ART.

THE HIGHER CRITICISM.*

WITHIN the last ten years, public interest has been excited to a degree quite unparalleled in England about artistic matters; we may almost talk about an English Renaissance, which, heralded by Ruskin's earlier works, was carried forward by the Pre- Raphaelite movement, and the schools of poetry headed by Swinburne, Morris, and Rossetti, till it took its present shape, and became visible in Queen Anne furniture, decorative needle- work, iridescent glass, Doulton pottery, and many another minor symptom of awakened interest and commercial enterprise..

From taking no interest in Art whatever, the nation—at all events, the fashionable portion of it—has suddenly discovered its incapacity for performing the commonest actions of daily life without (esthetic assistance, and from the capes of its foot- men to the covers of its prayer-books, Society expresses its long- ing for the sweet simplicity of Art. Happy Society, to have discovered a fresh subject to arouse its languid attention ! Happy Art, to find itself condescendingly protected by Peers and plutocrats ! But still drawbacks exist in most human move- ments, be they never so progressive, and if we carefully ex- amine our Renaissance, we find that it, too, is not quite so

perfect as it seems,—that we have to pay a price, and no small one, for our artistic whistle. To men of sober mind, and especi- ally to those who are too slow, too bigoted, or too old-fashioned to move with the fierce current, how intensely annoying,. as well as astonishing, must it be to live in the midst of a jargon which has grown up suddenly, with a rapidity unheard of outside the story of " Jack and the Beanstalk !"' Fancy a respectable father of a family being regarded as a " Philistine " by his more enlightened children, or imagine what his feelings must be as he finds his house gradually under- going an artistic reformation ; sees bit by bit his old-fashioned, comfortable furniture disappear, till at last he sits in a wilder- ness of spindle-legged chairs and gimcrack tables, with a brass fireplace which will not warm him in front, bare, stained boards beneath his feet, and a distorted image of himself reflected from a convex mirror, as a sarcastic commentary upon his improved condition. Still there are many other consequences of our Renaissance of greater importance, than the somewhat. ludicrous discomfort, to which many respectable rich persons have reduced their houses. Father and mother would grow used in time to tiles and dados, to coal-scuttles from which the- coals cannot be extracted, and plates whose position has changed from the dinner -table to the drawing-room, to stained floors which chill them in winter, and stick to their- feet in summer; to portieres which conceal the doorway, but let in the draught, and to the many minor inconveniences of (esthetic domestic life. But what use can accustom, or what advantage recompense, the parents whose children have been infected with that most dangerous and gener- ally fatal disease, called' " the Higher Criticism P" Think a little of the feelings of a mother who takes her child to a picture-gallery, in the fond hope that she may "like to see the pictures," and then hears her whisper, in an awestruck voice,. of "the secret of Lionardo," or the sweet, sensuous exist- ence of living harmonies of tone in the masterly music of Burne Jones's work. We know, or can guess, what would have happened to such a child, had she lived fifty years since. But now, what is to be done? We cannot logically punish our children for talking this nonsense, for strange as it may seem, there are many men and women grown, still at large in society, who talk and think, if their mental opera- tion can be called thinking, in a manner similar to that above quoted. It is not only the men who have made money and reputation by writing in this style who are responsible for the spread of this irredeemable bosh; it is due in no small meas- ure to the cultivated ignorance of a certain set of fashionable people, who seek to disguise the vapidity of their thoughts beneath an affected enthusiasm and a wordy obscurity.

It is not worth while to give any long description of the origin of " the Higher Criticism," though its ancestors are clearly determinable. Like many another quasi-intellectual, quasi-emotional movement, it first took definite shape at. Oxford,—indeed, its scholastic ancestry is still clearly evi- dent. Partly the result, not of Ruskin's teaching, but of

* The Renaissance, by W. Pater. Studies and Essays, by A. O. &debunk& Essays on Art, by Ocanyna Carr.

Ruskin's manner of word-painting, partly the outcome of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, partly the result of general culture applied to the discrimination of Art theories, without any pre- vious acquaintance with Art practice, and above all, the result of that school of thinkers, who proceed on a purely deductive method, scorning all facts, save such as can be evolved from their inner consciousness,—to such various influences was the new style of criticism due, in its first inception. It is amusing to think what must have been the Slade Professor's indignation and disgust, as he had to watch, day by day at Oxford, the growth of a school, whose main tenets could hardly be better -described than as being the direct opposites of everything he was endeavouring to teach. He had endeavoured to show that Art really meant the intelligent delight in, and reproduction of, God's work." But the coming race of critics and Art-tasters shouted as their watch-word, " Art for Art's sake !" He had said over and over again that only by long-continued labour and patient investigation of Nature could any knowledge of, or pro- ficiency in, Art be reached. But his young opponents asked in what the real merit of a work of art consisted P and answered themselves,—that it was "in the effect which it produced upon them ;" clearly, therefore they had only to investigate their consciousness to discern its merit,—and to do them justice, they .adhered to this tenet with touching fidelity. " Investigate Nature !" they cried; we would scorn to degrade ourselves to such drudgery ; we " look into our heart, and write,"—and so they did. And thus, to quote words used by Ruskin on another subject, they cut themselves off "from all possible sources of healthy knowledge or natural delight; they wilfully sealed up and put aside the entire volume of the world, and had nothing to read, nothing to dwell upon, but the imagination of the thoughts of their hearts, of which we are told that it is only -evil continually.' They lie bound in the dungeon of their own corruption, encompassed only by doleful phantoms, or by spectral vacancy."

It may be thought that this is perhaps a somewhat over- drawn description of that school's doctrines, but it is not so ; it is not even a sufficiently strong one, for we have passed over without notice the most repulsive part of their doctrines, the utter divorce of art from morality, and the exaltation of sen- suousness above intellectual or spiritual meaning. We shall have something to say of this hereafter. At present, we beg • our readers to keep in mind these three qualities of the Higher Criticism,—first, its main doctrine that pure art, is pure sensuous- ness, and as a consequence of this, that any admixture of moral, spiritual, or intellectual meaning signifies alower form ; secondly, that this pure sensuousness is admirable and desirable in itself, apart from any use we may put it to; and thirdly, that cul- ture of the imagination and intellect does the best it can for us, when it leaves our souls, like the leaves of the sensitive plant, ready to quiver and droop at every passing breath of emotion.

These three doctrines are preached, indirectly, it is true, but still preached, by every member of this school, and are best exempli- fied in the works of Swinburne, Walter Pater, and offspring of the above two, Comyns Carr, whose new volume of essays has given rise to this article. Algernon Charles Swinburne, whose prose essays are the earliest as well as the best examples -of this school, is a man of considerable critical insight, when he can restrain himself sufficiently to give it fair-play, and is besides, a consummate master of sounding, eloquent English.

His criticisms of Matthew Arnold and Coleridge are sufficient to prove the first, and almost any passage of his writings would do as well as the following, in proof of the second :—

" In the verse, as on the canvas, there is the breathless breath of -over-much delight, the passion of over-running pleasure which grieves and aches on the very edge of heavenly tears, tears of perfect moan for excess of unfathomable pleasure and burden of inexpress- ible things, only to be borne by gods in heaven—the sweet and sove- aeign oppression of absolute beauty, and the nakedness of burning life—the supreme pause of soul and sense at the climax of their -consummate noon and high-tide of being ; glad, and sad, and sacred —unsearchable, and natural, and strange."

This is a very typical passage ; in it we see criticism just trembling upon that brink of nonsense, that unfathomable gulf of unmeaning sound, into which it was soon to fall. We see also what will be the cause of that fall. Very plainly, it will be the excess of words over the meaning which they are intended to convey, the predominance of sound over sense. Mark this,—at the beginning of the above sentence, Swinburne has something to say, and though he expresses it in terms of which the extravagance is clearly perceptible, yet, on the whole,

he says it intelligibly and well ; but he is not content with that, and he goes on with repetition after repetition, growing more incoherent with each successive phrase, till the sentence ends with a burst of glorious word-music, the only drawback to which is its perfect unintelligibility. And there is still another quality observable in this quotation, which is almost invariably present in the works of the writers who have imitated Mr. Swinburne, and that is an element of sickly sweetness. There are too many " lumps of delight," and no solid food of whole- some character; an atmosphere of closed windows and much incense and half-shut eyes, unsuitable for the muddy ways and cold grey skies of England, and productive of languorous ex- haustion. This is the damning sin of this higher criticism, even at its best; it is thoroughly morbid and unhealthy, unreal and unworthy. A world whose actions were regulated by such emotions, and guided by such writers, would be a world of thorough unmanliness and sensuous indolence. Art is good, and may be noble and pure, and dilettante Art and amateurs and critics are at least tolerable when they confine themselves within reasonable limits ; but this murmuring of scented. nothings, this continual pampering-up of the emotions with sounding words, is neither good nor endurable, and if continued, it will be alike destructive of our national literature, and our reputation for sturdy common-sense.

Let us take a quotation from Pater's " Studies in the Renaiss- ance," not as a specimen of his more extravagant writing, but as one of this half-delirious sweetness to which we have been referring. He is speaking of Greek sculpture :—

" If one had to choose a single product of Hellenic art, to save in the wreck of all the rest, one would choose, from the beautiful multi- tude of the Panathenaic frieze that line of youths on horses, with their level glances, their proud, patient lips, their chastened reins, their whole bodies in exquisite service. This colourless, unclassified purity of life, with its blending and interpenetration of intellectual, spiritual, and physical elements, still folded together, pregnant with the possi- bilities of a whole world closed within it, is the highest expression of that indifference which is beyond all that is relative or partial."

Here we have another style of rhapsody than Swinburne's; rhapsody uttered, as we may fancy, in a whisper, in some half- waking intervals of an opium-trance ; rhapsody which clearly reveals no mean power of writing, and-in which each word seems deliberately chosen and placed, and yet which means,—well (is it an exaggeration to say P) absolutely nothing. We gain from it an impression of pleasant sound,—if we do not look too closely, we can fancy that its author is a very clever fellow; but if we once dare to break the spell, and try to attach a definite mean- ing to the words, we grow momentarily more bewildered, and at last give it up in despair. What is a chastened rein? What is a body "in exquisite service ?" What colourless, unclassified purity ? What is ?—all the rest of it ? We can't say. Can any of our readers ? Can Mr. Pater himself ?

We have been a long time coming to the consideration of Mr, Comyns Carr's essays, but we have prepared the way for our readers to thoroughly understand his work, whence it had its origin, and its position in the school to which we are referr- ing. Mr. Carr may be said to be the utmost and worst develop-

ment of the school to which he belongs. In him, the victory of sound over sense is far more triumphant, because more habitual, than even in Swinburne and Pater ; nor is even his sound of the same quality as theirs, but rings faint and hollow, as if it were

some telephonic echo of those writers. In him, too, is the doctrine sensuous carried to a pitch which transcends all former efforts. To use his own words, spoken approvingly of Keats, " Men and women perfect in the flesh, with their feet on perfect flowers, move across his fancy as in twilight." The first essay in the book is on " The Artistic Spirit in Modern English Poetry," and the gist of it may be found in Stopford Brooke's " Primer of English Literature," the essay being an expansion, possibly an unconscious one, of two sentences therein. "Not so ideal, but for that very reason closer in his grasp of nature than Shelley, in love of loveliness for its own sake, in the sense of its

rightful and pre-eminent power, and in the singleness of the worship which he gave to beauty, Keats is especially the artist." Such, shortly put, is the essence of Mr. Carr's long essay,—an old idea enough, strung out to thirty and odd pages. Full of admiration for the " solid, sensuous character " of Keats's verse, Mr. Carr writes as if the limited vision of that poet was worthy of greater praise than any wider sight, and talks about the " fleeting things " admitted by Byron and Shelley, but excluded by Keats; " from the sacred.realm of ideal truth."

It would be useless to weary our readers with quotations from Mr. Carr's essays in support of our assertion as to the

character of the doctrine he teaches ; it is, as we have said above, identical in all essential respects with that of Swinburne and Pater; but we will give one or two further examples of the diffi- culty with which he manages to surround his simplest criticisms, owing to the habit of considering the form and sound of the sen- tence, rather than its sense. Thus, talking of Leonardo da Vinci's portrait-painting, Mr. Carr says :—" We cannot, perhaps, define the means by which he infused a certain harmony into monstrous features, nor can we tell how it is that the smile upon the lips of his women should avail to bring all the features into perfect agreement of expression, and how the system of finely balanced shadows should give even to his portraits the significance of character." Or again, of Michael Angelo. The stillness pervading the work of Michael Angelo implies of itself a foregone season of passionate preparation, wherein all the recesses of human passion have been sounded,—" the brooding stillness of Michael Angelo's faces, with all the later passions held in still suspense." It may be that in such sentences a meaning lies hidden, beyond the reach of us ordinary mortals, it may be that it is true that Art has no mission save that of apotheothising sensu- ousness, and enveloping us in languid dreams ; it may be, per- haps, even true that expression becomes more perfect as its ob- scurity deepens and its meaning grows less ; in a word, it may be that in the time to come these apostles of the Higher Criticism, these priests of a fleshly ideal, may be hailed as the true re- generators of humanity. But if it be not so, if this be but a phase through which we must pass, ere reaching a clearer and a healthier atmosphere, if, as we believe, the time will soon come when this word-y Babel will fall to the earth, and its builders be scattered abroad, to rail-splitting and other honest and useful, if uncongenial employments, in such a case, we may perhaps be pardoned, for having lent a hand to the destruction of the vast edifice of humbug which we have here styled " the Higher Criticism."