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Page 26
Wholly unconscious--yes, but we are no longer so: there lies the
sting of it, and there also the hope.
When the brightness of the so-called Renaissance faded, and it faded
very suddenly, a deadly chill fell upon the arts: that New-birth
mostly meant looking back to past times, wherein the men of those
days thought they saw a perfection of art, which to their minds was
different in kind, and not in degree only, from the ruder suggestive
art of their own fathers: this perfection they were ambitious to
imitate, this alone seemed to be art to them, the rest was
childishness: so wonderful was their energy, their success so
great, that no doubt to commonplace minds among them, though surely
not to the great masters, that perfection seemed to be gained: and,
perfection being gained, what are you to do?--you can go no further,
you must aim at standing still--which you cannot do.
Art by no means stood still in those latter days of the Renaissance,
but took the downward road with terrible swiftness, and tumbled down
at the bottom of the hill, where as if bewitched it lay long in
great content, believing itself to be the art of Michael Angelo,
while it was the art of men whom nobody remembers but those who want
to sell their pictures.
Thus it fared with the more individual forms of art. As to the art
of the people; in countries and places where the greater art had
flourished most, it went step by step on the downward path with
that: in more out-of-the-way places, England for instance, it still
felt the influence of the life of its earlier and happy days, and in
a way lived on a while; but its life was so feeble, and, so to say,
illogical, that it could not resist any change in external
circumstances, still less could it give birth to anything new; and
before this century began, its last flicker had died out. Still,
while it was living, in whatever dotage, it did imply something
going on in those matters of daily use that we have been thinking
of, and doubtless satisfied some cravings for beauty: and when it
was dead, for a long time people did not know it, or what had taken
its place, crept so to say into its dead body--that pretence of art,
to wit, which is done with machines, though sometimes the machines
are called men, and doubtless are so out of working hours:
nevertheless long before it was quite dead it had fallen so low that
the whole subject was usually treated with the utmost contempt by
every one who had any pretence of being a sensible man, and in short
the whole civilised world had forgotten that there had ever been an
art MADE BY THE PEOPLE FOR THE PEOPLE AS A JOY FOR THE MAKER AND THE
USER.
But now it seems to me that the very suddenness of the change ought
to comfort us, to make us look upon this break in the continuity of
the golden chain as an accident only, that itself cannot last: for
think how many thousand years it may be since that primeval man
graved with a flint splinter on a bone the story of the mammoth he
had seen, or told us of the slow uplifting of the heavily-horned
heads of the reindeer that he stalked: think I say of the space of
time from then till the dimming of the brightness of the Italian
Renaissance! whereas from that time till popular art died unnoticed
and despised among ourselves is just but two hundred years.
Strange too, that very death is contemporaneous with new-birth of
something at all events; for out of all despair sprang a new time of
hope lighted by the torch of the French Revolution: and things that
have languished with the languishing of art, rose afresh and surely
heralded its new birth: in good earnest poetry was born again, and
the English Language, which under the hands of sycophantic verse-
makers had been reduced to a miserable jargon, whose meaning, if it
have a meaning, cannot be made out without translation, flowed
clear, pure, and simple, along with the music of Blake and
Coleridge: take those names, the earliest in date among ourselves,
as a type of the change that has happened in literature since the
time of George II.
With that literature in which romance, that is to say humanity, was
re-born, there sprang up also a feeling for the romance of external
nature, which is surely strong in us now, joined with a longing to
know something real of the lives of those who have gone before us;
of these feelings united you will find the broadest expression in
the pages of Walter Scott: it is curious as showing how sometimes
one art will lag behind another in a revival, that the man who wrote
the exquisite and wholly unfettered naturalism of the Heart of
Midlothian, for instance, thought himself continually bound to seem
to feel ashamed of, and to excuse himself for, his love of Gothic
Architecture: he felt that it was romantic, and he knew that it
gave him pleasure, but somehow he had not found out that it was art,
having been taught in many ways that nothing could be art that was
not done by a named man under academical rules.
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