036 6:8 4 ^ „^ -N —— ^— " Ex Libris v%t ', *<>pi ■■■■•■ i'ViV'- ., • ■ ■ ■■ .. ■,,■■• ' > ',1'' VI " '■ ' ... 7 ^4■?■^ > K"'/ ■■.; ■';:$?; I ;■,,;,:.. v.i'j fv. ..'■- ■''-"■ "■\. vu. ,.«i*- ;»:■'.,■ ■■.'4;,. Sv ^i'':i^j. ;■.; ■• V*; ,i^Sf|t;.--*.v-^,,:v. ,.•'.. ,.;,,,::■■ ;;^^c. ■•:-■•::; '■'\>'^-: -■,■;-'.,■ .. ,-,. ■■:..>.,■.:,„■>». %_■-. <.\/>- ,■■': .^'.-i, ;'-.,.'.ir-^ ,■,-.. .. •%;■■ ..■> , . ■ ■ ^ -•;. ■'h[ mm:^:: il .S;?'' -'.• IS^;«lfc- -:.'-:^;-/ DISCOURSE DELIVERED TO THE STUDENTS OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY: ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE PRIZES, DECEMBEK 10th, 1881. SIR FREDERICK LEIGHTON, P.R.A. LONDON: PRINTED BY WM. CLOWES & SONS, LIMITED, STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS. PRINTERS TO THE ROYAL ACADEMY. 188 1. TO THE MEMBERS OP THE EOYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS, ^W Discourse, PRINTED BY THEIR DESIRE, IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED, BT THEIR OBLIGED AND FAITHFUL SERVANT, FREDEEICK LEIGHTON, P.R.A. 'j^ b2 -4 r^t^t^i-^ro/Ti. DISCOUESE. Students of the Royal Academy, When, at our last biennial gathering, I addressed yon from this place, it was my endeavour to indicate to you. with what conciseness so wide a subject permitted, a solution to certain doubts and perplexities concerning the position of Art in the Modern World, which, as I said, are apt in these days to assail the minds of students who think as well as work. I sought to show you, in answer to these doubts, that we have no cause for misgiving in regard to the continued vitality of the Arts we follow, inasmuch as they have their root in deep needs and undying instincts in our common nature ; and I exhorted you to ^vork on in unwavering faith that the day is not at hand when the expression of aesthetic emotion through the forms of Art shall fail for lack of answering echo in the hearts of men. There is, however, a grave question connected with the imitative arts of Painting and Sculpture to which, on that occasion, I only passingly alluded, and to which I purpose to devote a few words this evening ; a question on which widely divergent opinions stand opposed one to the other, and are upheld with equal tenacity ; namely, the question : — " What is the relation in which Art stands to Morals and to Eeligion ? " The solution of this question has a twofold bearing on the young artist who is about to submit his work to the ordeal of 6 DISCOURSE. publicity — a direct and an indirect bearing; on the one hand, the answer to it which he frames for himself will determine the direction into which he will incline to bend his energies ; but he will, on the other, be hardly less powerfully affected by the view which prevails in regard to it in the general mind, that is to say, in the intellectual atmosphere which he breathes and by which he is, though he be unconscious of it, largely moulded ; for on ' the conception entertained of the aims and ends of Art must depend the mode in which its achievements are judged, and it is evident that a mistaken view of those aims and ends must taint the appreciation of the qualities exhibited in the production of a work of Art, and tend to the subversion of all sound criticism as well as to the bewilderment of those young artists whose native instincts are not sufficiently imperative to cany them un- swervingly along their path. And the problem of the relation of Art to Ethics is one which assumes in this country exceptional prominence from the mental and moral peculiarities of our race. There is, I suppose, no country in the world, unless it be the sister-land beyond the Atlantic, in which the religious sense has exercised an influence so definite and so controlling as it has in our own on the de- velopment of the intellectual, as well as of the ethical, tone of the nation. In the moral order this sense has added incalculably to the strength and dignity of the national character; in the in- tellectual order its overmastering influence has too often tended to cramp and impede that full and equal play of the intelligence witliout which our natui'e cannot yield its fullest hai'vest or bear its finest fruit. There is, therefore, no country in which the task of un- ravelling the complex question of the true relation of Morality and IJeligion to Art is one of greater delicacy. Now, what are the doctrines between Avhich the perplexed DISCOURSE. 7 student finds himself tossed hither and thither on a sea of controversy ? On the one side it is asserted that the first duty of all artistic production is the inculcation of a moral lesson, if not indeed of a Christian truth, and that the worth and dignity of a work of Art are to be gauged by the degree in which it performs this duty. Unless it preach, as from a pulpit, the cardinal doc- trines of the Faith, or declare — whether by unambiguous sym- bolism, or by definite embodied example — the loftiness of virtue and the deadliness of sin; unless a very gospel made more eloquent by form and colour cry aloud to us from the canvas or from the marble— then, we are told, the artist has laboured in vain, for his work fails in the fulfilment of the highest function of Art. With this contention connects itself naturally, if not necessarily, this other— that as a man is mirrored in his work, so the noblest work can be, and has in fact been, produced only by the most pious and God-fearing men, of the moral level of whose nature it is indeed the test, and, as it were, the tide-mark. These views, of which, whatever then* intrinsic and final value, the moral elevation is very attractive to certain natures, and which have been supported, if not substantiated, by im- pressive illustrations, have found many advocates, and have been proclaimed with the passionate eloquence of an overmastering conviction. And they have been pushed to strange lengths ; some men, carried away by an unrelenting logic working on an ascetic tem- perament, have been impelled to assert that the application of Art to any save a definite religious end is little less than an act of moral depravity; and a great and nobly gifted artist, Friedrich von Overbeck, has not hesitated to declare his opinion that when Raphael painted his famous Galatea in the Farnesina the Lord had abandoned him. 8 DISCOURSE. A further, cand the strangest, development of this fi-ame of mind, one with which I have myself, in my youth, come into contact in Germany, is that which sees in the excessive love of colom* an almost culpable indulgence of the senses. Such views, indeed, are not likely to find favour or acceptance in the country of Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds; they are, nevertheless, interesting as showing to what extremes the doctrine of the dependence of Ai't on Religion may, and sometimes does, lead its followers. In opposition to this doctrine it is maintained, on the other hand, that the fimction of Art, as such, whatever may be its inci- dental operation, and Avhatever it may include in the broad verge of its sphere of action and appeal, is absolutely unconnected with Ethics, and that its distinct and special province is to satisfy certain cravings, and excite certain emotions in our nature to which it alone has access ; and that without Art not a few of our keenest and deepest capabilities of emotion would lie unaroused and barren within us. The corollary generally attached to this proposition is this, that, as artistic production springs from esthetic and not from ethic impulses within the artist, so the character of that produc- tion is independent of his moral attitude and unaffected by it. These two theories, which stand arrayed one against the other, are in appearance so consistent in themselves, their respective propositions seem to flow so naturally one from the other, that the student who sees them distinctly formulated is tempted to fling himself without further question into the arms of one or of the other, accepting it unreservedly and in all its parts. My task to-night is to give you reason, so far as the limits of our time may alloAv it, to doubt the wisdom of such a course, and to aslc you, rather, to believe that, whilst Art is indeed in its own nature wholly independent of Morality, and whilst the loftiest J DISCOUKSE. 9 moi'al purport can add no jot or tittle to the merits of a work of Art, as such, there is, nevertheless, no eiTor deeper or more"! deadly, and I use the words in no rhetorical sense but in their j plain and sober meaning, than to deny that the moral complexion, I the ethos, of the artist does in truth tinge every work of his hand, [ and fashion, in silence, but with the certainty of Fate, the course I and current of his whole career. Let us look more closely into these assertions. The theory which, for convenience, we may call the didactic Ay«rVic7^ theory is founded on a priori reasoning, and is supported by reference to facts. It is, in effect, postulated somewhat arbitrarily, by its advocates, that eveiy higher expression of our emotional nature must, in oi'der to merit the favour of mankind, aim directly at moral edification, and that this moral edification is to be achieved only by the inculcation of moral lessons; and it is further asserted by them that this has been in fact the character and tendency of all the greatest Art the Avorld has seen. There can be no doubt that the evidence which is marshalled in support of this view seems, at first sight, formidable and even overwhelming. Modern painting, using the word modem in the wider sense and to distinguish it from that of the Ancient World, was reared, we are bid remember, on the lap of Christianity and received its loftiest themes from the Church of which it was, as we are constantly reminded, the faithful handmaid ; and, accord- ingly, from the hour of its dawn to the high noon of its strength, a continuous host of divinely endowed artists is sho^vn to us, testifying in unnumbered masterpieces to the glory of the Almighty and of his Saints. We see them handing down, undimmed, from generation to generation, the lamp of their stedfast Faith, and fi'om the harmonious concert of their works, as from a vast consenting choir, does not a solemn anthem seem c 10 DISCOUKSE. to roll across the centuries, crying fi-om a thousand throats " Hosannah ! Hosannah in the Highest ! " ? With the dechne of Faith, on the other hand, we are taught to connect that downward course of Art which begins to manifest itself towards the close of the sixteenth century ; and, in the absence of any religious afflatus in the great Dutch and Flemish Masters of the seventeenth century, we are invited to see cause, I even though one of them be called Rembrandt and the other j Eubens, for placing them in a rank lower than the foremost. Nay more, turning to the Ancient World, the greater loftiness of Greek Sculpture in the Fericleau than in the succeeding ages is attributed to the primitive piety which pre- vailed up to that period, which breathes throughout the pages of the great Historian of Hahcarnassus, and burns on the lips of the Titan ^schylus. Time would fail me to-night to test minutely the value of the evidence which I have here summarily indicated. I Avill limit myself to the consideration of two or three points which suggest themselves on a closer exammation of this array of facts, or rather, of assertions. It can be argued, in the first place, that they do not comprise the whole body of evidence to which we must look, if we would form an impartial conception and take a comprehensive view of the question; secondly, that the evidence adduced is not, even where it seems strongest, so accurately corroborative of the theoiy as is contended, and as may, at the first glance, seem ; and thirdly, that through the whole contention lurks tlie fallacy of mistaldng a coefficient for a — nay for the — primary cause. C As a striking instance of evidence that must be either omitted by the upholders of the didactic theory, or admitted by them to be hostile to their contention, Spanish Art will at once V I DISCOURSE. 11 suggest itself to you. There is probably, in the history of the world, no such illustration as that afforded to us by Catholic Spain of the absolute, irresistible, all-embracing supremacy of religious faith as a controlling influence in a national life, whether public or private ; and assuredly the lurid fervour of that faith had not waned in the days of Spanish greatness in the field of Art. That the Church should exert her influence in that field, also, and more dictatorially even than elsewhere, was a matter of course, and accordingly Ave find in the Iberian Peninsula a School of religious Painters of an ascetic type, men of a stern piety, and noteworthy if not great — a Morales, for instance, who earned for himself the surname " El Divino," a Juanes, a Luis de Vargas, who Avrought in the intervals of fasting, of prayer, and of self- flagellation, and lived in the constant contemplation of death and of the grave. Yet who will seriously claim for these men the~ same level of artistic excellence with that which is held by the great painters of the seventeenth century, by a Murillo, whose religious works have, Avith few exceptions, so little of real religious inspiration, or a Velasquez, the most mundane of pajntersj^ and Shakespearian, almost, in the width of his mental objectivity? J Again, we need not linger on the sweeping disparagement of the later Dutch and Flemish Masters, which is logically involved in the didactic theory, and wdiich carries with it the exclusion from the highest place of that supreme painter who revealed to the Avorld the poetry of twilight and all the magic mystery of gloom, Rembrandt of the Rhine. Let us consider rather, for a few moments, the more specious argument draAvn fi'om the growth of painting in Italy, and let us first once again call to mind the position assumed in the didactic theoiy ; it is that the moral edification of men being the highest duty of Art, those productions of Art wiU take the highest rank which teach, 2 brt-<. 1- •'rt'irn^ he ! r rS. /^(iac."^ <■ -U- s- 'zcJu^d-. 12 DISCOUESE. with sincerity and of a definite purpose, the greatest number of moral truths, and that the Painter who, the gift being, of course, postulated, aims most constantly at the inculcation of these truths, will produce the greatest works. You will at once feel that these assumptions, if accepted without reservation, sap at the roots of all free criticism, practically substituting for it a foregone conclusion. A critic Avho approaches a Avork of Art imder their influence will instinctively gauge it in accordance with them, however inclined he may be in the abstract to weigh it Avith a more scientific impartiality. We must be careful, therefore, in testing this doctrine by the light of facts, to bear in mind, in weighing these facts, the general verdict of enlightened opinion ripened and confirmed by Time. n 4- Now if, on a review of Itahan Art from its rise to its zenith, Ave ask ourselves which works have by the consent of the vast majority of the intelligent been pronounced the most mature and perfect, we shall not find that verdict harmonising with one which should be built up on the axioms of the didactic theory ; we shall, on the contrary, find that the evolution of Art in Italy, an evolution singularly organic and continuous, bears no ratio, unless it be an inverse ratio, to the religious life and develop- ment in the midst of Avhich it ran its course. It is a matter of notoriety that with the more general spread of Classic Literature throughout Italy in the fifteenth century, partly through the ' Italian Humanists, and partly by the agency of Greek refugees fleeing westward before the conquering hordes of Mohammed II., a disintegrating effect was produced on the religious beliefs of that country. For more than a century already a seething rest- lessness had obtained possession of the minds of men ; Nature fi.o.c' was fast rising within them in rebellion against the ascetic teaching of the Church ; and when to minds so prepared the DISCOURSE. 13 revelation was suddenly offered of a Literature fearless in '//jext o^ speculation, and broadly based on the equal development of all r-\ p.- J? the human faculties — a Literature, furthermore, of which the /iJ^odkwXja. • Latin branch breathed, in every line, of that distant national greatness to a sense of which, in the previous century, the friend of Petrarch, Cola di Rienzo, had sought not vainly to kindle and inflame his countrymen — a revulsion, long prepared, was operated amongst the Italian people, and from one end of the land to the other a thrill, as of a newly-awakened life, ran through them, stirring within them as the sap stirs within the wintry trees under the first mild sweet breath of spring. But not Ancient Literature alone roused them to a new w. , r consciousness and a feverish emulation ; fragments of Antique "•^^t^rli.&i^i5^ Statuary, few as yet, but sufficient, were exhumed under their \ wondering eyes, and, behold, the frame of man, that tenement of ' clay which they had been taught till now to regard as a thing to be mortified and held in contempt, suddenly arose before them in a new-born dignity, transformed by an ideal — their shame no longer, but their pride. So, under the influence of this awakening, this Renaissance as we call it, Art, like Letters, put on a new physiognomy ; with the vindication of human nature and the newly accepted view of life as a thing wherein to rejoice, the forms in which life reveals itself became a source of absorbing interest, and a worthy subject of study for their beauty's sake. The young scientific spirit which at the same time flamed up . in a very passion of enthusiasm came powerfully to the aid of the ^ artist. The study of Anatomy emerged from its hiding-places, and was practised in the open day ; Perspective was eagerly ' ■ s^st."^^ • studied, and exercised on the minds of artists a fascination which, in our day, seems strange enough, obtruding its problems every now and then in their works in the most unexpected and naively far-fetched ways. A more healthful cast of Beauty was 14 DISCOUESE. ^V<-^-T,C*^ /O /' r-t ft {. ^-^ by clegi'ees developed, and we thus see Art gradually expanding and rising to a fuller dig-nity and a loftier level through causes wholly foreign to, and not coincident with, religious growth. In fact, with the risuig tide of the humanistic and scientific spirit the religious spirit was not gaining in strength and fer- vour ; on the contraiy, the powerflil revulsion of feeling of which we have just noted the eifects in the world of the intellect and of the imagination, operated also, as might have been expected, on the beliefs of the cultivated masses, and loosened the hold on them of that religious teaching which men could not dissociate in their minds from the intellectual thraldom in which the Church had hitherto sought to hold them. The cause of Morality undoubtedly suffered with that of doctrinal Religion, and those who value most highly the precious boon conferred on the world by Italy in the fifteenth century cannot but re- cognise with sorrow that it came alloyed with much dross, and touched with much taint of corruption. So lo^v was the moral tone of a large number of the Humanists, that we recall with a sense of relief as well as of gratitude the names of such men, for instance, as Vittorino da Feltre, Guarino, the countryman of Catullus, Giannozzo Manetti, Pomponio Leto, or Pico della Mirandola, in whom wisdom and learning went hand in hand with every Christian virtue. And if it be not true that Italian Art owed its unfolding to the impulse of Religion, and the purifying atmosphere of Faith, neither is it true that its decadence was the result of the waning of Faith and Religion to which I have just alluded. Nor was it coincident with it in point of time : nay, that malarious moral taint which hung about the footsteps of the Renaissance in the day of its complete ascendancy, and polluted so much of its Literature, is not traceable — and then in a far less degree— till a century later in the plastic Arts ; so purifying, I had almost said highest DISCOUESE. 15 SO antiseptic, are those arts in their very nature, and in their influences. Indeed the causes of the downward tendency of Art towards C*-*-r«. -^ istcxUwj. oj. the close of the sixteenth century must be sought less in the '^^^ ^^^ f railmg oi the rengious laitn among artists than m the excessive and too exclusive faith in mere Science. Artists had now di'unk deeply of the springs of knowledge, and were intoxicated in the strength of this rich new vintage ; they had investigated the wondrous mechanism of the human frame, with a scientific thoroughness never till then brought to bear upon it; they had explored the science of composition, and measured the expressional resources of abstract Form ; but they too often forgot that the province of Art is to speak to the emotional - y ^ Pt-J'i**, sense, not to make vain exhibition of acquired knowledge, and .' ^-^^^f* ■ that work which reveals in the workman no impulse warmer or higher than vanity, or a thirst for display, will for ever fail to move the hearts of men. Accordingly, the gradual supersession of sentiment by scientific pedantry marks faithfully the decline in sterlins; artistic r nobility. Correggio, who indeed still rides on the crest of this ' great wave of Art, combines no doubt a true artistic passion with the most consummate knowledge, but we seem conscious in him ::f^L. already of the last moment of perilous poise; in the Caraccis and c*^«-cctj. their School, pedantry too often triumphs; in Tiepolo, the last of r^.eyS<»^^ . the Venetians, the acrobat lurks everywhere in the man of genius. I have, in the foregoing remarks on Italian Ait, turned my attention to Painting exclusively ; I have done so because, just as Sculpture is in an emphatic manner the characteristic expression of the Greeks, so Painting was pre-eminently the Art of the Italians, and because, further, the upholders of the didactic theory lean habitually more on the Painting of Italy than on her Sculp- ture. Nevertheless the groAvth of that Art on Italian soil, fed as .oU.^ fc4. 16 DISCOUESE. iL- %M-i"'^ it was from the same som-ces, fostered by the same influences, and '^"^^'; -r-;-, breathing the same intellectual and moral air, followed the same ' course as Painting, and though it culminated in the hands of a man as sternly religious as his great spiritual predecessor, Dante, in the main the plastic Ai-t rose on the same pinions, flew with the same flight, and fell at last stifled in the same lethal fiimes as did her sister Painting. One word concerning Greece before leaving this part of our subject ; since Greece, too, is, as I said, not infrequently quoted in support of the views I am combating to-night. We are tempted, when the bearing of Religion on Greek i'f^-vfe^'i' ^^^ ^^ pressed upon us, to ask which Religion is here alluded to; i for in Greece, as elsewhere in the heathen world, there was a « , . Religion of the few, the purer and the more abstract, and the hi, >*-*^ f- Religion of the many, the more tangible and the less pure ; the i kt jx.»f. faith in one supreme God, great amongst all Gods, fi'ee from sin, and wholly unlike men, or the faith in that joyous fellowship of gods and goddesses, loving and hating, scheming and boasting, founders of dynasties on the earth, whom the Greek race, if it borrowed the first conception of them from far-oflf ancestors in a dimly-remembered East, had finally moulded, as was their nature, 1?!.i. ff jtf ^ ^.t/l I after their own living likeness and image. Of the former, '^ ' however strong the impress wdth which it has stamped the Poetry of Greece, it would be difficult to show its direct influence I on the plastic Arts. It seems to me to be far-fetched in the ' extreme to trace any definite ethical purpose or high religious character even in those sculptures, the noblest of all known to us and unapproached as yet in their lonely greatness, which have come down to us under the name of Phidias. 7f, ///(V^,- Of the popular religion of Greece, it would perhaps be safer C, to say that it owed nmcli to Art, than that Art was strongly influenced by it. The gods as they were conceived by the masses, r DISCOUESE. 17 were in the main the embodiment of that exuberant sense of life and that overmastering love of Beaut}:, which was the distinctive privilege of their race no less than the life-breath of their Art. In sum, then, we may, I think, say that, as far as we have seen, a cursory glance at a few of the points adduced in eAddence for the didactic theory does not seem to justify the use made of them, and rather shows us Art not, in truth, uninfluenced by the moral characteristics of those who practise it, but withal growing its own growth as a distinct organism with its own ! principles of life, and fed by conditions in which intellectual, moral, and physical causes each play their appointed part. But if the illustrations by which it is sought to buttress this theory do not in fact uphold it, let us see how it stands with the doctrine itself viewed on its own intrinsic merits. Now the reasoning on which the didactic theory is built up ■■ , would seem to be this: — the moral sense is the highest attribute "^ ^t^«c 'c and the distinctive appanage of man; its strengthening must therefore be man's noblest aim, and the dignity of all human intellectual achievement must be according to the deg-ree in Avhicli this end is primarily and professedly subserved by it. But here a difficulty at once meets us ; for the consistent application of these views involves, amongst other consequences, one in which we may, I venture to think, see the rediictio ad ahsurdmn of the whole theory ; it involves the dethronement of an Art closely akin in many ways to those we follow, like them a language common to all races, like them from Time immemorial a channel of purest emotion, an Art divine, if a divine Ait there be : the Art of Music. The dignity of Music has indeed, strange though it may seem, not remained unchallenged ; such heresies may, however, safely be left to their own foolishness. It is given to the supreme few who occupy the solitary mountain- tops of Fame to be able to express, without incurring the charge D 18 DISCOUESE. of vanity, their high consciousness of the vakie to the world of the gifts thej bestow upon it ; one of these few was Beethoven, and his proud words are there to show us in what esteem he, at least, held the power of the Art on which he has risen to immortality : " He to whom my music reveals its whole signifi- cance is lifted up," these are his words, " is lifted up above all the sorrow of the world." And assuredly the Art which has borne up and daily bears up in oblivious ecstasy so many weary souls, which has lulled and cheated if only for a moment so many aching hearts, and which in its endless plasticity has a response for every mood of the imagination and a voice for every phase of feeling, is rooted too deeply in the general love and reverence to fear the onslaughts of any logic-ridden crochet- ^U<^u. '»<-"-^"^A monger. Yet, let me ask, what definite moral truth is taught by '^" '■"■-' it with all its universality? What ethical proposition can it I convey ? What teaching or exhortation is in its voice '? None, I absolutely none. I JMeanwhile we may safely affirm that a doctrine which should lead in its logical application to the exclusion of this Ai't %-A_^<-oe^/ ''. from the first rank amongst the intellectual agents which raise S?T-dW-f mankind is tainted with grave fallacies. What, then, are these ' n faUacies ? They are, I think, the following : first, the assumption that the pursuit of moral edification can alone confer a claim to the respect of men ; secondly, the assumption that moral edifica- tion can attach only to direct moral teaching ; and thirdly, the assumption that any mode of expression by which appeal is made to the emotional faculty and the imagination can be exercising its highest office except in the application and development of its own distinctive resources, and in seeking to convey those emotions of which it is the proper and especial vehicle. And this last fallacy lies at the root of the matter. Now the language of Art is not the appointed vehicle of U/l DISCOURSE. 19 ethic truths ; of these, as of all knowledge as distinct from "^ ^*^/.^-^ iM^^^-i emotion, though not necessarily separated from it, the obvious <^.7^^.vf" c\i and only fitted vehicle is speech, written or spoken, — words, the i^