people either greatly like them, or they dislike in a sort of frightened and angry way, as if they had been personally aggrieved. And the persons who feel this antipathy most strongly, are often extremely sensible and good, and of the kind one is extremely unwilling to offend; but either they are not fond of art at all, or else they admire, naturally, pictures from real life only, such as, to name an extremely characteristic example, those of the Swiss painter, Vautier, of whom I shall have much, in another place,' to say in praise, but of whom, with the total school he leads, I must peremptorily assure my hearers that their manner of painting is merely part of our general modern system of scientific illustration aided by photography, and has no claim to rank with works of creative art at all: and farther, that it is essentially illiterate, and can teach you nothing but what you can easily see without the painter's trouble. Here, for instance, is a very charming little picture of a school girl going to her class, and telling her doll to be good till she comes back;-you like it, and ought to like it, because you see the same kind of incident in your own children every day; but I should say, on the whole, you had better look at the real children than the picture. Whereas, you can't every day at home see the Goddess Athena telling you yourselves to be good, and perhaps you wouldn't altogether like to, if you could.

58. Without venturing on the rudeness of hinting that any such feeling underlies the English dislike of didactie art, I will pray you at once to check the habit of carelessly blaming the things that repel you in early or existing religious artists, and to observe, for the sum of what is to be noted respecting the four of whom I have thus far ventured to speak-Mr. Rossetti, Mr. Hunt, Mr. Jones, and Mr. Watts,—that they are, in the most solemn sense, Hero-worshippers; and that, whatever may be their faults

[Ruskin, however, did not elsewhere write of this painter, Benjamin Vautier (born at Morges, on the Lake of Geneva, 1829); examples of his genre pictures are given in R. Muther's History of Modern Painting, 1896, vol. ii. pp. 263–268.]

or shortcomings, their aim has always been the brightest and the noblest possible. The more you can admire them, and the longer you read, the more your minds and hearts will be filled with the best knowledge accessible in history, and the loftiest associations conveyable by the passionate and reverent skill, of which I have told you in The Laws of Fésole, that "All great Art is Praise."1

[The title of Chapter I. in that book: Vol. XV. p. 351. Compare Fiction,

Fair and Foul, § 42 (Vol. XXXIV.).]

XXXIII.

LECTURE III

CLASSIC SCHOOLS OF PAINTING

SIR F. LEIGHTON AND ALMA TADEMA

(Delivered 19th and 23rd May 1883)

59. I HAD originally intended this lecture to be merely the exposition, with direct reference to painting and literature, of the single line of Horace which sums the conditions of a gentleman's education, be he rich or poor, learned or unlearned:

66

"Est animus tibi,-sunt mores et lingua,-fidesque," 1

"animus" being that part of him in which he differs from an ox or an ape; "mores," the difference in him from the malignum vulgus"; "lingua," eloquence, the power of expression; and "fides," fidelity, to the Master, or Mistress, or Law, that he loves. But since I came to London and saw the exhibitions, I have thought good to address my discourse more pertinently to what must at this moment chiefly interest you in them. And I must at once, and before everything, tell you the delight given me by the quite beautiful work in portraiture, with which my brotherprofessor Richmond leads and crowns the general splendour of the Grosvenor Gallery. I am doubly thankful that his release from labour in Oxford has enabled him to develop his special powers so nobly, and that my own return grants me the privilege of publicly expressing to him the admiration we all must feel.

2

[Epistles, i. 1, 57. For the "malignum vulgus" (Odes, ii. 16, 40), see Vol. XVII. p. 228.]

2 [Sir William Richmond exhibited eight portraits, and also a portrait-bust.]

60. And now in this following lecture, you must please understand at once that I use the word "classic," first in its own sense of senatorial, academic, and authoritative;' but, as a necessary consequence of that first meaning, also in the sense, more proper to our immediate subject, of Anti-Gothic; antagonist, that is to say, to the temper in which Gothic architecture was built: and not only antagonist to that form of art, but contemptuous of it; unforgiving to its faults, cold to its enthusiasms, and impatient of its absurdities. In which contempt the classic mind is certainly illiberal; and narrower than the mind of an equitable art student should be in these enlightened days for instance, in the British Museum, it is quite right that the British public should see the Elgin marbles to the best advantage; but not that they should be unable to see any example of the sculpture of Chartres or Wells, unless they go to the miscellaneous collection at Kensington, where Gothic saints and sinners are confounded alike among steam thrashing-machines and dynamite-proof ships of war; or to the Crystal Palace, where they are mixed up with Rimmel's perfumery.

:

3

2

61. For this hostility, in our present English schools, between the votaries of classic and Gothic art, there is no ground in past history, and no excuse in the nature of those arts themselves. Briefly, to-day, I would sum for you the statement of their historical continuity which you will find expanded and illustrated in my former lectures.*

Only observe, for the present, you must please put Oriental Art entirely out of your heads. I shall allow myself no allusion to China, Japan, India, Assyria, or Arabia: though this restraint on myself will be all the more difficult, because, only a few weeks since, I had a [Compare the Preface to Xenophon's Economist, Vol. XXXI. p. 8.] [For a similar description of the South Kensington Museum, see

1

A Museum

or Picture Gallery," § 3 (Vol. XXXIV.), and compare the other passages there noted.]

3

[See Vol. XIV. p. 346 n.]

[Ruskin refers, as will be seen from the facsimile, to Aratra and Ariadne: see Vol. XX. p. 333, and Vol. XXII. pp. 406, 440, 441.]

delightful audience of Sir Frederick Leighton beside his Arabian fountain, and beneath his Aladdin's palace glass.1 Yet I shall not allude, in what I say of his designs, to any points in which they may perchance have been influenced by those enchantments. Similarly there were some charming Zobeides and Cleopatras among the variegated colour fancies of Mr. Alma Tadema in the last Grosvenor; but I have nothing yet to say of them: it is only as a careful and learned interpreter of certain phases of Greek and Roman life, and as himself a most accomplished painter, on longestablished principles, that I name him as representatively "classic."

2

62. The summary, therefore, which I have to give you of the course of Pagan and Gothic Art must be understood as kept wholly on this side of the Bosphorus, and recognizing no farther shore beyond the Mediterranean. Thus fixing our termini, you find from the earliest times, in Greece and Italy, a multitude of artists gradually perfecting the knowledge and representation of the human body, glorified by the exercises of war. And you have, north of Greece and Italy, innumerably and incorrigibly savage nations, representing, with rude and irregular efforts, on huge stones and ice-borne boulders, on cave-bones and forest-stocks and logs, with any manner of innocent tinting or scratching possible to them, sometimes beasts, sometimes hobgoblins-sometimes, heaven only knows what; but never attaining any skill in figure-drawing, until, whether invading or invaded, Greece and Italy teach them what a human being is like; and with that help they dream and blunder on through the centuries, achieving many fantastic and amusing things, more especially the art of rhyming, whereby they usually express their notions of things far better than by painting. Nevertheless, in due course we get a Holbein out of them; and, in the end, for best product hitherto,

[In the "Leighton House," Holland Park Road, presented by Leighton's sisters to a committee for public purposes.]

2 [The Winter Exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery, 1882-1883, consisted for the most part of a "Collection of the Works of L. Alma Tadema, R.A."]