98
PARTISAN REVIEW
Rossetti, and their power was not easily exhausted. One discovered more
and more-the abruptly fragmented heads, the red and green cabbages,
the infant's hand and stockinged foot in Brown's "Last of England";
the symbolic cat and bird or the approaching hour-high noon-in the
"Awakening Conscience"; the poignant expression of tenderness and
prophecy on Mary's face or the uncannily precise wood-shavings in
Millais' "Christ in the House of His Parents"; the searching geological
exactitude of the rocks in Dyce's "Pegwell Bay," a work whose intense
seeing and feeling should have given contemporary sharp-focus painters
much pause. In short, these paintings demonstrated that in the 1850s,
in the white heat of their fervor, the Pre-Raphaelites were able to per–
suade us that their alien values were genuine.
Unhappily, the second half of the survey demonstrated that with–
out fervor, even familiar values looked neither genuine nor persuasive,
for the course of British painting between Whistler and the emergence
of Bacon and Sutherland produced a tepid, innocuous succession of
painters who paid so much homage to French values that they lost
sight of British ones. Had masters like Burne-Jones or Watts been in–
cluded-presumably they did not conform to the criterion of "painting
per se"-we
should have had a more stimulating and indigenous picture
of the later nineteenth century, just as the inclusion of some earlier
nineteenth-century subject painters might have served to put the Blakes
in a more explicable historical framework. But as it was, there remained
little more than a series of anemic Gallicisms, unless one excepted the
primitive, Stanley Spencer, whose chalky, detailed canvases, while ap–
pealing in their naive solemnity, looked pallid when compared to their
Pre-Raphaelite ancestors. In this selective context, Whistler, asserting
his qualitative and historical importance with only three works, appeared
responsible for this about-face in British taste by insisting, in theory
and in practice, upon those progressive French attitudes which held
that painting was first of all painting and not nature, morality, emotion,
or narrative.
If
one strained very hard, one could detect British qualities
in Sickert or in Matthew Smith, but by and large their works could be
slurred over without loss as that of all too admiring students of Degas,
Vuillard, or the Fauve Matisse. Why, one rightly asked, should one
look at Smith's "Fitzroy St. Nude" of 1916 when Matisse had painted
the same picture so very much better ten years earlier? Could one really
hold that the inflection Wyndham Lewis gave to cubism was more
than that of a gifted amateur? There were, of course, occasional glim–
mers of life (Sickert's vertiginous "Raising of Lazarus" and Steer's
haunting "Walberswick Pier" were among them), but in general, these
