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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
facades 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.
Content of LECTURE I - THE DETERIORATIVE POWER OF CONVENTIONAL ART OVER NATIONS [John Ruskin's essay: The Two Paths]
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