Michelle Shephard, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team



THE TWO PATHS

By John Ruskin, M.A.




CONTENTS.


THE TWO PATHS.


LECTURE I.
THE DETERIORATIVE POWER OF CONVENTIONAL ART OVER NATIONS

LECTURE II.
THE UNITY OF ART

LECTURE III.
MODERN MANUFACTURE AND DESIGN

LECTURE IV.
THE INFLUENCE OF IMAGINATION IN ARCHITECTURE

LECTURE V.
THE WORK OF IRON, IN NATURE, ART, AND POLICY

APPENDICES





LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.


THE TWO PATHS.

THE IDEAL OF AN ANGEL
THE SERPENT BEGUILING EVE
CONTRAST
SYMMETRY
ORNAMENT
CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE
CENTREPIECE OF BALCONY
GENERAL EFFECT OF MASSES
PROFILE
TEETH OF THE BORDER
BORDER AT THE SIDE OF BALCONY
OUTLINE OF RETRACTED LEAVES




PREFACE.


The following addresses, though spoken at different times, are
intentionally connected in subject; their aim being to set one or two
main principles of art in simple light before the general student, and
to indicate their practical bearing on modern design. The law which it
has been my effort chiefly to illustrate is the dependence of all noble
design, in any kind, on the sculpture or painting of Organic Form.

This is the vital law; lying at the root of all that I have ever tried
to teach respecting architecture or any other art. It is also the law
most generally disallowed.

I believe this must be so in every subject. We are all of us willing
enough to accept dead truths or blunt ones; which can be fitted
harmlessly into spare niches, or shrouded and coffined at once out of
the way, we holding complacently the cemetery keys, and supposing we
have learned something. But a sapling truth, with earth at its root and
blossom on its branches; or a trenchant truth, that can cut its way
through bars and sods; most men, it seems to me, dislike the sight or
entertainment of, if by any means such guest or vision may be avoided.
And, indeed, this is no wonder; for one such truth, thoroughly
accepted, connects itself strangely with others, and there is no saying
what it may lead us to.

And thus the gist of what I have tried to teach about architecture has
been throughout denied by my architect readers, even when they thought
what I said suggestive in other particulars. "Anything but that. Study
Italian Gothic?--perhaps it would be as well: build with pointed
arches?--there is no objection: use solid stone and well-burnt brick?--
by all means: but--learn to carve or paint organic form ourselves! How
can such a thing be asked? We are above all that. The carvers and painters
are our servants--quite subordinate people. They ought to be glad if we
leave room for them."

Well: on that it all turns. For those who will not learn to carve or
paint, and think themselves greater men because they cannot, it is
wholly wasted time to read any words of mine; in the truest and
sternest sense they can read no words of mine; for the most familiar I
can use--"form," "proportion," "beauty," "curvature," "colour"--are
used in a sense which by no effort I can communicate to such readers;
and in no building that I praise, is the thing that I praise it for,
visible to them.

And it is the more necessary for me to state this fully; because so-
called Gothic or Romanesque buildings are now rising every day around
us, which might be supposed by the public more or less to embody the
principles of those styles, but which embody not one of them, nor any
shadow or fragment of them; but merely serve to caricature the noble
buildings of past ages, and to bring their form into dishonour by
leaving out their soul.

The following addresses are therefore arranged, as I have just stated,
to put this great law, and one or two collateral ones, in less
mistakeable light, securing even in this irregular form at least
clearness of assertion. For the rest, the question at issue is not one
to be decided by argument, but by experiment, which if the reader is
disinclined to make, all demonstration must be useless to him.

The lectures are for the most part printed as they were read, mending
only obscure sentences here and there. The parts which were trusted to
extempore speaking are supplied, as well as I can remember (only with
an addition here and there of things I forgot to say), in the words, or
at least the kind of words, used at the time; and they contain, at all
events, the substance of what I said more accurately than hurried
journal reports. I must beg my readers not in general to trust to such,
for even in fast speaking I try to use words carefully; and any
alteration of expression will sometimes involve a great alteration in
meaning. A little while ago I had to speak of an architectural design,
and called it "elegant," meaning, founded on good and well "elected"
models; the printed report gave "excellent" design (that is to say,
design _excellingly_ good), which I did not mean, and should, even
in the most hurried speaking, never have said.

The illustrations of the lecture on iron were sketches made too roughly
to be engraved, and yet of too elaborate subjects to allow of my
drawing them completely. Those now substituted will, however, answer
the purpose nearly as well, and are more directly connected with the
subjects of the preceding lectures; so that I hope throughout the
volume the student will perceive an insistance upon one main truth, nor
lose in any minor direction of inquiry the sense of the responsibility
which the acceptance of that truth fastens upon him; responsibility for
choice, decisive and conclusive, between two modes of study, which
involve ultimately the development, or deadening, of every power he
possesses. I have tried to hold that choice clearly out to him, and to
unveil for him to its farthest the issue of his turning to the right
hand or the left. Guides he may find many, and aids many; but all these
will be in vain unless he has first recognised the hour and the point
of life when the way divides itself, one way leading to the Olive
mountains--one to the vale of the Salt Sea. There are few cross roads,
that I know of, from one to the other. Let him pause at the parting of
THE TWO PATHS.




THE TWO PATHS


_BEING_

LECTURES ON ART, AND ITS APPLICATION TO DECORATION AND
MANUFACTURE DELIVERED IN 1858-9.




LECTURE I.

THE DETERIORATIVE POWER OF CONVENTIONAL ART OVER
NATIONS.


_An Inaugural Lecture, Delivered at the Kensington Museum,
January, 1858._

[Footnote: A few introductory words, in which, at the opening of this
lecture, I thanked the Chairman (Mr. Cockerell), for his support on the
occasion, and asked his pardon for any hasty expressions in my
writings, which might have seemed discourteous towards him, or other
architects whose general opinions were opposed to mine, may be found by
those who care for preambles, not much misreported, in the _Building
Chronicle;_ with such comments as the genius of that journal was
likely to suggest to it.]


As I passed, last summer, for the first time, through the north of
Scotland, it seemed to me that there was a peculiar painfulness in its
scenery, caused by the non-manifestation of the powers of human art. I
had never travelled in, nor even heard or conceived of such a country
before; nor, though I had passed much of my life amidst mountain
scenery in the south, was I before aware how much of its charm depended
on the little gracefulnesses and tendernesses of human work, which are
mingled with the beauty of the Alps, or spared by their desolation. It
is true that the art which carves and colours the front of a Swiss
cottage is not of any very exalted kind; yet it testifies to the
completeness and the delicacy of the faculties of the mountaineer; it
is true that the remnants of tower and battlement, which afford footing
to the wild vine on the Alpine promontory, form but a small part of the
great serration of its rocks; and yet it is just that fragment of their
broken outline which gives them their pathetic power, and historical
majesty. And this element among the wilds of our own country I found
wholly wanting. The Highland cottage is literally a heap of gray
stones, choked up, rather than roofed over, with black peat and
withered heather; the only approach to an effort at decoration consists
in the placing of the clods of protective peat obliquely on its roof,
so as to give a diagonal arrangement of lines, looking somewhat as if
the surface had been scored over by a gigantic claymore.

And, at least among the northern hills of Scotland, elements of more
ancient architectural interest are equally absent. The solitary peel-
house is hardly discernible by the windings of the stream; the roofless
aisle of the priory is lost among the enclosures of the village; and
the capital city of the Highlands, Inverness, placed where it might
ennoble one of the sweetest landscapes, and by the shore of one of the
loveliest estuaries in the world;--placed between the crests of the
Grampians and the flowing of the Moray Firth, as if it were a jewel
clasping the folds of the mountains to the blue zone of the sea,--is
only distinguishable from a distance by one architectural feature, and
exalts all the surrounding landscape by no other associations than
those which can be connected with its modern castellated gaol.

While these conditions of Scottish scenery affected me very painfully,
it being the first time in my life that I had been in any country
possessing no valuable monuments or examples of art, they also forced
me into the consideration of one or two difficult questions respecting
the effect of art on the human mind; and they forced these questions
upon me eminently for this reason, that while I was wandering
disconsolately among the moors of the Grampians, where there was no art
to be found, news of peculiar interest was every day arriving from a
country where there was a great deal of art, and art of a delicate
kind, to be found. Among the models set before you in this institution,
and in the others established throughout the kingdom for the teaching
of design, there are, I suppose, none in their kind more admirable than
the decorated works of India. They are, indeed, in all materials
capable of colour, wool, marble, or metal, almost inimitable in their
delicate application of divided hue, and fine arrangement of fantastic
line. Nor is this power of theirs exerted by the people rarely, or
without enjoyment; the love of subtle design seems universal in the
race, and is developed in every implement that they shape, and every
building that they raise; it attaches itself with the same intensity,
and with the same success, to the service of superstition, of pleasure
or of cruelty; and enriches alike, with one profusion on enchanted
iridescence, the dome of the pagoda, the fringe of the girdle and the
edge of the sword.

So then you have, in these two great populations, Indian and Highland--
in the races of the jungle and of the moor--two national capacities
distinctly and accurately opposed. On the one side you have a race
rejoicing in art, and eminently and universally endowed with the gift
of it; on the other you have a people careless of art, and apparently
incapable of it, their utmost effort hitherto reaching no farther than
to the variation of the positions of the bars of colour in square
chequers. And we are thus urged naturally to enquire what is the effect
on the moral character, in each nation, of this vast difference in
their pursuits and apparent capacities? and whether those rude chequers
of the tartan, or the exquisitely fancied involutions of the Cashmere,
fold habitually over the noblest hearts? We have had our answer. Since
the race of man began its course of sin on this earth, nothing has ever
been done by it so significative of all bestial, and lower than bestial
degradation, as the acts the Indian race in the year that has just
passed by. Cruelty as fierce may indeed have been wreaked, and
brutality as abominable been practised before, but never under like
circumstances; rage of prolonged war, and resentment of prolonged
oppression, have made men as cruel before now; and gradual decline into
barbarism, where no examples of decency or civilization existed around
them, has sunk, before now, isolated populations to the lowest level of
possible humanity. But cruelty stretched to its fiercest against the
gentle and unoffending, and corruption festered to its loathsomest in
the midst of the witnessing presence of a disciplined civilization,--
these we could not have known to be within the practicable compass of
human guilt, but for the acts of the Indian mutineer. And, as thus, on
the one hand, you have an extreme energy of baseness displayed by these
lovers of art; on the other,--as if to put the question into the
narrowest compass--you have had an extreme energy of virtue displayed
by the despisers of art. Among all the soldiers to whom you owe your
victories in the Crimea, and your avenging in the Indies, to none are
you bound by closer bonds of gratitude than to the men who have been
born and bred among those desolate Highland moors. And thus you have
the differences in capacity and circumstance between the two nations,
and the differences in result on the moral habits of two nations, put
into the most significant--the most palpable--the most brief
opposition. Out of the peat cottage come faith, courage, self-
sacrifice, purity, and piety, and whatever else is fruitful in the work
of Heaven; out of the ivory palace come treachery, cruelty, cowardice,
idolatry, bestiality,--whatever else is fruitful in the work of Hell.

But the difficulty does not close here. From one instance, of however
great apparent force, it would be wholly unfair to gather any general
conclusion--wholly illogical to assert that because we had once found
love of art connected with moral baseness, the love of art must be the
general root of moral baseness; and equally unfair to assert that,
because we had once found neglect of art coincident with nobleness of
disposition, neglect of art must be always the source or sign of that
nobleness. But if we pass from the Indian peninsula into other
countries of the globe; and from our own recent experience, to the
records of history, we shall still find one great fact fronting us, in
stern universality--namely, the apparent connection of great success in
art with subsequent national degradation. You find, in the first place,
that the nations which possessed a refined art were always subdued by
those who possessed none: you find the Lydian subdued by the Mede; the
Athenian by the Spartan; the Greek by the Roman; the Roman by the Goth;
the Burgundian by the Switzer: but you find, beyond this--that even
where no attack by any external power has accelerated the catastrophe
of the state, the period in which any given people reach their highest
power in art is precisely that in which they appear to sign the warrant
of their own ruin; and that, from the moment in which a perfect statue
appears in Florence, a perfect picture in Venice, or a perfect fresco
in Rome, from that hour forward, probity, industry, and courage seem to
be exiled from their walls, and they perish in a sculpturesque
paralysis, or a many-coloured corruption.

But even this is not all. As art seems thus, in its delicate form, to
be one of the chief promoters of indolence and sensuality,--so, I need
hardly remind you, it hitherto has appeared only in energetic
manifestation when it was in the service of superstition. The four
greatest manifestations of human intellect which founded the four
principal kingdoms of art, Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, and Italian,
were developed by the strong excitement of active superstition in the
worship of Osiris, Belus, Minerva, and the Queen of Heaven. Therefore,
to speak briefly, it may appear very difficult to show that art has
ever yet existed in a consistent and thoroughly energetic school,
unless it was engaged in the propagation of falsehood, or the
encouragement of vice.

And finally, while art has thus shown itself always active in the
service of luxury and idolatry, it has also been strongly directed to
the exaltation of cruelty. A nation which lives a pastoral and innocent
life never decorates the shepherd's staff or the plough-handle, but
races who live by depredation and slaughter nearly always bestow
exquisite ornaments on the quiver, the helmet, and the spear.

Does it not seem to you, then, on all these three counts, more than
questionable whether we are assembled here in Kensington Museum to any
good purpose? Might we not justly be looked upon with suspicion and
fear, rather than with sympathy, by the innocent and unartistical
public? Are we even sure of ourselves? Do we know what we are about?
Are we met here as honest people? or are we not rather so many
Catilines assembled to devise the hasty degradation of our country, or,
like a conclave of midnight witches, to summon and send forth, on new
and unexpected missions, the demons of luxury, cruelty, and
superstition?

I trust, upon the whole, that it is not so: I am sure that Mr. Redgrave
and Mr. Cole do not at all include results of this kind in their
conception of the ultimate objects of the institution which owes so
much to their strenuous and well-directed exertions. And I have put
this painful question before you, only that we may face it thoroughly,
and, as I hope, out-face it. If you will give it a little sincere
attention this evening, I trust we may find sufficiently good reasons
for our work, and proceed to it hereafter, as all good workmen should
do, with clear heads, and calm consciences.

To return, then, to the first point of difficulty, the relations
between art and mental disposition in India and Scotland. It is quite
true that the art of India is delicate and refined. But it has one
curious character distinguishing it from all other art of equal merit
in design--_it never represents a natural fact_. It either forms
its compositions out of meaningless fragments of colour and flowings of
line; or if it represents any living creature, it represents that
creature under some distorted and monstrous form. To all the facts and
forms of nature it wilfully and resolutely opposes itself; it will not
draw a man, but an eight-armed monster; it will not draw a flower, but
only a spiral or a zigzag.

It thus indicates that the people who practise it are cut off from all
possible sources of healthy knowledge or natural delight; that they
have wilfully sealed up and put aside the entire volume of the world,
and have got nothing to read, nothing to dwell upon, but that
imagination of the thoughts of their hearts, of which we are told that
"it is only evil continually." Over the whole spectacle of creation
they have thrown a veil in which there is no rent. For them no star
peeps through the blanket of the dark--for them neither their heaven
shines nor their mountains rise--for them the flowers do not blossom--
for them the creatures of field and forest do not live. They lie bound
in the dungeon of their own corruption, encompassed only by doleful
phantoms, or by spectral vacancy.

Need I remind you what an exact reverse of this condition of mind, as
respects the observance of nature, is presented by the people whom we
have just been led to contemplate in contrast with the Indian race? You
will find upon reflection, that all the highest points of the Scottish
character are connected with impressions derived straight from the
natural scenery of their country. No nation has ever before shown, in
the general tone of its language--in the general current of its
literature--so constant a habit of hallowing its passions and
confirming its principles by direct association with the charm, or
power, of nature. The writings of Scott and Burns--and yet more, of the
far greater poets than Burns who gave Scotland her traditional
ballads,--furnish you in every stanza--almost in every line--with
examples of this association of natural scenery with the passions;
[Footnote: The great poets of Scotland, like the great poets of all
other countries, never write dissolutely, either in matter or method;
but with stern and measured meaning in every syllable. Here's a bit of
first-rate work for example:

                      "Tweed said to Till,
                      'What gars ye rin sae still?'
                       Till said to Tweed,
                      'Though ye rin wi' speed,
                       And I rin slaw,
                       Whar ye droon ae man,
                       I droon twa.'"]

but an instance of its farther connection with moral principle struck
me forcibly just at the time when I was most lamenting the absence of
art among the people. In one of the loneliest districts of Scotland,
where the peat cottages are darkest, just at the western foot of that
great mass of the Grampians which encircles the sources of the Spey and
the Dee, the main road which traverses the chain winds round the foot
of a broken rock called Crag, or Craig Ellachie. There is nothing
remarkable in either its height or form; it is darkened with a few
scattered pines, and touched along its summit with a flush of heather;
but it constitutes a kind of headland, or leading promontory, in the
group of hills to which it belongs--a sort of initial letter of the
mountains; and thus stands in the mind of the inhabitants of the
district, the Clan Grant, for a type of their country, and of the
influence of that country upon themselves. Their sense of this is
beautifully indicated in the war-cry of the clan, "Stand fast, Craig
Ellachie." You may think long over those few words without exhausting
the deep wells of feeling and thought contained in them--the love of
the native land, the assurance of their faithfulness to it; the subdued
and gentle assertion of indomitable courage--I _may_ need to be
told to stand, but, if I do, Craig Ellachie does. You could not but
have felt, had you passed beneath it at the time when so many of
England's dearest children were being defended by the strength of heart
of men born at its foot, how often among the delicate Indian palaces,
whose marble was pallid with horror, and whose vermilion was darkened
with blood, the remembrance of its rough grey rocks and purple heaths
must have risen before the sight of the Highland soldier; how often the
hailing of the shot and the shriek of battle would pass away from his
hearing, and leave only the whisper of the old pine branches--"Stand
fast, Craig Ellachie!"

You have, in these two nations, seen in direct opposition the effects
on moral sentiment of art without nature, and of nature without art.
And you see enough to justify you in suspecting--while, if you choose
to investigate the subject more deeply and with other examples, you
will find enough to justify you in _concluding_--that art,
followed as such, and for its own sake, irrespective of the
interpretation of nature by it, is destructive of whatever is best and
noblest in humanity; but that nature, however simply observed, or
imperfectly known, is, in the degree of the affection felt for it,
protective and helpful to all that is noblest in humanity.

You might then conclude farther, that art, so far as it was devoted to
the record or the interpretation of nature, would be helpful and
ennobling also.

And you would conclude this with perfect truth. Let me repeat the
assertion distinctly and solemnly, as the first that I am permitted to
make in this building, devoted in a way so new and so admirable to the
service of the art-students of England--Wherever art is practised for
its own sake, and the delight of the workman is in what he _does_
and _produces_, instead of what he _interprets_ or _exhibits_,
--there art has an influence of the most fatal kind on brain and heart,
and it issues, if long so pursued, in the _destruction both of intellectual
power_ and _moral principal_; whereas art, devoted humbly and self-
forgetfully to the clear statement and record of the facts of the universe,
is always helpful and beneficent to mankind, full of comfort, strength,
and salvation.

Now, when you were once well assured of this, you might logically infer
another thing, namely, that when Art was occupied in the function in
which she was serviceable, she would herself be strengthened by the
service, and when she was doing what Providence without doubt intended
her to do, she would gain in vitality and dignity just as she advanced
in usefulness. On the other hand, you might gather, that when her
agency was distorted to the deception or degradation of mankind, she
would herself be equally misled and degraded--that she would be checked
in advance, or precipitated in decline.

And this is the truth also; and holding this clue you will easily and
justly interpret the phenomena of history. So long as Art is steady in
the contemplation and exhibition of natural facts, so long she herself
lives and grows; and in her own life and growth partly implies, partly
secures, that of the nation in the midst of which she is practised. But
a time has always hitherto come, in which, having thus reached a
singular perfection, she begins to contemplate that perfection, and to
imitate it, and deduce rules and forms from it; and thus to forget her
duty and ministry as the interpreter and discoverer of Truth. And in
the very instant when this diversion of her purpose and forgetfulness
of her function take place--forgetfulness generally coincident with her
apparent perfection--in that instant, I say, begins her actual
catastrophe; and by her own fall--so far as she has influence--she
accelerates the ruin of the nation by which she is practised.

The study, however, of the effect of art on the mind of nations is one
rather for the historian than for us; at all events it is one for the
discussion of which we have no more time this evening. But I will ask
your patience with me while I try to illustrate, in some further
particulars, the dependence of the healthy state and power of art
itself upon the exercise of its appointed function in the
interpretation of fact.

You observe that I always say _interpretation_, never
_imitation_. My reason for so doing is, first, that good art
rarely imitates; it usually only describes or explains. But my second
and chief reason is that good art always consists of two things: First,
the observation of fact; secondly, the manifesting of human design and
authority in the way that fact is told. Great and good art must unite
the two; it cannot exist for a moment but in their unity; it consists
of the two as essentially as water consists of oxygen and hydrogen, or
marble of lime and carbonic acid.

Let us inquire a little into the nature of each of the elements. The
first element, we say, is the love of Nature, leading to the effort to
observe and report her truly. And this is the first and leading
element. Review for yourselves the history of art, and you will find
this to be a manifest certainty, that _no great school ever yet
existed which had not for primal aim the representation of some natural
fact as truly as possible_. There have only yet appeared in the
world three schools of perfect art--schools, that is to say, that did
their work as well as it seems possible to do it. These are the
Athenian, [Footnote: See below, the farther notice of the real spirit
of Greek work, in the address at Bradford.] Florentine, and Venetian.
The Athenian proposed to itself the perfect representation of the form
of the human body. It strove to do that as well as it could; it did
that as well as it can be done; and all its greatness was founded upon
and involved in that single and honest effort. The Florentine school
proposed to itself the perfect expression of human emotion--the showing
of the effects of passion in the human face and gesture. I call this
the Florentine school, because, whether you take Raphael for the
culminating master of expressional art in Italy, or Leonardo, or
Michael Angelo, you will find that the whole energy of the national
effort which produced those masters had its root in Florence; not at
Urbino or Milan. I say, then, this Florentine or leading Italian school
proposed to itself human expression for its aim in natural truth; it
strove to do that as well as it could--did it as well as it can be
done--and all its greatness is rooted in that single and honest effort.
Thirdly, the Venetian school propose the representation of the effect
of colour and shade on all things; chiefly on the human form. It tried
to do that as well as it could--did it as well as it can be done--and
all its greatness is founded on that single and honest effort.

Pray, do not leave this room without a perfectly clear holding of these
three ideas. You may try them, and toss them about afterwards, as much
as you like, to see if they'll bear shaking; but do let me put them
well and plainly into your possession. Attach them to three works of
art which you all have either seen or continually heard of. There's the
(so-called) "Theseus" of the Elgin marbles. That represents the whole
end and aim of the Athenian school--the natural form of the human body.
All their conventional architecture--their graceful shaping and
painting of pottery--whatsoever other art they practised--was dependent
for its greatness on this sheet-anchor of central aim: true shape of
living man. Then take, for your type of the Italian school, Raphael's
"Disputa del Sacramento;" that will be an accepted type by everybody,
and will involve no possibly questionable points: the Germans will
admit it; the English academicians will admit it; and the English
purists and pre-Raphaelites will admit it. Well, there you have the
truth of human expression proposed as an aim. That is the way people
look when they feel this or that--when they have this or that other
mental character: are they devotional, thoughtful, affectionate,
indignant, or inspired? are they prophets, saints, priests, or kings?
then--whatsoever is truly thoughtful, affectionate, prophetic,
priestly, kingly--_that_ the Florentine school tried to discern,
and show; _that_ they have discerned and shown; and all their
greatness is first fastened in their aim at this central truth--the
open expression of the living human soul. Lastly, take Veronese's
"Marriage in Cana" in the Louvre. There you have the most perfect
representation possible of colour, and light, and shade, as they affect
the external aspect of the human form, and its immediate accessories,
architecture, furniture, and dress. This external aspect of noblest
nature was the first aim of the Venetians, and all their greatness
depended on their resolution to achieve, and their patience in
achieving it.

Here, then, are the three greatest schools of the former world
exemplified for you in three well-known works. The Phidian "Theseus"
represents the Greek school pursuing truth of form; the "Disputa" of
Raphael, the Florentine school pursuing truth of mental expression; the
"Marriage in Cana," the Venetian school pursuing truth of colour and
light. But do not suppose that the law which I am stating to you--the
great law of art-life--can only be seen in these, the most powerful of
all art schools. It is just as manifest in each and every school that
ever has had life in it at all. Wheresoever the search after truth
begins, there life begins; wheresoever that search ceases, there life
ceases. As long as a school of art holds any chain of natural facts,
trying to discover more of them and express them better daily, it may
play hither and thither as it likes on this side of the chain or that;
it may design grotesques and conventionalisms, build the simplest
buildings, serve the most practical utilities, yet all it does will be
gloriously designed and gloriously done; but let it once quit hold of
the chain of natural fact, cease to pursue that as the clue to its
work; let it propose to itself any other end than preaching this living
word, and think first of showing its own skill or its own fancy, and
from that hour its fall is precipitate--its destruction sure; nothing
that it does or designs will ever have life or loveliness in it more;
its hour has come, and there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor
wisdom in the grave whither it goeth.

Let us take for example that school of art over which many of you would
perhaps think this law had but little power--the school of Gothic
architecture. Many of us may have been in the habit of thinking of that
school rather as of one of forms than of facts--a school of pinnacles,
and buttresses, and conventional mouldings, and disguise of nature by
monstrous imaginings--not a school of truth at all. I think I shall be
able, even in the little time we have to-night, to show that this is
not so; and that our great law holds just as good at Amiens and
Salisbury, as it does at Athens and Florence.

I will go back then first to the very beginnings of Gothic art, and
before you, the students of Kensington, as an impanelled jury, I will
bring two examples of the barbarism out of which Gothic art emerges,
approximately contemporary in date and parallel in executive skill;
but, the one, a barbarism that did not get on, and could not get on;
the other, a barbarism that could get on, and did get on; and you, the
impanelled jury, shall judge what is the essential difference between
the two barbarisms, and decide for yourselves what is the seed of life
in the one, and the sign of death in the other.

The first,--that which has in it the sign of death,--furnishes us at
the same time with an illustration far too interesting to be passed by,
of certain principles much depended on by our common modern designers.
Taking up one of our architectural publications the other day, and
opening it at random, I chanced upon this piece of information, put in
rather curious English; but you shall have it as it stands--

"Aristotle asserts, that the greatest species of the beautiful are
Order, Symmetry, and the Definite."

I should tell you, however, that this statement is not given as
authoritative; it is one example of various Architectural teachings,
given in a report in the _Building Chronicle_ for May, 1857, of a
lecture on Proportion; in which the only thing the lecturer appears to
have proved was that,--

The system of dividing the diameter of the shaft of a column into
parts for copying the ancient architectural remains of Greece and Rome,
adopted by architects from Vitruvius (circa B.C. 25) to the present
period, as a method for producing ancient architecture, _is entirely
useless_, for the several parts of Grecian architecture cannot be
reduced or subdivided by this system; neither does it apply to the
architecture of Rome.

Still, as far as I can make it out, the lecture appears to have been
one of those of which you will just at present hear so many, the
protests of architects who have no knowledge of sculpture--or of any
other mode of expressing natural beauty--_against_ natural beauty;
and their endeavour to substitute mathematical proportions for the
knowledge of life they do not possess, and the representation of life
of which they are incapable.[Illustration] Now, this substitution of
obedience to mathematical law for sympathy with observed life, is the
first characteristic of the hopeless work of all ages; as such, you
will find it eminently manifested in the specimen I have to give you of
the hopeless Gothic barbarism; the barbarism from which nothing could
emerge--for which no future was possible but extinction. The
Aristotelian principles of the Beautiful are, you remember, Order,
Symmetry, and the Definite. Here you have the three, in perfection,
applied to the ideal of an angel, in a psalter of the eighth century,
existing in the library of St. John's College, Cambridge.[Footnote: I
copy this woodcut from Westwood's "Palaeographia Sacra."]

Now, you see the characteristics of this utterly dead school are, first
the wilful closing of its eyes to natural facts;--for, however ignorant
a person may be, he need only look at a human being to see that it has
a mouth as well as eyes; and secondly, the endeavour to adorn or
idealize natural fact according to its own notions: it puts red spots
in the middle of the hands, and sharpens the thumbs, thinking to
improve them. Here you have the most pure type possible of the
principles of idealism in all ages: whenever people don't look at
Nature, they always think they can improve her. You will also admire,
doubtless, the exquisite result of the application of our great modern
architectural principle of beauty--symmetry, or equal balance of part
by part; you see even the eyes are made symmetrical--entirely round,
instead of irregular, oval; and the iris is set properly in the middle,
instead of--as nature has absurdly put it--rather under the upper lid.
You will also observe the "principle of the pyramid" in the general
arrangement of the figure, and the value of "series" in the placing of
dots.

From this dead barbarism we pass to living barbarism--to work done by
hands quite as rude, if not ruder, and by minds as uninformed; and yet
work which in every line of it is prophetic of power, and has in it the
sure dawn of day. You have often heard it said that Giotto was the
founder of art in Italy. He was not: neither he, nor Giunta Pisano, nor
Niccolo Pisano. They all laid strong hands to the work, and brought it
first into aspect above ground; but the foundation had been laid for
them by the builders of the Lombardic churches in the valleys of the
Adda and the Arno. It is in the sculpture of the round arched churches
of North Italy, bearing disputable dates, ranging from the eighth to
the twelfth century, that you will find the lowest struck roots of the
art of Titian and Raphael. [Footnote: I have said elsewhere, "the root
of _all_ art is struck in the thirteenth century." This is quite
true: but of course some of the smallest fibres run lower, as in this
instance.] I go, therefore, to the church which is certainly the
earliest of these, St. Ambrogio, of Milan, said still to retain some
portions of the actual structure from which St. Ambrose excluded
Theodosius, and at all events furnishing the most archaic examples of
Lombardic sculpture in North Italy. I do not venture to guess their
date; they are barbarous enough for any date.

We find the pulpit of this church covered with interlacing patterns,
closely resembling those of the manuscript at Cambridge, but among them
is figure sculpture of a very different kind. It is wrought with mere
incisions in the stone, of which the effect may be tolerably given by
single lines in a drawing. Remember, therefore, for a moment--as
characteristic of culminating Italian art--Michael Angelo's fresco of
the "Temptation of Eve," in the Sistine chapel, and you will be more
interested in seeing the birth of Italian art, illustrated by the same
subject, from St. Ambrogio, of Milan, the "Serpent beguiling Eve."
[Footnote: This cut is ruder than it should be: the incisions in the
marble have a lighter effect than these rough black lines; but it is
not worth while to do it better.]

Yet, in that sketch, rude and ludicrous as it is, you have the elements
of life in their first form. The people who could do that were sure to
get on. For, observe, the workman's whole aim is straight at the facts,
as well as he can get them; and not merely at the facts, but at the
very heart of the facts. A common workman might have looked at nature
for his serpent, but he would have thought only of its scales. But this
fellow does not want scales, nor coils; he can do without them; he
wants the serpent's heart--malice and insinuation;--and he has actually
got them to some extent. So also a common workman, even in this
barbarous stage of art, might have carved Eve's arms and body a good
deal better; but this man does not care about arms and body, if he can
only get at Eve's mind--show that she is pleased at being flattered,
and yet in a state of uncomfortable hesitation. And some look of
listening, of complacency, and of embarrassment he has verily got:--
note the eyes slightly askance, the lips compressed, and the right hand
nervously grasping the left arm: nothing can be declared impossible to
the people who could begin thus--the world is open to them, and all
that is in it; while, on the contrary, nothing is possible to the man
who did the symmetrical angel--the world is keyless to him; he has
built a cell for himself in which he must abide, barred up for ever--
there is no more hope for him than for a sponge or a madrepore.

I shall not trace from this embryo the progress of Gothic art in Italy,
because it is much complicated and involved with traditions of other
schools, and because most of the students will be less familiar with
its results than with their own northern buildings. So, these two
designs indicating Death and Life in the beginnings of mediaeval art,
we will take an example of the _progress_ of that art from our
northern work. Now, many of you, doubtless, have been interested by the
mass, grandeur, and gloom of Norman architecture, as much as by Gothic
traceries; and when you hear me say that the root of all good work lies
in natural facts, you doubtless think instantly of your round arches,
with their rude cushion capitals, and of the billet or zigzag work by
which they are surrounded, and you cannot see what the knowledge of
nature has to do with either the simple plan or the rude mouldings. But
all those simple conditions of Norman art are merely the expiring of it
towards the extreme north. Do not study Norman architecture in
Northumberland, but in Normandy, and then you will find that it is just
a peculiarly manly, and practically useful, form of the whole great
French school of rounded architecture. And where has that French school
its origin? Wholly in the rich conditions of sculpture, which, rising
first out of imitations of the Roman bas-reliefs, covered all the
façades of the French early churches with one continuous arabesque of
floral or animal life. If you want to study round-arched buildings, do
not go to Durham, but go to Poictiers, and there you will see how all
the simple decorations which give you so much pleasure even in their
isolated application were invented by persons practised in carving men,
monsters, wild animals, birds, and flowers, in overwhelming redundance;
and then trace this architecture forward in central France, and you
will find it loses nothing of its richness--it only gains in truth, and
therefore in grace, until just at the moment of transition into the
pointed style, you have the consummate type of the sculpture of the
school given you in the west front of the Cathedral of Chartres. From
that front I have chosen two fragments to illustrate it. [Footnote:
This part of the lecture was illustrated by two drawings, made
admirably by Mr. J. T. Laing, with the help of photographs from statues
at Chartres. The drawings may be seen at present at the Kensington
Museum: but any large photograph of the west front of Chartres will
enable the reader to follow what is stated in the lecture, as far as is
needful.]

These statues have been long, and justly, considered as representative
of the highest skill of the twelfth or earliest part of the thirteenth
century in France; and they indeed possess a dignity and delicate
charm, which are for the most part wanting in later works. It is owing
partly to real nobleness of feature, but chiefly to the grace, mingled
with severity, of the falling lines of excessively _thin_ drapery;
as well as to a most studied finish in composition, every part of the
ornamentation tenderly harmonizing with the rest. So far as their power
over certain tones of religious mind is owing to a palpable degree of
non-naturalism in them, I do not praise it--the exaggerated thinness of
body and stiffness of attitude are faults; but they are noble faults,
and give the statues a strange look of forming part of the very
building itself, and sustaining it--not like the Greek caryatid,
without effort--nor like the Renaissance caryatid, by painful or
impossible effort--but as if all that was silent and stern, and
withdrawn apart, and stiffened in chill of heart against the terror of
earth, had passed into a shape of eternal marble; and thus the Ghost
had given, to bear up the pillars of the church on earth, all the
patient and expectant nature that it needed no more in heaven. This is
the transcendental view of the meaning of those sculptures. I do not
dwell upon it. What I do lean upon is their purely naturalistic and
vital power. They are all portraits--unknown, most of them, I believe,
--but palpably and unmistakeably portraits, if not taken from the actual
person for whom the statue stands, at all events studied from some
living person whose features might fairly represent those of the king
or saint intended. Several of them I suppose to be authentic: there is
one of a queen, who has evidently, while she lived, been notable for
her bright black eyes. The sculptor has cut the iris deep into the
stone, and her dark eyes are still suggested with her smile.

There is another thing I wish you to notice specially in these statues
--the way in which the floral moulding is associated with the vertical
lines of the figure. You have thus the utmost complexity and richness
of curvature set side by side with the pure and delicate parallel
lines, and both the characters gain in interest and beauty; but there
is deeper significance in the thing than that of mere effect in
composition; significance not intended on the part of the sculptor, but
all the more valuable because unintentional. I mean the close
association of the beauty of lower nature in animals and flowers, with
the beauty of higher nature in human form. You never get this in Greek
work. Greek statues are always isolated; blank fields of stone, or
depths of shadow, relieving the form of the statue, as the world of
lower nature which they despised retired in darkness from their hearts.
Here, the clothed figure seems the type of the Christian spirit--in
many respects feebler and more contracted--but purer; clothed in its
white robes and crown, and with the riches of all creation at its side.

The next step in the change will be set before you in a moment, merely
by comparing this statue from the west front of Chartres with that of
the Madonna, from the south transept door of Amiens. [Footnote: There
are many photographs of this door and of its central statue. Its
sculpture in the tympanum is farther described in the Fourth Lecture.]

This Madonna, with the sculpture round her, represents the culminating
power of Gothic art in the thirteenth century. Sculpture has been
gaining continually in the interval; gaining, simply because becoming
every day more truthful, more tender, and more suggestive. By the way,
the old Douglas motto, "Tender and true," may wisely be taken up again
by all of us, for our own, in art no less than in other things. Depend
upon it, the first universal characteristic of all great art is
Tenderness, as the second is Truth. I find this more and more every
day: an infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift and inheritance of
all the truly great men. It is sure to involve a relative intensity of
disdain towards base things, and an appearance of sternness and
arrogance in the eyes of all hard, stupid, and vulgar people--quite
terrific to such, if they are capable of terror, and hateful to them,
if they are capable of nothing higher than hatred. Dante's is the great
type of this class of mind. I say the first inheritance is Tenderness--
the second Truth, because the Tenderness is in the make of the
creature, the Truth in his acquired habits and knowledge; besides, the
love comes first in dignity as well as in time, and that is always pure
and complete: the truth, at best, imperfect.

To come back to our statue. You will observe that the arrangement of
this sculpture is exactly the same as at Chartres--severe falling
drapery, set off by rich floral ornament at the side; but the statue is
now completely animated: it is no longer fixed as an upright pillar,
but bends aside out of its niche, and the floral ornament, instead of
being a conventional wreath, is of exquisitely arranged hawthorn. The
work, however, as a whole, though perfectly characteristic of the
advance of the age in style and purpose, is in some subtler qualities
inferior to that of Chartres. The individual sculptor, though trained
in a more advanced school, has been himself a man of inferior order of
mind compared to the one who worked at Chartres. But I have not time to
point out to you the subtler characters by which I know this.

This statue, then, marks the culminating point of Gothic art, because,
up to this time, the eyes of its designers had been steadily fixed on
natural truth--they had been advancing from flower to flower, from form
to form, from face to face,--gaining perpetually in knowledge and
veracity--therefore, perpetually in power and in grace. But at this
point a fatal change came over their aim. From the statue they now
began to turn the attention chiefly to the niche of the statue, and
from the floral ornament to the mouldings that enclosed the floral
ornament. The first result of this was, however, though not the
grandest, yet the most finished of northern genius. You have, in the
earlier Gothic, less wonderful construction, less careful masonry, far
less expression of harmony of parts in the balance of the building.
Earlier work always has more or less of the character of a good solid
wall with irregular holes in it, well carved wherever there is room.
But the last phase of good Gothic has no room to spare; it rises as
high as it can on narrowest foundation, stands in perfect strength with
the least possible substance in its bars; connects niche with niche,
and line with line, in an exquisite harmony, from which no stone can be
removed, and to which you can add not a pinnacle; and yet introduces in
rich, though now more calculated profusion, the living element of its
sculpture: sculpture in the quatrefoils--sculpture in the brackets--
sculpture in the gargoyles--sculpture in the niches--sculpture in the
ridges and hollows of its mouldings,--not a shadow without meaning, and
not a light without life. [Footnote: The two _transepts_ of Rouen
Cathedral illustrate this style. There are plenty of photographs of
them. I take this opportunity of repeating what I have several times
before stated, for the sake of travellers, that St. Ouen, impressive as
it is, is entirely inferior to the transepts of Rouen Cathedral.] But
with this very perfection of his work came the unhappy pride of the
builder in what he had done. As long as he had been merely raising
clumsy walls and carving them like a child, in waywardness of fancy,
his delight was in the things he thought of as he carved; but when he
had once reached this pitch of constructive science, he began to think
only how cleverly he could put the stones together. The question was
not now with him, What can I represent? but, How high can I build--how
wonderfully can I hang this arch in air, or weave this tracery across
the clouds? And the catastrophe was instant and irrevocable.
Architecture became in France a mere web of waving lines,--in England a
mere grating of perpendicular ones. Redundance was substituted for
invention, and geometry for passion; tho Gothic art became a mere
expression of wanton expenditure, and vulgar mathematics; and was swept
away, as it then deserved to be swept away, by the severer pride, and
purer learning, of the schools founded on classical traditions.

You cannot now fail to see, how, throughout the history of this
wonderful art--from its earliest dawn in Lombardy to its last
catastrophe in France and England--sculpture, founded on love of
nature, was the talisman of its existence; wherever sculpture was
practised, architecture arose--wherever that was neglected,
architecture expired; and, believe me, all you students who love this
mediaeval art, there is no hope of your ever doing any good with it,
but on this everlasting principle. Your patriotic associations with it
are of no use; your romantic associations with it--either of chivalry
or religion--are of no use; they are worse than useless, they are
false. Gothic is not an art for knights and nobles; it is an art for
the people: it is not an art for churches or sanctuaries; it is an art
for houses and homes: it is not an art for England only, but an art for
the world: above all, it is not an art of form or tradition only, but
an art of vital practice and perpetual renewal. And whosoever pleads
for it as an ancient or a formal thing, and tries to teach it you as an
ecclesiastical tradition or a geometrical science, knows nothing of its
essence, less than nothing of its power.

Leave, therefore, boldly, though not irreverently, mysticism and
symbolism on the one side; cast away with utter scorn geometry and
legalism on the other; seize hold of God's hand and look full in the
face of His creation, and there is nothing He will not enable you to
achieve.

Thus, then, you will find--and the more profound and accurate your
knowledge of the history of art the more assuredly you will find--that
the living power in all the real schools, be they great or small, is
love of nature. But do not mistake me by supposing that I mean this law
to be all that is necessary to form a school. There needs to be much
superadded to it, though there never must be anything superseding it.
The main thing which needs to be superadded is the gift of design.

It is always dangerous, and liable to diminish the clearness of
impression, to go over much ground in the course of one lecture. But I
dare not present you with a maimed view of this important subject: I
dare not put off to another time, when the same persons would not be
again assembled, the statement of the great collateral necessity which,
as well as the necessity of truth, governs all noble art.

That collateral necessity is _the visible operation of human
intellect in the presentation of truth, _the evidence of what is
properly called design or plan in the work, no less than of veracity. A
looking-glass does not design--it receives and communicates
indiscriminately all that passes before it; a painter designs when he
chooses some things, refuses others, and arranges all.

This selection and arrangement must have influence over everything that
the art is concerned with, great or small--over lines, over colours,
and over ideas. Given a certain group of colours, by adding another
colour at the side of them, you will either improve the group and
render it more delightful, or injure it, and render it discordant and
unintelligible. "Design" is the choosing and placing the colour so as
to help and enhance all the other colours it is set beside. So of
thoughts: in a good composition, every idea is presented in just that
order, and with just that force, which will perfectly connect it with
all the other thoughts in the work, and will illustrate the others as
well as receive illustration from them; so that the entire chain of
thoughts offered to the beholder's mind shall be received by him with
as much delight and with as little effort as is possible. And thus you
see design, properly so called, is human invention, consulting human
capacity. Out of the infinite heap of things around us in the world, it
chooses a certain number which it can thoroughly grasp, and presents
this group to the spectator in the form best calculated to enable him
to grasp it also, and to grasp it with delight.

And accordingly, the capacities of both gatherer and receiver being
limited, the object is to make _everything that you offer helpful_
and precious. If you give one grain of weight too much, so as to
increase fatigue without profit, or bulk without value--that added
grain is hurtful; if you put one spot or one syllable out of its proper
place, that spot or syllable will be destructive--how far destructive
it is almost impossible to tell: a misplaced touch may sometimes
annihilate the labour of hours. Nor are any of us prepared to
understand the work of any great master, till we feel this, and feel it
as distinctly as we do the value of arrangement in the notes of music.
Take any noble musical air, and you find, on examining it, that not one
even of the faintest or shortest notes can be removed without
destruction to the whole passage in which it occurs; and that every
note in the passage is twenty times more beautiful so introduced, than
it would have been if played singly on the instrument. Precisely this
degree of arrangement and relation must exist between every touch
[Footnote: Literally. I know how exaggerated this statement sounds; but
I mean it,--every syllable of it.--See Appendix IV.] and line in a
great picture. You may consider the whole as a prolonged musical
composition: its parts, as separate airs connected in the story; its
little bits and fragments of colour and line, as separate passages or
bars in melodies; and down to the minutest note of the whole--down to
the minutest _touch_,--if there is one that can be spared--that
one is doing mischief.

Remember therefore always, you have two characters in which all
greatness of art consists:--First, the earnest and intense seizing of
natural facts; then the ordering those facts by strength of human
intellect, so as to make them, for all who look upon them, to the
utmost serviceable, memorable, and beautiful. And thus great art is
nothing else than the type of strong and noble life; for, as the
ignoble person, in his dealings with all that occurs in the world about
him, first sees nothing clearly,--looks nothing fairly in the face, and
then allows himself to be swept away by the trampling torrent, and
unescapable force, of the things that he would not foresee, and could
not understand: so the noble person, looking the facts of the world
full in the face, and fathoming them with deep faculty, then deals with
them in unalarmed intelligence and unhurried strength, and becomes,
with his human intellect and will, no unconscious nor insignificant
agent, in consummating their good, and restraining their evil.

Thus in human life you have the two fields of rightful toil for ever
distinguished, yet for ever associated; Truth first--plan or design,
founded thereon; so in art, you have the same two fields for ever
distinguished, for ever associated; Truth first--plan, or design,
founded thereon.

Now hitherto there is not the least difficulty in the subject; none of
you can look for a moment at any great sculptor or painter without
seeing the full bearing of these principles. But a difficulty arises
when you come to examine the art of a lower order, concerned with
furniture and manufacture, for in that art the element of design enters
without, apparently, the element of truth. You have often to obtain
beauty and display invention without direct representation of nature.
Yet, respecting all these things also, the principle is perfectly
simple. If the designer of furniture, of cups and vases, of dress
patterns, and the like, exercises himself continually in the imitation
of natural form in some leading division of his work; then, holding by
this stem of life, he may pass down into all kinds of merely
geometrical or formal design with perfect safety, and with noble
results.[Footnote: This principle, here cursorily stated, is one of the
chief subjects of inquiry in the following Lectures.] Thus Giotto,
being primarily a figure painter and sculptor, is, secondarily, the
richest of all designers in mere mosaic of coloured bars and triangles;
thus Benvenuto Cellini, being in all the higher branches of metal work
a perfect imitator of nature, is in all its lower branches the best
designer of curve for lips of cups and handles of vases; thus Holbein,
exercised primarily in the noble art of truthful portraiture, becomes,
secondarily, the most exquisite designer of embroideries of robe, and
blazonries on wall; and thus Michael Angelo, exercised primarily in the
drawing of body and limb, distributes in the mightiest masses the order
of his pillars, and in the loftiest shadow the hollows of his dome. But
once quit hold of this living stem, and set yourself to the designing
of ornamentation, either in the ignorant play of your own heartless
fancy, as the Indian does, or according to received application of
heartless laws, as the modern European does, and there is but one word
for you--Death:--death of every healthy faculty, and of every noble
intelligence, incapacity of understanding one great work that man has
ever done, or of doing anything that it shall be helpful for him to
behold. You have cut yourselves off voluntarily, presumptuously,
insolently, from the whole teaching of your Maker in His Universe; you
have cut yourselves off from it, not because you were forced to
mechanical labour for your bread--not because your fate had appointed
you to wear away your life in walled chambers, or dig your life out of
dusty furrows; but, when your whole profession, your whole occupation--
all the necessities and chances of your existence, led you straight to
the feet of the great Teacher, and thrust you into the treasury of His
works; where you have nothing to do but to live by gazing, and to grow
by wondering;--wilfully you bind up your eyes from the splendour--
wilfully bind up your life-blood from its beating--wilfully turn your
backs upon all the majesties of Omnipotence--wilfully snatch your hands
from all the aids of love, and what can remain for you, but
helplessness and blindness,--except the worse fate than the being blind
yourselves--that of becoming Leaders of the blind?

Do not think that I am speaking under excited feeling, or in any
exaggerated terms. I have written the words I use, that I may know what
I say, and that you, if you choose, may see what I have said. For,
indeed, I have set before you tonight, to the best of my power, the sum
and substance of the system of art to the promulgation of which I have
devoted my life hitherto, and intend to devote what of life may still
be spared to me. I have had but one steady aim in all that I have ever
tried to teach, namely--to declare that whatever was great in human art
was the expression of man's delight in God's work.

And at this time I have endeavoured to prove to you--if you investigate
the subject you may more entirely prove to yourselves--that no school
ever advanced far which had not the love of natural fact as a primal
energy. But it is still more important for you to be assured that the
conditions of life and death in the art of nations are also the
conditions of life and death in your own; and that you have it, each in
his power at this very instant, to determine in which direction his
steps are turning. It seems almost a terrible thing to tell you, that
all here have all the power of knowing at once what hope there is for
them as artists; you would, perhaps, like better that there was some
unremovable doubt about the chances of the future--some possibility
that you might be advancing, in unconscious ways, towards unexpected
successes--some excuse or reason for going about, as students do so
often, to this master or the other, asking him if they have genius, and
whether they are doing right, and gathering, from his careless or
formal replies, vague flashes of encouragement, or fitfulnesses of
despair. There is no need for this--no excuse for it. All of you have
the trial of yourselves in your own power; each may undergo at this
instant, before his own judgment seat, the ordeal by fire. Ask
yourselves what is the leading motive which actuates you while you are
at work. I do not ask you what your leading motive is for working--that
is a different thing; you may have families to support--parents to
help--brides to win; you may have all these, or other such sacred and
pre-eminent motives, to press the morning's labour and prompt the
twilight thought. But when you are fairly _at_ the work, what is
the motive then which tells upon every touch of it? If it is the love
of that which your work represents--if, being a landscape painter, it
is love of hills and trees that moves you--if, being a figure painter,
it is love of human beauty and human soul that moves you--if, being a
flower or animal painter, it is love, and wonder, and delight in petal
and in limb that move you, then the Spirit is upon you, and the earth
is yours, and the fulness thereof. But if, on the other hand, it is
petty self-complacency in your own skill, trust in precepts and laws,
hope for academical or popular approbation, or avarice of wealth,--it
is quite possible that by steady industry, or even by fortunate chance,
you may win the applause, the position, the fortune, that you desire;--
but one touch of true art you will never lay on canvas or on stone as
long as you live.

Make, then, your choice, boldly and consciously, for one way or other
it _must_ be made. On the dark and dangerous side are set, the
pride which delights in self-contemplation--the indolence which rests
in unquestioned forms--the ignorance that despises what is fairest
among God's creatures, and the dulness that denies what is marvellous
in His working: there is a life of monotony for your own souls, and of
misguiding for those of others. And, on the other side, is open to your
choice the life of the crowned spirit, moving as a light in creation--
discovering always--illuminating always, gaining every hour in
strength, yet bowed down every hour into deeper humility; sure of being
right in its aim, sure of being irresistible in its progress; happy in
what it has securely done--happier in what, day by day, it may as
securely hope; happiest at the close of life, when the right hand
begins to forget its cunning, to remember, that there never was a touch
of the chisel or the pencil it wielded, but has added to the knowledge
and quickened the happiness of mankind.




LECTURE II.

THE UNITY OF ART.

_Part of an Address delivered at Manchester, 14th March, 1859._

[Footnote: I was prevented, by press of other engagements, from
preparing this address with the care I wished; and forced to trust to
such expression as I could give at the moment to the points of
principal importance; reading, however, the close of the preceding
lecture, which I thought contained some truths that would bear
repetition. The whole was reported, better than it deserved, by Mr.
Pitman, of the _Manchester Courier_, and published nearly
verbatim. I have here extracted, from the published report, the facts
which I wish especially to enforce; and have a little cleared their
expression; its loose and colloquial character I cannot now help,
unless by re-writing the whole, which it seems not worth while to do.]


It is sometimes my pleasant duty to visit other cities, in the hope of
being able to encourage their art students; but here it is my
pleasanter privilege to come for encouragement myself. I do not know
when I have received so much as from the report read this evening by
Mr. Hammersley, bearing upon a subject which has caused me great
anxiety. For I have always felt in my own pursuit of art, and in my
endeavors to urge the pursuit of art on others, that while there are
many advantages now that never existed before, there are certain
grievous difficulties existing, just in the very cause that is giving
the stimulus to art--in the immense spread of the manufactures of every
country which is now attending vigorously to art. We find that
manufacture and art are now going on always together; that where there
is no manufacture there is no art. I know how much there is of
pretended art where there is no manufacture: there is much in Italy,
for instance; no country makes so bold pretence to the production of
new art as Italy at this moment; yet no country produces so little. If
you glance over the map of Europe, you will find that where the
manufactures are strongest, there art also is strongest. And yet I
always felt that there was an immense difficulty to be encountered by
the students who were in these centres of modern movement. They had to
avoid the notion that art and manufacture were in any respect one. Art
may be healthily associated with manufacture, and probably in future
will always be so; but the student must be strenuously warned against
supposing that they can ever be one and the same thing, that art can
ever be followed on the principles of manufacture. Each must be
followed separately; the one must influence the other, but each must be
kept distinctly separate from the other.

It would be well if all students would keep clearly in their mind the
real distinction between those words which we use so often,
"Manufacture," "Art," and "Fine Art." "MANUFACTURE" is, according to
the etymology and right use of the word, "the making of anything by
hands,"--directly or indirectly, with or without the help of
instruments or machines. Anything proceeding from the hand of man is
manufacture; but it must have proceeded from his hand only, acting
mechanically, and uninfluenced at the moment by direct intelligence.

Then, secondly, ART is the operation of the hand and the intelligence
of man together; there is an art of making machinery; there is an art
of building ships; an art of making carriages; and so on. All these,
properly called Arts, but not Fine Arts, are pursuits in which the hand
of man and his head go together, working at the same instant.

Then FINE ART is that in which the hand, the head, and the _heart_
of man go together.

Recollect this triple group; it will help you to solve many difficult
problems. And remember that though the hand must be at the bottom of
everything, it must also go to the top of everything; for Fine Art must
be produced by the hand of man in a much greater and clearer sense than
manufacture is. Fine Art must always be produced by the subtlest of all
machines, which is the human hand. No machine yet contrived, or
hereafter contrivable, will ever equal the fine machinery of the human
fingers. Thoroughly perfect art is that which proceeds from the heart,
which involves all the noble emotions;--associates with these the head,
yet as inferior to the heart; and the hand, yet as inferior to the
heart and head; and thus brings out the whole man.

Hence it follows that since Manufacture is simply the operation of the
hand of man in producing that which is useful to him, it essentially
separates itself from the emotions; when emotions interfere with
machinery they spoil it: machinery must go evenly, without emotion. But
the Fine Arts cannot go evenly; they always must have emotion ruling
their mechanism, and until the pupil begins to feel, and until all he
does associates itself with the current of his feeling, he is not an
artist. But pupils in all the schools in this country are now exposed
to all kinds of temptations which blunt their feelings. I constantly
feel discouraged in addressing them because I know not how to tell them
boldly what they ought to do, when I feel how practically difficult it
is for them to do it. There are all sorts of demands made upon them in
every direction, and money is to be made in every conceivable way but
the right way. If you paint as you ought, and study as you ought,
depend upon it the public will take no notice of you for a long while.
If you study wrongly, and try to draw the attention of the public upon
you,--supposing you to be clever students--you will get swift reward;
but the reward does not come fast when it is sought wisely; it is
always held aloof for a little while; the right roads of early life are
very quiet ones, hedged in from nearly all help or praise. But the
wrong roads are noisy,--vociferous everywhere with all kinds of demand
upon you for art which is not properly art at all; and in the various
meetings of modern interests, money is to be made in every way; but art
is to be followed only in _one_ way. That is what I want mainly to
say to you, or if not to you yourselves (for, from what I have heard
from your excellent master to-night, I know you are going on all
rightly), you must let me say it through you to others. Our Schools of
Art are confused by the various teaching and various interests that are
now abroad among us. Everybody is talking about art, and writing about
it, and more or less interested in it; everybody wants art, and there
is not art for everybody, and few who talk know what they are talking
about; thus students are led in all variable ways, while there is only
one way in which they can make steady progress, for true art is always
and will be always one. Whatever changes may be made in the customs of
society, whatever new machines we may invent, whatever new manufactures
we may supply, Fine Art must remain what it was two thousand years ago,
in the days of Phidias; two thousand years hence, it will be, in all
its principles, and in all its great effects upon the mind of man, just
the same. Observe this that I say, please, carefully, for I mean it to
the very utmost. _There is but one right way of doing any given thing
required of an artist_; there may be a hundred wrong, deficient, or
mannered ways, but there is only one complete and right way. Whenever
two artists are trying to do the same thing with the same materials,
and do it in different ways, one of them is wrong; he may be charmingly
wrong, or impressively wrong--various circumstances in his temper may
make his wrong pleasanter than any person's right; it may for him,
under his given limitations of knowledge or temper, be better perhaps
that he should err in his own way than try for anybody else's--but for
all that his way is wrong, and it is essential for all masters of
schools to know what the right way is, and what right art is, and to
see how simple and how single all right art has been, since the
beginning of it.

But farther, not only is there but one way of _doing_ things
rightly, but there is only one way of _seeing_ them, and that is,
seeing the whole of them, without any choice, or more intense
perception of one point than another, owing to our special
idiosyncrasies. Thus, when Titian or Tintoret look at a human being,
they see at a glance the whole of its nature, outside and in; all that
it has of form, of colour, of passion, or of thought; saintliness, and
loveliness; fleshly body, and spiritual power; grace, or strength, or
softness, or whatsoever other quality, those men will see to the full,
and so paint, that, when narrower people come to look at what they have
done, every one may, if he chooses, find his own special pleasure in
the work. The sensualist will find sensuality in Titian; the thinker
will find thought; the saint, sanctity; the colourist, colour; the
anatomist, form; and yet the picture will never be a popular one in the
full sense, for none of these narrower people will find their special
taste so alone consulted, as that the qualities which would ensure
their gratification shall be sifted or separated from others; they are
checked by the presence of the other qualities which ensure the
gratification of other men. Thus, Titian is not soft enough for the
sensualist, Correggio suits him better; Titian is not defined enough
for the formalist,--Leonardo suits him better; Titian is not pure
enough for the religionist,--Raphael suits him better; Titian is not
polite enough for the man of the world,--Vandyke suits him better;
Titian is not forcible enough for the lovers of the picturesque,--
Rembrandt suits him better. So Correggio is popular with a certain set,
and Vandyke with a certain set, and Rembrandt with a certain set. All
are great men, but of inferior stamp, and therefore Vandyke is popular,
and Rembrandt is popular, [Footnote: And Murillo, of all true painters
the narrowest, feeblest, and most superficial, for those reasons the
most popular.] but nobody cares much at heart about Titian; only there
is a strange under-current of everlasting murmur about his name, which
means the deep consent of all great men that he is greater than they--
the consent of those who, having sat long enough at his feet, have
found in that restrained harmony of his strength there are indeed
depths of each balanced power more wonderful than all those separate
manifestations in inferior painters: that there is a softness more
exquisite than Correggio's, a purity loftier than Leonardo's, a force
mightier than Rembrandt's, a sanctity more solemn even than
Raffaelle's.

Do not suppose that in saying this of Titian, I am returning to the old
eclectic theories of Bologna; for all those eclectic theories, observe,
were based, not upon an endeavour to unite the various characters of
nature (which it is possible to do), but the various narrownesses of
taste, which it is impossible to do. Rubens is not more vigorous than
Titian, but less vigorous; but because he is so narrow-minded as to
enjoy vigour only, he refuses to give the other qualities of nature,
which would interfere with that vigour and with our perception of it.
Again, Rembrandt is not a greater master of chiaroscuro than Titian;--
he is a less master, but because he is so narrow-minded as to enjoy
chiaroscuro only, he withdraws from you the splendour of hue which
would interfere with this, and gives you only the shadow in which you
can at once feel it.

Now all these specialties have their own charm in their own way: and
there are times when the particular humour of each man is refreshing to
us from its very distinctness; but the effort to add any other
qualities to this refreshing one instantly takes away the
distinctiveness, and therefore the exact character to be enjoyed in its
appeal to a particular humour in us. Our enjoyment arose from a
weakness meeting a weakness, from a partiality in the painter fitting
to a partiality in us, and giving us sugar when we wanted sugar, and
myrrh when we wanted myrrh; but sugar and myrrh are not meat: and when
we want meat and bread, we must go to better men.

The eclectic schools endeavoured to unite these opposite partialities
and weaknesses. They trained themselves under masters of exaggeration,
and tried to unite opposite exaggerations. That was impossible. They
did not see that the only possible eclecticism had been already
accomplished;--the eclecticism of temperance, which, by the restraint
of force, gains higher force; and by the self-denial of delight, gains
higher delight. This you will find is ultimately the case with every
true and right master; at first, while we are tyros in art, or before
we have earnestly studied the man in question, we shall see little in
him; or perhaps see, as we think, deficiencies; we shall fancy he is
inferior to this man in that, and to the other man in the other; but as
we go on studying him we shall find that he has got both that and the
other; and both in a far higher sense than the man who seemed to
possess those qualities in excess. Thus in Turner's lifetime, when
people first looked at him, those who liked rainy, weather, said he was
not equal to Copley Fielding; but those who looked at Turner long
enough found that he could be much more wet than Copley Fielding, when
he chose. The people who liked force, said that "Turner was not strong
enough for them; he was effeminate; they liked De Wint,--nice strong
tone;--or Cox--great, greeny, dark masses of colour--solemn feeling of
the freshness and depth of nature;--they liked Cox--Turner was too hot
for them." Had they looked long enough they would have found that he
had far more force than De Wint, far more freshness than Cox when he
chose,--only united with other elements; and that he didn't choose to
be cool, if nature had appointed the weather to be hot. The people who
liked Prout said "Turner had not firmness of hand--he did not know
enough about architecture--he was not picturesque enough." Had they
looked at his architecture long, they would have found that it
contained subtle picturesquenesses, infinitely more picturesque than
anything of Prout's. People who liked Callcott said that "Turner was
not correct or pure enough--had no classical taste." Had they looked at
Turner long enough they would have found him as severe, when he chose,
as the greater Poussin;--Callcott, a mere vulgar imitator of other
men's high breeding. And so throughout with all thoroughly great men,
their strength is not seen at first, precisely because they unite, in
due place and measure, every great quality.

Now the question is, whether, as students, we are to study only these
mightiest men, who unite all greatness, or whether we are to study the
works of inferior men, who present us with the greatness which we
particularly like? That question often comes before me when I see a
strong idiosyncrasy in a student, and he asks me what he should study.
Shall I send him to a true master, who does not present the quality in
a prominent way in which that student delights, or send him to a man
with whom he has direct sympathy? It is a hard question. For very
curious results have sometimes been brought out, especially in late
years, not only by students following their own bent, but by their
being withdrawn from teaching altogether. I have just named a very
great man in his own field--Prout. We all know his drawings, and love
them: they have a peculiar character which no other architectural
drawings ever possessed, and which no others can possess, because all
Prout's subjects are being knocked down or restored. (Prout did not
like restored buildings any more than I do.) There will never be any
more Prout drawings. Nor could he have been what he was, or expressed
with that mysteriously effective touch that peculiar delight in broken
and old buildings, unless he had been withdrawn from all high art
influence. You know that Prout was born of poor parents--that he was
educated down in Cornwall;--and that, for many years, all the art-
teaching he had was his own, or the fishermen's. Under the keels of the
fishing-boats, on the sands of our southern coasts, Prout learned all
that he needed to learn about art. Entirely by himself, he felt his way
to this particular style, and became the painter of pictures which I
think we should all regret to lose. It becomes a very difficult
question what that man would have been, had he been brought under some
entirely wholesome artistic influence, He had immense gifts of
composition. I do not know any man who had more power of invention than
Prout, or who had a sublimer instinct in his treatment of things; but
being entirely withdrawn from all artistical help, he blunders his way
to that short-coming representation, which, by the very reason of its
short-coming, has a certain charm we should all be sorry to lose. And
therefore I feel embarrassed when a student comes to me, in whom I see
a strong instinct of that kind: and cannot tell whether I ought to say
to him, "Give up all your studies of old boats, and keep away from the
sea-shore, and come up to the Royal Academy in London, and look at
nothing but Titian." It is a difficult thing to make up one's mind to
say that. However, I believe, on the whole, we may wisely leave such
matters in the hands of Providence; that if we have the power of
teaching the right to anybody, we should teach them the right; if we
have the power of showing them the best thing, we should show them the
best thing; there will always, I fear, be enough want of teaching, and
enough bad teaching, to bring out very curious erratical results if we
want them. So, if we are to teach at all, let us teach the right thing,
and ever the right thing. There are many attractive qualities
inconsistent with rightness;--do not let us teach them,--let us be
content to waive them. There are attractive qualities in Burns, and
attractive qualities in Dickens, which neither of those writers would
have possessed if the one had been educated, and the other had been
studying higher nature than that of cockney London; but those
attractive qualities are not such as we should seek in a school of
literature. If we want to teach young men a good manner of writing, we
should teach it from Shakspeare,--not from Burns; from Walter Scott,--
and not from Dickens. And I believe that our schools of painting are at
present inefficient in their action, because they have not fixed on
this high principle what are the painters to whom to point; nor boldly
resolved to point to the best, if determinable. It is becoming a matter
of stern necessity that they should give a simple direction to the
attention of the student, and that they should say, "This is the mark
you are to aim at; and you are not to go about to the print-shops, and
peep in, to see how this engraver does that, and the other engraver
does the other, and how a nice bit of character has been caught by a
new man, and why this odd picture has caught the popular attention. You
are to have nothing to do with all that; you are not to mind about
popular attention just now; but here is a thing which is eternally
right and good: you are to look at that, and see if you cannot do
something eternally right and good too."

But suppose you accept this principle: and resolve to look to some
great man, Titian, or Turner, or whomsoever it may be, as the model of
perfection in art;--then the question is, since this great man pursued
his art in Venice, or in the fields of England, under totally different
conditions from those possible to us now--how are you to make your
study of him effective here in Manchester? how bring it down into
patterns, and all that you are called upon as operatives to produce?
how make it the means of your livelihood, and associate inferior
branches of art with this great art? That may become a serious doubt to
you. You may think there is some other way of producing clever, and
pretty, and saleable patterns than going to look at Titian, or any
other great man. And that brings me to the question, perhaps the most
vexed question of all amongst us just now, between conventional and
perfect art. You know that among architects and artists there are, and
have been almost always, since art became a subject of much discussion,
two parties, one maintaining that nature should be always altered and
modified, and that the artist is greater than nature; they do not
maintain, indeed, in words, but they maintain in idea, that the artist
is greater than the Divine Maker of these things, and can improve them;
while the other party say that he cannot improve nature, and that
nature on the whole should improve him. That is the real meaning of the
two parties, the essence of them; the practical result of their several
theories being that the Idealists are always producing more or less
formal conditions of art, and the Realists striving to produce in all
their art either some image of nature, or record of nature; these,
observe, being quite different things, the image being a resemblance,
and the record, something which will give information about nature, but
not necessarily imitate it.

[Footnote: The portion of the lecture here omitted was a recapitulation
of that part of the previous one which opposed conventional art to
natural art.]

       *       *       *       *       *

You may separate these two groups of artists more distinctly in your
mind as those who seek for the pleasure of art, in the relations of its
colours and lines, without caring to convey any truth with it; and
those who seek for the truth first, and then go down from the truth to
the pleasure of colour and line. Marking those two bodies distinctly as
separate, and thinking over them, you may come to some rather notable
conclusions respecting the mental dispositions which are involved in
each mode of study. You will find that large masses of the art of the
world fall definitely under one or the other of these heads. Observe,
pleasure first and truth afterwards, (or not at all,) as with the
Arabians and Indians; or, truth first and pleasure afterwards, as with
Angelico and all other great European painters. You will find that the
art whose end is pleasure only is pre-eminently the gift of cruel and
savage nations, cruel in temper, savage in habits and conception; but
that the art which is especially dedicated to natural fact always
indicates a peculiar gentleness and tenderness of mind, and that all
great and successful work of that kind will assuredly be the production
of thoughtful, sensitive, earnest, kind men, large in their views of
life, and full of various intellectual power. And farther, when you
examine the men in whom the gifts of art are variously mingled, or
universally mingled, you will discern that the ornamental, or
pleasurable power, though it may be possessed by good men, is not in
itself an indication of their goodness, but is rather, unless balanced
by other faculties, indicative of violence of temper, inclining to
cruelty and to irreligion. On the other hand, so sure as you find any
man endowed with a keen and separate faculty of representing natural
fact, so surely you will find that man gentle and upright, full of
nobleness and breadth of thought. I will give you two instances, the
first peculiarly English, and another peculiarly interesting because it
occurs among a nation not generally very kind or gentle.

I am inclined to think that, considering all the disadvantages of
circumstances and education under which his genius was developed, there
was perhaps hardly ever born a man with a more intense and innate gift
of insight into nature than our own Sir Joshua Reynolds. Considered as
a painter of individuality in the human form and mind, I think him,
even as it is, the prince of portrait painters. Titian paints nobler
pictures, and Vandyke had nobler subjects, but neither of them entered
so subtly as Sir Joshua did into the minor varieties of human heart and
temper; arid when you consider that, with a frightful conventionality
of social habitude all around him, he yet conceived the simplest types
of all feminine and childish loveliness;--that in a northern climate,
and with gray, and white, and black, as the principal colours around
him, he yet became a colourist who can be crushed by none, even of the
Venetians;--and that with Dutch painting and Dresden china for the
prevailing types of art in the saloons of his day, he threw himself at
once at the feet of the great masters of Italy, and arose from their
feet to share their throne--I know not that in the whole history of art
you can produce another instance of so strong, so unaided, so unerring
an instinct for all that was true, pure, and noble.

Now, do you recollect the evidence respecting the character of this
man,--the two points of bright peculiar evidence given by the sayings
of the two greatest literary men of his day, Johnson and Goldsmith?
Johnson, who, as you know, was always Reynolds' attached friend, had
but one complaint to make against him, that he hated nobody:--
"Reynolds," he said, "you hate no one living; I like a good hater!"
Still more significant is the little touch in Goldsmith's
"Retaliation." You recollect how in that poem he describes the various
persons who met at one of their dinners at St. James's Coffee-house,
each person being described under the name of some appropriate dish.
You will often hear the concluding lines about Reynolds Quoted--

                  "He shifted his trumpet," &c;--

less often, or at least less attentively, the preceding ones, far more
important--

        "Still born to improve us in every part--
         His pencil our faces, his _manners our heart;_"

and never, the most characteristic touch of all, near the beginning:--

        "Our dean shall be venison, just fresh from the plains;
         Our Burke shall be tongue, with a garnish of brains.
         To make out the dinner, full certain I am,
         That Rich is anchovy, and Reynolds is _lamb_."

The other painter whom I would give you as an instance of this
gentleness is a man of another nation, on the whole I suppose one of
the most cruel civilized nations in the world--the Spaniards. They
produced but one great painter, only one; but he among the very
greatest of painters, Velasquez. You would not suppose, from looking at
Velasquez' portraits generally, that he was an especially kind or good
man; you perceive a peculiar sternness about them; for they were as
true as steel, and the persons whom he had to paint being not generally
kind or good people, they were stern in expression, and Velasquez gave
the sternness; but he had precisely the same intense perception of
truth, the same marvellous instinct for the rendering of all natural
soul and all natural form that our Reynolds had. Let me, then, read you
his character as it is given by Mr. Stirling, of Kier:--

"Certain charges, of what nature we are not informed, brought against
him after his death, made it necessary for his executor, Fuensalida, to
refute them at a private audience granted to him by the king for that
purpose. After listening to the defence of his friend, Philip
immediately made answer: 'I can believe all you say of the excellent
disposition of Diego Velasquez.' Having lived for half his life in
courts, he was yet capable both of gratitude and generosity, and in the
misfortunes, he could remember the early kindness of Olivares. The
friend of the exile of Loeches, it is just to believe that he was also
the friend of the all-powerful favourite at Buenretiro. No mean
jealousy ever influenced his conduct to his brother artists; he could
afford not only to acknowledge the merits, but to forgive the malice,
of his rivals. His character was of that _rare and happy kind, in
which high intellectual power is combined with indomitable strength of
will, and a winning sweetness of temper_, and which seldom fails to
raise the possessor above his fellow-men, making his life a

               'laurelled victory, and smooth success
                Be strewed before his feet.'"

I am sometimes accused of trying to make art too moral; yet, observe, I
do not say in the least that in order to be a good painter you must be
a good man; but I do say that in order to be a good natural painter
there must be strong elements of good in the mind, however warped by
other parts of the character. There are hundreds of other gifts of
painting which are not at all involved with moral conditions, but this
one, the perception of nature, is never given but under certain moral
conditions. Therefore, now you have it in your choice; here are your
two paths for you: it is required of you to produce conventional
ornament, and you may approach the task as the Hindoo does, and as the
Arab did,--without nature at all, with the chance of approximating your
disposition somewhat to that of the Hindoos and Arabs; or as Sir Joshua
and Velasquez did, with, not the chance, but the certainty, of
approximating your disposition, according to the sincerity of your
effort--to the disposition of those great and good men.

And do you suppose you will lose anything by approaching your
conventional art from this higher side? Not so. I called, with
deliberate measurement of my expression, long ago, the decoration of
the Alhambra "detestable," not merely because indicative of base
conditions of moral being, but because merely as decorative work,
however captivating in some respects, it is wholly wanting in the real,
deep, and intense qualities of ornamental art. Noble conventional
decoration belongs only to three periods. First, there is the
conventional decoration of the Greeks, used in subordination to their
sculpture. There are then the noble conventional decoration of the
early Gothic schools, and the noble conventional arabesque of the great
Italian schools. All these were reached from above, all reached by
stooping from a knowledge of the human form. Depend upon it you will
find, as you look more and more into the matter, that good subordinate
ornament has ever been rooted in a higher knowledge; and if you are
again to produce anything that is noble, you must have the higher
knowledge first, and descend to all lower service; condescend as much
as you like,--condescension never does any man any harm,--but get your
noble standing first. So, then, without any scruple, whatever branch of
art you may be inclined as a student here to follow,--whatever you are
to make your bread by, I say, so far as you have time and power, make
yourself first a noble and accomplished artist; understand at least
what noble and accomplished art is, and then you will be able to apply
your knowledge to all service whatsoever.

I am now going to ask your permission to name the masters whom I think
it would be well if we could agree, in our Schools of Art in England,
to consider our leaders. The first and chief I will not myself presume
to name; he shall be distinguished for you by the authority of those
two great painters of whom we have just been speaking--Reynolds and
Velasquez. You may remember that in your Manchester Art Treasures
Exhibition the most impressive things were the works of those two men--
nothing told upon the eye so much; no other pictures retained it with
such a persistent power. Now, I have the testimony, first of Reynolds
to Velasquez, and then of Velasquez to the man whom I want you to take
as the master of all your English schools. The testimony of Reynolds to
Velasquez is very striking. I take it from some fragments which have
just been published by Mr. William Cotton--precious fragments--of
Reynolds' diaries, which I chanced upon luckily as I was coming down
here: for I was going to take Velasquez' testimony alone, and then fell
upon this testimony of Reynolds to Velasquez, written most fortunately
in Reynolds' own hand-you may see the manuscript. "What _we_ are
all," said Reynolds, "attempting to do with great labor, Velasquez does
at once." Just think what is implied when a man of the enormous power
and facility that Reynolds had, says he was "trying to do with great
labor" what Velasquez "did at once."

Having thus Reynolds' testimony to Velasquez, I will take Velasquez'
testimony to somebody else. You know that Velasquez was sent by Philip
of Spain to Italy, to buy pictures for him. He went all over Italy, saw
the living artists there, and all their best pictures when freshly
painted, so that he had every opportunity of judging; and never was a
man so capable of judging. He went to Rome and ordered various works of
living artists; and while there, he was one day asked by Salvator Rosa
what he thought of Raphael. His reply, and the ensuing conversation,
are thus reported by Boschini, in curious Italian verse, which, thus
translated by Dr. Donaldson, is quoted in Mr. Stirling's Life of
Velasquez:--

          "The master" [Velasquez] "stiffly bowed his figure tall
             And said, 'For Rafael, to speak the truth--
             I always was plain-spoken from my youth--
           I cannot say I like his works at all.'

          "'Well,' said the other" [Salvator], 'if you can run down
             So great a man, I really cannot see
             What you can find to like in Italy;
           To him we all agree to give the crown.'

          "Diego answered thus: 'I saw in Venice
             The true test of the good and beautiful;
             First in my judgment, ever stands that school,
           And Titian first of all Italian men is.'"

          "_Tizian ze quel die porta la bandiera_"

Learn that line by heart and act, at all events for some time to come,
upon Velasquez' opinion in that matter. Titian is much the safest
master for you. Raphael's power, such as it characters in his mind; it
is "Raphaelesque," properly so called; but Titian's power is simply the
power of doing right. Whatever came before Titian, he did wholly as it
_ought_ to be done. Do not suppose that now in recommending Titian
to you so strongly, and speaking of nobody else to-night, I am
retreating in anywise from what some of you may perhaps recollect in my
works, the enthusiasm with which I have always spoken of another
Venetian painter. There are three Venetians who are never separated in
my mind--Titian, Veronese, and Tintoret. They all have their own
unequalled gifts, and Tintoret especially has imagination and depth of
soul which I think renders him indisputably the greatest man; but,
equally indisputably, Titian is the greatest painter; and therefore the
greatest painter who ever lived. You may be led wrong by Tintoret
[Footnote: See Appendix I.--"Right and Wrong."] in many respects, wrong
by Raphael in more; all that you learn from Titian will be right. Then,
with Titian, take Leonardo, Rembrandt, and Albert Dürer. I name those
three masters for this reason: Leonardo has powers of subtle drawing
which are peculiarly applicable in many ways to the drawing of fine
ornament, and are very useful for all students. Rembrandt and Dürer are
the only men whose actual work of hand you can have to look at; you can
have Rembrandt's etchings, or Dürer's engravings actually hung in your
schools; and it is a main point for the student to see the real thing,
and avoid judging of masters at second-hand. As, however, in obeying
this principle, you cannot often have opportunities of studying
Venetian painting, it is desirable that you should have a useful
standard of colour, and I think it is possible for you to obtain this.
I cannot, indeed, without entering upon ground which might involve the
hurting the feelings of living artists, state exactly what I believe to
be the relative position of various painters in England at present with
respect to power of colour. But I may say this, that in the peculiar
gifts of colour which will be useful to you as students, there are only
one or two of the pre-Raphaelites, and William Hunt, of the old Water
Colour Society, who would be safe guides for you: and as quite a safe
guide, there is nobody but William Hunt, because the pre-Raphaelites
are all more or less affected by enthusiasm and by various morbid
conditions of intellect and temper; but old William Hunt--I am sorry to
say "old," but I say it in a loving way, for every year that has added
to his life has added also to his skill--William Hunt is as right as
the Venetians, as far as he goes, and what is more, nearly as
inimitable as they. And I think if we manage to put in the principal
schools of England a little bit of Hunt's work, and make that somewhat
of a standard of colour, that we can apply his principles of colouring
to subjects of all kinds. Until you have had a work of his long near
you; nay, unless you have been labouring at it, and trying to copy it,
you do not know the thoroughly grand qualities that are concentrated in
it. Simplicity, and intensity, both of the highest character;--
simplicity of aim, and intensity of power and success, are involved in
that man's unpretending labour.

Finally, you cannot believe that I would omit my own favourite, Turner.
I fear from the very number of his works left to the nation, that there
is a disposition now rising to look upon his vast bequest with some
contempt. I beg of you, if in nothing else, to believe me in this, that
you cannot further the art of England in any way more distinctly than
by giving attention to every fragment that has been left by that man.
The time will come when his full power and right place will be
acknowledged; that time will not be for many a day yet: nevertheless,
be assured--as far as you are inclined to give the least faith to
anything I may say to you, be assured--that you can act for the good of
art in England in no better way than by using whatever influence any of
you have in any direction to urge the reverent study and yet more
reverent preservation of the works of Turner. I do not say "the
exhibition" of his works, for we are not altogether ripe for it: they
are still too far above us; uniting, as I was telling you, too many
qualities for us yet to feel fully their range and their influence;--
but let us only try to keep them safe from harm, and show thoroughly
and conveniently what we show of them at all, and day by day their
greatness will dawn upon us more and more, and be the root of a school
of art in England, which I do not doubt may be as bright, as just, and
as refined as even that of Venice herself. The dominion of the sea
seems to have been associated, in past time, with dominion in the arts
also: Athens had them together; Venice had them together; but by so
much as our authority over the ocean is wider than theirs over the
Ægean or Adriatic, let us strive to make our art more widely beneficent
than theirs, though it cannot be more exalted; so working out the
fulfilment, in their wakening as well as their warning sense, of those
great words of the aged Tintoret:

                    "Sempre si fa il mare maggiore."




LECTURE III.

MODERN MANUFACTURE AND DESIGN.

_A Lecture delivered at Bradford, March, 1859_.


It is with a deep sense of necessity for your indulgence that I venture
to address you to-night, or that I venture at any time to address the
pupils of schools of design intended for the advancement of taste in
special branches of manufacture. No person is able to give useful and
definite help towards such special applications of art, unless he is
entirely familiar with the conditions of labour and natures of material
involved in the work; and indefinite help is little better than no help
at all. Nay, the few remarks which I propose to lay before you this
evening will, I fear, be rather suggestive of difficulties than helpful
in conquering them: nevertheless, it may not be altogether
unserviceable to define clearly for you (and this, at least, I am able
to do) one or two of the more stern general obstacles which stand at
present in the way of our success in design; and to warn you against
exertion of effort in any vain or wasteful way, till these main
obstacles are removed.

The first of these is our not understanding the scope and dignity of
Decorative design. With all our talk about it, the very meaning of the
words "Decorative art" remains confused and undecided. I want, if
possible, to settle this question for you to-night, and to show you
that the principles on which you must work are likely to be false, in
proportion as they are narrow; true, only as they are founded on a
perception of the connection of all branches of art with each other.

Observe, then, first--the only essential distinction between Decorative
and other art is the being fitted for a fixed place; and in that place,
related, either in subordination or command, to the effect of other
pieces of art. And all the greatest art which the world has produced is
thus fitted for a place, and subordinated to a purpose. There is no
existing highest-order art but is decorative. The best sculpture yet
produced has been the decoration of a temple front--the best painting,
the decoration of a room. Raphael's best doing is merely the wall-
colouring of a suite of apartments in the Vatican, and his cartoons
were made for tapestries. Correggio's best doing is the decoration of
two small church cupolas at Parma; Michael Angelo's of a ceiling in the
Pope's private chapel; Tintoret's, of a ceiling and side wall belonging
to a charitable society at Venice; while Titian and Veronese threw out
their noblest thoughts, not even on the inside, but on the outside of
the common brick and plaster walls of Venice.

Get rid, then, at once of any idea of Decorative art being a degraded
or a separate kind of art. Its nature or essence is simply its being
fitted for a definite place; and, in that place, forming part of a
great and harmonious whole, in companionship with other art; and so far
from this being a degradation to it--so far from Decorative art being
inferior to other art because it is fixed to a spot--on the whole it
may be considered as rather a piece of degradation that it should be
portable. Portable art--independent of all place--is for the most part
ignoble art. Your little Dutch landscape, which you put over your
sideboard to-day, and between the windows tomorrow, is a far more
contemptible piece of work than the extents of field and forest with
which Benozzo has made green and beautiful the once melancholy arcade
of the Campo Santo at Pisa; and the wild boar of silver which you use
for a seal, or lock into a velvet case, is little likely to be so noble
a beast as the bronze boar who foams forth the fountain from under his
tusks in the market-place of Florence. It is, indeed, possible that the
portable picture or image may be first-rate of its kind, but it is not
first-rate because it is portable; nor are Titian's frescoes less than
first-rate because they are fixed; nay, very frequently the highest
compliment you can pay to a cabinet picture is to say--"It is as grand
as a fresco."

Keeping, then, this fact fixed in our minds,--that all art _may_
be decorative, and that the greatest art yet produced has been
decorative,--we may proceed to distinguish the orders and dignities of
decorative art, thus:--

I. The first order of it is that which is meant for places where it
cannot be disturbed or injured, and where it can be perfectly seen; and
then the main parts of it should be, and have always been made, by the
great masters, as perfect, and as full of nature as possible.

You will every day hear it absurdly said that room decoration should be
by flat patterns--by dead colours--by conventional monotonies, and I
know not what. Now, just be assured of this--nobody ever yet used
conventional art to decorate with, when he could do anything better,
and knew that what he did would be safe. Nay, a great painter will
always give you the natural art, safe or not. Correggio gets a
commission to paint a room on the ground floor of a palace at Parma:
any of our people--bred on our fine modern principles--would have
covered it with a diaper, or with stripes or flourishes, or mosaic
patterns. Not so Correggio: he paints a thick trellis of vine-leaves,
with oval openings, and lovely children leaping through them into the
room; and lovely children, depend upon it, are rather more desirable
decorations than diaper, if you can do them--but they are not quite so
easily done. In like manner Tintoret has to paint the whole end of the
Council Hall at Venice. An orthodox decorator would have set himself to
make the wall look like a wall--Tintoret thinks it would be rather
better, if he can manage it, to make it look a little like Paradise;--
stretches his canvas right over the wall, and his clouds right over his
canvas; brings the light through his clouds--all blue and clear--zodiac
beyond zodiac; rolls away the vaporous flood from under the feet of
saints, leaving them at last in infinitudes of light--unorthodox in the
last degree, but, on the whole, pleasant.

And so in all other cases whatever, the greatest decorative art is
wholly unconventional--downright, pure, good painting and sculpture,
but always fitted for its place; and subordinated to the purpose it has
to serve in that place.

II. But if art is to be placed where it is liable to injury--to wear
and tear; or to alteration of its form; as, for instance, on domestic
utensils, and armour, and weapons, and dress; in which either the
ornament will be worn out by the usage of the thing, or will be cast
into altered shape by the play of its folds; then it is wrong to put
beautiful and perfect art to such uses, and you want forms of inferior
art, such as will be by their simplicity less liable to injury; or, by
reason of their complexity and continuousness, may show to advantage,
however distorted by the folds they are cast into.

And thus arise the various forms of inferior decorative art, respecting
which the general law is, that the lower the place and office of the
thing, the less of natural or perfect form you should have in it; a
zigzag or a chequer is thus a better, because a more consistent
ornament for a cup or platter than a landscape or portrait is: hence
the general definition of the true forms of conventional ornament is,
that they consist in the bestowal of as much beauty on the object as
shall be consistent with its Material, its Place, and its Office.

Let us consider these three modes of consistency a little.

(A.) Conventionalism by cause of inefficiency of material.

If, for instance, we are required to represent a human figure with
stone only, we cannot represent its colour; we reduce its colour to
whiteness. That is not elevating the human body, but degrading it; only
it would be a much greater degradation to give its colour falsely.
Diminish beauty as much as you will, but do not misrepresent it. So
again, when we are sculpturing a face, we can't carve its eyelashes.
The face is none the better for wanting its eyelashes--it is injured by
the want; but would be much more injured by a clumsy representation of
them.

Neither can we carve the hair. We must be content with the
conventionalism of vile solid knots and lumps of marble, instead of the
golden cloud that encompasses the fair human face with its waving
mystery. The lumps of marble are not an elevated representation of
hair--they are a degraded one; yet better than any attempt to imitate
hair with the incapable material.

In all cases in which such imitation is attempted, instant degradation
to a still lower level is the result. For the effort to imitate shows
that the workman has only a base and poor conception of the beauty of
the reality--else he would know his task to be hopeless, and give it up
at once; so that all endeavours to avoid conventionalism, when the
material demands it, result from insensibility to truth, and are among
the worst forms of vulgarity. Hence, in the greatest Greek statues, the
hair is very slightly indicated--not because the sculptor disdained
hair, but because he knew what it was too well to touch it insolently.
I do not doubt but that the Greek painters drew hair exactly as Titian
does. Modern attempts to produce finished pictures on glass result from
the same base vulgarism. No man who knows what painting means, can
endure a painted glass window which emulates painter's work. But he
rejoices in a glowing mosaic of broken colour: for that is what the
glass has the special gift and right of producing. [Footnote: See
Appendix II., Sir Joshua Reynolds's disappointment.]

(B.) Conventionalism by cause of inferiority of place.

When work is to be seen at a great distance, or in dark places, or in
some other imperfect way, it constantly becomes necessary to treat it
coarsely or severely, in order to make it effective. The statues on
cathedral fronts, in good times of design, are variously treated
according to their distances: no fine execution is put into the
features of the Madonna who rules the group of figures above the south
transept of Rouen at 150 feet above the ground; but in base modern
work, as Milan Cathedral, the sculpture is finished without any
reference to distance; and the merit of every statue is supposed to
consist in the visitor's being obliged to ascend three hundred steps
before he can see it.

(C.) Conventionalism by cause of inferiority of office.

When one piece of ornament is to be subordinated to another (as the
moulding is to the sculpture it encloses, or the fringe of a drapery to
the statue it veils), this inferior ornament needs to be degraded in
order to mark its lower office; and this is best done by refusing, more
or less, the introduction of natural form. The less of nature it
contains, the more degraded is the ornament, and the fitter for a
humble place; but, however far a great workman may go in refusing the
higher organisms of nature, he always takes care to retain the
magnificence of natural lines; that is to say, of the infinite curves,
such as I have analyzed in the fourth volume of "Modern Painters." His
copyists, fancying that they can follow him without nature, miss
precisely the essence of all the work; so that even the simplest piece
of Greek conventional ornament loses the whole of its value in any
modern imitation of it, the finer curves being always missed. Perhaps
one of the dullest and least justifiable mistakes which have yet been
made about my writing, is the supposition that I have attacked or
despised Greek work. I have attacked Palladian work, and modern
imitation of Greek work. Of Greek work itself I have never spoken but
with a reverence quite infinite: I name Phidias always in exactly the
same tone with which I speak of Michael Angelo, Titian, and Dante. My
first statement of this faith, now thirteen years ago, was surely clear
enough. "We shall see by this light three colossal images standing up
side by side, looming in their great rest of spirituality above the
whole world horizon. Phidias, Michael Angelo, and Dante,--from these we
may go down step by step among the mighty men of every age, securely
and certainly observant of diminished lustre in every appearance of
restlessness and effort, until the last trace of inspiration vanishes
in the tottering affectation or tortured insanities of modern times."
("Modern Painters," vol. ii., p. 253.) This was surely plain speaking
enough, and from that day to this my effort has been not less
continually to make the heart of Greek work known than the heart of
Gothic: namely, the nobleness of conception of form derived from
perpetual study of the figure; and my complaint of the modern architect
has been not that he followed the Greeks, but that he denied the first
laws of life in theirs as in all other art.

The fact is, that all good subordinate forms of ornamentation ever yet
existent in the world have been invented, and others as beautiful can
only be invented, by men primarily exercised in drawing or carving the
human figure. I will not repeat here what I have already twice insisted
upon, to the students of London and Manchester, respecting the
degradation of temper and intellect which follows the pursuit of art
without reference to natural form, as among the Asiatics: here, I will
only trespass on your patience so far as to mark the inseparable
connection between figure-drawing and good ornamental work, in the
great European schools, and all that are connected with them.

Tell me, then, first of all, what ornamental work is usually put before
our students as the type of decorative perfection? Raphael's
arabesques; are they not? Well, Raphael knew a little about the figure,
I suppose, before he drew them. I do not say that I like those
arabesques; but there are certain qualities in them which are
inimitable by modern designers; and those qualities are just the fruit
of the master's figure study. What is given the student as next to
Raphael's work? Cinquecento ornament generally. Well, cinquecento
generally, with its birds, and cherubs, and wreathed foliage, and
clustered fruit, was the amusement of men who habitually and easily
carved the figure, or painted it. All the truly fine specimens of it
have figures or animals as main parts of the design.

"Nay, but," some anciently or mediævally minded person will exclaim,
"we don't want to study cinquecento. We want severer, purer
conventionalism." What will you have? Egyptian ornament? Why, the whole
mass of it is made up of multitudinous human figures in every kind of
action--and magnificent action; their kings drawing their bows in their
chariots, their sheaves of arrows rattling at their shoulders; the
slain falling under them as before a pestilence; their captors driven
before them in astonied troops; and do you expect to imitate Egyptian
ornament without knowing how to draw the human figure? Nay, but you
will take Christian ornament--purest mediaeval Christian--thirteenth
century! Yes: and do you suppose you will find the Christian less
human? The least natural and most purely conventional ornament of the
Gothic schools is that of their painted glass; and do you suppose
painted glass, in the fine times, was ever wrought without figures? We
have got into the way, among our other modern wretchednesses, of trying
to make windows of leaf diapers, and of strips of twisted red and
yellow bands, looking like the patterns of currant jelly on the top of
Christmas cakes; but every casement of old glass contained a saint's
history. The windows of Bourges, Chartres, or Rouen have ten, fifteen,
or twenty medallions in each, and each medallion contains two figures
at least, often six or seven, representing every event of interest in
the history of the saint whose life is in question. Nay, but, you say
those figures are rude and quaint, and ought not to be imitated. Why,
so is the leafage rude and quaint, yet you imitate that. The coloured
border pattern of geranium or ivy leaf is not one whit better drawn, or
more like geraniums and ivy, than the figures are like figures; but you
call the geranium leaf idealized--why don't you call the figures so?
The fact is, neither are idealized, but both are conventionalized on
the same principles, and in the same way; and if you want to learn how
to treat the leafage, the only way is to learn first how to treat the
figure. And you may soon test your powers in this respect. Those old
workmen were not afraid of the most familiar subjects. The windows of
Chartres were presented by the trades of the town, and at the bottom of
each window is a representation of the proceedings of the tradesmen at
the business which enabled them to pay for the window. There are smiths
at the forge, curriers at their hides, tanners looking into their pits,
mercers selling goods over the counter--all made into beautiful
medallions. Therefore, whenever you want to know whether you have got
any real power of composition or adaptation in ornament, don't be
content with sticking leaves together by the ends,--anybody can do
that; but try to conventionalize a butcher's or a greengrocer's, with
Saturday night customers buying cabbage and beef. That will tell you if
you can design or not.

I can fancy your losing patience with me altogether just now. "We asked
this fellow down to tell our workmen how to make shawls, and he is only
trying to teach them how to caricature." But have a little patience
with me, and examine, after I have done, a little for yourselves into
the history of ornamental art, and you will discover why I do this. You
will discover, I repeat, that all great ornamental art whatever is
founded on the effort of the workman to draw the figure, and, in the
best schools, to draw all that he saw about him in living nature. The
best art of pottery is acknowledged to be that of Greece, and all the
power of design exhibited in it, down to the merest zigzag, arises
primarily from the workman having been forced to outline nymphs and
knights; from those helmed and draped figures he holds his power. Of
Egyptian ornament I have just spoken. You have everything given there
that the workman saw; people of his nation employed in hunting,
fighting, fishing, visiting, making love, building, cooking--everything
they did is drawn, magnificently or familiarly, as was needed. In
Byzantine ornament, saints, or animals which are types of various
spiritual power, are the main subjects; and from the church down to the
piece of enamelled metal, figure,--figure,--figure, always principal.
In Norman and Gothic work you have, with all their quiet saints, also
other much disquieted persons, hunting, feasting, fighting, and so on;
or whole hordes of animals racing after each other. In the Bayeux
tapestry, Queen Matilda gave, as well as she could,--in many respects
graphically enough,--the whole history of the conquest of England.
Thence, as you increase in power of art, you have more and more
finished figures, up to the solemn sculptures of Wells Cathedral, or
the cherubic enrichments of the Venetian Madonna dei Miracoli.
Therefore, I will tell you fearlessly, for I know it is true, you must
raise your workman up to life, or you will never get from him one line
of well-imagined conventionalism. We have at present no good ornamental
design. We can't have it yet, and we must be patient if we want to have
it. Do not hope to feel the effect of your schools at once, but raise
the men as high as you can, and then let them stoop as low as you need;
no great man ever minds stooping. Encourage the students, in sketching
accurately and continually from nature anything that comes in their
way--still life, flowers, animals; but, above all, figures; and so far
as you allow of any difference between an artist's training and theirs,
let it be, not in what they draw, but in the degree of conventionalism
you require in the sketch.

For my own part, I should always endeavour to give thorough artistical
training first; but I am not certain (the experiment being yet untried)
what results may be obtained by a truly intelligent practice of
conventional drawing, such as that of the Egyptians, Greeks, or
thirteenth century French, which consists in the utmost possible
rendering of natural form by the fewest possible lines. The animal and
bird drawing of the Egyptians is, in their fine age, quite magnificent
under its conditions; magnificent in two ways--first, in keenest
perception of the main forms and facts in the creature; and, secondly,
in the grandeur of line by which their forms are abstracted and
insisted on, making every asp, ibis, and vulture a sublime spectre of
asp or ibis or vulture power. The way for students to get some of this
gift again (_some_ only, for I believe the fulness of the gift
itself to be connected with vital superstition, and with resulting
intensity of reverence; people were likely to know something about
hawks and ibises, when to kill one was to be irrevocably judged to
death) is never to pass a day without drawing some animal from the
life, allowing themselves the fewest possible lines and colours to do
it with, but resolving that whatever is characteristic of the animal
shall in some way or other be shown. [Footnote: Plate 75 in Vol. V. of
Wilkinson's "Ancient Egypt" will give the student an idea of how to set
to work.] I repeat, it cannot yet be judged what results might be
obtained by a nobly practised conventionalism of this kind; but,
however that may be, the first fact,--the necessity of animal and
figure drawing, is absolutely certain, and no person who shrinks from
it will ever become a great designer.

One great good arises even from the first step in figure drawing, that
it gets the student quit at once of the notion of formal symmetry. If
you learn only to draw a leaf well, you are taught in some of our
schools to turn it the other way, opposite to itself; and the two
leaves set opposite ways are called "a design:" and thus it is supposed
possible to produce ornamentation, though you have no more brains than
a looking-glass or a kaleidoscope has. But if you once learn to draw
the human figure, you will find that knocking two men's heads together
does not necessarily constitute a good design; nay, that it makes a
very bad design, or no design at all; and you will see at once that to
arrange a group of two or more figures, you must, though perhaps it may
be desirable to balance, or oppose them, at the same time vary their
attitudes, and make one, not the reverse of the other, but the
companion of the other.

I had a somewhat amusing discussion on this subject with a friend, only
the other day; and one of his retorts upon me was so neatly put, and
expresses so completely all that can either be said or shown on the
opposite side, that it is well worth while giving it you exactly in the
form it was sent to me. My friend had been maintaining that the essence
of ornament consisted in three things:--contrast, series, and symmetry.
I replied (by letter) that "none of them, nor all of them together,
would produce ornament. Here"--(making a ragged blot with the back of
my pen on the paper)--"you have contrast; but it isn't ornament: here,
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,"--(writing the numerals)--"You have series; but it
isn't ornament: and here,"--(sketching a rough but symmetrical "stick-
figure" sketch of a human body at the side)--"you have symmetry; but it
isn't ornament."

My friend replied:--

"Your materials were not ornament, because you did not apply them. I
send them to you back, made up into a choice sporting neckerchief:"

[Illustration: Sketch of a square of cloth decorated with a diagonal
grid pattern of stick-figure human forms, with repeated and reflected
ink-blot shapes at the corners and the digits 1 through 6 arranged into
simple symmetrical shapes and repeated around the border.]

               Symmetrical figure         Unit of diaper.
               Contrast                   Corner ornaments.
               Series                     Border ornaments.

"Each figure is converted into a harmony by being revolved on its two
axes, the whole opposed in contrasting series."

My answer was--or rather was to the effect (for I must expand it a
little, here)--that his words, "because you did not apply them,"
contained the gist of the whole matter;--that the application of them,
or any other things, was precisely the essence of design; the non-
application, or wrong application, the negation of design: that his use
of the poor materials was in this case admirable; and that if he could
explain to me, in clear words, the principles on which he had so used
them, he would be doing a very great service to all students of art.

"Tell me, therefore (I asked), these main points:

"1. How did you determine the number of figures you would put into the
neckerchief? Had there been more, it would have been mean and
ineffective,--a pepper-and-salt sprinkling of figures. Had there been
fewer, it would have been monstrous. How did you fix the number?

"2. How did you determine the breadth of the border and relative size
of the numerals?

"3. Why are there two lines outside of the border, and one only inside?
Why are there no more lines? Why not three and two, or three and five?
Why lines at all to separate the barbarous figures; and why, if lines
at all, not double or treble instead of single?

"4. Why did you put the double blots at the corners? Why not at the
angles of the chequers,--or in the middle of the border?

"It is precisely your knowing why _not_ to do these things, and
why to do just what you have done, which constituted your power of
design; and like all the people I have ever known who had that power,
you are entirely unconscious of the essential laws by which you work,
and confuse other people by telling them that the design depends on
symmetry and series, when, in fact, it depends entirely on your own
sense and judgment."

This was the substance of my last answer--to which (as I knew
beforehand would be the case) I got no reply; but it still remains to
be observed that with all the skill and taste (especially involving the
architect's great trust, harmony of proportion), which my friend could
bring to bear on the materials given him, the result is still only--a
sporting neckerchief--that is to say, the materials addressed, first,
to recklessness, in the shape of a mere blot; then to computativeness
in a series of figures; and then to absurdity and ignorance, in the
shape of an ill-drawn caricature--such materials, however treated, can
only work up into what will please reckless, computative, and vulgar
persons,--that is to say, into a sporting neckerchief. The difference
between this piece of ornamentation and Correggio's painting at Parma
lies simply and wholly in the additions (somewhat large ones), of truth
and of tenderness: in the drawing being lovely as well as symmetrical--
and representative of realities as well as agreeably disposed. And
truth, tenderness, and inventive application or disposition are indeed
the roots of ornament--not contrast, nor symmetry.

It ought yet farther to be observed, that _the nobler the materials,
the less their symmetry is endurable_. In the present case, the
sense of fitness and order, produced by the repetition of the figures,
neutralizes, in some degree, their reckless vulgarity; and is wholly,
therefore, beneficent to them. But draw the figures better, and their
repetition will become painful. You may harmlessly balance a mere
geometrical form, and oppose one quatrefoil or cusp by another exactly
like it. But put two Apollo Belvideres back to back, and you will not
think the symmetry improves them. _Whenever the materials of ornament
are noble, they must be various_; and repetition of parts is either
the sign of utterly bad, hopeless, and base work; or of the intended
degradation of the parts in which such repetition is allowed, in order
to foil others more noble.

Such, then, are a few of the great principles, by the enforcement of
which you may hope to promote the success of the modern student of
design; but remember, none of these principles will be useful at all,
unless you understand them to be, in one profound and stern sense,
useless. [Footnote: I shall endeavour for the future to put my self-
contradictions in short sentences and direct terms, in order to save
sagacious persons the trouble of looking for them.]

That is to say, unless you feel that neither you nor I, nor any one,
can, in the great ultimate sense, teach anybody how to make a good
design.

If designing _could_ be taught, all the world would learn: as all
the world reads--or calculates. But designing is not to be spelled, nor
summed. My men continually come to me, in my drawing class in London,
thinking I am to teach them what is instantly to enable them to gain
their bread. "Please, sir, show us how to design." "Make designers of
us." And you, I doubt not, partly expect me to tell you to-night how to
make designers of your Bradford youths. Alas! I could as soon tell you
how to make or manufacture an ear of wheat, as to make a good artist of
any kind. I can analyze the wheat very learnedly for you--tell you
there is starch in it, and carbon, and silex. I can give you starch,
and charcoal, and flint; but you are as far from your ear of wheat as
you were before. All that can possibly be done for any one who wants
ears of wheat is to show them where to find grains of wheat, and how to
sow them, and then, with patience, in Heaven's time, the ears will
come--or will perhaps come--ground and weather permitting. So in this
matter of making artists--first you must find your artist in the grain;
then you must plant him; fence and weed the field about him; and with
patience, ground and weather permitting, you may get an artist out of
him--not otherwise. And what I have to speak to you about, tonight, is
mainly the ground and the weather, it being the first and quite most
material question in this matter, whether the ground and weather of
Bradford, or the ground and weather of England in general,--suit wheat.

And observe in the outset, it is not so much what the present
circumstances of England are, as what we wish to make them, that we
have to consider. If you will tell me what you ultimately intend
Bradford to be, perhaps I can tell you what Bradford can ultimately
produce. But you must have your minds clearly made up, and be distinct
in telling me what you do want. At present I don't know what you are
aiming at, and possibly on consideration you may feel some doubt
whether you know yourselves. As matters stand, all over England, as
soon as one mill is at work, occupying two hundred hands, we try, by
means of it, to set another mill at work, occupying four hundred. That
is all simple and comprehensive enough--but what is it to come to? How
many mills do we want? or do we indeed want no end of mills? Let us
entirely understand each other on this point before we go any farther.
Last week, I drove from Rochdale to Bolton Abbey; quietly, in order to
see the country, and certainly it was well worth while. I never went
over a more interesting twenty miles than those between Rochdale and
Burnley. Naturally, the valley has been one of the most beautiful in
the Lancashire hills; one of the far away solitudes, full of old
shepherd ways of life. At this time there are not,--I speak
deliberately, and I believe quite literally,--there are not, I think,
more than a thousand yards of road to be traversed anywhere, without
passing a furnace or mill.

Now, is that the kind of thing you want to come to everywhere? Because,
if it be, and you tell me so distinctly, I think I can make several
suggestions to-night, and could make more if you give me time, which
would materially advance your object. The extent of our operations at
present is more or less limited by the extent of coal and ironstone,
but we have not yet learned to make proper use of our clay. Over the
greater part of England, south of the manufacturing districts, there
are magnificent beds of various kinds of useful clay; and I believe
that it would not be difficult to point out modes of employing it which
might enable us to turn nearly the whole of the south of England into a
brickfield, as we have already turned nearly the whole of the north
into a coal-pit. I say "nearly" the whole, because, as you are
doubtless aware, there are considerable districts in the south composed
of chalk renowned up to the present time for their downs and mutton.
But, I think, by examining carefully into the conceivable uses of
chalk, we might discover a quite feasible probability of turning all
the chalk districts into a limekiln, as we turn the clay districts into
a brickfield. There would then remain nothing but the mountain
districts to be dealt with; but, as we have not yet ascertained all the
uses of clay and chalk, still less have we ascertained those of stone;
and I think, by draining the useless inlets of the Cumberland, Welsh,
and Scotch lakes, and turning them, with their rivers, into navigable
reservoirs and canals, there would be no difficulty in working the
whole of our mountain districts as a gigantic quarry of slate and
granite, from which all the rest of the world might be supplied with
roofing and building stone.

Is this, then, what you want? You are going straight at it at present;
and I have only to ask under what limitations I am to conceive or
describe your final success? Or shall there be no limitations? There
are none to your powers; every day puts new machinery at your disposal,
and increases, with your capital, the vastness of your undertakings.
The changes in the state of this country are now so rapid, that it
would be wholly absurd to endeavour to lay down laws of art education
for it under its present aspect and circumstances; and therefore I must
necessarily ask, how much of it do you seriously intend within the next
fifty years to be coal-pit, brickfield, or quarry? For the sake of
distinctness of conclusion, I will suppose your success absolute: that
from shore to shore the whole of the island is to be set as thick with
chimneys as the masts stand in the docks of Liverpool: and there shall
be no meadows in it; no trees; no gardens; only a little corn grown
upon the housetops, reaped and threshed by steam: that you do not leave
even room for roads, but travel either over the roofs of your mills, on
viaducts; or under their floors, in tunnels: that, the smoke having
rendered the light of the sun unserviceable, you work always by the
light of your own gas: that no acre of English ground shall be without
its shaft and its engine; and therefore, no spot of English ground
left, on which it shall be possible to stand, without a definite and
calculable chance of being blown off it, at any moment, into small
pieces.

Under these circumstances, (if this is to be the future of England,) no
designing or any other development of beautiful art will be possible.
Do not vex your minds, nor waste your money with any thought or effort
in the matter. Beautiful art can only be produced by people who have
beautiful things about them, and leisure to look at them; and unless
you provide some elements of beauty for your workmen to be surrounded
by, you will find that no elements of beauty can be invented by them.

I was struck forcibly by the bearing of this great fact upon our modern
efforts at ornamentation in an afternoon walk, last week, in the
suburbs of one of our large manufacturing towns. I was thinking of the
difference in the effect upon the designer's mind, between the scene
which I then came upon, and the scene which would have presented itself
to the eyes of any designer of the middle ages, when he left his
workshop. Just outside the town I came upon an old English cottage, or
mansion, I hardly know which to call it, set close under the hill, and
beside the river, perhaps built somewhere in the Charles's time, with
mullioned windows and a low arched porch; round which, in the little
triangular garden, one can imagine the family as they used to sit in
old summer times, the ripple of the river heard faintly through the
sweetbrier hedge, and the sheep on the far-off wolds shining in the
evening sunlight. There, uninhabited for many and many a year, it had
been left in unregarded havoc of ruin; the garden-gate still swung
loose to its latch; the garden, blighted utterly into a field of ashes,
not even a weed taking root there; the roof torn into shapeless rents;
the shutters hanging about the windows in rags of rotten wood; before
its gate, the stream which had gladdened it now soaking slowly by,
black as ebony, and thick with curdling scum; the bank above it trodden
into unctuous, sooty slime: far in front of it, between it and the old
hills, the furnaces of the city foaming forth perpetual plague of
sulphurous darkness; the volumes of their storm clouds coiling low over
a waste of grassless fields, fenced from each other, not by hedges, but
by slabs of square stone, like gravestones, riveted together with iron.

That was your scene for the designer's contemplation in his afternoon
walk at Rochdale. Now fancy what was the scene which presented itself,
in his afternoon walk, to a designer of the Gothic school of Pisa--Nino
Pisano, or any of his men.

On each side of a bright river he saw rise a line of brighter palaces,
arched and pillared, and inlaid with deep red porphyry, and with
serpentine; along the quays before their gates were riding troops of
knights, noble in face and form, dazzling in crest and shield; horse
and man one labyrinth of quaint colour and gleaming light--the purple,
and silver, and scarlet fringes flowing over the strong limbs and
clashing mail, like sea-waves over rocks at sunset. Opening on each
side from the river were gardens, courts, and cloisters; long
successions of white pillars among wreaths of vine; leaping of
fountains through buds of pomegranate and orange: and still along the
garden-paths, and under and through the crimson of the pomegranate
shadows, moving slowly, groups of the fairest women that Italy ever
saw--fairest, because purest and thoughtfullest; trained in all high
knowledge, as in all courteous art--in dance, in song, in sweet wit, in
lofty learning, in loftier courage, in loftiest love--able alike to
cheer, to enchant, or save, the souls of men. Above all this scenery of
perfect human life, rose dome and bell-tower, burning with white
alabaster and gold; beyond dome and bell-tower the slopes of mighty
hills, hoary with olive; far in the north, above a purple sea of peaks
of solemn Apennine, the clear, sharp-cloven Carrara mountains sent up
their steadfast flames of marble summit into amber sky; the great sea
itself, scorching with expanse of light, stretching from their feet to
the Gorgonian isles; and over all these, ever present, near or far--
seen through the leaves of vine, or imaged with all its march of clouds
in the Arno's stream, or set with its depth of blue close against the
golden hair and burning cheek of lady and knight,--that untroubled and
sacred sky, which was to all men, in those days of innocent faith,
indeed the unquestioned abode of spirits, as the earth was of men; and
which opened straight through its gates of cloud and veils of dew into
the awfulness of the eternal world;--a heaven in which every cloud that
passed was literally the chariot of an angel, and every ray of its
Evening and Morning streamed from the throne of God.

What think you of that for a school of design?

I do not bring this contrast before you as a ground of hopelessness in
our task; neither do I look for any possible renovation of the Republic
of Pisa, at Bradford, in the nineteenth century; but I put it before
you in order that you may be aware precisely of the kind of difficulty
you have to meet, and may then consider with yourselves how far you can
meet it. To men surrounded by the depressing and monotonous
circumstances of English manufacturing life, depend upon it, design is
simply impossible. This is the most distinct of all the experiences I
have had in dealing with the modern workman. He is intelligent and
ingenious in the highest degree--subtle in touch and keen in sight: but
he is, generally speaking, wholly destitute of designing power. And if
you want to give him the power, you must give him the materials, and
put him in the circumstances for it. Design is not the offspring of
idle fancy: it is the studied result of accumulative observation and
delightful habit. Without observation and experience, no design--
without peace and pleasurableness in occupation, no design--and all the
lecturings, and teachings, and prizes, and principles of art, in the
world, are of no use, so long as you don't surround your men with happy
influences and beautiful things. It is impossible for them to have
right ideas about colour, unless they see the lovely colours of nature
unspoiled; impossible for them to supply beautiful incident and action
in their ornament, unless they see beautiful incident and action in the
world about them. Inform their minds, refine their habits, and you form
and refine their designs; but keep them illiterate, uncomfortable, and
in the midst of unbeautiful things, and whatever they do will still be
spurious, vulgar, and valueless.

I repeat, that I do not ask you nor wish you to build a new Pisa for
them. We don't want either the life or the decorations of the
thirteenth century back again; and the circumstances with which you
must surround your workmen are those simply of happy modern English
life, because the designs you have now to ask for from your workmen are
such as will make modern English life beautiful. All that gorgeousness
of the middle ages, beautiful as it sounds in description, noble as in
many respects it was in reality, had, nevertheless, for foundation and
for end, nothing but the pride of life--the pride of the so-called
superior classes; a pride which supported itself by violence and
robbery, and led in the end to the destruction both of the arts
themselves and the States in which they nourished.

The great lesson of history is, that all the fine arts hitherto--having
been supported by the selfish power of the noblesse, and never having
extended their range to the comfort or the relief of the mass of the
people--the arts, I say, thus practised, and thus matured, have only
accelerated the ruin of the States they adorned; and at the moment
when, in any kingdom, you point to the triumphs of its greatest
artists, you point also to the determined hour of the kingdom's
decline. The names of great painters are like passing bells: in the
name of Velasquez, you hear sounded the fall of Spain; in the name of
Titian, that of Venice; in the name of Leonardo, that of Milan; in the
name of Raphael, that of Rome. And there is profound justice in this;
for in proportion to the nobleness of the power is the guilt of its use
for purposes vain or vile; and hitherto the greater the art, the more
surely has it been used, and used solely, for the decoration of pride,
[Footnote:  Whether religious or profane pride,--chapel or banqueting
room,--is no matter.] or the provoking of sensuality. Another course
lies open to us. We may abandon the hope--or if you like the words
better--we may disdain the temptation, of the pomp and grace of Italy
in her youth. For us there can be no more the throne of marble--for us
no more the vault of gold--but for us there is the loftier and lovelier
privilege of bringing the power and charm of art within the reach of
the humble and the poor; and as the magnificence of past ages failed by
its narrowness and its pride, ours may prevail and continue, by its
universality and its lowliness.

And thus, between the picture of too laborious England, which we
imagined as future, and the picture of too luxurious Italy, which we
remember in the past, there may exist--there will exist, if we do our
duty--an intermediate condition, neither oppressed by labour nor wasted
in vanity--the condition of a peaceful and thoughtful temperance in
aims, and acts, and arts.

We are about to enter upon a period of our world's history in which
domestic life, aided by the arts of peace, will slowly, but at last
entirely, supersede public life and the arts of war. For our own
England, she will not, I believe, be blasted throughout with furnaces;
nor will she be encumbered with palaces. I trust she will keep her
green fields, her cottages, and her homes of middle life; but these
ought to be, and I trust will be enriched with a useful, truthful,
substantial form of art. We want now no more feasts of the gods, nor
martyrdoms of the saints; we have no need of sensuality, no place for
superstition, or for costly insolence. Let us have learned and faithful
historical painting--touching and thoughtful representations of human
nature, in dramatic painting; poetical and familiar renderings of
natural objects and of landscape; and rational, deeply-felt
realizations of the events which are the subjects of our religious
faith. And let these things we want, as far as possible, be scattered
abroad and made accessible to all men.

So also, in manufacture: we require work substantial rather than rich
in make; and refined, rather than splendid in design. Your stuffs need
not be such as would catch the eye of a duchess; but they should be
such as may at once serve the need, and refine the taste, of a
cottager. The prevailing error in English dress, especially among the
lower orders, is a tendency to flimsiness and gaudiness, arising mainly
from the awkward imitation of their superiors. [Footnote: If their
superiors would give them simplicity and economy to imitate, it would,
in the issue, be well for themselves, as well as for those whom they
guide. The typhoid fever of passion for dress, and all other display,
which has struck the upper classes of Europe at this time, is one of
the most dangerous political elements we have to deal with. Its
wickedness I have shown elsewhere (Polit. Economy of Art, p. 62, _et
seq._); but its wickedness is, in the minds of most persons, a
matter of no importance. I wish I had time also to show them its
danger. I cannot enter here into political investigation; but this is a
certain fact, that the wasteful and vain expenses at present indulged
in by the upper classes are hastening the advance of republicanism more
than any other element of modern change. No agitators, no clubs, no
epidemical errors, ever were, or will be, fatal to social order in any
nation. Nothing but the guilt of the upper classes, wanton,
accumulated, reckless, and merciless, ever overthrows them Of such
guilt they have now much to answer for--let them look to it in time.]
It should be one of the first objects of all manufacturers to produce
stuffs not only beautiful and quaint in design, but also adapted for
every-day service, and decorous in humble and secluded life. And you
must remember always that your business, as manufacturers, is to form
the market, as much as to supply it. If, in shortsighted and reckless
eagerness for wealth, you catch at every humour of the populace as it
shapes itself into momentary demand--if, in jealous rivalry with
neighbouring States, or with other producers, you try to attract
attention by singularities, novelties, and gaudinesses--to make every
design an advertisement, and pilfer every idea of a successful
neighbour's, that you may insidiously imitate it, or pompously eclipse
--no good design will ever be possible to you, or perceived by you. You
may, by accident, snatch the market; or, by energy, command it; you may
obtain the confidence of the public, and cause the ruin of opponent
houses; or you may, with equal justice of fortune, be ruined by them.
But whatever happens to you, this, at least, is certain, that the whole
of your life will have been spent in corrupting public taste and
encouraging public extravagance. Every preference you have won by
gaudiness must have been based on the purchaser's vanity; every demand
you have created by novelty has fostered in the consumer a habit of
discontent; and when you retire into inactive life, you may, as a
subject of consolation for your declining years, reflect that precisely
according to the extent of your past operations, your life has been
successful in retarding the arts,--tarnishing the virtues, and
confusing the manners of your country.

But, on the other hand, if you resolve from the first that, so far as
you can ascertain or discern what is best, you will produce what is
best, on an intelligent consideration of the probable tendencies and
possible tastes of the people whom you supply, you may literally become
more influential for all kinds of good than many lecturers on art, or
many treatise-writers on morality. Considering the materials dealt
with, and the crude state of art knowledge at the time, I do not know
that any more wide or effective influence in public taste was ever
exercised than that of the Staffordshire manufacture of pottery under
William Wedgwood, and it only rests with the manufacturer in every
other business to determine whether he will, in like manner, make his
wares educational instruments, or mere drugs of the market. You all
should, be, in a certain sense, authors: you must, indeed, first catch
the public eye, as an author must the public ear; but once gain your
audience, or observance, and as it is in the writer's power
thenceforward to publish what will educate as it amuses--so it is in
yours to publish what will educate as it adorns. Nor is this surely a
subject of poor ambition. I hear it said continually that men are too
ambitious: alas! to me, it seems they are never enough ambitious. How
many are content to be merely the thriving merchants of a state, when
they might be its guides, counsellors, and rulers--wielding powers of
subtle but gigantic beneficence, in restraining its follies while they
supplied its wants. Let such duty, such ambition, be once accepted in
their fulness, and the best glory of European art and of European
manufacture may yet be to come. The paintings of Raphael and of
Buonaroti gave force to the falsehoods of superstition, and majesty to
the imaginations of sin; but the arts of England may have, for their
task, to inform the soul with truth, and touch the heart with
compassion. The steel of Toledo and the silk of Genoa did but give
strength to oppression and lustre to pride: let it be for the furnace
and for the loom of England, as they have already richly earned, still
more abundantly to bestow, comfort on the indigent, civilization on the
rude, and to dispense, through the peaceful homes of nations, the grace
and the preciousness of simple adornment, and useful possession.




LECTURE IV.

INFLUENCE OF IMAGINATION IN ARCHITECTURE

_An Address Delivered to the Members of the Architectural
Association, in Lyon's Inn Hall, 1857._


If we were to be asked abruptly, and required to answer briefly, what
qualities chiefly distinguish great artists from feeble artists, we
should answer, I suppose, first, their sensibility and tenderness;
secondly, their imagination; and thirdly, their industry. Some of us
might, perhaps, doubt the justice of attaching so much importance to
this last character, because we have all known clever men who were
indolent, and dull men who were industrious. But though you may have
known clever men who were indolent, you never knew a great man who was
so; and, during such investigation as I have been able to give to the
lives of the artists whose works are in all points noblest, no fact
ever looms so large upon me--no law remains so steadfast in the
universality of its application, as the fact and law that they are all
great workers: nothing concerning them is matter of more astonishment
than the quantity they have accomplished in the given length of their
life; and when I hear a young man spoken of, as giving promise of high
genius, the first question I ask about him is always--

Does he work?

But though this quality of industry is essential to an artist, it does
not in anywise make an artist; many people are busy, whose doings are
little worth. Neither does sensibility make an artist; since, as I
hope, many can feel both strongly and nobly, who yet care nothing about
art. But the gifts which distinctively mark the artist--_without_
which he must be feeble in life, forgotten in death--_with_ which
he may become one of the shakers of the earth, and one of the signal
lights in heaven--are those of sympathy and imagination. I will not
occupy your time, nor incur the risk of your dissent, by endeavouring
to give any close definition of this last word. We all have a general
and sufficient idea of imagination, and of its work with our hands and
in our hearts: we understand it, I suppose, as the imaging or picturing
of new things in our thoughts; and we always show an involuntary
respect for this power, wherever we can recognize it, acknowledging it
to be a greater power than manipulation, or calculation, or
observation, or any other human faculty. If we see an old woman
spinning at the fireside, and distributing her thread dexterously from
the distaff, we respect her for her manipulation--if we ask her how
much she expects to make in a year, and she answers quickly, we respect
her for her calculation--if she is watching at the same time that none
of her grandchildren fall into the fire, we respect her for her
observation--yet for all this she may still be a commonplace old woman
enough. But if she is all the time telling her grandchildren a fairy
tale out of her head, we praise her for her imagination, and say, she
must be a rather remarkable old woman. Precisely in like manner, if an
architect does his working-drawing well, we praise him for his
manipulation--if he keeps closely within his contract, we praise him
for his honest arithmetic--if he looks well to the laying of his beams,
so that nobody shall drop through the floor, we praise him for his
observation. But he must, somehow, tell us a fairy tale out of his head
beside all this, else we cannot praise him for his imagination, nor
speak of him as we did of the old woman, as being in any wise out of
the common way, a rather remarkable architect. It seemed to me,
therefore, as if it might interest you to-night, if we were to consider
together what fairy tales are, in and by architecture, to be told--what
there is for you to do in this severe art of yours "out of your heads,"
as well as by your hands.

Perhaps the first idea which a young architect is apt to be allured by,
as a head-problem in these experimental days, is its being incumbent
upon him to invent a "new style" worthy of modern civilization in
general, and of England in particular; a style worthy of our engines
and telegraphs; as expansive as steam, and as sparkling as electricity.

But, if there are any of my hearers who have been impressed with this
sense of inventive duty, may I ask them first, whether their plan is
that every inventive architect among us shall invent a new style for
himself, and have a county set aside for his conceptions, or a province
for his practice? Or, must every architect invent a little piece of the
new style, and all put it together at last like a dissected map? And if
so, when the new style is invented, what is to be done next? I will
grant you this Eldorado of imagination--but can you have more than one
Columbus? Or, if you sail in company, and divide the prize of your
discovery and the honour thereof, who is to come after you clustered
Columbuses? to what fortunate islands of style are your architectural
descendants to sail, avaricious of new lands? When our desired style is
invented, will not the best we can all do be simply--to build in it?--
and cannot you now do that in styles that are known? Observe, I grant,
for the sake of your argument, what perhaps many of you know that I
would not grant otherwise--that a new style _can_ be invented. I
grant you not only this, but that it shall be wholly different from any
that was ever practised before. We will suppose that capitals are to be
at the bottom of pillars instead of the top; and that buttresses shall
be on the tops of pinnacles instead of at the bottom; that you roof
your apertures with stones which shall neither be arched nor
horizontal; and that you compose your decoration of lines which shall
neither be crooked nor straight. The furnace and the forge shall be at
your service: you shall draw out your plates of glass and beat out your
bars of iron till you have encompassed us all,--if your style is of the
practical kind,--with endless perspective of black skeleton and
blinding square,--or if your style is to be of the ideal kind--you
shall wreathe your streets with ductile leafage, and roof them with
variegated crystal--you shall put, if you will, all London under one
blazing dome of many colours that shall light the clouds round it with
its flashing, as far as to the sea. And still, I ask you, What after
this? Do you suppose those imaginations of yours will ever lie down
there asleep beneath the shade of your iron leafage, or within the
coloured light of your enchanted dome? Not so. Those souls, and
fancies, and ambitions of yours, are wholly infinite; and, whatever may
be done by others, you will still want to do something for yourselves;
if you cannot rest content with Palladio, neither will you with Paxton:
all the metal and glass that ever were melted have not so much weight
in them as will clog the wings of one human spirit's aspiration.

If you will think over this quietly by yourselves, and can get the
noise out of your ears of the perpetual, empty, idle, incomparably
idiotic talk about the necessity of some novelty in architecture, you
will soon see that the very essence of a Style, properly so called, is
that it should be practised _for ages_, and applied to all
purposes; and that so long as any given style is in practice, all that
is left for individual imagination to accomplish must be within the
scope of that style, not in the invention of a new one. If there are
any here, therefore, who hope to obtain celebrity by the invention of
some strange way of building which must convince all Europe into its
adoption, to them, for the moment, I must not be understood to address
myself, but only to those who would be content with that degree of
celebrity which an artist may enjoy who works in the manner of his
forefathers;--which the builder of Salisbury Cathedral might enjoy in
England, though he did not invent Gothic; and which Titian might enjoy
at Venice, though he did not invent oil painting. Addressing myself
then to those humbler, but wiser, or rather, only wise students who are
content to avail themselves of some system of building already
understood, let us consider together what room for the exercise of the
imagination may be left to us under such conditions. And, first, I
suppose it will be said, or thought, that the architect's principal
field for exercise of his invention must be in the disposition of
lines, mouldings, and masses, in agreeable proportions. Indeed, if you
adopt some styles of architecture, you cannot exercise invention in any
other way. And I admit that it requires genius and special gift to do
this rightly. Not by rule, nor by study, can the gift of graceful
proportionate design be obtained; only by the intuition of genius can
so much as a single tier of façade be beautifully arranged; and the man
has just cause for pride, as far as our gifts can ever be a cause for
pride, who finds himself able, in a design of his own, to rival even
the simplest arrangement of parts in one by Sanmicheli, Inigo Jones, or
Christopher Wren.

Invention, then, and genius being granted, as necessary to accomplish
this, let me ask you, What, after all, with this special gift and
genius, you _have_ accomplished, when you have arranged the lines
of a building beautifully?

In the first place you will not, I think, tell me that the beauty there
attained is of a touching or pathetic kind. A well-disposed group of
notes in music will make you sometimes weep and sometimes laugh. You
can express the depth of all affections by those dispositions of sound:
you can give courage to the soldier, language to the lover, consolation
to the mourner, more joy to the joyful, more humility to the devout.
Can you do as much by your group of lines? Do you suppose the front of
Whitehall, a singularly beautiful one ever inspires the two Horse
Guards, during the hour they sit opposite to it, with military ardour?
Do you think that the lovers in our London walk down to the front of
Whitehall for consolation when mistresses are unkind; or that any
person wavering in duty, or feeble in faith, was ever confirmed in
purpose or in creed by the pathetic appeal of those harmonious
architraves? You will not say so. Then, if they cannot touch, or
inspire, or comfort any one, can your architectural proportions amuse
any one? Christmas is just over; you have doubtless been at many merry
parties during the period. Can you remember any in which architectural
proportions contributed to the entertainment of the evening?
Proportions of notes in music were, I am sure, essential to your
amusement; the setting of flowers in hair, and of ribands on dresses,
were also subjects of frequent admiration with you, not inessential to
your happiness. Among the juvenile members of your society the
proportion of currants in cake, and of sugar in comfits, became
subjects of acute interest; and, when such proportions were harmonious,
motives also of gratitude to cook and to confectioner. But did you ever
see either young or old amused by the architrave of the door? Or
otherwise interested in the proportions of the room than as they
admitted more or fewer friendly faces? Nay, if all the amusement that
there is in the best proportioned architecture of London could be
concentrated into one evening, and you were to issue tickets for
nothing to this great proportional entertainment;--how do you think it
would stand between you and the Drury pantomine?

You are, then, remember, granted to be people of genius--great and
admirable; and you devote your lives to your art, but you admit that
you cannot comfort anybody, you cannot encourage anybody, you cannot
improve anybody, and you cannot amuse anybody. I proceed then farther
to ask, Can you inform anybody? Many sciences cannot be considered as
highly touching or emotional; nay, perhaps not specially amusing;
scientific men may sometimes, in these respects, stand on the same
ground with you. As far as we can judge by the results of the late war,
science helps our soldiers about as much as the front of Whitehall; and
at the Christmas parties, the children wanted no geologists to tell
them about the behaviour of bears and dragons in Queen Elizabeth's
time. Still, your man of science teaches you something; he may be dull
at a party, or helpless in a battle, he is not always that; but he can
give you, at all events, knowledge of noble facts, and open to you the
secrets of the earth and air. Will your architectural proportions do as
much? Your genius is granted, and your life is given, and what do you
teach us?--Nothing, I believe, from one end of that life to the other,
but that two and two make four, and that one is to two as three is to
six.

You cannot, then, it is admitted, comfort any one, serve or amuse any
one, nor teach any one. Finally, I ask, Can you be of _Use_ to any
one? "Yes," you reply; "certainly we are of some use--we architects--in
a climate like this, where it always rains." You are of use certainly;
but, pardon me, only as builders--not as proportionalists. We are not
talking of building as a protection, but only of that special work
which your genius is to do; not of building substantial and comfortable
houses like Mr. Cubitt, but of putting beautiful façades on them like
Inigo Jones. And, again, I ask--Are you of use to any one? Will your
proportions of the façade heal the sick, or clothe the naked? Supposing
you devoted your lives to be merchants, you might reflect at the close
of them, how many, fainting for want, you had brought corn to sustain;
how many, infected with disease, you had brought balms to heal; how
widely, among multitudes of far-away nations, you had scattered the
first seeds of national power, and guided the first rays of sacred
light. Had you been, in fine, _anything_ else in the world
_but_ architectural designers, you might have been of some use or
good to people. Content to be petty tradesmen, you would have saved the
time of mankind;--rough-handed daily labourers, you would have added to
their stock of food or of clothing. But, being men of genius, and
devoting your lives to the exquisite exposition of this genius, on what
achievements do you think the memories of your old age are to fasten?
Whose gratitude will surround you with its glow, or on what
accomplished good, of that greatest kind for which men show _no_
gratitude, will your life rest the contentment of its close? Truly, I
fear that the ghosts of proportionate lines will be thin phantoms at
your bedsides--very speechless to you; and that on all the emanations
of your high genius you will look back with less delight than you might
have done on a cup of cold water given to him who was thirsty, or to a
single moment when you had "prevented with your bread him that fled."

Do not answer, nor think to answer, that with your great works and
great payments of workmen in them, you would do this; I know you would,
and will, as Builders; but, I repeat, it is not your _building_
that I am talking about, but your _brains_; it is your invention
and imagination of whose profit I am speaking. The good done through
the building, observe, is done by your employers, not by you--you share
in the benefit of it. The good that _you_ personally must do is by
your designing; and I compare you with musicians who do good by their
pathetic composing, not as they do good by employing fiddlers in the
orchestra; for it is the public who in reality do that, not the
musicians. So clearly keeping to this one question, what good we
architects are to do by our genius; and having found that on our
proportionate system we can do no good to others, will you tell me,
lastly, what good we can do to _ourselves_?

Observe, nearly every other liberal art or profession has some intense
pleasure connected with it, irrespective of any good to others. As
lawyers, or physicians, or clergymen, you would have the pleasure of
investigation, and of historical reading, as part of your work: as men
of science you would be rejoicing in curiosity perpetually gratified
respecting the laws and facts of nature: as artists you would have
delight in watching the external forms of nature: as day labourers or
petty tradesmen, supposing you to undertake such work with as much
intellect as you are going to devote to your designing, you would find
continued subjects of interest in the manufacture or the agriculture
which you helped to improve; or in the problems of commerce which bore
on your business. But your architectural designing leads you into no
pleasant journeys,--into no seeing of lovely things,--no discerning of
just laws,--no warmths of compassion, no humilities of veneration, no
progressive state of sight or soul. Our conclusion is--must be--that
you will not amuse, nor inform, nor help anybody; you will not amuse,
nor better, nor inform yourselves; you will sink into a state in which
you can neither show, nor feel, nor see, anything, but that one is to
two as three is to six. And in that state what should we call
ourselves? Men? I think not. The right name for us would be--numerators
and denominators. Vulgar Fractions.

Shall we, then, abandon this theory of the soul of architecture being
in proportional lines, and look whether we can find anything better to
exert our fancies upon?

May we not, to begin with, accept this great principle--that, as our
bodies, to be in health, must be _generally_ exercised, so our
minds, to be in health, must be _generally_ cultivated? You would
not call a man healthy who had strong arms but was paralytic in his
feet; nor one who could walk well, but had no use of his hands; nor one
who could see well, if he could not hear. You would not voluntarily
reduce your bodies to any such partially developed state. Much more,
then, you would not, if you could help it, reduce your minds to it.
Now, your minds are endowed with a vast number of gifts of totally
different uses--limbs of mind as it were, which, if you don't exercise,
you cripple. One is curiosity; that is a gift, a capacity of pleasure
in knowing; which if you destroy, you make yourselves cold and dull.
Another is sympathy; the power of sharing in the feelings of living
creatures, which if you destroy, you make yourselves hard and cruel.
Another of your limbs of mind is admiration; the power of enjoying
beauty or ingenuity, which, if you destroy, you make yourselves base
and irreverent. Another is wit; or the power of playing with the lights
on the many sides of truth; which if you destroy, you make yourselves
gloomy, and less useful and cheering to others than you might be. So
that in choosing your way of work it should be your aim, as far as
possible, to bring out all these faculties, as far as they exist in
you; not one merely, nor another, but all of them. And the way to bring
them out, is simply to concern yourselves attentively with the subjects
of each faculty. To cultivate sympathy you must be among living
creatures, and thinking about them; and to cultivate admiration, you
must be among beautiful things and looking at them.

All this sounds much like truism, at least I hope it does, for then you
will surely not refuse to act upon it; and to consider farther, how, as
architects, you are to keep yourselves in contemplation of living
creatures and lovely things.

You all probably know the beautiful photographs which have been
published within the last year or two of the porches of the Cathedral
of Amiens. I hold one of these up to you, (merely that you may know
what I am talking about, as of course you cannot see the detail at this
distance, but you will recognise the subject.) Have you ever considered
how much sympathy, and how much humour, are developed in filling this
single doorway [Footnote: The tympanum of the south transcept door; it
is to be found generally among all collections of architectural
photographs] with these sculptures of the history of St. Honoré (and,
by the way, considering how often we English are now driving up and
down the Rue St. Honoré, we may as well know as much of the saint as
the old architect cared to tell us). You know in all legends of saints
who ever were bishops, the first thing you are told of them is that
they didn't want to be bishops. So here is St. Honoré, who doesn't want
to be a bishop, sitting sulkily in the corner; he hugs his book with
both hands, and won't get up to take his crosier; and here are all the
city aldermen of Amiens come to _poke_ him up; and all the monks
in the town in a great puzzle what they shall do for a bishop if St.
Honoré won't be; and here's one of the monks in the opposite corner who
is quite cool about it, and thinks they'll get on well enough without
St Honoré,--you see that in his face perfectly. At last St. Honoré
consents to be bishop, and here he sits in a throne, and has his book
now grandly on his desk instead of his knees, and he directs one of his
village curates how to find relics in a wood; here is the wood, and
here is the village curate, and here are the tombs, with the bones of
St. Victorien and Gentien in them.

After this, St. Honoré performs grand mass, and the miracle occurs of
the appearance of a hand blessing the wafer, which occurrence
afterwards was painted for the arms of the abbey. Then St. Honoré dies;
and here is his tomb with his statue on the top; and miracles are being
performed at it--a deaf man having his ear touched, and a blind man
groping his way up to the tomb with his dog. Then here is a great
procession in honour of the relics of St. Honoré; and under his coffin
are some cripples being healed; and the coffin itself is put above the
bar which separates the cross from the lower subjects, because the
tradition is that the figure on the crucifix of the Church of St.
Firmin bowed its head in token of acceptance, as the relics of St.
Honoré passed beneath.

Now just consider the amount of sympathy with human nature, and
observance of it, shown in this one bas-relief; the sympathy with
disputing monks, with puzzled aldermen, with melancholy recluse, with
triumphant prelate, with palsy-stricken poverty, with ecclesiastical
magnificence, or miracle-working faith. Consider how much intellect was
needed in the architect, and how much observance of nature before he
could give the expression to these various figures--cast these
multitudinous draperies--design these rich and quaint fragments of
tombs and altars--weave with perfect animation the entangled branches
of the forest.

But you will answer me, all this is not architecture at all--it is
sculpture. Will you then tell me precisely where the separation exists
between one and the other? We will begin at the very beginning. I will
show you a piece of what you will certainly admit to be a piece of pure
architecture; [Footnote: See Appendix III., "Classical Architecture."]
it is drawn on the back of another photograph, another of these
marvellous tympana from Notre Dame, which you call, I suppose, impure.
Well, look on this picture, and on this. Don't laugh; you must not
laugh, that's very improper of you, this is classical architecture. I
have taken it out of the essay on that subject in the "Encyclopædia
Britannica."

Yet I suppose none of you would think yourselves particularly ingenious
architects if you had designed nothing more than this; nay, I will even
let you improve it into any grand proportion you choose, and add to it
as many windows as you choose; the only thing I insist upon in our
specimen of pure architecture is, that there shall be no mouldings nor
ornaments upon it. And I suspect you don't quite like your architecture
so "pure" as this. We want a few mouldings, you will say--just a few.
Those who want mouldings, hold up their hands. We are unanimous, I
think. Will, you, then, design the profiles of these mouldings
yourselves, or will you copy them? If you wish to copy them, and to
copy them always, of course I leave you at once to your authorities,
and your imaginations to their repose. But if you wish to design them
yourselves, how do you do it? You draw the profile according to your
taste, and you order your mason to cut it. Now, will you tell me the
logical difference between drawing the profile of a moulding and giving
_that_ to be cut, and drawing the folds of the drapery of a statue
and giving _those_ to be cut. The last is much more difficult to
do than the first; but degrees of difficulty constitute no specific
difference, and you will not accept it, surely, as a definition of the
difference between architecture and sculpture, that "architecture is
doing anything that is easy, and sculpture anything that is difficult."

It is true, also, that the carved moulding represents nothing, and the
carved drapery represents something; but you will not, I should think,
accept, as an explanation of the difference between architecture and
sculpture, this any more than the other, that "sculpture is art which
has meaning, and architecture art which has none."

Where, then, is your difference? In this, perhaps, you will say; that
whatever ornaments we can direct ourselves, and get accurately cut to
order, we consider architectural. The ornaments that we are obliged to
leave to the pleasure of the workman, or the superintendence of some
other designer, we consider sculptural, especially if they are more or
less extraneous and incrusted--not an essential part of the building.

Accepting this definition, I am compelled to reply, that it is in
effect nothing more than an amplification of my first one--that
whatever is easy you call architecture, whatever is difficult you call
sculpture. For you cannot suppose the arrangement of the place in which
the sculpture is to be put is so difficult or so great a part of the
design as the sculpture itself. For instance: you all know the pulpit
of Niccolo Pisano, in the baptistry at Pisa. It is composed of seven
rich _relievi_, surrounded by panel mouldings, and sustained on
marble shafts. Do you suppose Niccolo Pisano's reputation--such part of
it at least as rests on this pulpit (and much does)--depends on the
panel mouldings, or on the relievi? The panel mouldings are by his
hand; he would have disdained to leave even them to a common workman;
but do you think he found any difficulty in them, or thought there was
any credit in them? Having once done the sculpture, those enclosing
lines were mere child's play to him; the determination of the diameter
of shafts and height of capitals was an affair of minutes; his
_work_ was in carving the Crucifixion and the Baptism.

Or, again, do you recollect Orcagna's tabernacle in the church of San
Michele, at Florence? That, also, consists of rich and multitudinous
bas-reliefs, enclosed in panel mouldings, with shafts of mosaic, and
foliated arches sustaining the canopy. Do you think Orcagna, any more
than Pisano, if his spirit could rise in the midst of us at this
moment, would tell us that he had trusted his fame to the foliation, or
had put his soul's pride into the panelling? Not so; he would tell you
that his spirit was in the stooping figures that stand round the couch
of the dying Virgin.

Or, lastly, do you think the man who designed the procession on the
portal of Amiens was the subordinate workman? that there was an
architect over _him_, restraining him within certain limits, and
ordering of him his bishops at so much a mitre, and his cripples at so
much a crutch? Not so. _Here_, on this sculptured shield, rests
the Master's hand; _this_ is the centre of the Master's thought;
from this, and in subordination to this, waved the arch and sprang the
pinnacle. Having done this, and being able to give human expression and
action to the stone, all the rest--the rib, the niche, the foil, the
shaft--were mere toys to his hand and accessories to his conception:
and if once you also gain the gift of doing this, if once you can carve
one fronton such as you have here, I tell you, you would be able--so
far as it depended on your invention--to scatter cathedrals over
England as fast as clouds rise from its streams after summer rain.

Nay, but perhaps you answer again, our sculptors at present do not
design cathedrals, and could not. No, they could not; but that is
merely because we have made architecture so dull that they cannot take
any interest in it, and, therefore, do not care to add to their higher
knowledge the poor and common knowledge of principles of building. You
have thus separated building from sculpture, and you have taken away
the power of both; for the sculptor loses nearly as much by never
having room for the development of a continuous work, as you do from
having reduced your work to a continuity of mechanism. You are
essentially, and should always be, the same body of men, admitting only
such difference in operation as there is between the work of a painter
at different times, who sometimes labours on a small picture, and
sometimes on the frescoes of a palace gallery.

This conclusion, then, we arrive at, _must_ arrive at; the fact
being irrevocably so:--that in order to give your imagination and the
other powers of your souls full play, you must do as all the great
architects of old time did--you must yourselves be your sculptors.
Phidias, Michael Angelo, Orcagna, Pisano, Giotto,--which of these men,
do you think, could not use his chisel? You say, "It is difficult;
quite out of your way." I know it is; nothing that is great is easy;
and nothing that is great, so long as you study building without
sculpture, can be _in_ your way. I want to put it in your way, and
you to find your way to it. But, on the other hand, do not shrink from
the task as if the refined art of perfect sculpture were always
required from you. For, though architecture and sculpture are not
separate arts, there is an architectural _manner_ of sculpture;
and it is, in the majority of its applications, a comparatively easy
one. Our great mistake at present, in dealing with stone at all, is
requiring to have all our work too refined; it is just the same mistake
as if we were to require all our book illustrations to be as fine work
as Raphael's. John Leech does not sketch so well as Leonardo da Vinci;
but do you think that the public could easily spare him; or that he is
wrong in bringing out his talent in the way in which it is most
effective? Would you advise him, if he asked your advice, to give up
his wood-blocks and take to canvas? I know you would not; neither would
you tell him, I believe, on the other hand, that because he could not
draw as well as Leonardo, therefore he ought to draw nothing but
straight lines with a ruler, and circles with compasses, and no figure-
subjects at all. That would be some loss to you; would it not? You
would all be vexed if next week's _Punch_ had nothing in it but
proportionate lines. And yet, do not you see that you are doing
precisely the same thing with _your_ powers of sculptural design
that he would be doing with his powers of pictorial design, if he gave
you nothing but such lines. You feel that you cannot carve like
Phidias; therefore you will not carve at all, but only draw mouldings;
and thus all that intermediate power which is of especial value in
modern days,--that popular power of expression which is within the
attainment of thousands,--and would address itself to tens of
thousands,--is utterly lost to us in stone, though in ink and paper it
has become one of the most desired luxuries of modern civilization.

Here, then, is one part of the subject to which I would especially
invite your attention, namely, the distinctive character which may be
wisely permitted to belong to architectural sculpture, as distinguished
from perfect sculpture on one side, and from mere geometrical
decoration on the other.

And first, observe what an indulgence we have in the distance at which
most work is to be seen. Supposing we were able to carve eyes and lips
with the most exquisite precision, it would all be of no use as soon as
the work was put far above the eye; but, on the other hand, as beauties
disappear by being far withdrawn, so will faults; and the mystery and
confusion which are the natural consequence of distance, while they
would often render your best skill but vain, will as often render your
worst errors of little consequence; nay, more than this, often a deep
cut, or a rude angle, will produce in certain positions an effect of
expression both startling and true, which you never hoped for. Not that
mere distance will give animation to the work, if it has none in
itself; but if it has life at all, the distance will make that life
more perceptible and powerful by softening the defects of execution. So
that you are placed, as workmen, in this position of singular
advantage, that you may give your fancies free play, and strike hard
for the expression that you want, knowing that, if you miss it, no one
will detect you; if you at all touch it, nature herself will help you,
and with every changing shadow and basking sunbeam bring forth new
phases of your fancy.

But it is not merely this privilege of being imperfect which belongs to
architectural sculpture. It has a true privilege of imagination, far
excelling all that can be granted to the more finished work, which, for
the sake of distinction, I will call,--and I don't think we can have a
much better term--"furniture sculpture;" sculpture, that is, which can
be moved from place to furnish rooms.

For observe, to that sculpture the spectator is usually brought in a
tranquil or prosaic state of mind; he sees it associated rather with
what is sumptuous than sublime, and under circumstances which address
themselves more to his comfort than his curiosity. The statue which is
to be pathetic, seen between the flashes of footmen's livery round the
dining-table, must have strong elements of pathos in itself; and the
statue which is to be awful, in the midst of the gossip of the drawing-
room, must have the elements of awe wholly in itself. But the spectator
is brought to _your_ work already in an excited and imaginative
mood. He has been impressed by the cathedral wall as it loomed over the
low streets, before he looks up to the carving of its porch--and his
love of mystery has been touched by the silence and the shadows of the
cloister, before he can set himself to decipher the bosses on its
vaulting. So that when once he begins to observe your doings, he will
ask nothing better from you, nothing kinder from you, than that you
would meet this imaginative temper of his half way;--that you would
farther touch the sense of terror, or satisfy the expectation of things
strange, which have been prompted by the mystery or the majesty of the
surrounding scene. And thus, your leaving forms more or less undefined,
or carrying out your fancies, however extravagant, in grotesqueness of
shadow or shape, will be for the most part in accordance with the
temper of the observer; and he is likely, therefore, much more
willingly to use his fancy to help your meanings, than his judgment to
detect your faults.

Again. Remember that when the imagination and feelings are strongly
excited, they will not only bear with strange things, but they will
_look_ into _minute_ things with a delight quite unknown in
hours of tranquillity. You surely must remember moments of your lives
in which, under some strong excitement of feeling, all the details of
visible objects presented themselves with a strange intensity and
insistance, whether you would or no; urging themselves upon the mind,
and thrust upon the eye, with a force of fascination which you could
not refuse. Now, to a certain extent, the senses get into this state
whenever the imagination is strongly excited. Things trivial at other
times assume a dignity or significance which we cannot explain; but
which is only the more attractive because inexplicable: and the powers
of attention, quickened by the feverish excitement, fasten and feed
upon the minutest circumstances of detail, and remotest traces of
intention. So that what would at other times be felt as more or less
mean or extraneous in a work of sculpture, and which would assuredly be
offensive to the perfect taste in its moments of languor, or of
critical judgment, will be grateful, and even sublime, when it meets
this frightened inquisitiveness, this fascinated watchfulness, of the
roused imagination. And this is all for your advantage; for, in the
beginnings of your sculpture, you will assuredly find it easier to
imitate minute circumstances of costume or character, than to perfect
the anatomy of simple forms or the flow of noble masses; and it will be
encouraging to remember that the grace you cannot perfect, and the
simplicity you cannot achieve, would be in great part vain, even if you
could achieve them, in their appeal to the hasty curiosity of
passionate fancy; but that the sympathy which would be refused to your
science will be granted to your innocence: and that the mind of the
general observer, though wholly unaffected by the correctness of
anatomy or propriety of gesture, will follow you with fond and pleased
concurrence, as you carve the knots of the hair, and the patterns of
the vesture.

Farther yet. We are to remember that not only do the associated
features of the larger architecture tend to excite the strength of
fancy, but the architectural laws to which you are obliged to submit
your decoration stimulate its _ingenuity_. Every crocket which you
are to crest with sculpture,--every foliation which you have to fill,
presents itself to the spectator's fancy, not only as a pretty thing,
but as a _problematic_ thing. It contained, he perceives
immediately, not only a beauty which you wished to display, but a
necessity which you were forced to meet; and the problem, how to occupy
such and such a space with organic form in any probable way, or how to
turn such a boss or ridge into a conceivable image of life, becomes at
once, to him as to you, a matter of amusement as much as of admiration.
The ordinary conditions of perfection in form, gesture, or feature, are
willingly dispensed with, when the ugly dwarf and ungainly goblin have
only to gather themselves into angles, or crouch to carry corbels; and
the want of skill which, in other kinds of work would have been
required for the finishing of the parts, will at once be forgiven here,
if you have only disposed ingeniously what you have executed roughly,
and atoned for the rudeness of your hands by the quickness of your
wits.

Hitherto, however, we have been considering only the circumstances in
architecture favourable to the development of the _powers_ of
imagination. A yet more important point for us seems, to me, the place
which it gives to all the _objects_ of imagination.

For, I suppose, you will not wish me to spend any time in proving, that
imagination must be vigorous in proportion to the quantity of material
which it has to handle; and that, just as we increase the range of what
we see, we increase the richness of what we can imagine. Granting this,
consider what a field is opened to your fancy merely in the subject
matter which architecture admits. Nearly every other art is severely
limited in its subjects--the landscape painter, for instance, gets
little help from the aspects of beautiful humanity; the historical
painter, less, perhaps, than he ought, from the accidents of wild
nature; and the pure sculptor, still less, from the minor details of
common life. But is there anything within range of sight, or
conception, which may not be of use to _you_, or in which your
interest may not be excited with advantage to your art? From visions of
angels, down to the least important gesture of a child at play,
whatever may be conceived of Divine, or beheld of Human, may be dared
or adopted by you: throughout the kingdom of animal life, no creature
is so vast, or so minute, that you cannot deal with it, or bring it
into service; the lion and the crocodile will couch about your shafts;
the moth and the bee will sun themselves upon your flowers; for you,
the fawn will leap; for you, the snail be slow; for you, the dove
smooth her bosom; and the hawk spread her wings toward the south. All
the wide world of vegetation blooms and bends for you; the leaves
tremble that you may bid them be still under the marble snow; the thorn
and the thistle, which the earth casts forth as evil, are to you the
kindliest servants; no dying petal, nor drooping tendril, is so feeble
as to have no more help for you; no robed pride of blossom so kingly,
but it will lay aside its purple to receive at your hands the pale
immortality. Is there anything in common life too mean,--in common too
trivial,--to be ennobled by your touch? As there is nothing in life, so
there is nothing in lifelessness which has not its lesson for you, or
its gift; and when you are tired of watching the strength of the plume,
and the tenderness of the leaf, you may walk down to your rough river
shore, or into the thickest markets of your thoroughfares, and there is
not a piece of torn cable that will not twine into a perfect moulding;
there is not a fragment of cast-away matting, or shattered basket-work,
that will not work into a chequer or capital. Yes: and if you gather up
the very sand, and break the stone on which you tread, among its
fragments of all but invisible shells you will find forms that will
take their place, and that proudly, among the starred traceries of your
vaulting; and you, who can crown the mountain with its fortress, and
the city with its towers, are thus able also to give beauty to ashes,
and worthiness to dust.

Now, in that your art presents all this material to you, you have
already much to rejoice in. But you have more to rejoice in, because
all this is submitted to you, not to be dissected or analyzed, but to
be sympathized with, and to bring out, therefore, what may be
accurately called the moral part of imagination. We saw that, if we
kept ourselves among lines only, we should have cause to envy the
naturalist, because he was conversant with facts; but you will have
little to envy now, if you make yourselves conversant with the feelings
that arise out of his facts. For instance, the naturalist coming upon a
block of marble, has to begin considering immediately how far its
purple is owing to iron, or its whiteness to magnesia; he breaks his
piece of marble, and at the close of his day, has nothing but a little
sand in his crucible and some data added to the theory of the elements.
But _you_ approach your marble to sympathize with it, and rejoice
over its beauty. You cut it a little indeed; but only to bring out its
veins more perfectly; and at the end of your day's work you leave your
marble shaft with joy and complacency in its perfectness, as marble.
When you have to watch an animal instead of a stone, you differ from
the naturalist in the same way. He may, perhaps, if he be an amiable
naturalist, take delight in having living creatures round him;--still,
the major part of his work is, or has been, in counting feathers,
separating fibres, and analyzing structures. But _your_ work is
always with the living creature; the thing you have to get at in him is
his life, and ways of going about things. It does not matter to you how
many cells there are in his bones, or how many filaments in his
feathers; what you want is his moral character and way of behaving
himself; it is just that which your imagination, if healthy, will first
seize--just that which your chisel, if vigorous, will first cut. You
must get the storm spirit into your eagles, and the lordliness into
your lions, and the tripping fear into your fawns; and in order to do
this, you must be in continual sympathy with every fawn of them; and be
hand-in-glove with all the lions, and hand-in-claw with all the hawks.
And don't fancy that you will lower yourselves by sympathy with the
lower creatures; you cannot sympathize rightly with the higher, unless
you do with those: but you have to sympathize with the higher, too--
with queens, and kings, and martyrs, and angels. Yes, and above all,
and more than all, with simple humanity in all its needs and ways, for
there is not one hurried face that passes you in the street that will
not be impressive, if you can only fathom it. All history is open to
you, all high thoughts and dreams that the past fortunes of men can
suggest, all fairy land is open to you--no vision that ever haunted
forest, or gleamed over hill-side, but calls you to understand how it
came into men's hearts, and may still touch them; and all Paradise is
open to you--yes, and the work of Paradise; for in bringing all this,
in perpetual and attractive truth, before the eyes of your fellow-men,
you have to join in the employment of the angels, as well as to imagine
their companies.

And observe, in this last respect, what a peculiar importance, and
responsibility, are attached to your work, when you consider its
permanence, and the multitudes to whom it is addressed. We frequently
are led, by wise people, to consider what responsibility may sometimes
attach to words, which yet, the chance is, will be heard by few, and
forgotten as soon as heard. But none of _your_ words will be heard
by few, and none will be forgotten, for five or six hundred years, if
you build well. You will talk to all who pass by; and all those little
sympathies, those freaks of fancy, those jests in stone, those
workings-out of problems in caprice, will occupy mind after mind of
utterly countless multitudes, long after you are gone. You have not,
like authors, to plead for a hearing, or to fear oblivion. Do but build
large enough, and carve boldly enough, and all the world will hear you;
they cannot choose but look.

I do not mean to awe you by this thought; I do not mean that because
you will have so many witnesses and watchers, you are never to jest, or
do anything gaily or lightly; on the contrary, I have pleaded, from the
beginning, for this art of yours, especially because it has room for
the whole of your character--if jest is in you, let the jest be jested;
if mathematical ingenuity is yours, let your problem be put, and your
solution worked out, as quaintly as you choose; above all, see that
your work is easily and happily done, else it will never make anybody
else happy; but while you thus give the rein to all your impulses, see
that those impulses be headed and centred by one noble impulse; and let
that be Love--triple love--for the art which you practise, the creation
in which you move, and the creatures to whom you minister.

I. I say, first, Love for the art which you practise. Be assured that
if ever any other motive becomes a leading one in your mind, as the
principal one for exertion, except your love of art, that moment it is
all over with your art. I do not say you are to desire money, nor to
desire fame, nor to desire position; you cannot but desire all three;
nay, you may--if you are willing that I should use the word Love in a
desecrated sense--love all three; that is, passionately covet them, yet
you must not covet or love them in the first place. Men of strong
passions and imaginations must always care a great deal for anything
they care for at all; but the whole question is one of first or second.
Does your art lead you, or your gain lead you? You may like making
money exceedingly; but if it come to a fair question, whether you are
to make five hundred pounds less by this business, or to spoil your
building, and you choose to spoil your building, there's an end of you.
So you may be as thirsty for fame as a cricket is for cream; but, if it
come to a fair question, whether you are to please the mob, or do the
thing as you know it ought to be done; and you can't do both, and
choose to please the mob, it's all over with you--there's no hope for
you; nothing that you can do will ever be worth a man's glance as he
passes by. The test is absolute, inevitable--Is your art first with
you? Then you are artists; you may be, after you have made your money,
misers and usurers; you may be, after you have got your fame, jealous,
and proud, and wretched, and base: but yet, _as long as you won't
spoil your work_, you are artists. On the other hand--Is your money
first with you, and your fame first with you? Then, you may be very
charitable with your money, and very magnificent with your money, and
very graceful in the way you wear your reputation, and very courteous
to those beneath you, and very acceptable to those above you; but you
are _not artists_. You are mechanics, and drudges.

II. You must love the creation you work in the midst of. For, wholly in
proportion to the intensity of feeling which you bring to the subject
you have chosen, will be the depth and justice of our perception of its
character. And this depth of feeling is not to be gained on the
instant, when you want to bring it to bear on this or that. It is the
result of the general habit of striving to feel rightly; and, among
thousands of various means of doing this, perhaps the one I ought
specially to name to you, is the keeping yourselves clear of petty and
mean cares. Whatever you do, don't be anxious, nor fill your heads with
little chagrins and little desires. I have just said, that you may be
great artists, and yet be miserly and jealous, and troubled about many
things. So you may be; but I said also that the miserliness or trouble
must not be in your hearts all day. It is possible that you may get a
habit of saving money; or it is possible, at a time of great trial, you
may yield to the temptation of speaking unjustly of a rival,--and you
will shorten your powers arid dim your sight even by this;--but the
thing that you have to dread far more than any such unconscious habit,
or--any such momentary fall--is the _constancy of small emotions_;--the
anxiety whether Mr. So-and-so will like your work; whether such and such
a workman will do all that you want of him, and so on;--not wrong feelings
or anxieties in themselves, but impertinent, and wholly incompatible with
the full exercise of your imagination.

Keep yourselves, therefore, quiet, peaceful, with your eyes open. It
doesn't matter at all what Mr. So-and-so thinks of your work; but it
matters a great deal what that bird is doing up there in its nest, or
how that vagabond child at the street corner is managing his game of
knuckle-down. And remember, you cannot turn aside from your own
interests, to the birds' and the children's interests, unless you have
long before got into the habit of loving and watching birds and
children; so that it all comes at last to the forgetting yourselves,
and the living out of yourselves, in the calm of the great world, or if
you will, in its agitation; but always in a calm of your own bringing.
Do not think it wasted time to submit yourselves to any influence which
may bring upon you any noble feeling. Rise early, always watch the
sunrise, and the way the clouds break from the dawn; you will cast your
statue-draperies in quite another than your common way, when the
remembrance of that cloud motion is with you, and of the scarlet
vesture of the morning. Live always in the springtime in the country;
you do not know what leaf-form means, unless you have seen the buds
burst, and the young leaves breathing low in the sunshine, and
wondering at the first shower of rain. But above all, accustom
yourselves to look for, and to love, all nobleness of gesture and
feature in the human form; and remember that the highest nobleness is
usually among the aged, the poor, and the infirm; you will find, in the
end, that it is not the strong arm of the soldier, nor the laugh of the
young beauty, that are the best studies for you. Look at them, and look
at them reverently; but be assured that endurance is nobler than
strength, and patience than beauty; and that it is not in the high
church pews, where the gay dresses are, but in the church free seats,
where the widows' weeds are, that you may see the faces that will fit
best between the angels' wings, in the church porch.

III. And therefore, lastly, and chiefly, you must love the creatures to
whom you minister, your fellow-men; for, if you do not love them, not
only will you be little interested in the passing events of life, but
in all your gazing at humanity, you will be apt to be struck only by
outside form, and not by expression. It is only kindness and tenderness
which will ever enable you to see what beauty there is in the dark eyes
that are sunk with weeping, and in the paleness of those fixed faces
which the earth's adversity has compassed about, till they shine in
their patience like dying watchfires through twilight. But it is not
this only which makes it needful for you, if you would be great, to be
also kind; there is a most important and all-essential reason in the
very nature of your own art. So soon as you desire to build largely,
and with addition of noble sculpture, you will find that your work must
be associative. You cannot carve a whole cathedral yourself--you can
carve but few and simple parts of it. Either your own work must be
disgraced in the mass of the collateral inferiority, or you must raise
your fellow-designers to correspondence of power. If you have genius,
you will yourselves take the lead in the building you design; you will
carve its porch and direct its disposition. But for all subsequent
advancement of its detail, you must trust to the agency and the
invention of others; and it rests with you either to repress what
faculties your workmen have, into cunning subordination to your own; or
to rejoice in discovering even the powers that may rival you, and
leading forth mind after mind into fellowship with your fancy, and
association with your fame.

I need not tell you that if you do the first--if you endeavour to
depress or disguise the talents of your subordinates--you are lost; for
nothing could imply more darkly and decisively than this, that your art
and your work were not beloved by you; that it was your own prosperity
that you were seeking, and your own skill only that you cared to
contemplate. I do not say that you must not be jealous at all; it is
rarely in human nature to be wholly without jealousy; and you may be
forgiven for going some day sadly home, when you find some youth,
unpractised and unapproved, giving the life-stroke to his work which
you, after years of training, perhaps, cannot reach; but your jealousy
must not conquer--your love of your building must conquer, helped by
your kindness of heart. See--I set no high or difficult standard before
you. I do not say that you are to surrender your pre-eminence in
_mere_ unselfish generosity. But I do say that you must surrender
your pre-eminence in your love of your building helped by your
kindness; and that whomsoever you find better able to do what will
adorn it than you,--that person you are to give place to; and to
console yourselves for the humiliation, first, by your joy in seeing
the edifice grow more beautiful under his chisel, and secondly, by your
sense of having done kindly and justly. But if you are morally strong
enough to make the kindness and justice the first motive, it will be
better;--best of all, if you do not consider it as kindness at all, but
bare and stern justice; for, truly, such help as we can give each other
in this world is a _debt_ to each other; and the man who perceives
a superiority or a capacity in a subordinate, and neither confesses,
nor assists it, is not merely the withholder of kindness, but the
committer of injury. But be the motive what you will, only see that you
do the thing; and take the joy of the consciousness that, as your art
embraces a wider field than all others--and addresses a vaster
multitude than all others--and is surer of audience than all others--so
it is profounder and holier in Fellowship than all others. The artist,
when his pupil is perfect, must see him leave his side that he may
declare his distinct, perhaps opponent, skill. Man of science wrestles
with man of science for priority of discovery, and pursues in pangs of
jealous haste his solitary inquiry. You alone are called by kindness,--
by necessity,--by equity, to fraternity of toil; and thus, in those
misty and massive piles which rise above the domestic roofs of our
ancient cities, there was--there may be again--a meaning more profound
and true than any that fancy so commonly has attached to them. Men say
their pinnacles point to heaven. Why, so does every tree that buds, and
every bird that rises as it sings. Men say their aisles are good for
worship. Why, so is every mountain glen, and rough sea-shore. But this
they have of distinct and indisputable glory,--that their mighty walls
were never raised, and never shall be, but by men who love and aid each
other in their weakness;--that all their interlacing strength of
vaulted stone has its foundation upon the stronger arches of manly
fellowship, and all their changing grace of depressed or lifted
pinnacle owes its cadence and completeness to sweeter symmetries of
human soul.




LECTURE V.

THE WORK OP IRON, IN NATURE, ART, AND POLICY.

_A Lecture Delivered at Tunbridge Wells, February, 1858._


When first I heard that you wished me to address you this evening, it
was a matter of some doubt with me whether I could find any subject
that would possess any sufficient interest for you to justify my
bringing you out of your comfortable houses on a winter's night. When I
venture to speak about my own special business of art, it is almost
always before students of art, among whom I may sometimes permit myself
to be dull, if I can feel that I am useful: but a mere talk about art,
especially without examples to refer to (and I have been unable to
prepare any careful illustrations for this lecture), is seldom of much
interest to a general audience. As I was considering what you might
best bear with me in speaking about, there came naturally into my mind
a subject connected with the origin and present prosperity of the town
you live in; and, it seemed to me, in the out-branchings of it, capable
of a very general interest. When, long ago (I am afraid to think how
long), Tunbridge Wells was my Switzerland, and I used to be brought
down here in the summer, a sufficiently active child, rejoicing in the
hope of clambering sandstone cliffs of stupendous height above the
common, there used sometimes, as, I suppose, there are in the lives of
all children at the Wells, to be dark days in my life--days of
condemnation to the pantiles and band--under which calamities my only
consolation used to be in watching, at every turn in my walk, the
welling forth of the spring over the orange rim of its marble basin.
The memory of the clear water, sparkling over its saffron stain, came
back to me as the strongest image connected with the place; and it
struck me that you might not be unwilling, to-night, to think a little
over the full significance of that saffron stain, and of the power, in
other ways and other functions, of the steelly element to which so many
here owe returning strength and life;--chief as it has been always, and
is yet more and more markedly so day by day, among the precious gifts
of the earth.

The subject is, of course, too wide to be more than suggestively
treated; and even my suggestions must be few, and drawn chiefly from my
own fields of work; nevertheless, I think I shall have time to indicate
some courses of thought which you may afterwards follow out for
yourselves if they interest you; and so I will not shrink from the full
scope of the subject which I have announced to you--the functions of
Iron, in Nature, Art, and Policy.

Without more preface, I will take up the first head.

I. IRON IN NATURE.--You all probably know that the ochreous stain,
which, perhaps, is often thought to spoil the basin of your spring, is
iron in a state of rust: and when you see rusty iron in other places
you generally think, not only that it spoils the places it stains, but
that it is spoiled itself--that rusty iron is spoiled iron.

For most of our uses it generally is so; and because we cannot use a
rusty knife or razor so well as a polished one, we suppose it to be a
great defect in iron that it is subject to rust. But not at all. On the
contrary, the most perfect and useful state of it is that ochreous
stain; and therefore it is endowed with so ready a disposition to get
itself into that state. It is not a fault in the iron, but a virtue, to
be so fond of getting rusted, for in that condition it fulfils its most
important functions in the universe, and most kindly duties to mankind.
Nay, in a certain sense, and almost a literal one, we may say that iron
rusted is Living; but when pure or polished, Dead. You all probably
know that in the mixed air we breathe, the part of it essentially
needful to us is called oxygen; and that this substance is to all
animals, in the most accurate sense of the word, "breath of life." The
nervous power of life is a different thing; but the supporting element
of the breath, without which the blood, and therefore the life, cannot
be nourished, is this oxygen. Now it is this very same air which the
iron breathes when it gets rusty. It takes the oxygen from the
atmosphere as eagerly as we do, though it uses it differently. The iron
keeps all that it gets; we, and other animals, part with it again; but
the metal absolutely keeps what it has once received of this aerial
gift; and the ochreous dust which we so much despise is, in fact, just
so much nobler than pure iron, in so far as it is _iron and the
air._ Nobler, and more useful--for, indeed, as I shall be able to
show you presently--the main service of this metal, and of all other
metals, to us, is not in making knives, and scissors, and pokers, and
pans, but in making the ground we feed from, and nearly all the
substances first needful to our existence. For these are all nothing
but metals and oxygen--metals with breath put into them. Sand, lime,
clay, and the rest of the earths--potash and soda, and the rest of the
alkalies--are all of them metals which have undergone this, so to
speak, vital change, and have been rendered fit for the service of man
by permanent unity with the purest air which he himself breathes. There
is only one metal which does not rust readily; and that, in its
influence on Man hitherto, has caused Death rather than Life; it will
not be put to its right use till it is made a pavement of, and so
trodden under foot.

Is there not something striking in this fact, considered largely as one
of the types, or lessons, furnished by the inanimate creation? Here you
have your hard, bright, cold, lifeless metal--good enough for swords
and scissors--but not for food. You think, perhaps, that your iron is
wonderfully useful in a pure form, but how would you like the world, if
all your meadows, instead of grass, grew nothing but iron wire--if all
your arable ground, instead of being made of sand and clay, were
suddenly turned into flat surfaces of steel--if the whole earth,
instead of its green and glowing sphere, rich with forest and flower,
showed nothing but the image of the vast furnace of a ghastly engine--a
globe of black, lifeless, excoriated metal? It would be that,--probably
it was once that; but assuredly it would be, were it not that all the
substance of which it is made sucks and breathes the brilliancy of the
atmosphere; and as it breathes, softening from its merciless hardness,
it falls into fruitful and beneficent dust; gathering itself again into
the earths from which we feed, and the stones with which we build;--
into the rocks that frame the mountains, and the sands that bind the
sea.

Hence, it is impossible for you to take up the most insignificant
pebble at your feet, without being able to read, if you like, this
curious lesson in it. You look upon it at first as if it were earth
only. Nay, it answers, "I am not earth--I am earth and air in one; part
of that blue heaven which you love, and long for, is already in me; it
is all my life--without it I should be nothing, and able for nothing; I
could not minister to you, nor nourish you--I should be a cruel and
helpless thing; but, because there is, according to my need and place
in creation, a kind of soul in me, I have become capable of good, and
helpful in the circles of vitality."

Thus far the same interest attaches to all the earths, and all the
metals of which they are made; but a deeper interest, and larger
beneficence belong to that ochreous earth of iron which stains the
marble of your springs. It stains much besides that marble. It stains
the great earth wheresoever you can see it, far and wide--it is the
colouring substance appointed to colour the globe for the sight, as
well as subdue it to the service of man. You have just seen your hills
covered with snow, and, perhaps, have enjoyed, at first, the contrast
of their fair white with the dark blocks of pine woods; but have you
ever considered how you would like them always white--not pure white,
but dirty white--the white of thaw, with all the chill of snow in it,
but none of its brightness? That is what the colour of the earth would
be without its iron; that would be its colour, not here or there only,
but in all places, and at all times. Follow out that idea till you get
it in some detail. Think first of your pretty gravel walks in your
gardens, yellow and fine, like plots of sunshine between the flower-
beds; fancy them all suddenly turned to the colour of ashes. That is
what they would be without iron ochre. Think of your winding walks over
the common, as warm to the eye as they are dry to the foot, and imagine
them all laid down suddenly with gray cinders. Then pass beyond the
common into the country, and pause at the first ploughed field that you
see sweeping up the hill sides in the sun, with its deep brown furrows,
and wealth of ridges all a-glow, heaved aside by the ploughshare, like
deep folds of a mantle of russet velvet--fancy it all changed suddenly
into grisly furrows in a field of mud. That is what it would be without
iron. Pass on, in fancy, over hill and dale, till you reach the bending
line of the sea shore; go down upon its breezy beach--watch the white
foam flashing among the amber of it, and all the blue sea embayed in
belts of gold: then fancy those circlets of far sweeping shore suddenly
put into mounds of mourning--all those golden sands turned into gray
slime, the fairies no more able to call to each other, "Come unto these
yellow sands;" but, "Come unto these drab sands." That is what they
would be, without iron.

Iron is in some sort, therefore, the sunshine and light of landscape,
so far as that light depends on the ground; but it is a source of
another kind of sunshine, quite as important to us in the way we live
at present--sunshine, not of landscape, but of dwelling-place.

In these days of swift locomotion I may doubtless assume that most of
my audience have been somewhere out of England--have been in Scotland,
or France, or Switzerland. Whatever may have been their impression, on
returning to their own country, of its superiority or inferiority in
other respects, they cannot but have felt one thing about it--the
comfortable look of its towns and villages. Foreign towns are often
very picturesque, very beautiful, but they never have quite that look
of warm self-sufficiency and wholesome quiet, with which our villages
nestle themselves down among the green fields. If you will take the
trouble to examine into the sources of this impression, you will find
that by far the greater part of that warm and satisfactory appearance
depends upon the rich scarlet colour of the bricks and tiles. It does
not belong to the neat building--very neat building has an
uncomfortable rather than a comfortable look--but it depends on the
_warm_ building; our villages are dressed in red tiles as our old
women are in red cloaks; and it does not matter how worn the cloaks, or
how bent and bowed the roof may be, so long as there are no holes in
either one or the other, and the sobered but unextinguishable colour
still glows in the shadow of the hood, and burns among the green mosses
of the gable. And what do you suppose dyes your tiles of cottage roof?
You don't paint them. It is nature who puts all that lovely vermilion
into the clay for you; and all that lovely vermilion is this oxide of
iron. Think, therefore, what your streets of towns would become--ugly
enough, indeed, already, some of them, but still comfortable-looking--
if instead of that warm brick red, the houses became all pepper-and-
salt colour. Fancy your country villages changing from that homely
scarlet of theirs which, in its sweet suggestion of laborious peace, is
as honourable as the soldiers' scarlet of laborious battle--suppose all
those cottage roofs, I say, turned at once into the colour of unbaked
clay, the colour of street gutters in rainy weather. That's what they
would be, without iron.

There is, however, yet another effect of colour in our English country
towns which, perhaps, you may not all yourselves have noticed, but for
which you must take the word of a sketcher. They are not so often
merely warm scarlet as they are warm purple;--a more beautiful colour
still: and they owe this colour to a mingling with the vermilion of the
deep grayish or purple hue of our fine Welsh slates on the more
respectable roofs, made more blue still by the colour of intervening
atmosphere. If you examine one of these Welsh slates freshly broken,
you will find its purple colour clear and vivid; and although never
strikingly so after it has been long exposed to weather, it always
retains enough of the tint to give rich harmonies of distant purple in
opposition to the green of our woods and fields. Whatever brightness or
power there is in the hue is entirely owing to the oxide of iron.
Without it the slates would either be pale stone colour, or cold gray,
or black.

Thus far we have only been considering the use and pleasantness of iron
in the common earth of clay. But there are three kinds of earth which
in mixed mass and prevalent quantity, form the world. Those are, in
common language, the earths of clay, of lime, and of flint. Many other
elements are mingled with these in sparing quantities; but the great
frame and substance of the earth is made of these three, so that
wherever you stand on solid ground, in any country of the globe, the
thing that is mainly under your feet will be either clay, limestone, or
some condition of the earth of flint, mingled with both.

These being what we have usually to deal with, Nature seems to have set
herself to make these three substances as interesting to us, and as
beautiful for us, as she can. The clay, being a soft and changeable
substance, she doesn't take much pains about, as we have seen, till it
is baked; she brings the colour into it only when it receives a
permanent form. But the limestone and flint she paints, in her own way,
in their native state: and her object in painting them seems to be much
the same as in her painting of flowers; to draw us, careless and idle
human creatures, to watch her a little, and see what she is about--that
being on the whole good for us,--her children. For Nature is always
carrying on very strange work with this limestone and flint of hers:
laying down beds of them at the bottom of the sea; building islands out
of the sea; filling chinks and veins in mountains with curious
treasures; petrifying mosses, and trees, and shells; in fact, carrying
on all sorts of business, subterranean or submarine, which it would be
highly desirable for us, who profit and live by it, to notice as it
goes on. And apparently to lead us to do this, she makes picture-books
for us of limestone and flint; and tempts us, like foolish children as
we are, to read her books by the pretty colours in them. The pretty
colours in her limestone-books form those variegated marbles which all
mankind have taken delight to polish and build with from the beginning
of time; and the pretty colours in her flint-books form those agates,
jaspers, cornelians, bloodstones, onyxes, cairngorms, chrysoprases,
which men have in like manner taken delight to cut, and polish, and
make ornaments of, from the beginning of time; and yet, so much of
babies are they, and so fond of looking at the pictures instead of
reading the book, that I question whether, after six thousand years of
cutting and polishing, there are above two or three people out of any
given hundred, who know, or care to know, how a bit of agate or a bit
of marble was made, or painted.

How it was made, may not be always very easy to say; but with what it
was painted there is no manner of question. All those beautiful violet
veinings and variegations of the marbles of Sicily and Spain, the
glowing orange and amber colours of those of Siena, the deep russet of
the Rosso antico, and the blood-colour of all the precious jaspers that
enrich the temples of Italy; and, finally, all the lovely transitions
of tint in the pebbles of Scotland and the Rhine, which form, though
not the most precious, by far the most interesting portion of our
modern jewellers' work;--all these are painted by nature with this one
material only, variously proportioned and applied--the oxide of iron
that stains your Tunbridge springs.

But this is not all, nor the best part of the work of iron. Its service
in producing these beautiful stones is only rendered to rich people,
who can afford to quarry and polish them. But Nature paints for all the
world, poor and rich together: and while, therefore, she thus adorns
the innermost rocks of her hills, to tempt your investigation, or
indulge your luxury,--she paints, far more carefully, the outsides of
the hills, which are for the eyes of the shepherd and the ploughman. I
spoke just now of the effect in the roofs of our villages of their
purple slates: but if the slates are beautiful even in their flat and
formal rows on house-roofs, much more are they beautiful on the rugged
crests and flanks of their native mountains. Have you ever considered,
in speaking as we do so often of distant blue hills, what it is that
makes them blue? To a certain extent it is distance; but distance alone
will not do it. Many hills look white, however distant. That lovely
dark purple colour of our Welsh and Highland hills is owing, not to
their distance merely, but to their rocks. Some of their rocks are,
indeed, too dark to be beautiful, being black or ashy gray; owing to
imperfect and porous structure. But when you see this dark colour
dashed with russet and blue, and coming out in masses among the green
ferns, so purple that you can hardly tell at first whether it is rock
or heather, then you must thank your old Tunbridge friend, the oxide of
iron.

But this is not all. It is necessary for the beauty of hill scenery
that Nature should colour not only her soft rocks, but her hard ones;
and she colours them with the same thing, only more beautifully.
Perhaps you have wondered at my use of the word "purple," so often of
stones; but the Greeks, and still more the Romans, who had profound
respect for purple, used it of stone long ago. You have all heard of
"porphyry" as among the most precious of the harder massive stones. The
colour which gave it that noble name, as well as that which gives the
flush to all the rosy granite of Egypt--yes, and to the rosiest summits
of the Alps themselves--is still owing to the same substance--your
humble oxide of iron.

And last of all:

A nobler colour than all these--the noblest colour ever seen on this
earth--one which belongs to a strength greater than that of the
Egyptian granite, and to a beauty greater than that of the sunset or
the rose--is still mysteriously connected with the presence of this
dark iron. I believe it is not ascertained on what the crimson of blood
actually depends; but the colour is connected, of course, with its
vitality, and that vitality with the existence of iron as one of its
substantial elements.

Is it not strange to find this stern and strong metal mingled so
delicately in our human life, that we cannot even blush without its
help? Think of it, my fair and gentle hearers; how terrible the
alternative--sometimes you have actually no choice but to be brazen-
faced, or iron-faced!

In this slight review of some of the functions of the metal, you
observe that I confine myself strictly to its operations as a colouring
element. I should only confuse your conception of the facts, if I
endeavoured to describe its uses as a substantial element, either in
strengthening rocks, or influencing vegetation by the decomposition of
rocks. I have not, therefore, even glanced at any of the more serious
uses of the metal in the economy of nature. But what I wish you to
carry clearly away with you is the remembrance that in all these uses
the metal would be nothing without the air. The pure metal has no
power, and never occurs in nature at all except in meteoric stones,
whose fall no one can account for, and which are useless after they
have fallen: in the necessary work of the world, the iron is invariably
joined with the oxygen, and would be capable of no service or beauty
whatever without it.

II. IRON IN ART.--Passing, then, from the offices of the metal in the
operations of nature to its uses in the hands of man, you must
remember, in the outset, that the type which has been thus given you,
by the lifeless metal, of the action of body and soul together, has
noble antitype in the operation of all human power. All art worthy the
name is the energy--neither of the human body alone, nor of the human
soul alone, but of both united, one guiding the other: good
craftsmanship and work of the fingers, joined with good emotion and
work of the heart.

There is no good art, nor possible judgment of art, when these two are
not united; yet we are constantly trying to separate them. Our amateurs
cannot be persuaded but that they may produce some kind of art by their
fancy or sensibility, without going through the necessary manual toil.
That is entirely hopeless. Without a certain number, and that a very
great number, of steady acts of hand--a practice as careful and
constant as would be necessary to learn any other manual business--no
drawing is possible. On the other side, the workman, and those who
employ him, are continually trying to produce art by trick or habit of
fingers, without using their fancy or sensibility. That also is
hopeless. Without mingling of heart-passion with hand-power, no art is
possible. [Footnote: No fine art, that is. See the previous definition
of fine art at p. 38.] The highest art unites both in their intensest
degrees: the action of the hand at its finest, with that of the heart
at its fullest.

Hence it follows that the utmost power of art can only be given in a
material capable of receiving and retaining the influence of the
subtlest touch of the human hand. That hand is the most perfect agent
of material power existing in the universe; and its full subtlety can
only be shown when the material it works on, or with, is entirely
yielding. The chords of a perfect instrument will receive it, but not
of an imperfect one; the softly bending point of the hair pencil, and
soft melting of colour, will receive it, but not even the chalk or pen
point, still less the steel point, chisel, or marble. The hand of a
sculptor may, indeed, be as subtle as that of a painter, but all its
subtlety is not bestowable nor expressible: the touch of Titian,
Correggio, or Turner, [Footnote: See Appendix IV., "Subtlety of Hand."]
is a far more marvellous piece of nervous action than can be shown in
anything but colour, or in the very highest conditions of executive
expression in music. In proportion as the material worked upon is less
delicate, the execution necessarily becomes lower, and the art with it.
This is one main principle of all work. Another is, that whatever the
material you choose to work with, your art is base if it does not bring
out the distinctive qualities of that material.

The reason of this second law is, that if you don't want the qualities
of the substance you use, you ought to use some other substance: it can
be only affectation, and desire to display your skill, that lead you to
employ a refractory substance, and therefore your art will all be base.
Glass, for instance, is eminently, in its nature, transparent. If you
don't want transparency, let the glass alone. Do not try to make a
window look like an opaque picture, but take an opaque ground to begin
with. Again, marble is eminently a solid and massive substance. Unless
you want mass and solidity, don't work in marble. If you wish for
lightness, take wood; if for freedom, take stucco; if for ductility,
take glass. Don't try to carve leathers, or trees, or nets, or foam,
out of marble. Carve white limbs and broad breasts only out of that.

So again, iron is eminently a ductile and tenacious substance--
tenacious above all things, ductile more than most. When you want
tenacity, therefore, and involved form, take iron. It is eminently made
for that. It is the material given to the sculptor as the companion of
marble, with a message, as plain as it can well be spoken, from the
lips of the earth-mother, "Here's for you to cut, and here's for you to
hammer. Shape this, and twist that. What is solid and simple, carve
out; what is thin and entangled, beat out. I give you all kinds of
forms to be delighted in;--fluttering leaves as well as fair bodies;
twisted branches as well as open brows. The leaf and the branch you may
beat and drag into their imagery: the body and brow you shall
reverently touch into their imagery. And if you choose rightly and work
rightly, what you do shall be safe afterwards. Your slender leaves
shall not break off in my tenacious iron, though they may be rusted a
little with an iron autumn. Your broad surfaces shall not be unsmoothed
in my pure crystalline marble--no decay shall touch them. But if you
carve in the marble what will break with a touch, or mould in the metal
what a stain of rust or verdigris will spoil, it is your fault--not
mine."

These are the main principles in this matter; which, like nearly all
other right principles in art, we moderns delight in contradicting as
directly and specially as may be. We continually look for, and praise,
in our exhibitions the sculpture of veils, and lace, and thin leaves,
and all kinds of impossible things pushed as far as possible in the
fragile stone, for the sake of showing the sculptor's dexterity.
[Footnote: I do not mean to attach any degree of blame to the effort to
represent leafage in marble for certain expressive purposes. The later
works of Mr. Munro have depended for some of their most tender thoughts
on a delicate and skilful use of such accessories. And in general, leaf
sculpture is good and admirable, if it renders, as in Gothic work, the
grace and lightness of the leaf by the arrangement of light and shadow
--supporting the masses well by strength of stone below; but all carving
is base which proposes to itself _slightness_ as an aim, and tries
to imitate the absolute thinness of thin or slight things, as much
modern wood carving does, I saw in Italy, a year or two ago, a marble
sculpture of birds' nests.] On the other hand, we _cast_ our iron
into bars--brittle, though an inch thick--sharpen them at the ends,
and consider fences, and other work, made of such materials,
decorative! I do not believe it would be easy to calculate the amount
of mischief done to our taste in England by that fence iron-work of
ours alone. If it were asked of us by a single characteristic, to
distinguish the dwellings of a country into two broad sections; and to
set, on one side, the places where people were, for the most part,
simple, happy, benevolent, and honest; and, on the other side, the
places where at least a great number of the people were sophisticated,
unkind, uncomfortable, and unprincipled, there is, I think, one feature
that you could fix upon as a positive test: the uncomfortable and
unprincipled parts of a country would be the parts where people lived
among iron railings, and the comfortable and principled parts where
they had none. A broad generalization, you will say! Perhaps a little
too broad; yet, in all sobriety, it will come truer than you think.
Consider every other kind of fence or defence, and you will find some
virtue in it; but in the iron railing none. There is, first, your
castle rampart of stone--somewhat too grand to be considered here among
our types of fencing; next, your garden or park wall of brick, which
has indeed often an unkind look on the outside, but there is more
modesty in it than unkindness. It generally means, not that the builder
of it wants to shut you out from the view of his garden, but from the
view of himself: it is a frank statement that as he needs a certain
portion of time to himself, so he needs a certain portion of ground to
himself, and must not be stared at when he digs there in his shirt-
sleeves, or plays at leapfrog with his boys from school, or talks over
old times with his wife, walking up and down in the evening sunshine.
Besides, the brick wall has good practical service in it, and shelters
you from the east wind, and ripens your peaches and nectarines, and
glows in autumn like a sunny bank. And, moreover, your brick wall, if
you build it properly, so that it shall stand long enough, is a
beautiful thing when it is old, and has assumed its grave purple red,
touched with mossy green.

Next to your lordly wall, in dignity of enclosure, comes your close-set
wooden paling, which is more objectionable, because it commonly means
enclosure on a larger scale than people want. Still it is significative
of pleasant parks, and well-kept field walks, and herds of deer, and
other such aristocratic pastoralisms, which have here and there their
proper place in a country, and may be passed without any discredit.

Next to your paling, comes your low stone dyke, your mountain fence,
indicative at a glance either of wild hill country, or of beds of stone
beneath the soil; the hedge of the mountains--delightful in all its
associations, and yet more in the varied and craggy forms of the loose
stones it is built of; and next to the low stone wall, your lowland
hedge, either in trim line of massive green, suggested of the
pleasances of old Elizabethan houses, and smooth alleys for aged feet,
and quaint labyrinths for young ones, or else in fair entanglement of
eglantine and virgin's bower, tossing its scented luxuriance along our
country waysides;--how many such you have here among your pretty hills,
fruitful with black clusters of the bramble for boys in autumn, and
crimson hawthorn berries for birds in winter. And then last, and most
difficult to class among fences, comes your handrail, expressive of all
sorts of things; sometimes having a knowing and vicious look, which it
learns at race-courses; sometimes an innocent and tender look, which it
learns at rustic bridges over cressy brooks; and sometimes a prudent
and protective look, which it learns on passes of the Alps, where it
has posts of granite and bars of pine, and guards the brows of cliffs
and the banks of torrents. So that in all these kinds of defence there
is some good, pleasant, or noble meaning. But what meaning has the iron
railing? Either, observe, that you are living in the midst of such bad
characters that you must keep them out by main force of bar, or that
you are yourself of a character requiring to be kept inside in the same
manner. Your iron railing always means thieves outside, or Bedlam
inside; it _can_ mean nothing else than that. If the people
outside were good for anything, a hint in the way of fence would be
enough for them; but because they are violent and at enmity with you,
you are forced to put the close bars and the spikes at the top.

Last summer I was lodging for a little while in a cottage in the
country, and in front of my low window there were, first some beds of
daisies, then a row of gooseberry and currant bushes, and then a low
wall about three feet above the ground, covered with stone-cress.
Outside, a corn-field, with its green ears glistening in the sun, and a
field path through it, just past the garden gate. From my window I
could see every peasant of the village who passed that way, with basket
on arm for market, or spade on shoulder for field. When I was inclined
for society, I could lean over my wall, and talk to anybody; when I was
inclined for science, I could botanize all along the top of my wall--
there were four species of stone-cress alone growing on it; and when I
was inclined for exercise, I could jump over my wall, backwards and
forwards. That's the sort of fence to have in a Christian country; not
a thing which you can't walk inside of without making yourself look
like a wild beast, nor look at out of your window in the morning
without expecting to see somebody impaled upon it in the night.

And yet farther, observe that the iron railing is a useless fence--it
can shelter nothing, and support nothing; you can't nail your peaches
to it, nor protect your flowers with it, nor make anything whatever out
of its costly tyranny; and besides being useless, it is an insolent
fence;--it says plainly to everybody who passes--"You may be an honest
person,--but, also, you may be a thief: honest or not, you shall not
get in here, for I am a respectable person, and much above you; you
shall only see what a grand place I have got to keep you out of--look
here, and depart in humiliation."

This, however, being in the present state of civilization a frequent
manner of discourse, and there being unfortunately many districts where
the iron railing is unavoidable, it yet remains a question whether you
need absolutely make it ugly, no less than significative of evil. You
must have railings round your squares in London, and at the sides of
your areas; but need you therefore have railings so ugly that the
constant sight of them is enough to neutralise the effect of all the
schools of art in the kingdom? You need not. Far from such necessity,
it is even in your power to turn all your police force of iron bars
actually into drawing masters, and natural historians. Not, of course,
without some trouble and some expense; you can do nothing much worth
doing, in this world, without trouble, you can get nothing much worth
having without expense. The main question is only--what is worth doing
and having:--Consider, therefore, if this be not. Here is your iron
railing, as yet, an uneducated monster; a sombre seneschal, incapable
of any words, except his perpetual "Keep out!" and "Away with you!"
Would it not be worth some trouble and cost to turn this ungainly
ruffian porter into a well-educated servant; who, while he was severe
as ever in forbidding entrance to evilly-disposed people, should yet
have a kind word for well-disposed people, and a pleasant look, and a
little useful information at his command, in case he should be asked a
question by the passers-by?

We have not time to-night to look at many examples of ironwork; and
those I happen to have by me are not the best; ironwork is not one of
my special subjects of study; so that I only have memoranda of bits
that happened to come into picturesque subjects which I was drawing for
other reasons. Besides, external ironwork is more difficult to find
good than any other sort of ancient art; for when it gets rusty and
broken, people are sure, if they can afford it, to send it to the old
iron shop, and get a fine new grating instead; and in the great cities
of Italy, the old iron is thus nearly all gone: the best bits I
remember in the open air were at Brescia;--fantastic sprays of laurel-
like foliage rising over the garden gates; and there are a few fine
fragments at Verona, and some good trellis-work enclosing the Scala
tombs; but on the whole, the most interesting pieces, though by no
means the purest in style, are to be found in out-of-the-way provincial
towns, where people do not care, or are unable, to make polite
alterations. The little town of Bellinzona, for instance, on the south
of the Alps, and that of Sion on the north, have both of them complete
schools of ironwork in their balconies and vineyard gates. That of
Bellinzona is the best, though not very old--I suppose most of it of
the seventeenth century; still it is very quaint and beautiful. Here,
for example, are two balconies, from two different houses; one has been
a cardinal's, and the hat is the principal ornament of the balcony; its
tassels being wrought with delightful delicacy and freedom; and
catching the eye clearly even among the mass of rich wreathed leaves.
These tassels and strings are precisely the kind of subject fit for
ironwork--noble in ironwork, they would have been entirely ignoble in
marble, on the grounds above stated. The real plant of oleander
standing in the window enriches the whole group of lines very happily.

The other balcony, from a very ordinary-looking house in the same
street, is much more interesting in its details. It is shown in the
plate as it appeared last summer, with convolvulus twined about the
bars, the arrow-shaped living leaves mingled among the leaves of iron;
but you may see in the centre of these real leaves a cluster of lighter
ones, which are those of the ironwork itself. This cluster is worth
giving a little larger to show its treatment. Fig. 2 (in Appendix V.)
is the front view of it: Fig. 4, its profile. It is composed of a large
tulip in the centre; then two turkscap lilies; then two pinks, a little
conventionalized; then two narcissi; then two nondescripts, or, at
least, flowers I do not know; and then two dark buds, and a few leaves.
I say, dark buds, for all these flowers have been coloured in their
original state. The plan of the group is exceedingly simple: it is all
enclosed in a pointed arch (Fig. 3, Appendix V.): the large mass of the
tulip forming the apex; a six-foiled star on each side; then a jagged
star; then a five-foiled star; then an unjagged star or rose; finally a
small bud, so as to establish relation and cadence through the whole
group. The profile is very free and fine, and the upper bar of the
balcony exceedingly beautiful in effect;--none the less so on account
of the marvellously simple means employed. A thin strip of iron is bent
over a square rod; out of the edge of this strip are cut a series of
triangular openings--widest at top, leaving projecting teeth of iron
(Appendix, Fig. 5); then each of these projecting pieces gets a little
sharp tap with the hammer in front, which beaks its edge inwards,
tearing it a little open at the same time, and the thing is done.

The common forms of Swiss ironwork are less naturalistic than these
Italian balconies, depending more on beautiful arrangements of various
curve; nevertheless, there has been a rich naturalist school at
Fribourg, where a few bell-handles are still left, consisting of rods
branched into laurel and other leafage. At Geneva, modern improvements
have left nothing; but at Annecy, a little good work remains; the
balcony of its old hôtel de ville especially, with a trout of the lake
--presumably the town arms--forming its central ornament.

I might expatiate all night--if you would sit and hear me--on the
treatment of such required subject, or introduction of pleasant caprice
by the old workmen; but we have no more time to spare, and I must quit
this part of our subject--the rather as I could not explain to you the
intrinsic merit of such ironwork without going fully into the theory of
curvilinear design; only let me leave with you this one distinct
assertion--that the quaint beauty and character of many natural
objects, such as intricate branches, grass, foliage (especially thorny
branches and prickly foliage), as well as that of many animals, plumed,
spined, or bristled, is sculpturally expressible in iron only, and in
iron would be majestic and impressive in the highest degree; and that
every piece of metal work you use might be, rightly treated, not only a
superb decoration, but a most valuable abstract of portions of natural
forms, holding in dignity precisely the same relation to the painted
representation of plants, that a statue does to the painted form of
man. It is difficult to give you an idea of the grace and interest
which the simplest objects possess when their forms are thus abstracted
from among the surrounding of rich circumstance which in nature
disturbs the feebleness of our attention. In Plate 2, a few blades of
common green grass, and a wild leaf or two--just as they were thrown by
nature,--are thus abstracted from the associated redundance of the
forms about them, and shown on a dark ground: every cluster of herbage
would furnish fifty such groups, and every such group would work into
iron (fitting it, of course, rightly to its service) with perfect ease,
and endless grandeur of result.

III. IRON in POLICY.--Having thus obtained some idea of the use of iron
in art, as dependent on its ductility, I need not, certainly, say
anything of its uses in manufacture and commerce; we all of us know
enough,--perhaps a little too much--about _them_. So I pass lastly
to consider its uses in policy; dependent chiefly upon its tenacity--
that is to say, on its power of bearing a pull, and receiving an edge.
These powers, which enable it to pierce, to bind, and to smite, render
it fit for the three great instruments, by which its political action
may be simply typified; namely, the Plough, the Fetter, and the Sword.

On our understanding the right use of these three instruments, depend,
of course, all our power as a nation, and all our happiness as
individuals.

I. THE PLOUGH.--I say, first, on our understanding the right use of the
plough, with which, in justice to the fairest of our labourers, we must
always associate that feminine plough--the needle. The first
requirement for the happiness of a nation is that it should understand
the function in this world of these two great instruments: a happy
nation may be defined as one in which the husband's hand is on the
plough, and the housewife's on the needle; so in due time reaping its
golden harvest, and shining in golden vesture: and an unhappy nation is
one which, acknowledging no use of plough nor needle, will assuredly at
last find its storehouse empty in the famine, and its breast naked to
the cold.

Perhaps you think this is a mere truism, which I am wasting your time
in repeating. I wish it were.

By far the greater part of the suffering and crime which exist at this
moment in civilized Europe, arises simply from people not understanding
this truism--not knowing that produce or wealth is eternally connected
by the laws of heaven and earth with resolute labour; but hoping in
some way to cheat or abrogate this everlasting law of life, and to feed
where they have not furrowed, and be warm where they have not woven.

I repeat, nearly all our misery and crime result from this one
misapprehension. The law of nature is, that a certain quantity of work
is necessary to produce a certain quantity of good, of any kind
whatever. If you want knowledge, you must toil for it: if food, you
must toil for it; and if pleasure, you must toil for it. But men do not
acknowledge this law, or strive to evade it, hoping to get their
knowledge, and food, and pleasure for nothing; and in this effort they
either fail of getting them, and remain ignorant and miserable, or they
obtain them by making other men work for their benefit; and then they
are tyrants and robbers. Yes, and worse than robbers. I am not one who
in the least doubts or disputes the progress of this century in many
things useful to mankind; but it seems to me a very dark sign
respecting us that we look with so much indifference upon dishonesty
and cruelty in the pursuit of wealth. In the dream of Nebuchadnezzar it
was only the _feet_ that were part of iron and part of clay; but
many of us are now getting so cruel in our avarice, that it seems as
if, in us, the _heart_ were part of iron, and part of clay.

From what I have heard of the inhabitants of this town, I do not doubt
but that I may be permitted to do here what I have found it usually
thought elsewhere highly improper and absurd to do, namely, trace a few
Bible sentences to their practical result.

You cannot but have noticed how often in those parts of the Bible which
are likely to be oftenest opened when people look for guidance,
comfort, or help in the affairs of daily life, namely, the Psalms and
Proverbs, mention is made of the guilt attaching to the
_Oppression_ of the poor. Observe: not the neglect of them, but
the _Oppression_ of them: the word is as frequent as it is
strange. You can hardly open either of those books, but somewhere in
their pages you will find a description of the wicked man's attempts
against the poor: such as--"He doth ravish the poor when he getteth him
into his net."

"He sitteth in the lurking places of the villages; his eyes are privily
set against the poor."

"In his pride he doth persecute the poor, and blesseth the covetous,
whom God abhorreth."

"His mouth is full of deceit and fraud; in the secret places doth he
murder the innocent. Have the workers of iniquity no knowledge, who eat
up my people as they eat bread? They have drawn out the sword, and bent
the bow, to cast down the poor and needy."

"They are corrupt, and speak wickedly concerning oppression."

"Pride compasseth them about as a chain, and violence as a garment."

"Their poison is like the poison of a serpent. Ye weigh the violence of
your hands in the earth."

Yes: "Ye weigh the violence of your hands:"--weigh these words as well.
The last things we ever usually think of weighing are Bible words. We
like to dream and dispute over them; but to weigh them, and see what
their true contents are--anything but that. Yet, weigh these; for I
have purposely taken all these verses, perhaps more striking to you
read in this connection, than separately in their places, out of the
Psalms, because, for all people belonging to the Established Church of
this country these Psalms are appointed lessons, portioned out to them
by their clergy to be read once through every month. Presumably,
therefore, whatever portions of Scripture we may pass by or forget,
these at all events, must be brought continually to our observance as
useful for direction of daily life. Now, do we ever ask ourselves what
the real meaning of these passages may be, and who these wicked people
are, who are "murdering the innocent?" You know it is rather singular
language this!--rather strong language, we might, perhaps, call it--
hearing it for the first time. Murder! and murder of innocent people!--
nay, even a sort of cannibalism. Eating people,--yes, and God's people,
too--eating _My_ people as if they were bread! swords drawn, bows
bent, poison of serpents mixed! violence of hands weighed, measured,
and trafficked with as so much coin! where is all this going on? Do you
suppose it was only going on in the time of David, and that nobody but
Jews ever murder the poor? If so, it would surely be wiser not to
mutter and mumble for our daily lessons what does not concern us; but
if there be any chance that it may concern us, and if this description,
in the Psalms, of human guilt is at all generally applicable, as the
descriptions in the Psalms of human sorrow are, may it not be advisable
to know wherein this guilt is being committed round about us, or by
ourselves? and when we take the words of the Bible into our mouths in a
congregational way, to be sure whether we mean merely to chant a piece
of melodious poetry relating to other people--(we know not exactly to
whom)--or to assert our belief in facts bearing somewhat stringently on
ourselves and our daily business. And if you make up your minds to do
this no longer, and take pains to examine into the matter, you will
find that these strange words, occurring as they do, not in a few
places only, but almost in every alternate psalm and every alternate
chapter of proverb, or prophecy, with tremendous reiteration, were not
written for one nation or one time only; but for all nations and
languages, for all places and all centuries; and it is as true of the
wicked man now as ever it was of Nabal or Dives, that "his eyes are set
against the poor."

Set _against_ the poor, mind you. Not merely set _away_ from
the poor, so as to neglect or lose sight of them, but set against, so
as to afflict and destroy them. This is the main point I want to fix.
your attention upon. You will often hear sermons about neglect or
carelessness of the poor. But neglect and carelessness are not at all
the points. The Bible hardly ever talks about neglect of the poor. It
always talks of _oppression_ of the poor--a very different matter.
It does not merely speak of passing by on the other side, and binding
up no wounds, but of drawing the sword and ourselves smiting the men
down. It does not charge us with being idle in the pest-house, and
giving no medicine, but with being busy in the pest-house, and giving
much poison.

May we not advisedly look into this matter a little, even tonight, and
ask first, Who are these poor?

No country is, or ever will be, without them: that is to say, without
the class which cannot, on the average, do more by its labour than
provide for its subsistence, and which has no accumulations of property
laid by on any considerable scale. Now there are a certain number of
this class whom we cannot oppress with much severity. An able-bodied
and intelligent workman--sober, honest, and industrious, will almost
always command a fair price for his work, and lay by enough in a few
years to enable him to hold his own in the labour market. But all men
are not able-bodied, nor intelligent, nor industrious; and you cannot
expect them to be. Nothing appears to me at once more ludicrous and
more melancholy than the way the people of the present age usually talk
about the morals of labourers. You hardly ever address a labouring man
upon his prospects in life, without quietly assuming that he is to
possess, at starting, as a small moral capital to begin with, the
virtue of Socrates, the philosophy of Plato, and the heroism of
Epaminondas. "Be assured, my good man,"--you say to him,--"that if you
work steadily for ten hours a day all your life long, and if you drink
nothing but water, or the very mildest beer, and live on very plain
food, and never lose your temper, and go to church every Sunday, and
always remain content in the position in which Providence has placed
you, and never grumble nor swear; and always keep your clothes decent,
and rise early, and use every opportunity of improving yourself, you
will get on very well, and never come to the parish."

All this is exceedingly true; but before giving the advice so
confidently, it would be well if we sometimes tried it practically
ourselves, and spent a year or so at some hard manual labour, not of an
entertaining kind--ploughing or digging, for instance, with a very
moderate allowance of beer; nothing hut bread and cheese for dinner; no
papers nor muffins in the morning; no sofas nor magazines at night; one
small room for parlour and kitchen; and a large family of children
always in the middle of the floor. If we think we could, under these
circumstances, enact Socrates or Epaminondas entirely to our own
satisfaction, we shall be somewhat justified in requiring the same
behaviour from our poorer neighbours; but if not, we should surely
consider a little whether among the various forms of the oppression of
the poor, we may not rank as one of the first and likeliest--the
oppression of expecting too much from them.

But let this pass; and let it be admitted that we can never be guilty
of oppression towards the sober, industrious, intelligent, exemplary
labourer. There will always be in the world some who are not
altogether, intelligent and exemplary; we shall, I believe, to the end
of time find the majority somewhat unintelligent, a little inclined to
be idle, and occasionally, on Saturday night, drunk; we must even be
prepared to hear of reprobates who like skittles on Sunday morning
better than prayers; and of unnatural parents who send their children
out to beg instead of to go to school.

Now these are the kind of people whom you _can_ oppress, and whom
you do oppress, and that to purpose,--and with all the more cruelty and
the greater sting, because it is just their own fault that puts them
into your power. You know the words about wicked people are, "He doth
ravish the poor when he getteth him _into his net_." This getting
into the net is constantly the fault or folly of the sufferer--his own
heedlessness or his own indolence; but after he is once in the net, the
oppression of him, and making the most of his distress, are ours. The
nets which we use against the poor are just those worldly
embarrassments which either their ignorance or their improvidence are
almost certain at some time or other to bring them into: then, just at
the time when we ought to hasten to help them, and disentangle them,
and teach them how to manage better in future, we rush forward to
_pillage_ them, and force all we can out of them in their
adversity. For, to take one instance only, remember this is literally
and simply what we do, whenever we buy, or try to buy, cheap goods--
goods offered at a price which we know cannot be remunerative for the
labour involved in them. Whenever we buy such goods, remember we are
stealing somebody's labour. Don't let us mince the matter. I say, in
plain Saxon, STEALING--taking from him the proper reward of his work,
and putting it into our own pocket. You know well enough that the thing
could not have been offered you at that price, unless distress of some
kind had forced the producer to part with it. You take advantage of
this distress, and you force as much out of him as you can under the
circumstances. The old barons of the middle ages used, in general, the
thumbscrew to extort property; we moderns use, in preference, hunger or
domestic affliction: but the fact of extortion remains precisely the
same. Whether we force the man's property from him by pinching his
stomach, or pinching his fingers, makes some difference anatomically;--
morally, none whatsoever: we use a form of torture of some sort in
order to make him give up his property; we use, indeed, the man's own
anxieties, instead of the rack; and his immediate peril of starvation,
instead of the pistol at the head; but otherwise we differ from Front
de Bœuf, or Dick Turpin, merely in being less dexterous, more cowardly,
and more cruel. More cruel, I say, because the fierce baron and the
redoubted highwayman are reported to have robbed, at least by
preference, only the rich; _we_ steal habitually from the poor. We
buy our liveries, and gild our prayer-books, with pilfered pence out of
children's and sick men's wages, and thus ingeniously dispose a given
quantity of Theft, so that it may produce the largest possible measure
of delicately distributed suffering.

But this is only one form of common oppression of the poor--only one
way of taking our hands off the plough handle, and binding another's
upon it. This first way of doing it is the economical way--the way
preferred by prudent and virtuous people. The bolder way is the
acquisitive way:--the way of speculation. You know we are considering
at present the various modes in which a nation corrupts itself, by not
acknowledging the eternal connection between its plough and its
pleasure;--by striving to get pleasure, without working for it. Well, I
say the first and commonest way of doing so is to try to get the
product of other people's work, and enjoy it ourselves, by cheapening
their labour in times of distress: then the second way is that grand
one of watching the chances of the market;--the way of speculation. Of
course there are some speculations that are fair and honest--
speculations made with our own money, and which do not involve in their
success the loss, by others, of what we gain. But generally modern
speculation involves much risk to others, with chance of profit only to
ourselves: even in its best conditions it is merely one of the forms of
gambling or treasure hunting; it is either leaving the steady plough
and the steady pilgrimage of life, to look for silver mines beside the
way; or else it is the full stop beside the dice-tables in Vanity Fair
--investing all the thoughts and passions of the soul in the fall of the
cards, and choosing rather the wild accidents of idle fortune than the
calm and accumulative rewards of toil. And this is destructive enough,
at least to our peace and virtue. But is usually destructive of far
more than _our_ peace, or _our_ virtue. Have you ever deliberately set
yourselves to imagine and measure the suffering, the guilt, and the
mortality caused necessarily by the failure of any large-dealing merchant,
or largely-branched bank? Take it at the lowest possible supposition-
count, at the fewest you choose, the families  whose means of support have
been involved in the catastrophe. Then, on the morning after the intelli-
gence of ruin, let us go forth amongst them in earnest thought; let us use
that imagination which we waste so often on fictitious sorrow, to measure
the stern facts of that multitudinous distress; strike open the private
doors of their chambers, and enter silently into the midst of the domestic
misery; look upon the old men, who had reserved for their failing strength
some remainder of rest in the evening-tide of life, cast helplessly back
into its trouble and tumult; look upon the active strength of middle
age suddenly blasted into incapacity--its hopes crushed, and its hardly
earned rewards snatched away in the same instant--at once the heart
withered, and the right arm snapped; look upon the piteous children,
delicately nurtured, whose soft eyes, now large with wonder at their
parents' grief, must soon be set in the dimness of famine; and, far
more than all this, look forward to the length of sorrow beyond--to the
hardest labour of life, now to be undergone either in all the severity
of unexpected and inexperienced trial, or else, more bitter still, to
be begun again, and endured for the second time, amidst the ruins of
cherished hopes and the feebleness of advancing years, embittered by
the continual sting and taunt of the inner feeling that it has all been
brought about, not by the fair course of appointed circumstance, but by
miserable chance and wanton treachery; and, last of all, look beyond
this--to the shattered destinies of those who have faltered under the
trial, and sunk past recovery to despair. And then consider whether the
hand which has poured this poison into all the springs of life be one
whit less guiltily red with human blood than that which literally pours
the hemlock into the cup, or guides the dagger to the heart? We read
with horror of the crimes of a Borgia or a Tophana; but there never
lived Borgias such as live now in the midst of us. The cruel lady of
Ferrara slew only in the strength of passion--she slew only a few,
those who thwarted her purposes or who vexed her soul; she slew sharply
and suddenly, embittering the fate of her victims with no foretastes of
destruction, no prolongations of pain; and, finally and chiefly, she
slew, not without remorse, nor without pity. But _we,_ in no storm
of passion--in no blindness of wrath,--we, in calm and clear and
untempted selfishness, pour our poison--not for a few only, but for
multitudes;--not for those who have wronged us, or resisted,--but for
those who have trusted us and aided:--we, not with sudden gift of
merciful and unconscious death, but with slow waste of hunger and weary
rack of disappointment and despair;--we, last and chiefly, do our
murdering, not with any pauses of pity or scorching of conscience, but
in facile and forgetful calm of mind--and so, forsooth, read day by
day, complacently, as if they meant any one else than ourselves, the
words that forever describe the wicked: "The _poison of asps_ is
under their lips, and their _feet are swift to shed blood._"

You may indeed, perhaps, think there is some excuse for many in this
matter, just because the sin is so unconscious; that the guilt is not
so great when it is unapprehended, and that it is much more pardonable
to slay heedlessly than purposefully. I believe no feeling can be more
mistaken, and that in reality, and in the sight of heaven; the callous
indifference which pursues its own interests at any cost of life,
though it does not definitely adopt the purpose of sin, is a state of
mind at once more heinous and more hopeless than the wildest
aberrations of ungoverned passion. There may be, in the last case, some
elements of good and of redemption still mingled in the character; but,
in the other, few or none. There may be hope for the man who has slain
his enemy in anger; hope even for the man who has betrayed his friend
in fear; but what hope for him who trades in unregarded blood, and
builds his fortune on unrepented treason?

But, however this may be, and wherever you may think yourselves bound
in justice to impute the greater sin, be assured that the question is
one of responsibilities only, not of facts. The definite result of all
our modern haste to be rich is assuredly, and constantly, the murder of
a certain number of persons by our hands every year. I have not time to
go into the details of another--on the whole, the broadest and
terriblest way in which we cause the destruction of the poor--namely,
the way of luxury and waste, destroying, in improvidence, what might
have been the support of thousands; [Footnote: The analysis of this
error will be found completely carried out in my lectures on the
political economy of art. And it is an error worth analyzing; for until
it is finally trodden under foot, no healthy political, economical, or
moral action is _possible_ in any state. I do not say this
impetuously or suddenly, for I have investigated this subject as
deeply; and as long, as my own special subject of art; and the
principles of political economy which I have stated in those lectures
are as sure as the principles of Euclid. Foolish readers doubted their
certainty, because I told them I had "never read any books on Political
Economy" Did they suppose I had got my knowledge of art by reading
books?] but if you follow out the subject for yourselves at home--and
what I have endeavoured to lay before you to-night will only be useful
to you if you do--you will find that wherever and whenever men are
endeavouring to _make money hastily_, and to avoid the labour
which Providence has appointed to be tho only source of honourable
profit;--and also wherever and whenever they permit themselves to
_spend it luxuriously_, without reflecting how far they are
misguiding the labour of others;--there and then, in either case, they
are literally and infallibly causing, for their own benefit or their
own pleasure, a certain annual number of human deaths; that, therefore,
the choice given to every man born into this world is, simply, whether
he will be a labourer, or an assassin; and that whosoever has not his
hand on the Stilt of the plough, has it on the Hilt of the dagger.

It would also be quite vain for me to endeavour to follow out this
evening the lines of thought which would be suggested by the other two
great political uses of iron in the Fetter and the Sword: a few words
only I must permit myself respecting both.

2. THE FETTER.--As the plough is the typical instrument of industry, so
the fetter is the typical instrument of the restraint or subjection
necessary in a nation--either literally, for its evil-doers, or
figuratively, in accepted laws, for its wise and good men. You have to
choose between this figurative and literal use; for depend upon it, the
more laws you accept, the fewer penalties you will have to endure, and
the fewer punishments to enforce. For wise laws and just restraints are
to a noble nation not chains, but chain mail--strength and defence,
though something also of an incumbrance. And this necessity of
restraint, remember, is just as honourable to man as the necessity of
labour. You hear every day greater numbers of foolish people speaking
about liberty, as if it were such an honourable thing: so far from
being that, it is, on the whole, and in the broadest sense,
dishonourable, and an attribute of the lower creatures. No human being,
however great or powerful, was ever so free as a fish. There is always
something that he must, or must not do; while the fish may do whatever
he likes. All the kingdoms of the world put together are not half so
large as the sea, and all the railroads and wheels that ever were, or
will be, invented are not so easy as fins. You will find, on fairly
thinking of it, that it is his Restraint which is honourable to man,
not his Liberty; and, what is more, it is restraint which is honourable
even in the lower animals. A butterfly is much more free than a bee;
but you honour the bee more, just because it is subject to certain laws
which fit it for orderly function in bee society And throughout the
world, of the two abstract things, liberty and restraint, restraint is
always the more honourable. It is true, indeed, that in these and all
other matters you never can reason finally from the abstraction, for
both liberty and restraint are good when they are nobly chosen, and
both are bad when they are basely chosen; but of the two, I repeat, it
is restraint which characterizes the higher creature, and betters the
lower creature: and, from the ministering of the archangel to the
labour of the insect,--from the poising of the planets to the
gravitation of a grain of dust,--the power and glory of all creatures,
and all matter, consist in their obedience, not in their freedom. The
Sun has no liberty--a dead leaf has much. The dust of which you are
formed has no liberty. Its liberty will come--with its corruption.

And, therefore, I say boldly, though it seems a strange thing to say in
England, that as the first power of a nation consists in knowing how to
guide the Plough, its second power consists in knowing how to wear the
Fetter:--

3. THE SWORD.--And its third power, which perfects it as a nation,
consist in knowing how to wield the sword, so that the three talismans
of national existence are expressed in these three short words--Labour,
Law, and Courage.

This last virtue we at least possess; and all that is to be alleged
against us is that we do not honour it enough. I do not mean honour by
acknowledgment of service, though sometimes we are slow in doing even
that. But we do not honour it enough in consistent regard to the lives
and souls of our soldiers. How wantonly we have wasted their lives you
have seen lately in the reports of their mortality by disease, which a
little care and science might have prevented; but we regard their souls
less than their lives, by keeping them in ignorance and idleness, and
regarding them merely as instruments of battle. The argument brought
forward for the maintenance of a standing army usually refers only to
expediency in the case of unexpected war, whereas, one of the chief
reasons for the maintenance of an army is the advantage of the military
system as a method of education. The most fiery and headstrong, who are
often also the most gifted and generous of your youths, have always a
tendency both in the lower and upper classes to offer themselves for
your soldiers: others, weak and unserviceable in a civil capacity, are
tempted or entrapped into the army in a fortunate hour for them: out of
this fiery or uncouth material, it is only a soldier's discipline which
can bring the full value and power. Even at present, by mere force of
order and authority, the army is the salvation of myriads; and men who,
under other circumstances, would have sunk into lethargy or
dissipation, are redeemed into noble life by a service which at once
summons and directs their energies. How much more than this military
education is capable of doing, you will find only when you make it
education indeed. We have no excuse for leaving our private soldiers at
their present level of ignorance and want of refinement, for we shall
invariably find that, both among officers and men, the gentlest and
best informed are the bravest; still less have we excuse for
diminishing our army, either in the present state of political events,
or, as I believe, in any other conjunction of them that for many a year
will be possible in this world.

You may, perhaps, be surprised at my saying this; perhaps surprised at
my implying that war itself can be right, or necessary, or noble at
all. Nor do I speak of all war as necessary, nor of all war as noble.
Both peace and war are noble or ignoble according to their kind and
occasion. No man has a profounder sense of the horror and guilt of
ignoble war than I have: I have personally seen its effects, upon
nations, of unmitigated evil, on soul and body, with perhaps as much
pity, and as much bitterness of indignation, as any of those whom you
will hear continually declaiming in the cause of peace. But peace may
be sought in two ways. One way is as Gideon sought it, when he built
his altar in Ophrah, naming it, "God send peace," yet sought this peace
that he loved, as he was ordered to seek it, and the peace was sent, in
God's way:--"the country was in quietness forty years in the days of
Gideon." And the other way of seeking peace is as Menahem sought it
when he gave the King of Assyria a thousand talents of silver, that
"his hand might be with him." That is, you may either win your peace,
or buy it:--win it, by resistance to evil;--buy it, by compromise with
evil. You may buy your peace, with silenced consciences;--you may buy
it, with broken vows,--buy it, with lying words,--buy it, with base
connivances,--buy it, with the blood of the slain, and the cry of the
captive, and the silence of lost souls--over hemispheres of the earth,
while you sit smiling at your serene hearths, lisping comfortable
prayers evening and morning, and counting your pretty Protestant beads
(which are flat, and of gold, instead of round, and of ebony, as the
monks' ones were), and so mutter continually to yourselves, "Peace,
peace," when there is No peace; but only captivity and death, for you,
as well as for those you leave unsaved;--and yours darker than theirs.

I cannot utter to you what I would in this matter; we all see too
dimly, as yet, what our great world-duties are, to allow any of us to
try to outline their enlarging shadows. But think over what I have
said, and as you return to your quiet homes to-night, reflect that
their peace was not won for you by your own hands; but by theirs who
long ago jeoparded their lives for you, their children; and remember
that neither this inherited peace, nor any other, can be kept, but
through the same jeopardy. No peace was ever won from Fate by
subterfuge or agreement; no peace is ever in store for any of us, but
that which we shall win by victory over shame or sin;--victory over the
sin that oppresses, as well as over that which corrupts. For many a
year to come, the sword of every righteous nation must be whetted to
save or subdue; nor will it be by patience of others' suffering, but by
the offering of your own, that you ever will draw nearer to the time
when the great change shall pass upon the iron of the earth;--when men
shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into
pruning-hooks; neither shall they learn war any more.




APPENDICES.

APPENDIX I.

RIGHT AND WRONG.


Readers who are using my _Elements of Drawing_ may be surprised by
my saying here that Tintoret may lead them wrong; while in the
_Elements_ he is one of the six men named as being "always right."

I bring the apparent inconsistency forward at the beginning of this
Appendix, because the illustration of it will be farther useful in
showing the real nature of the self-contradiction which is often
alleged against me by careless readers.

It is not only possible, but a frequent condition of human action, to
_do_ right and _be_ right--yet so as to mislead other people
if they rashly imitate the thing done. For there are many rights which
are not absolutely, but relatively right--right only for _that_
person to do under those circumstances,--not for _this_ person to
do under other circumstances.

Thus it stands between Titian and Tintoret. Titian is always absolutely
Right. You may imitate him with entire security that you are doing the
best thing that can possibly be done for the purpose in hand. Tintoret
is always relatively Right--relatively to his own aims and peculiar
powers. But you must quite understand Tintoret before you can be sure
what his aim was, and why he was then right in doing what would not be
right always. If, however, you take the pains thus to understand him,
he becomes entirely instructive and exemplary, just as Titian is; and
therefore I have placed him among those are "always right," and you can
only study him rightly with that reverence for him.

Then the artists who are named as "admitting question of right and
wrong," are those who from some mischance of circumstance or short-
coming in their education, do not always do right, even with relation
to their own aims and powers.

Take for example the quality of imperfection in drawing form. There are
many pictures of Tintoret in which the trees are drawn with a few
curved flourishes of the brush instead of leaves. That is (absolutely)
wrong. If you copied the tree as a model, you would be going very wrong
indeed. But it is relatively, and for Tintoret's purposes, right. In
the nature of the superficial work you will find there must have been a
cause for it. Somebody perhaps wanted the picture in a hurry to fill a
dark corner. Tintoret good-naturedly did all he could--painted the
figures tolerably--had five minutes left only for the trees, when the
servant came. "Let him wait another five minutes." And this is the best
foliage we can do in the time. Entirely, admirably, unsurpassably
right, under the conditions. Titian would not have worked under them,
but Tintoret was kinder and humbler; yet he may lead you wrong if you
don't understand him. Or, perhaps, another day, somebody came in while
Tintoret was at work, who tormented Tintoret. An ignoble person! Titian
would have been polite to him, and gone on steadily with his trees.
Tintoret cannot stand the ignobleness; it is unendurably repulsive and
discomfiting to him. "The Black Plague take him--and the trees, too!
Shall such a fellow see me paint!" And the trees go all to pieces.
This, in you, would be mere ill-breeding and ill-temper. In Tintoret it
was one of the necessary conditions of his intense sensibility; had he
been capable, then, of keeping his temper, he could never have done his
greatest works. Let the trees go to pieces, by all means; it is quite
right they should; he is always right.

But in a background of Gainsborough you would find the trees
unjustifiably gone to pieces. The carelessness of form there is
definitely purposed by him;--adopted as an advisable thing; and
therefore it is both absolutely and relatively wrong;--it indicates his
being imperfectly educated as a painter, and not having brought out all
his powers. It may still happen that the man whose work thus partially
erroneous is greater far, than others who have fewer faults.
Gainsborough's and Reynolds' wrongs are more charming than almost
anybody else's right. Still, they occasionally _are_ wrong--but
the Venetians and Velasquez, [Footnote: At least after his style was
formed; early pictures, like the Adoration of the Magi in our Gallery,
are of little value.] never.

I ought, perhaps, to have added in that Manchester address (only one
does not like to say things that shock people) some words of warning
against painters likely to mislead the student. For indeed, though here
and there something may be gained by looking at inferior men, there is
always more to be gained by looking at the best; and there is not time,
with all the looking of human life, to exhaust even one great painter's
instruction. How then shall we dare to waste our sight and thoughts on
inferior ones, even if we could do so, which we rarely can, without
danger of being led astray? Nay, strictly speaking, what people call
inferior painters are in general no painters. Artists are divided by an
impassable gulf into the men who can paint, and who cannot. The men who
can paint often fall short of what they should have done;--are
repressed, or defeated, or otherwise rendered inferior one to another:
still there is an everlasting barrier between them and the men who
cannot paint--who can only in various popular ways pretend to paint.
And if once you know the difference, there is always some good to be
got by looking at a real painter--seldom anything but mischief to be
got out of a false one; but do not suppose real painters are common. I
do not speak of living men; but among those who labour no more, in this
England of ours, since it first had a school, we have had only five
real painters;--Reynolds, Gainsborough, Hogarth, Richard Wilson, and
Turner.

The reader may, perhaps, think I have forgotten Wilkie. No. I once much
overrated him as an expressional draughtsman, not having then studied
the figure long enough to be able to detect superficial sentiment. But
his colour I have never praised; it is entirely false and valueless.
And it would tie unjust to English art if I did not here express my
regret that the admiration of Constable, already harmful enough in
England, is extending even into France. There was, perhaps, the making,
in Constable, of a second or third-rate painter, if any careful
discipline had developed in him the instincts which, though
unparalleled for narrowness, were, as far as they went, true. But as it
is, he is nothing more than an industrious and innocent amateur
blundering his way to a superficial expression of one or two popular
aspects of common nature.

And my readers may depend upon it, that all blame which I express in
this sweeping way is trustworthy. I have often had to repent of over-
praise of inferior men; and continually to repent of insufficient
praise of great men; but of broad condemnation, never. For I do not
speak it but after the most searching examination of the matter, and
under stern sense of need for it: so that whenever the reader is
entirely shocked by what I say, he may be assured every word is
true.[Footnote:  He must, however, be careful to distinguish blame--
however strongly expressed, of some special fault or error in a true
painter,--from these general statements of inferiority or
worthlessness. Thus he will find me continually laughing at Wilson's
tree-painting; not because Wilson could not paint, but because he had
never looked at a tree.] It is just because it so much offends him,
that it was necessary: and knowing that it must offend him, I should
not have ventured to say it, without certainty of its truth. I say
"certainty," for it is just as possible to be certain whether the
drawing of a tree or a stone is true or false, as whether the drawing
of a triangle is; and what I mean primarily by saying that a picture is
in all respects worthless, is that it is in all respects False: which
is not a matter of opinion at all, but a matter of ascertainable fact,
such as I never assert till I have ascertained. And the thing so
commonly said about my writings, that they are rather persuasive than
just; and that though my "language" may be good, I am an unsafe guide
in art criticism, is, like many other popular estimates in such
matters, not merely untrue, but precisely the reverse of the truth; it
is truth, like reflections in water, distorted much by the shaking
receptive surface, and in every particular, upside down. For my
"language," until within the last six or seven years, was loose,
obscure, and more or less feeble; and still, though I have tried hard
to mend it, the best I can do is inferior to much contemporary work. No
description that I have ever given of anything is worth four lines of
Tennyson; and in serious thought, my half-pages are generally only
worth about as much as a single sentence either of his, or of
Carlyle's. They are, I well trust, as true and necessary; but they are
neither so concentrated nor so well put. But I am an entirely safe
guide in art judgment: and that simply as the necessary result of my
having given the labour of life to the determination of facts, rather
than to the following of feelings or theories. Not, indeed, that my
work is free from mistakes; it admits many, and always must admit many,
from its scattered range; but, in the long run, it will be found to
enter sternly and searchingly into the nature of what it deals with,
and the kind of mistake it admits is never dangerous, consisting,
usually, in pressing the truth too far. It is quite easy, for instance,
to take an accidental irregularity in a piece of architecture, which
less careful examination would never have detected at all, for an
intentional irregularity; quite possible to misinterpret an obscure
passage in a picture, which a less earnest observer would never have
tried to interpret. But mistakes of this kind--honest, enthusiastic
mistakes--are never harmful; because they are always made in a true
direction,--falls forward on the road, not into the ditch beside it;
and they are sure to be corrected by the next comer. But the blunt and
dead mistakes made by too many other writers on art--the mistakes of
sheer inattention, and want of sympathy--are mortal. The entire purpose
of a great thinker may be difficult to fathom, and we may be over and
over again more or less mistaken in guessing at his meaning; but the
real, profound, nay, quite bottomless, and unredeemable mistake, is the
fool's thought--that he had no meaning.

I do not refer, in saying this, to any of my statements respecting
subjects which it has been my main work to study: as far as I am aware,
I have never yet misinterpreted any picture of Turner's, though often
remaining blind to the half of what he had intended: neither have I as
yet found anything to correct in my statements respecting Venetian
architecture; [Footnote: The subtle portions of the Byzantine Palaces,
given in precise measurements in the second volume of the "Stones of
Venice," were alleged by architects to be accidental irregularities.
They will be found, by every one who will take the pains to examine
them, most assuredly and indisputably intentional,--and not only so,
but one of the principal subjects of the designer's care.] but in
_casual references_ to what has been quickly seen, it is
impossible to guard wholly against error, without losing much valuable
observation, true in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, and harmless
even when erroneous.





APPENDIX II.

REYNOLDS' DISAPPOINTMENT.


It is very fortunate that in the fragment of Mason's MSS., published
lately by Mr. Cotton in his "Sir Joshua Reynolds' Notes," [Footnote:
Smith, Soho Square, 1859.] record is preserved of Sir Joshua's feelings
respecting the paintings in the window of New College, which might
otherwise have been supposed to give his full sanction to this mode of
painting on glass. Nothing can possibly be more curious, to my mind,
than the great painter's expectations; or his having at all entertained
the idea that the qualities of colour which are peculiar to opaque
bodies could be obtained in a transparent medium; but so it is: and
with the simplicity and humbleness of an entirely great man he hopes
that Mr. Jervas on glass is to excel Sir Joshua on canvas. Happily,
Mason tells us the result.

"With the copy Jervas made of this picture he was grievously
disappointed. 'I had frequently,' he said to me, 'pleased myself by
reflecting, after I had produced what I thought a brilliant effect of
light and shadow on my canvas, how greatly that effect would be
heightened by the transparency which the painting on glass would be
sure to produce. It turned out quite the reverse.'"




APPENDIX III.

CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE.


This passage in the lecture was illustrated by an enlargement of the
woodcut, Fig. 1; but I did not choose to disfigure the middle of this
book with it. It is copied from the 49th plate of the third edition of
the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ (Edinburgh, 1797), and represents an
English farmhouse arranged on classical principles. If the reader cares
to consult the work itself, he will find in the same plate another
composition of similar propriety, and dignified by the addition of a
pediment, beneath the shadow of which "a private gentleman who has a
small family may find conveniency."




APPENDIX IV.

SUBTLETY OF HAND.


I had intended in one or other of these lectures to have spoken at some
length of the quality of refinement in Colour, but found the subject
would lead me too far. A few words are, however, necessary in order to
explain some expressions in the text.

"Refinement in colour" is indeed a tautological expression, for colour,
in the true sense of the word, does not exist until it _is_
refined. Dirt exists,--stains exist,--and pigments exist, easily enough
in all places; and are laid on easily enough by all hands; but colour
exists only where there is tenderness, and can be laid on only by a
hand which has strong life in it. The law concerning colour is very
strange, very noble, in some sense almost awful. In every given touch
laid on canvas, if one grain of the colour is inoperative, and does not
take its full part in producing the hue, the hue will be imperfect. The
grain of colour which does not work is dead. It infects all about it
with its death. It must be got quit of, or the touch is spoiled. We
acknowledge this instinctively in our use of the phrases "dead colour,"
"killed colour," "foul colour." Those words are, in some sort,
literally true. If more colour is put on than is necessary, a heavy
touch when a light one would have been enough, the quantity of colour
that was not wanted, and is overlaid by the rest, is as dead, and it
pollutes the rest. There will be no good in the touch.

The art of painting, properly so called, consists in laying on the
least possible colour that will produce the required result, and this
measurement, in all the ultimate, that is to say, the principal,
operations of colouring, is so delicate that not one human hand in a
million has the required lightness. The final touch of any painter
properly so named, of Correggio--Titian--Turner--or Reynolds--would be
always quite invisible to any one watching the progress of the work,
the films of hue being laid thinner than the depths of the grooves in
mother-of-pearl. The work may be swift, apparently careless, nay, to
the painter himself almost unconscious. Great painters are so organized
that they do their best work without effort: but analyze the touches
afterwards, and you will find the structure and depth of the colour
laid mathematically demonstrable to be of literally infinite fineness,
the last touches passing away at their edges by untraceable gradation.
The very essence of a master's work may thus be removed by a picture-
cleaner in ten minutes.

Observe, however, this thinness exists only in portions of the ultimate
touches, for which the preparation may often have been made with solid
colours, commonly, and literally, called "dead colouring," but even
that is always subtle if a master lays it--subtle at least in drawing,
if simple in hue; and farther, observe that the refinement of work
consists not in laying absolutely _little_ colour, but in always
laying precisely the right quantity. To lay on little needs indeed the
rare lightness of hand; but to lay much,--yet not one atom _too_
much, and obtain subtlety, not by withholding strength, but by
precision of pause,--that is the master's final sign-manual--power,
knowledge, and tenderness all united. A great deal of colour may often
be wanted; perhaps quite a mass of it, such as shall project from the
canvas; but the real painter lays this mass of its required thickness
and shape with as much precision as if it were a bud of a flower which
he had to touch into blossom; one of Turner's loaded fragments of white
cloud is modelled and gradated in an instant, as if it alone were the
subject of the picture, when the same quantity of colour, under another
hand, would be a lifeless lump.

The following extract from a letter in the _Literary Gazette_ of
13th November, 1858, which I was obliged to write to defend a
questioned expression respecting Turner's subtlety of hand from a
charge of hyperbole, contains some interesting and conclusive evidence
on the point, though it refers to pencil and chalk drawing only:--

"I must ask you to allow me yet leave to reply to the objections you
make to two statements in my catalogue, as those objections would
otherwise diminish its usefulness. I have asserted that, in a given
drawing (named as one of the chief in the series), Turner's pencil did
not move over the thousandth of an inch without meaning; and you charge
this expression with extravagant hyperbole. On the contrary, it is much
within the truth, being merely a mathematically accurate description of
fairly good execution in either drawing or engraving. It is only
necessary to measure a piece of any ordinary good work to ascertain
this. Take, for instance, Finden's engraving at the 180th page of
Rogers' poems; in which the face of the figure, from the chin to the
top of the brow, occupies just a quarter of an inch, and the space
between the upper lip and chin as nearly as possible one-seventeenth of
an inch. The whole mouth occupies one-third of this space, say one-
fiftieth of an inch, and within that space both the lips and the much
more difficult inner corner of the mouth are perfectly drawn and
rounded, with quite successful and sufficiently subtle expression. Any
artist will assure you that in order to draw a mouth as well as this,
there must be more than twenty gradations of shade in the touches; that
is to say, in this case, gradations changing, with meaning, within less
than the thousandth of an inch.

"But this is mere child's play compared to the refinement of a first-
rate mechanical work--much more of brush or pencil drawing by a
master's hand. In order at once to furnish you with authoritative
evidence on this point, I wrote to Mr. Kingsley, tutor of Sidney-Sussex
College, a friend to whom I always have recourse when I want to be
precisely right in any matter; for his great knowledge both of
mathematics and of natural science is joined, not only with singular
powers of delicate experimental manipulation, but with a keen
sensitiveness to beauty in art. His answer, in its final statement
respecting Turner's work, is amazing even to me, and will, I should
think, be more so to your readers. Observe the successions of measured
and tested refinement: here is No. 1:--

"'The finest mechanical work that I know, which is not optical, is that
done by Nobert in the way of ruling lines. I have a series ruled by him
on glass, giving actual scales from .000024 and .000016 of an inch,
perfectly correct to these places of decimals, and he has executed
others as fine as .000012, though I do not know how far he could repeat
these last with accuracy.'

"This is No. 1 of precision. Mr. Kingsley proceeds to No. 2:--

"'But this is rude work compared to the accuracy necessary for the
construction of the object-glass of a microscope such as Rosse turns
out.'

"I am sorry to omit the explanation which follows of the ten lenses
composing such a glass, 'each of which must be exact in radius and in
surface, and all have their axes coincident:' but it would not be
intelligible without the figure by which it is illustrated; so I pass
to Mr. Kingsley's No. 3:--

"'I am tolerably familiar,' he proceeds, 'with the actual grinding and
polishing of lenses and specula, and have produced by my own hand some
by no means bad optical work, and I have copied no small amount of
Turner's work, and _I still look with awe at the combined delicacy
and precision of his hand_; IT BEATS OPTICAL WORK OUT OF SIGHT. In
optical work, as in refined drawing, the hand goes beyond the eye, and
one has to depend upon the feel; and when one has once learned what a
delicate affair touch is, one gets a horror of all coarse work, and is
ready to forgive any amount of feebleness, sooner than that boldness
which is akin to impudence. In optics the distinction is easily seen
when the work is put to trial; but here too, as in drawing, it requires
an educated eye to tell the difference when the work is only moderately
bad; but with "bold" work, nothing can be seen but distortion and fog:
and I heartily wish the same result would follow the same kind of
handling in drawing; but here, the boldness cheats the unlearned by
looking like the precision of the true man. It is very strange how much
better our ears are than our eyes in this country: if an ignorant man
were to be "bold" with a violin, he would not get many admirers, though
his boldness was far below that of ninety-nine out of a hundred
drawings one sees.'

"The words which I have put in italics in the above extract are those
which were surprising to me. I knew that Turner's was as refined as any
optical work, but had no idea of its going beyond it. Mr. Kingsley's
word 'awe' occurring just before, is, however, as I have often felt,
precisely the right one. When once we begin at all to understand the
handling of any truly great executor, such as that of any of the three
great Venetians, of Correggio, or Turner, the awe of it is something
greater than can be felt from the most stupendous natural scenery. For
the creation of such a system as a high human intelligence, endowed
with its ineffably perfect instruments of eye and hand, is a far more
appalling manifestation of Infinite Power, than the making either of
seas or mountains.

"After this testimony to the completion of Turner's work, I need not at
length defend myself from the charge of hyperbole in the statement
that, 'as far as I know, the galleries of Europe may be challenged to
produce one sketch [footnote: A sketch, observe,--not a finished
drawing. Sketches are only proper subjects of comparison with each
other when they contain about the same quantity of work: the test of
their merit is the quantity of truth told with a given number of
touches. The assertion in the Catalogue which this letter was written
to defend, was made respecting the sketch of Rome, No. 101.] that shall
equal the chalk study No. 45, or the feeblest of the memoranda in the
71st and following frames;' which memoranda, however, it should have
been observed, are stated at the 44th page to be in some respects 'the
grandest work in grey that he did in his life.' For I believe that, as
manipulators, none but the four men whom I have just named (the three
Venetians and Correggio) were equal to Turner; and, as far as I know,
none of those four ever put their full strength into sketches. But
whether they did or not, my statement in the catalogue is limited by my
own knowledge: and, as far as I can trust that knowledge, it is not an
enthusiastic statement, but an entirely calm and considered one. It may
be a mistake but it is not a hyperbole."




APPENDIX V.


I can only give, to illustrate this balcony, fac-similes of rough
memoranda made on a single leaf of my note-book, with a tired hand; but
it may be useful to young students to see them, in order that they may
know the difference between notes made to get at the gist and heart of
a thing, and notes made merely to look neat. Only it must be observed
that the best characters of free drawing are always lost even in the
most careful facsimile; and I should not show even these slight notes
in woodcut imitation, unless the reader had it in his power, by a
glance at the 21st or 35th plates in _Modern Painters_ (and yet
better, by trying to copy a piece of either of them), to ascertain how
far I can draw or not. I refer to these plates, because, though I
distinctly stated in the preface that they, together with the 12th,
20th, 34th, and 37th, were executed on the steel by my own hand, (the
use of the dry point in the foregrounds of the 12th and 21st plates
being moreover wholly different from the common processes of etching) I
find it constantly assumed that they were engraved for me--as if direct
lying in such matters were a thing of quite common usage.

Fig. 2 is the centre-piece of the balcony, but a leaf-spray is omitted
on the right-hand side, having been too much buried among the real
leaves to be drawn.

Fig. 3 shows the intended general effect of its masses, the five-leaved
and six-leaved flowers being clearly distinguishable at any distance.

Fig. 4 is its profile, rather carefully drawn at the top, to show the
tulip and turkscap lily leaves. Underneath there is a plate of iron
beaten into broad thin leaves, which gives the centre of the balcony a
gradual sweep outwards, like the side of a ship of war. The central
profile is of the greatest importance in ironwork, as the flow of it
affects the curves of the whole design, not merely in surface, as in
marble carving, but in their intersections, when the side is seen
through the front. The lighter leaves, _b b_, are real bindweed.

Fig. 5 shows two of the teeth of the border, illustrating their
irregularity of form, which takes place quite to the extent indicated.

Fig. 6 is the border at the side of the balcony, showing the most
interesting circumstance in the treatment of the whole, namely, the
enlargement and retraction of the teeth of the cornice, as it
approaches the wall. This treatment of the whole cornice as a kind of
wreath round the balcony, having its leaves flung loose at the back,
and set close at the front, as a girl would throw a wreath of leaves
round her hair, is precisely the most finished indication of a good
workman's mind to be found in the whole thing.

Fig. 7 shows the outline of the retracted leaves accurately. It was
noted in the text that the whole of this ironwork had been coloured.
The difficulty of colouring ironwork rightly, and the necessity of
doing it in some way or other, have been the principal reasons for my
never having entered heartily into this subject; for all the ironwork I
have ever seen look beautiful was rusty, and rusty iron will not answer
modern purposes. Nevertheless it may be painted, but it needs some one
to do it who knows what painting means, and few of us do--certainly
none, as yet, of our restorers of decoration or writers on colour.

It is a marvellous thing to me that book after book should appear on
this last subject, without apparently the slightest consciousness on
the part of the writers that the first necessity of beauty in colour is
gradation, as the first necessity of beauty in line is curvature,--or
that the second necessity in colour is mystery or subtlety, as the
second necessity in line is softness. Colour ungradated is wholly
valueless; colour unmysterious is wholly barbarous. Unless it looses
itself and melts away towards other colours, as a true line loses
itself and melts away towards other lines, colour has no proper
existence, in the noble sense of the word. What a cube, or tetrahedron,
is to organic form, ungradated and unconfused colour is to organic
colour; and a person who attempts to arrange colour harmonies without
gradation of tint is in precisely the same category, as an artist who
should try to compose a beautiful picture out of an accumulation of
cubes and parallelepipeds.

The value of hue in all illuminations on painted glass of fine periods
depends primarily on the expedients used to make the colours palpitate and
fluctuate; _inequality_ of brilliancy being the _condition_ of brilliancy,
just as inequality of accent is the condition of power and loveliness in
sound. The skill with which the thirteenth century illuminators in books,
and the Indians in shawls and carpets, use the minutest atoms of colour
to gradate other colours, and confuse the eye, is the first secret in their
gift of splendour: associated, however, with so many other artifices which
are quite instinctive and unteachable, that it is of little use to dwell
upon them. Delicacy of organization in the designer given, you will soon
have all, and without it, nothing. However, not to close my book with
desponding words, let me set down, as many of us like such things, five
Laws to which there is no exception whatever, and which, if they can
enable no one to produce good colour, are at least, as far as they
reach, accurately condemnatory of bad colour.

1. ALL GOOD COLOUR IS GRADATED. A blush rose (or, better still, a blush
itself), is the type of rightness in arrangement of pure hue.

2. ALL HARMONIES OF COLOUR DEPEND FOR THEIR VITALITY ON THE ACTION AND
HELPFUL OPERATION OF EVERY PARTICLE OF COLOUR THEY CONTAIN.

3. THE FINAL PARTICLES OF COLOUR NECESSARY TO THE COMPLETENESS OF A
COLOUR HARMONY ARE ALWAYS INFINITELY SMALL; either laid by immeasurably
subtle touches of the pencil, or produced by portions of the colouring
substance, however distributed, which are so absolutely small as to
become at the intended distance infinitely so to the eye.

4. NO COLOUR HARMONY IS OF HIGH ORDER UNLESS IT INVOLVES INDESCRIBABLE
TINTS. It is the best possible sign of a colour when nobody who sees it
knows what to call it, or how to give an idea of it to any one else.
Even among simple hues the most valuable are those which cannot be
defined; the most precious purples will look brown beside pure purple,
and purple beside pure brown; and the most precious greens will be
called blue if seen beside pure green, and green if seen beside pure
blue.

5. THE FINER THE EYE FOR COLOUR, THE LESS IT WILL REQUIRE TO GRATIFY IT
INTENSELY. But that little must be supremely good and pure, as the
finest notes of a great singer, which are so near to silence. And a
great colourist will make even the absence of colour lovely, as the
fading of the perfect voice makes silence sacred.