NATURE OF THE PROPOSED INQUIRY.

13

litism" in a wider sense than that in which it was first adopted. And it will be no less plain that the terms "Philosophy, Poetry, Religion, Revolution of Art" are not titles of so many treatises; but the simple result of an attempt to gather into a series of homogeneous groupings, particulars, multifarious enough at the best, but, without some such arrangement, embarrassing as well as desultory.

It may be found that the inquiry touches, even with these limitations, not only the salient points of Pre-Raffaellitism, but some of the great master questions of artistic criticism; -- possibly some of those higher and deeper problems of which Art ever has been, and ever must be, at once a symptom, type, and organ.

CHAP. II.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

THE TURNER CONTROVERSY.- "THE PHARISEES.

I CALL the topics we first enter on "the Turner Controversy," because it has become next to impossible to avoid the examination of them under that form. Not only has Mr. Ruskin waged war, from first to last, in the name of Joseph Mallord William Turner; but that strange man himself did battle through all the most important part of his professional life, and by his strange bequest of two of his works to the National Gallery, may be said to continue to do battle from his grave. Here is Mr. Ruskin's broad statement of the point at issue :

"We find painters ranging themselves into two great classes, one aiming at the developement of the exquisite truths of specific form, refined colour, and ethereal space, and content with the clear and impressive recognition of any of these, by whatever means obtained; and the other casting all these aside to obtain the particular truths of tone and chiaroscuro which may trick the spectator into a belief of reality. . . . They endeavour only to make you think you are looking at wood-in all of them, everything that they can do is done for deception, and nothing for the sake or love of what they are painting." (Modern

Painters, pt. i. sec. i. chap. vii.) "They passed their lives. in jugglery." (Ibid.)

It will be seen at once that this part of our inquiry is purely defensive. The question is not whether Joseph Mallord William Turner was a great painter, but whether all preceding landscape painters were, for two centuries or more, bad men whether their art, instead of meriting the renown so long awarded them, does not, in reality, convict them of moral pravity.

The issue is of no small moment ourselves alone considered. We have been used to look on landscape painting as, at least, a wholesome refreshment. The works of Claude, especially, have been the constant resort of those

"Who do ambition shun,

And love to live in the sun.”

If the charge before us be substantiated, we must prepare to convert every one of our Picture Galleries into a Hall of Pluto, or a Field of Mars.

The other side of the contingency I will not enter on. I said, here is a direct charge of moral pravity: we are told, in so many words, that they

were

"Pharisees-all they did was to be seen of men; and they had their reward." (Ibid. § 3.)

The parties intended are no less distinctly specified :

Speaking generally of the old masters, I refer only to Claude, Gaspar Poussin, Salvator Rosa, Cuyp, Berghem,

Both, Ruysdael, Hobbima, Teniers (in his landscapes), Paul Potter, Canaletto, and the various Van-somethings and Bach-somethings, more especially and malignantly those who have libelled the sea." (Modern Painters, Introd.)

Now there can be no doubt that Art is, in many cases, a discriminative developement and test of character; nor that, in many, it is no such developement or test at all. Whilst the works of Fra Angelico and Carlo Dolci were a sort of embalming of their daily life, the sacred character of those of Giotto were, Mr. Ruskin himself tells us, the result not of personal predilection, but of the requirements of the age he lived in.* The charge, however, stands recorded. It occupies as early a place in the third volume† as in the first; and in the more recent instance, in direct reference to one of the works of the Prince of Painters, of which it may be unhesitatingly affirmed that it is all heart and soul in every stroke of the pencil. We will confine ourselves, at present, to the accused in Landscape.

It is startling to learn that, of the five great sources of pleasure or profit derivable from Art, no less than three have respect- not to the thing done, but to the mode of doing it, viz. "Ideas of power," that is, of the power of the artist, of which we have the following elements, "truth, simplicity, mystery, inadequacy of means, decision, velocity;" 2. "Ideas of imitation," of which more anon; and, 3. "Ideas of

*Notice of Giotto for the Arundel Society, p. 24.
† P. 52.

truth," that is to say, "when we perceive the faithfulness of a statement of any fact in nature." (Ibid. pt. i. sec. i. chap. iii. and sec. ii. chap. i. sec. i. chap. iv. sec. i. chap. v.)

Now, having been used, from Aristotle downwards, to call painting an imitative art, ideas of imitation would seem well nigh inseparable from every exercise of it. Call it by its nobler name of language; yet, of that language imitation must be at least the alphabet. Say that imitation may be wasted on things not worth imitating onions, oysters, and cabbages, made all to eat, not copy: say that it may exceed its limits in things ever so worthy; and in exact proportion may become obtrusive; you do not strike out imitation as a legitimate element in artistic practice. If you are not prepared to confine painting to the use of symbols; or to deny to imitation the being true to itself; or, lastly, if you do not mean to proscribe all recognition that it is imitation, and not the thing imitated, how can you stumble on such an aphorism as that "ideas of imitation are inconsistent with ideas of truth," without feeling that the phrase "ideas of imitation," if not employed in a peculiar sense, is paraded for a peculiar object? Here is the explanation:

"Whenever a thing looks like what it is not, the resemblance being so great as nearly (sic) to deceive, we feel a kind of pleasurable surprise, exactly the same in its nature as that which we receive from juggling. When we perceive this in something produced by art, we receive what I call an idea of imitation." (Ibid. pt. i. sec. i. chap. iv. § 2.)

C