Pictorial Shakespeare, 1880-1890 - eTheses Repository - University ...

similar kind sought for the restoration of the status quo
which obtained before the Pre-Ranhaelite movement. In "The
Old Gyr. tern of Art-Culture and the Nev;" W.Oave Thomas inveighed
against realism:
How many a life work has been marred, cribbed,
cabined, and confined for want of a stimulus oO
grand world The tendency of Art of late years
has been dovm! Town! from uincl to matter. It is
the presence o± thought, of ideas, which exalts
s innocent in themselves,
but of no great account; to beauties which are
not overlooked by tLe higher culture; but are
re'^.rdecl only in relation to greater. The
rendering of the poetry of thought or the facts
of history is humanly of far greater import
than tile exact imitation of the dovm of a peacli
or of every filament in a bird's nest.
(The Art-Journal,XIX (1880) 373-5;
p. 375)
,,ritten twenty years later, this might have seemed an
unskilful defence of Impressionism, but in i860 it was
recognisably a truculent suggestion that the Pre-Raphaelite
rot had set in. For Thomas "poetry", so far as it concerns
the winter, is confined to the depiction of men enjoyiirj
and arousinr in others, nobility of reflection. His r-u?.rrol
v;ith the moderns is with their lack of ethic;.! loftiness,
and more immediately with ainute realism of detail. 'lis
ideal, noble artist embraces ethical ( a.nd per:i -os li-'sr^ry)
subject-natter, ana despises realism: he is a figure offered
up as a rival to the contemporary r.rtist.
The major conservative champion v/as, ni^vertlicloss,
^uekininr. mm, reekin;; sublimity in rictori 1 accuracy of
dot^il anc1 striving to present no.n anc" nntiore in moments of
tellin r; cnotionn.l an." physical cricis. Val Princes, ^..R. 1 .,
\vho Iir.d participated vit^ Worris n.nc 1. Rossetti in the paint:." ^
of the Oxford Union f.riese, offoreu the ideal of the
conservative painter to pupils of the St. Martin*G school of
Art r.-t their prise^iving in 1^01. He wc.rnod them against
eccentricity:
.lie greatest jeniaoes have bocn -:lie .iinnljot
men." ohakospeare lived, dressed, and :.iov?d
much as other people of his day; R; pliael was
the rim;-lost and "bc.-t lov-'= of men;