PROFESSOR BLACKIE.

PHILOSOPHICAL INSTITUTION—ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR BLACKIE.

(From the Scotsman, April 19.)
Professor Blackie then passed on to a criticism of Mr. Ruskin's recent lectures on the fine arts. Mr. Ruskin, he said, came to this town as St. Paul came to the ancient classical Athens. "Men of Athens, I perceive that you are all given to superstition "—that is what St. Paul said to the ancient Athenians ; and what Mr. Ruskin said to the Modern Athenians was this:— " Men of Modern Athens, I perceive that you are all particularly well pleased with yourselves, particularly well pleased with your beautiful city, and altogether besotted in that godly style of architecture which we call Greek. I wish to convert you to the true faith of Greek architecture." Now, before proceeding farther I will give you my idea of Mr Ruskin's character. It is not that of a philosopher, a logician, a historian, but that of an artistic, apostle and missionary. The one main distinguishing feature of his character is religion. He is a most pure, deeply-feeling religious man, and it is only by a religious man that he can be thoroughly understood. To a man who is not religious he will be apt to appear ridiculous and puerile. Now what we have to discuss in order to understand Mr Ruskin's position is the connection between religious faith and art. That is a far more difficult subject than Mr Ruskin seemed to imagine it ; at all events, I did not see him go beyond the surface of it. He stated in your hearing and mine, that we might divide the whole history of the world with reference to the development of art into three periods—the Classical period, the Mediæval period, and the Modern period. He told you that the representative of the Classical period, was Leonidas ; why he chose him I don't know, because he was a Spartan, and they were all clumsy in reference to art. Of Mediævalism, he chose St. Louis as the type, and of Modernism, Nelson. Why he did not choose Oliver Cromwell, or Dr Chalmers, or Dr Guthrie, I cannot tell. But he wished to prove that the two first men were great believers, full of faith, and that the latter had none. I am quite sure he might have picked out a score of men from modern history who had more religion than Leonidas or St. Louis. Now, I wish to make a short survey of these different epochs, in order to investigate how far the amount of faith in them was an adequate measure of art; how far the Greeks were great in art, because they were great in faith, and how far the Scotch or any other modern people are little in art, because they are little in faith. The assertion was that the Greeks had faith, and therefore they were great in art; the people of the middle ages were great in faith, and therefore they were great in art, the moderns, from Raphael and Martin Luther downwards, have no faith, and therefore no art worth speaking about. Now, in reference to the ancients, let us first examine the state of the case as regarded the Romans. There is no proof whatsoever that any of them had great faith. Neither Horace, nor Lucretius, nor Cicero, nor Lucian, nor Tacitus, nor any of the great names in Roman literature, were so far as we know, remarkable for the firmness of their faith in the religion of their country. On the contrary, we know that Roman literature began to flourish only when the Roman faith began to fall. Therefore we can get nothing from Rome. But with regard to the Greeks, it is perfectly true, as St. Paul said in that famous sermon on the hill of Mars to which I have alluded—as Aristophanes says in his beautiful and humorous plays—as Pausanias, the meagre old antiquarian, says in his geography— that the Athenians were amongst the most religious of all peoples on earth. But the Greeks were a very slippery people, and we must not take their religion in the slump any more than any other person's religion. We must look a little more minutely into what kind of religion it was which Mr. Ruskin said it was, and when we do this we will see the whole sophism which entered into his contrast of ancient and modern times. I say it is perfectly true that some of the greatest of the Greek poets had a firm faith in the Greek religion. Homer had a firm faith in the Greek religion ; Pindar had a most firm and a most noble faith; and Æschylus had a no less firm and no less noble faith. But as for those that came immediately afterwards—that brilliant and fascinating Aspasia; that Ictinus, who marshalled in rows or stable symmetry the pillared ranges of the Parthenon ; that Phidias, who carved in majestic ivory and gold the blue-eyed maiden divinity of the Acropolis—who pledges to us their faith ? In what document have they handed down the subscription of their orthodoxy ? Is it not, rather, certain that they were all more or less infected with the infidelity of the day, which they had derived from no less a person than Anaxagorus, the philosopher of mind? Were they not all tried for atheism and irreligion ?—as the good Socrates was afterwards. But even supposing that Phidias and the famous Praxitiles, who succeeded to his fame in a more polished but less manly age, were all pious believers in the Polytheistic faith of their time and places, the all-important question remains, what sort of a faith was it ?- a question which Mr. Ruskin, in my hearing, never put, but on which the whole matter depends. It was a faith so essentially various and imaginative, and giving itself without any anxious rules so liberally to the free use of the poet, painter, and sculptor, that it cannot so much be said to have created great artists as to have been created by artists. It was, in fact, in great part a failing of nature, and had no separate and distinctive province as religious creed has now. The poet and the artist found it, and used it with free disposal—just as much of it, or as little as they pleased—not because they were peculiarly pious, but because their creed was peculiarly poetical. Such a boon as this imaginative faith is the same in some, but in some only—with that combination of high intellectual convictions and stern modern resolves which constitute the form of a modern Christian. The two things are essentially unlike, and any inference drawn from the existence or non-existence of the one, in connection with certain periods of bloom or decadence in the fine arts, does not warrant a similar inference drawn from the existence or non-existence of the other. In other words, I say that the want of faith in the Mahometan or a Jew, or even in some of the sterner phases or forms of Christianity may produce the same artistic results as were produced by the pressure of it in the Greek mind. You know that the more zealous a man is for Judaism or Mahometanism the less is he inclined to have any images at all. The more zealous a man is for Polytheism the more does he wish to delight himself by figuring the million of divine shapes of which that religion is full.
We next come to Mediævalism. This is the grand Utopia, this is the cloud cuckoo land as the Greeks called it, where we are taught to seek for human perfection by Novalis, Frederick Schlegel, Carlyle and Ruskin. There they have found something better than the present, and because the Gothic architecture was a glory at that period, therefore nothing else is to be tolerated. Now this reverence for the middle ages is founded upon that very vulgar sophism which is noticed in the famous line of the poet,

" 'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view. " 

I have seen myself an extremely beautiful Italian or Greek village perched upon a blue,and violet, and purple hill—nothing more lovely, so long as there was a large valley between you and it ; but when you marched into it you became sensible of the mountains of filth, and the armies of innumerable stenches that come rushing into your nostrils. (Laughter.)
Now, I tell you that this talking about the middle ages is all pure nonsense. There may have been good points about them no doubt. There were no factories, there were no huge chimneys to interfere between you and any fine view, but that the middle ages as a whole are to be held up as a crowning epoch either in literature, or art, or philosophy, is perfectly absurd. The Gothic architecture was almost the only glory of the middle ages in respect of art. In other respects it was not altogether so dark as we in our conceit are fond of saying ; but they were unquestionably semi-barbaric, they were merely preparatory to the great outbreaking of the human mind which comes under the epoch of modernism, and it was only when Dante and Boccaccio appeared that the true dawn of this godless modernism, already infected by that spirit which introduced the domes and the round arches, it was only then that the middle ages became truly great in literature.
Who are the heroes of those times ? Club law, iron fists, Jeddart justice bleeding Waldenses, Willie Armstrong, Meg Merrilees, and Rob Roy Macgregor—these were the great men of those days ; and as for the faith of those ages, no doubt they believed in one God in Heaven, and they believed in one god on earth—that is to say, the Pope of Rome ; but there was a thinness and meagreness, a monkishness, a sickliness an utter want of humanity in religion which absolutely demanded a strong infusion of human and even heathen blood to make it tolerable. And this is got by what is called in literature the revival of letters, and in architecture the Renaissance. I say, therefore, so far from exclaiming against this modernism, it was a thing absolutely necessary, a thing on which we ought to look as the only method of our deliverance from that system of monkery which had trampled upon human flesh and blood for more than 1000 years. (Applause.)
And as for looking on the pictures of Titian with a squeamish eye, I look on them as a very great relief after these long galleries of monks, those white-eyed, grim-faced, stupid-looking monks, praying on their knees to pictures more stupid than themselves. (Laughter and cheers.) Well, really to mistake the mere universal submission of all men beneath that god upon earth the Pope, the burning of all sorts of heretics—to mistake these for real religion and Christianity is very very strange. There is, however, no doubt that the people in the middle ages had plenty of faith, and a great deal too much of it ; but, after all, I say that with all their faith, they produced nothing but meagreness in literature and art, except the Gothic architecture—and there is no age so meagre as not to blossom in one direction. They had no materials to go upon, for who, could make good pictures of these Roman Catholic saints ? It would make a man sick to look at them. (Laughter.)
I come now to your Modernism, which it has been the fashion to decry so much lately. I am extremely sorry for some men in point of their nativity. If some great men were born centuries before their time, there appear to be some modern men who ought to have been born 200 or 300 years ago. Thomas Carlyle says we have all been atheists since the time of Oliver Cromwell. Why, says Mr. Ruskin, we have all been heathens for a much longer time than that—since the time that Raphael put up Apollo with a fiddle in his hand in the midst of the muses, when he ought to have put up Isaiah and Ezekiel.
Now, I cannot understand what sort of notion these gentlemen have of piety, when they tell me that there is no piety and no religion in the present day. I believe that this is a more religious age than any that have gone before it (cheers). I mean the age from the Reformation ; and I say that that has been a more religious age than the world ever saw. Was not Martin Luther as religious as St. Augustine? Was not Gustavus Adolphus as religious as Richard Coeur de Lion ? Were not our Covenantors as good men as the Crusadors ? (Cheers.) Have not the principal wars which have fixed the destiny of our modern States been religious wars, and do you think that people will fight about religion unless they are in earnest about it? I have only one remark to make about Protestantism, which was the revival of religion. Wherever there is Protestantism there is more genuine faith than in a Catholic country in the middle ages, when faith and creeds were imposed from without. (Applause.) Now, if this be a fact, is it true that this faith should have generated art ? If the religion was there, why did it not produce as much art as the Greek religion ? Plainly for the reason that Mr Ruskin was altogether wrong in supposing that there was any necessary connection between faith merely as faith, and art merely as art. On the contrary, you must look to what sort of faith it is, and there may be a faith of such a kind that the more intense it burns the more it excludes art. Don't we all know that such a faith burned with the most glowing and terrible intenseness on these very brown hills which we can see from our streets? Who ever heard of the Covenanters being famous for the love of the arts? But this does not prove that they were godless, that we are godless, that the whole modern world is godless ; it merely proves that one strong passion does not necessarily beget another, but very often necessarily excludes another.
The old Jew and the modern Covenanter are not artistic races. They require to get art from abroad. Then, again, the mediaeval people had such a religion, so utterly inhuman, so utterly sickly, pining within monkish rules that they required to get the arts from abroad. And they got them from the revival of letters and the Renaissance, which were merely a return to nature, and a reassertion of the rights of the flesh on which the stupid monks had trampled. This brings in Titian and the whole secularity of modern painting. We are called on to re-assert nature and the body, since the flesh is not so respectable a word, against monkery and priestcraft, and unless we had done so we should have had a deadly sort of art breathing only the air of the cloisters, and not that of the mountains and of human life. (Applause.)
You will at once see that the revival and the Renaissance which characterised the moderns was the necessary supplement of the culture previously existing. The culture then existing was imperfect, but the characteristic of Modernism in which we ought to glory, and of which we ought not to be ashamed, is the adding of the old heathen elements of the senses, and of the body to the mediæval ideas of the emotional feelings, placing Greek architecture and Gothic architecture in their true position, the one beside the other, ranging classical literature along with modern literature, the Greek culture along with Christian culture, and producing out of the combination a more perfect humanity (cheers); for the watchword is neither the one-sided sensuous heathenism nor the one-sided Christianity of the middle ages, but a compound of both, which I call humanity. (Renewed applause.)
In conclusion I would remark, that mere religion, mere Christianity, do not and cannot make a man. Christianity does not teach us gymnastics, chemistry, or logic. We have these things as men, and we must have a great number of subjects fitted for poetry, art, and architecture, not as Christians merely, which Mr. Ruskin always argued, but as men. In the worship of the beautiful, and in that alone we are inferior to the Greeks. Let us therefore be glad to borrow from them ; not slavishly, but with a wise adaptation, not exclusively, but with a cunning selection, in art as in religion let us learn to prove all things and hold fast that which is good and not merely one thing which is good, but all good things—Classicalism Mediævalism, modernism, let us have and hold them all in one wide and lusty embrace.
Why should the world of art be more narrow and more monotonous than the world of nature ? Did God make all the flowers of one pattern,to please the devotees of the rose or the lily ; and did he make all the hills with the green folds of their queenly mantles all at one slope to suit the angelometer of that most mathematical decorator, Mr. D. R. Hay? I trow not. Let us go and do likewise. For out pictures, and our poems, and our statues, and our buildings, our true excellence consists not in excluding anything, but in including as much as may be of that various and exhaustless wealth of form, colour, and expression, in which God's beautiful world has been created.
The learned Professor concluded amidst loud applause.

 Empire 26/7/1854,