TRUTH" AND " CHAP. XIV. BEAUTY."— HISTORICAL PAINTING. GIOTTO AND PLAIN FACTS."-PRE-RAFFAELLITE PARAPHRASE OF HOLY SCRIPTHE GRAND SCHOOL."-HISTORY REDUCED TO PORTRAIT, -APPEAL TO FACTS. THE DUKE AT WATERLOO. TURE. "WHEN," says Mr. Ruskin, "the whole purpose of Art was moral teaching," a state of things we may glance at in another chapter,— "it naturally took truth for its first object, and beauty, and the pleasure resulting from beauty, for its second." (Edin. Lectures, p. 208.) But why, I must ask, this formal divorce between truth and beauty? It is true that those of whose principles Mr. Ruskin is the penman, are, he tells us, "characterised, as a body, by a total want of sensibility to the ordinary and popular forms of artistic gracefulness" (Ibid. p. 228.); but this is not surely to warp our judgment, much less to establish a law. To such a fact it were enough to oppose the single name of Fra Angelico. It has pleased Mr. Ruskin to go further back; and the case is too instructive to be left unnoticed. He tells us that "In Orcagna's great fresco of the Triumph of Death, one of the incidents is that three kings, when out hunting, are met by a spirit, which leads them to a churchyard, and points out to them, in open coffins, three bodies of kings, such as themselves, in the last stages of corruption. Now a modern artist representing this, would have endeavoured dimly and faintly to suggest the appearance of the dead bodies, and would have made, or attempted to make," (is this "Truth," or its sister, Charity ?) "the countenances of the three kings variously and solemnly expressive of thought. This would be, in his, or our view, a poetical and beautiful treatment of the subject. But Orcagna disdains both poetry and taste: he wants the facts only: he wishes to give the spectator the same lesson the kings had, and therefore, instead of concealing the dead bodies, he paints them with the most fearful detail. And then he does not consider what the three kings might most gracefully do. He considers only what they actually, in all probability, would have done. He makes them looking at the coffins with a startled air, and "- (Reader, keep your countenance) one holding his nose.” (Ibid. pp. 209, 210.) I repeat the question. Why this divorce of truth and beauty? Has death no moral power, till it has lost all its solemnity? Has a monarch no mode of expressing his sense of corruption, but by holding his nose? Has Art no means of telling truth, but by an outrage on social decency? Is there not more in stirring imagination than in exposing a naked fact? Is disgust enlightenment? Is there not a mode of presenting truth which makes the soul open all her avenues to receive it? and another which makes her, by the very instinct of self-preservation, close them fast, and attempt to escape? Is the Morgue a better teacher than the HISTORICAL PAINTING: WHAT? 125 Twelfth of Ecclesiastes? Is there no frightful significancy in those words of the scoffing Poet? "For sometimes they contain a deal of fun; Like mourning coaches, when the funeral's done.” It can never be too often remembered that the power of truth hangs on our receiving it, not as a disgusting necessity, but, as the Scripture says, "in the love of it." For this end it must reach us in a way consistent at once with itself, and with our capacities. The "look" of death, mute and motionless, "Before decay's effacing fingers Have swept the lines where beauty lingers,"has an eloquence that bows the soul. A few short hours, and the soul revolts. I remember how, after one youthful sight of that "first, last look," I found it difficult to feel that the moving forms around me were not shadows. I suspect that, had Orcagna completed his story, he might have painted the three kings at their evening banquet: one complaining of a "slovenly, unhandsome corse; " another replying, "Had I three ears, I'd hear thee;" and the third lifting his goblet to the words, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.' We are not, it seems, to take the case as singular: "All the men of that time. . . . either painted from nature things as they were, or from imagination things. as they must have been." (Ibid. p. 211.) And this is, it seems, the only legitimate practice. We have the same account of the modern PreRaffaellites, "From nature only; or, when imagination is necessarily resorted to, by always endeavouring to conceive a fact as it really was likely to have happened, rather than as it most prettily might have happened." (Ibid. p. 227.) So that the true and proper office of Imagination is just to conceive matter of fact. We arrive, then, at the result of those identifications of "Truth" with Imagination to which I called attention in the preceding chapters. We have done with all we have been used to mean when speaking of poetry and poetic art.* The conclusion is so monstrous as to be well nigh incredible. Those who have not read Mr. Ruskin must think I am dragging some unguarded phrase into a false rhetorical position. His own style is so paradoxically poetical, that many, even of his Readers, may be unconscious of all his meaning. At the risk, therefore, of what some may deem superfluous, we must look a little further. Here is first, then, a general question: "What do you at present mean by historical painting? Now-a-days it means the endeavouring, by the power of Imagination, to pourtray some historical event of past days. But in the middle ages it meant representing the acts of their own days: and that is the only historical painting worth a straw." (Ibid. p. 217.) * Whilst this work is in the printer's hands, an article in Blackwood has come to mine, developing, at no small length, and with considerable power, the point I have here, so briefly, insisted on. Want of space alone prevented my entering more largely on it whilst writing, and want of space alone prevents my quoting upon it whilst printing. The views of the writer of that excellent article are on this subject, and not on this only, identical with my own. 66 127 The Reader will be naturally tempted to a question of fact. An occasional cartoon of Pisa, or a procession in the Bransacci chapel, will not, of course, suffice us. What were, then, the recurring subjects, when the entire purpose of Art was moral teaching? Were the walls of churches and monasteries peopled with contemporaneous history? Did Masolino see "Peter and Paul healing the Cripple," or Masaccio "The Expulsion of Adam and Eve "? I will not ask who saw "The Last Judgment" in the Campo Santo. Did Orcagna see the three kings? and one of them "holding his nose"? The matter is not, however, so soon disposed of. We must make Mr. Ruskin his own interpreter. Since the "Modern Painters" of the "Oxford Graduate"-since his "Pre-Raphaelitism"-since even the "Edinburgh Lectures," we have a notice of Giotto for the Arundel Society. What I am about to quote from it will not, of course, be taken as expressing my personal sense of Giotto, much less of our obligations to the Society that would make him better known to us. Mr. Ruskin professes a revolution: we are concerned, not so much with facts, as with his manner of putting them. That we should not all agree as to the precise value of colour, is, I suppose, amicably referable to differences of organisation or temperament. Yet one is hardly prepared to hear of this foremost man amongst the lovers of " truth rather than beauty' the "greatest painter of medieval Italy” (p. 45.)— and "one of the greatest men who ever lived" (p. 24.) -that |