NO GOING BACK.

151

but surely preparing the way for the universal government based directly upon the enlightened will of the entire people.

There is vitality in Protestantism, because it permits the gradual unfolding of the higher truths which Romanism resolutely opposes. It repre

sents the new progress in art, science, and religion. Catholicism can no more revive its mediæval ecclesiastical power by jesuitical principles than it can its early religious art through the efforts of the German Pre-Raphaelites. Both attempts are futile, because not in harmony with the needs of the age. The hope of art now lies in the free principles of Protestantism.

CHAPTER XII.

What Protestantism offers to Art.

Identification with the People, — Fashion, — Promise.
Dutch School.
Blake.
- English School. - Turner.
Pre-Raphaelitism. The German, Belgian, and French
Schools, and their Chief Artists.

HAT is the new liberty in relation to art? Simply of unlimited self-development. Catholicism, first in its ignorance, and afterwards by selfish policy, aimed at its restriction to a defined, dogmatic, religious expression. But while itself under the impetus of growth and expansion, its art partook of the same partial freedom and noble energy, and to the extent of its liberty strove to be true and spiritual. Unfortunately for its final perfection in this direction, that art, whose varied progress and lofty genius were represented by Giotto, Niccola Pisano, Orgagna, Ghiberti, and Masaccio, culminating in a Raphael, Titian, and Buonarotti, with them passed under princely patronage, and shortly, in the hands of Vasari and contemporary artists, was degraded into an instrument of state pomp and aristocratic luxury.

Although Protestantism was the offspring of freedom of thought, in its infancy it was nursed

PROTESTANT BREADTH OF IDEA.

153

in a theological despotism more severe than even that of Rome. Emerging from error, corruption, and ecclesiastical assumption, its career has been a checkered one: now verging upon wild infidelity, and, as in the first French Revolution, disowning its Christian parentage; then fanatical and -destructive from religious bigotry, as with the Scottish Covenanters and German Anabaptists: by turns philosophical, skeptical, anarchical, and conservative, uniting the ritual extremes of Puseyite and Quaker, and the theological antagonisms of Calvin, Voltaire, Fichte, Kant, and Channing, in its comprehensiveness of idea, yet always protesting against error, and essaying to prove all things.

The question of art is so intimately interwoven with that of civil and intellectual progress, that a synopsis of the one implies a succinct view of the other. Having portrayed its various aspects and principles, tracing them from the Classical, through the Catholic, up to the semi-developed Protestant phase, as shown in the materialistic art of England and Holland, we will now glance at the various schools of the present century.

In all ages there exist true men, laboring, in humble sincerity and with apostolic forethought, to sustain and illumine art. We find such artists even now in Italy, and perhaps in Spain, countries in which its decay is the more conspicuous from contrast with former excellence, and its revival the more difficult from the general stagnation of thought under the blighting influence of

154 TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD INTERMINGLE.

but half-strangled ecclesiastical despotisms. Truth and falsehood so intermingle that it is only at a certain distance we can distinctly distinguish the lines of each. With individuals, also, art equally varies as in epochs, its condition depending upon the varying conditions of mind. So, in speaking of art-distinctions of various nations, times, or persons, we mean simply to state the prevailing feature or motive, premising that in all particular degrees of excellence are to be found, and special indications of genius, proving that no age is without its lights.

The spiritual superiority of Catholic art has been traced to its claim, from the outset, to represent the supernal element of religion, and the loftiest teachings of faith. There were, it is true, in the medieval democracies of Italy, exceptions to its exclusive religious or aristocratic bias; and, in proportion as it sprang from and was nurtured by the people, it prospered and grew still more lovely. But the democratic sentiment of that age was mainly one of castes, and too often a promoter of anarchy by party violence, instead of an orderly principle of civic liberty. Consequently, its influence was unsteady. With the disciples of Savonarola it was stringently ascetic, and tended to reaction from excess in the direction of pietism. Finally, in Italy, art was debased into a mere courtier and state lackey, on the one hand, and on the other, an instrument of church pageantry and artifice. Every drop of democratic blood was drained from it. Its vices were those of princes; its absurdities, those of priests.

ENGLISH SCHOOL.

155

As soon as Protestant art freed itself from the control of rulers sensual and papal at heart, like the English Stuarts, it identified itself by degrees with the people, assuming their level of thought, and their liking for the homely and common. Mark! - liking, not LOVE, in England, any more than in America; for in neither country does æsthetic feeling assume the dignity of a passion. In both, Fashion is still its protecting deity. A few minds only receive it as a conviction or sentiment; perhaps none as a portion of the true bread of life. Yet it is slowly making its way to the heart of the multitude, by bringing into the homes of the people that which is intelligible, dear, and pleasurable to them, without any need of church or state to interpret or dictate. Catholicism exalted the art-motive, but Protestantism gave it liberty.

The Dutch school, as we have shown, was the base of the democratic revolution of art growing out of Protestant freedom. England also caught up the new life, founding her art upon a similar taste for genre subjects, every-day humanity, fat pastures, animal life, and rural scenery; the instincts of the masses, and their loyalty and homage to aristocracy; in fine, every feature, good or bad, which makes up the stolid, insular Englishman. Hogarth is their first great master of realism, tempered by allegory and caricature. His art is that of a censor or moralist; but he painted actual life from a point of view and for an elevated purpose that makes his pictures of value to all time.