Chapter 9

Saskia By Rembrandt.

When Rembrandt painted his bride Saskia,[28]for instance, the extent to which he exercised his simplifying and transfiguring power is amazing, and precludes all possibility of our classing this work among the portraits which should be condemned. He knew perfectly well that poor Saskia was not beautiful—what beautiful girl would have condescended to look at Rembrandt?—so what did he do? He cast all the upper and right side of her face in shadow, and deliberately concentrated all his attention, and consequently the attention of the beholder as well, upon three or four square inches of nice round muscle in the lower part of Saskia's young cheek and neck. But how many plain daughters of rich bourgeois would allow three or four square inches of their cheek and neck to be exalted in this way, at the cost of their eyes and their nose and their brow? The same remarks also apply to Rembrandt's "Jewish Rabbi" in the National Gallery. There he had to deal with an emaciated, careworn old Jew. How did he overcome the difficulty? All of you who know this picture will be able to answer this question for yourselves, and I need not, therefore, go into the matter.

This, then, is not the class of portrait work which need necessarily deteriorate the power of art. What does deteriorate this power, is that other and more common class of portrait painting which began in Holland in the seventeenth century, and in which each sitter insisted upon discovering all his little characteristics and individual peculiarities; in which, as Muther says, each sitter wished to find "a counterfeit of his personality," and in which "no artistic effect, but resemblance alone was the object desired."[29]

It was the insistence upon this kind of portrait work by the wealthy bourgeoisie of England, which well-nigh drove Whistler, with his ruler spirit, out of his mind, and it is precisely this portrait work which is dominant to-day. In order to be pleasing and satisfactory to the people who demand it, this class of painting presupposes the suppression of all those first principles upon which Ruler-Art relies in order to flourish and to soar; and where it is seriously and earnestly pursued, art is bound to suffer.

This was recognized three hundred years ago by the Spanish theoretician Vincenti Carducho, and his judgment still remains the wisest that has ever been written on the subject. In formulating the credo of the sixteenth century, he wrote as follows—

"No great and extraordinary painter was ever a portraitist, for such an artist is enabled by judgment and acquired habit to improve upon nature. In portraiture, however, he must confine himself to the model, whether it be good or bad, with sacrifice of his observation and selection; which no one would like to do who has accustomed his mind and his eye to good forms and proportions."[30]

Our art at the present day is, unfortunately, very largely the development and natural outcome of the two influences I have just described, and that accounts for a good deal for which I have failed to account hitherto.

Art no longer gives: it takes. It no longer reflects beauty on reality: it seeks its beauty in reality. And that is why it falls to pieces judged by the standard of Ruler-Art. It cannot bear the fierce light of an art that is intimate with Life and inseparable from Life. In its death-throes it has decked itself with all kinds of metaphysical plumes, in order that it may thus, perhaps, live after death. But these plumes have been used before by dying gods and have proved of no avail. "Virtue for virtue's sake," was the cry of a dying religion. "Art for art's sake," is now the cry of an expiring godlike human function.

But unless this cry be altered very quickly into a cry of art for the sake of Life, there will be no chance of saving it. Before this art for Life's sake can be discovered, however; before the purpose after which it will strive can be determined and established, the first thing to which we shall have to lend our attention is not art, but mankind.

The purpose of man is a thousand times more important than the purpose of art. The one determines the other. And as a proof of how intimately the two are connected, see how much doubt there is as to the purpose of art, precisely at a moment when men also, owing to the terrible civil war which is raging among their values, are beginning to doubt the real purpose of human existence.

It would be useless to indulge in a detailed criticism of individual artists. To all those who have followed my arguments closely, no such clumsy holding up of particular modern artists to ridicule will seem necessary. In some of your minds these men are idols still, and it pleases only the envious and the unsuccessful to see niche-statues stoned.

The great artist, as I have shown you, is the synthetic and superhuman spirit that apotheosizes the type of a people and thereby stimulates them to a higher mode of life. But where should we go to-day, if we wished to look for a type or for a desirable code of values which that type would exemplify?

We know that we can go nowhere; for such things do not exist. They are utterly and hopelessly extinct.

Our first duty, then, is not to mend the arts—you cannot mend a cripple. But it is rather to mend the parents who bring forth this cripple—to mend Life itself, and above all Man.

"Away from God and Gods did my will allure me," says Zarathustra; "what would there be to create if there were Gods!

"But to man doth it ever drive me anew, my burning will; thus doth it drive the hammer unto the stone.

"Alas, ye fellow-men, within the stone slumbereth an image for me, the image of all my visions! Alas that it should perforce slumber in ugliest stone!

"Now rageth my hammer, ruthlessly against its prison. From the stone fly the fragments: what's that to me?

"I shall end the work: for a shadow came unto me—the stillest and lightest of all things once came unto me.

"The beauty of the Superman came unto me as a shadow. Alas my brethren, what are the gods to me now!"[31]

[28]Dresden Royal Picture Gallery.

[29]History of Painting(Eng. Trans.), Vol. II, pp. 572, 576.

[30]Muther,History of Painting(English Translation), Vol. II, p. 481.

[31]Z., II, XXIV.

"For if ye live after the flesh ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live."—Romans viii. 13.

I shall now endeavour to show you when and where Nietzsche's Art doctrine, or part of it, has raised its head in the past, and to touch lightly upon the conditions which led to its observance.

In doing this I shall travel backwards, zigzag fashion, from Rome, viâ Greece to Egypt, and beginning with Christianity, I shall show how the Holy Catholic Church succeeded in establishing one of the conditions necessary to all great Art, which, as I have said, is unity and solidarity lasting over a long period of time, and forming men according to a definite and severe scheme of values.

[1]Delivered at University College on Dec. 15th, 1910.

1. Rome and the Christian Ideal.

The compass of these lectures does not allow me to say anything concerning the Art of Rome. There are many aspects of this Art which are both interesting and important from the historical standpoint; but, from the particular point of view which I am now representing, temporal Rome does not concern me nearly as much as sacred Rome and its provincial Government.

For the first act of the Christian power was not to volatilize the stone bulwarks of the monuments of antiquity, neither was it to spiritualize the citizen of the Roman Empire; but it was to convert Rome the secular administration into Rome the Eternal City.

Long before the exterior of the Græco-Roman column was divided up and sub-divided, until, despite its volume, it seemed to have no solidity whatever; and long before men's eyes and bodies were transformed from broad, spacious wells of life into narrow, tenuous cylinders of fire, a teaching was spread broadcast over the Roman Empire, the devouring power of which was astounding, and the like of whose digestion has not been paralleled in history.

The Romans in their latter days had degenerated through the decline among them of that very principle which is the basis of all great art—restraint. Always utilitarians, in the end they had become materialists, and finally their will power had disintegrated.

Then, suddenly—perhaps through the very fact that their will power had declined, and through a preponderance among them of a class of people who were unfit to allow themselves any material enjoyment, and who were conscious of this shortcoming—the pendulum of Life swung back with a force so great to the opposite extreme, that the Pagan world was shaken to its foundations, and in its death-agony stretched out its arms and embraced the foreign creed which said—

"Flesh is death; Spirit is life and peace. The body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If ye live after the flesh ye shall die; but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live."[2]

Here was a fundamentally new valuation, a totally novel outlook upon the world of man. Some extraordinarily magnetic creator of values had spread his will over an empire, and stamped his hand upon a corner of the globe, and "the blessedness to write upon the will of millenniums as upon brass,"[3]promised to be his.

Here was a principle which obviously must have found its origin in a class of mind which, in order to overcome the flesh at all, knew of no better means thereto than to cut it right away and for ever. It was not a matter of contriving some sort of desirable inner harmony; the will of the people in whom this creed took its roots was incapable of such an achievement. The order went: "If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee ... if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off!" Whenever the Spirit was mentioned it was spelt in capital letters and uttered in exalted tones; while the body, on the other hand, as the great obstacle to salvation, was written small. States of the soul became surer indices to the qualities "good," "beautiful," and "virtuous," than states of the body, and the paradox that Life was the denial of Life, was honestly believed to be an attainable ideal. In Lübke's words: "Christianity disturbed the harmony between man and nature, and introduced a sense of discordance by proclaiming to man a higher spiritual law, in the light of which his inborn nature became a sinful thing which he was to overcome."[4]

The people who acclaimed this teaching by instinct ultimately organized themselves, conquered the Pagan world, enlisted Pagan elements into their organization—Pagan spirit and Pagan order—and gradually accomplished a task which no other European values seem to have been able to do. They established one idea, one thought, one hope, in the breasts of almost all great Western peoples, from Ireland to Constantinople, from the Mediterranean to the Baltic.

The power of their creation—the Church—was such that it co-ordinated the most heterogeneous elements, the most conflicting factors, and the most absurd contrasts. And, however much one may deprecate the nature of the type they advocated, and the ignoble valuation of humanity upon which their religion was based, as a Nietzschean, one can but acknowledge the power they wielded, the might with which they made one ideal prevail, and the art with which for a while they united and harmonized such discordant voices as those of the people of Europe.

One can admire all this, I say, even though it is but a spiritual reflection of Rome's former power, her former victories, and her former law and order.[5]

For, soon, however un-Pagan the ideal may have been which the Church made to prevail, the methods it employed were purely Pagan methods.

Fearing nothing, respecting nothing that was opposed to it, and not losing heart before the difficulty of vanquishing even the most formidable enemies of the expiring Empire—the Teutons away in the North—spiritual Rome thus set about its task of appropriating humanity; and all the art of the organizer, of the orator, of the painter, sculptor and architect, was speedily ordered into its service. If the type to which its ideal aspired were not already a general fact, then it must be made a general fact. It must be reared, cultivated and maintained.

Strangely enough, the feat of vanquishing the German nation proved a thousand times easier to Rome the Eternal City, than it had done to Rome the Metropolis of the Greatest Empire of antiquity. The ancient Germans, with their strong tendency to subjectivity, to fantastic brooding and to cobweb spinning, and with their coarse, brutal natures unused either to restraint or to the culture that arises from it, fell easy victims to this burning teaching of the spirit, of faith, and of sentiment;[6]and it was in their susceptible and untutored breasts that Christianity laid its firmest foundation.

In its work of appropriation and consumption, as I say, the Church halted at nothing.

[2]Romans viii. 6, 10, 13.

[3]Z., III, LVI.

[4]Outlines of the History of Art, Vol. I, p. 445.

[5]See H. H. Milman, D.D.,History of Latin Christianity(Ed. 1864), Vol. I, p. 10. Speaking of Catholicism, he says: "It was the Roman Empire, again extended over Europe by a universal code, and a provincial government; by a hierarchy of religious prætors or proconsuls, and a host of inferior officers, each in strict subordination to those immediately above them, and gradually descending to the very lowest ranks of society, the whole with a certain degree of freedom of action, but a restrained and limited freedom, and with an appeal to the spiritual Cæsar in the last resort."

[6]See J. B. Bury,A History of the Roman Empire, Vol. I, p. 17: "It has been said that the function of the German nations was to be the bearers of Christianity. The growth of the new religion was indeed contemporary with the spread of the new races in the Empire, but at this time in the external events of history, so far from being closely attached to the Germans, Christianity is identified with the Roman Empire. It is long afterwards that we see the mission fulfilled. The connection lies on a psychological basis: the German character was essentially subjective. The Teutons were gifted with that susceptibility which we call heart, and it was to the needs of the heart that Christianity possessed endless potentialities of adaptation.... Christianity and Teutonism were both solvents of the ancient world, and as the German nations became afterwards entirely Christian, we see that they were historically adapted to one another."

2. The Pagan Type appropriated and transformed by Christian Art.

Just as St. Paul had not refrained from taking possession of the Unknown God whom the Athenians ignorantly worshipped, by declaring

Him to be precisely the God whom he had come among them to proclaim, so Christianity did not refrain from incorporating all the suitable features of the Pagan faith into its own creed.

The Pagan type was thus the first thing to be assimilated and absorbed, and in the early Christian paintings of the catacombs you must not be surprised to find the Saviour depicted with all the beauties and charms of the classical god or hero. Here he appears as a Hermes, there as an Apollo, and yonder as an Orpheus.[7]Beardless, young, and strong, Christ stalks towards you. His gait is free his carriage majestic. Across his shoulders you will sometimes see, as in the catacombs of the Via Appia in Rome, that he bears a sheep, and he looks for all the world like a young Hermes, who, as you know, was the Greek god of flocks.

Elsewhere he looks like a Roman senator, as in the catacomb of St. Callixtus, for instance; his mother Mary looks like a Roman matron, praying with uplifted hands, and the apostles Peter and Paul, together with the prophets, appear as peripatetic philosophers, grasping learned-looking scrolls of manuscript, while Daniel is presented as a Hercules.[8]

Even the famous bronze statue of St. Peter in his great church at Rome is in fact an antique statue of a consul which has been transformed into a Peter, and the original of this monument was probably quite innocent of the sanctity which has caused the foot of his effigy to be worn away by the kisses of the faithful.[9]

This bold manner of appropriating the Pagan ideal in Art was but the symbol of what was actually occurring in the outside world; for the object was not to glorify the Pagan type, but to overthrow it, to transform it by degrees into the type which was compatible with Christian values, and thus to obliterate it.

We can watch this process. We can see the classic features and form of body surely and permanently vanishing from the wall decorations of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries A.D., and the Christian type asserting itself with ever greater assurance. Already in San Paolo fuori-le-mura in Rome, which had been decorated about the middle of the fifth century,[10]Christ appears bearded,[11]ugly and gloomy, and his apostles reflect his appearance and mood. In the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna, of the sixth century, the spirit of the antique had almost passed away;[12]in the basilica of San Lorenzo fuori-le-mura the bearded Christ is no longer sublime and dignified, but wan and emaciated;[13]while in the Church of SS. Nazarus and Celsus at Ravenna, there is a mosaic of the fifth century in which even the sheep are beginning to look with gloomy and dissatisfied eyes upon the world about them.

Examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely to prove how slow but sure was this gradual self-assertion of the type that was compatible with Christian values, and the early period of mediæval art is well described by Woltmann and Woermann as one in which the classical cast of figure and features gets swallowed up in ugliness.[14]

Finally, in the seventh century, the most daring and most extraordinary artistic feat of all was accomplished. The greatest paradox the world had ever seen—a god on a cross—was portrayed for men's eyes to behold. The Crucifixion became one of the loftiest subjects of Christian art, and the god of the Christians was painted in his death agony.

I will not dwell upon the manifold influences exercised by this class of picture; I simply record the fact, in order to show with what steadily increasing audacity the Church ultimately realized and exhibited its type.

For, the fact that Christian Art was didactic, as all art is which is associated with the will and idea of a fighting cause, and which is born on a soil of clashing values, nobody seems to deny.[15]Paulinus of Nola, Gregory the Great, Bishop Germanus, Gregory the Second,[16]John of Damascus and Basil the Great were all agreed as to the incalculable worth of images in the propagation of the Christian doctrine, and their attitude, subsequently adopted by the Franciscans and Dominicans, lasted, according to Milman, until very late in the Middle Ages. When it is remembered, moreover, that illuminated manuscripts, which were destined to remain in the hands of single individuals, retained the classical mould of body and features much later than did the work for church decoration, it is not difficult to discover the strong motive which lay behind the production of public art.[17]

With Roman culture and art, the western and northern provinces of Gaul, Spain, Germany and Britain thus received their religion and their ideal type; and if to-day, in our ball-rooms and drawing-rooms we are often confronted with tenuous, flamelike, swan-necked creatures, that recall Burne-Jones, Botticelli, Duccio and Segna to our minds, we know to which values these people owe their slender, heaven-aspiring stature, and their long, sensitive fingers.

For the attitude of the Christian ideal to Life, to the body, and to the world was an entirely negative one. The command from on high was, that the deeds of the body should be mortified through the Spirit. All beauty, all voluptuousness, smoothness and charm were very naturally regarded with suspicion by the promoters of such an ideal; for beauty, voluptuousness and shapeliness lure back to Life, lure back to the flesh, and ultimately back to the body.

What else, then, could possibly have been expected from such an ideal than the ultimate decline and uglification of the body? To what else did such an ideal actually aspire? For was not ugliness the strongest obstacle in the way of the loving one, in the way of him who wished only to affirm and to promote life?

When the student of mediæval miniatures, wall-paintings and stained-glass windows finds bodily charm almost completely eliminated, when he sees ugliness prevailing, and even made seductive by a host of the most subtle art-forms, by a gorgeous wealth of ornament and repetitive design; and when he perceives a certain guilty self-consciousness in regard to the attributes of sex revealing itself in such paintings as that on the ceiling of the Church of St. Michael at Hildesheim, where Adam and Eve are represented as naked human monstrosities, exactly alike in frame and limbs, and with all indications as to sex, save Eve's long tresses and Adam's beard, carefully suppressed,[18]what can be concluded from all this irrefutable and unimpeachable evidence?

When he finds the Gothic type of figure growing ever more tenuous, ever more emaciated and more sickly as the centuries roll on; when he hears of a Byzantine canon of the eleventh century in which the human body is actually declared to be a monstrosity measuring nine heads; when he finds strength and manhood gradually departing from the faces and the limbs of the men, and an expression of tender sentiment, culminating in puling sentimentality becoming the rule; finally, when he stands opposite Segna's appalling picture of "Christ on the Cross" at the National Gallery; what, under these circumstances, is he to say, save that he is here concerned with an art which is antagonistic and hostile to beauty, to Life and the world?

For the qualities of this art, qua art, although they never once attain to the excellence of Ruler-Art, are sometimes exceedingly great. With Meier Graefe I should be willing to agree that there has been no real style since the Gothic,[19]or certainly not one that can claim anything like such general distribution. And, if it had not been for the fact that the more the paradox at the root of Christian doctrine was realized, the more paradoxical it appeared—a fact which called forth the energies of scores of apologists, commentators, and dialecticians, and which made pictures retain to the very end a rhetorical, persuasive, and therefore more or less realistic manner, sometimes assisted (more especially towards the close of the Middle Ages) by almost lyrical ornament and charm; there is no saying to what simple power Christian art might not have attained. For behind it were all the conditions which go to produce the greatest artistic achievements.

As a style, apart from its subject—or content beauty; as the manifestation of a mighty will—who can help admiring this art of Christianity? If only its ideal had been a possible one, and one which would have required no rhetoric, seduction, or emotional oratory, accompanied by the ringing of all the precious metals, to support it until the end; it might have ascended to the highest pinnacle of art in simplicity, restraint and order. Into simplicity, however, it was never able to develop, while its constant need of explaining made it to the very last retain more or less realism in the presentation of its ideal type.

[7]On this point see Kraus,Geschichte der christlichen Kunst, Vol. I, pp. 41, 46 et seq. Muther,Geschichte der Malerei, Vol. I, p. 13. Woltmann and Woermann,History of Painting, Vol. I. pp. 151-156. Paul Lacroix,Les Arts au Moyen Age et à l'Epoque de la Renaissance(Ed. 1877, Paris), p. 254.

[8]See J. A. Crowe and G. B. Cavalcaselle,The History of Painting in Italy(Ed. 1903), Vol. I, p. 4. Woltmann and Woermann,op. cit., Vol. I, p. 156.

[9]Woltmann and Woermann,op. cit., Vol. I, p. 156.

[10]J. A. Crowe and G. B. Cavalcaselle,op. cit., pp. 14, 15.

[11]For a discussion of the material causes of the change of type, see Milman,op. cit.. Vol. IX, p. 324.

[12]Crowe and Cavalcaselle,op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 24, 25.

[13]Woltmann and Woermann,op. cit., Vol. I, p. 185.

[14]Woltmann and Woermann,op. cit., Vol. I, p. 230.

[15]See an interesting discussion on the early Christian attitude towards art in Kraus,Geschichte der christlichen Kunst, Vol. I, pp. 58 et seq. See also Milman's conclusions on the subject,History of Latin Christianity, Vol. II, pp. 345, 346.

[16]See his letter to Leo the Isaurian, quoted by Milman,op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 358-361. See also the Rev. J. S. Black's article on "Images" in theEncyclopædia Britannica(9th Edition).

[17]The Rev. J. S. Black says, in his article on "Images," above referred to, that even as early as the fourth or fifth centuries there is evidence of the tendency to enlist art in the service of the Church, while Woltmann and Woermann (op. cit., Vol. I, p. 167) quote the following instance: "When St. Nilus (A.D. 450) was consulted about the decoration of a church, he rejected as childish and unworthy the intended design of plants, birds, animals, and a number of crosses, and desired the interior to be adorned with pictures from the Old and New Testaments, with the same motive that Gregory II expressed afterwards...."

[18]Kraus seems to be of the opinion that this suppression of primary sexual characteristics in paintings was not at all uncommon in the Middle Ages. SeeGeschichte der christlichen Kunst, Vol. II, p. 280.

[19]Modern Art, Vol. I, p. 24.

3. The Gothic Building and Sentiment.

But the hierarchy of the Church, although it left no doubt in the minds of its followers as to the genuine type which was the apotheosis of Christian values, was nevertheless unable completely to impose its culture upon the barbarians under its sway. And soon, somewhere towards the end of the twelfth century, there began to appear in Europe, in things that did not seem to matter from the moral or didactic standpoint, a certain uncouth and uncultured spirit, which showed to what extent the despotic rule of Rome was beginning to be flouted.

In architecture, which, like music, has for some reason or other always seemed to Europeans to be less intimately connected with the thought and will of man than the graphic arts, an un-Catholic spirit was preparing its road to triumph. When I say un-Catholic, I mean emancipated from the law and order of the Universal Church.[20]And in the Gothic edifice, from its early stages to its development into the flamboyant style, all the impossibilities, all the terrible self-immolations imposed by the Christian ideal upon man, begin to make themselves openly felt.

Now churches begin to tower aloft into heights undreamt of heretofore. Huge columns spring heavenwards, bearing up a roof that seems almost ethereal because it is so high. Spires are thrust right into the very breasts of clouds, and acres are covered by constructions which, mechanically speaking, are alive. Kicks from the vaulted arches against the hollowed-out walls below, necessitate counter-kicks; buttresses and flying buttresses strive and struggle against the crushing pressure of the stone or brick skies of these fantastic architectural feats. All the parts of this mass of stone on baked clay are at loggerheads and at variance with each other, and their strife never ceases.

Typical of the contest going on within the body of the mediæval Christian, and the vain aspirations of his soul, the lofty buildings are also symbolic of the discord and lack of equilibrium which, as Lübke says, Christianity introduced into man's relations to Nature and to himself. And when we find the columns of these buildings carved and moulded to look like groups of pillars embracing each other to gain strength, the salient parts of the construction grooved and striped, and the extremities of the clustered pillars spreading after the manner of a fan, over our heads; we are amazed at the manner in which mass and volume have been volatilized, spiritualized, and apparently dissipated.

Elsewhere, too, there is variegated glass, gigantic filigree work, festive decoration, as elaborated as that of a queen or a bride; infinite grandeur and infinite littleness.[21]The ornament is nervous and excited, festoons, trefoils, gables, gargoyles and niches, all thrust themselves at you; all strive for individual effect, individual attention, and individual value, with a restlessness and an importunacy which knows no limits; until your eyes, bewildered and dazzled by the jutting, projecting and budding details, and out-startled by surprise, instinctively drop at last, and perhaps close in a paroxysm of despair, before the High Altar.[22]

This was the germ of Protestantism in stone. Long before Martin Luther burned the Papal Bull in the market-place of Wittenberg, the elements of Protestantism had already found expression in Gothic architecture. True the Pagan and Catholic spirit was still sufficiently master to dominate them, just as it did the heretics, by a tremendous force of style; but they are nevertheless present, and it is in this architecture, if we choose to seek it, that we shall find, at once, all the beauty, all the ugliness, and all the incompatible elements of the Christian ideal.

Its beauty and the fact for which we ought to be grateful to it, is, that by its one-sided and earnest advocacy of the spiritual in man, it extended the domain of his spirit over an area so much greater than that which had been covered theretofore, that only now can it be said that he knows exactly where he stands and who he is. Its ugliness lies in its contempt of the body and of Life; and its incompatible elements are its negation of Life and the necessary attitude of affirmation towards Life which all living creatures are bound to assume.

If, however, the above description of the Gothic may seem unfair, hear what one of the greatest friends of the Gothic has said on the subject!

John Ruskin, in the early days of the last half of the nineteenth century, wrote as follows—

"I believe that the characteristic or moral elements of the Gothic are the following, placed in order of their importance: (1) Savageness, (2) Changefulness, (3) Naturalism, (4) Grotesqueness, (5) Rigidity, (6) Redundance."[23]

He speaks of it as being "instinct with work of an imagination as wild and wayward as the Northern Sea";[24]lays stress upon its rudeness,[25]and declares that it is that strange disquietude of the Gothic spirit— that is its greatness,"that restlessness of the dreaming mind, that wanders hither and thither among the niches, and flickers feverishly around, and yet is not satisfied, nor shall be satisfied."[26]

In fact, in no instance could the saying, "preserve me from my own friends," be more aptly applied than in Ruskin's defence of the Gothic. For Ruskin was a conscientious student, and things which even enemies of his subject would be likely to overlook, he brings forward proudly and ingenuously, like a truculent mother presenting an ugly child to a friend, and with a broad smile in his forcible prose which sometimes throws even the experienced reader quite off his guard.

Hippolyte Taine speaks of the people of the Middle Ages as being possessed of delicate and over-excited imaginations, of morbid fancy unto whom vivid sensation—manifold, changing, bizarre and extreme —are necessary. In referring to their taste in ornament, he says, "It is the adornment of a nervous, over-excited woman, similar to the extravagant costumes of the day, whose delicate and morbid poesy denotes by its excess the singular sentiments, the feverish, violent, and impotent aspiration peculiar to an age of knights and monks."[27]

The Canon of Polycleitus (Rome)

And if you think of the physical and spiritual operations they had been made to undergo, you will not feel very much inclined to question these conclusions. It must not be supposed that the canon of Polycletus, measuring seven heads, was transformed into the Byzantine canon, measuring nine heads, without some one's suffering—even though it took centuries to effect the change. It must not be believed that the calm Pagan idea of death was converted into the Christian terror of death without the sacrifice of something; nor must these emaciated, careworn, and neurotic faces in Mediæval paintings be conceived as mere inventions of morbid phantasy. The deeds of the body are not mortified through the Spirit with impunity. Such brilliant achievements have their accounts to pay, and the Church never once deceived itself or its followers as to what was paying, what was suffering, or where the amputations and vivisections were taking place.

Look at the type of which the monks approved! Examine it in Cimabue's, Duccio's, Segna's and the Cologne painters' pictures. Examine it in the tapestry of Berne, known as the "Adoration of the Kings"; look at it in countless stained glass windows, and see its repetition in hundreds of illuminated manuscripts, some of which, like the Latin missal of the Church of St. Bavon at Ghent, and theLives of the Saintsby Simeon Metaphrasi, have found their way into the British Museum.

Then ask yourself whether or not humanity was suffering in conforming itself to this holy creed. "Like those mothers," says Lecky, "who govern their children by persuading them that the dark is crowded with spectres that' will seize the disobedient, and who often succeed in creating an association of ideas which the adult man is unable altogether to dissolve, the Catholic priests, by making the terrors of death for centuries the nightmare of the imagination, resolved to base their power upon the nerves."[28]

And, now that all this is known and realized, what is the meaning of the Renaissance, what is its explanation?

[20]Speaking of Gothic buildings in general, Fergusson, in A History of Architecture, Vol. I, p. 41, says: "It is in Nature's highest works that we find the symmetry of proportion most prominent. When we descend to the lower types of animals we find we lose it to a great extent, and among trees and vegetables generally find it only in a far less degree, and sometimes miss it altogether. In the mineral kingdom among rocks and stones it is altogether absent. So universal is this principle in Nature that we may safely apply it to our criticism on art, and say that a building is perfect as a whole in proportion to its motived regularity, and departs from the highest type in the ratio in which symmetrical arrangement is neglected. It may, however, be incorrect to say that an oak-tree is a less perfect work of creation than a human body, but it is certain that a picturesque group of Gothic buildings may be as perfect as the stately regularity of an Egyptian or classic temple; but if it is so, it is equally certain that it belongs to a lower and inferior class of design." Page 34: "The revival of the rites and ceremonies of the Mediæval Church, our reverent love of our own national antiquities, and our admiration of the rude but vigorous manhood of the Middle Ages, all have combined to repress the classical element, both in our literature and in our art, and to exalt in their place Gothic feelings and Gothic art to an extent which cannot be justified on any grounds of reasonable criticism."

Back to Index Next