Experiment or Suffocate

Extract

In England it all started in the respectable years of the early industrial development, when common sense was valued above sensibility and far above spirituality, and when church-going was done more for the sake of propriety than to worship God. In that time the pious vaguely felt that art was wrong and the artists were sure that religion was silly. The Church glared at the artist and the artist at the Church, both mutually suspicious. And there was no growing school of religious art—none in the Protestant Church for the state of affairs indicated above, and none in the Catholic Church because Catholics at that time had neither status nor money.

At the eleventh hour who should turn up but the Pre-Raphaelites. They swept Puritan prejudice before them and proceeded to paint religious subjects and even to make a lot of money out of their productions. But the Pre-Raphaelites did us no good. By their superior pastiche they put the clocks of appreciation right back and the sentimental ‘Light of the World’ is still influencing public taste.

But in spite even of the Pre-Raphaelites the average middle-class educated man still refused to take art seriously. He considered it as a furbelow in his house and far less important than comfort. He gave no thought to art in the church whatsoever. The churches were as bad. Even they had the idea that art was something that had been taken up by the Church as an extra glory in the Middle Ages, but as soon as art showed up in the Renaissance as a truly pagan business, then it had to be rejected as dangerous.