THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE OF ART

‘The English Renaissance of Art’ was delivered as a lecture for the first

time in the Chickering Hall, New York, on January 9, 1882. A portion of

it was reported in the _New York Tribune_ on the following day and in

other American papers subsequently. Since then this portion has been

reprinted, more or less accurately, from time to time, in unauthorised

editions.

There are in existence no less than four copies of the lecture, the

earliest of which is entirely in the author’s handwriting. The others

are type-written and contain many corrections and additions made by the

author in manuscript. These have all been collated and the text here

given contains, as nearly as possible, the lecture in the original form

as delivered by the author during his tour in the United States.

AMONG the many debts which we owe to the supreme æsthetic faculty of

Goethe is that he was the first to teach us to define beauty in terms the

most concrete possible, to realise it, I mean, always in its special

manifestations. So, in the lecture which I have the honour to deliver

before you, I will not try to give you any abstract definition of

beauty—any such universal formula for it as was sought for by the

philosophy of the eighteenth century—still less to communicate to you

that which in its essence is incommunicable, the virtue by which a

particular picture or poem affects us with a unique and special joy; but

rather to point out to you the general ideas which characterise the great

English Renaissance of Art in this century, to discover their source, as

far as that is possible, and to estimate their future as far as that is

possible.

I call it our English Renaissance because it is indeed a sort of new

birth of the spirit of man, like the great Italian Renaissance of the

fifteenth century, in its desire for a more gracious and comely way of

life, its passion for physical beauty, its exclusive attention to form,

its seeking for new subjects for poetry, new forms of art, new

intellectual and imaginative enjoyments: and I call it our romantic

movement because it is our most recent expression of beauty.

It has been described as a mere revival of Greek modes of thought, and

again as a mere revival of mediæval feeling. Rather I would say that to

these forms of the human spirit it has added whatever of artistic value

the intricacy and complexity and experience of modern life can give:

taking from the one its clearness of vision and its sustained calm, from

the other its variety of expression and the mystery of its vision. For

what, as Goethe said, is the study of the ancients but a return to the

real world (for that is what they did); and what, said Mazzini, is

mediævalism but individuality?

It is really from the union of Hellenism, in its breadth, its sanity of

purpose, its calm possession of beauty, with the adventive, the

intensified individualism, the passionate colour of the romantic spirit,

that springs the art of the nineteenth century in England, as from the

marriage of Faust and Helen of Troy sprang the beautiful boy Euphorion.

Such expressions as ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’ are, it is true, often apt

to become the mere catchwords of schools. We must always remember that

art has only one sentence to utter: there is for her only one high law,

the law of form or harmony—yet between the classical and romantic spirit

we may say that there lies this difference at least, that the one deals

with the type and the other with the exception. In the work produced

under the modern romantic spirit it is no longer the permanent, the

essential truths of life that are treated of; it is the momentary

situation of the one, the momentary aspect of the other that art seeks to

render. In sculpture, which is the type of one spirit, the subject

predominates over the situation; in painting, which is the type of the

other, the situation predominates over the subject.

There are two spirits, then: the Hellenic spirit and the spirit of

romance may be taken as forming the essential elements of our conscious

intellectual tradition, of our permanent standard of taste. As regards

their origin, in art as in politics there is but one origin for all

revolutions, a desire on the part of man for a nobler form of life, for a

freer method and opportunity of expression. Yet, I think that in

estimating the sensuous and intellectual spirit which presides over our

English Renaissance, any attempt to isolate it in any way from in the

progress and movement and social life of the age that has produced it

would be to rob it of its true vitality, possibly to mistake its true

meaning. And in disengaging from the pursuits and passions of this

crowded modern world those passions and pursuits which have to do with

art and the love of art, we must take into account many great events of

history which seem to be the most opposed to any such artistic feeling.

Alien then from any wild, political passion, or from the harsh voice of a

rude people in revolt, as our English Renaissance must seem, in its

passionate cult of pure beauty, its flawless devotion to form, its

exclusive and sensitive nature, it is to the French Revolution that we

must look for the most primary factor of its production, the first

condition of its birth: that great Revolution of which we are all the

children though the voices of some of us be often loud against it; that

Revolution to which at a time when even such spirits as Coleridge and

Wordsworth lost heart in England, noble messages of love blown across

seas came from your young Republic.

It is true that our modern sense of the continuity of history has shown

us that neither in politics nor in nature are there revolutions ever but

evolutions only, and that the prelude to that wild storm which swept over

France in 1789 and made every king in Europe tremble for his throne, was

first sounded in literature years before the Bastille fell and the Palace

was taken. The way for those red scenes by Seine and Loire was paved by

that critical spirit of Germany and England which accustomed men to bring

all things to the test of reason or utility or both, while the discontent

of the people in the streets of Paris was the echo that followed the life

of Emile and of Werther. For Rousseau, by silent lake and mountain, had

called humanity back to the golden age that still lies before us and

preached a return to nature, in passionate eloquence whose music still

lingers about our keen northern air. And Goethe and Scott had brought

romance back again from the prison she had lain in for so many

centuries—and what is romance but humanity?

Yet in the womb of the Revolution itself, and in the storm and terror of

that wild time, tendencies were hidden away that the artistic Renaissance

bent to her own service when the time came—a scientific tendency first,

which has borne in our own day a brood of somewhat noisy Titans, yet in

the sphere of poetry has not been unproductive of good. I do not mean

merely in its adding to enthusiasm that intellectual basis which in its

strength, or that more obvious influence about which Wordsworth was

thinking when he said very nobly that poetry was merely the impassioned

expression in the face of science, and that when science would put on a

form of flesh and blood the poet would lend his divine spirit to aid the

transfiguration. Nor do I dwell much on the great cosmical emotion and

deep pantheism of science to which Shelley has given its first and

Swinburne its latest glory of song, but rather on its influence on the

artistic spirit in preserving that close observation and the sense of

limitation as well as of clearness of vision which are the

characteristics of the real artist.

The great and golden rule of art as well as of life, wrote William Blake,

is that the more distinct, sharp and defined the boundary line, the more

perfect is the work of art; and the less keen and sharp the greater is

the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism and bungling. ‘Great

inventors in all ages knew this—Michael Angelo and Albert Durer are known

by this and by this alone’; and another time he wrote, with all the

simple directness of nineteenth-century prose, ‘to generalise is to be an

idiot.’

And this love of definite conception, this...