spoke for himself, and was not merely a copier from books.’ The highest praise that we can give to him is that he tried to revive style as a conscious tradition. But he saw that no amount of art lectures or art congresses, or ‘plans for advancing the fine arts,’ will ever produce this result. The people, he says very wisely, and in the true spirit of Toynbee Hall, must always have ‘the best models constantly before their eyes.’
As is to be expected from one who was a painter, he is often extremely technical in his art criticisms. Of Tintoret’s ‘St. George delivering the Egyptian Princess from the Dragon,’ he remarks:-
The robe of Sabra, warmly glazed with Prussian blue, is relieved from the pale greenish background by a vermilion scarf; and the full hues of both are beautifully echoed, as it were, in a lower key by the purple-lake coloured stuffs and bluish iron armour of the saint, besides an ample balance to the vivid azure drapery on the foreground in the indigo shades of the wild wood surrounding the castle.
And elsewhere he talks learnedly of ‘a delicate Schiavone, various as a tulip-bed, with rich broken tints,’ of ‘a glowing portrait, remarkable for morbidezza, by the scarce Moroni,’ and of another picture being ‘pulpy in the carnations.’
But, as a rule, he deals with his impressions of the work as an artistic whole, and tries to translate those impressions into words, to give, as it were, the literary equivalent for the imaginative and mental effect. He was one of the first to develop what has been called the art-literature of the nineteenth century, that form of literature which has found in Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Browning, its two most perfect exponents. His description of Lancret’s Repas Italien, in which ‘a dark-haired girl, “amorous of mischief,” lies on the daisy-powdered grass,’ is in some respects very charming. Here is his account of ‘The Crucifixion,’ by Rembrandt. It is extremely characteristic of his style:-
Darkness — sooty, portentous darkness — shrouds the whole scene: only above the accursed wood, as if through a horrid rift in the murky ceiling, a rainy deluge — ‘sleety-flaw, discoloured water’ — streams down amain, spreading a grisly spectral light, even more horrible than that palpable night. Already the Earth pants thick and fast! the darkened Cross trembles! the winds are dropt — the air is stagnant — a muttering rumble growls underneath their feet, and some of that miserable crowd begin to fly down the hill. The horses snuff the coming terror, and become unmanageable through fear. The moment rapidly approaches when, nearly torn asunder by His own weight, fainting with loss of blood, which now runs in narrower rivulets from His slit veins, His temples and breast drowned in sweat, and His black tongue parched with the fiery death-fever, Jesus cries, ‘I thirst.’ The deadly vinegar is elevated to Him.
His head sinks, and the sacred corpse ‘swings senseless of the cross.’ A sheet of vermilion flame shoots sheer through the air and vanishes; the rocks of Carmel and Lebanon cleave asunder; the sea rolls on high from the sands its black weltering waves. Earth yawns, and the graves give up their dwellers. The dead and the living are mingled together in unnatural conjunction and hurry through the holy city. New prodigies await them there. The veil of the temple — the unpierceable veil — is rent asunder from top to bottom, and that dreaded recess containing the Hebrew mysteries — the fatal ark with the tables and seven-branched candelabrum — is disclosed by the light of unearthly flames to the God-deserted multitude.
Rembrandt never painted this sketch, and he was quite right. It would have lost nearly all its charms in losing that perplexing veil of indistinctness which affords such ample range wherein the doubting imagination may speculate. At present it is like a thing in another world. A dark gulf is betwixt us. It is not tangible by the body. We can only approach it in the spirit.
In this passage, written, the author tells us, ‘in awe and reverence,’ there is much that is terrible, and very much that is quite horrible, but it is not without a certain crude form of power, or, at any rate, a certain crude violence of words, a quality which this age should highly appreciate, as it is its chief defect. It is pleasanter, however, to pass to this description of Giulio Romano’s ‘Cephalus and Procris’:-
We should read Moschus’s lament for Bion, the sweet shepherd, before looking at this picture, or study the picture as a preparation for the lament. We have nearly the same images in both. For either victim the high groves and forest dells murmur; the flowers exhale sad perfume from their buds; the nightingale mourns on the craggy lands, and the swallow in the long-winding vales; ‘the satyrs, too, and fauns dark-veiled groan,’ and the fountain nymphs within the wood melt into tearful waters. The sheep and goats leave their pasture; and oreads, ‘who love to scale the most inaccessible tops of all uprightest rocks,’ hurry down from the song of their wind-courting pines; while the dryads bend from the branches of the meeting trees, and the rivers moan for white Procris, ‘with many-sobbing streams,’
Filling the far-seen ocean with a voice.
The golden bees are silent on the thymy Hymettus; and the knelling horn of Aurora’s love no more shall scatter away the cold twilight on the top of Hymettus. The foreground of our subject is a grassy sunburnt bank, broken into swells and hollows like waves (a sort of land-breakers), rendered more uneven by many foot-tripping roots and stumps of trees stocked untimely by the axe, which are again throwing out light-green shoots. This bank rises rather suddenly on the right to a clustering grove, penetrable to no star, at the entrance of which sits the stunned Thessalian king, holding between his knees that ivory-bright body which was, but an instant agone, parting the rough boughs with her smooth forehead, and treading alike on thorns and flowers with jealousy-stung foot — now helpless, heavy, void of all motion, save when the breeze lifts her thick hair in mockery.
From between the closely-neighboured boles astonished nymphs press forward with loud cries -
And deerskin-vested satyrs, crowned with ivy twists, advance;
And put strange pity in their horned countenance.
Laelaps lies beneath, and shows by his panting the rapid pace of death. On the other side of the group, Virtuous Love with ‘vans dejected’ holds forth the arrow to an approaching troop of sylvan people, fauns, rams, goats, satyrs, and satyr-mothers, pressing their children tighter with their fearful hands, who hurry along from the left in a sunken path between the foreground and a rocky wall, on whose lowest ridge a brook-guardian pours from her urn her grief-telling waters. Above and more remote than the Ephidryad, another female, rending her locks, appears among the vine-festooned pillars of an unshorn grove. The centre of the picture is filled by shady meadows, sinking down to a river-mouth; beyond is ‘the vast strength of the ocean stream,’ from whose floor the extinguisher of stars, rosy Aurora, drives furiously up her brine-washed steeds to behold the death-pangs of her rival.
Were this description carefully re-written, it would be quite admirable. The conception of making a prose poem out of paint is excellent. Much of the best modern literature springs from the same aim. In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.
His sympathies, too, were wonderfully varied. In everything connected with the stage, for instance, he was always extremely interested, and strongly upheld the necessity for archaeological accuracy in costume and scene-painting. ‘In art,’ he says in one of his essays, ‘whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well’; and he points out that once we allow the intrusion of anachronisms, it becomes difficult to say where the line is to be drawn. In literature, again, like Lord Beaconsfield on a famous occasion, he was ‘on the side of the angels.’ He was one of the first to admire Keats and Shelley — ‘the tremulously-sensitive and poetical Shelley,’ as he calls him. His admiration for Wordsworth was sincere and profound. He thoroughly appreciated William Blake. One of the best copies of the ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ that is now in existence was wrought specially for him. He loved Alain Chartier, and Ronsard, and the Elizabethan dramatists, and Chaucer
