Restoration literature

“ This age of metamorphosis, therefore, is one of the most important in the history of English literature, and if the men of the Restoration could have beheld themselves in their relation, not only to their predecessors, but also to their successors, their complacency would not have been unjustifiable. ”

“ Of all the Restorations yet undertaken the worst have meant the reckless stripping a building of some of its most interesting material features; while the best have their exact analogy in the Restoration of an old picture, where the partly perished work of the ancient craftsmaster has been made neat and smooth by the tricky hand of some unoriginal and thoughtless hack of to-day. ”

“ But in losing the stage the Restoration drama has lost everything, while the Elizabethan is yet a living and working force. It powerfully co-operated in the splendid revival of English poetry at the end of last century; it is at this moment an inspirer and a nurse of young genius. It is inconceivable that the Restoration drama as a whole should inspire anyone, or that it should count for anything as a factor in future developments of literature. One is a perennial plant, which may die down to the root in ungenial seasons, [Pg 79] but will assuredly put forth new flowers ”

“ By bad restoration we are ruining our most beautiful works of art, our marvelous architecture, our Gothic cathedrals, Renaissance city halls, all those old houses that transformed France into a garden of beauty of which it was impossible to grow weary, for everything was a delight to the eye and intelligence. Our workmen would have to be as capable as those of former times to restore those works of art without changing them, they would have to possess the same wonderfully trained eye and hand. But to-day we have lost that conception and execution. ”

“ Worst offence of all is that done in the name of restoration, where, inextricably mixed up with old work, is modern forgery; not clever enough to pass for old, but sufficiently like it to cast a doubt upon the genuine work, at the same time that it quite destroys its beauty. ”

“ Of all destructive manias, that of restoration is the frightfullest and foolishest. Nevertheless, what good, in its miserable way, it can bring, the poor art scholar must now apply his common sense to take; there is no use, because a great work has been restored, in now passing it by altogether, not even looking for what instruction we still may find in its design, which will be more intelligible, if the restorer has had any conscience at all, to the ordinary spectator, than it would have been in the faded work. ”

“ Thus you see, every mountain being made low, and every valley exalted, and the rough places being made plain, and the crooked places straight—that these mighty revolutions will begin to restore the face of the earth to its former beauty. But all this done, we have not yet gone through our restoration; there are many more great things to be done in order to restore all things. ”

“ At the Restoration its spirit, with many of its staunchest upholders, took flight to a land beyond the Atlantic, there to breathe freely, live a new life, call into existence and nourish a new nation, ere long destined to dictate the policy and control the action of every other, in the civilised world. ”

“ To my mind, restoration means giving back to a monument the appearance that the centuries would have given it if it had been well looked after. Restoration doesn't mean making a thing look new; it doesn't consist in giving an old man the hair, beard, complexion and teeth of a youth; it consists in bringing a dying man back to life and giving him the health and beauty of his age."
"How glad I am to hear you talk like this," said Rose. "I hope M. Lanfranc shares your ideas." ”

“ The recent restoration has been carried out with a skill which is simply marvellous, and the uninformed observer may easily be betrayed into the belief that he is looking at an unaltered ancient work. ”

“ Much good ink has been spilt on the vexed question of restoration, so many sins have been committed in its name, that the word has become hateful to antiquaries and archæologists. There is a charm quite incommunicable in words about an ancient fane whose walls are beautified by the bloom of ages, and are hallowed by the oft-repeated prayers of bygone generations of worshippers—generations who have added to its history in stone as the years rolled by. Time has given every such edifice a character of its own, just as it gives each human face its special character. ”

“ In course of time, decay, neglect and restoration will deprive our ancient buildings of every visible stone of original work which they possess, and careful records of this kind, written, photographed and sketched, may be of the highest possible value to future generations of historians and architects, long after the objects themselves have ceased to exist. ”

“ The restoration of the outer walls, which has lately been so much attacked and defended, is certainly a great shock. Of the necessity of the work only an expert is, I suppose, in a position to judge; but there is no doubt that, if a necessity it be, it is one that is deeply to be regretted. To no more distressing necessity have people of taste lately had to resign themselves. Wherever the hand of the restorer has been laid all semblance of beauty has vanished ”

“ Now, under the Restoration, the reaction set in, and the lower and earthly side of human nature—none the less human because it is at the bottom and not at the top—seemed determined to take its full revenge. ”

“ You will readily see that with this view restitution or restoration is out of the question, and the Paradise that was lost will forever remain lost, and the earth and its history be a blot upon the pages of the Divine plan of the ages. Of the millions which the earth has produced, it is claimed that not one has ceased to be and never can cease to be. ”

“ Amidst the ruined monuments of ancient and the infant erections of modern art, he who had restored the broken link between the two ages of human civilisation was crowned with the wreath which he had deserved from the moderns who owed to him their refinement—from the ancients who owed to him their fame. ”

“ No one can fail to observe the almost universal restoration of the old works of antiquity which is going on throughout the country. Although nothing of this kind has yet taken place here, our ancient Cross must be redeemed, and the sooner it is done, the greater will be the credit due to those who accomplish it. ”

“ To the Editor of “The Times.”
Sir: I trust that the excitement which has been caused by the alleged destruction of some of the most important pictures in the National Gallery will not be without results, whatever may{46} be the facts of the case with respect to the works in question. Under the name of “restoration,” the ruin of the noblest architecture and painting is constant throughout Europe. ”

“ But those who make the changes wrought in our day under the name of Restoration, while professing to bring back a building to the best time of its history, have no guide but each his own individual whim to point out to them what is admirable and what contemptible: while the very nature of their task compels them to destroy something, and to supply the gap by imagining what the earlier builders should or might have done. Moreover, in the course of this double process of destruction and addition, the whole surface of the building is necessarily tampered with ”

“ Certainly it cannot be adopted as a fad and imposed on an unwilling society as a clever archaeological restoration. It will have to grow naturally out of life itself and along lines at present hardly predicable. ”

“ The mellowing passage of time has dealt gently with many of our old homes, and history and romance have woven about them an added fascination for every generation to enjoy. When the work of restoration is commenced, the problem of retaining this charm is often a difficult one. ”

“ Frequent reactions between revolution and restoration serve to emphasize the stress of this crisis; and these contrasts in the conditions of men, revealing human character under the most diverse phases, show how inextricably the romantic and the tragic are interwoven in the average lot. ”

“ According to responsible art critics the restoration of paintings may consist of repainting the missing and obliterated parts and that of sculpture in the replacing of lost fragments only when decorative parts are concerned, important for the better comprehension of the whole but not expressing any marked characteristic of the artist. ”

“ If the restoration of a public building is to be completely successful, it is absolutely essential that the person who directs it should combine with an enlightened æsthetic sense an artistic capacity in a high degree, and, moreover, be deeply imbued with feelings of veneration for all that has come down to us from ancient times. ”

“ May our voice be heard by new generations as it was by the serious youth of the Restoration! Yes, it is particularly to you that we address this work, young men whom we no longer know, but whom we bear in our heart, because you are the seed and the hope of the{11} future. ”

“ We think that those last fifty years of knowledge and attention have done more for their destruction than all the foregoing centuries of revolution, violence, and contempt.
"For architecture, long decaying, died out, as a popular art at least, just as the knowledge of mediæval art was born. So that the civilized world of the nineteenth century has no style of its own amidst its wide knowledge of the styles of other centuries. From this lack and this gain arose in men's minds the strange idea of the Restoration of ancient buildings ”

“ Indeed, for a time the aims and methods of fiction were almost entirely lost sight of. And it is easy to see how this unfortunate result was brought about. Weary of the conventionalities of the old romances, and of the shadowy heroes and heroines with whose tedious adventures and even more tedious disquisitions their pages were filled, the novelists of the Restoration made a bold endeavor to get back to 173the life with which they were familiar, and to deal with the world as they knew it to exist. ”

“ But I will write a few words on the way in which it seems to me we ought to face the present position of that revival in decorative art of which our Society is one of the tokens.
And, in the first place, the very fact that there is a "revival" shows that the arts aforesaid have been sick unto death. In all such changes the first of the new does not appear till there is little or no life left in the old, and yet the old, even when it is all but dead, goes on living in corruption, and refuses to get itself put quietly out of the way and decently buried. ”

“ Each restoration displaces more of the original and replaces it with the restorer. As the same hands generally have a monopoly of a public gallery, the contents of some are beginning to acquire a strange uniformity of external character, while the old masters in the same degree are vanishing from them. These remarks, however, are more applicable to past than to present systems; for a reform founded on true artistic principles is being everywhere inaugurated. ”

“ The Renaissance stands not only for a revival of ancient forms in architecture, sculpture, and painting, but for a vast awakening in all departments of human enterprise, and the final abandonment of mediævalism with all its crude and crabbed methods and ways of thought. ”

“ Now, we can never understand precisely what is meant by restoration, unless we understand what is lost or taken away; for instance, when we offer to restore anything to a man, it is as much as to say he once possessed it, but had lost it, and we propose to replace, or put him in possession of, that which he once had; therefore, when a Prophet speaks of the restoration of all things, he means that all things have undergone a change, and are to be again restored to their primitive order, even as they first existed. ”

“ And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places; thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations, and thou shalt be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of paths to dwell in. ”

“ As regards the physical object, palæographers and philologists, who restore to texts their original physiognomy, restorers of pictures and of statues and other industrious toilers strive precisely to preserve or to restore to the physical object all its primitive energy. These efforts are certainly not always successful, or are not completely successful, for it is never or hardly ever possible to obtain a restoration complete in its smallest details. ”

“ For, while churches and palaces were destroyed as relics of Popery, while works of art were demolished, and frescoes whitewashed in reforming zeal, fresh life was always sprouting, fresh energy ever filling up gaps, ever obliterating the traces of the past, the relics of the older time. ”

“ Without doubt the restoring of works of art has at times greatly contributed to their preservation, and more than one masterpiece has come down to us, thanks solely to some clever restorer who at the right time prevented its complete ruin. This is the good side of the profession, but as for its reverse, the art of restoring has, through the ignorance of workers, greatly damaged well-known works of art by the repainting or obliterating of different parts, often helping deception by embellishing bad art into deceitful good art. ”

“ It is, however, by no means confined to our branch of anthropology. Thus I have heard an alltoo-enthusiastic totemist define a god as a degraded totem. Renovation, on this view, spells destruction. The rule that ghosts must not walk is applied to survivals. Let a stake be driven through them at the cross-roads rather than that they should thus unconscionably resurrect. More especially is it resented if revival lift the obsolescent custom to a higher plane of culture. ”

“ If he is a Puritan he looks upon the Restoration as a national disaster: if he is an artist he regards it as the salvation of the country from gloom, devil worship and starvation of the affections. The Puritan is ready to try the Commonwealth again with a few modern improvements: the Amateur is equally ready to try the Restoration with modern enlightenments. And so for the present we must be content to proceed by reactions, hoping that each will establish some permanently practical and beneficial reform or moral habit that will survive the correction of its excesses by the next reaction. ”