ART.
WILLIAM HOLMAN HUNT.
Mawr reflections flitted through the mind on Monday as the ashes of William Holman Hunt were lowered out of the sunshine into sepulchre at St. Paul's Cathedral, but one took definite shape as the eye lingered on the lilies and violets beneath his picture, The Light of the World, that hangs in the south nave. We were saying farewell not only to the first and last of the Pre-Raphaelites, but to the man with whom English religions painting began, and now seems to have ended. The general bent and signifi- cance of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, or movements, have already provided a copious literature, but Holman Hunt's contribution to sacred painting has yet to receive considera- tion in the surveys of our art. In the two centuries before the reign of Victoria in which England may be said to have had native painting religious subjects had now and then provided exercises for her painters,—even Hogarth painted an altar-piece for St. Mary Redcliffe at Bristol, and Reynolds's cursory treatise on the Holy Family now hangs in the National Gallery. But while England had been served by a noble religious literature, the religious genius of the race had not found fine expression through painting. There are of course good historical reasons why religious painting should not have flourished in England, but it is surely a little strange that when we took our landscape from the Dutch, the miracu- lona Protestant art of Rembrandt should not too have sent seed to propagate in a soil so germane and well prepared for it. Dyce had produced some work of beauty andtincerity, but owing its inspiration and formulas to the German school of Overbeck. One of the first subjects upon which the Pre- Raphaelites determined was a picture of Christ, and it is clear by a conversation that has been preserved who was the
initiator. Moreover, Holman Hunt's words in their energy and confidence, as well as in the eccentricity of the plan he proposed, seem characteristically English. Rossetti had said that he had a friend who would serve as his model ; all he
needed was an aureole. Millais said that he could find a child, a beautiful woman, and an old man whom he could see, but he could not paint what he had never seen, and he had never seen Christ. Holman Hunt said:— "I will find out what Christ is like that I may see Him with my own eyes. If I cannot find Him in the West, I will find Him in the East. I will tear the secret from the stones of the city where He dwelt; from the sands of the desert where He hungered ; from the waters on which He walked. I will find it and paint it before I die."
He sought his vision of Christ, not as the old painters of sacred art did, in the inmost depths of their own soul and
in their heart's experiences, but through fervent study of the historical setting of the Christian story. The fruits of his pilgrimage have a strong and bitter savour that sometimes recalls that essence of English spirit present in Bunyan rather than the spirit of Milton or Treherne. His art is evangelical in its presentation of the subject, painted in a white-heat of reality, not, it would seem, to glorify God by a beautiful expression of human worship, not to demonstrate splendidly the heights of the great Christian argument, but to force the beholder to believe that these events happened like that in that place at that time, to feel that they had a momentous significance. The series stands alone in its passionate Pro- testant belief in the power of the individual to penetrate into the sacred mysteries by the light of the Bible and his own intimations and understanding. Other painters had conceived Christ in the semblance of their own race, or in an ideal human form. In his pictures conceived in Palestine Holman Hunt painted Him as a Jew ; in The Shadow of the Cross his model was a young Jewish carpenter. It was characteristic, too, of a nationality that never knows when it is beaten that out of the vast range of Biblical symbolism Holman Hunt should have chosen The Scapegoat as the subject for a painting, and have carried it out through years of passionate labour and danger on the bitterest shore in Palestine. The mood of ecstasy seems only once to have come to him—in The Triumph of the Innocents, with its torrent of spiritual joy in the exquisite groups of child-figures in the earth and sky and its swooning colour—but his ideas seem always to have possessed him to a degree very rare in modern art.
In a very real sense Holman Hunt took pains. A new sub- ject was a terrible joy to him. He seemed to prostrate himself before his conception; but sometimes he so swathed it in toil and detail that it died within its trappings. The design of The Shadow of the Cross provoked admiration for its ingenuity rather than awe, and so hardly supports the wonderful finish and emphasis of its execution and (colour. In his religious art as a whole one is constantly being made aware that paint- ing was being pressed, and even tortured, in the good cause,—of a distrust of its native eloquence and of a sharp look being kept that it never presumed to be a friend rather than a servant. In an age when painting had established itself a master and a rhetorician the Pre-Raphaelites did a mighty work in urging it again to the service of spiritual truth, but as the years go on the orchestration of colour and swelling movement of instinctive handiwork that reside in the greater works of art announce their absence more and more clearly, despite the spiritual intensity of their message and the quiet beauties and graces that lie within their angular and sometimes harsh designs. Holman Hunt's Eastern paintings carried on their face a special penalty, for his mimetic method over the whole surface of a large work tends to rouse a vicious curiosity in the part rather than the whole, and his well- authenticated realistic portraits of the scene and detail of the Christian story detract from rather than increase their spiritual significance.
The palace of Pre-Raphaelitism has many mansions—it is difficult for us to believe that they are under one roof, or even to decipher all the old names on the door-plates crossed over and rewritten by the sub-tenants—but there seem to be no new faces at the windows now ; its stark, clean architecture is half hidden in decaying creepers and dead lotus-flowers.
The house of modern art is being built elsewhere, and its site is almost as far from the market-place as the palace was when it was built. In the beginning the Pre-Raphaelites, in their reaction against the empty rhetoric that followed the
Cinquecento, sought the truth, intensity, and humbleness before Nature of Gothic art. Philosophic and poetic ideas were to be related in terms of strict reality. Outdoor pictures were to be painted in the open air. The representa- tive side of painting and its imaginative side were to walk hand-in-hand as never before in history. The hairs of the head were to be numbered, but the soul was to shine in the face. Looking back at this great movement, it would seem (as indeed all significant movements seem when seen from a distance) that it was an inevitable outcome of the tendencies of their time, England the mother giving birth to the Pre- Raphaelites when her mind was obsessed with Science's relentless scrutiny of Nature, and her spirit by a flight of new and wonderful poets bursting into song. Of all the brilliant group, Holman Hunt alone never deviated from the original Pre-Raphaelite faith that makes The Hireling Shepherd one of the outstanding works in English art ; but neither did he develop its tenets into a larger realism. Embarked on the experiment of representing Nature as she is to the human eye, he produced effects of sunshine which foretold the revolu- tion in the modern vision which was to come in France almost a generation later, and has now been incorporated in the main stream of modern art. Holman Hunt drew back, perhaps distrusting the larger truths of vision that might have led his interest away from the spiritual truths he desired to tell ; but these truths had to be expressed in terms of the general aspect of Nature, and when he denied this, and wrought all parts to equal degree of finish and interest, be was giving his conception a perverse appearance that would stand between it and the people, and would keep his work apart from the whole tendency of his century. But much of it will surely be preserved through the centuries by the extraordinary sense of dramatic expression in which his genius is most revealed, in fact by the very quality that is now rarest in our art. "A good painter," says Leonardo in a passage that has been known to amuse our art schools, " has two chief objects to paint—man and the intention of his soul. The former is easy, the latter hard, for it must be expressed by gestures and movements of the limbs." Holman Hunt proved many times that he was one of the elect who could do this hard thing. In Claudio and Isabella—one of the monumental works in modern pictorial art—he did it magnificently. There is no need to look in Claudio's face to read what sort of soul was his, and how it was moving. Whatever his weaknesses, Holman Hunt has been able to leave to posterity a life- work of extraordinary culminative, single-minded force that will always wring admiration and respect for the steadfast spirit that underlies it even from those to whom it does not yield great aesthetic delight. The Chantrey Trustees have never honoured themselves by acquiring for the nation one of his works, but his portrait hangs in the Uffizi beside the
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