in any case, the fidelity to nature has no relation
whatever to the quality of the art) ; and to estab-
lish as the very foundation of the system of
education that only the impression of nature is
to be aimed at, even if it is in contradiction to
the facts, and that memory and the record of
impression are to be put in the first place in the
acquisitions of the artist. We cannot go back to
the childlike simplicity of all archaic art, with its
210 THE REVIVAL OF ART
dominant unsophisticated rendering of the central
idea, and its normal and evolutionary attainment
of perfection; we know too much of the fruit of
the tree of knowledge to accept its greenness,
and science has already too much forereached on
art for the latter to begin again, with the capital
of the days of Greek myths and the Italian re-
awakening, as all archaic art did, surrounded by
the circumstances which excite the creative im-
pulse, with the simplest, most direct expression
of a dominant idea, and without reference to any
non-essential facts, time and ripening knowledge
adding step by step the deficient traits. What
is to be done must be done with the recognition
that we have been on a false road, on which we
cannot now return, but must find the best cross-
path to regain it. The simple satisfaction with
which the artist in the childhood of art, as the
child in his art, saw grow under his eye the image
of his thought, is replaced by a mixed emotion
in which the knowledge of the non-essential is
too large a part to be slighted in the record.
And in this process we must return to the
springs of art. The law is the same for all: the
young poet trains his rhythmical sense by the
reading of the best verse; the young musician
in the music of his predecessors. The artist of
form cannot escape from the law; if the emotion
which inspires him is not supreme over all fact,
remoulding, even suppressing or reversing it at
need, casting it fused into the mould of his con-
ception, if he does not accept the evolutionary
THE REVIVAL OF ART 211
law and absorb what went before him, his work
will not be art. The distinction is radical and
decides the very life of work or worker ; it makes
the difference between science and art, poetry and
prose, music and talk, dance and locomotion; and
the system of education which does not recog-
nise and work from the distinction is doomed
to eternal futility. From this there is no escape.
I appeal to the history of art. The earliest
work of the great Greek school is scarcely dis-
tinguishable from the archaic work of all barbaric
tribes; rude attempts to make visible an ideal,
mostly of its conceptions of Deity, in which it is
impossible not to see the analogy with the first
efforts of children to shape resemblance of the
things they love; this was, and is, invariably the
presentation of conceptions, not studies from an
object. The ideal was slowly worked out by the
universal process of evolution, generation after
generation working out the same problem of the
ideal, the pupil carrying the work of his master
a little further as he perceived the incomplete-
ness of what was done before, but always in the
sense of more perfect expression ; finally arriving
at a perception of nature idealised, the perfect
types of beauty which no later epoch has re-dis-
covered. And to the thorough student of Greek
art it is brought home by a thousand details of
internal evidence, that this slow attainment of
perfection was the result, not of any system of
copying nature, but by the gradual evolution,
through centuries, of the perception of the ideal
212 THE REVIVAL OF ART
of form, attained through the simultaneous de-
velopment of technical refinement and the power
of retaining passing impressions of nature, and
through the mutual reaction of these on each
other.
The caviller will say that it matters not how
the facts of nature came into the work it was
the nature, after all, which furnished the forms,
and that the most perfect of the Greek works
are those which are most like nature. But this
is not true in fact, and is utterly false as general-
isation. Nature never furnishes a perfect form,
and supplies us with no criterion by which we
can distinguish the more from the less beautiful.
Nature tends to perfect beauty when she is re-
garded as a whole ; but some of the noblest Greek
statues contain violations of anatomical truth
which no modern French sculptor would, or dare,
be guilty of, but which were intentional and
necessary to the beauty of form and expression.
The artist found the lines and forms he wanted:
where the anatomy came right it was because
his memory was precise and tenacious, and the
facts did not interfere with his ideal form ; he
saw the god in his imagination and gave him the
form of highest beauty as he conceived it, and
when in later days he saw the athlete in action,
his memory retained the forms that gave the
figure its expression; he knew nothing of an-
atomy or the function of the muscles, which, in
the science of his day, were only the cushions
which protected the bones in which all strength
THE EEVIVAL OF ART 213
was supposed to lie ; his vision of what was on
the surface was undimmed by theories of what
was underneath, and his powers of observation
of every variation and characteristic of external
form, and his retention of what he saw, were so
highly developed that the use of the model was
superfluous his vision of the ideal was truer
than the actuality of flesh and blood. This might
seem incredible did we not know that it was
the case with Michael Angelo, who worked on the
marble without even a clay model to guide him.
Taking the entire course of Greek art from the
most archaic period down to the Pergamenean
school, we see that the development of the per-
fection of form was so slow as to be only
recognised as an evolution, and no internal evi-
dence of the direct copying of nature is to be
found in the whole field; but when the inten-
tional fidelity to nature becomes evident, as in
the Dying Gladiator (although the pose plastique,
which is the shadow of coming death to all art,
is not yet apparent), we recognise that art is in
its decline, fidelity to facts has begun to shoulder
the perception of beauty, and the reign of the
ideal has come to its end.
The same phenomenon appears in the history
of the Italian Renaissance. The decay following
the decline of all motives of art, in Greece, Rome,
and Byzantium, consequent, perhaps, on the moral
and political debasement, had brought all the arts
to one dead level of mechanical achievement.
Byzantine art is the synonym of all that is most
214 THE REVIVAL OF ART
mechanical and prescriptive, but with the posses-
sions of its technique much was prepared for a
revival, and the decorative instinct was always
there potent and healthy. And out of the sleep
of centuries came the new birth, not, as the
fables run, from the inspiration of a single man
or from a recognition of nature, but from the
general awakening of the intellectual and moral
life of Italy. Cimabue was only one of its
manifestations. Sienna, if we had her record,
might come before Florence, and certainly, in
her Duccio, was superior to the master of Giotto
I am even inclined to believe not inferior to
Giotto himself. But in Giotto we have the sum
of all the qualities which told in the revival.
What we find in his art is what we find in the
early Greek, with something beyond, due to the
evolution of humanity at large to a fuller life
and a wider range of faculties; but it is an art
of the ideal, not of the model ; pure expression,
in which the faculty of imaginative vision appears
in a startling power, and in which there is the
clearest internal evidence that he never used the
model. His ideal differed from that of the Greek
as the mediaeval Italian did from the fellow-
citizen of Pericles, and the ideal of the Renais-
sance was not that of physical perfection, but of
spiritual glory and struggle, not of Apollo but
of Christ. The intellectual processes are, how-
ever, the same. If, in the work of Giotto, the
internal evidence of the purely ideal method be
obscured, it is abundant in that of his pupils
THE REVIVAL OF ART 215
and immediate successors, whose absolutely sub-
jective method is beyond dispute. And from
Giotto onward there is a steady development in
the direction of a larger comprehension of the
qualities of the art and a fuller grasp of its
alphabet ; though, while in Giotto every detail is
a part of his story and in his successors they
become more or less conventional symbols, the
underlying idea is the same. The undivided
purpose of the work was the expression of the
idea which inspired the artist, never the repre-
sentation of nature except as a part of the
vocabulary.
The climax of this ecstatic art came in Fra
Angelico, not a great imagination but a wonderful
visionary, whose pictures are probably the most
perfect expressions we have of the purely subjec-
tive art, produced under the exaltation of religious
emotion, and probably drawn from what the artist
believed to be revelations of the heavenly world,
and actually seen by him. The work of William
Blake was probably as purely subjective, but there
seems to me a taint of insanity in the vision ; not
the pure ecstacy kept, in Fra Angelico, a con-
sistent element by the intensity of his religious
passion, and in Blake replaced by an abnormal
obsession. In the work of Fra Angelico's great
pupil, Benozzo Gozzoli, I find for the first time
the evidence of the direct and prosaic reference
to nature for certain facts, forms, and the real
semblance of the personages with whom the artist
came in contact, and who became to a large
216 THE REVIVAL OF ART
extent the dramatis personce of his pictures ; but
Gozzoli only made drawings from the person,
which he used as memoranda when working on
the picture. After him the practice became
general to draw from the figure, and in some
cases from cast draperies; but it is only in Fra
Fillippo that we find the employment of actual
types of the everyday world for the sacred per-
sonages, and not till long after that do we find
the posing of the figure for dramatic action, while
actual painting from life in the final work is not
indicated till we reach the Carracci, in their so-
called revival of art, which was really the death-
blow to it. It is probable that Raphael and
Titian drew their portraits from life on the
canvas direct in the preparation, on which they
afterward got their colour without the model;
and, in the case of Titian, we have not only the
internal evidence, but that of tradition to show
that he did not paint from nature in the modern
way, but on the basis of an accurate likeness,
done in monochrome, followed by his conven-
tional scheme of colour in the conventional
technical method, borrowed from Bellini, and con-
tinued through the Venetian school till its close.
All through the great period of the Renaissance
the figures were evidently drawn from know-
ledge, in many cases acquired by the most severe
drawing from nature, but the design was made
from that knowledge, not from the model, which
served merely for the better understanding of
the subject. What the Greeks did we do not
THE REVIVAL OF AET 217
know by direct tradition, but we know that the
absurd legends of their composing figures from
the various members of different individuals, a
leg from one and an arm from another, can
have had no foundation in fact. No one who
knows the modus operandi of the artistic mind
can be in doubt as to that no ideal image, even
of a landscape, can be constructed in that way.
The true idealist is he who, having the most
complete knowledge of nature, uses her materials
freely for his own purposes. She has her laws,
and the idealist learns them and follows them
as far as they serve his purposes.
The mental operations of the copyist and those
of the idealist are diametrically opposed, whether
the former copies nature or the work of another
artist. With the former there is a constant
measuring^ comparing, a process of balancing in
the mind far more laborious than the process of
expression of conception in the imagination or
memory. A modern school of painting has
assumed the title of "impressionist," apparently
ignorant of the fact that all true art is im-
pressionist in the proper sense of the term, as
all naturalistic representation is science, and not,
strictly speaking, art at all. The majority of
people nowadays prefer the latter: they know,
more or less, what resembles what they see, and
what they like; this world, familiar to them,
may be worthier than that of the idealist and
artist; that is a matter of taste not of discussion.
But let us not confound terms and definitions
218 THE REVIVAL OF ART
if what we want is art, let us understand its
character: if what we want is nature, let us
recognise the fact and have done with it, but
not wander in uncertainty as to what we are
talking about.
Much of the confusion in the world of general
thought on the subject of the ideal, is due to
the confusion between the two accepted mean-
ings of the word. The broad and comprehensive,
and, therefore, the primary meaning, is the de-
signation of what is present to the imagination
as opposed to the palpable and materialised
the theory of the thing, as opposed to the accom-
plishment of it; the secondary meaning is some-
thing which is produced in conformity to that
hypothetical perfection, because, as we recognise
the imperfection of actual things, we admit that
we must seek a perfect image in ttfMlbegions of
imagination i.e., of ideas. But, wlwn we come
to scientific discussion of the nature of art, we
must recur to the primary use of the term, and
recognise that whatever is the embodiment of a
mental conception is ideal ; and in any possible
combination of the ideal and the actual, that
part of the combination which makes it art is
that which it owes to the mind of the artist,
and not that which it derives from the material
world. When, then, we propose to cultivate art
by setting the would-be artist to painting from
nature directly, we take a road which may in
time permit him to become an artist, but which
is not the true and direct way, and which may,
THE REVIVAL OF ART 219
indeed, divert him entirely from his aim, and
is not, therefore, to be advised as the basis of an
education, though it may be that best adapted
to an education in what I will designate as
scientific graphics, and the only method for men
who have no ideal faculties. The essential con-
ditions of a true art education, if we are to
develop a genuine school, are the cultivation,
above all others, of the faculties of rapid obser-
vation and retention of the significant facts, and
putting before the eye the essential truths of
what was seen, memorising the flitting panorama
of nature and training the power of conception
and the imagination by exercising and depending
on them. Hamerton has given some most in-
teresting observations on the method of memoris-
ing as a system of art training, and the history
of modern art is full of cases of the power to
be so attained. To work from knowledge of the
reality of things, rather than from information
of their superficial aspects, is the end to be kept
in view: to get rid of the model as far as
possible is the first step to the right education,
dependence on the model the obstacle to it. The
shadow of science is the eclipse of art.
I have said that I do not know that the re-
vival of art is of any importance to humanity.
I admit the possibility of its utter inutility to the
spiritual or intellectual evolution of the race, of
its having finished its work as an agent in that
evolution, and having, in general, a purely his-
torical value. I perceive, in the study of its
220 THE REVIVAL OF ART
history, that there have been epochs in which
it served only to gratify vanity and ostentation,
and it seems to me that we are now in such an
epoch; but as in the past these morbid conditions
have had reactions of healthy life, it is not per-
mitted from an historical parallel to conclude that
the future does not contain an art as genuine
as any in the past. But two things must be
noted by the philosophical student viz., that the
great evolutions of true art have always had
their origin in some general passion supervening
on the love of decoration, no fiat of ruler or
official forcing-process ever having succeeded in
initiating one ; and that they have invariably
been followed, and been stifled by, naturalistic
tendencies. Nature has in every case killed art.
The devotion to naturalism has, in all the past
schools, been recognised by thoughtful criticism
as the "decline of art." The reason is evident.
The servile study of nature supersedes the exer-
cise of those faculties on which I have shown the
successful pursuit of art to depend; the vulgar
taste applauds what it can understand the super-
ficial aspect of things, imitation, illusion, etc. ;
and the Academies, Royal and National, and the
various societies, in their exhibitions and search
of popularity, follow and confirm the vulgar
opinion, which can never be otherwise than
grossly ignorant; and only the artistic genius of
inflexible fibre resists the current, and is generally
ignored. The annual exhibitions are the grave
of all that is best in art: individuality of the
THE REVIVAL OF ART 221
finer kind, refinement, simplicity which is a form
of religion, and pure intellectual purpose these
are trampled out by the eager feet of those who
give a morning to the work of a year, are un-
recognised in the competition of brilliant technical
surfaces, and are finally buried in the ignorant
comment of the hurried daily press, compelled to
pronounce judgment without consideration, and
generally without the most elementary know-
ledge of the subject. No labour of any human
worker is ever subjected to such degradation as
is art to-day under the criticism of the daily
paper. Now and then a true artist fights his
way to his proper place by sheer intellectual
power and patient endurance; but others, as true
in aim, if of minor force, are never recognised
till they are dead, if even then.
Under the hypothesis, then, that art is to be
revived and cultivated, the study of the works
and methods of the genuine schools of art in
past times is of the highest and primary import-
ance is, in fact, the foundation of our schools to
be. The mimicry of ancient forms, the adoption
of antique or mediaeval themes, or the affectation
of a manner that was spontaneous to a mind that
came to activity under influences utterly diverse
from those under which we live, have nothing to
do with art, and in no wise aid us. Whether the
Greeks believed in the gods whose images they
carved, or the Cinquecentists in the holy men
and women they painted, is to us utterly im-
material. What they have given us is the method
222 THE REVIVAL OF ART
by which they attained excellence in art, and the
law at the root of it. That their faith in their
saints had anything to do with that excellence I
do not believe, or that any revival of such faith
is necessary for a new art. The history of art
does not indicate it, and the biography of the
artists denies it. What the old art teaches, in
whatever form it took, is that the art is in the
artist, and not in nature; and from Archermos
to Praxiteles, as from Cimabue to Raphael, the
development is one of accumulating knowledge
going hand-in-hand with an increasing skill and
technical resources, in which the evidence is un-
mistakable to who can read it, that the study
of nature was indirect, and that scientific know-
ledge of things never came to disturb the order
of ideal creation. The Greek sculpture was not
cursed by a knowledge of anatomy; and, after
Michael Angelo had introduced it, the sculpture
of Italy became a mere muscular inanity. We
cannot now go so far as to ignore anatomy, but
we can cease to study it, and recognise no more
of it than the Greek could see and show; no
more of it than is necessary to express the idea
that animates us, remembering always that fidelity
to the conception is the first obligation of art,
fidelity to nature a secondary matter, and some-
times counter-indicated by the primary law, and
out of the question.
These considerations only add, however, to the
gravity of the question I have already asked and
which no individual can answer, but a race and
THE REVIVAL OF ART 223
an epoch Does the world want art any longer?
Has it, in the present state of human progress,
any place which will justify the devotion to it of
the class of minds which once found in it the
enthusiasm of their youth and the content of
their ripe years ? Is it with the race, as with the
individual, that
"There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not as it has been of yore ;
Turn whereso'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more"?
and must we be content, like the apostle of na-
ture, the passion and exaltation of the youth of
humanity being outgrown, to look back at what
the bloom-time has left us, and
" . . . . rather find
Strength in what remains behind,
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be :
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering ;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind"?
Is not this unquestionable indication of the
operation of the law of collective evolution on
the progress of the race an indication also of the
futility of our schemes for collective art educa-
tion? Is it not the case that the feeling which
alone can make fruitful all these schemes now
224 THE REVIVAL OF ART
only occurs in rare individuals who may be con-
sidered survivals of a prior and more youthful
state of humanity, which is now in the "years
that bring the philosophic mind"? No one can
admit that the human intellect is weaker than it
was five or twenty centuries ago; but it is cer-
tain that if we take the pains to study what was
done five centuries ago in painting, or twenty
centuries ago in sculpture, and compare it with
the best work of to-day, we shall find the latter
trivial and 'prentice work compared with the
ordinary work of men whose names are lost in
the lustre of a school.
Then, little men inspired by the Zeitgeist, painted
greatly; now, our great men fail to reach the
technical achievement of the little men of them.
There is only one living painter who can treat a
portrait as a Venetian painter of 1550 A.D. would
have done it, and how differently in the mastery
of his material! If we go to the work of wider
range, the Campo Santo of Pisa, the Stanze, the
Sistine Chapel, the distance becomes an abyss ; the
simplest fragment of a Greek statue of 450 B.C.
shows us that the best sculpture of this century,
even the French, is only a happy child-work, not
even to be put in sight of Donatello or Michael
Angelo. The reason is simple, and already in-
dicated. The early men grew up in a system in
which the power of expression was taught from
childhood ; they acquired method as the musician
does now, and the tendency of the opinion of their
time was to keep them in the good method.
THE EEVIVAL OF AET 225
Beginning as apprentices, they grew to be masters ;
art was not a diversion, but a serious occupation,
to which fathers sent their sons when boys as to
other trades, and they learned to express ideas
as soon as ideas began to form, and before they
had acquired scientific perception ; and, having ac-
quired the power to express thought, power grew
as the thought enlarged. We begin late as amat-
eurs; we see surfaces, and contemporary taste
likes surfaces, but nothing serious; we lean on
the model, and cannot escape it because we dare
not risk to be caught out of drawing ; the concep-
tion is never clear because we never trust it, and
we must compare our work, touch by touch, with
the model; we are never free, and we end in
pose plastique, the caricature of art. The purely
mechanical habit of reproducing the thing set
before us, deferring to scientific exactitude as if
it were authority in art, has little by little ex-
tinguished in the modern mind the sense of the
ideal, just as an absorption in the material life
in its insatiable and ever-increasing claims, stifles,
and finally entirely eliminates, the spiritual facul-