The New Renaissance; or, The Gospel of Intensity [pp. 453-460]

THE NEW RENAISSANCE.
triumphantly with some firmly clutched improper
little story which he had rescued from the oblivion into which it had unfortunately fallen, or
with the name of some forgotten painter, too
long allowed to slumber in peaceful obscurity.
Swinburne was no less active in the intervals of
his poetic labors, and brought many a buried or
misconceived genius before the glare of our
modern footlights. Morris's business, and his
epics, both expanded, and at last, only yesterday
as it seems, the Grosvenor Gallery opened, and
gave to the movement its final fashionable influence. Imitators and admirers had by this
time sprung up all round, especially among the
women, and the first Grosvenor Exhibition witnessed the curious sight of the now greatest
master of the new school surrounded on all
sides by the works of his followers, and as Mr.
Ruskin said at the time, in a famous number of
"Fors Clavigera," the effect of the master's
work was both "weakened by the repetition and
degraded by the fallacy" of its echoes.
Behold, then, a new philosophy of art and
life, sanctioned by the aristocracy, and supported on all sides by an admiring, and what
the Americans would call a " high falutin',"
criticism. Can we wonder at the success attained? Here, indeed, was a gospel suited to
cultured England, the very first article of whose
creed was "Whatever is, is wrong "-a curious
result this of scientific discovery and nineteenthcentury progress in general culture and enlightenment, that melancholy should be discovered to
be the summum bonum; that the great object of
art was to express, in words or colors, that there
is
"A little time for laughter;
A little time to sing;
A little time to kiss and cling,
And no more kissing after."
Cast your recollection back for thirty or forty
years before this new light had broken upon us,
and try to imagine what Turner, or De Wint, or
David Cox, or even old William Hunt, would
have thought of our new theories. Fancy inviting the painter of the "Hayfield" and the
"Welsh Funeral" to a modem esthetic "at
home," or explaining " the sweet secret of Leonardo" to Hunt while he painted "Too Hot" or
the "Listening Stable-boy"! Fancy a young
lady asking Turner if he was "intense," or
reading "Eden Bower's in flower" to De Wint
as he sat sketching in the muddy lanes under
the gray skies, which he knew so well and (curiously as it now seems to us) loved so dearly.
And yet why should these suppositions sound so
ludicrous? Surely all fine art has ties of bloodrelationship, and we have not yet got so far as to
deny that Turner, Cox, De Wint, and Hunt,
were true artists!
Is it possible that somehow our revival has
strayed "off the line," and is wandering in mazes
of false feeling and morbid affectation? Is it
possible that, after all, melancholy is not the key
to all fine art, and that even a return to the
"Early Renascence" will not compensate us for
the loss of healthy national feeling? Is it possible that Hunt's motto, still to be seen on one
of his pictures, "Love what you paint, and paint
what you love," is a truer one than "Love nothing but regret, and regret nothing but love"?
And lastly, is it possible that this self-consciousness of a miserable, thwarted, and limited existence-this conception of the world as a place
where effort is absurd and action futile, and
where the only vital thing to remember is
"That sad things stay, and glad things fly,
And then to die "
is it possible that such a creed as this is unworthy of English men and English women, and is
poorly compensated for by a little increased
knowledge of the peculiarities of early Italian
artists and a morbid love of medieval ballads?
It is too soon to trace the effects which will
surely follow the spread of the present fashion.
If Mr. and Mrs. " Cimabue Brown," " Maudle,"
and "Postlethwaite" are to become permanent
facts in our social system; if the mutual-admiration societies, and the "intense" young ladies
who have lately been so well satirized for us by
Mr. Du Maurier, still continue to increase as
they have done of late; if our women's dresses
and drawing-rooms continue to present a combination of dreary, faded tints, dotted here and
there with spots of bright color; if china must
still be hung upon the wall, and parasols stuck
in the fireplace; if our houses continue to assume the appearance of a compromise between
a Buddhist temple and a Bond-Street curiosityshop; if the cultivation of hysteric self-consciousness continues to be considered as a sign
of artistic faculty, and the incomprehensibility
of art-criticism to be a guarantee of its profundity; if we still continue to think that no art is
worthy of examination which has been produced
since the time of the "Early Renascence"; if,
in a word, the present fashion continues to live
and flourish among us, if we can not have art at
all unless we have art of the kind I have mentioned, with results to match-why then, in
Heaven's name, let us "throw up the sponge"
without further contention-let us become frankly
and thoroughly "Philistine," as were our fathers.
Very certainly there is more hope for a nation in thorough but loving ignorance of art
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