V. THE PROSPECTS OF ART IN ENGLAND. 1. Directory of the Science and Art Department of the Committee of Council on Education, South Kensington, with Regulations for establishing and conducting Schools of Art, and promoting General Art Education. London: The Queen's Printers. 2. Companion to the British Almanac for 1859. London: Knight. 3. On Colour and Taste. By Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson. London: Murray. 4. Handbook of Architecture. By James Fergusson, M.R.I.B.A. Second Edition. London: Murray, 1859. 5. On Gothic Architecture, Secular and Domestic. By G. G. Scott, A.R.A. Second Edition. London: Murray, 1859. 6. Report from the Select Committee on Foreign-Office Reconstruction. Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed. 1858. 7. The Common Sense of Art. A Lecture delivered at the Architectural Museum, by A. J. B. Beresford Hope, M.P. London: Murray, 1858. 8. Publications (for the year 1856) of the Arundel Society for Promoting the Knowledge of Art. London: 1858. 9. Memoir of Thomas Uwins, R.A. London: Longmans, 1858. 10. Memoir of Thomas Seddon, Artist. London: Nisbet, 1858. 11. Ruskin's Address at the Opening of the Cambridge School of Art. 12. Westlake's Illustrated Old Testament History. By an English Artist about A.D. 1310. London: Masters. 13. Painting Popularly Explained. By T. J. Gullick and John Timbs, F.S.A. London: Kent & Co., 1859. IT T is easier to follow the course, and to trace out the consequences, of the several conspicuous revivals of arts or letters which are recorded in the annals of civilisation than it is to account satisfactorily for their origin or to explain their phenomena. The periods of greatest intellectual activity have not uniformly recurred under similar conditions of political, religious, or social life; and it has as yet defied the inductive powers of the philosophical student of history to determine the law, if any, which regulates their cycles. Art, for instance, has thriven equally in the free atmosphere of republican Athens and under the close and stifling oligarchy of the Italian municipalities; amidst the fresh bursts of the new life of Teutonic Christianity and under the decrepit despotism of the Medicean or Borgian Popedom. Literature, again, has flourished under the most dissimilar outward circumstances. Shakspeare and Milton needed no Mæcenas, and the mild patronage of Weimar was wholly wanting in the Florence of Dante and Boccaccio. How little, again, was there in common between the times of our own great Elizabethan and so-called Augustan writers! And, remembering Tacitus and Tiberius, we will not yet believe, in spite of appearances, that even an imperial tyranny can wholly quench the flame of genius in a great people. Nor, again, have the most important historical developments of science, art, and literature been strictly parallel or contemporaneous. At first sight it would seem probable that all the chief branches of human study would flourish simultaneously in an age of great intellectual progress. But the theory is not borne out by facts. Music, for example, did not reach the culminating point of its mediæval stage under Palestrina till its sister arts had long passed their maturity and entered upon their decline. But then, again, it was music that, under Mozart and Beethoven, anticipated that modern revival which, in its special relation to architecture, painting, and sculpture, it is our present purpose to examine. Past experience, therefore, would not justify any very confident prediction with respect to the future of that remarkable renaissance of the fine arts which has been witnessed by the present generation. We may observe its facts, study its tendencies, and record its progress; but as we cannot with any certainty trace these events to their final causes, so neither can we prophecy their ultimate results. Still we may profitably speculate on the future; and we may even affect the future very materially by directing the course of the stream as it flows on. There are some who have attempted to prove that we owe to the romantic mediavalism of the writings of Sir Walter Scott the modern reaction in matters of taste which is characteristic of the art of our day. But deeper reflection would show that the great novelist was not so much the originator and prophet of a new faith as an exponent of a general movement which was beginning in his time to stir the whole European mind. Fouqué in Germany, and Victor Hugo in France, represent the same principle. It is seldom otherwise than futile to attempt to trace to any one man, or to any one place, the first impulses of those great tides of opinion which from time to time have ebbed and Hlowed among mankind. There are generally deeper and more mysterious energies in operation to produce such mighty results than the will of any individual, however gifted. Such an one is himself an agent, not the prime mover. He represents rather than originates. Many a thinker has thrown out hints which, if taken up, would have revolutionised the world; but, so long as the seed sown fell on ground that was not prepared, it took no root. Such men are familiarly described as being before their age. All great changes of opinion are the growth of years and the result of numberless co-operative and converging forces. When the time has come, and men's minds are ripe for it, the new sentiment shows its universality by manifesting itself in a thousand forms and places at once. And such a movement, unless we are much mistaken, is that recurrence to sounder principles of taste which in so many different departments of art and literature distinguishes our own times. Were we to attempt to define, in the most general terms, the leading characteristic of this movement, we should probably not be far wrong in calling it a reaction from corrupt conventional standards, and a recovery of first principles with a view to an improved practice. The last qualification severs it wholly in essence from archæology pure and simple; but, inasmuch as it was necessary to go back before a fresh step could be taken forward, the revival, for a certain way, was scarcely distinguishable from antiquarianism. And even now the divorce between the two is not complete. The more progressive artists of the day are denounced by mere antiquaries as rash innovators, and by their opponents as mere archæological copyists. The truth is, that their advance is made from a new starting-point which they could only reach by a preliminary retrogression. It is curious to observe how important a place archæology occupies, and must occupy, in modern art. There have been times when such a thing as 'keeping' was unknown, and the most incongruous anachronism shocked no one. No mediaval architect, for example, ever dreamed of reviving or perpetuating a defunct style; and the earlier artists clothed their Holy Families or saintly groups in the habits of their own period. Garrick saw nothing absurd in acting Julius Cæsar in a fullbottomed wig; and, except for the ill-omened precedent of the revival of the costume of Brutus at Paris in the days of the Terror, it has been left for our own day to see the Westminster play acted in practicable togas, and the Shakspearian dramas revived with archæological properties and proprieties by a manager who scrupulously appends F.S.A. to his name. We live in an age of criticism, and are never satisfied unless the unities of a work of art are observed religiously, and all its accessories are congruous and in character.' Thus, on the Burns Centenary, people thought it in good taste to eat haggis VOL. I. NO. I. L and applaud the bagpipes; and Mr. Albert Smith, returned from Canton, substitutes Chinese for Alpine fittings in the Egyptian Hall. It is useless to lament, as some do, this 'over-consciousness' -to borrow a phrase from ethics-this almost exaggerated attention to the minutiae of externals, and to long after the careless freedom of less artificial times. We must take things as we find them, and submit to a certain pedantry as a general characteristic of the age. Art and literature, at least in the old world, have a historic past which moulds the present, and which foreshadows the future. Hence it is that the healthiest and most promising artistic efforts of the day have, in one point of view, an archæological aspect; and neither the inventive painter nor the daring architect can dispense with the humbler labours of the plodding antiquary. This, in fact, is involved in the very name of a revival as applied to art. Reculer pour mieux sauter: the proverb implies that the forward spring must be preceded by a backward motion. There is no way of recovering first principles when obscured or lost but by the intelligent study of the past. It is just because men had become disgusted with traditions that had lost all their vitality, and conventionalisms that were fairly worn out, that they began to retrace their steps in search of truth, reality, and nature. The poets of the Lake School, for instance, were following a right instinct when they placed their ideal in a certain simplicity, and naturalness, and unaffectedness. Poor Haydon, too, was dreaming of a right ideal when he thought he was bringing back the high art of Raffaelle and Michelangelo by historical pictures on a colossal scale. Flaxman, in sculpture, actually reached an antique purity of design which none of his successors have fully equalled. And Rickman, in architecture, essayed at Cambridge, though with singularly small success, to revive practically that national Gothic, the successive styles of which he had been one of the first to discriminate theoretically. When things had come to their worst in matters of art, the first step towards amendment was of necessity a step backwards. When the lowest depth of degradation had been reached in this country in the first quarter of the present century, there were even then, in various directions, signs and tokens which, to a careful observer, might have presaged better things to come. How remarkably, for instance, the late extraordinary development of English ceramic art-manufactures was harbingered in Wedgwood's beautiful invention of the ware that bears his name! The potteries of Europe, indeed, were the asylums of art in the last century. In painting there was less promise. France was working threadbare the traditions of David and his school. In Germany there was as yet nothing to tell of the future eminence of Overbeck, though Boisserée, more in the spirit of an antiquary than a connoisseur, was collecting those precious gems of ancient art which now adorn the Munich Gallery. At home our English school remained stationary, never sinking below, nor rising above, an average level in landscape and portraiture, but showing a decided and growing appreciation and mastery of colour. Gainsborough and Reynolds, indeed, had no equal successors, but Turner was already beginning his career and laying the foundations of his unique reputation. And the water-colour painters, who began to exhibit early in the century, were the worthy forerunners of the clever artists who, in later years, have brought that form of art to such high perfection. For the rest, there was so much mannerism, and conventional rules had so largely superseded the genuine study of nature, that a reaction, sooner or later, was inevitable. But of all the arts, that of architecture was in the most languishing condition. The grandiose style of Wren had died out under Hawksmoor and Gibbs, and no school was founded by Chambers, or Stuart, or Soane. Gothic architecture was in general contempt, which was not likely to be diminished through the well-meant patronage of Walpole or the absurd practice of Battey Langley. George IV. parodied a Chinese pagoda amidst universal applause in his Brighton Pavilion; and finding the court end of London brick, did his best, by the help of Nash, to leave it stucco. Very unlike the dignified churches of Queen Anne's reign, the few churches that were built in the earlier years of this century were either grotesquely hideous or indescribably anomalous. All Souls' church in Langham Place, for example, received as a steeple an extinguisher perched upon the Temple of the Winds, which again was elevated over a portico. St. Pancras was even more remarkable for its fabulous cost than for its ugliness: but here, while the main structure was almost destitute of ornament, quaternions of gigantic caryatides were made to sustain the cornices of a pair of subordinate vestries. In domestic and secular works the building art was meaner and baser than at any preceding period. The window-tax and the excise on glass and on bricks combined to produce the greatest possible amount of unsightliness without and of unwholesomeness within. Those were the days in which houses were run up in populous neighbourhoods, avowedly constructed so as to last for the few years of the building-lease and no longer. The last vestige of the honest and substantial detail of the early Georgian days disappeared utterly; and the outskirts of our great towns became fringed with dwellings which |