At this moment, there are two specimens of Pre-Raphaelitism to be seen at the Exhibition of the Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. They are both distinguished, like the philosopher in Andersen's Drop of Ditchwater, by having no name; but a quotation is appended to each of the numbers in the catalogue, and is to be supposed to indicate, the subject. No. 9, in the Great Room, has this quatrain from Tennyson
The other picture, No. 93, in the same room, is larger and more ambitious. It represents a carpenter's workshop, with a mechanic at each end of the long bench; one of these, a half-starved, hideous wretch, with hardly a trace of the human anatomy in his composition; and the other, a respectable and rather
sagacious-looking person, with immeasurable legs. Behind the bench is a frightful old woman, of the lowest class; and before it another, younger, but repulsively ugly and vulgar, examining, in conjunction with the respectable workmanand with her brow knotted in an awful congeries of wrinkles up to her fiery hairthe hand of a little boy. This little boy, though plebeian and red-haired, is not unpleasing: he has apparently cut his hand while playing with some of the edge-tools lying about the shop; while his brother, a better-figured as well as better-behaved boy, with a hairy apron round him, is making himself useful in carrying a basin of some dark-coloured stuffprobably carpenter's glue. But let us see what the legend attached to the number says: 'And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.'Zechariah, xiii. 6. What does this mean? It means, innocent reader, that the piece we have described in its principal features is the Holy Family of the Pre-Raphaelites! This is their mode of going to nature, selecting nothing but the mean and repulsive, and rejecting nothing but poetical and religious feeling and common decency.
But if the theory of the Pre-Raphaelites is just as regards painting, it must be just as regards the other departments of taste. Suppose it applied to musical composition. Let us throw overboard everything that degrades music to a science, and 'go to nature,' as Mr Ruskin counsels, 'rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing.' What would be the result? The result would be the torture of everybody in the country who had the misfortune to possess a cultivated ear. And yet the music of that time would not be absolutely disagreeable in itself: it would merely involve the deprivation of what had become a necessary to the taste; for nature would still inspire simple sounds, connected more or less with the feelings. Nature, in fact, proceeds in music upon laws that are merely elaborated and carried out by science; while in painting, she offers an endless variety of objects and effects, to be selected, grouped, and made into a picture by the artist. We all feel this when gazing on natural scenery. We are actuated by an unconscious eclecticism, and make the composition for ourselves. To some natural scenes, no skill could impart interest of any kind; others attain to a certain character of the picturesque; while others, again, combine in themselves all the elements of a good picture. But even with these last, mere imitation will not do. Nature, as Hazlitt observes, 'has a larger canvas than man'a canvas immensely larger; and the artist, since he cannot copy, must select. The same reasoning applies to figure and group-painting, and its accessories. Nature rarely forms a perfect group, because it is not her purpose to embody a single expression. As for small accessorial objects, such as a pin or a leaf, being painted with the same care and accuracy as principal objects, this is a defect in drawing, that argues a singular want of reflection. In nature, we see distinctly the figure and its more prominent parts, but we see the minute accessorial parts so indistinctly, that sometimes we can scarcely tell what they are. The precise detailing of these objects, therefore, may have the truth of fact, but it is destitute of the truth of nature.
What would be the effect of the new system, if applied to romantic fiction? But the question is unnecessary; for the new system ignores romance, which is the truth of nature not of fact. A pre-Raphaelite story, taken from real life, might be romantic in its incidents and striking in its catastrophe; but it would want coherence in the design, and therefore produce no sustained emotion; and its characters being drawn, without selection, from vulgar prototypes, would excite more disgust than interest. The drama?but there the new theory of art becomes too ridiculous: a tragedy on such a plan would be received with alternate yawns of ennui and shouts of laughter. All these are pertinent questions; for fine art, in literature, music, sculpture, painting, architecture, forms a homogeneous circle under one law of taste.