from nature, and which appeals to new sources of



THE DECAY OF AKT 193

enjoyment. In the satisfaction due to successful
and complete imitation lies a triumph far more
facile than those of the ideal method, and which
appeals to that general appreciation to which few
men are great enough to be indifferent; for the
artist above most men craves the appreciation
of his fellow-men. This change seems to have
occurred generally, if not invariably, at the close
of long periods of purely artistic activity, and
after rapid increase of civic and individual pros-
perity, when the comparatively uneducated taste
of the community at large was the court to which
the artist appealed. Then, with this lowered
standard and sacrifice of the ideal, nature became
the mistress of the school, and the old way and
the old insight departed. Art was no longer
expression, poetry, but a representation, a simula-
tion, more or less earnest, of an actuality: first,
history, sacred or profane or commonplace; and
so in time came genre, story-painting, etc., etc.,
with much pride in rendering of stuffs and
illusions, of light and shade, descending to a kind
of intelligent photography.

And so it happens that in our time we have only
sporadic cases of the true method of the study
of art, and that beside them occurs a form of art
which was never known in the days of the ideal
art viz., the strictly historical, of which Ford
Madox Brown was in England the most con-
spicuous example, and of which much might be
said, but by me at present only that it relates

to the art of the ideal, the supreme art whose

N



194 THE DECAY OF ART

loss we deplore, as history does to poetry and
music.

That the inspiration is not extinct, we have
proof in our own days, in France, in Delacroix,
J. F. Millet in intellectual ability quite the peers
of the men of the great schools in America, in
Allston, and in England, in Watts, Burne-Jones,
Rossetti : each of the great type, eminent, distinct,
entirely individual, but each, unfortunately, com-
pelled to work out his results alone, groping for
the true method by the aid of the light remaining
to us in the works of the great masters of the
Greek and Italian schools, but with no leading or
following of their own time.*

Since the days of the great Renaissance masters,
no man has comprehended so fully and applied so
successfully the spirit of Greek art as Watts, and
none has caught so perfectly that of the Renais-
sance as Burne-Jones. Rossetti, like Turner, stood
alone. He even less resembled all his predecessors,
and has been followed by no disciples. For felicity
of imaginative design, nothing in art surpasses
some of the work of his youth such draw-
ings, for instance, as his Cassandra, Hamlet,
and the Magdalen s First Sight of Christ ; or, in
chromatic brilliancy and weird harmony, some of
the water-colour drawings, all drawn to the
minutest details from imaginative vision. What

* It is in my personal knowledge that Mr Watts has said that he
would have been a better painter if he had had the advantage of a
training in youth in Titian's studio, instead of arriving late by his own
research at the proper methods of execution.



THE DECAY OF ART 195

he might have done for art, had his life and health
been spared, we can only conjecture ; but what he
has left is a page of art history, brilliant, indeed,
but even more suggestive of what might have
been. If, again, we demand technical "mastery,"
the knowledge of the processes which are required
in art production, that which was the qualifica-
tion to become a teacher in the great Italian
schools, there is only, in England, W. B. Richmond,
competent to do in a workmanlike manner any
work set before him, without which competence
no man can be called a "master."

The public of to-day prefers a form of art which
shall require no previous study, and make no
appeal to faculties beyond keen optics. It likes
work studded with fine bits of realism and whose
story lies on the surface. A thoroughly realistic
perception of natural colour (not so common a
gift, however, as the public imagines) and a
masterly execution are sufficient to secure the
painter's position. Imagination and imaginative
fusion, and the sense of ideal beauty which make
what is commonly called " high art " and may be
called true art, are no longer necessary to place
the artist in the position of authority which would
give rise to a school. The great schools of art
were founded in the search for these supreme
qualities. The artists went into them as students
of music now go in youth to study while the hand
and thought are flexible Titian and Michael
Angelo at eight and ten years of age and the
whole course of study was one which widened and



196 THE DECAY OF ART

deepened the intellectual nature in the direction
of art. This early entry into the school, invari-
able in the practice of the great schools, is, to my
opinion, the condition sine qua non of any mastery
in painting and sculpture as in music, or in the
acquisition of any other language. Expression
must be unconscious to be supreme. The minor
men were caught up by the power and influence
of the masters' minds into the majesty of the
school, and the masters quickened and stimulated
each other's genius. The morbid vanity of indi-
vidualism, tending to eccentricity, did not carry
men out of the sound traditions of their masters,
but the true scholars laboured collectively for the
attainment of the ideal of their school. Now,
stat nominis umbra there is no school. Drawing
classes there are, and lessons at so much an hour,
but no masters, and therefore no schools. The
drawing and painting classes teach technical vir-
tues, and all classes, painters, and exhibitions,
exalt the imitation of nature as the end of art.

The end it is, but in another sense its grave.
To know nature and employ her terms for the
expression of the artist's ideal, is a widely different
thing from the imitation of her forms and facts.
The former is an education, it wakens a kinship
to all great thought and all great thinkers ; the
latter narrows and dwarfs the intellect and ex-
terminates the imagination. So long as the
modern thinker only accepts realism and nature-
reproduction as art, art education must remain
a shallow and unimportant branch of modern in-



THE DECAY OF ART 197

tellectual development, and art stay where it is
the servant of all fashions and fancies, huckster
of stuffs and bric-a-brac, tableaux vivants and still
life, archaeological restorations and mediaeval poses
plastiques anything and everything but essential
truth and ideal beauty. If this is to be the con-
clusion of the education on which we are concen-
trating our forces, it is hardly necessary to say
that the play is not worth the candle.



THE REVIVAL OF ART

IN one of his most important and suggestive
essays, that on Culture, Emerson has the follow-
ing sentence: "Whilst all the world is in pursuit
of power, and of wealth as a means of power,
culture corrects the theory of success." No man
was better qualified to estimate the qualities and
value of culture by his own experience, or to
judge of the dignity or the reverse, of success,
by the daily spectacle all round him of the most
successful pursuit of power and wealth that any
society has ever afforded viz., that in the great
commonwealth of the American Republic. He
stood at the head of its culture ; and, in a country
where intellect has only to choose the path to
power and accept the sacrifices and compensa-
tions demanded to acquire it, he remained in-
different to it and the means to it, died poor
and indifferent to politics and other distinction
than that his culture gave him. Emerson has
often been called the American Plato, and
amongst the mental qualities which justify the
claim was the curious insensibility to the attrac-
tions of art. Plato had no place in his com-
munity for the artist; Emerson, in a time and
state of society in which nature has brought art
nearer to the daily life of men, through the

198



THE REVIVAL OF ART 199

invention of landscape, photography, etc., etc.,
remained all his life insensible in a remarkable
degree to contemporary art. He felt nature
as the ancient Greeks seem to have felt her,
apart from the human subjective uses of her;
and this trait, in the mental conformation of a
man so typical of the race which seems to be
evolving the type of civilisation for the next
phase of human development, is a phenomenon
which invites study. We talk a great deal about
art, and spend a great deal of time and money
on it, but it is a serious question if art has any
more hold on the modern mind, or has any more
share in modern culture than alchemy or astro-
logy. And when I say that it is a serious
question, I mean not only that it is one that
may have serious import, but that it may be
seriously held in the negative as well as positive,
and seriously debated. But to debate it, to main-
tain either the negative or the positive, it is
necessary to understand with precision what art
means; and if, in the grave deliberations the
subject may call up, it should be discovered that
it is a necessary part of modern culture, this
understanding must be applied to the system of
education devoted to it.

I do not recognise the ignorant and substan-
tially superstitious respect, often amounting to
reverence, for the artist, and begetting an im-
pulsive patronage of him, as implying or leading
to a knowledge of art it is a feeling strong in
proportion to the ignorance of art in the indi-



200 THE REVIVAL OF ART

vidual, and is a phenomenon of the religious
nature, a shadow of the lingering reverence for
a creator, and, as given to art, is strongest in
weak minds. It is that which impels so many
to think they must "do something for art";
leads to some intelligent, but more unintelligent
patronage of it by individuals, schemes of art
schools and art education by communities, in
which the patronage of artists and fostering of
art are confounded sometimes identified, some-
times mistaken, the one for the other, to the
injury of both. The artist is no more entitled
to respect or charity, much less to reverence,
than any other brain worker; that he excites
our wonder by feats of legerdemain, tours de
force, tricks of the brush, or audacities of tech-
nique is due purely to our ignorance, and counts
for the artisan, not for the artist; in true art
the means are so completely subordinated to the
end that they are not, and ought not to be,
noticed. Nor is fidelity to nature any more the
standard to which we should bring our critical
measures to be tried; the photograph is truer to
nature than any art can be, and is yet the very
antipodes of art. Yet, these are the qualities
which determine the exhibition success, the fame
and fortune of the artist; and, by the theory of
success, determine the nature of the education of
the artist so far as the public has anything to
do with it. The dominant virtues in the general
estimation and in the success of the Royal
Academy exhibitions are, first, clever brush



THE REVIVAL OF ART 201

work ; and second, fidelity to the facts of nature.
And with these ideals in view, the education in
art of our public, and to a greater or less extent
of our artist, is shaped. If the general public is
content, it is an argument to strengthen the case
of those who maintain that the uses of art are
matters of the past, and that of its finer qualities,
as of its true methods, we are in equal ignorance
and indifference.

And yet we have under our eyes, and held up
to our admiration, the products of the two great
schools of the past, the Greek and the Italian
Renaissance, which all thoughtful students of art
recognise as beyond modern rivalries; with the
contemporary Japanese, in which, with an antip-
odal difference of motive and temperament, the
fundamental system is the same, and the success
due to the same processes of thought and work
as those of the Greek and Italian schools. These
processes are absolutely antagonistic to those of
the modern European schools without exception,
the difference between the latter being rather
one of processes and handiwork than in concep-
tion of the purposes of art, or more or less vital
affinity with the essential motives of art, in the
correct theory of it. The English school is, with
very few but most notable exceptions, only an
aggregation of more or less clever amateurs; the
German, a mistaken philosophical worship of the
mass of matter we call the world, and humanity,
without a trace of imagination or spirituality;
and the French, of the moment, while technically



202 THE KEVIVAL OF ART

at the head of modern art, is but the apotheosis
of brush work and the speculum of the surface
of things, as devoid of vitality, as cold and sterile
as the surface of the moon. It is useless to call
up men like Millet, Th. Rousseau, and two or
three more : they are voted out of the scheme
of to-day, and form no part of the French system
any more than Watts, Burne-Jones, and Rossetti
of the English. These are survivals of a condi-
tion of the human intellect which, though once
normal, has ceased to be so.

The steady degradation of art, almost without
distinction of form, with only rare and isolated
recurrences of the true spirit, from the six-
teenth century to the day we live in, and which
I have elsewhere attempted to explain, is in
itself the indication of the remedy, if the study
of art is to be healthily revived. As an evolu-
tionary problem, it is one of the most interesting
and not the least important in the history of
culture. Is the question a purely historical one?
Its practical solution is indicated more or less
clearly by the analogies of every branch of the
history of thought, and is shown with absolute
precision in the philosophy of the arts taken
collectively, their individual history, in which
the law of evolution is shown, and, if we would
study it, in the development of the individual
artist; it is visible in music, in poetry, the dance,
in sculpture, and in painting sister arts where
true arts, and as such subject to the same laws,
and, in fact, only various forms of the same



THE REVIVAL OF ART 203

passion; that of expressing our emotions in
rhythmic forms ; of manifesting in communi-
cable and sympathetic modes and ideal types
the absolute and individual self. If the arts,
born of one motive, appear in diverse guise, it
is because each of our faculties demands a
distinct appeal, and, for the satisfaction of its
peculiar emotion, a distinct language. In each
and all the artist is a creator, borrowing the
language of nature only when it serves his
purpose; but he is nowise her clerk or mirror
that is the mission of the scientist. But
creation is governed by the law of evolution
nature did not escape this law and the artist
cannot the true art was evolved, the false art
is borrowed.

Poetry and music have their motives and
method so rooted in our spiritual natures that
they can only be degraded by sensuality; but
even then the art may keep its fineness, because,
after all, the most intense sensuality has its
roots in the spiritual nature, and it is only in
its escape from the divine order and precedence
that its vice lies. The dance we may consider
a dependence of music ; and these are immortal,
in no peril of extinction. It is only to sculpture
and painting that death can come ; that form
of death that keeps a body and loses the soul.
Materialism is the deadly enemy of all the arts;
but music and poetry cannot be materialised :
they are born in human emotion, and will only
die with it. Painting and sculpture are material-



204 THE REVIVAL OF ART

ised by subjection to the facts of nature. They
draw their language, the prime elements of their
creation, from a visible world, so full in its
vocabulary that the artist cannot escape from
the suggestion of its terms, if he would be
understood. Colour is, and in its highest ex-
pressions can only be, subjective, to be treated
like music, orchestrally ; but the element of
form is necessarily dependent on nature for the
intelligibility of its terms and types, the artist
having only the faculty of exalting and refining
her forms into what we recognise as the ideal;
but the essential condition of all the arts of
design becoming true art is in their being ex-
pression not imitation; that their statements
and imagery shall be evolved from the mind
of the artist, not copied from natural models;
be creation, not repetition; and in the degree
that this condition is fulfilled does the work
become more or less purely a work of art. The
form of materialism which" menaces the arts of
design is therefore science. The antagonism is
inexorable but logical, and the position cannot
be escaped from. Photography is the absolute
negation of art; and if to-morrow it could
succeed in reproducing all the tints of nature,
it would only be the more antagonistic, if that
were possible, to the true artistic qualities.
"The letter killeth, the spirit giveth life," and
though artistic creation does not involve the
creation of the prime material, no more does,
so far as science teaches, the creation of the



THE REVIVAL OF ART 205

world ; the old material takes new forms, that
is all. The idealist gets his materials from
nature, but he recasts them in expression; the
realist, who is no artist, repeats them as he gets
them. This is the fundamental distinction in all
design; the copyist is not an artist.

It is this and not the choice of subject, or the
more or less decided tendency of a painter or
a school, which constitutes the distinction be-
tween " high," or true art and " low," or spurious
art; the test is not in fidelity to nature, but to
one's own self. Giotto and Turner, Orcagna and
Blake, Phidias and Michael Angelo, are alike types
of the highest attainment; the modern realistic
(? naturalistic) painters and the "Derby Day"
school, the incident and costume painters of
whatever school, are at the other end of the
scale, more or less redeemed by purely technical
power, but by no measure of it to be raised to
the higher rank. Not that the distinction can
be drawn sharply, so that we can in every case
say that painters shall fall in one or the other
category; but just in the proportion that an
artist depends on his model or the actual material
furnished by nature, so is he removed from pure
art. Nature is a noble mistress, and there is
nothing degrading in the most absolute subjec-
tion to her ; but let us not for that confound
the distinctions, the recognition of which lies at
the bottom of sound criticism. The painter,
whose devotion to nature is such that he never
leaves or varies from her, may be, and is likely



206 THE REVIVAL OF ART

to be, a happier man than if he were a true
artist; but he is not an artist any more than
a photographer is one. Michael Angelo studied
the human figure profoundly, probably more in-
tensely than any modern painter, and worked
from the knowledge he had acquired; but it is
on record, and is shown by the internal evidence
of his work, that he never worked directly from
the model in his matured works. Giotto very
certainly never used the model at all; and
Turner never could paint from nature. To men
of this type the external image disturbs the
ideal, which is so complete that it admits no
interference; as Turner is reported to have said,
"Nature put him out," and this is a true con-
dition. In Blake it was so developed that it
became a morbid vision.

I have asked, without attempting to answer
the question, in a prior essay, Is it necessary that
art should be revived to the degree of importance
it possessed in former times? I think not, but I
hold my opinion as disputable. If the contrary
is the truth, we must understand the law of the
evolution of art and the element of our nature
from which it draws its vitality, and not waste
energy and existence in trying to make figs grow
on thistles, or art at South Kensington. Some
one said long ago what is to the profound student
of religions a fundamental truth "The nearer
the church, the farther from God"; and in strict
analogy with this I may say, the nearer to nature,
the farther from art. I maintain it by the history



THE REVIVAL OF ART 207

of art, and by the demonstration of the law
which governs all the arts of the ideals, as well as
by the analysis of the method of working of the
individual artist. This does not hinder that the
church may become the guide to divine wisdom,
as nature may lead to art, but never through
slavery; but, to state it broadly, the subjection
of reason to authority, or individual feeling to
the hard and fast aspects of the physical world,
is utterly antagonistic to the individuality which
is the end of the development of the man or
the artist. As religion was made for man, and
not man for religion, so art was not made for
nature, but nature for art, looking at the matter
from the artist's point of view. The modern
conception of the arts of design is that they are
intended as the mirror of nature; the ancient
and true one, that it was the outcome of the
emotions, aspirations, and imaginative or spiritual
conceptions of the artist; to the old master the
facts of nature were the vocabulary of his
language, to the new they are the types of his
achievement; the former employed her forms to
define his visions, the latter only mimics them;
the former expresses an idea, the latter imitates
a surface. Art has changed its public, forgotten
its origin, and is no longer the teacher of hu-
manity, the message of the gods, but the syco-
phant of vulgarity and ignorance ; or, at its best
and would it were never worse employed! the
servant of science.
Who accepts nature as the supreme authority,



208 THE REVIVAL OF ART

from which no appeal can lie, may be a scientist
but never an artist. To the latter she offers
suggestions but lays down no law. When what
she brings him suits his purposes, he builds it in;
when not, which is oftener the case, he hammers
it into his own shape. Her facts are accidents;
and what he wants is the very truth, the ideal.*
If, from the beginning, his visions do not surpass
the actualities he sees about him, if the passion
of expression has not laid hold of him before the
love of nature awakens in him, there is little or
no probability of his having in him the material
of success. The evolution of the individual follows
the general law; and that, in all art, is that
invention precedes imitation. Pure decoration
with arbitrary forms, generally geometrical, pre-
cedes the representation of natural objects. This
passion for decoration and the harmonious ar-
rangement of forms, sounds, colours, or move-
ments, is the essential element of all art. The
love of nature is a distinct and completely sub-
ordinate element. Without the recognition of
this law the development of a true and progressive
art, the foundation of a school, is impossible. In
music, the absolute subjection of the objective to
the subjective, to the complete concealment of the
former where it existed, makes the law clear to
the dullest mind; in poetry, it is equally clear to
those who have the ear for form, even if some-
times confused by those who confound the dignity

* The ideal of art is the perfection of form, but in nature all forms
are accidental and imperfect.



THE REVIVAL OF ART 209

of thought for the perfection of form, or, as in
Whitman, mistaking the material for the form
and ignoring the essential distinction between
prose and poetry; but in painting and sculpture,
the modern doctrine, ruinously, as earnestly and
eloquently, maintained by Ruskin, gives the ob-
jective the absolute supremacy, making fidelity
to nature the standard of excellence in art, com-
pletely reversing the artistic law. Until this
heresy is recognised for what it is pure fallacy
the arts of design can never be cultivated on the
true basis.

What, then, is to be done to bring about a
healthy revival of art on a foundation of education
which shall secure its continued vitality? I am
supposing, for the sake of my argument, that this
is possible and necessary, of which I am not at
all convinced. The first thing to be done, in the
contrary case, is to banish from our criticism the
false standard, and admit the possibility of a work
of art being the better the less it is like nature (I
do not say that divergence from nature is neces-
sarily an approach to art, but that it may be so ;