drawing nor impressive color redeems their inanity of conception. There are some curious water-color drawings by Lance, remarkable mainly as forcibly painted, some exquisite color-pieces by William Hunt, and a number of fine examples of the matter-of-fact common-place which forms the great mass of pictures in the London exhibitions. Two drawings deserve especial, though brief, notice; one a coast bit by Copley Fielding,—a sultry, hazy afternoon on the seashore, where sea and sky, distance and foreground, are fused into one golden, slumberous silence, in which neither wave laps nor breeze fans, and only the blinding sun moves, sinking slowly down to where heaven and ocean mingle again in a happy dream of their old unity before the waters under the firmament were divided from the waters above the firmament, and the stranded ships lie with sails drooping and listless on a beach from which the last tide seems to have ebbed, leaving the ooze glistening and gleaming in the sunlight,—a picture of rare sentiment and artistic refinement;—the other is a waterfall by Nesfield,—a dreamy, careless, wayward plunge of waters over ledge after ledge of massive rock, the merry cascade enveloping itself in a robe of spray and mist, on the skirt of which flashes the faintest vision of a rainbow, which wavers and flits, almost, as you look at it, while the jets of foam plash up from the pool at the foot of the fall, a tranquil pause of the waters in a depth of uncertain blue, in which a suggestion of emerald flashes, and from which they dance on in less frantic mood over the brown and water-worn boulders to follow their further whims; everything that is most charming and spirituelle in the water-fall is given, and with a delicacy of color and subtilty of execution fitting the subject. These are not the only good drawings, but there is in them a simplicity and singleness of purpose, a total subordination of all minor matters to the great impression, which makes them points of poetic value in the collection. There are some drawings by Finch, scarcely less noticeable for their rendering of solemn twilight, tender and touching as the memory of a loved one long dead. The water-color representation is, indeed, complete and interesting; but we have only present use with five of these drawings, by Turner, and from different stages of his progress.
Ruskin, in his pamphlet on Pre-Raphaelitism, has drawn such a comparison between Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites as to make them only different manifestations of the same spirit in Art. Nothing, it seems to us, could be more mistaken than this; for, in all that concerns either the end of Art or its paths of approach, its purposes or its methods, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites are diametrically opposed. Turner was intensely subjective,—the Pre-Raphaelites are as intensely objective. There is no evidence whatever in Turner's works that he ever made the slightest attempt to reproduce Nature in such guise as the Pre-Raphaelites paint her in; on the contrary, the early drawings of Turner are as inattentive to absolute truth of detail as they could well be. His course of study was one of memory. He commenced by expressing in his drawing such palpable facts and truths as were most strongly retained, and in which he conveyed the great impression of the scene, with the most complete indifference to all facts not essential to the telling of his story. From this, as his memory grew stronger and his perception more minute and comprehensive, he widened his circle of ideas and facts, always working from feeling rather than from what Nature set before him. His mind thus sifting his perceptions, retaining always only those which constituted the essential features of the impression, and with a distinctness proportioned to their relative importance, there necessarily resulted a subjective unity like that of an absolute creation. The Pre-Raphaelites, on the other hand, endeavor to paint everything that they see just as they see it; and doing this without permitting the slightest liberty of choice to their feeling, where they have feeling, their Art is, of course, in all its early stages, destitute of that singleness of purpose which marked Turner's works from the beginning. Turner felt an emotion before Nature, and used the objects from which he had received the emotion as symbols to convey it again;—the Pre-Raphaelites look at Nature as full of beautiful facts, and, like children amid the flowers, they gather their hands full, "indifferent of worst or best," and when their hands are full, crowd their laps and bosoms, and even drop some already picked, to make room for others which beckon from their stems,—insatiable with beauty. This is delightful,—but childlike, nevertheless. Turner was, above all, an artist; with him Art stood first, facts secondary;—with the Pre-Raphaelites it is the reverse; it is far less important to them that their facts should be broadly stated and in keeping in their pictures, than that they should be there and comprehensible. To him a fact that was out of keeping was a nuisance, and he treated it as such; while any falsehood that was in keeping was as unhesitatingly admitted, if he needed it to strengthen the impression of his picture. Turner would put a rainbow by the side of the sun, if he wanted one there;—a Pre-Raphaelite would paint with a stop-watch, to get the rainbow in the right place. In brief, Turner's was the purely subjective method of study, a method fatal to any artist of the opposite quality of mind;—that of the Pre-Raphaelites is the purely objective, absolutely enslaving to a subjective artist, and no critic capable of following out the first principles of Art to logical deductions could confound the two. The one leads to a sentimental, the other to a philosophic Art; and the only advice to be given to an artist as to his choice of method is, that, until he knows that he can trust himself in the liberty of the subjective, he had better remain in the discipline of the objective. The fascination of the former, once felt, forbids all return to the latter. If he be happy in the Pre-Raphaelite fidelity, let him thank the Muse and tempt her no farther.