13. Concerning Zeitgeist - Page 2

century pile is encrusted and overlaid by hideous gewgaw
monstrosities of the flashiest Bernini and _baroque_ period. There they
sprawl their obtrusive legs and wave their flaunting theatrical wings to
the utter destruction of all repose and consistency in one of the
noblest and most perfect buildings of Europe. Nowadays, any child, any
workman can see at a glance how ugly and how disfiguring those floppy
creatures are; it is impossible to look at them without saying to
oneself: "Why don't they clear away all this high-faluting rubbish, and
let us see the real columns and arches and piers as their makers
designed them?" Yet who was it that put them there, those unspeakable
angels in muslin drapery, those fly-away nymphs and graces and seraphim?
Why, the best and most skilled artists of their day in Europe. And
whence comes it that the merest child can now see instinctively how out
of place they are, how disfiguring, how incongruous? Why, because the
Gothic revival has taught us all by degrees to appreciate the beauty and
delicacy of a style which to our eighteenth century ancestors was mere
barbaric mediævalism; has taught us to admire its exquisite purity, and
to dislike the obstrusive introduction into its midst of incongruous and
meretricious Bernini-like flimsiness.

The Zeitgeist has changed, and we have changed with it.

It is just the same with our friend Botticelli. Scarce a dozen years
ago, it was almost an affectation to pretend you admired him. It is no
affectation now. Hundreds of assorted young women from the Abyss of
Bayswater may rise any morning here in sacred Florence and stand
genuinely enchanted before the Adoration of the Kings, or the Venus who
floats on her floating shell in a Botticellian ocean. And why? Because
Leighton, Holman Hunt, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Madox Brown, Strudwick,
have led them slowly up to it by golden steps innumerable. Thirty years
ago the art of the early Tuscan painters was something to us Northerners
exotic, strange, unconnected, archæological. Gradually, it has been
brought nearer and nearer to us on the walls of the Grosvenor and the
New Gallery, till now he that runs may read; the ingenuous maiden,
fished from the Abyss of Bayswater, can drink in at a glance what it
took a Ruskin many years of his life and much slow development to attain
to piecemeal.

That is just what all great men are for--to make the world accept as a
truism in the generation after them what it rejected as a paradox in the
generation before them.

Not, of course, that there isn't a little of affectation, and still more
of fashion, to the very end in all of it. An immense number of people,
incapable of genuinely admiring anything for its own sake at all, are