CHAP. XX.

THE MOVEMENT FURTHER EXAMINED. GIOTTO AND MILLAIS.

CRITICAL QUESTIONS.

LET us look, now, a little closer at the revolutionary Mr. Ruskin tells us that

movement.

"It was not by greater learning, not by the discovery of new theories of Art, not by greater taste, not by the ideal principles of selection, that he (Giotto) became the head of the progressive schools of Italy. It was simply by being interested in what was going on around him, by substituting the gestures of living men for conventional attitudes, and portraits of living men for conventional faces, and incidents of every day life for conventional circumstances, that he became great, and the master of the great." (Notice for the Arundel Society, p. 23.)

Some of the results of such a mode of treating Scripture history we have seen in a former chapter. Mr. Ruskin tells us further that

"Giotto was to his contemporaries precisely what Millais is to his contemporaries, both movements being the protests of vitality against mortality, of spirit against letter, and of truth against tradition." (Ibid.)

We might almost accept this as the practical issue of no small part of our controversy. The subject condenses itself, in fact, into certain questions, suggested, more or less directly, by this passage and its context. Let us ask, for instance,

1. What is meant by "truth against tradition?” Now, I am no great friend of tradition. I believe few things have done more harm. Only let us take care, that in roasting tradition we do not burn our own fingers. There are two very obvious fallacies; the one, of those who lose all personal perception in a blind dependence on tradition; the other, that of those who, in mistrust of tradition, shut themselves up within their own perceptions. The first is the fallacy of the slave, the second, of the fool. What is the case before us?

If tradition be opposed to "truth," it must be, not tradition simply, but false tradition. Was the one referred to false? Mr. Ruskin says of it "Generally speaking, the Byzantine Art, though manifesting itself only in perpetual repetitions, yet preserved reminiscences of design originally noble, and tradition of execution originally perfect." (P. 18.) Such traditions, then, of form and practice were not, at all events, false traditions. Again,- "The great system of perfect colour was then in use, solemn and deep (we are engaged with religious art), "composed strictly, in all its leading masses, of the colours re vealed by God from Sinai as the noblest." (P. 21.) This tradition, then, of colour was not, I presume, any more, false tradition.

وو

A preceding sentence speaks of "substituting gestures and portraits of living men for conventional attitudes and faces." Were these attitudes and faces false as well as conventional? Let us look to the other arm of the antithesis.

Nothing easier, of course, than to talk of "truth"

and "nature." But, as I have asked already, and can scarce ask too often, What truth? Is it abstract, general, comprehensive? or personal, local, circumstantial, idiosyncratic truth?

Is it typical

to

So again of“ nature." What nature? Is it human nature? or an individual piece of it? or actual? noble or ignoble nature? Do you see it in the Apollo? or in the filthy Ganymede of Rembrandt? Both are nature: which do you mean, when you oppose the words "truth and nature "tradition?" A man may prefer the cabbagestump to the lily, but is the lily, therefore, not nature? There is, if I may be allowed the expression, a lily-humanity and a cabbage-stump humanity. Which of these presents itself when we read those beautiful words

Mother of Him who is Brother to all?”

But, if all of us, not being Pre-Raffaellites, think, and cannot but think, of that higher humanity,-if we meet not this humanity in every day life if the nearest actual approaches to it are yet sensibly but approaches, each falling short, yet all concurring in the assertion of an ultimate fact — and if tradition be the record of happy glimpses of that ultimate fact,

then, so far as the record is not a falsehood, it is a truth; and a truth in that higher sense of truth, in which what it testifies to is, in the higher sense, humanity.

The matter is so plain, I almost hesitate to argue it. Mr. Ruskin forgets his own antithesis in the

NATURE AND TRADITION.

221

very act of asserting it. He supposes one asking, “But what is the use of the works of Giotto to us ?” (P. 23.)

Now this was a critical two ways of answering it.

question. There were One would be saying,

They are useful as a simple protest; sending us at once to actual nature. This would square with the antithesis; What is the reply?

“I answer, first, it is a great thing to have hold of the

root."

What root? Nature? or Giotto's rendering of it? The answer proceeds:

“In nine cases out of ten, the first expression of an idea is the most valuable; the works of such a man should assuredly be studied with the greatest care."

And

What is Giotto, then, to us but tradition? what becomes of the antithesis? But now as to another contrast.

2. What is the meaning of spirit against letter? I should have thought it very near a truism to say that ideal nature is the spirit, of which actual nature is but the letter. Let us go on, then, to the next point.

3. What are we to understand by "vitality against mortality?" Vitality must be either in the student, or in what he studies. If the former, it is but saying that Giotto was a better artist than his predecessors. If the latter, then Mr. Ruskin has himself told us that "if any superior mind arose among them, it had before it models which suggested or recorded a perfection they did not themselves possess." (P. 19.)

This, however, is below the mark. If so much could be said of Byzantine models, What shall we say of those which give the interest to the present question? Is Raffaelle's Madonna de San Sisto mortality? Is the un-dying gladiator mortality? What would Michael Angelo have replied, had one accused his Maestro of mortality?

One would think it was not the qualities of a thing, but its simply being a thing, that make it interesting. And so the representation of it was measurable, not by the qualities, but by the sense of reality that representation suggested.

Were it thus, Morland's pigs were better than Michael Angelo's prophets and to speak of the horse's head, snorting fire and wrath among the Elgin marbles, in comparison with some wretched beast within three hobbling steps of the nacker's, were to put "mortality " and "vitality" on the same illicit level.

Had we been told that Art had fallen into a mere heartless reiteration of the model, that all reference. to actual life had ceased, and that Giotto brought men back to the consciousness, and love, and study of it, there had been no dispute. As it is, these eloquent contrasts sound like a protest against all but life in the vulgar sense.

It were easy to construct, by simple counter-quotation, a protest, from Mr. Ruskin himself, against almost all the important errors I call Pre-Raffael