Part 11 (1/2)
All the Renaissance principles of art tended, as I have before often explained, to the setting Beauty above Truth, and seeking for it always at the expense of truth And the proper punishment of such pursuit--the punishment which all the laws of the universe rendered inevitable--was, that those who thus pursued beauty should wholly lose sight of beauty All the thinkers of the age, aspreviously, declared that it did not exist The age seconded their efforts, and banished beauty, so far as hu so, from the face of the earth, and the form of man To powder the hair, to patch the cheek, to hoop the body, to buckle the foot, were all part and parcel of the same system which reduced streets to brick walls, and pictures to brown stains One desert of Ugliness was extended before the eyes of mankind; and their pursuit of the beautiful, so recklessly continued, received unexpected consus,--Gower Street, and Gaspar Poussin[116]
Reaction from this state was inevitable, if any true life was left in the races of h still forced, by rule and fashi+on, to the producing and wearing all that is ugly,so, to the fields andthese the colour, and liberty, and variety, and pohich are for ever grateful to theht in these to an extent never before known; rejoice in all the wildest shattering of the aze in a rapt old, and purple, which glow for theather with care out of the fields, into their blotted herbaria, the flohich the five orders of architecture have banished from their doors and casements
The absence of care for personal beauty, which is another great characteristic of the age, adds to this feeling in a twofold way: first, by turning all reverent thoughts away froly creatures, getting through the world as well as they can, and spoiling it in doing so; not ruling it in a kingly way and crowning all its loveliness In the Middle Ages hardly anything but vice could be caricatured, because virtue was always visibly and personally noble: now virtue itself is apt to inhabit such poor human bodies, that no aspect of it is invulnerable to jest; and for all fairness we have to seek to the flowers, for all sublimity, to the hills
The sa the standard of health, increasing the susceptibility to nervous or senti to the other powers of nature over us whatever char theidleness
It is not, however, only to existing inanimate nature that our want of beauty in person and dress has driven us The iination of it, as it was seen in our ancestors, haunts us continually; and while we yield to the present fashi+ons, or act in accordance with the dullest modern principles of econoes of chivalry, and delight in painting, to the fancy, the fashi+ons we pretend to despise, and the splendours we think it wise to abandon The furniture and personages of our roht, when the writer desires to please most easily, in the centuries which we profess to have surpassed in everything; the art which takes us into the present tiraded; and while the weakest words please us, and are regarded as poetry, which recall the ers, it is only as faar that we accept the description of our own
In this we are wholly different from all the races that preceded us
All other nations have regarded their ancestors with reverence as saints or heroes; but have nevertheless thought their own deeds and ways of life the fitting subjects for their arts of painting or of verse We, on the contrary, regard our ancestors as foolish and wicked, but yet find our chief artistic pleasures in descriptions of their ways of life
The Greeks and mediaevals honoured, but did not imitate their forefathers; we imitate, but do not honour
With this romantic love of beauty, forced to seek in history, and in external nature, the satisfaction it cannot find in ordinary life, we le a more rational passion, the due and just result of neakened powers of attention Whatever may first lead us to the scrutiny of natural objects, that scrutiny never fails of its reward
Unquestionably they are intended to be regarded by us with both reverence and delight; and every hour we give to them renders their beautyNatural science--which can hardly be considered to have existed before e fruitful in accuood or evil, according to the teh it has hardened the faithlessness of the dull and proud, has sho grounds for reverence to hearts which were thoughtful and hulect of the art of hile it has soiven us leisure and opportunity for studies to which, before, ti; lives which once were early wasted on the battle-field are now passed usefully in the study; nations which exhausted themselves in annual warfare now dispute with each other the discovery of new planets; and the serene philosopher dissects the plants, and analyzes the dust, of lands which were of old only traversed by the knight in hasty march, or by the borderer in heedless rapine
The eleled in the ht beforehand anticipate that one of the notable characters of our art would be its inconsistency; that efforts would be made in every direction, and arrested by every conceivable cause and manner of failure; that in all we did, it would becorounds for praise or for regret; that all previous canons of practice and radually overthrown, and criticism continually defied by successes which no one had expected, and sentily, while, in our inquiries into Greek and eneral terms, what all men did or felt, I find now many characters in many men; some, it seems to me, founded on the inferior and evanescent principles of modernism, on its recklessness, impatience, or faithlessness; others founded on its science, its new affection for nature, its love of openness and liberty And aood or evil, I see that so to us fro to us, and will soon fade away, and others, though not yet distinctly developed, are yet properly our own, and likely to groard into greater strength
For instance: our reprobation of bright colour is, I think, for the most part, arity, dulness, or ih art in brown and grey, as in Rear, dull, or ied to continue so in any wise Our greatest reatof Scott and Byron is full and pure; that of Keats and Tennyson rich even to excess Our practical failures in colouring are ed want of practice during the periods of Renaissance affectation and ignorance; and the only durable difference between old and , is the acceptance of certain hues, by thethat melancholy peculiar to his reater variety of theain: if we ever becoracefully, to make health a principal object in education, and to render our streets beautiful with art, the external charreat measure disappear There is no essential reason, because we live after the fatal seventeenth century, that we should never again be able to confess interest in sculpture, or see brightness in eht deadly with our pleasures, and the day with our labours, prolonging the dance till dawn, and the toil to twilight, that we should never again learn how rightly to eth, beauty, and time Whatever external charm attaches itself to the past, would then be seen in proper subordination to the brightness of present life; and the elees, only in the attraction whichto whatever is unfamiliar; in the reverence which a noble nation always pays to its ancestors; and in the enchanted light which races, like individuals,back to the days of their childhood
Again: the peculiar levity hich natural scenery Is regarded by a large number of modern minds cannot be considered as entirely characteristic of the age, inasreatest intellects Men of any high mental power must be serious, whether in ancient or ree of reverence for fair scenery is found in all our great writers without exception,--even the one who hasus to the valley of Chaive peace after suffering, and change revenge into pity[118] It is only the dull, the uneducated, or the worldly, whom it is painful tocharacter, cannot be ascribed to the whole nation, but only to its holiday- apprentices, and its House of Cole poet or painter representing the entire group of powers, weaknesses, and inconsistent instincts which govern or confuse our modern life But we iven by Providence as the type of the age (as Hoiven, as the types of classical and mediaeval mind), we shall find whatever is fruitful and substantial to be coether with those of our weaknesses, which are indeed nationally characteristic, and coreatness of mind, just as the weak love of fences, and dislike of reatness in other respects
Farther: as the adreat part passed from men to mountains, and from human ereat strength of art will also be warped in this direction; with this notable result for us, that whereas the greatest painters or painter of classical andwholly devoted to the representation of humanity, furnished us with but little to exareatest painters or painter of modern times will in all probability be devoted to landscape principally: and farther, because in representing hu natural scenery painting surpasses words, we may anticipate also that the painter and poet (for convenience' sake I here use the words in opposition) will so the e; that the painter will become of more importance, the poet of less; and that the relations between the e in word and work,--namely, Scott and Turner,--will be, in many curious respects, different from those between Homer and Phidias, or Dante and Giotto[119]
[112] _Clouds_, 316-318; 380 ff; 320-321
[113] _Ephesians_ ii, 12
[114] Wordsworth's ”The world is too much with us”
[115] Pre-Raphaelitism, of course, excepted, which is a new phase of art, in no wise considered in this chapter Blake was sincere, but full of wild creeds, and somewhat diseased in brain [Ruskin]
[116] Gower Street, a London street selected as typical of liness
Gaspar Poussin [1613-75], a French landscape painter, of the pseudo-classical school
[117] Of course this is entleman, as compared with a citizen of Sparta or old Florence I leave it to others to say whether the ”neglect of the art of war” may or lish nation War, _without_ art, we seee nobly [Ruskin]
[118] See _David Copperfield_, chap 55 and 58 [Ruskin]