Prior art

“ In purely literary excellence—in perfection of form—the pre-eminence of the ancients is not disputed. In every department which they attempted, and they attempted almost all, their composition, like their sculpture, has been to the greatest modern artists an example, to be looked up to with hopeless admiration, but of inappreciable value as a light on high, guiding their own endeavours. In prose and in poetry, in epic, lyric, or dramatic, as in historical, philosophical, and oratorical art, the pinnacle on which they stand is equally eminent. ”

“ This is the point at which art reaches its highest mark: when to the primitive strength and simplicity of early art are added the infinite refinements and graces of culture without destroying or weakening the sublimity of the expression.
In painting, the refinement and graces of culture take the form of an increasing truth to natural appearances, added bit by bit to the primitive baldness of early work ”

“ And yet, I say, how have we of these latter days treated the beauty of the earth, or that which we call art?
Perhaps I had best begin by stating what will scarcely be new to you, that art must be broadly divided into two kinds, of which we may call the first Intellectual, and the second Decorative Art, using the words as mere forms of convenience. The first kind addresses itself wholly to our mental needs; the things made by it serve no other purpose but to feed the mind, and, as far as material needs go, might be done without altogether. ”

“ Antique art celebrates its triumph in just this fact, that even in its most delicate figures all parts throughout and their appropriate organization are somehow made perceptible in barely visible nuances of elevation and depression, by means of which the science and virtuosity of an artist is only followed by an observer whose research and attention is equally thorough. ”

“ Upon these creations of ancient Art we cannot look as those did for whom they were created; we cannot annihilate the centuries which lie between us and them; we cannot, in simplicity of heart, forget the artist in the image he has placed before us, nor supply what may be deficient in his work, through a reverentially excited fancy. ”

“ In this we shall not only possess a historical survey of the technique of art in its stages of development, but shall have set before our minds, as an essential process with a history, that articulation of its ideal content in the distinctions of its schools, their various subject-matter, and their different modes of artistic conception and treatment. ”

“ All art has a sensuous element, colour, form, sound—in poetry a dexterous recalling of these, together with the profound, joyful sensuousness of motion, and each [210] of them may be a medium for the ideal: it is partly accident which in any individual case makes the born artist, poet, or painter rather than sculptor. But as the mind itself has had an historical development, one form of art, by the very limitations of its material, may be more adequate than another for the expression of any one phase of that development. ”

“ Yet if history be anything more than a chronological catalogue of facts, if it be concerned with the movements of mind and spirit, then I submit that to read history aright we must know, not only the works of art that each age produced, but also their value as works of art. If the aesthetic significance or insignificance of works of art does, indeed, bear witness to a spiritual state, then he who can appreciate that significance should be in a position to form some opinion concerning the spiritual state of the men who produced those works and of those who appreciated them. ”

“ Each art has its own medium of expression and to this medium it absolutely adheres in its periods of greatness, adapting itself to its limitations, working within them, and even making them tributary to its excellence. ”

“ We are accustomed to conceive the painters of the sixteenth century, as those who have brought their art to the highest perfection, probably because none of the ancient paintings have been preserved. For all the inventive arts maintain, as it were, a sympathetic connexion between each other, being no more than various expressions of one internal power, modified by different circumstances, either of an individual, or of society ”

“ Before, however, we attempt to gauge in its profundity the new type of art, whose opposition to the old does not come into the course of Art's development, so far, at least, as we here have undertaken to follow it along its fundamental lines, we must in the first instance make clear for ourselves that other transition in its earliest form, which attaches to antique art itself. ”

“ But I say, that in the sincere endeavour to learn and practise, amid the bewildering confusion of our times, what is sound and true in poetical art, I seemed to myself to find the only sure guidance, the only solid footing, among the ancients. They, at any rate, knew what they wanted in Art, and we do not. It is this uncertainty which is disheartening, and not hostile criticism. ”

“ Its forms, and its symbols, and its imagery, have mingled with every branch of art, and become a universal language. It is the deification of the material world; and therefore, that art, which in its perfection may be called the apotheosis of form, finds there its proper region and element. ”

“ It is only of late, and chiefly by a superficial imitation of foreigners, that we have begun to use the word Art by itself, and to speak of Art as we speak of Science, or Government, or Religion: we used to talk of the Arts, and more specifically of the Fine Arts: and even by them were vulgarly meant only two forms of art, Painting and Sculpture, the two which as a people we cared least about—which were regarded even by the more cultivated among us as little more than branches of domestic ornamentation, a kind of elegant upholstery. ”

“ Our purpose is to write a history of the art itself, to show how its various manifestations arose from social and political circumstances, to trace the emotions and thoughts which stimulated the artists to produce their greatest works and to gauge the action and interaction which created the various national styles. ”

“ In tracing the progress of the Art, and upon comparing the merits of artists of ancient and modern times, it is to the moderns that we assign the palm of superiority, especially for perfection of detail in the ornamentation. ”

“ The explanation of this fidelity to one theme of representation in an art which was the very furthest removed from any hieratic prescriptions, in an art which was perpetually growing—and growing more human and secular—must be sought for, I think, in no peculiarities of spiritual condition or national imagination, but in two facts concerning the merely technical development of painting, and the results thereof. ”

“ These invaluable fragments of antiquity have also proved, beyond dispute, that ideal beauty and historic truth do not consist in middle or average forms, &c. but in harmonious outlines, in unity of action, and in the utmost refinement of character and expression. We there see art following close in the footsteps of nature, and exalted, raised, refined with it to the utmost extent that either was capable of. ”

“ But the chief quarrel of the modern is with the story-telling subject—the sentimental or funny incident in paint—of which we see enough and to spare at every new exhibition. This too is historical art in a way. For the genre subjects of the present time are history in the little—personal incidents usually, but nevertheless the history of the people. ”

“ Lucky for us that it is so: for if our judgments about real things had to wait upon historical certitude they might have to wait for ever. Nevertheless it is amusing to see how far that of which we are sure agrees with that which we should expect. My aesthetic hypothesis—that the essential quality in a work of art is significant form—was based on my aesthetic experience. ”

“ For him the problem came to be:—Can the blitheness and universality of the antique ideal be communicated to artistic productions, which shall contain the fulness of the experience of the modern world? We have seen that the development of the various forms of art has corresponded to the development of the thoughts of man concerning humanity, to the growing revelation of the mind to itself. Sculpture corresponds to the unperplexed, emphatic outlines of Hellenic humanism; painting to the mystic depth and intricacy of the middle age; music and poetry have their fortune in the modern world. ”

“ The Web.—Literature, although it stands apart by reason of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or, as used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and merely presentative. ”

“ How eagerly the poet, the painter, the sculptor, would seek to recover some traits of their terrible lineaments, or of their softer outlines when they related to scenes of the gentler passions or of domestic life!—that either a stern grandeur or the romantic glow of a primitive state of existence might be imparted to some work of art. ”

“ In this little book I have tried to develop a complete theory of visual art. I have put forward an hypothesis by reference to which the respectability, though not the validity, of all aesthetic judgments can be tested, in the light of which the history of art from palaeolithic days to the present becomes intelligible, by adopting which we give intellectual backing to an almost universal and immemorial conviction. ”

“ The whole system and discipline of art, the collected results of the experience of ages, might, but for the fixed authority of antiquity, be swept away by the rage of fashion, or lost in the glare of novelty ”

“ It is also true that subjects not new in art are treated in a nineteenth-century manner. This is noticeable in the picturing of historical subjects. The more intimate knowledge of the world enables the historical painter of the present to impart to his representations of the important events of the past a more human and emotional element than exists in the historical art of earlier centuries. ”

“ Whilst, at the same time, it is not disallowed that a subsequent pleasure may and does result, upon reflecting that the objects contemplated were the work of human ingenuity.
Now the subject to be treated, is the ‘subject’ of Painter and Sculptor; what ought to be the nature of that ‘subject,’ how far that subject may be drawn from past or present time with advantage, how far the subject may tend to confer upon its embodiment the title, ‘High Art,’ how far the subject may tend to confer upon its embodiment the title ‘Low Art;’ what is ‘High Art,’ what is ‘Low Art’? ”

“ Before we can come to a true initiation into, and an abiding enjoyment of, the domains of representative art, we must have a keen, clear, settled, and contented view of its limitations. Far less of the fruitlessness of discontent enters into poetry and literature than into the subject of painting and sculpture. ”

“ When we turn to our special subject we find an activity and expansion in nineteenth-century art quite in accordance with the spirit of the time. This expansion is especially noticeable in the increased number of subjects represented in works of art, and in the invention of new methods of artistic expression. ”

“ Of late years, with a growing passion for the works of Art of the Middle Ages, there has arisen among us a [Pg 2] desire to comprehend the state of feeling which produced them, and the legends and traditions on which they are founded;—a desire to understand, and to bring to some surer critical test, representations which have become familiar without being intelligible. ”

“ And this is the place for a remark which, in the present uncertainty of all æsthetic psychology, I put forward as a mere suggestion, but a suggestion less wide of the truth than certain theories now almost unquestioned: the theories which arbitrarily assume that art is the immediate and exact expression of contemporary spiritual aspirations and troubles. ”

“ The critic devotes himself to the appreciation of some special contemporary or historical field of art—Shakespearean drama, Renaissance sculpture, Italian painting, for example; while the philosopher of art looks for general principles, and gives attention to individual works of art and historical movements only for the purpose of discovering and illustrating them. ”

“ The undue importance now assigned to this coveted quality of Originality is partly the outcome of the illusion to which I have already referred,—that art is in its nature progressive and is in fact constantly and steadily progressing. ”

“ Given any development at all in this matter, there must have been phases of art, which, if immature, were also veritable expressions of power to come, intermediate discoveries of beauty, such as are by no means a mere anticipation, and of service only as explaining historically larger subsequent achievements, but of permanent attractiveness in themselves, being often, indeed, the true maturity of certain amiable artistic qualities. ”

“ This view, to which we are necessarily led by investigating any period of art-history, forces itself upon us with particular cogency when we turn our attention to the earliest stages of art-development. ”

“ In this respect consequently the primitive and most ancient art-products in all the particular arts are the vehicle of a content that is essentially most abstract, such as simple tales in poetry, theogonies effervescent with abstract thoughts and their incomplete elaboration, single objects of sacred association in stone and wood and so forth, and the representation remains unaccommodating, monotonous or confused, stiff and dry. ”