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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lectures on Art, by John Ruskin
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Lectures on Art
+       Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870
+
+Author: John Ruskin
+
+Release Date: September 3, 2006 [EBook #19164]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LECTURES ON ART ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif, Juliet Sutherland and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's note:  Transliteration of Greek words appears between + signs.]
+
+
+
+
+        Library Edition
+
+THE COMPLETE WORKS OF JOHN RUSKIN
+
+
+       CROWN OF WILD OLIVE
+
+         TIME AND TIDE
+
+        QUEEN OF THE AIR
+
+  LECTURES ON ART AND LANDSCAPE
+
+         ARATRA PENTELICI
+
+
+     NATIONAL LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
+          NEW YORK CHICAGO
+
+               ***
+
+          LECTURES ON ART.
+
+            DELIVERED
+
+            BEFORE THE
+
+        UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
+
+        IN HILARY TERM, 1870.
+
+               ***
+
+
+
+
+             CONTENTS.
+
+
+             LECTURE I.
+
+INAUGURAL                             1
+
+             LECTURE II.
+
+THE RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION      24
+
+             LECTURE III.
+
+THE RELATION OF ART TO MORALS        46
+
+             LECTURE IV.
+
+THE RELATION OF ART TO USE           66
+
+             LECTURE V.
+
+LINE                                 86
+
+             LECTURE VI.
+
+LIGHT                               102
+
+             LECTURE VII.
+
+COLOUR                              123
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1887.
+
+
+The following lectures were the most important piece of my literary work
+done with unabated power, best motive, and happiest concurrence of
+circumstance. They were written and delivered while my mother yet lived,
+and had vividest sympathy in all I was attempting;--while also my
+friends put unbroken trust in me, and the course of study I had followed
+seemed to fit me for the acceptance of noble tasks and graver
+responsibilities than those only of a curious traveler, or casual
+teacher.
+
+Men of the present world may smile at the sanguine utterances of the
+first four lectures: but it has not been wholly my own fault that they
+have remained unfulfilled; nor do I retract one word of hope for the
+success of other masters, nor a single promise made to the sincerity of
+the student's labor, on the lines here indicated. It would have been
+necessary to my success, that I should have accepted permanent residence
+in Oxford, and scattered none of my energy in other tasks. But I chose
+to spend half my time at Coniston Waterhead; and to use half my force in
+attempts to form a new social organization,--the St. George's
+Guild,--which made all my Oxford colleagues distrustful of me, and many
+of my Oxford hearers contemptuous. My mother's death in 1871, and that
+of a dear friend in 1875, took away the personal joy I had in anything I
+wrote or designed: and in 1876, feeling unable for Oxford duty, I
+obtained a year's leave of rest, and, by the kind and wise counsel of
+Prince Leopold, went to Venice, to reconsider the form into which I had
+cast her history in the abstract of it given in the "Stones of Venice."
+
+The more true and close view of that history, begun in "St. Mark's
+Rest," and the fresh architectural drawings made under the stimulus of
+it, led me forward into new fields of thought, inconsistent with the
+daily attendance needed by my Oxford classes; and in my discontent with
+the state I saw them in, and my inability to return to their guidance
+without abandonment of all my designs of Venetian and Italian history,
+began the series of vexations which ended in the very nearly mortal
+illness of 1878.
+
+Since, therefore, the period of my effective action in Oxford was only
+from 1870 to 1875, it can scarcely be matter of surprise or reproof that
+I could not in that time obtain general trust in a system of teaching
+which, though founded on that of Da Vinci and Reynolds, was at variance
+with the practice of all recent European academy schools; nor
+establish--on the unassisted resources of the Slade Professorship--the
+schools of Sculpture, Architecture, Metal-work, and manuscript
+Illumination, of which the design is confidently traced in the four
+inaugural lectures.
+
+In revising the book, I have indicated as in the last edition of the
+"Seven Lamps," passages which the student will find generally
+applicable, and in all their bearings useful, as distinguished from
+those regarding only their immediate subject. The relative importance of
+these broader statements, I again indicate by the use of capitals or
+italics; and if the reader will index the sentences he finds useful for
+his own work, in the blank pages left for that purpose at the close of
+the volume, he will certainly get more good of them than if they had
+been grouped for him according to the author's notion of their contents.
+
+SANDGATE, _10th January, 1888_.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURES ON ART
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE I
+
+INAUGURAL
+
+
+1. The duty which is to-day laid on me, of introducing, among the
+elements of education appointed in this great University, one not only
+new, but such as to involve in its possible results some modification of
+the rest, is, as you well feel, so grave, that no man could undertake it
+without laying himself open to the imputation of a kind of insolence;
+and no man could undertake it rightly, without being in danger of having
+his hands shortened by dread of his task, and mistrust of himself.
+
+And it has chanced to me, of late, to be so little acquainted either
+with pride or hope, that I can scarcely recover so much as I now need,
+of the one for strength, and of the other for foresight, except by
+remembering that noble persons, and friends of the high temper that
+judges most clearly where it loves best, have desired that this trust
+should be given me: and by resting also in the conviction that the
+goodly tree whose roots, by God's help, we set in earth to-day, will not
+fail of its height because the planting of it is under poor auspices, or
+the first shoots of it enfeebled by ill gardening.
+
+
+2. The munificence of the English gentleman to whom we owe the founding
+of this Professorship at once in our three great Universities, has
+accomplished the first great group of a series of changes now taking
+gradual effect in our system of public education, which, as you well
+know, are the sign of a vital change in the national mind, respecting
+both the principles on which that education should be conducted, and the
+ranks of society to which it should extend. For, whereas it was formerly
+thought that the discipline necessary to form the character of youth was
+best given in the study of abstract branches of literature and
+philosophy, it is now thought that the same, or a better, discipline may
+be given by informing men in early years of the things it will be of
+chief practical advantage to them afterwards to know; and by permitting
+to them the choice of any field of study which they may feel to be best
+adapted to their personal dispositions. I have always used what poor
+influence I possessed in advancing this change; nor can any one rejoice
+more than I in its practical results. But the completion--I will not
+venture to say, correction--of a system established by the highest
+wisdom of noble ancestors, cannot be too reverently undertaken: and it
+is necessary for the English people, who are sometimes violent in change
+in proportion to the reluctance with which they admit its necessity, to
+be now, oftener than at other times, reminded that the object of
+instruction here is not primarily attainment, but discipline; and that a
+youth is sent to our Universities, not (hitherto at least) to be
+apprenticed to a trade, nor even always to be advanced in a profession;
+but, always, to be made a gentleman and a scholar.
+
+
+3. To be made these,--if there is in him the making of either. The
+populaces of civilised countries have lately been under a feverish
+impression that it is possible for all men to be both; and that having
+once become, by passing through certain mechanical processes of
+instruction, gentle and learned, they are sure to attain in the sequel
+the consummate beatitude of being rich.
+
+Rich, in the way and measure in which it is well for them to be so, they
+may, without doubt, _all_ become. There is indeed a land of Havilah open
+to them, of which the wonderful sentence is literally true--"The gold of
+_that_ land is good." But they must first understand, that education, in
+its deepest sense, is not the equaliser, but the discerner, of men;[1]
+and that, so far from being instruments for the collection of riches,
+the first lesson of wisdom is to disdain them, and of gentleness, to
+diffuse.
+
+[Footnote 1: The full meaning of this sentence, and of that which closes
+the paragraph, can only be understood by reference to my more developed
+statements on the subject of Education in "Modern Painters" and in "Time
+and Tide." The following fourth paragraph is the most pregnant summary
+of my political and social principles I have ever been able to give.]
+
+It is not therefore, as far as we can judge, yet possible for all men to
+be gentlemen and scholars. Even under the best training some will remain
+too selfish to refuse wealth, and some too dull to desire leisure. But
+many more might be so than are now; nay, perhaps all men in England
+might one day be so, if England truly desired her supremacy among the
+nations to be in kindness and in learning. To which good end, it will
+indeed contribute that we add some practice of the lower arts to our
+scheme of University education; but the thing which is vitally necessary
+is, that we should extend the spirit of University education to the
+practice of the lower arts.
+
+
+4. And, above all, it is needful that we do this by redeeming them from
+their present pain of self-contempt, and by giving them _rest_. It has
+been too long boasted as the pride of England, that out of a vast
+multitude of men, confessed to be in evil case, it was possible for
+individuals, by strenuous effort, and rare good fortune, occasionally to
+emerge into the light, and look back with self-gratulatory scorn upon
+the occupations of their parents, and the circumstances of their
+infancy. Ought we not rather to aim at an ideal of national life, when,
+of the employments of Englishmen, though each shall be distinct, none
+shall be unhappy or ignoble; when mechanical operations, acknowledged to
+be debasing in their tendency,[2] shall be deputed to less fortunate and
+more covetous races; when advance from rank to rank, though possible to
+all men, may be rather shunned than desired by the best; and the chief
+object in the mind of every citizen may not be extrication from a
+condition admitted to be disgraceful, but fulfilment of a duty which
+shall be also a birthright?
+
+[Footnote 2: "+technai epirrêtoi+," compare page 81.]
+
+
+5. And then, the training of all these distinct classes will not be by
+Universities of general knowledge, but by distinct schools of such
+knowledge as shall be most useful for every class: in which, first the
+principles of their special business may be perfectly taught, and
+whatever higher learning, and cultivation of the faculties for receiving
+and giving pleasure, may be properly joined with that labour, taught in
+connection with it. Thus, I do not despair of seeing a School of
+Agriculture, with its fully-endowed institutes of zoology, botany, and
+chemistry; and a School of Mercantile Seamanship, with its institutes of
+astronomy, meteorology, and natural history of the sea: and, to name
+only one of the finer, I do not say higher, arts, we shall, I hope, in a
+little time, have a perfect school of Metal-work, at the head of which
+will be, not the ironmasters, but the goldsmiths: and therein, I
+believe, that artists, being taught how to deal wisely with the most
+precious of metals, will take into due government the uses of all
+others.
+
+But I must not permit myself to fail in the estimate of my immediate
+duty, while I debate what that duty may hereafter become in the hands of
+others; and I will therefore now, so far as I am able, lay before you a
+brief general view of the existing state of the arts in England, and of
+the influence which her Universities, through these newly-founded
+lectureships, may, I hope, bring to bear upon it for good.
+
+
+6. We have first to consider the impulse which has been given to the
+practice of all the arts by the extension of our commerce, and enlarged
+means of intercourse with foreign nations, by which we now become more
+familiarly acquainted with their works in past and in present times. The
+immediate result of these new opportunities, I regret to say, has been
+to make us more jealous of the genius of others, than conscious of the
+limitations of our own; and to make us rather desire to enlarge our
+wealth by the sale of art, than to elevate our enjoyments by its
+acquisition.
+
+Now, whatever efforts we make, with a true desire to produce, and
+possess, things that are intrinsically beautiful, have in them at least
+one of the essential elements of success. But efforts having origin only
+in the hope of enriching ourselves by the sale of our productions, are
+_assuredly_ condemned to dishonourable failure; not because, ultimately,
+a well-trained nation is forbidden to profit by the exercise of its
+peculiar art-skill; but because that peculiar art-skill can never be
+developed _with a view_ to profit. The right fulfilment of national
+power in art depends always on THE DIRECTION OF ITS AIM BY THE
+EXPERIENCE OF AGES. Self-knowledge is not less difficult, nor less
+necessary for the direction of its genius, to a people than to an
+individual; and it is neither to be acquired by the eagerness of
+unpractised pride, nor during the anxieties of improvident distress. No
+nation ever had, or will have, the power of suddenly developing, under
+the pressure of necessity, faculties it had neglected when it was at
+ease; nor of teaching itself in poverty, the skill to produce, what it
+has never, in opulence, had the sense to admire.
+
+
+7. Connected also with some of the worst parts of our social system, but
+capable of being directed to better result than this commercial
+endeavour, we see lately a most powerful impulse given to the production
+of costly works of art, by the various causes which promote the sudden
+accumulation of wealth in the hands of private persons. We have thus a
+vast and new patronage, which, in its present agency, is injurious to
+our schools; but which is nevertheless in a great degree earnest and
+conscientious, and far from being influenced chiefly by motives of
+ostentation. Most of our rich men would be glad to promote the true
+interests of art in this country: and even those who buy for vanity,
+found their vanity on the possession of what they suppose to be best.
+
+It is therefore in a great measure the fault of artists themselves if
+they suffer from this partly unintelligent, but thoroughly
+well-intended, patronage. If they seek to attract it by eccentricity, to
+deceive it by superficial qualities, or take advantage of it by
+thoughtless and facile production, they necessarily degrade themselves
+and it together, and have no right to complain afterwards that it will
+not acknowledge better-grounded claims. But if every painter of real
+power would do only what he knew to be worthy of himself, and refuse to
+be involved in the contention for undeserved or accidental success,
+there is indeed, whatever may have been thought or said to the contrary,
+true instinct enough in the public mind to follow such firm guidance. It
+is one of the facts which the experience of thirty years enables me to
+assert without qualification, that a really good picture is ultimately
+always approved and bought, unless it is wilfully rendered offensive to
+the public by faults which the artist has been either too proud to
+abandon or too weak to correct.
+
+
+8. The development of whatever is healthful and serviceable in the two
+modes of impulse which we have been considering, depends however,
+ultimately, on the direction taken by the true interest in art which has
+lately been aroused by the great and active genius of many of our
+living, or but lately lost, painters, sculptors, and architects. It may
+perhaps surprise, but I think it will please you to hear me, or (if you
+will forgive me, in my own Oxford, the presumption of fancying that some
+may recognise me by an old name) to hear the author of "Modern Painters"
+say, that his chief error in earlier days was not in over estimating,
+but in too slightly acknowledging the merit of living men. The great
+painter whose power, while he was yet among us, I was able to perceive,
+was the first to reprove me for my disregard of the skill of his
+fellow-artists; and, with this inauguration of the study of the art of
+all time,--a study which can only by true modesty end in wise
+admiration,--it is surely well that I connect the record of these words
+of his, spoken then too truly to myself, and true always more or less
+for all who are untrained in that toil,--"You don't know how difficult
+it is."
+
+You will not expect me, within the compass of this lecture, to give you
+any analysis of the many kinds of excellent art (in all the three great
+divisions) which the complex demands of modern life, and yet more varied
+instincts of modern genius, have developed for pleasure or service. It
+must be my endeavour, in conjunction with my colleagues in the other
+Universities, hereafter to enable you to appreciate these worthily; in
+the hope that also the members of the Royal Academy, and those of the
+Institute of British Architects, may be induced to assist, and guide,
+the efforts of the Universities, by organising such a system of
+art-education for their own students, as shall in future prevent the
+waste of genius in any mistaken endeavours; especially removing doubt as
+to the proper substance and use of materials; and requiring compliance
+with certain elementary principles of right, in every picture and design
+exhibited with their sanction. It is not indeed possible for talent so
+varied as that of English artists to be compelled into the formalities
+of a determined school; but it must certainly be the function of every
+academical body to see that their younger students are guarded from what
+must in every school be error; and that they are practised in the best
+methods of work hitherto known, before their ingenuity is directed to
+the invention of others.
+
+
+9. I need scarcely refer, except for the sake of completeness in my
+statement, to one form of demand for art which is wholly unenlightened,
+and powerful only for evil;--namely, the demand of the classes occupied
+solely in the pursuit of pleasure, for objects and modes of art that can
+amuse indolence or excite passion. There is no need for any discussion
+of these requirements, or of their forms of influence, though they are
+very deadly at present in their operation on sculpture, and on
+jewellers' work. They cannot be checked by blame, nor guided by
+instruction; they are merely the necessary result of whatever defects
+exist in the temper and principles of a luxurious society; and it is
+only by moral changes, not by art-criticism, that their action can be
+modified.
+
+
+10. Lastly, there is a continually increasing demand for popular art,
+multipliable by the printing-press, illustrative of daily events, of
+general literature, and of natural science. Admirable skill, and some of
+the best talent of modern times, are occupied in supplying this want;
+and there is no limit to the good which may be effected by rightly
+taking advantage of the powers we now possess of placing good and lovely
+art within the reach of the poorest classes. Much has been already
+accomplished; but great harm has been done also,--first, by forms of art
+definitely addressed to depraved tastes; and, secondly, in a more subtle
+way, by really beautiful and useful engravings which are yet not good
+enough to retain their influence on the public mind;--which weary it by
+redundant quantity of monotonous average excellence, and diminish or
+destroy its power of accurate attention to work of a higher order.
+
+Especially this is to be regretted in the effect produced on the schools
+of line engraving, which had reached in England an executive skill of a
+kind before unexampled, and which of late have lost much of their more
+sterling and legitimate methods. Still, I have seen plates produced
+quite recently, more beautiful, I think, in some qualities than anything
+ever before attained by the burin: and I have not the slightest fear
+that photography, or any other adverse or competitive operation, will in
+the least ultimately diminish,--I believe they will, on the contrary,
+stimulate and exalt--the grand old powers of the wood and the steel.
+
+
+11. Such are, I think, briefly the present conditions of art with which
+we have to deal; and I conceive it to be the function of this
+Professorship, with respect to them, to establish both a practical and
+critical school of fine art for English gentlemen: practical, so that if
+they draw at all, they may draw rightly; and critical, so that being
+first directed to such works of existing art as will best reward their
+study, they may afterwards make their patronage of living artists
+delightful to themselves in their consciousness of its justice, and, to
+the utmost, beneficial to their country, by being given to the men who
+deserve it; in the early period of their lives, when they both need it
+most, and can be influenced by it to the best advantage.
+
+
+12. And especially with reference to this function of patronage, I
+believe myself justified in taking into account future probabilities as
+to the character and range of art in England: and I shall endeavour at
+once to organise with you a system of study calculated to develop
+chiefly the knowledge of those branches in which the English schools
+have shown, and are likely to show, peculiar excellence.
+
+Now, in asking your sanction both for the nature of the general plans I
+wish to adopt, and for what I conceive to be necessary limitations of
+them, I wish you to be fully aware of my reasons for both: and I will
+therefore risk the burdening of your patience while I state the
+directions of effort in which I think English artists are liable to
+failure, and those also in which past experience has shown they are
+secure of success.
+
+
+13. I referred, but now, to the effort we are making to improve the
+designs of our manufactures. Within certain limits I believe this
+improvement may indeed take effect: so that we may no more humour
+momentary fashions by ugly results of chance instead of design; and may
+produce both good tissues, of harmonious colours, and good forms and
+substance of pottery and glass. But we shall never excel in decorative
+design. Such design is usually produced by people of great natural
+powers of mind, who have no variety of subjects to employ themselves on,
+no oppressive anxieties, and are in circumstances either of natural
+scenery or of daily life, which cause pleasurable excitement. _We_
+cannot design, because we have too much to think of, and we think of it
+too anxiously. It has long been observed how little real anxiety exists
+in the minds of the partly savage races which excel in decorative art;
+and we must not suppose that the temper of the Middle Ages was a
+troubled one, because every day brought its danger or its change. The
+very eventfulness of the life rendered it careless, as generally is
+still the case with soldiers and sailors. Now, when there are great
+powers of thought, and little to think of, all the waste energy and
+fancy are thrown into the manual work, and you have so much intellect as
+would direct the affairs of a large mercantile concern for a day, spent
+all at once, quite unconsciously, in drawing an ingenious spiral.
+
+Also, powers of doing fine ornamental work are only to be reached by a
+perpetual discipline of the hand as well as of the fancy; discipline as
+attentive and painful as that which a juggler has to put himself
+through, to overcome the more palpable difficulties of his profession.
+The execution of the best artists is always a splendid tour-de-force;
+and much that in painting is supposed to be dependent on material is
+indeed only a lovely and quite inimitable legerdemain. Now, when powers
+of fancy, stimulated by this triumphant precision of manual dexterity,
+descend uninterruptedly from generation to generation, you have at last,
+what is not so much a trained artist, as a new species of animal, with
+whose instinctive gifts you have no chance of contending. And thus all
+our imitations of other people's work are futile. We must learn first to
+make honest English wares, and afterwards to decorate them as may please
+the then approving Graces.
+
+
+14. Secondly--and this is an incapacity of a graver kind, yet having its
+own good in it also--we shall never be successful in the highest fields
+of ideal or theological art.
+
+For there is one strange, but quite essential, character in us: ever
+since the Conquest, if not earlier:--a delight in the forms of burlesque
+which are connected in some degree with the foulness of evil. I think
+the most perfect type of a true English mind in its best possible
+temper, is that of Chaucer; and you will find that, while it is for the
+most part full of thoughts of beauty, pure and wild like that of an
+April morning, there are even in the midst of this, sometimes
+momentarily jesting passages which stoop to play with evil--while the
+power of listening to and enjoying the jesting of entirely gross
+persons, whatever the feeling may be which permits it, afterwards
+degenerates into forms of humour which render some of quite the
+greatest, wisest, and most moral of English writers now almost useless
+for our youth. And yet you will find that whenever Englishmen are wholly
+without this instinct, their genius is comparatively weak and
+restricted.
+
+
+15. Now, the first necessity for the doing of any great work in ideal
+art, is the looking upon all foulness with horror, as a contemptible
+though dreadful enemy. You may easily understand what I mean, by
+comparing the feelings with which Dante regards any form of obscenity or
+of base jest, with the temper in which the same things are regarded by
+Shakespeare. And this strange earthly instinct of ours, coupled as it
+is, in our good men, with great simplicity and common sense, renders
+them shrewd and perfect observers and delineators of actual nature, low
+or high; but precludes them from that specialty of art which is properly
+called sublime. If ever we try anything in the manner of Michael Angelo
+or of Dante, we catch a fall, even in literature, as Milton in the
+battle of the angels, spoiled from Hesiod; while in art, every attempt
+in this style has hitherto been the sign either of the presumptuous
+egotism of persons who had never really learned to be workmen, or it has
+been connected with very tragic forms of the contemplation of death,--it
+has always been partly insane, and never once wholly successful.
+
+But we need not feel any discomfort in these limitations of our
+capacity. We can do much that others cannot, and more than we have ever
+yet ourselves completely done. Our first great gift is in the
+portraiture of living people--a power already so accomplished in both
+Reynolds and Gainsborough that nothing is left for future masters but to
+add the calm of perfect workmanship to their vigour and felicity of
+perception. And of what value a true school of portraiture may become in
+the future, when worthy men will desire only to be known, and others
+will not fear to know them, for what they truly were, we cannot from
+any past records of art influence yet conceive. But in my next address
+it will be partly my endeavour to show you how much more useful, because
+more humble, the labour of great masters might have been, had they been
+content to bear record of the souls that were dwelling with them on
+earth, instead of striving to give a deceptive glory to those they
+dreamed of in heaven.
+
+
+16. Secondly, we have an intense power of invention and expression in
+domestic drama; (King Lear and Hamlet being essentially domestic in
+their strongest motives of interest). There is a tendency at this moment
+towards a noble development of our art in this direction, checked by
+many adverse conditions, which may be summed in one,--the insufficiency
+of generous civic or patriotic passion in the heart of the English
+people; a fault which makes its domestic affection selfish, contracted,
+and, therefore, frivolous.
+
+
+17. Thirdly, in connection with our simplicity and good-humour, and
+partly with that very love of the grotesque which debases our ideal, we
+have a sympathy with the lower animals which is peculiarly our own; and
+which, though it has already found some exquisite expression in the
+works of Bewick and Landseer, is yet quite undeveloped. This sympathy,
+with the aid of our now authoritative science of physiology, and in
+association with our British love of adventure, will, I hope, enable us
+to give to the future inhabitants of the globe an almost perfect record
+of the present forms of animal life upon it, of which many are on the
+point of being extinguished.
+
+Lastly, but not as the least important of our special powers, I have to
+note our skill in landscape, of which I will presently speak more
+particularly.
+
+
+18. Such I conceive to be the directions in which, principally, we have
+the power to excel; and you must at once see how the consideration of
+them must modify the advisable methods of our art study. For if our
+professional painters were likely to produce pieces of art loftily ideal
+in their character, it would be desirable to form the taste of the
+students here by setting before them only the purest examples of Greek,
+and the mightiest of Italian, art. But I do not think you will yet find
+a single instance of a school directed exclusively to these higher
+branches of study in England, which has strongly, or even definitely,
+made impression on its younger scholars. While, therefore, I shall
+endeavour to point out clearly the characters to be looked for and
+admired in the great masters of imaginative design, I shall make no
+special effort to stimulate the imitation of them; and above all things,
+I shall try to probe in you, and to prevent, the affectation into which
+it is easy to fall, even through modesty,--of either endeavouring to
+admire a grandeur with which we have no natural sympathy, or losing the
+pleasure we might take in the study of familiar things, by considering
+it a sign of refinement to look for what is of higher class, or rarer
+occurrence.
+
+
+19. Again, if our artisans were likely to attain any distinguished skill
+in ornamental design, it would be incumbent upon me to make my class
+here accurately acquainted with the principles of earth and metal work,
+and to accustom them to take pleasure in conventional arrangements of
+colour and form. I hope, indeed, to do this, so far as to enable them to
+discern the real merit of many styles of art which are at present
+neglected; and, above all, to read the minds of semi-barbaric nations in
+the only language by which their feelings were capable of expression;
+and those members of my class whose temper inclines them to take
+pleasure in the interpretation of mythic symbols, will not probably be
+induced to quit the profound fields of investigation which early art,
+examined carefully, will open to them, and which belong to it alone: for
+this is a general law, that supposing the intellect of the workman the
+same, the more imitatively complete his art, the less he will mean by
+it; and the ruder the symbol, the deeper is its intention. Nevertheless,
+when I have once sufficiently pointed out the nature and value of this
+conventional work, and vindicated it from the contempt with which it is
+too generally regarded, I shall leave the student to his own pleasure in
+its pursuit; and even, so far as I may, discourage all admiration
+founded on quaintness or peculiarity of style; and repress any other
+modes of feeling which are likely to lead rather to fastidious
+collection of curiosities, than to the intelligent appreciation of work
+which, being executed in compliance with constant laws of right, cannot
+be singular, and must be distinguished only by excellence in what is
+always desirable.
+
+
+20. While, therefore, in these and such other directions, I shall
+endeavour to put every adequate means of advance within reach of the
+members of my class, I shall use my own best energy to show them what is
+consummately beautiful and well done, by men who have passed through the
+symbolic or suggestive stage of design, and have enabled themselves to
+comply, by truth of representation, with the strictest or most eager
+demands of accurate science, and of disciplined passion. I shall
+therefore direct your observation, during the greater part of the time
+you may spare to me, to what is indisputably best, both in painting and
+sculpture; trusting that you will afterwards recognise the nascent and
+partial skill of former days both with greater interest and greater
+respect, when you know the full difficulty of what it attempted, and the
+complete range of what it foretold.
+
+
+21. And with this view, I shall at once endeavour to do what has for
+many years been in my thoughts, and now, with the advice and assistance
+of the curators of the University Galleries, I do not doubt may be
+accomplished here in Oxford, just where it will be preëminently
+useful--namely, to arrange an educational series of examples of
+excellent art, standards to which you may at once refer on any
+questionable point, and by the study of which you may gradually attain
+an instinctive sense of right, which will afterwards be liable to no
+serious error. Such a collection may be formed, both more perfectly, and
+more easily, than would commonly be supposed. For the real utility of
+the series will depend on its restricted extent,--on the severe
+exclusion of all second-rate, superfluous, or even attractively varied
+examples,--and On the confining the students' attention to a few types
+of what is insuperably good. More progress in power of judgment may be
+made in a limited time by the examination of one work, than by the
+review of many; and a certain degree of vitality is given to the
+impressiveness of every characteristic, by its being exhibited in clear
+contrast, and without repetition.
+
+The greater number of the examples I shall choose will be only
+engravings or photographs: they shall be arranged so as to be easily
+accessible, and I will prepare a catalogue, pointing out my purpose in
+the selection of each. But in process of time, I have good hope that
+assistance will be given me by the English public in making the series
+here no less splendid than serviceable; and in placing minor
+collections, arranged on a similar principle, at the command also of the
+students in our public schools.
+
+
+22. In the second place, I shall endeavour to prevail upon all the
+younger members of the University who wish to attend the art lectures,
+to give at least so much time to manual practice as may enable them to
+understand the nature and difficulty of executive skill. The time so
+spent will not be lost, even as regards their other studies at the
+University, for I will prepare the practical exercises in a double
+series, one illustrative of history, the other of natural science. And
+whether you are drawing a piece of Greek armour, or a hawk's beak, or a
+lion's paw, you will find that the mere necessity of using the hand
+compels attention to circumstances which would otherwise have escaped
+notice, and fastens them in the memory without farther effort. But were
+it even otherwise, and this practical training did really involve some
+sacrifice of your time, I do not fear but that it will be justified to
+you by its felt results: and I think that general public feeling is also
+tending to the admission that accomplished education must include, not
+only full command of expression by language, but command of true musical
+sound by the voice, and of true form by the hand.
+
+
+23. While I myself hold this professorship, I shall direct you in these
+exercises very definitely to natural history, and to landscape; not only
+because in these two branches I am probably able to show you truths
+which might be despised by my successors: but because I think the vital
+and joyful study of natural history quite the principal element
+requiring introduction, not only into University, but into national,
+education, from highest to lowest; and I even will risk incurring your
+ridicule by confessing one of my fondest dreams, that I may succeed in
+making some of you English youths like better to look at a bird than to
+shoot it; and even desire to make wild creatures tame, instead of tame
+creatures wild. And for the study of landscape, it is, I think, now
+calculated to be of use in deeper, if not more important modes, than
+that of natural science, for reasons which I will ask you to let me
+state at some length.
+
+
+24. Observe first;--no race of men which is entirely bred in wild
+country, far from cities, ever enjoys landscape. They may enjoy the
+beauty of animals, but scarcely even that: a true peasant cannot see the
+beauty of cattle; but only qualities expressive of their
+serviceableness. I waive discussion of this to-day; permit my assertion
+of it, under my confident guarantee of future proof. Landscape can only
+be enjoyed by cultivated persons; and it is only by music, literature,
+and painting, that cultivation can be given. Also, the faculties which
+are thus received are hereditary; so that the child of an educated race
+has an innate instinct for beauty, derived from arts practised hundreds
+of years before its birth. Now farther note this, one of the loveliest
+things in human nature. In the children of noble races, trained by
+surrounding art, and at the same time in the practice of great deeds,
+there is an intense delight in the landscape of their country as
+_memorial_; a sense not taught to them, nor teachable to any others;
+but, in them, innate; and the seal and reward of persistence in great
+national life;--the obedience and the peace of ages having extended
+gradually the glory of the revered ancestors also to the ancestral
+land; until the Motherhood of the dust, the mystery of the Demeter from
+whose bosom we came, and to whose bosom we return, surrounds and
+inspires, everywhere, the local awe of field and fountain; the
+sacredness of landmark that none may remove, and of wave that none may
+pollute; while records of proud days, and of dear persons, make every
+rock monumental with ghostly inscription, and every path lovely with
+noble desolateness.
+
+
+25. Now, however checked by lightness of temperament, the instinctive
+love of landscape in us has this deep root, which, in your minds, I will
+pray you to disencumber from whatever may oppress or mortify it, and to
+strive to feel with all the strength of your youth that a nation is only
+worthy of the soil and the scenes that it has inherited, when, by all
+its acts and arts, it is making them more lovely for its children.
+
+And now, I trust, you will feel that it is not in mere yielding to my
+own fancies that I have chosen, for the first three subjects in your
+educational series, landscape scenes;--two in England, and one in
+France,--the association of these being not without purpose:--and for
+the fourth Albert Dürer's dream of the Spirit of Labour. And of the
+landscape subjects, I must tell you this much. The first is an engraving
+only; the original drawing by Turner was destroyed by fire twenty years
+ago. For which loss I wish you to be sorry, and to remember, in
+connection with this first example, that whatever remains to us of
+possession in the arts is, compared to what we might have had if we had
+cared for them, just what that engraving is to the lost drawing. You
+will find also that its subject has meaning in it which will not be
+harmful to you. The second example is a real drawing by Turner, in the
+same series, and very nearly of the same place; the two scenes are
+within a quarter of a mile of each other. It will show you the character
+of the work that was destroyed. It will show you, in process of time,
+much more; but chiefly, and this is my main reason for choosing both, it
+will be a permanent expression to you of what English landscape was
+once;--and must, if we are to remain a nation, be again.
+
+I think it farther right to tell you, for otherwise you might hardly pay
+regard enough to work apparently so simple, that by a chance which is
+not altogether displeasing to me, this drawing, which it has become, for
+these reasons, necessary for me to give you, is--not indeed the best I
+have, (I have several as good, though none better)--but, of all I have,
+the one I had least mind to part with.
+
+The third example is also a Turner drawing--a scene on the Loire--never
+engraved. It is an introduction to the series of the Loire, which you
+have already; it has in its present place a due concurrence with the
+expressional purpose of its companions; and though small, it is very
+precious, being a faultless, and, I believe, unsurpassable example of
+water-colour painting.
+
+Chiefly, however, remember the object of these three first examples is
+to give you an index to your truest feelings about European, and
+especially about your native landscape, as it is pensive and historical;
+and so far as you yourselves make any effort at its representation, to
+give you a motive for fidelity in handwork more animating than any
+connected with mere success in the art itself.
+
+
+26. With respect to actual methods of practice, I will not incur the
+responsibility of determining them for you. We will take Lionardo's
+treatise on painting for our first text-book; and I think you need not
+fear being misled by me if I ask you to do only what Lionardo bids, or
+what will be necessary to enable you to do his bidding. But you need not
+possess the book, nor read it through. I will translate the pieces to
+the authority of which I shall appeal; and, in process of time, by
+analysis of this fragmentary treatise, show you some characters not
+usually understood of the simplicity as well as subtlety common to most
+great workmen of that age. Afterwards we will collect the instructions
+of other undisputed masters, till we have obtained a code of laws
+clearly resting on the consent of antiquity.
+
+While, however, I thus in some measure limit for the present the methods
+of your practice, I shall endeavour to make the courses of my University
+lectures as wide in their range as my knowledge will permit. The range
+so conceded will be narrow enough; but I believe that my proper function
+is not to acquaint you with the general history, but with the essential
+principles of art; and with its history only when it has been both great
+and good, or where some special excellence of it requires examination of
+the causes to which it must be ascribed.
+
+
+27. But if either our work, or our enquiries, are to be indeed
+successful in their own field, they must be connected with others of a
+sterner character. Now listen to me, if I have in these past details
+lost or burdened your attention; for this is what I have chiefly to say
+to you. The art of any country is _the exponent of its social and
+political virtues_. I will show you that it is so in some detail, in the
+second of my subsequent course of lectures; meantime accept this as one
+of the things, and the most important of all things, I can positively
+declare to you. The art, or general productive and formative energy, of
+any country, is an exact exponent of its ethical life. You can have
+noble art only from noble persons, associated under laws fitted to their
+time and circumstances. And the best skill that any teacher of art could
+spend here in your help, would not end in enabling you even so much as
+rightly to draw the water-lilies in the Cherwell (and though it did, the
+work when done would not be worth the lilies themselves) unless both he
+and you were seeking, as I trust we shall together seek, in the laws
+which regulate the finest industries, the clue to the laws which
+regulate _all_ industries, and in better obedience to which we shall
+actually have henceforward to live: not merely in compliance with our
+own sense of what is right, but under the weight of quite literal
+necessity. For the trades by which the British people has believed it to
+be the highest of destinies to maintain itself, cannot now long remain
+undisputed in its hands; its unemployed poor are daily becoming more
+violently criminal; and a certain distress in the middle classes,
+arising, _partly from their vanity in living always up to their incomes,
+and partly from their folly in imagining that they can subsist in
+idleness upon usury_, will at last compel the sons and daughters of
+English families to acquaint themselves with the principles of
+providential economy; and to learn that food can only be got out of the
+ground, and competence only secured by frugality; and that although it
+is not possible for all to be occupied in the highest arts, nor for any,
+guiltlessly, to pass their days in a succession of pleasures, the most
+perfect mental culture possible to men is founded on their useful
+energies, and their best arts and brightest happiness are consistent,
+and consistent only, with their virtue.
+
+
+28. This, I repeat, gentlemen, will soon become manifest to those among
+us, and there are yet many, who are honest-hearted. And the future fate
+of England depends upon the position they then take, and on their
+courage in maintaining it.
+
+There is a destiny now possible to us--the highest ever set before a
+nation to be accepted or refused. We are still undegenerate in race; a
+race mingled of the best northern blood. We are not yet dissolute in
+temper, but still have the firmness to govern, and the grace to obey. We
+have been taught a religion of pure mercy, which we must either now
+betray, or learn to defend by fulfilling. And we are rich in an
+inheritance of honour, bequeathed to us through a thousand years of
+noble history, which it should be our daily thirst to increase with
+splendid avarice, so that Englishmen, if it be a sin to covet honour,
+should be the most offending souls alive. Within the last few years we
+have had the laws of natural science opened to us with a rapidity which
+has been blinding by its brightness; and means of transit and
+communication given to us, which have made but one kingdom of the
+habitable globe. One kingdom;--but who is to be its king? Is there to be
+no king in it, think you, and every man to do that which is right in his
+own eyes? Or only kings of terror, and the obscene empires of Mammon
+and Belial? Or will you, youths of England, make your country again a
+royal throne of kings; a sceptred isle, for all the world a source of
+light, a centre of peace; mistress of Learning and of the
+Arts;--faithful guardian of great memories in the midst of irreverent
+and ephemeral visions;--faithful servant of time-tried principles, under
+temptation from fond experiments and licentious desires; and amidst the
+cruel and clamorous jealousies of the nations, worshipped in her strange
+valour of goodwill towards men?
+
+
+29. "Vexilla regis prodeunt." Yes, but of which king? There are the two
+oriflammes; which shall we plant on the farthest islands,--the one that
+floats in heavenly fire, or that hangs heavy with foul tissue of
+terrestrial gold? There is indeed a course of beneficent glory open to
+us, such as never was yet offered to any poor group of mortal souls. But
+it must be--it _is_ with us, now, "Reign or Die." And if it shall be
+said of this country, "Fece per viltate, il gran rifiuto;" that refusal
+of the crown will be, of all yet recorded in history, the shamefullest
+and most untimely.
+
+And this is what she must either do, or perish: she must found colonies
+as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and
+worthiest men;--seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set
+her foot on, and there teaching these her colonists that their chief
+virtue is to be fidelity to their country, and that their first aim is
+to be to advance the power of England by land and sea: and that, though
+they live on a distant plot of ground, they are no more to consider
+themselves therefore disfranchised from their native land, than the
+sailors of her fleets do, because they float on distant waves. So that
+literally, these colonies must be fastened fleets; and every man of them
+must be under authority of captains and officers, whose better command
+is to be over fields and streets instead of ships of the line; and
+England, in these her motionless navies (or, in the true and mightiest
+sense, motionless _churches_, ruled by pilots on the Galilean lake of
+all the world), is to "expect every man to do his duty;" recognising
+that duty is indeed possible no less in peace than war; and that if we
+can get men, for little pay, to cast themselves against cannon-mouths
+for love of England, we may find men also who will plough and sow for
+her, who will behave kindly and righteously for her, who will bring up
+their children to love her, and who will gladden themselves in the
+brightness of her glory, more than in all the light of tropic skies.
+
+But that they may be able to do this, she must make her own majesty
+stainless; she must give them thoughts of their home of which they can
+be proud. The England who is to be mistress of half the earth, cannot
+remain herself a heap of cinders, trampled by contending and miserable
+crowds; she must yet again become the England she was once, and in all
+beautiful ways,--more: so happy, so secluded, and so pure, that in her
+sky--polluted by no unholy clouds--she may be able to spell rightly of
+every star that heaven doth show; and in her fields, ordered and wide
+and fair, of every herb that sips the dew; and under the green avenues
+of her enchanted garden, a sacred Circe, true Daughter of the Sun, she
+must guide the human arts, and gather the divine knowledge, of distant
+nations, transformed from savageness to manhood, and redeemed from
+despairing into peace.
+
+
+30. You think that an impossible ideal. Be it so; refuse to accept it if
+you will; but see that you form your own in its stead. All that I ask of
+you is to have a fixed purpose of some kind for your country and
+yourselves; no matter how restricted, so that it be fixed and unselfish.
+I know what stout hearts are in you, to answer acknowledged need: but it
+is the fatallest form of error in English youths to hide their hardihood
+till it fades for lack of sunshine, and to act in disdain of purpose,
+till all purpose is vain. It is not by deliberate, but by careless
+selfishness; not by compromise with evil, but by dull following of good,
+that the weight of national evil increases upon us daily. Break through
+at least this pretence of existence; determine what you will be, and
+what you would win. You will not decide wrongly if you will resolve to
+decide at all. Were even the choice between lawless pleasure and loyal
+suffering, you would not, I believe, choose basely. But your trial is
+not so sharp. It is between drifting in confused wreck among the
+castaways of Fortune, who condemns to assured ruin those who know not
+either how to resist her, or obey; between this, I say, and the taking
+of your appointed part in the heroism of Rest; the resolving to share in
+the victory which is to the weak rather than the strong; and the binding
+yourselves by that law, which, thought on through lingering night and
+labouring day, makes a man's life to be as a tree planted by the
+water-side, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season;--
+
+     "ET FOLIUM EJUS NON DEFLUET,
+      ET OMNIA, QUĈCUNQUE FACIET, PROSPERABUNTUR."
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE II
+
+THE RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION
+
+
+31. It was stated, and I trust partly with your acceptance, in my
+opening lecture, that the study on which we are about to enter cannot be
+rightly undertaken except in furtherance of the grave purposes of life
+with respect to which the rest of the scheme of your education here is
+designed. But you can scarcely have at once felt all that I intended in
+saying so;--you cannot but be still partly under the impression that the
+so-called fine arts are merely modes of graceful recreation, and a new
+resource for your times of rest. Let me ask you, forthwith, so far as
+you can trust me, to change your thoughts in this matter. All the great
+arts have for their object either the support or exaltation of human
+life,--usually both; and their dignity, and ultimately their very
+existence, depend on their being "+meta logou alêthous+," that is
+to say, apprehending, with right reason, the nature of the materials
+they work with, of the things they relate or represent, and of the
+faculties to which they are addressed. And farther, they form one united
+system from which it is impossible to remove any part without harm to
+the rest. They are founded first in mastery, by strength of _arm_, of
+the earth and sea, in agriculture and seamanship; then their inventive
+power begins, with the clay in the hand of the potter, whose art is the
+humblest but truest type of the forming of the human body and spirit;
+and in the carpenter's work, which probably was the early employment of
+the Founder of our religion. And until men have perfectly learned the
+laws of art in clay and wood, they can consummately know no others. Nor
+is it without the strange significance which you will find in what at
+first seems chance, in all noble histories, as soon as you can read
+them rightly,--that the statue of Athena Polias was of olive-wood, and
+that the Greek temple and Gothic spire are both merely the permanent
+representations of useful wooden structures. On these two first arts
+follow building in stone,--sculpture,--metal work,--and painting; every
+art being properly called "fine" which demands the exercise of the full
+faculties of heart and intellect. For though the fine arts are not
+necessarily imitative or representative, for their essence is in being
++peri genesin+--occupied in the actual _production_ of beautiful
+form or colour,--still, the highest of them are appointed also to relate
+to us the utmost ascertainable truth respecting visible things and moral
+feelings: and this pursuit of _fact_ is the vital _element_ of the art
+power;--that in which alone it can develop itself to its utmost. And I
+will anticipate by an assertion which you will at present think too
+bold, but which I am willing that you should think so, in order that you
+may well remember it,--THE HIGHEST THING THAT ART CAN DO IS TO SET
+BEFORE YOU THE TRUE IMAGE OF THE PRESENCE OF A NOBLE HUMAN BEING. IT HAS
+NEVER DONE MORE THAN THIS, AND IT OUGHT NOT TO DO LESS.
+
+
+32. The great arts--forming thus one perfect scheme of human skill, of
+which it is not right to call one division more honourable, though it
+may be more subtle, than another--have had, and can have, but three
+principal directions of purpose:--first, that of enforcing the religion
+of men; secondly, that of perfecting their ethical state; thirdly, that
+of doing them material service.
+
+
+33. I do not doubt but that you are surprised at my saying the arts can
+in their second function only be directed to the perfecting of ethical
+state, it being our usual impression that they are often destructive of
+morality. But it is impossible to direct fine art to an immoral end,
+except by giving it characters unconnected with its fineness, or by
+addressing it to persons who cannot perceive it to be fine. Whosoever
+recognises it is exalted by it. On the other hand, it has been commonly
+thought that art was a most fitting means for the enforcement of
+religious doctrines and emotions; whereas there is, as I must presently
+try to show you, room for grave doubt whether it has not in this
+function hitherto done evil rather than good.
+
+
+34. In this and the two next following lectures, I shall endeavour
+therefore to show you the grave relations of human art, in these three
+functions, to human life. I can do this but roughly, as you may well
+suppose--since each of these subjects would require for its right
+treatment years instead of hours. Only, remember, _I_ have already given
+years, not a few, to each of them; and what I try to tell _you_ now will
+be only so much as is absolutely necessary to set our work on a clear
+foundation. You may not, at present, see the necessity for _any_
+foundation, and may think that I ought to put pencil and paper in your
+hands at once. On that point I must simply answer, "Trust me a little
+while," asking you however also to remember, that--irrespectively of any
+consideration of last or first--my true function here is not that of
+your master in painting, or sculpture, or pottery; but to show you what
+it is that makes any of these arts _fine_, or the contrary of _fine_:
+essentially _good_, or essentially _base_. You need not fear my not
+being practical enough for you; all the industry you choose to give me,
+I will take; but far the better part of what you may gain by such
+industry would be lost, if I did not first lead you to see what every
+form of art-industry intends, and why some of it is justly called right,
+and some wrong.
+
+
+35. It would be well if you were to look over, with respect to this
+matter, the end of the second, and what interests you of the third, book
+of Plato's Republic; noting therein these two principal things, of which
+I have to speak in this and my next lecture: first, the power which
+Plato so frankly, and quite justly, attributes to art, of _falsifying_
+our conceptions of Deity: which power he by fatal error partly implies
+may be used wisely for good, and that the feigning is only wrong when it
+is of evil, "+ean tis mê kalôs pseudêtai+;" and you may trace
+through all that follows the beginning of the change of Greek ideal art
+into a beautiful expediency, instead of what it was in the days of
+Pindar, the statement of what "could not be otherwise than so." But, in
+the second place, you will find in those books of the Polity, stated
+with far greater accuracy of expression than our English language
+admits, the essential relations of art to morality; the sum of these
+being given in one lovely sentence, which, considering that we have
+to-day grace done us by fair companionship,[3] you will pardon me for
+translating. "_Must it be then only with our poets that we insist they
+shall either create for us the image of a noble morality, or among us
+create none? or shall we not also keep guard over all other workers for
+the people, and forbid them to make what is ill-customed, and
+unrestrained, and ungentle, and without order or shape, either in
+likeness of living things, or in buildings, or in any other thing
+whatsoever that is made for the people? and shall we not rather seek for
+workers who_ CAN TRACK THE INNER NATURE OF ALL THAT MAY BE SWEETLY
+SCHEMED; _so that the young men, as living in a wholesome place, may be
+profited by everything that, in work fairly wrought, may touch them
+through hearing or sight--as if it were a breeze bringing health to them
+from places strong for life?_"
+
+[Footnote 3: There were, in fact, a great many more girls than
+University men at the lectures.]
+
+
+36. And now--but one word, before we enter on our task, as to the way
+you must understand what I may endeavour to tell you.
+
+Let me beg you--now and always--not to think that I mean more than I
+say. In all probability, I mean just what I say, and only that. At all
+events I do fully mean _that_; and if there is anything reserved in my
+mind, it will be probably different from what you would guess. You are
+perfectly welcome to know all that I think, as soon as I have put before
+you all my grounds for thinking it; but by the time I have done so, you
+will be able to form an opinion of your own; and mine will then be of no
+consequence to you.
+
+
+37. I use then to-day, as I shall in future use, the word "Religion" as
+signifying the feelings of love, reverence, or dread with which the
+human mind is affected by its conceptions of spiritual being; and you
+know well how necessary it is, both to the rightness of our own life,
+and to the understanding the lives of others, that we should always keep
+clearly distinguished our ideas of Religion, as thus defined, and of
+Morality, as the law of rightness in human conduct. For there are many
+religions, but there is only one morality. There are moral and immoral
+religions, which differ as much in precept as in emotion; but there is
+only one morality, WHICH HAS BEEN, IS, AND MUST BE FOR EVER, AN INSTINCT
+IN THE HEARTS OF ALL CIVILISED MEN, AS CERTAIN AND UNALTERABLE AS THEIR
+OUTWARD BODILY FORM, AND WHICH RECEIVES FROM RELIGION NEITHER LAW, NOR
+PLACE; BUT ONLY HOPE, AND FELICITY.
+
+
+38. The pure forms or states of religion hitherto known, are those in
+which a healthy humanity, finding in itself many foibles and sins, has
+imagined, or been made conscious of, the existence of higher spiritual
+personality, liable to no such fault or stain; and has been assisted in
+effort, and consoled in pain, by reference to the will or sympathy of
+such purer spirits, whether imagined or real. I am compelled to use
+these painful latitudes of expression, because no analysis has hitherto
+sufficed to distinguish accurately, in historical narrative, the
+difference between impressions resulting from the imagination of the
+worshipper, and those made, if any, by the actually local and temporary
+presence of another spirit. For instance, take the vision, which of all
+others has been since made most frequently the subject of physical
+representation--the appearance to Ezekiel and St. John of the four
+living creatures, which throughout Christendom have been used to
+symbolise the Evangelists.[4] Supposing such interpretation just, one of
+those figures was either the mere symbol to St. John of himself, or it
+was the power which inspired him, manifesting itself in an independent
+form. Which of these it was, or whether neither of these, but a vision
+of other powers, or a dream, of which neither the prophet himself knew,
+nor can any other person yet know, the interpretation,--I suppose no
+modestly-minded and accurate thinker would now take upon himself to
+decide. Nor is it therefore anywise necessary for you to decide on that,
+or any other such question; but it is necessary that you should be bold
+enough to look every opposing question steadily in its face; and modest
+enough, having done so, to know when it is too hard for you. But above
+all things, see that you be modest in your thoughts, for of this one
+thing we may be absolutely sure, that all our thoughts are but degrees
+of darkness. And in these days you have to guard against the fatallest
+darkness of the two opposite Prides;--the Pride of Faith, which imagines
+that the nature of the Deity can be defined by its convictions; and the
+Pride of Science, which imagines that the energy of Deity can be
+explained by its analysis.
+
+[Footnote 4: Only the Gospels, "IV Evangelia," according to St. Jerome.]
+
+
+39. Of these, the first, the Pride of Faith, is now, as it has been
+always, the most deadly, because the most complacent and
+subtle;--because it invests every evil passion of our nature with the
+aspect of an angel of light, and enables the self-love, which might
+otherwise have been put to wholesome shame, and the cruel carelessness
+of the ruin of our fellow-men, which might otherwise have been warmed
+into human love, or at least checked by human intelligence, to congeal
+themselves into the mortal intellectual disease of imagining that
+myriads of the inhabitants of the world for four thousand years have
+been left to wander and perish, many of them everlastingly, in order
+that, in fulness of time, divine truth might be preached sufficiently to
+ourselves: with this farther ineffable mischief for direct result, that
+multitudes of kindly-disposed, gentle, and submissive persons, who might
+else by their true patience have alloyed the hardness of the common
+crowd, and by their activity for good balanced its misdoing, are
+withdrawn from all such true services of man, that they may pass the
+best part of their lives in what they are told is the service of God;
+_namely, desiring what_ _they cannot obtain, lamenting what they cannot
+avoid, and reflecting on what they cannot understand_.[5]
+
+[Footnote 5: This concentrated definition of monastic life is of course
+to be understood only of its more enthusiastic forms.]
+
+
+40. This, I repeat, is the deadliest, but for you, under existing
+circumstances, it is becoming daily, almost hourly, the least probable
+form of Pride. That which you have chiefly to guard against consists in
+the overvaluing of minute though correct discovery; the groundless
+denial of all that seems to you to have been groundlessly affirmed; and
+the interesting yourselves too curiously in the progress of some
+scientific minds, which in their judgment of the universe can be
+compared to nothing so accurately as to the woodworms in the panel of a
+picture by some great painter, if we may conceive them as tasting with
+discrimination of the wood, and with repugnance of the colour, and
+declaring that even this unlooked-for and undesirable combination is a
+normal result of the action of molecular Forces.
+
+
+41. Now, I must very earnestly warn you, in the beginning of my work
+with you here, against allowing either of these forms of egotism to
+interfere with your judgment or practice of art. On the one hand, you
+must not allow the expression of your own favourite religious feelings
+by any particular form of art to modify your judgment of its absolute
+merit; nor allow the art itself to become an illegitimate means of
+deepening and confirming your convictions, by realising to your eyes
+what you dimly conceive with the brain; as if the greater clearness of
+the image were a stronger proof of its truth. On the other hand, you
+must not allow your scientific habit of trusting nothing but what you
+have ascertained, to prevent you from appreciating, or at least
+endeavouring to qualify yourselves to appreciate, the work of the
+highest faculty of the human mind,--its imagination,--when it is toiling
+in the presence of things that cannot be dealt with by any other power.
+
+
+42. These are both vital conditions of your healthy progress. On the one
+hand, observe that you do not wilfully use the realistic power of art
+to convince yourselves of historical or theological statements which you
+cannot otherwise prove; and which you wish to prove:--on the other hand,
+that you do not check your imagination and conscience while seizing the
+truths of which they alone are cognizant, because you value too highly
+the scientific interest which attaches to the investigation of second
+causes.
+
+For instance, it may be quite possible to show the conditions in water
+and electricity which necessarily produce the craggy outline, the
+apparently self-contained silvery light, and the sulphurous blue shadow
+of a thunder-cloud, and which separate these from the depth of the
+golden peace in the dawn of a summer morning. Similarly, it may be
+possible to show the necessities of structure which groove the fangs and
+depress the brow of the asp, and which distinguish the character of its
+head from that of the face of a young girl. But it is the function of
+the rightly-trained imagination to recognise, in these, and such other
+relative aspects, the unity of teaching which impresses, alike on our
+senses and our conscience, the eternal difference between good and evil:
+and the rule, over the clouds of heaven and over the creatures in the
+earth, of the same Spirit which teaches to our own hearts the bitterness
+of death, and strength of love.
+
+
+43. Now, therefore, approaching our subject in this balanced temper,
+which will neither resolve to see only what it would desire, nor expect
+to see only what it can explain, we shall find our enquiry into the
+relation of Art to Religion is distinctly threefold: first, we have to
+ask how far art may have been literally directed by spiritual powers;
+secondly, how far, if not inspired, it may have been exalted by them;
+lastly, how far, in any of its agencies, it has advanced the cause of
+the creeds it has been used to recommend.
+
+
+44. First: What ground have we for thinking that art has ever been
+inspired as a message or revelation? What internal evidence is there in
+the work of great artists of their having been under the authoritative
+guidance of supernatural powers?
+
+It is true that the answer to so mysterious a question cannot rest alone
+upon internal evidence; but it is well that you should know what might,
+from that evidence alone, be concluded. And the more impartially you
+examine the phenomena of imagination, the more firmly you will be led to
+conclude that they are the result of the influence of the common and
+vital, but not, therefore, less Divine, spirit, of which some portion is
+given to all living creatures in such manner as may be adapted to their
+rank in creation; and that everything which men rightly accomplish is
+indeed done by Divine help, but under a consistent law which is never
+departed from.
+
+The strength of this spiritual life within us may be increased or
+lessened by our own conduct; it varies from time to time, as physical
+strength varies; it is summoned on different occasions by our will, and
+dejected by our distress, or our sin; but it is always _equally human_,
+and _equally Divine_. We are men, and not mere animals, because a
+special form of it is with us always; we are nobler and baser men, as it
+is with us more or less; but it is never given to us in any degree which
+can make us more than men.
+
+
+45. Observe:--I give you this general statement doubtfully, and only as
+that towards which an impartial reasoner will, I think, be inclined by
+existing data. But I shall be able to show you, without any doubt, in
+the course of our studies, that the achievements of art which have been
+usually looked upon as the results of peculiar inspiration have been
+arrived at only through long courses of wisely directed labour, and
+under the influence of feelings which are common to all humanity.
+
+But of these feelings and powers which in different degrees are common
+to humanity, you are to note that there are three principal divisions:
+first, the instincts of construction or melody, which we share with
+lower animals, and which are in us as native as the instinct of the bee
+or nightingale; secondly, the faculty of vision, or of dreaming, whether
+in sleep or in conscious trance, or by voluntarily exerted fancy; and
+lastly, the power of rational inference and collection, of both the laws
+and forms of beauty.
+
+
+46. Now the faculty of vision, being closely associated with the
+innermost spiritual nature, is the one which has by most reasoners been
+held for the peculiar channel of Divine teaching: and it is a fact that
+great part of purely didactic art has been the record, whether in
+language, or by linear representation, of actual vision involuntarily
+received at the moment, though cast on a mental retina blanched
+by the past course of faithful life. But it is also true that
+these visions, where most distinctly received, are always--I speak
+deliberately--_always_, the _sign of some mental limitation or
+derangement_; and that the persons who most clearly recognise their
+value, exaggeratedly estimate it, choosing what they find to be useful,
+and calling that "inspired," and disregarding what they perceive to be
+useless, though presented to the visionary by an equal authority.
+
+
+47. Thus it is probable that no work of art has been more widely
+didactic than Albert Dürer's engraving, known as the "Knight and
+Death."[6] But that is only one of a series of works representing
+similarly vivid dreams, of which some are uninteresting, except for the
+manner of their representation, as the "St. Hubert," and others are
+unintelligible; some, frightful, and wholly unprofitable; so that we
+find the visionary faculty in that great painter, when accurately
+examined, to be a morbid influence, abasing his skill more frequently
+than encouraging it, and sacrificing the greater part of his energies
+upon vain subjects, two only being produced, in the course of a long
+life, which are of high didactic value, and both of these capable only
+of giving sad courage.[7] Whatever the value of these two, it bears more
+the aspect of a treasure obtained at great cost of suffering, than of a
+directly granted gift from heaven.
+
+[Footnote 6: Standard Series, No. 9.]
+
+[Footnote 7: The meaning of the "Knight and Death," even in this
+respect, has lately been questioned on good grounds.]
+
+
+48. On the contrary, not only the highest, but the most consistent
+results have been attained in art by men in whom the faculty of vision,
+however strong, was subordinate to that of deliberative design, and
+tranquillised by a measured, continual, not feverish, but affectionate,
+observance of the quite unvisionary facts of the surrounding world.
+
+And so far as we can trace the connection of their powers with the moral
+character of their lives, we shall find that the best art is the work of
+good, but of not distinctively religious men, who, at least, are
+conscious of no inspiration, and often so unconscious of their
+superiority to others, that one of the greatest of them, Reynolds,
+deceived by his modesty, has asserted that "all things are possible to
+well-directed labour."
+
+
+49. The second question, namely, how far art, if not inspired, has yet
+been ennobled by religion, I shall not touch upon to-day; for it both
+requires technical criticism, and would divert you too long from the
+main question of all,--How far religion has been helped by art?
+
+You will find that the operation of formative art--(I will not speak
+to-day of music)--the operation of formative art on religious creed is
+essentially twofold; the realisation, to the eyes, of imagined spiritual
+persons; and the limitation of their imagined presence to certain
+places. We will examine these two functions of it successively.
+
+
+50. And first, consider accurately what the agency of art is, in
+realising, to the sight, our conceptions of spiritual persons.
+
+For instance. Assume that we believe that the Madonna is always present
+to hear and answer our prayers. Assume also that this is true. I think
+that persons in a perfectly honest, faithful, and humble temper, would
+in that case desire only to feel so much of the Divine presence as the
+spiritual Power herself chose to make felt; and, above all things, not
+to think they saw, or knew, anything except what might be truly
+perceived or known.
+
+But a mind imperfectly faithful, and impatient in its distress, or
+craving in its dulness for a more distinct and convincing sense of the
+Divinity, would endeavour to complete, or perhaps we should rather say
+to contract, its conception, into the definite figure of a woman wearing
+a blue or crimson dress, and having fair features, dark eyes, and
+gracefully arranged hair.
+
+Suppose, after forming such a conception, that we have the power to
+realise and preserve it, this image of a beautiful figure with a
+pleasant expression cannot but have the tendency of afterwards leading
+us to think of the Virgin as present, when she is not actually present;
+or as pleased with us, when she is not actually pleased; or if we
+resolutely prevent ourselves from such imagination, nevertheless the
+existence of the image beside us will often turn our thoughts towards
+subjects of religion, when otherwise they would have been differently
+occupied; and, in the midst of other occupations, will familiarise more
+or less, and even mechanically associate with common or faultful states
+of mind, the appearance of the supposed Divine person.
+
+
+51. There are thus two distinct operations upon our mind: first, the art
+makes us believe what we would not otherwise have believed; and
+secondly, it makes us think of subjects we should not otherwise have
+thought of, intruding them amidst our ordinary thoughts in a confusing
+and familiar manner. We cannot with any certainty affirm the advantage
+or the harm of such accidental pieties, for their effect will be very
+different on different characters: but, without any question, the art,
+which makes us believe what we would not have otherwise believed, is
+misapplied, and in most instances very dangerously so. Our duty is to
+believe in the existence of Divine, or any other, persons, only upon
+rational proofs of their existence; and not because we have seen
+pictures of them.[8]
+
+[Footnote 8: I have expunged a sentence insisting farther on this point,
+having come to reverence more, as I grew older, every simple means of
+stimulating all religious belief and affection. It is the lower and
+realistic world which is fullest of false beliefs and vain loves.]
+
+
+52. But now observe, it is here necessary to draw a distinction, so
+subtle that in dealing with facts it is continually impossible to mark
+it with precision, yet so vital, that not only your understanding of the
+power of art, but the working of your minds in matters of primal moment
+to you, depends on the effort you make to affirm this distinction
+strongly. The art which realises a creature of the imagination is only
+mischievous when that realisation is conceived to imply, or does
+practically induce a belief in, the real existence of the imagined
+personage, contrary to, or unjustified by the other evidence of its
+existence. But if the art only represents the personage on the
+understanding that its form is imaginary, then the effort at realisation
+is healthful and beneficial.
+
+For instance, the Greek design of Apollo crossing the sea to Delphi,
+which is one of the most interesting of Le Normant's series, so far as
+it is only an expression, under the symbol of a human form, of what may
+be rightly imagined respecting the solar power, is right and ennobling;
+but so far as it conveyed to the Greek the idea of there being a real
+Apollo, it was mischievous, whether there be, or be not, a real Apollo.
+If there is no real Apollo, then the art was mischievous because it
+deceived; but if there is a real Apollo, then it was still more
+mischievous,[9] for it not only began the degradation of the image of
+that true god into a decoration for niches, and a device for seals; but
+prevented any true witness being borne to his existence. For if the
+Greeks, instead of multiplying representations of what they imagined to
+be the figure of the god, had given us accurate drawings of the heroes
+and battles of Marathon and Salamis, and had simply told us in plain
+Greek what evidence they had of the power of Apollo, either through his
+oracles, his help or chastisement, or by immediate vision, they would
+have served their religion more truly than by all the vase-paintings and
+fine statues that ever were buried or adored.
+
+
+53. Now in this particular instance, and in many other examples of fine
+Greek art, the two conditions of thought, symbolic and realistic, are
+mingled; and the art is helpful, as I will hereafter show you, in one
+function, and in the other so deadly, that I think no degradation of
+conception of Deity has ever been quite so base as that implied by the
+designs of Greek vases in the period of decline, say about 250 B. C.
+
+[Footnote 9: I am again doubtful, here. The most important part of the
+chapter is from § 60 to end.]
+
+But though among the Greeks it is thus nearly always difficult to say
+what is symbolic and what realistic, in the range of Christian art the
+distinction is clear. In that, a vast division of imaginative work is
+occupied in the symbolism of virtues, vices, or natural powers or
+passions; and in the representation of personages who, though nominally
+real, become in conception symbolic. In the greater part of this work
+there is no intention of implying the existence of the represented
+creature; Dürer's Melencolia and Giotto's Justice are accurately
+characteristic examples. Now all such art is wholly good and useful when
+it is the work of good men.
+
+
+54. Again, there is another division of Christian work in which the
+persons represented, though nominally real, are treated as
+dramatis-personĉ of a poem, and so presented confessedly as subjects of
+imagination. All this poetic art is also good when it is the work of
+good men.
+
+
+55. There remains only therefore to be considered, as truly religious,
+the work which definitely implies and modifies the conception of the
+existence of a real person. There is hardly any great art which entirely
+belongs to this class; but Raphael's Madonna della Seggiola is as
+accurate a type of it as I can give you; Holbein's Madonna at Dresden,
+the Madonna di San Sisto, and the Madonna of Titian's Assumption, all
+belong mainly to this class, but are removed somewhat from it (as, I
+repeat, nearly all great art is) into the poetical one. It is only the
+bloody crucifixes and gilded virgins and other such lower forms of
+imagery (by which, to the honour of the English Church, it has been
+truly claimed for her, that "she has never appealed to the madness or
+dulness of her people,") which belong to the realistic class in strict
+limitation, and which properly constitute the type of it.
+
+There is indeed an important school of sculpture in Spain, directed to
+the same objects, but not demanding at present any special attention.
+And finally, there is the vigorous and most interesting realistic school
+of our own, in modern times, mainly known to the public by Holman Hunt's
+picture of the Light of the World, though, I believe, deriving its first
+origin from the genius of the painter to whom you owe also the revival
+of interest, first here in Oxford, and then universally, in the cycle of
+early English legend,--Dante Rossetti.
+
+
+56. The effect of this realistic art on the religious mind of Europe
+varies in scope more than any other art power; for in its higher
+branches it touches the most sincere religious minds, affecting an
+earnest class of persons who cannot be reached by merely poetical
+design; while, in its lowest, it addresses itself not only to the most
+vulgar desires for religious excitement, but to the mere thirst for
+sensation of horror which characterises the uneducated orders of
+partially civilised countries; nor merely to the thirst for horror, but
+to the strange love of death, as such, which has sometimes in Catholic
+countries showed itself peculiarly by the endeavour to paint the images
+in the chapels of the Sepulchre so as to look deceptively like corpses.
+The same morbid instinct has also affected the minds of many among the
+more imaginative and powerful artists with a feverish gloom which
+distorts their finest work; and lastly--and this is the worst of all its
+effects--it has occupied the sensibility of Christian women,
+universally, in lamenting the sufferings of Christ, instead of
+preventing those of His people.
+
+
+57. When any of you next go abroad, observe, and consider the meaning
+of, the sculptures and paintings, which of every rank in art, and in
+every chapel and cathedral, and by every mountain path, recall the
+hours, and represent the agonies, of the Passion of Christ: and try to
+form some estimate of the efforts that have been made by the four arts
+of eloquence, music, painting, and sculpture, since the twelfth century,
+to wring out of the hearts of women the last drops of pity that could be
+excited for this merely physical agony: for the art nearly always dwells
+on the physical wounds or exhaustion chiefly, and degrades, far more
+than it animates, the conception of pain.
+
+Then try to conceive the quantity of time, and of excited and thrilling
+emotion, which have been wasted by the tender and delicate women of
+Christendom during these last six hundred years, in thus picturing to
+themselves, under the influence of such imagery, the bodily pain, long
+since passed, of One Person:--which, so far as they indeed conceived it
+to be sustained by a Divine Nature, could not for that reason have been
+less endurable than the agonies of any simple human death by torture:
+and then try to estimate what might have been the better result, for the
+righteousness and felicity of mankind, if these same women had been
+taught the deep meaning of the last words that were ever spoken by their
+Master to those who had ministered to Him of their substance: "Daughters
+of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your
+children." If they had but been taught to measure with their pitiful
+thoughts the tortures of battle-fields--the slowly consuming plagues of
+death in the starving children, and wasted age, of the innumerable
+desolate those battles left;--nay, in our own life of peace, the agony
+of unnurtured, untaught, unhelped creatures, awaking at the grave's edge
+to know how they should have lived; and the worse pain of those whose
+existence, not the ceasing of it, is death; those to whom the cradle was
+a curse, and for whom the words they cannot hear, "ashes to ashes," are
+all that they have ever received of benediction. These,--you who would
+fain have wept at His feet, or stood by His cross,--these you have
+always with you! Him, you have not always.
+
+
+58. The wretched in death you have always with you. Yes, and the brave
+and good in life you have always;--these also needing help, though you
+supposed they had only to help others; these also claiming to be thought
+for, and remembered. And you will find, if you look into history with
+this clue, that one of quite the chief reasons for the continual misery
+of mankind is that they are always divided in their worship between
+angels or saints, who are out of their sight, and need no help, and
+proud and evil-minded men, who are too definitely in their sight, and
+ought not to have their help. And consider how the arts have thus
+followed the worship of the crowd. You have paintings of saints and
+angels, innumerable;--of petty courtiers, and contemptible or cruel
+kings, innumerable. Few, how few you have, (but these, observe, almost
+always by great painters) of the best men, or of their actions. But
+think for yourselves,--I have no time now to enter upon the mighty
+field, nor imagination enough to guide me beyond the threshold of
+it,--think, what history might have been to us now;--nay, what a
+different history that of all Europe might have become, if it had but
+been the object both of the people to discern, and of their arts to
+honour and bear record of, the great deeds of their worthiest men. And
+if, instead of living, as they have always hitherto done, in a hellish
+cloud of contention and revenge, lighted by fantastic dreams of cloudy
+sanctities, they had sought to reward and punish justly, wherever reward
+and punishment were due, but chiefly to reward; and at least rather to
+bear testimony to the human acts which deserved God's anger or His
+blessing, than only, in presumptuous imagination, to display the secrets
+of Judgment, or the beatitudes of Eternity.
+
+
+59. Such I conceive generally, though indeed with good arising out of
+it, for every great evil brings some good in its backward eddies--such I
+conceive to have been the deadly function of art in its ministry to
+what, whether in heathen or Christian lands, and whether in the
+pageantry of words, or colours, or fair forms, is truly, and in the deep
+sense, to be called (idolatry)--the serving with the best of our hearts
+and minds, some dear or sad fantasy which we have made for ourselves,
+while we disobey the present call of the Master, who is not dead, and
+who is not now fainting under His cross, but requiring us to take up
+ours.
+
+
+60. I pass to the second great function of religious art, the limitation
+of the idea of Divine presence to particular localities. It is of course
+impossible within my present limits to touch upon this power of art, as
+employed on the temples of the gods of various religions; we will
+examine that on future occasions. To-day, I want only to map out main
+ideas, and I can do this best by speaking exclusively of this localising
+influence as it affects our own faith.
+
+Observe first, that the localisation is almost entirely dependent upon
+human art. You must at least take a stone and set it up for a pillar, if
+you are to mark the place, so as to know it again, where a vision
+appeared. A persecuted people, needing to conceal their places of
+worship, may perform every religious ceremony first under one crag of
+the hill-side, and then under another, without invalidating the
+sacredness of the rites or sacraments thus administered. It is,
+therefore, we all acknowledge, inessential, that a particular spot
+should be surrounded with a ring of stones, or enclosed within walls of
+a certain style of architecture, and so set apart as the only place
+where such ceremonies may be properly performed; and it is thus less by
+any direct appeal to experience or to reason, but in consequence of the
+effect upon our senses produced by the architecture, that we receive the
+first strong impressions of what we afterwards contend for as absolute
+truth. I particularly wish you to notice how it is always by help of
+human art that such a result is attained, because, remember always, I am
+neither disputing nor asserting the truth of any theological
+doctrine;--that is not my province;--I am only questioning the
+expediency of enforcing that doctrine by the help of architecture. Put a
+rough stone for an altar under the hawthorn on a village
+green;--separate a portion of the green itself with an ordinary paling
+from the rest;--then consecrate, with whatever form you choose, the
+space of grass you have enclosed, and meet within the wooden fence as
+often as you desire to pray or preach; yet you will not easily fasten an
+impression in the minds of the villagers, that God inhabits the space of
+grass inside the fence, and does not extend His presence to the common
+beyond it: and that the daisies and violets on one side of the railing
+are holy,--on the other, profane. But, instead of a wooden fence, build
+a wall, pave the interior space; roof it over, so as to make it
+comparatively dark;--and you may persuade the villagers with ease that
+you have built a house which Deity inhabits, or that you have become, in
+the old French phrase, a "logeur du Bon Dieu."
+
+
+61. And farther, though I have no desire to introduce any question as to
+the truth of what we thus architecturally teach, I would desire you most
+strictly to determine what is intended to be taught.
+
+Do not think I underrate--I am among the last men living who would
+underrate,--the importance of the sentiments connected with their church
+to the population of a pastoral village. I admit, in its fullest extent,
+the moral value of the scene, which is almost always one of perfect
+purity and peace; and of the sense of supernatural love and protection,
+which fills and surrounds the low aisles and homely porch. But the
+question I desire earnestly to leave with you is, whether all the earth
+ought not to be peaceful and pure, and the acknowledgment of the Divine
+protection, as universal as its reality? That in a mysterious way the
+presence of Deity is vouchsafed where it is sought, and withdrawn where
+it is forgotten, must of course be granted as the first postulate in the
+enquiry: but the point for our decision is just this, whether it ought
+always to be sought in one place only, and forgotten in every other.
+
+It may be replied, that since it is impossible to consecrate the entire
+space of the earth, it is better thus to secure a portion of it than
+none: but surely, if so, we ought to make some effort to enlarge the
+favoured ground, and even look forward to a time when in English
+villages there may be a God's acre tenanted by the living, not the
+dead; and when we shall rather look with aversion and fear to the
+remnant of ground that is set apart as profane, than with reverence to a
+narrow portion of it enclosed as holy.
+
+
+62. But now, farther. Suppose it be admitted that by enclosing ground
+with walls, and performing certain ceremonies there habitually, some
+kind of sanctity is indeed secured within that space,--still the
+question remains open whether it be advisable for religious purposes to
+decorate the enclosure. For separation the mere walls would be enough.
+What is the purpose of your decoration?
+
+Let us take an instance--the most noble with which I am acquainted, the
+Cathedral of Chartres. You have there the most splendid coloured glass,
+and the richest sculpture, and the grandest proportions of building,
+united to produce a sensation of pleasure and awe. We profess that this
+is to honour the Deity; or, in other words, that it is pleasing to Him
+that we should delight our eyes with blue and golden colours, and
+solemnise our spirits by the sight of large stones laid one on another,
+and ingeniously carved.
+
+
+63. I do not think it can be doubted that it _is_ pleasing to Him when
+we do this; for He has Himself prepared for us, nearly every morning and
+evening, windows painted with Divine art, in blue and gold and
+vermilion: windows lighted from within by the lustre of that heaven
+which we may assume, at least with more certainty than any consecrated
+ground, to be one of His dwelling-places. Again, in every mountain side,
+and cliff of rude sea shore, He has heaped stones one upon another of
+greater magnitude than those of Chartres Cathedral, and sculptured them
+with floral ornament,--surely not less sacred because living?
+
+
+64. Must it not then be only because we love our own work better than
+His, that we respect the lucent glass, but not the lucent clouds; that
+we weave embroidered robes with ingenious fingers, and make bright the
+gilded vaults we have beautifully ordained--while yet we have not
+considered the heavens, the work of His fingers, nor the stars of the
+strange vault which He has ordained? And do we dream that by carving
+fonts and lifting pillars in His honour, who cuts the way of the rivers
+among the rocks, and at whose reproof the pillars of the earth are
+astonished, we shall obtain pardon for the dishonour done to the hills
+and streams by which He has appointed our dwelling-place;--for the
+infection of their sweet air with poison;--for the burning up of their
+tender grass and flowers with fire, and for spreading such a shame of
+mixed luxury and misery over our native land, as if we laboured only
+that, at least here in England, we might be able to give the lie to the
+song, whether of the Cherubim above, or Church beneath--"Holy, holy,
+Lord God of all creatures; Heaven--_and Earth_--are full of Thy glory"?
+
+
+65. And how much more there is that I long to say to you; and how much,
+I hope, that you would like to answer to me, or to question me of! But I
+can say no more to-day. We are not, I trust, at the end of our talks or
+thoughts together; but, if it were so, and I never spoke to you more,
+this that I have said to you I should have been glad to have been
+permitted to say; and this, farther, which is the sum of it,--That we
+may have splendour of art again, and with that, we may truly praise and
+honour our Maker, and with that set forth the beauty and holiness of all
+that He has made: but only after we have striven with our whole hearts
+first to sanctify the temple of the body and spirit of every child that
+has no roof to cover its head from the cold, and no walls to guard its
+soul from corruption, in this our English land.
+
+One word more.
+
+What I have suggested hitherto, respecting the relations of Art to
+Religion, you must receive throughout as merely motive of thought;
+though you must have well seen that my own convictions were established
+finally on some of the points in question. But I must, in conclusion,
+tell you something that I _know_;--which, if you truly labour, you will
+one day know also; and which I trust some of you will believe, now.
+
+During the minutes in which you have been listening to me, I suppose
+that almost at every other sentence those whose habit of mind has been
+one of veneration for established forms and faiths, must have been in
+dread that I was about to say, or in pang of regret at my having said,
+what seemed to them an irreverent or reckless word touching vitally
+important things.
+
+So far from this being the fact, it is just because the feelings that I
+most desire to cultivate in your minds are those of reverence and
+admiration, that I am so earnest to prevent you from being moved to
+either by trivial or false semblances. _This_ is the thing which I
+KNOW--and which, if you labour faithfully, you shall know also,--that in
+Reverence is the chief joy and power of life;--Reverence, for what is
+pure and bright in your own youth; for what is true and tried in the age
+of others; for all that is gracious among the living,--great among the
+dead,--and marvellous, in the Powers that cannot die.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE III
+
+THE RELATION OF ART TO MORALS
+
+
+66. You probably recollect that, in the beginning of my last lecture, it
+was stated that fine art had, and could have, but three functions: the
+enforcing of the religious sentiments of men, the perfecting their
+ethical state, and the doing them material service. We have to-day to
+examine, the mode of its action in the second power--that of perfecting
+the morality, or ethical state, of men.
+
+Perfecting, observe--not producing.
+
+You must have the right moral state first, or you cannot have the art.
+But when the art is once obtained, its reflected action enhances and
+completes the moral state out of which it arose, and, above all,
+communicates the exultation to other minds which are already morally
+capable of the like.
+
+
+67. For instance, take the art of singing, and the simplest perfect
+master of it (up to the limits of his nature) whom you can find;--a
+skylark. From him you may learn what it is to "sing for joy." You must
+get the moral state first, the pure gladness, then give it finished
+expression; and it is perfected in itself, and made communicable to
+other creatures capable of such joy. But it is incommunicable to those
+who are not prepared to receive it.
+
+Now, all right human song is, similarly, the finished expression, by
+art, of the joy or grief of noble persons, for right causes. And
+accurately in proportion to the rightness of the cause, and purity of
+the emotion, is the possibility of the fine art. A maiden may sing of
+her lost love, but a miser cannot sing of his lost money. And with
+absolute precision, from highest to lowest, _the fineness of the
+possible art is an index of the moral purity and majesty of the emotion
+it expresses_. You may test it practically at any instant. Question with
+yourselves respecting any feeling that has taken strong possession of
+your mind, "Could this be sung by a master, and sung nobly, with a true
+melody and art?" Then it is a right feeling. Could it not be sung at
+all, or only sung ludicrously? It is a base one. And that is so in all
+the arts; so that with mathematical precision, subject to no error or
+exception, the art of a nation, so far as it exists, is an exponent of
+its ethical state.
+
+
+68. An exponent, observe, and exalting influence; but not the root or
+cause. You cannot paint or sing yourselves into being good men; you must
+be good men before you can either paint or sing, and then the colour and
+sound will complete in you all that is best.
+
+And this it was that I called upon you to hear, saying, "listen to me at
+least now," in the first lecture, namely, that no art-teaching could be
+of use to you, but would rather be harmful, unless it was grafted on
+something deeper than all art. For indeed not only with this, of which
+it is my function to show you the laws, but much more with the art of
+all men, which you came here chiefly to learn, that of language, the
+chief vices of education have arisen from the one great fallacy of
+supposing that noble language is a communicable trick of grammar and
+accent, instead of simply the careful expression of right thought. All
+the virtues of language are, in their roots, moral; it becomes accurate
+if the speaker desires to be true; clear, if he speaks with sympathy and
+a desire to be intelligible; powerful, if he has earnestness; pleasant,
+if he has sense of rhythm and order. There are no other virtues of
+language producible by art than these: but let me mark more deeply for
+an instant the significance of one of them. Language, I said, is only
+clear when it is sympathetic. You can, in truth, understand a man's word
+only by understanding his temper. Your own word is also as of an unknown
+tongue to him unless he understands yours. And it is this which makes
+the art of language, if any one is to be chosen separately from the
+rest, that which is fittest for the instrument of a gentleman's
+education. To teach the meaning of a word thoroughly, is to teach the
+nature of the spirit that coined it; the secret of language is the
+secret of sympathy, and its full charm is possible only to the gentle.
+And thus the principles of beautiful speech have all been fixed by
+sincere and kindly speech. On the laws which have been determined by
+sincerity, false speech, apparently beautiful, may afterwards be
+constructed; but all such utterance, whether in oration or poetry, is
+not only without permanent power, but it is destructive of the
+principles it has usurped. So long as no words are uttered but in
+faithfulness, so long the art of language goes on exalting itself; but
+the moment it is shaped and chiselled on external principles, it falls
+into frivolity, and perishes. And this truth would have been long ago
+manifest, had it not been that in periods of advanced academical science
+there is always a tendency to deny the sincerity of the first masters of
+language. Once learn to write gracefully in the manner of an ancient
+author, and we are apt to think that he also wrote in the manner of some
+one else. But no noble nor right style was ever yet founded but out of a
+sincere heart.
+
+No man is worth reading to form your style, who does not mean what he
+says; nor was any great style ever invented but by some man who meant
+what he said. Find out the beginner of a great manner of writing, and
+you have also found the declarer of some true facts or sincere passions:
+and your whole method of reading will thus be quickened, for, being sure
+that your author really meant what he said, you will be much more
+careful to ascertain what it is that he means.
+
+
+69. And of yet greater importance is it deeply to know that every beauty
+possessed by the language of a nation is significant of the innermost
+laws of its being. Keep the temper of the people stern and manly; make
+their associations grave, courteous, and for worthy objects; occupy them
+in just deeds; and their tongue must needs be a grand one. Nor is it
+possible, therefore--observe the necessary reflected action--that any
+tongue should be a noble one, of which the words are not so many
+trumpet-calls to action. All great languages invariably utter great
+things, and command them; they cannot be mimicked but by obedience; the
+breath of them is inspiration because it is not only vocal, but vital;
+and you can only learn to speak as these men spoke, by becoming what
+these men were.
+
+
+70. Now for direct confirmation of this, I want you to think over the
+relation of expression to character in two great masters of the absolute
+art of language, Virgil and Pope. You are perhaps surprised at the last
+name; and indeed you have in English much higher grasp and melody of
+language from more passionate minds, but you have nothing else, in its
+range, so perfect. I name, therefore, these two men, because they are
+the two most accomplished _Artists_, merely as such, whom I know in
+literature; and because I think you will be afterwards interested in
+investigating how the infinite grace in the words of the one, and the
+severity in those of the other, and the precision in those of both,
+arise wholly out of the moral elements of their minds:--out of the deep
+tenderness in Virgil which enabled him to write the stories of Nisus and
+Lausus; and the serene and just benevolence which placed Pope, in his
+theology, two centuries in advance of his time, and enabled him to sum
+the law of noble life in two lines which, so far as I know, are the most
+complete, the most concise, and the most lofty expression of moral
+temper existing in English words:--
+
+    _"Never elated, while one man's oppress'd;_
+    _Never dejected, while another's bless'd."_
+
+I wish you also to remember these lines of Pope, and to make yourselves
+entirely masters of his system of ethics; because, putting Shakespeare
+aside as rather the world's than ours, I hold Pope to be the most
+perfect representative we have, since Chaucer, of the true English mind;
+and I think the Dunciad is the most absolutely chiselled and monumental
+work "exacted" in our country. You will find, as you study Pope, that
+he has expressed for you, in the strictest language and within the
+briefest limits, every law of art, of criticism, of economy, of policy,
+and, finally, of a benevolence, humble, rational, and resigned,
+contented with its allotted share of life, and trusting the problem of
+its salvation to Him in whose hand lies that of the universe.
+
+
+71. And now I pass to the arts with which I have special concern, in
+which, though the facts are exactly the same, I shall have more
+difficulty in proving my assertion, because very few of us are as
+cognizant of the merit of painting as we are of that of language; and I
+can only show you whence that merit springs, after having thoroughly
+shown you in what it consists. But, in the meantime, I have simply to
+tell you, that the manual arts are as accurate exponents of ethical
+state, as other modes of expression; first, with absolute precision, of
+that of the workman; and then with precision, disguised by many
+distorting influences, of that of the nation to which it belongs.
+
+And, first, they are a perfect exponent of the mind of the workman: but,
+being so, remember, if the mind be great or complex, the art is not an
+easy book to read; for we must ourselves possess all the mental
+characters of which we are to read the signs. No man can read the
+evidence of labour who is not himself laborious, for he does not know
+what the work cost: nor can he read the evidence of true passion if he
+is not passionate; nor of gentleness if he is not gentle: and the most
+subtle signs of fault and weakness of character he can only judge by
+having had the same faults to fight with. I myself, for instance, know
+impatient work, and tired work, better than most critics, because I am
+myself always impatient, and often tired:--so also, the patient and
+indefatigable touch of a mighty master becomes more wonderful to me than
+to others. Yet, wonderful in no mean measure it will be to you all, when
+I make it manifest,--and as soon as we begin our real work, and you have
+learned what it is to draw a true line, I shall be able to make manifest
+to you,--and indisputably so,--that the day's work of a man like
+Mantegna or Paul Veronese consists of an unfaltering, uninterrupted
+succession of movements of the hand more precise than those of the
+finest fencer: the pencil leaving one point and arriving at another, not
+only with unerring precision at the extremity of the line, but with an
+unerring and yet varied course--sometimes over spaces a foot or more in
+extent--yet a course so determined everywhere, that either of these men
+could, and Veronese often does, draw a finished profile, or any other
+portion of the contour of the face, with one line, not afterwards
+changed. Try, first, to realise to yourselves the muscular precision of
+that action, and the intellectual strain of it; for the movement of a
+fencer is perfect in practised monotony; but the movement of the hand of
+a great painter is at every instant governed by a direct and new
+intention. Then imagine that muscular firmness and subtlety, and the
+instantaneously selective and ordinant energy of the brain, sustained
+all day long, not only without fatigue, but with a visible joy in the
+exertion, like that which an eagle seems to take in the wave of his
+wings; and this all life long, and through long life, not only without
+failure of power, but with visible increase of it, until the actually
+organic changes of old age. And then consider, so far as you know
+anything of physiology, what sort of an ethical state of body and mind
+that means! ethic through ages past! what fineness of race there must be
+to get it, what exquisite balance and symmetry of the vital powers! And
+then, finally, determine for yourselves whether a manhood like that is
+consistent with any viciousness of soul, with any mean anxiety, any
+gnawing lust, any wretchedness of spite or remorse, any consciousness of
+rebellion against law of God or man, or any actual, though unconscious
+violation of even the least law to which obedience is essential for the
+glory of life and the pleasing of its Giver.
+
+
+72. It is, of course, true that many of the strong masters had deep
+faults of character, but their faults always show in their work. It is
+true that some could not govern their passions; if so, they died young,
+or they painted ill when old. But the greater part of our
+misapprehension in the whole matter is from our not having well known
+who the great painters were, and taking delight in the petty skill that
+was bred in the fumes of the taverns of the North, instead of theirs who
+breathed empyreal air, sons of the morning, under the woods of Assisi
+and the crags of Cadore.
+
+
+73. It is true however also, as I have pointed out long ago, that the
+strong masters fall into two great divisions, one leading simple and
+natural lives, the other restrained in a Puritanism of the worship of
+beauty; and these two manners of life you may recognise in a moment by
+their work. Generally the naturalists are the strongest; but there are
+two of the Puritans, whose work if I can succeed in making clearly
+understandable to you during my three years here, it is all I need care
+to do. But of these two Puritans one I cannot name to you, and the other
+I at present will not. One I cannot, for no one knows his name, except
+the baptismal one, Bernard, or "dear little Bernard"--Bernardino, called
+from his birthplace, (Luino, on the Lago Maggiore,) Bernard of Luino.
+The other is a Venetian, of whom many of you probably have never heard,
+and of whom, through me, you shall not hear, until I have tried to get
+some picture by him over to England.
+
+
+74. Observe then, this Puritanism in the worship of beauty, though
+sometimes weak, is always honourable and amiable, and the exact reverse
+of the false Puritanism, which consists in the dread or disdain of
+beauty. And in order to treat my subject rightly, I ought to proceed
+from the skill of art to the choice of its subject, and show you how the
+moral temper of the workman is shown by his seeking lovely forms and
+thoughts to express, as well as by the force of his hand in expression.
+But I need not now urge this part of the proof on you, because you are
+already, I believe, sufficiently conscious of the truth in this matter,
+and also I have already said enough of it in my writings; whereas I have
+not at all said enough of the infallibleness of fine technical work as a
+proof of every other good power. And indeed it was long before I myself
+understood the true meaning of the pride of the greatest men in their
+mere execution, shown for a permanent lesson to us, in the stories
+which, whether true or not, indicate with absolute accuracy the general
+conviction of great artists;--the stories of the contest of Apelles and
+Protogenes in a line only, (of which I can promise you, you shall know
+the meaning to some purpose in a little while),--the story of the circle
+of Giotto, and especially, which you may perhaps not have observed, the
+expression of Dürer in his inscription on the drawings sent him by
+Raphael. These figures, he says, "Raphael drew and sent to Albert Dürer
+in Nürnberg, to show him"--What? Not his invention, nor his beauty of
+expression, but "sein Hand zu weisen," "To show him his _hand_." And you
+will find, as you examine farther, that all inferior artists are
+continually trying to escape from the necessity of sound work, and
+either indulging themselves in their delights in subject, or pluming
+themselves on their noble motives for attempting what they cannot
+perform; (and observe, by the way, that a great deal of what is mistaken
+for conscientious motive is nothing but a very pestilent, because very
+subtle, condition of vanity); whereas the great men always understand at
+once that the first morality of a painter, as of everybody else, is to
+know his business; and so earnest are they in this, that many, whose
+lives you would think, by the results of their work, had been passed in
+strong emotion, have in reality subdued themselves, though capable of
+the very strongest passions, into a calm as absolute as that of a deeply
+sheltered mountain lake, which reflects every agitation of the clouds in
+the sky, and every change of the shadows on the hills, but is itself
+motionless.
+
+
+75. Finally, you must remember that great obscurity has been brought
+upon the truth in this matter by the want of integrity and simplicity in
+our modern life. I mean integrity in the Latin sense, wholeness.
+Everything is broken up, and mingled in confusion, both in our habits
+and thoughts; besides being in great part imitative: so that you not
+only cannot tell what a man is, but sometimes you cannot tell whether
+he is, at all!--whether you have indeed to do with a spirit, or only
+with an echo. And thus the same inconsistencies appear now, between the
+work of artists of merit and their personal characters, as those which
+you find continually disappointing expectation in the lives of men of
+modern literary power; the same conditions of society having obscured or
+misdirected the best qualities of the imagination, both in our
+literature and art. Thus there is no serious question with any of us as
+to the personal character of Dante and Giotto, of Shakespeare and
+Holbein; but we pause timidly in the attempt to analyse the moral laws
+of the art skill in recent poets, novelists, and painters.
+
+
+76. Let me assure you once for all, that as you grow older, if you
+enable yourselves to distinguish, by the truth of your own lives, what
+is true in those of other men, you will gradually perceive that all good
+has its origin in good, never in evil; that the fact of either
+literature or painting being truly fine of their kind, whatever their
+mistaken aim, or partial error, is proof of their noble origin: and
+that, if there is indeed sterling value in the thing done, it has come
+of a sterling worth in the soul that did it, however alloyed or defiled
+by conditions of sin which are sometimes more appalling or more strange
+than those which all may detect in their own hearts, because they are
+part of a personality altogether larger than ours, and as far beyond our
+judgment in its darkness as beyond our following in its light. And it is
+sufficient warning against what some might dread as the probable effect
+of such a conviction on your own minds, namely, that you might permit
+yourselves in the weaknesses which you imagined to be allied to genius,
+when they took the form of personal temptations;--it is surely, I say,
+sufficient warning against so mean a folly, to discern, as you may with
+little pains, that, of all human existences, the lives of men of that
+distorted and tainted nobility of intellect are probably the most
+miserable.
+
+
+77. I pass to the second, and for us the more practically important
+question, What is the effect of noble art upon other men; what has it
+done for national morality in time past: and what effect is the extended
+knowledge or possession of it likely to have upon us now? And here we
+are at once met by the facts, which are as gloomy as indisputable, that,
+while many peasant populations, among whom scarcely the rudest practice
+of art has ever been attempted, have lived in comparative innocence,
+honour and happiness, the worst foulness and cruelty of savage tribes
+have been frequently associated with fine ingenuities of decorative
+design; also, that no people has ever attained the higher stages of art
+skill, except at a period of its civilisation which was sullied by
+frequent, violent and even monstrous crime; and, lastly, that the
+attaining of perfection in art power has been hitherto, in every nation,
+the accurate signal of the beginning of its ruin.
+
+
+78. Respecting which phenomena, observe first, that although good never
+springs out of evil, it is developed to its highest by contention with
+evil. There are some groups of peasantry, in far-away nooks of Christian
+countries, who are nearly as innocent as lambs; but the morality which
+gives power to art is the morality of men, not of cattle.
+
+Secondly, the virtues of the inhabitants of many country districts are
+apparent, not real; their lives are indeed artless, but not innocent;
+and it is only the monotony of circumstances, and the absence of
+temptation, which prevent the exhibition of evil passions not less real
+because often dormant, nor less foul because shown only in petty faults,
+or inactive malignities.
+
+
+79. But you will observe also that _absolute_ artlessness, to men in any
+kind of moral health, is impossible; they have always, at least, the art
+by which they live--agriculture or seamanship; and in these industries,
+skilfully practised, you will find the law of their moral training;
+while, whatever the adversity of circumstances, every rightly-minded
+peasantry, such as that of Sweden, Denmark, Bavaria, or Switzerland, has
+associated with its needful industry a quite studied school of
+pleasurable art in dress; and generally also in song, and simple
+domestic architecture.
+
+
+80. Again, I need not repeat to you here what I endeavoured to explain
+in the first lecture in the book I called "The Two Paths," respecting
+the arts of savage races: but I may now note briefly that such arts are
+the result of an intellectual activity which has found no room to
+expand, and which the tyranny of nature or of man has condemned to
+disease through arrested growth. And where neither Christianity, nor any
+other religion conveying some moral help, has reached, the animal energy
+of such races necessarily flames into ghastly conditions of evil, and
+the grotesque or frightful forms assumed by their art are precisely
+indicative of their distorted moral nature.
+
+
+81. But the truly great nations nearly always begin from a race
+possessing this imaginative power; and for some time their progress is
+very slow, and their state not one of innocence, but of feverish and
+faultful animal energy. This is gradually subdued and exalted into
+bright human life; the art instinct purifying itself with the rest of
+the nature, until social perfectness is nearly reached; and then comes
+the period when conscience and intellect are so highly developed, that
+new forms of error begin in the inability to fulfil the demands of the
+one, or to answer the doubts of the other. Then the wholeness of the
+people is lost; all kinds of hypocrisies and oppositions of science
+develop themselves; their faith is questioned on one side, and
+compromised with on the other; wealth commonly increases at the same
+period to a destructive extent; luxury follows; and the ruin of the
+nation is then certain: while the arts, all this time, are simply, as I
+said at first, the exponents of each phase of its moral state, and no
+more control it in its political career than the gleam of the firefly
+guides its oscillation. It is true that their most splendid results are
+usually obtained in the swiftness of the power which is hurrying to the
+precipice; but to lay the charge of the catastrophe to the art by which
+it is illumined, is to find a cause for the cataract in the hues of its
+iris. It is true that the colossal vices belonging to periods of great
+national wealth (for wealth, you will find, is the real root of all
+evil) can turn every good gift and skill of nature or of man to evil
+purpose. If, in such times, fair pictures have been misused, how much
+more fair realities? And if Miranda is immoral to Caliban, is that
+Miranda's fault?
+
+
+82. And I could easily go on to trace for you what at the moment I
+speak, is signified, in our own national character, by the forms of art,
+and unhappily also by the forms of what is not art, but [Greek:
+atechnia], that exist among us. But the more important question is, What
+_will_ be signified by them; what is there in us now of worth and
+strength, which under our new and partly accidental impulse towards
+formative labour, may be by that expressed, and by that fortified?
+
+Would it not be well to know this? Nay, irrespective of all future work,
+is it not the first thing we should want to know, what stuff we are made
+of--how far we are +agathoi+ or +kakoi+--good, or good for
+nothing? We may all know that, each of ourselves, easily enough, if we
+like to put one grave question well home.
+
+
+83. Supposing it were told any of you by a physician whose word you
+could not but trust, that you had not more than seven days to live. And
+suppose also that, by the manner of your education it had happened to
+you, as it has happened to many, never to have heard of any future
+state, or not to have credited what you heard; and therefore that you
+had to face this fact of the approach of death in its simplicity:
+fearing no punishment for any sin that you might have before committed,
+or in the coming days might determine to commit; and having similarly no
+hope of reward for past, or yet possible, virtue; nor even of any
+consciousness whatever to be left to you, after the seventh day had
+ended, either of the results of your acts to those whom you loved, or of
+the feelings of any survivors towards you. Then the manner in which you
+would spend the seven days is an exact measure of the morality of your
+nature.
+
+
+84. I know that some of you, and I believe the greater number of you,
+would, in such a case, spend the granted days entirely as you ought.
+Neither in numbering the errors, or deploring the pleasures of the
+past; nor in grasping at vile good in the present, nor vainly lamenting
+the darkness of the future; but in an instant and earnest execution of
+whatever it might be possible for you to accomplish in the time, in
+setting your affairs in order, and in providing for the future comfort,
+and--so far as you might by any message or record of yourself,--for the
+consolation, of those whom you loved, and by whom you desired to be
+remembered, not for your good, but for theirs. How far you might fail
+through human weakness, in shame for the past, despair at the little
+that could in the remnant of life be accomplished, or the intolerable
+pain of broken affection, would depend wholly on the degree in which
+your nature had been depressed or fortified by the manner of your past
+life. But I think there are few of you who would not spend those last
+days better than all that had preceded them.
+
+
+85. If you look accurately through the records of the lives that have
+been most useful to humanity, you will find that all that has been done
+best, has been done so;--that to the clearest intellects and highest
+souls,--to the true children of the Father, with whom a thousand years
+are as one day, their poor seventy years are but as seven days. The
+removal of the shadow of death from them to an uncertain, but always
+narrow, distance, never takes away from them their intuition of its
+approach; the extending to them of a few hours more or less of light
+abates not their acknowledgment of the infinitude that must remain to be
+known beyond their knowledge,--done beyond their deeds: the
+unprofitableness of their momentary service is wrought in a magnificent
+despair, and their very honour is bequeathed by them for the joy of
+others, as they lie down to their rest, regarding for themselves the
+voice of men no more.
+
+
+86. The best things, I repeat to you, have been done thus, and
+therefore, sorrowfully. But the greatest part of the good work of the
+world is done either in pure and unvexed instinct of duty, "I have
+stubbed Thornaby waste," or else, and better, it is cheerful and helpful
+doing of what the hand finds to do, in surety that at evening time,
+whatsoever is right the Master will give. And that it be worthily done,
+depends wholly on that ultimate quantity of worth which you can measure,
+each in himself, by the test I have just given you. For that test,
+observe, will mark to you the precise force, first of your absolute
+courage, and then of the energy in you for the right ordering of things,
+and the kindly dealing with persons. You have cut away from these two
+instincts every selfish or common motive, and left nothing but the
+energies of Order and of Love.
+
+
+87. Now, where those two roots are set, all the other powers and desires
+find right nourishment, and become to their own utmost, helpful to
+others and pleasurable to ourselves. And so far as those two springs of
+action are not in us, all other powers become corrupt or dead; even the
+love of truth, apart from these, hardens into an insolent and cold
+avarice of knowledge, which unused, is more vain than unused gold.
+
+
+88. These, then, are the two essential instincts of humanity: the love
+of Order and the love of Kindness. By the love of order the moral energy
+is to deal with the earth, and to dress it, and keep it; and with all
+rebellious and dissolute forces in lower creatures, or in ourselves. By
+the love of doing kindness it is to deal rightly with all surrounding
+life. And then, grafted on these, we are to make every other passion
+perfect; so that they may every one have full strength and yet be
+absolutely under control.
+
+
+89. Every one must be strong, every one perfect, every one obedient as a
+war horse. And it is among the most beautiful pieces of mysticism to
+which eternal truth is attached, that the chariot race, which Plato uses
+as an image of moral government, and which is indeed the most perfect
+type of it in any visible skill of men, should have been made by the
+Greeks the continual subject of their best poetry and best art.
+Nevertheless Plato's use of it is not altogether true. There is no black
+horse in the chariot of the soul. One of the driver's worst faults is in
+starving his horses; another, in not breaking them early enough; but
+they are all good. Take, for example, one usually thought of as wholly
+evil--that of Anger, leading to vengeance. I believe it to be quite one
+of the crowning wickednesses of this age that we have starved and
+chilled our faculty of indignation, and neither desire nor dare to
+punish crimes justly. We have taken up the benevolent idea, forsooth,
+that justice is to be preventive instead of vindictive; and we imagine
+that we are to punish, not in anger, but in expediency; not that we may
+give deserved pain to the person in fault, but that we may frighten
+other people from committing the same fault. The beautiful theory of
+this non-vindictive justice is, that having convicted a man of a crime
+worthy of death, we entirely pardon the criminal, restore him to his
+place in our affection and esteem, and then hang him, not as a
+malefactor, but as a scarecrow. That is the theory. And the practice is,
+that we send a child to prison for a month for stealing a handful of
+walnuts, for fear that other children should come to steal more of our
+walnuts. And we do not punish a swindler for ruining a thousand
+families, because we think swindling is a wholesome excitement to trade.
+
+
+90. But all true justice is vindictive to vice, as it is rewarding to
+virtue. Only--and herein it is distinguished from personal revenge--it
+is vindictive of the wrong done;--not of the wrong done _to us_. It is
+the national expression of deliberate anger, as of deliberate gratitude;
+it is not exemplary, or even corrective, but essentially retributive; it
+is the absolute art of measured recompense, giving honour where honour
+is due, and shame where shame is due, and joy where joy is due, and pain
+where pain is due. It is neither educational, for men are to be educated
+by wholesome habit, not by rewards and punishments; nor is it
+preventive, for it is to be executed without regard to any consequences;
+but only for righteousness' sake, a righteous nation does judgment and
+justice. But in this, as in all other instances, the rightness of the
+secondary passion depends on its being grafted on those two primary
+instincts, the love of order and of kindness, so that indignation
+itself is against the wounding of love. Do you think the +mênis
+Achilêos+ came of a hard heart in Achilles, or the "Pallas te hoc
+vulnere, Pallas," of a hard heart in Anchises' son?
+
+
+91. And now, if with this clue through the labyrinth of them, you
+remember the course of the arts of great nations, you will perceive that
+whatever has prospered, and become lovely, had its beginning--for no
+other was possible--in the love of order in material things associated
+with true +dikaiosunê+: and the desire of beauty in material
+things, which is associated with true affection, _charitas_, and with
+the innumerable conditions of gentleness expressed by the different uses
+of the words +charis+ and _gratia_. You will find that this love
+of beauty is an essential part of all healthy human nature, and though
+it can long co-exist with states of life in many other respects
+unvirtuous, it is itself wholly good;--the direct adversary of envy,
+avarice, mean worldly care, and especially of cruelty. It entirely
+perishes when these are wilfully indulged; and the men in whom it has
+been most strong have always been compassionate, and lovers of justice,
+and the earliest discerners and declarers of things conducive to the
+happiness of mankind.
+
+
+92. Nearly every important truth respecting the love of beauty in its
+familiar relations to human life was mythically expressed by the Greeks
+in their various accounts of the parentage and offices of the Graces.
+But one fact, the most vital of all, they could not in its fulness
+perceive, namely, that the intensity of other perceptions of beauty is
+exactly commensurate with the imaginative purity of the passion of love,
+and with the singleness of its devotion. They were not fully conscious
+of, and could not therefore either mythically or philosophically
+express, the deep relation within themselves between their power of
+perceiving beauty, and the honour of domestic affection which found
+their sternest themes of tragedy in the infringement of its laws;--which
+made the rape of Helen the chief subject of their epic poetry, and which
+fastened their clearest symbolism of resurrection on the story of
+Alcestis. Unhappily, the subordinate position of their most revered
+women, and the partial corruption of feeling towards them by the
+presence of certain other singular states of inferior passion which it
+is as difficult as grievous to analyse, arrested the ethical as well as
+the formative progress of the Greek mind; and it was not until after an
+interval of nearly two thousand years of various error and pain, that,
+partly as the true reward of Christian warfare nobly sustained through
+centuries of trial, and partly as the visionary culmination of the faith
+which saw in a maiden's purity the link between God and her race, the
+highest and holiest strength of mortal love was reached; and, together
+with it, in the song of Dante, and the painting of Bernard of Luino and
+his fellows, the perception, and embodiment for ever of whatsoever
+things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of
+good report;--that, if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise,
+men might think on those things.
+
+
+93. You probably observed the expression I used a moment ago, the
+_imaginative_ purity of the passion of love. I have not yet spoken, nor
+is it possible for me to-day, to speak adequately, of the moral power of
+the imagination: but you may for yourselves enough discern its nature
+merely by comparing the dignity of the relations between the sexes, from
+their lowest level in moths or mollusca, through the higher creatures in
+whom they become a domestic influence and law, up to the love of pure
+men and women; and, finally, to the ideal love which animated chivalry.
+Throughout this vast ascent it is the gradual increase of the
+imaginative faculty which exalts and enlarges the authority of the
+passion, until, at its height, it is the bulwark of patience, the tutor
+of honour, and the perfectness of praise.
+
+
+94. You will find farther, that as of love, so of all the other
+passions, the right government and exaltation begins in that of the
+Imagination, which is lord over them. For to _subdue_ the passions,
+which is thought so often to be the sum of duty respecting them, is
+possible enough to a proud dulness; but to _excite_ them rightly, and
+make them strong for good, is the work of the unselfish imagination. It
+is constantly said that human nature is heartless. Do not believe it.
+Human nature is kind and generous; but it is narrow and blind; and can
+only with difficulty conceive anything but what it immediately sees and
+feels. People would instantly care for others as well as themselves if
+only they could _imagine_ others as well as themselves. Let a child fall
+into the river before the roughest man's eyes;--he will usually do what
+he can to get it out, even at some risk to himself; and all the town
+will triumph in the saving of one little life. Let the same man be shown
+that hundreds of children are dying of fever for want of some sanitary
+measure which it will cost him trouble to urge, and he will make no
+effort; and probably all the town would resist him if he did. So, also,
+the lives of many deserving women are passed in a succession of petty
+anxieties about themselves, and gleaning of minute interests and mean
+pleasures in their immediate circle, because they are never taught to
+make any effort to look beyond it; or to know anything about the mighty
+world in which their lives are fading, like blades of bitter grass in
+fruitless fields.
+
+
+95. I had intended to enlarge on this--and yet more on the kingdom which
+every man holds in his conceptive faculty, to be peopled with active
+thoughts and lovely presences, or left waste for the springing up of
+those dark desires and dreams of which it is written that "every
+imagination of the thoughts of man's heart is evil continually." True,
+and a thousand times true it is, that, here at least, "greater is he
+that ruleth his spirit, than he that taketh a city." But this you can
+partly follow out for yourselves without help, partly we must leave it
+for future enquiry. I press to the conclusion which I wish to leave with
+you, that all you can rightly do, or honourably become, depends on the
+government of these two instincts of order and kindness, by this great
+Imaginative faculty, which gives you inheritance of the past, grasp of
+the present, authority over the future. Map out the spaces of your
+possible lives by its help; measure the range of their possible agency!
+On the walls and towers of this your fair city, there is not an ornament
+of which the first origin may not be traced back to the thoughts of men
+who died two thousand years ago. Whom will _you_ be governing by your
+thoughts, two thousand years hence? Think of it, and you will find that
+so far from art being immoral, little else except art is moral; that
+life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality:
+and for the words "good" and "wicked," used of men, you may almost
+substitute the words "Makers" and "Destroyers." Far the greater part of
+the seeming prosperity of the world is, so far as our present knowledge
+extends, vain: wholly useless for any kind of good, but having assigned
+to it a certain inevitable sequence of destruction and of sorrow. Its
+stress is only the stress of wandering storm; its beauty the hectic of
+plague: and what is called the history of mankind is too often the
+record of the whirlwind, and the map of the spreading of the leprosy.
+But underneath all that, or in narrow spaces of dominion in the midst of
+it, the work of every man, "qui non accepit in vanitatem animam suam,"
+endures and prospers; a small remnant or green bud of it prevailing at
+last over evil. And though faint with sickness, and encumbered in ruin,
+the true workers redeem inch by inch the wilderness into garden ground;
+by the help of their joined hands the order of all things is surely
+sustained and vitally expanded, and although with strange vacillation,
+in the eyes of the watcher, the morning cometh, and also the night,
+there is no hour of human existence that does not draw on towards the
+perfect day.
+
+
+96. And perfect the day shall be, when it is of all men understood that
+the beauty of Holiness must be in labour as well as in rest. Nay!
+_more_, if it may be, in labour; in our strength, rather than in our
+weakness; and in the choice of what we shall work for through the six
+days, and may know to be good at their evening time, than in the choice
+of what we pray for on the seventh, of reward or repose. With the
+multitude that keep holiday, we may perhaps sometimes vainly have gone
+up to the house of the Lord, and vainly there asked for what we fancied
+would be mercy; but for the few who labour as their Lord would have
+them, the mercy needs no seeking, and their wide home no hallowing.
+Surely goodness and mercy shall _follow_ them, _all_ the days of their
+life; and they shall dwell in the house of the Lord--FOR EVER.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE IV
+
+THE RELATION OF ART TO USE
+
+
+97. Our subject of enquiry to-day, you will remember, is the mode in
+which fine art is founded upon, or may contribute to, the practical
+requirements of human life.
+
+Its offices in this respect are mainly twofold: it gives Form to
+knowledge, and Grace to utility; that is to say, it makes permanently
+visible to us things which otherwise could neither be described by our
+science, nor retained by our memory; and it gives delightfulness and
+worth to the implements of daily use, and materials of dress, furniture
+and lodging. In the first of these offices it gives precision and charm
+to truth; in the second it gives precision and charm to service. For,
+the moment we make anything useful thoroughly, it is a law of nature
+that we shall be pleased with ourselves, and with the thing we have
+made; and become desirous therefore to adorn or complete it, in some
+dainty way, with finer art expressive of our pleasure.
+
+And the point I wish chiefly to bring before you to-day is this close
+and healthy connection of the fine arts with material use; but I must
+first try briefly to put in clear light the function of art in giving
+Form to truth.
+
+
+98. Much that I have hitherto tried to teach has been disputed on the
+ground that I have attached too much importance to art as representing
+natural facts, and too little to it as a source of pleasure. And I wish,
+in the close of these four prefatory lectures, strongly to assert to
+you, and, so far as I can in the time, convince you, that the entire
+vitality of art depends upon its being either full of truth, or full of
+use; and that, however pleasant, wonderful or impressive it may be in
+itself, it must yet be of inferior kind, and tend to deeper
+inferiority, unless it has clearly one of these main objects,--either
+_to state a true thing_, or to _adorn a serviceable one_. It must never
+exist alone--never for itself; it exists rightly only when it is the
+means of knowledge, or the grace of agency for life.
+
+
+99. Now, I pray you to observe--for though I have said this often
+before, I have never yet said it clearly enough--every good piece of
+art, to whichever of these ends it may be directed, involves first
+essentially the evidence of human skill and the formation of an actually
+beautiful thing by it.
+
+Skill, and beauty, always then; and, beyond these, the formative arts
+have always one or other of the two objects which I have just defined to
+you--truth, or serviceableness; and without these aims neither the skill
+nor their beauty will avail; only by these can either legitimately
+reign. All the graphic arts begin in keeping the outline of shadow that
+we have loved, and they end in giving to it the aspect of life; and all
+the architectural arts begin in the shaping of the cup and the platter,
+and they end in a glorified roof.
+
+Therefore, you see, in the graphic arts you have Skill, Beauty, and
+Likeness; and in the architectural arts, Skill, Beauty, and Use; and you
+_must_ have the three in each group, balanced and co-ordinate; and all
+the chief errors of art consist in losing or exaggerating one of these
+elements.
+
+
+100. For instance, almost the whole system and hope of modern life are
+founded on the notion that you may substitute mechanism for skill,
+photograph for picture, cast-iron for sculpture. That is your main
+nineteenth-century faith, or infidelity. You think you can get
+everything by grinding--music, literature, and painting. You will find
+it grievously not so; you can get nothing but dust by mere grinding.
+Even to have the barley-meal out of it, you must have the barley first;
+and that comes by growth, not grinding. But essentially, we have lost
+our delight in Skill; in that majesty of it which I was trying to make
+clear to you in my last address, and which long ago I tried to express,
+under the head of ideas of power. The entire sense of that, we have
+lost, because we ourselves do not take pains enough to do right, and
+have no conception of what the right costs; so that all the joy and
+reverence we ought to feel in looking at a strong man's work have ceased
+in us. We keep them yet a little in looking at a honeycomb or a
+bird's-nest; we understand that these differ, by divinity of skill, from
+a lump of wax or a cluster of sticks. But a picture, which is a much
+more wonderful thing than a honeycomb or a bird's-nest,--have we not
+known people, and sensible people too, who expected to be taught to
+produce that, in six lessons?
+
+
+101. Well, you must have the skill, you must have the beauty, which is
+the highest moral element; and then, lastly, you must have the verity or
+utility, which is not the moral, but the vital element; and this desire
+for verity and use is the one aim of the three that always leads in
+great schools, and in the minds of great masters, without any exception.
+They will permit themselves in awkwardness, they will permit themselves
+in ugliness; but they will never permit themselves in uselessness or in
+unveracity.
+
+
+102. And farther, as their skill increases, and as their grace, so much
+more, their desire for truth. It is impossible to find the three motives
+in fairer balance and harmony than in our own Reynolds. He rejoices in
+showing you his skill; and those of you who succeed in learning what
+painter's work really is, will one day rejoice also, even to
+laughter--that highest laughter which springs of pure delight, in
+watching the fortitude and the fire of a hand which strikes forth its
+will upon the canvas as easily as the wind strikes it on the sea. He
+rejoices in all abstract beauty and rhythm and melody of design; he will
+never give you a colour that is not lovely, nor a shade that is
+unnecessary, nor a line that is ungraceful. But all his power and all
+his invention are held by him subordinate,--and the more obediently
+because of their nobleness,--to his true leading purpose of setting
+before you such likeness of the living presence of an English gentleman
+or an English lady, as shall be worthy of being looked upon for ever.
+
+
+103. But farther, you remember, I hope--for I said it in a way that I
+thought would shock you a little, that you might remember it--my
+statement, that art had never done more than this, never more than given
+the likeness of a noble human being. Not only so, but it very seldom
+does so much as this; and the best pictures that exist of the great
+schools are all portraits, or groups of portraits, often of very simple
+and no wise noble persons. You may have much more brilliant and
+impressive qualities in imaginative pictures; you may have figures
+scattered like clouds, or garlanded like flowers; you may have light and
+shade, as of a tempest, and colour, as of the rainbow; but all that is
+child's play to the great men, though it is astonishment to us. Their
+real strength is tried to the utmost, and as far as I know, it is never
+elsewhere brought out so thoroughly, as in painting one man or woman,
+and the soul that was in them; nor that always the highest soul, but
+often only a thwarted one that was capable of height; or perhaps not
+even that, but faultful and poor, yet seen through, to the poor best of
+it, by the masterful sight. So that in order to put before you in your
+Standard series, the best art possible, I am obliged, even from the very
+strongest men, to take portraits, before I take the idealism. Nay,
+whatever is best in the great compositions themselves has depended on
+portraiture; and the study necessary to enable you to understand
+invention will also convince you that the mind of man never invented a
+greater thing than the form of man, animated by faithful life. Every
+attempt to refine or exalt such healthy humanity has weakened or
+caricatured it; or else consists only in giving it, to please our fancy,
+the wings of birds, or the eyes of antelopes. Whatever is truly great in
+either Greek or Christian art, is also restrictedly human; and even the
+raptures of the redeemed souls who enter, "celestemente ballando," the
+gate of Angelico's Paradise, were seen first in the terrestrial, yet
+most pure, mirth of Florentine maidens.
+
+
+104. I am aware that this cannot but at present appear gravely
+questionable to those of my audience who are strictly cognisant of the
+phases of Greek art; for they know that the moment of its decline is
+accurately marked, by its turning from abstract form to portraiture. But
+the reason of this is simple. The progressive course of Greek art was in
+subduing monstrous conceptions to natural ones; it did this by general
+laws; it reached absolute truth of generic human form, and if this
+ethical force had remained, would have advanced into healthy
+portraiture. But at the moment of change the national life ended in
+Greece; and portraiture, there, meant insult to her religion, and
+flattery to her tyrants. And her skill perished, not because she became
+true in sight, but because she became vile at heart.
+
+
+105. And now let us think of our own work, and ask how that may become,
+in its own poor measure, active in some verity of representation. We
+certainly cannot begin by drawing kings or queens; but we must try, even
+in our earliest work, if it is to prosper, to draw something that will
+convey true knowledge both to ourselves and others. And I think you will
+find greatest advantage in the endeavour to give more life and
+educational power to the simpler branches of natural science: for the
+great scientific men are all so eager in advance that they have no time
+to popularise their discoveries, and if we can glean after them a
+little, and make pictures of the things which science describes, we
+shall find the service a worthy one. Not only so, but we may even be
+helpful to science herself; for she has suffered by her proud severance
+from the arts; and having made too little effort to realise her
+discoveries to vulgar eyes, has herself lost true measure of what was
+chiefly precious in them.
+
+
+106. Take Botany, for instance. Our scientific botanists are, I think,
+chiefly at present occupied in distinguishing species, which perfect
+methods of distinction will probably in the future show to be
+indistinct;--in inventing descriptive names of which a more advanced
+science and more fastidious scholarship will show some to be
+unnecessary, and others inadmissible;--and in microscopic investigations
+of structure, which through many alternate links of triumphant
+discovery that tissue is composed of vessels, and that vessels are
+composed of tissue, have not hitherto completely explained to us either
+the origin, the energy, or the course of the sap; and which however
+subtle or successful, bear to the real natural history of plants only
+the relation that anatomy and organic chemistry bear to the history of
+men. In the meantime, our artists are so generally convinced of the
+truth of the Darwinian theory that they do not always think it necessary
+to show any difference between the foliage of an elm and an oak; and the
+gift-books of Christmas have every page surrounded with laboriously
+engraved garlands of rose, shamrock, thistle, and forget-me-not, without
+its being thought proper by the draughtsman, or desirable by the public,
+even in the case of those uncommon flowers, to observe the real shape of
+the petals of any one of them.
+
+
+107. Now what we especially need at present for educational purposes is
+to know, not the anatomy of plants, but their biography--how and where
+they live and die, their tempers, benevolences, malignities, distresses,
+and virtues. We want them drawn from their youth to their age, from bud
+to fruit. We ought to see the various forms of their diminished but
+hardy growth in cold climates, or poor soils; and their rank or wild
+luxuriance, when full-fed, and warmly nursed. And all this we ought to
+have drawn so accurately, that we might at once compare any given part
+of a plant with the same part of any other, drawn on the like
+conditions. Now, is not this a work which we may set about here in
+Oxford, with good hope and much pleasure? I think it is so important,
+that the first exercise in drawing I shall put before you will be an
+outline of a laurel leaf. You will find in the opening sentence of
+Lionardo's treatise, our present text-book, that you must not at first
+draw from nature, but from a good master's work, "per assuefarsi a buone
+membra," to accustom yourselves, that is, to entirely good
+representative organic forms. So your first exercise shall be the top of
+the laurel sceptre of Apollo, drawn by an Italian engraver of Lionardo's
+own time; then we will draw a laurel leaf itself; and little by little,
+I think we may both learn ourselves, and teach to many besides, somewhat
+more than we know yet, of the wild olives of Greece, and the wild roses
+of England.
+
+
+108. Next, in Geology, which I will take leave to consider as an
+entirely separate science from the zoology of the past, which has lately
+usurped its name and interest. In geology itself we find the strength of
+many able men occupied in debating questions of which there are yet no
+data even for the clear statement; and in seizing advanced theoretical
+positions on the mere contingency of their being afterwards tenable;
+while, in the meantime, no simple person, taking a holiday in
+Cumberland, can get an intelligible section of Skiddaw, or a clear
+account of the origin of the Skiddaw slates; and while, though half the
+educated society of London travel every summer over the great plain of
+Switzerland, none know, or care to know, why that is a plain, and the
+Alps to the south of it are Alps; and whether or not the gravel of the
+one has anything to do with the rocks of the other. And though every
+palace in Europe owes part of its decoration to variegated marbles, and
+nearly every woman in Europe part of her decoration to pieces of jasper
+or chalcedony, I do not think any geologist could at this moment with
+authority tell us either how a piece of marble is stained, or what
+causes the streaks in a Scotch pebble.
+
+
+109. Now, as soon as you have obtained the power of drawing, I do not
+say a mountain, but even a stone, accurately, every question of this
+kind will become to you at once attractive and definite; you will find
+that in the grain, the lustre, and the cleavage-lines of the smallest
+fragment of rock, there are recorded forces of every order and
+magnitude, from those which raise a continent by one volcanic effort, to
+those which at every instant are polishing the apparently complete
+crystal in its nest, and conducting the apparently motionless metal in
+its vein; and that only by the art of your own hand, and fidelity of
+sight which it develops, you can obtain true perception of these
+invincible and inimitable arts of the earth herself; while the
+comparatively slight effort necessary to obtain so much skill as may
+serviceably draw mountains in distant effect will be instantly rewarded
+by what is almost equivalent to a new sense of the conditions of their
+structure.
+
+
+110. And, because it is well at once to know some direction in which our
+work may be definite, let me suggest to those of you who may intend
+passing their vacation in Switzerland, and who care about mountains,
+that if they will first qualify themselves to take angles of position
+and elevation with correctness, and to draw outlines with approximate
+fidelity, there are a series of problems of the highest interest to be
+worked out on the southern edge of the Swiss plain, in the study of the
+relations of its molasse beds to the rocks which are characteristically
+developed in the chain of the Stockhorn, Beatenberg, Pilate, Mythen
+above Schwytz, and High Sentis of Appenzell, the pursuit of which may
+lead them into many pleasant, as well as creditably dangerous, walks,
+and curious discoveries; and will be good for the discipline of their
+fingers in the pencilling of crag form.
+
+
+111. I wish I could ask you to draw, instead of the Alps, the crests of
+Parnassus and Olympus, and the ravines of Delphi and of Tempe. I have
+not loved the arts of Greece as others have; yet I love them, and her,
+so much, that it is to me simply a standing marvel how scholars can
+endure for all these centuries, during which their chief education has
+been in the language and policy of Greece, to have only the names of her
+hills and rivers upon their lips, and never one line of conception of
+them in their mind's sight. Which of us knows what the valley of Sparta
+is like, or the great mountain vase of Arcadia? which of us, except in
+mere airy syllabling of names, knows aught of "sandy Ladon's lilied
+banks, or old Lycĉus, or Cyllene hoar"? "You cannot travel in
+Greece?"--I know it; nor in Magna Grĉcia. But, gentlemen of England, you
+had better find out why you cannot, and put an end to that horror of
+European shame, before you hope to learn Greek art.
+
+
+112. I scarcely know whether to place among the things useful to art,
+or to science, the systematic record, by drawing, of phenomena of the
+sky. But I am quite sure that your work cannot in any direction be more
+useful to yourselves, than in enabling you to perceive the quite
+unparalleled subtilties of colour and inorganic form, which occur on any
+ordinarily fine morning or evening horizon; and I will even confess to
+you another of my perhaps too sanguine expectations, that in some far
+distant time it may come to pass, that young Englishmen and Englishwomen
+may think the breath of the morning sky pleasanter than that of
+midnight, and its light prettier than that of candles.
+
+
+113. Lastly, in Zoology. What the Greeks did for the horse, and what, as
+far as regards domestic and expressional character, Landseer has done
+for the dog and the deer, remains to be done by art for nearly all other
+animals of high organisation. There are few birds or beasts that have
+not a range of character which, if not equal to that of the horse or
+dog, is yet as interesting within narrower limits, and often in
+grotesqueness, intensity, or wild and timid pathos, more singular and
+mysterious. Whatever love of humour you have,--whatever sympathy with
+imperfect, but most subtle, feeling,--whatever perception of sublimity
+in conditions of fatal power, may here find fullest occupation: all
+these being joined, in the strong animal races, to a variable and
+fantastic beauty far beyond anything that merely formative art has yet
+conceived. I have placed in your Educational series a wing by Albert
+Dürer, which goes as far as art yet has reached in delineation of
+plumage; while for the simple action of the pinion it is impossible to
+go beyond what has been done already by Titian and Tintoret; but you
+cannot so much as once look at the rufflings of the plumes of a pelican
+pluming itself after it has been in the water, or carefully draw the
+contours of the wing either of a vulture or a common swift, or paint the
+rose and vermilion on that of a flamingo, without receiving almost a new
+conception of the meaning of form and colour in creation.
+
+
+114. Lastly. Your work, in all directions I have hitherto indicated,
+may be as deliberate as you choose; there is no immediate fear of the
+extinction of many species of flowers or animals; and the Alps, and
+valley of Sparta, will wait your leisure, I fear too long. But the
+feudal and monastic buildings of Europe, and still more the streets of
+her ancient cities, are vanishing like dreams: and it is difficult to
+imagine the mingled envy and contempt with which future generations will
+look back to us, who still possessed such things, yet made no effort to
+preserve, and scarcely any to delineate them: for when used as material
+of landscape by the modern artist, they are nearly always superficially
+or flatteringly represented, without zeal enough to penetrate their
+character, or patience enough to render it in modest harmony. As for
+places of traditional interest, I do not know an entirely faithful
+drawing of any historical site, except one or two studies made by
+enthusiastic young painters in Palestine and Egypt: for which, thanks to
+them always: but we want work nearer home.
+
+
+115. Now it is quite probable that some of you, who will not care to go
+through the labour necessary to draw flowers or animals, may yet have
+pleasure in attaining some moderately accurate skill of sketching
+architecture, and greater pleasure still in directing it usefully.
+Suppose, for instance, we were to take up the historical scenery in
+Carlyle's "Frederick." Too justly the historian accuses the genius of
+past art, in that, types of too many such elsewhere, the galleries of
+Berlin--"are made up, like other galleries, of goat-footed Pan, Europa's
+Bull, Romulus's She-Wolf, and the Correggiosity of Correggio, and
+contain, for instance, no portrait of Friedrich the Great,--no likeness
+at all, or next to none at all, of the noble series of Human Realities,
+or any part of them, who have sprung, not from the idle brains of
+dreaming _dilettanti_, but from the head of God Almighty, to make this
+poor authentic earth a little memorable for us, and to do a little work
+that may be eternal there." So Carlyle tells us--too truly! We cannot
+now draw Friedrich for him, but we can draw some of the old castles and
+cities that were the cradles of German life--Hohenzollern, Hapsburg,
+Marburg, and such others;--we may keep some authentic likeness of these
+for the future. Suppose we were to take up that first volume of
+"Friedrich," and put outlines to it: shall we begin by looking for Henry
+the Fowler's tomb--Carlyle himself asks if he has any--at Quedlinburgh,
+and so downwards, rescuing what we can? That would certainly be making
+our work of some true use.
+
+
+116. But I have told you enough, it seems to me, at least to-day, of
+this function of art in recording fact; let me now finally, and with all
+distinctness possible to me, state to you its main business of all;--its
+service in the actual uses of daily life.
+
+You are surprised, perhaps, to hear me call this its main business. That
+is indeed so, however. The giving brightness to picture is much, but the
+giving brightness to life more. And remember, were it as patterns only,
+you cannot, without the realities, have the pictures. _You cannot have a
+landscape by Turner, without a country for him to paint; you cannot have
+a portrait by Titian, without a man to be portrayed._ I need not prove
+that to you, I suppose, in these short terms; but in the outcome I can
+get no soul to believe that the beginning of art _is in getting our
+country clean, and our people beautiful_. I have been ten years trying
+to get this very plain certainty--I do not say believed--but even
+thought of, as anything but a monstrous proposition. To get your country
+clean, and your people lovely;--I assure you that is a necessary work of
+art to begin with! There has indeed been art in countries where people
+lived in dirt to serve God, but never in countries where they lived in
+dirt to serve the devil. There has indeed been art where the people were
+not all lovely--where even their lips were thick--and their skins black,
+because the sun had looked upon them; but never in a country where the
+people were pale with miserable toil and deadly shade, and where the
+lips of youth, instead of being full with blood, were pinched by famine,
+or warped with poison. And now, therefore, note this well, the gist of
+all these long prefatory talks. I said that the two great moral
+instincts were those of Order and Kindness. Now, all the arts are
+founded on agriculture by the hand, and on the graces, and kindness of
+feeding, and dressing, and lodging your people. Greek art begins in the
+gardens of Alcinous--perfect order, leeks in beds, and fountains in
+pipes. And Christian art, as it arose out of chivalry, was only possible
+so far as chivalry compelled both kings and knights to care for the
+right personal training of their people; it perished utterly when those
+kings and knights became +dêmoboroi+, devourers of the people.
+And it will become possible again only, when, literally, the sword is
+beaten into the ploughshare, when your St. George of England shall
+justify his name, and Christian art shall be known as its Master was, in
+breaking of bread.
+
+
+117. Now look at the working out of this broad principle in minor
+detail; observe how, from highest to lowest, health of art has first
+depended on reference to industrial use. There is first the need of cup
+and platter, especially of cup; for you can put your meat on the
+Harpies',[10] or on any other, tables; but you must have your cup to
+drink from. And to hold it conveniently, you must put a handle to it;
+and to fill it when it is empty you must have a large pitcher of some
+sort; and to carry the pitcher you may most advisably have two handles.
+Modify the forms of these needful possessions according to the various
+requirements of drinking largely and drinking delicately; of pouring
+easily out, or of keeping for years the perfume in; of storing in
+cellars, or bearing from fountains; of sacrificial libation, of
+Panathenaic treasure of oil, and sepulchral treasure of ashes,--and you
+have a resultant series of beautiful form and decoration, from the rude
+amphora of red earth up to Cellini's vases of gems and crystal, in which
+series, but especially in the more simple conditions of it, are
+developed the most beautiful lines and most perfect types of severe
+composition which have yet been attained by art.
+
+[Footnote 10: Virg., _Ĉn._, iii. 209 _seqq._]
+
+
+118. But again, that you may fill your cup with pure water, you must go
+to the well or spring; you need a fence round the well; you need some
+tube or trough, or other means of confining the stream at the spring.
+For the conveyance of the current to any distance you must build either
+enclosed or open aqueduct; and in the hot square of the city where you
+set it free, you find it good for health and pleasantness to let it leap
+into a fountain. On these several needs you have a school of sculpture
+founded; in the decoration of the walls of wells in level countries, and
+of the sources of springs in mountainous ones, and chiefly of all, where
+the women of household or market meet at the city fountain.
+
+There is, however, a farther reason for the use of art here than in any
+other material service, so far as we may, by art, express our reverence
+or thankfulness. Whenever a nation is in its right mind, it always has a
+deep sense of divinity in the gift of rain from heaven, filling its
+heart with food and gladness; and all the more when that gift becomes
+gentle and perennial in the flowing of springs. It literally is not
+possible that any fruitful power of the Muses should be put forth upon a
+people which disdains their Helicon; still less is it possible that any
+Christian nation should grow up "tanquam lignum quod plantatum est secus
+decursus aquarum," which cannot recognise the lesson meant in their
+being told of the places where Rebekah was met;--where Rachel,--where
+Zipporah,--and she who was asked for water under Mount Grerizim by a
+Stranger, weary, who had nothing to draw with.
+
+
+119. And truly, when our mountain springs are set apart in vale or
+craggy glen, or glade of wood green through the drought of summer, far
+from cities, then it is best to let them stay in their own happy peace;
+but if near towns, and liable therefore to be defiled by common usage,
+we could not use the loveliest art more worthily than by sheltering the
+spring and its first pools with precious marbles: nor ought anything to
+be esteemed more important, as a means of healthy education, than the
+care to keep the streams of it afterwards, to as great a distance as
+possible, pure, full of fish, and easily accessible to children. There
+used to be, thirty years ago, a little rivulet of the Wandel, about an
+inch deep, which ran over the carriage-road and under a foot-bridge just
+under the last chalk hill near Croydon. Alas! men came and went; and it
+did _not_ go on for ever. It has long since been bricked over by the
+parish authorities; but there was more education in that stream with its
+minnows than you could get out of a thousand pounds spent yearly in the
+parish schools, even though you were to spend every farthing of it in
+teaching the nature of oxygen and hydrogen, and the names, and rate per
+minute, of all the rivers in Asia and America.
+
+
+120. Well, the gist of this matter lies here then. Suppose we want a
+school of pottery again in England, all we poor artists are ready to do
+the best we can, to show you how pretty a line may be that is twisted
+first to one side, and then to the other; and how a plain household-blue
+will make a pattern on white; and how ideal art may be got out of the
+spaniel's colours of black and tan. But I tell you beforehand, all that
+we can do will be utterly useless, unless you teach your peasant to say
+grace, not only before meat, but before drink; and having provided him
+with Greek cups and platters, provide him also with something that is
+not poisoned to put into them.
+
+
+121. There cannot be any need that I should trace for you the conditions
+of art that are directly founded on serviceableness of dress, and of
+armour; but it is my duty to affirm to you, in the most positive manner,
+that after recovering, for the poor, wholesomeness of food, your next
+step towards founding schools of art in England must be in recovering,
+for the poor, decency and wholesomeness of dress; thoroughly good in
+substance, fitted for their daily work, becoming to their rank in life,
+and worn with order and dignity. And this order and dignity must be
+taught them by the women of the upper and middle classes, whose minds
+can be in nothing right, as long as they are so wrong in this matter as
+to endure the squalor of the poor, while they themselves dress gaily.
+And on the proper pride and comfort of both poor and rich in dress, must
+be founded the true arts of dress; carried on by masters of manufacture
+no less careful of the perfectness and beauty of their tissues, and of
+all that in substance and design can be bestowed upon them, than ever
+the armourers of Milan and Damascus were careful of their steel.
+
+
+122. Then, in the third place, having recovered some wholesome habits of
+life as to food and dress, we must recover them as to lodging. I said
+just now that the best architecture was but a glorified roof. Think of
+it. The dome of the Vatican, the porches of Rheims or Chartres, the
+vaults and arches of their aisles, the canopy of the tomb, and the spire
+of the belfry, are all forms resulting from the mere requirement that a
+certain space shall be strongly covered from heat and rain. More than
+that--as I have tried all through "The Stories of Venice" to show,--the
+lovely forms of these were every one of them developed in civil and
+domestic building, and only after their invention, employed
+ecclesiastically on the grandest scale. I think you cannot but have
+noticed here in Oxford, as elsewhere, that our modern architects never
+seem to know what to do with their roofs. Be assured, until the roofs
+are right, nothing else will be; and there are just two ways of keeping
+them right. Never build them of iron, but only of wood or stone; and
+secondly, take care that in every town the little roofs are built before
+the large ones, and that everybody who wants one has got one. And we
+must try also to make everybody want one. That is to say, at some not
+very advanced period of life, men should desire to have a home, which
+they do not wish to quit any more, suited to their habits of life, and
+likely to be more and more suitable to them until their death. And men
+must desire to have these their dwelling-places built as strongly as
+possible, and furnished and decorated daintily, and set in pleasant
+places, in bright light, and good air, being able to choose for
+themselves that at least as well as swallows. And when the houses are
+grouped together in cities, men must have so much civic fellowship as to
+subject their architecture to a common law, and so much civic pride as
+to desire that the whole gathered group of human dwellings should be a
+lovely thing, not a frightful one, on the face of the earth. Not many
+weeks ago an English clergyman,[11] a master of this University, a man
+not given to sentiment, but of middle age, and great practical sense,
+told me, by accident, and wholly without reference to the subject now
+before us, that he never could enter London from his country parsonage
+but with closed eyes, lest the sight of the blocks of houses which the
+railroad intersected in the suburbs should unfit him, by the horror of
+it, for his day's work.
+
+[Footnote 11: Osborne Gordon.]
+
+
+123. Now, it is not possible--and I repeat to you, only in more
+deliberate assertion, what I wrote just twenty-two years ago in the last
+chapter of the "Seven Lamps of Architecture"--it is not possible to have
+any right morality, happiness, or art, in any country where the cities
+are thus built, or thus, let me rather say, clotted and coagulated;
+spots of a dreadful mildew, spreading by patches and blotches over the
+country they consume. You must have lovely cities, crystallised, not
+coagulated, into form; limited in size, and not casting out the scum and
+scurf of them into an encircling eruption of shame, but girded each with
+its sacred pomoerium, and with garlands of gardens full of blossoming
+trees and softly guided streams.
+
+That is impossible, you say! it may be so. I have nothing to do with its
+possibility, but only with its indispensability. More than that must be
+possible, however, before you can have a school of art; namely, that you
+find places elsewhere than in England, or at least in otherwise
+unserviceable parts of England, for the establishment of manufactories
+needing the help of fire, that is to say, of all the +technai
+banausikai+ and +epirrêtoi+, of which it was long ago known to be
+the constant nature that "+ascholias malista echousi kai philôn
+kai poleôs sunepimeleisthai+," and to reduce such manufactures to their
+lowest limit, so that nothing may ever be made of iron that can as
+effectually be made of wood or stone; and nothing moved by steam that
+can be as effectually moved by natural forces. And observe, that for all
+mechanical effort required in social life and in cities, water power is
+infinitely more than enough; for anchored mills on the large rivers, and
+mills moved by sluices from reservoirs filled by the tide, will give you
+command of any quantity of constant motive power you need.
+
+Agriculture by the hand, then, and absolute refusal or banishment of
+unnecessary igneous force, are the first conditions of a school of art
+in any country. And until you do this, be it soon or late, things will
+continue in that triumphant state to which, for want of finer art, your
+mechanism has brought them;--that, though England is deafened with
+spinning wheels, her people have not clothes--though she is black with
+digging of fuel, they die of cold--and though she has sold her soul for
+gain, they die of hunger. Stay in that triumph, if you choose; but be
+assured of this, it is not one which the fine arts will ever share with
+you.
+
+
+124. Now, I have given you my message, containing, as I know, offence
+enough, and itself, it may seem to many, unnecessary enough. But just in
+proportion to its apparent non-necessity, and to its certain offence,
+was its real need, and my real duty to speak it. The study of the fine
+arts could not be rightly associated with the grave work of English
+Universities, without due and clear protest against the misdirection of
+national energy, which for the present renders all good results of such
+study on a great scale, impossible. I can easily teach you, as any other
+moderately good draughtsman could, how to hold your pencils, and how to
+lay your colours; but it is little use my doing that, while the nation
+is spending millions of money in the destruction of all that pencil or
+colour has to represent, and in the promotion of false forms of art,
+which are only the costliest and the least enjoyable of follies. And
+therefore these are the things that I have first and last to tell you in
+this place;--that the fine arts are not to be learned by Locomotion, but
+by making the homes we live in lovely, and by staying in them;--that
+the fine arts are not to be learned by Competition, but by doing our
+quiet best in our own way;--that the fine arts are not to be learned by
+Exhibition, but by doing what is right, and making what is honest,
+whether it be exhibited or not;--and, for the sum of all, that men must
+paint and build neither for pride nor for money, but for love; for love
+of their art, for love of their neighbour, and whatever better love may
+be than these, founded on these. I know that I gave some pain, which I
+was most unwilling to give, in speaking of the possible abuses of
+religious art; but there can be no danger of any, so long as we remember
+that God inhabits cottages as well as churches, and ought to be well
+lodged there also. Begin with wooden floors; the tessellated ones will
+take care of themselves; begin with thatching roofs, and you shall end
+by splendidly vaulting them; begin by taking care that no old eyes fail
+over their Bibles, nor young ones over their needles, for want of
+rushlight, and then you may have whatever true good is to be got out of
+coloured glass or wax candles. And in thus putting the arts to universal
+use, you will find also their universal inspiration, their universal
+benediction. I told you there was no evidence of a _special_ Divineness
+in any application of them; that they were always equally human and
+equally Divine; and in closing this inaugural series of lectures, into
+which I have endeavoured to compress the principles that are to be the
+foundations of your future work, it is my last duty to say some positive
+words as to the Divinity of all art, when it is truly fair, or truly
+serviceable.
+
+
+125. Every seventh day, if not oftener, the greater number of
+well-meaning persons in England thankfully receive from their teachers a
+benediction, couched in those terms:--"The grace of our Lord Jesus
+Christ, and the Love of God, and the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be
+with you." Now I do not know precisely what sense is attached in the
+English public mind to those expressions. But what I have to tell you
+positively is that the three things do actually exist, and can be known
+if you care to know them, and possessed if you care to possess them;
+and that another thing exists, besides these, of which we already know
+too much.
+
+First, by simply obeying the orders of the Founder of your religion, all
+grace, graciousness, or beauty and favour of gentle life, will be given
+to you in mind and body, in work and in rest. The Grace of Christ
+exists, and can be had if you will. Secondly, as you know more and more
+of the created world, you will find that the true will of its Maker is
+that its creatures should be happy;--that He has made everything
+beautiful in its time and its place, and that it is chiefly by the fault
+of men, when they are allowed the liberty of thwarting His laws, that
+Creation groans or travails in pain. The Love of God exists, and you may
+see it, and live in it if you will. Lastly, a Spirit does actually exist
+which teaches the ant her path, the bird her building, and men, in an
+instinctive and marvellous way, whatever lovely arts and noble deeds are
+possible to them. Without it you can do no good thing. To the grief of
+it you can do many bad ones. In the possession of it is your peace and
+your power.
+
+And there is a fourth thing, of which we already know too much. There is
+an evil spirit whose dominion is in blindness and in cowardice, as the
+dominion of the Spirit of wisdom is in clear sight and in courage.
+
+And this blind and cowardly spirit is for ever telling you that evil
+things are pardonable, and you shall not die for them, and that good
+things are impossible, and you need not live for them; and that gospel
+of his is now the loudest that is preached in your Saxon tongue. You
+will find some day, to your cost, if you believe the first part of it,
+that it is not true; but you may never, if you believe the second part
+of it, find, to your gain, that also, untrue; and therefore I pray you
+with all earnestness to prove, and know within your hearts, that all
+things lovely and righteous are possible for those who believe in their
+possibility, and who determine that, for their part, they will make
+every day's work contribute to them. Let every dawn of morning be to you
+as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its
+close:--then let every one of these short lives leave its sure record of
+some kindly thing done for others--some goodly strength or knowledge
+gained for yourselves; so, from day to day, and strength to strength,
+you shall build up indeed, by Art, by Thought, and by Just Will, an
+Ecclesia of England, of which it shall not be said, "See what manner of
+stones are here," but, "See what manner of men."
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE V
+
+LINE
+
+
+126. You will, I doubt not, willingly permit me to begin your lessons in
+real practice of art in the words of the greatest of English painters:
+one also, than whom there is indeed no greater, among those of any
+nation, or any time,--our own gentle Reynolds.
+
+He says in his first discourse:--"The Directors" (of the Academy) "ought
+more particularly to watch over the genius of those students, who being
+more advanced, are arrived at that critical period of study, on the nice
+management of which their future turn of taste depends. At that age it
+is natural for them to be more captivated with what is brilliant, than
+with what is solid, and to prefer splendid negligence to painful and
+humiliating exactness."
+
+"A facility in composing, a lively and, what is called, a 'masterly'
+handling of the chalk or pencil, are, it must be confessed, captivating
+qualities to young minds, and become of course the objects of their
+ambition. They endeavour to imitate these dazzling excellences, which
+they will find no great labour in attaining. After much time spent in
+these frivolous pursuits, the difficulty will be to retreat; but it will
+then be too late; and there is scarce an instance of return to
+scrupulous labour, after the mind has been debauched and deceived by
+this fallacious mastery."
+
+
+127. I read you these words, chiefly that Sir Joshua, who founded, as
+first President, the Academical schools of English painting, in these
+well-known discourses, may also begin, as he has truest right to do, our
+system of instruction in this University. But secondly, I read them that
+I may press on your attention these singular words, "painful and
+humiliating exactness." Singular, as expressing the first conditions of
+the study required from his pupils by the master, who, of all men except
+Velasquez, seems to have painted with the greatest ease. It is true that
+he asks this pain, this humiliation, only from youths who intend to
+follow the profession of artists. But if you wish yourselves to know
+anything of the practice of art, you must not suppose that because your
+study will be more desultory than that of Academy students, it may
+therefore be less accurate. The shorter the time you have to give, the
+more careful you should be to spend it profitably; and I would not wish
+you to devote one hour to the practice of drawing, unless you are
+resolved to be informed in it of all that in an hour can be taught.
+
+
+128. I speak of the practice of _drawing_ only; though elementary study
+of modelling may perhaps some day be advisably connected with it; but I
+do not wish to disturb, or amuse, you with a formal statement of the
+manifold expectations I have formed respecting your future work. You
+will not, I am sure, imagine that I have begun without a plan, nor blame
+my reticence as to the parts of it which cannot yet be put into
+execution, and which there may occur reason afterwards to modify. My
+first task must unquestionably be to lay before you right and simple
+methods of drawing and colouring.
+
+I use the word "colouring" without reference to any particular vehicle
+of colour, for the laws of good painting are the same, whatever liquid
+is employed to dissolve the pigments. But the technical management of
+oil is more difficult than that of water-colour, and the impossibility
+of using it with safety among books or prints, and its unavailableness
+for note-book sketches and memoranda, are sufficient reasons for not
+introducing it in a course of practice intended chiefly for students of
+literature. On the contrary, in the exercises of artists, oil should be
+the vehicle of colour employed from the first. The extended practice of
+water-colour painting, as a separate skill, is in every way harmful to
+the arts: its pleasant slightness and plausible dexterity divert the
+genius of the painter from its proper aims, and withdraw the attention
+of the public from excellence of higher claim; nor ought any man, who
+has the consciousness of ability for good work, to be ignorant of, or
+indolent in employing, the methods of making its results permanent as
+long as the laws of Nature allow. It is surely a severe lesson to us in
+this matter, that the best works of Turner could not be shown to the
+public for six months without being destroyed,--and that his most
+ambitious ones for the most part perished, even before they could be
+shown. I will break through my law of reticence, however, so far as to
+tell you that I have hope of one day interesting you greatly (with the
+help of the Florentine masters), in the study of the arts of moulding
+and painting porcelain; and to induce some of you to use your future
+power of patronage in encouraging the various branches of this art, and
+turning the attention of the workmen of Italy from the vulgar tricks of
+minute and perishable mosaic to the exquisite subtilties of form and
+colour possible in the perfectly ductile, afterwards unalterable clay.
+And one of the ultimate results of such craftsmanship might be the
+production of pictures as brilliant as painted glass,--as delicate as
+the most subtle water-colours, and more permanent than the Pyramids.
+
+
+129. And now to begin our own work. In order that we may know how
+rightly to learn to draw and to paint, it will be necessary, will it
+not, that we know first what we are to aim at doing;--what kind of
+representation of nature is best?
+
+I will tell you in the words of Lionardo. "That is the most praiseworthy
+painting which has most conformity with the thing represented," "quella
+pittura e piu laudabile, la quale ha piu conformita con la cosa mitata,"
+(ch. 276). In plain terms, "the painting which is likest nature is the
+best." And you will find by referring to the preceding chapter, "come lo
+specchio e maestro de' pittori," how absolutely Lionardo means what he
+says. Let the living thing, (he tells us,) be reflected in a mirror,
+then put your picture beside the reflection, and match the one with the
+other. And indeed, the very best painting is unquestionably so like the
+mirrored truth, that all the world admits its excellence. Entirely
+first-rate work is so quiet and natural that there can be no dispute
+over it; you may not particularly admire it, but you will find no fault
+with it. Second-rate painting pleases one person much, and displeases
+another; but first-rate painting pleases all a little, and intensely
+pleases those who can recognise its unostentatious skill.
+
+
+130. This, then, is what we have first got to do--to make our drawing
+look as like the thing we have to draw as we can.
+
+Now, all objects are seen by the eye as patches of colour of a certain
+shape, with gradations of colour within them. And, unless their colours
+be actually luminous, as those of the sun, or of fire, these patches of
+different hues are sufficiently imitable, except so far as they are seen
+stereoscopically. You will find Lionardo again and again insisting on
+the stereoscopic power of the double sight: but do not let that trouble
+you; you can only paint what you can see from one point of sight, but
+that is quite enough. So seen, then, all objects appear to the human eye
+simply as masses of colour of variable depth, texture, and outline. The
+outline of any object is the limit of its mass, as relieved against
+another mass. Take a crocus, and lay it on a green cloth. You will see
+it detach itself as a mere space of yellow from the green behind it, as
+it does from the grass. Hold it up against the window--you will see it
+detach itself as a dark space against the white or blue behind it. In
+either case its outline is the limit of the space of light or dark
+colour by which it expresses itself to your sight. That outline is
+therefore infinitely subtle--not even a line, but the place of a line,
+and that, also, made soft by texture. In the finest painting it is
+therefore slightly softened; but it is necessary to be able to draw it
+with absolute sharpness and precision. The art of doing this is to be
+obtained by drawing it as an actual line, which art is to be the subject
+of our immediate enquiry; but I must first lay the divisions of the
+entire subject completely before you.
+
+
+131. I have said that all objects detach themselves as masses of
+colour. Usually, light and shade are thought of as separate from colour;
+but the fact is that all nature is seen as a mosaic composed of gradated
+portions of different colours, dark or light. There is no difference in
+the quality of these colours, except as affected by texture. You will
+constantly hear lights and shades spoken of as if these were different
+in their nature, and to be painted in different ways. But every light is
+a shadow compared to higher lights, till we reach the brightness of the
+sun; and every shadow is a light compared to lower shadows, till we
+reach the darkness of night.
+
+Every colour used in painting, except pure white and black, is therefore
+a light and shade at the same time. It is a light with reference to all
+below it, and a shade with reference to all above it.
+
+
+132. The solid forms of an object, that is to say, the projections or
+recessions of its surface within the outline, are, for the most part,
+rendered visible by variations in the intensity or quantity of light
+falling on them. The study of the relations between the quantities of
+this light, irrespectively of its colour, is the second division of the
+regulated science of painting.
+
+
+133. Finally, the qualities and relations of natural colours, the means
+of imitating them, and the laws by which they become separately
+beautiful, and in association harmonious, are the subjects of the third
+and final division of the painter's study. I shall endeavour at once to
+state to you what is most immediately desirable for you to know on each
+of these topics, in this and the two following lectures.
+
+
+134. What we have to do, then, from beginning to end, is, I repeat once
+more, simply to draw spaces of their true shape, and to fill them with
+colours which shall match their colours; quite a simple thing in the
+definition of it, not quite so easy in the doing of it.
+
+But it is something to get this simple definition; and I wish you to
+notice that the terms of it are complete, though I do not introduce the
+term "light," or "shadow." Painters who have no eye for colour have
+greatly confused and falsified the practice of art by the theory that
+shadow is an absence of colour. Shadow is, on the contrary, necessary to
+the full presence of colour; for every colour is a diminished quantity
+or energy of light; and, practically, it follows from what I have just
+told you--(that every light in painting is a shadow to higher lights,
+and every shadow a light to lower shadows)--that also every _colour_ in
+painting must be a shadow to some brighter colour, and a light to some
+darker one--all the while being a positive colour itself. And the great
+splendour of the Venetian school arises from their having seen and held
+from the beginning this great fact--that shadow is as much colour as
+light, often much more. In Titian's fullest red the lights are pale
+rose-colour, passing into white--the shadows warm deep crimson. In
+Veronese's most splendid orange, the lights are pale, the shadows crocus
+colour; and so on. In nature, dark sides if seen by reflected lights,
+are almost always fuller or warmer in colour than the lights; and the
+practice of the Bolognese and Roman schools, in drawing their shadows
+always dark and cold, is false from the beginning, and renders perfect
+painting for ever impossible in those schools, and to all who follow
+them.
+
+
+135. Every visible space, then, be it dark or light, is a space of
+colour of some kind, or of black or white. And you have to enclose it
+with a true outline, and to paint it with its true colour.
+
+But before considering how we are to draw this enclosing line, I must
+state to you something about the use of lines in general, by different
+schools.
+
+I said just now that there was no difference between the masses of
+colour of which all visible nature is composed, except in _texture_. Now
+textures are principally of three kinds:--
+
+     (1) Lustrous, as of water and glass.
+     (2) Bloomy, or velvety, as of a rose-leaf or peach.
+     (3) Linear, produced by filaments or threads as in feathers, fur,
+         hair, and woven or reticulated tissues.
+
+All these three sources of pleasure to the eye in texture are united in
+the best ornamental work. A fine picture by Fra Angelico, or a fine
+illuminated page of missal, has large spaces of gold, partly burnished
+and lustrous, partly dead;--some of it chased and enriched with linear
+texture, and mingled with imposed or inlaid colours, soft in bloom like
+that of the rose-leaf. But many schools of art affect for the most part
+one kind of texture only, and a vast quantity of the art of all ages
+depends for great part of its power on texture produced by multitudinous
+lines. Thus, wood engraving, line engraving properly so called, and
+countless varieties of sculpture, metal work, and textile fabric, depend
+for great part of the effect, for the mystery, softness, and clearness
+of their colours, or shades, on modification of the surfaces by lines or
+threads. Even in advanced oil painting, the work often depends for some
+part of its effect on the texture of the canvas.
+
+
+136. Again, the arts of etching and mezzotint engraving depend
+principally for their effect on the velvety, or bloomy texture of their
+darkness, and the best of all painting is the fresco work of great
+colourists, in which the colours are what is usually called dead; but
+they are anything but dead, they glow with the luminous bloom of life.
+The frescoes of Correggio, when not repainted, are supreme in this
+quality.
+
+
+137. While, however, in all periods of art these different textures are
+thus used in various styles, and for various purposes, you will find
+that there is a broad historical division of schools, which will
+materially assist you in understanding them. The earliest art in most
+countries is linear, consisting of interwoven, or richly spiral and
+otherwise involved arrangements of sculptured or painted lines, on
+stone, wood, metal or clay. It is generally characteristic of savage
+life, and of feverish energy of imagination. I shall examine these
+schools with you hereafter, under the general head of the "Schools of
+Line."[12]
+
+[Footnote 12: See "Ariadne Florentina," § 5.]
+
+Secondly, even in the earliest periods, among powerful nations, this
+linear decoration is more or less filled with chequered or barred shade,
+and begins at once to represent animal or floral form, by filling its
+outlines with flat shadow, or with flat colour. And here we instantly
+find two great divisions of temper and thought. The Greeks look upon all
+colour first as light; they are, as compared with other races,
+insensitive to hue, exquisitely sensitive to phenomena of light. And
+their linear school passes into one of flat masses of light and
+darkness, represented in the main by four tints,--white, black, and two
+reds, one brick colour, more or less vivid, the other dark purple; these
+two standing mentally their favourite +porphyreos+ colour, in its
+light and dark powers. On the other hand, many of the Northern nations
+are at first entirely insensible to light and shade, but exquisitely
+sensitive to colour, and their linear decoration is filled with flat
+tints, infinitely varied, but with no expression of light and shade.
+Both these schools have a limited but absolute perfection of their own,
+and their peculiar successes can in no wise be imitated, except by the
+strictest observance of the same limitations.
+
+
+138. You have then, Line for the earliest art, branching into--
+
+     (1) Greek, Line with Light.
+     (2) Gothic, Line with Colour.
+
+Now, as art completes itself, each of these schools retain their
+separate characters, but they cease to depend on lines, and learn to
+represent masses instead, becoming more refined at the same time in all
+modes of perception and execution.
+
+And thus there arise the two vast mediĉval schools; one of flat and
+infinitely varied colour, with exquisite character and sentiment added,
+in the forms represented; but little perception of shadow. The other, of
+light and shade, with exquisite drawing of solid form, and little
+perception of colour: sometimes as little of sentiment. Of these, the
+school of flat colour is the more vital one; it is always natural and
+simple, if not great;--and when it is great, it is very great.
+
+The school of light and shade associates itself with that of engraving;
+it is essentially an academical school, broadly dividing light from
+darkness, and begins by assuming that the light side of all objects
+shall be represented by white, and the extreme shadow by black. On this
+conventional principle it reaches a limited excellence of its own, in
+which the best existing types of engraving are executed, and ultimately,
+the most regular expressions of organic form in painting.
+
+Then, lastly,--the schools of colour advance steadily, till they adopt
+from those of light and shade whatever is compatible with their own
+power,--and then you have perfect art, represented centrally by that of
+the great Venetians.
+
+The schools of light and shade, on the other hand, are partly, in their
+academical formulas, too haughty, and partly, in their narrowness of
+imagination, too weak, to learn much from the schools of colour; and
+pass into a state of decadence, consisting partly in proud endeavours to
+give painting the qualities of sculpture, and partly in the pursuit of
+effects of light and shade, carried at last to extreme sensational
+subtlety by the Dutch school. In their fall, they drag the schools of
+colour down with them; and the recent history of art is one of confused
+effort to find lost roads, and resume allegiance to violated principles.
+
+
+139. That, briefly, is the map of the great schools, easily remembered
+in this hexagonal form:--
+
+                                   1.
+                                  LINE
+                             Early schools.
+
+           2.                                      3.
+     LINE AND LIGHT.                          LINE AND COLOUR.
+       Greek clay.                              Gothic glass.
+
+           4.                                      5.
+     MASS AND LIGHT.                       MASS AND COLOUR.
+ (Represented by Lionardo,             (Represented by Giorgione,
+    and his schools.)                         and his schools.)
+
+                                   6.
+                         MASS, LIGHT, AND COLOUR.
+                          (Represented by Titian,
+                              and his schools.)
+
+And I wish you with your own eyes and fingers to trace, and in your own
+progress follow, the method of advance exemplified by these great
+schools. I wish you to begin by getting command of line, that is to say,
+by learning to draw a steady line, limiting with absolute correctness
+the form or space you intend it to limit; to proceed by getting command
+over flat tints, so that you may be able to fill the spaces you have
+enclosed, evenly, either with shade or colour according to the school
+you adopt; and finally to obtain the power of adding such fineness of
+gradation within the masses, as shall express their roundings, and their
+characters of texture.
+
+
+140. Those who are familiar with the methods of existing schools must be
+aware that I thus nearly invert their practice of teaching. Students at
+present learn to draw details first, and to colour and mass them
+afterwards. I shall endeavour to teach you to arrange broad masses and
+colours first; and you shall put the details into them afterwards. I
+have several reasons for this audacity, of which you may justly require
+me to state the principal ones. The first is that, as I have shown you,
+this method I wish you to follow, is the natural one. All great artist
+nations _have_ actually learned to work in this way, and I believe it
+therefore the right, as the hitherto successful one. Secondly, you will
+find it less irksome than the reverse method, and more definite. When a
+beginner is set at once to draw details, and make finished studies in
+light and shade, no master can correct his innumerable errors, or rescue
+him out of his endless difficulties. But in the natural method, he can
+correct, if he will, his own errors. You will have positive lines to
+draw, presenting no more difficulty, except in requiring greater
+steadiness of hand, than the outlines of a map. They will be generally
+sweeping and simple, instead of being jagged into promontories and bays;
+but assuredly, they may be drawn rightly (with patience), and their
+rightness tested with mathematical accuracy. You have only to follow
+your own line with tracing paper, and apply it to your own copy. If they
+do not correspond, you are wrong, and you need no master to show you
+where. Again; in washing in a flat tone of colour or shade, you can
+always see yourself if it is flat, and kept well within the edges; and
+you can set a piece of your colour side by side with that of the copy;
+if it does not match, you are wrong; and, again, you need no one to tell
+you so, if your eye for colour is true. It happens, indeed, more
+frequently than would be supposed, that there is real want of power in
+the eye to distinguish colours; and this I even suspect to be a
+condition which has been sometimes attendant on high degrees of cerebral
+sensitiveness in other directions; but such want of faculty would be
+detected in your first two or three exercises by this simple method,
+while, otherwise, you might go on for years endeavouring to colour from
+nature in vain. Lastly, and this is a very weighty collateral reason,
+such a method enables me to show you many things, besides the art of
+drawing. Every exercise that I prepare for you will be either a portion
+of some important example of ancient art, or of some natural object.
+However rudely or unsuccessfully you may draw it, (though I anticipate
+from you neither want of care nor success,) you will nevertheless have
+learned what no words could have so forcibly or completely taught you,
+either respecting early art or organic structure; and I am thus certain
+that not a moment you spend attentively will be altogether wasted, and
+that, generally, you will be twice gainers by every effort.
+
+
+141. There is, however, yet another point in which I think a change of
+existing methods will be advisable. You have here in Oxford one of the
+finest collections in Europe of drawings in pen, and chalk, by Michael
+Angelo and Raphael. Of the whole number, you cannot but have noticed
+that not one is weak or student-like--all are evidently master's work.
+
+You may look the galleries of Europe through, and so far as I know, or
+as it is possible to make with safety any so wide generalization, you
+will not find in them a childish or feeble drawing, by these, or by any
+other great master.
+
+And farther:--by the greatest men--by Titian, Velasquez, or
+Veronese--you will hardly find an authentic drawing, at all. For the
+fact is, that while we moderns have always learned, or tried to learn,
+to paint by drawing, the ancients learned to draw by painting--or by
+engraving, more difficult still. The brush was put into their hands when
+they were children, and they were forced to draw with that, until, if
+they used the pen or crayon, they used it either with the lightness of a
+brush or the decision of a graver. Michael Angelo uses his pen like a
+chisel; but all of them seem to use it only when they are in the height
+of their power, and then for rapid notation of thought or for study of
+models; but never as a practice helping them to paint. Probably
+exercises of the severest kind were gone through in minute drawing by
+the apprentices of the goldsmiths, of which we hear and know little, and
+which were entirely matters of course. To these, and to the
+exquisiteness of care and touch developed in working precious metals,
+may probably be attributed the final triumph of Italian sculpture.
+Michael Angelo, when a boy, is said to have copied engravings by
+Schöngauer and others, with his pen, in facsimile so true that he could
+pass his drawings as the originals. But I should only discourage you
+from all farther attempts in art, if I asked you to imitate any of these
+accomplished drawings of the gem-artificers. You have, fortunately, a
+most interesting collection of them already in your galleries, and may
+try your hands on them if you will. But I desire rather that you should
+attempt nothing except what can by determination be absolutely
+accomplished, and be known and felt by you to be accomplished when it is
+so. Now, therefore, I am going at once to comply with that popular
+instinct which, I hope, so far as you care for drawing at all, you are
+still boys enough to feel, the desire to paint. Paint you shall; but
+remember, I understand by painting what you will not find easy. Paint
+you shall; but daub or blot you shall not: and there will be even more
+care required, though care of a pleasanter kind, to follow the lines
+traced for you with the point of the brush than if they had been drawn
+with that of a crayon. But from the very beginning (though carrying on
+at the same time an incidental practice with crayon and lead pencil),
+you shall try to draw a line of absolute correctness with the point, not
+of pen or crayon, but of the brush, as Apelles did, and as all coloured
+lines are drawn on Greek vases. A line of absolute correctness, observe.
+I do not care how slowly you do it, or with how many alterations,
+junctions, or re-touchings; the one thing I ask of you is, that the line
+shall be right, and right by measurement, to the same minuteness which
+you would have to give in a Government chart to the map of a dangerous
+shoal.
+
+
+142. This question of measurement is, as you are probably aware, one
+much vexed in art schools; but it is determined indisputably by the very
+first words written by Lionardo: "Il giovane deve prima imparare
+prospettiva, _per le misure d'ogni cosa_."
+
+Without absolute precision of measurement, it is certainly impossible
+for you to learn perspective rightly; and, as far as I can judge,
+impossible to learn anything else rightly. And in my past experience of
+teaching, I have found that such precision is of all things the most
+difficult to enforce on the pupils. It is easy to persuade to diligence,
+or provoke to enthusiasm; but I have found it hitherto impossible to
+humiliate one clever student into perfect accuracy.
+
+It is, therefore, necessary, in beginning a system of drawing for the
+University, that no opening should be left for failure in this essential
+matter. I hope you will trust the words of the most accomplished
+draughtsman of Italy, and the painter of the great sacred picture which,
+perhaps beyond all others, has influenced the mind of Europe, when he
+tells you that your first duty is "to learn perspective by the
+_measures_ of everything." For perspective, I will undertake that it
+shall be made, practically, quite easy to you; if you care to master the
+mathematics of it, they are carried as far as is necessary for you in my
+treatise written in 1859, of which copies shall be placed at your
+disposal in your working room. But the habit and dexterity of
+_measurement_ you must acquire at once, and that with engineer's
+accuracy. I hope that in our now gradually developing system of
+education, elementary architectural or military drawing will be required
+at all public schools; so that when youths come to the University, it
+may be no more necessary for them to pass through the preliminary
+exercises of perspective than of grammar: for the present, I will place
+in your series examples simple and severe enough for all necessary
+practice.
+
+
+143. And while you are learning to measure, and to draw, and lay flat
+tints, with the brush, you must also get easy command of the pen; for
+that is not only the great instrument for the first sketching, but its
+right use is the foundation of the art of illumination. In nothing is
+fine art more directly founded on utility than in the close dependence
+of decorative illumination on good writing. Perfect illumination is only
+writing made lovely; the moment it passes into picture-making it has
+lost its dignity and function. For pictures, small or great, if
+beautiful, ought not to be painted on leaves of books, to be worn with
+service; and pictures, small or great, not beautiful, should be painted
+nowhere. But to make writing _itself_ beautiful,--to make the sweep of
+the pen lovely,--is the true art of illumination; and I particularly
+wish you to note this, because it happens continually that young girls
+who are incapable of tracing a single curve with steadiness, much more
+of delineating any ornamental or organic form with correctness, think
+that work, which would be intolerable in ordinary drawing, becomes
+tolerable when it is employed for the decoration of texts; and thus they
+render all healthy progress impossible, by protecting themselves in
+inefficiency under the shield of good motive. Whereas the right way of
+setting to work is to make themselves first mistresses of the art of
+writing beautifully; and then to apply that art in its proper degrees of
+development to whatever they desire permanently to write. And it is
+indeed a much more truly religious duty for girls to acquire a habit of
+deliberate, legible, and lovely penmanship in their daily use of the
+pen, than to illuminate any quantity of texts. Having done so, they may
+next discipline their hands into the control of lines of any length,
+and, finally, add the beauty of colour and form to the flowing of these
+perfect lines. But it is only after years of practice that they will be
+able to illuminate noble words rightly for the eyes, as it is only after
+years of practice that they can make them melodious rightly, with the
+voice.
+
+
+144. I shall not attempt, in this lecture, to give you any account of
+the use of the pen as a drawing instrument. That use is connected in
+many ways with principles both of shading and of engraving, hereafter to
+be examined at length. But I may generally state to you that its best
+employment is in giving determination to the forms in drawings washed
+with neutral tint; and that, in this use of it, Holbein is quite without
+a rival. I have therefore placed many examples of his work among your
+copies. It is employed for rapid study by Raphael and other masters of
+delineation, who, in such cases, give with it also partial indications
+of shadow; but it is not a proper instrument for shading, when drawings
+are intended to be deliberate and complete, nor do the great masters so
+employ it. Its virtue is the power of producing a perfectly delicate,
+equal, and decisive line with great rapidity; and the temptation allied
+with that virtue is the licentious haste, and chance-swept, instead of
+strictly-commanded, curvature. In the hands of very great painters it
+obtains, like the etching needle, qualities of exquisite charm in this
+free use; but all attempts at imitation of these confused and suggestive
+sketches must be absolutely denied to yourselves while students. You may
+fancy you have produced something like them with little trouble; but, be
+assured, it is in reality as unlike them as nonsense is unlike sense;
+and that, if you persist in such work, you will not only prevent your
+own executive progress, but you will never understand in all your lives
+what good painting means. Whenever you take a pen in your hand, if you
+cannot count every line you lay with it, and say why you make it so long
+and no longer, and why you drew it in that direction and no other, your
+work is bad. The only man who can put his pen to full speed, and yet
+retain command over every separate line of it, is Dürer. He has done
+this in the illustrations of a missal preserved at Munich, which have
+been fairly facsimiled; and of these I have placed several in your
+copying series, with some of Turner's landscape etchings, and other
+examples of deliberate pen work, such as will advantage you in early
+study. The proper use of them you will find explained in the catalogue.
+
+
+145. And, now, but one word more to-day. Do not impute to me the
+impertinence of setting before you what is new in this system of
+practice as being certainly the best method. No English artists are yet
+agreed entirely on early methods; and even Reynolds expresses with some
+hesitation his conviction of the expediency of learning to draw with the
+brush. But this method that I show you rests in all essential points on
+his authority, on Lionardo's, or on the evident as well as recorded
+practice of the most splendid Greek and Italian draughtsmen; and you may
+be assured it will lead you, however slowly, to great and certain skill.
+To what degree of skill, must depend greatly on yourselves; but I know
+that in practice of this kind you cannot spend an hour without
+definitely gaining, both in true knowledge of art, and in useful power
+of hand; and for what may appear in it too difficult, I must shelter or
+support myself, as in beginning, so in closing this first lecture on
+practice, by the words of Reynolds: "The impetuosity of youth is
+disgusted at the slow approaches of a regular siege, and desires, from
+mere impatience of labour, to take the citadel by storm. They must
+therefore be told again and again that labour is the only price of solid
+fame; and that, whatever their force of genius may be, there is no easy
+method of becoming a good painter."
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE VI
+
+LIGHT
+
+
+146. The plan of the divisions of art-schools which I gave you in the
+last lecture is of course only a first germ of classification, on which
+we are to found farther and more defined statement; but for this very
+reason it is necessary that every term of it should be very clear in
+your minds.
+
+And especially I must explain, and ask you to note the sense in which I
+use the word "mass." Artists usually employ that word to express the
+spaces of light and darkness, or of colour, into which a picture is
+divided. But this habit of theirs arises partly from their always
+speaking of pictures in which the lights represent solid form. If they
+had instead been speaking of flat tints, as, for instance, of the gold
+and blue in this missal page, they would not have called them "masses,"
+but "spaces" of colour. Now both for accuracy and convenience' sake, you
+will find it well to observe this distinction, and to call a simple flat
+tint a space of colour; and only the representation of solid or
+projecting form a mass.
+
+I use, however, the word "line" rather than "space" in the second and
+third heads of our general scheme, at p. 94, because you cannot limit a
+flat tint but by a line, or the locus of a line: whereas a gradated
+tint, expressive of mass, may be lost at its edges in another, without
+any fixed limit; and practically is so, in the works of the greatest
+masters.
+
+
+147. You have thus, in your hexagonal scheme, the expression of the
+universal manner of advance in painting: Line first; then line enclosing
+flat spaces coloured or shaded; then the lines vanish, and the solid
+forms are seen within the spaces. That is the universal law of
+advance:--1, line; 2, flat space; 3, massed or solid space. But as you
+see, this advance may be made, and has been made, by two different
+roads; one advancing always through colour, the other through light and
+shade. And these two roads are taken by two entirely different kinds of
+men. The way by colour is taken by men of cheerful, natural, and
+entirely sane disposition in body and mind, much resembling, even at its
+strongest, the temper of well-brought-up children:--too happy to think
+deeply, yet with powers of imagination by which they can live other
+lives than their actual ones: make-believe lives, while yet they remain
+conscious all the while that they _are_ making believe--therefore
+entirely sane. They are also absolutely contented; they ask for no more
+light than is immediately around them, and cannot see anything like
+darkness, but only green and blue, in the earth and sea.
+
+
+148. The way by light and shade is, on the contrary, taken by men of the
+highest powers of thought, and most earnest desire for truth; they long
+for light, and for knowledge of all that light can show. But seeking for
+light, they perceive also darkness; seeking for truth and substance,
+they find vanity. They look for form in the earth,--for dawn in the sky;
+and seeking these, they find formlessness in the earth, and night in the
+sky.
+
+Now remember, in these introductory lectures I am putting before you the
+roots of things, which are strange, and dark, and often, it may seem,
+unconnected with the branches. You may not at present think these
+metaphysical statements necessary; but as you go on, you will find that
+having hold of the clue to methods of work through their springs in
+human character, you may perceive unerringly where they lead, and what
+constitutes their wrongness and rightness; and when we have the main
+principles laid down, all others will develop themselves in due
+succession, and everything will become more clearly intelligible to you
+in the end, for having been apparently vague in the beginning. You know
+when one is laying the foundation of a house, it does not show directly
+where the rooms are to be.
+
+
+149. You have then these two great divisions of human mind: one, content
+with the colours of things, whether they are dark or light; the other
+seeking light pure, as such, and dreading darkness as such. One, also,
+content with the coloured aspects and visionary shapes of things; the
+other seeking their form and substance. And, as I said, the school of
+knowledge, seeking light, perceives, and has to accept and deal with
+obscurity: and seeking form, it has to accept and deal with
+formlessness, or death.
+
+Farther, the school of colour in Europe, using the word Gothic in its
+broadest sense, is essentially Gothic _Christian_; and full of comfort
+and peace. Again, the school of light is essentially Greek, and full of
+sorrow. I cannot tell you which is right, or least wrong. I tell you
+only what I know--this vital distinction between them: the Gothic or
+colour school is always cheerful, the Greek always oppressed by the
+shadow of death; and the stronger its masters are, the closer that body
+of death grips them. The strongest whose work I can show you in recent
+periods is Holbein; next to him is Lionardo; and then Dürer: but of the
+three Holbein is the strongest, and with his help I will put the two
+schools in their full character before you in a moment.
+
+
+150. Here is, first, the photograph of an entirely characteristic piece
+of the great colour school. It is by Cima of Conegliano, a mountaineer,
+like Luini, born under the Alps of Friuli. His Christian name was John
+Baptist: he is here painting his name-Saint; the whole picture full of
+peace, and intense faith and hope, and deep joy in light of sky, and
+fruit and flower and weed of earth. It was painted for the church of Our
+Lady of the Garden at Venice, La Madonna dell' Orto (properly Madonna of
+the _Kitchen_ Garden), and it is full of simple flowers, and has the
+wild strawberry of Cima's native mountains gleaming through the grass.
+
+Beside it I will put a piece of the strongest work of the school of
+light and shade--strongest because Holbein was a colourist also; but he
+belongs, nevertheless, essentially to the chiaroscuro school. You know
+that his name is connected, in ideal work, chiefly with his "Dance of
+Death." I will not show you any of the terror of that; only a photograph
+of his well-known "Dead Christ." It will at once show you how completely
+the Christian art of this school is oppressed by its veracity, and
+forced to see what is fearful, even in what it most trusts.
+
+You may think I am showing you contrasts merely to fit my theories. But
+there is Dürer's "Knight and Death," his greatest plate; and if I had
+Lionardo's "Medusa" here, which he painted when only a boy, you would
+have seen how he was held by the same chain. And you cannot but wonder
+why, this being the melancholy temper of the great Greek or naturalistic
+school, I should have called it the school of light. I call it so
+because it is through its intense love of light that the darkness
+becomes apparent to it, and through its intense love of truth and form
+that all mystery becomes attractive to it. And when, having learned
+these things, it is joined to the school of colour, you have the
+perfect, though always, as I will show you, pensive, art of Titian and
+his followers.
+
+
+151. But remember, its first development, and all its final power,
+depend on Greek sorrow, and Greek religion.
+
+The school of light is founded in the Doric worship of Apollo, and the
+Ionic worship of Athena, as the spirits of life in the light, and of
+life in the air, opposed each to their own contrary deity of
+death--Apollo to the Python, Athena to the Gorgon--Apollo as life in
+light, to the earth spirit of corruption in darkness;--Athena, as life
+by motion, to the Gorgon spirit of death by pause, freezing or turning
+to stone: both of the great divinities taking their glory from the evil
+they have conquered; both of them, when angry, taking to men the form of
+the evil which is their opposite--Apollo slaying by poisoned arrow, by
+pestilence; Athena by cold, the black ĉgis on her breast.
+
+These are the definite and direct expressions of the Greek thoughts
+respecting death and life. But underlying both these, and far more
+mysterious, dreadful, and yet beautiful, there is the Greek conception
+of _spiritual_ darkness; of the anger of fate, whether foredoomed or
+avenging; the root and theme of all Greek tragedy; the anger of the
+Erinnyes, and Demeter Erinnys, compared to which the anger either of
+Apollo or Athena is temporary and partial:--and also, while Apollo or
+Athena only slay, the power of Demeter and the Eumenides is over the
+whole life; so that in the stories of Bellerophon, of Hippolytus, of
+Orestes, of Oedipus, you have an incomparably deeper shadow than any
+that was possible to the thought of later ages, when the hope of the
+Resurrection had become definite. And if you keep this in mind, you will
+find every name and legend of the oldest history become full of meaning
+to you. All the mythic accounts of Greek sculpture begin in the legends
+of the family of Tantalus. The main one is the making of the ivory
+shoulder of Pelops after Demeter has eaten the shoulder of flesh. With
+that you have Broteas, the brother of Pelops, carving the first statue
+of the mother of the gods; and you have his sister, Niobe, weeping
+herself to stone under the anger of the deities of light. Then Pelops
+himself, the dark-faced, gives name to the Peloponnesus, which you may
+therefore read as the "isle of darkness;" but its central city, Sparta,
+the "sown city," is connected with all the ideas of the earth as
+life-giving. And from her you have Helen, the representative of light in
+beauty, and the Fratres Helenĉ--"lucida sidera;" and, on the other side
+of the hills, the brightness of Argos, with its correlative darkness
+over the Atreidĉ, marked to you by Helios turning away his face from the
+feast of Thyestes.
+
+
+152. Then join with these the Northern legends connected with the air.
+It does not matter whether you take Dorus as the son of Apollo or the
+son of Helen; he equally symbolises the power of light: while his
+brother, Ĉolus, through all his descendants, chiefly in Sisyphus, is
+confused or associated with the real god of the winds, and represents to
+you the power of the air. And then, as this conception enters into art,
+you have the myths of Dĉdalus, the flight of Icarus, and the story of
+Phrixus and Helle, giving you continual associations of the physical air
+and light, ending in the power of Athena over Corinth as well as over
+Athens.
+
+Now, once having the clue, you can work out the sequels for yourselves
+better than I can for you; and you will soon find even the earliest or
+slightest grotesques of Greek art become full of interest. For nothing
+is more wonderful than the depth of meaning which nations in their first
+days of thought, like children, can attach to the rudest symbols; and
+what to us is grotesque or ugly, like a little child's doll, can speak
+to them the loveliest things. I have brought you to-day a few more
+examples of early Greek vase painting, respecting which remember
+generally that its finest development is for the most part sepulchral.
+You have, in the first period, always energy in the figures, light in
+the sky or upon the figures;[13] in the second period, while the
+conception of the divine power remains the same, it is thought of as in
+repose, and the light is in the god, not in the sky; in the time of
+decline, the divine power is gradually disbelieved, and all form and
+light are lost together. With that period I wish you to have nothing to
+do. You shall not have a single example of it set before you, but shall
+rather learn to recognise afterwards what is base by its strangeness.
+These, which are to come early in the third group of your Standard
+series, will enough represent to you the elements of early and late
+conception in the Greek mind of the deities of light.
+
+[Footnote 13: See Note in the Catalogue on No. 201.]
+
+
+153. First (S. 204), you have Apollo ascending from the sea; thought of
+as the physical sunrise: only a circle of light for his head; his
+chariot horses, seen foreshortened, black against the day-break, their
+feet not yet risen above the horizon. Underneath is the painting from
+the opposite side of the same vase: Athena as the morning breeze, and
+Hermes as the morning cloud, flying across the waves before the sunrise.
+At the distance I now hold them from you, it is scarcely possible for
+you to see that they are figures at all, so like are they to broken
+fragments of flying mist; and when you look close, you will see that as
+Apollo's face is invisible in the circle of light, Mercury's is
+invisible in the broken form of cloud: but I can tell you that it is
+conceived as reverted, looking back to Athena; the grotesque appearance
+of feature in the front is the outline of his hair.
+
+These two paintings are excessively rude, and of the archaic period; the
+deities being yet thought of chiefly as physical powers in violent
+agency.
+
+Underneath these two are Athena and Hermes, in the types attained about
+the time of Phidias; but, of course, rudely drawn on the vase, and still
+more rudely in this print from Le Normant and De Witte. For it is
+impossible (as you will soon find if you try for yourself) to give on a
+plane surface the grace of figures drawn on one of solid curvature, and
+adapted to all its curves: and among other minor differences, Athena's
+lance is in the original nearly twice as tall as herself, and has to be
+cut short to come into the print at all. Still, there is enough here to
+show you what I want you to see--the repose, and entirely realised
+personality, of the deities as conceived in the Phidian period. The
+relation of the two deities is, I believe, the same as in the painting
+above, though probably there is another added of more definite kind. But
+the physical meaning still remains--Athena unhelmeted, as the _gentle_
+morning wind, commanding the cloud Hermes to slow flight. His petasus is
+slung at his back, meaning that the clouds are not yet opened or
+expanded in the sky.
+
+
+154. Next (S. 205), you have Athena, again unhelmeted and crowned with
+leaves, walking between two nymphs, who are crowned also with leaves;
+and all the three hold flowers in their hands, and there is a fawn
+walking at Athena's feet.
+
+This is still Athena as the morning air, but upon the earth instead of
+in the sky, with the nymphs of the dew beside her; the flowers and
+leaves opening as they breathe upon them. Note the white gleam of light
+on the fawn's breast; and compare it with the next following
+examples:--(underneath this one is the contest of Athena and Poseidon,
+which does not bear on our present subject).
+
+Next (S. 206), Artemis as the moon of morning, walking low on the hills,
+and singing to her lyre; the fawn beside her, with the gleam of light
+and sunrise on its ear and breast. Those of you who are often out in the
+dawntime know that there is no moon so glorious as that gleaming
+crescent, though in its wane, ascending _before_ the sun.
+
+Underneath, Artemis, and Apollo, of Phidian time.
+
+Next (S. 207), Apollo walking on the earth, god of the morning, singing
+to his lyre; the fawn beside him, again with the gleam of light on its
+breast. And underneath, Apollo, crossing the sea to Delphi, of the
+Phidian time.
+
+
+155. Now you cannot but be struck in these three examples with the
+similarity of action in Athena, Apollo, and Artemis, drawn as deities of
+the morning; and with the association in every case of the fawn with
+them. It has been said (I will not interrupt you with authorities) that
+the fawn belongs to Apollo and Diana because stags are sensitive to
+music; (are they?). But you see the fawn is here with Athena of the dew,
+though she has no lyre; and I have myself no doubt that in this
+particular relation to the gods of morning it always stands as the
+symbol of wavering and glancing motion on the ground, as well as of the
+light and shadow through the leaves, chequering the ground as the fawn
+is dappled. Similarly the spots on the nebris of Dionysus, thought of
+sometimes as stars (+apo tês tôn astrôn poikilias+, Diodorus, I.
+11), as well as those of his panthers, and the cloudings of the
+tortoise-shell of Hermes, are all significant of this light of the sky
+broken by cloud-shadow.
+
+
+156. You observe also that in all the three examples the fawn has light
+on its ears, and face, as well as its breast. In the earliest Greek
+drawings of animals, bars of white are used as one means of detaching
+the figures from the ground; ordinarily on the under side of them,
+marking the lighter colour of the hair in wild animals. But the placing
+of this bar of white, or the direction of the face in deities of light,
+(the faces and flesh of women being always represented as white,) may
+become expressive of the direction of the light, when that direction is
+important. Thus we are enabled at once to read the intention of this
+Greek symbol of the course of a day (in the centre-piece of S. 208,
+which gives you the types of Hermes). At the top you have an archaic
+representation of Hermes stealing Io from Argus. Argus is here the
+Night; his grotesque features monstrous; his hair overshadowing his
+shoulders; Hermes on tip-toe, stealing upon him and taking the cord
+which is fastened to the horn of Io out of his hand without his feeling
+it. Then, underneath, you have the course of an entire day. Apollo
+first, on the left, dark, entering his chariot, the sun not yet risen.
+In front of him Artemis, as the moon, ascending before him, playing on
+her lyre, and looking back to the sun. In the centre, behind the horses,
+Hermes, as the cumulus cloud at mid-day, wearing his petasus heightened
+to a cone, and holding a flower in his right hand; indicating the
+nourishment of the flowers by the rain from the heat cloud. Finally, on
+the right, Latona, going down as the evening, lighted from the right by
+the sun, now sunk; and with her feet reverted, signifying the reluctance
+of the departing day.
+
+Finally, underneath, you have Hermes of the Phidian period, as the
+floating cumulus cloud, almost shapeless (as you see him at this
+distance); with the tortoise-shell lyre in his hand, barred with black,
+and a fleece of white cloud, not level but _oblique_, under his feet.
+(Compare the "+dia tôn koilôn--plagiai+," and the relations of
+the "+aigidos êniochos Athana+," with the clouds as the moon's
+messengers, in Aristophanes; and note of Hermes generally, that you
+never find him flying as a Victory flies, but always, if moving fast at
+all, _clambering_ along, as it were, as a cloud gathers and heaps
+itself: the Gorgons stretch and stride in their flight, half kneeling,
+for the same reason, running or gliding shapelessly along in this
+stealthy way.)
+
+
+157. And now take this last illustration, of a very different kind. Here
+is an effect of morning light by Turner (S. 301), on the rocks of
+Otley-hill, near Leeds, drawn long ago, when Apollo, and Artemis, and
+Athena, still sometimes were seen, and felt, even near Leeds. The
+original drawing is one of the great Farnley series, and entirely
+beautiful. I have shown, in the last volume of "Modern Painters," how
+well Turner knew the meaning of Greek legends:--he was not thinking of
+them, however, when he made this design; but, unintentionally, has given
+us the very effect of morning light we want: the glittering of the
+sunshine on dewy grass, half dark; and the narrow gleam of it on the
+sides and head of the stag and hind.
+
+
+158. These few instances will be enough to show you how we may read in
+the early art of the Greeks their strong impressions of the power of
+light. You will find the subject entered into at somewhat greater length
+in my "Queen of the Air;" and if you will look at the beginning of the
+7th book of Plato's "Polity," and read carefully the passages in the
+context respecting the sun and intellectual sight, you will see how
+intimately this physical love of light was connected with their
+philosophy, in its search, as blind and captive, for better knowledge. I
+shall not attempt to define for you to-day the more complex but much
+shallower forms which this love of light, and the philosophy that
+accompanies it, take in the mediĉval mind; only remember that in future,
+when I briefly speak of the Greek school of art with reference to
+questions of delineation, I mean the entire range of the schools, from
+Homer's days to our own, which concern themselves with the
+representation of light, and the effects it produces on material
+form--beginning practically for us with these Greek vase paintings, and
+closing practically for us with Turner's sunset on the Temeraire; being
+throughout a school of captivity and sadness, but of intense power; and
+which in its technical method of shadow on material form, as well as in
+its essential temper, is centrally represented to you by Dürer's two
+great engravings of the "Melencolia" and the "Knight and Death." On the
+other hand, when I briefly speak to you of the Gothic school, with
+reference to delineation, I mean the entire and much more extensive
+range of schools extending from the earliest art in Central Asia and
+Egypt down to our own day in India and China:--schools which have been
+content to obtain beautiful harmonies of colour without any
+representation of light; and which have, many of them, rested in such
+imperfect expressions of form as could be so obtained; schools usually
+in some measure childish, or restricted in intellect, and similarly
+childish or restricted in their philosophies or faiths: but contented in
+the restriction; and in the more powerful races, capable of advance to
+nobler development than the Greek schools, though the consummate art of
+Europe has only been accomplished by the union of both. How that union
+was effected, I will endeavour to show you in my next lecture; to-day I
+shall take note only of the points bearing on our immediate practice.
+
+
+159. A certain number of you, by faculty and natural disposition,--and
+all, so far as you are interested in modern art,--will necessarily have
+to put yourselves under the discipline of the Greek or chiaroscuro
+school, which is directed primarily to the attainment of the power of
+representing form by pure contrast of light and shade. I say, the
+"discipline" of the Greek school, both because, followed faithfully, it
+is indeed a severe one, and because to follow it at all is, for persons
+fond of colour, often a course of painful self-denial, from which young
+students are eager to escape. And yet, when the laws of both schools are
+rightly obeyed, the most perfect discipline is that of the colourists;
+for they see and draw _everything_, while the chiaroscurists must leave
+much indeterminate in mystery, or invisible in gloom: and there are
+therefore many licentious and vulgar forms of art connected with the
+chiaroscuro school, both in painting and etching, which have no parallel
+among the colourists. But both schools, rightly followed, require first
+of all absolute accuracy of delineation. _This_ you need not hope to
+escape. Whether you fill your spaces with colours, or with shadows, they
+must equally be of the true outline and in true gradations. I have been
+thirty years telling modern students of art this in vain. I mean to say
+it to you only once, for the statement is too important to be weakened
+by repetition.
+
+WITHOUT PERFECT DELINEATION OF FORM AND PERFECT GRADATION OF SPACE,
+NEITHER NOBLE COLOUR IS POSSIBLE, NOR NOBLE LIGHT.
+
+
+160. It may make this more believable to you if I put beside each other
+a piece of detail from each school. I gave you the St. John of Cima da
+Conegliano for a type of the colour school. Here is my own study of the
+sprays of oak which rise against the sky of it in the distance, enlarged
+to about its real size (Edu. 12). I hope to draw it better for you at
+Venice; but this will show you with what perfect care the colourist has
+followed the outline of every leaf in the sky. Beside, I put a
+chiaroscurist drawing (at least, a photograph of one), Dürer's from
+nature, of the common wild wall-cabbage (Edu. 32). It is the most
+perfect piece of delineation by flat tint I have ever seen, in its
+mastery of the perspective of every leaf, and its attainment almost of
+the bloom of texture, merely by its exquisitely tender and decisive
+laying of the colour. These two examples ought, I think, to satisfy you
+as to the precision of outline of both schools, and the power of
+expression which may be obtained by flat tints laid within such outline.
+
+
+161. Next, here are two examples of the gradated shading expressive of
+the forms within the outline, by two masters of the chiaroscuro school.
+The first (S. 12) shows you Lionardo's method of work, both with chalk
+and the silver point. The second (S. 302), Turner's work in mezzotint;
+both masters doing their best. Observe that this plate of Turner's,
+which he worked on so long that it was never published, is of a subject
+peculiarly depending on effects of mystery and concealment, the fall of
+the Reuss under the Devil's Bridge on the St. Gothard; (the _old_
+bridge; you may still see it under the existing one, which was built
+since Turner's drawing was made). If ever outline could be dispensed
+with, you would think it might be so in this confusion of cloud, foam,
+and darkness. But here is Turner's own etching on the plate (Edu. 35 F),
+made under the mezzotint; and of all the studies of rock outline made by
+his hand, it is the most decisive and quietly complete.
+
+
+162. Again; in the Lionardo sketches, many parts are lost in obscurity,
+or are left intentionally uncertain and mysterious, even in the light,
+and you might at first imagine some permission of escape had been here
+given you from the terrible law of delineation. But the slightest
+attempts to copy them will show you that the terminal lines are
+inimitably subtle, unaccusably true, and filled by gradations of shade
+so determined and measured that the addition of a grain of the lead or
+chalk as large as the filament of a moth's wing, would make an
+appreciable difference in them.
+
+This is grievous, you think, and hopeless? No, it is delightful and full
+of hope: delightful, to see what marvellous things can be done by men;
+and full of hope, if your hope is the right one, of being one day able
+to rejoice more in what others have done, than in what you can yourself
+do, and more in the strength that is for ever above you, than in that
+you can never attain.
+
+
+163. But you can attain much, if you will work reverently and patiently,
+and hope for no success through ill-regulated effort. It is, however,
+most assuredly at this point of your study that the full strain on your
+patience will begin. The exercises in line-drawing and flat laying of
+colour are irksome; but they are definite, and within certain limits,
+sure to be successful if practised with moderate care. But the
+expression of form by shadow requires more subtle patience, and involves
+the necessity of frequent and mortifying failure, not to speak of the
+self-denial which I said was needful in persons fond of colour, to draw
+in mere light and shade. If, indeed, you were going to be artists, or
+could give any great length of time to study, it might be possible for
+you to learn wholly in the Venetian school, and to reach form through
+colour. But without the most intense application this is not possible;
+and practically, it will be necessary for you, as soon as you have
+gained the power of outlining accurately, and of laying flat colour, to
+learn to express solid form as shown by light and shade only. And there
+is this great advantage in doing so, that many forms are more or less
+disguised by colour, and that we can only represent them completely to
+others, or rapidly and easily record them for ourselves, by the use of
+shade alone. A single instance will show you what I mean. Perhaps there
+are few flowers of which the impression on the eye is more definitely of
+flat colour, than the scarlet geranium. But you would find, if you were
+to try to paint it,--first, that no pigment could approach the beauty of
+its scarlet; and secondly, that the brightness of the hue dazzled the
+eye, and prevented its following the real arrangement of the cluster of
+flowers. I have drawn for you here (at least this is a mezzotint from my
+drawing), a single cluster of the scarlet geranium, in mere light and
+shade (Edu. 32 B.), and I think you will feel that its domed form, and
+the flat lying of the petals one over the other, in the vaulted roof of
+it, can be seen better thus than if they had been painted scarlet.
+
+
+164. Also this study will be useful to you, in showing how entirely
+effects of light depend on delineation, and gradation of spaces, and not
+on methods of shading. And this is the second great practical matter I
+want you to remember to-day. All effects of light and shade depend not
+on the method or execution of shadows, but on their rightness of place,
+form, and depth. There is indeed a loveliness of execution _added_ to
+the rightness, by the great masters, but you cannot obtain that unless
+you become one of them. Shadow cannot be laid thoroughly well, any more
+than lines can be drawn steadily, but by a long-practised hand, and the
+attempts to imitate the shading of fine draughtsmen, by dotting and
+hatching, are just as ridiculous as it would be to endeavour to imitate
+their instantaneous lines by a series of re-touchings. You will often
+indeed see in Lionardo's work, and in Michael Angelo's, shadow wrought
+laboriously to an extreme of fineness; but when you look into it, you
+will find that they have always been drawing more and more form within
+the space, and never finishing for the sake of added texture, but of
+added fact. And all those effects of transparency and reflected light,
+aimed at in common chalk drawings, are wholly spurious. For since, as I
+told you, all lights are shades compared to higher lights, and lights
+only as compared to lower ones, it follows that there can be no
+difference in their quality as such; but that light is opaque when it
+expresses substance, and transparent when it expresses space; and shade
+is also opaque when it expresses substance, and transparent when it
+expresses space. But it is not, even then, transparent in the common
+sense of that word; nor is its appearance to be obtained by dotting or
+cross hatching, but by touches so tender as to look like mist. And now
+we find the use of having Lionardo for our guide. He is supreme in all
+questions of execution, and in his 28th chapter, you will find that
+shadows are to be "dolce e sfumose," to be tender, and look as if they
+were exhaled, or breathed on the paper. Then, look at any of Michael
+Angelo's finished drawings, or of Correggio's sketches, and you will see
+that the true nurse of light is in art, as in nature, the cloud; a misty
+and tender darkness, made lovely by gradation.
+
+
+165. And how absolutely independent it is of material or method of
+production, how absolutely dependent on rightness of place and
+depth,--there are now before you instances enough to prove. Here is
+Dürer's work in flat colour, represented by the photograph in its smoky
+brown; Turner's, in washed sepia, and in mezzotint; Lionardo's, in
+pencil and in chalk; on the screen in front of you a large study in
+charcoal. In every one of these drawings, the material of shadow is
+absolutely opaque. But photograph-stain, chalk, lead, ink, or
+charcoal,--every one of them, laid by the master's hand, becomes full of
+light by gradation only. Here is a moonlight (Edu. 31 B.), in which you
+would think the moon shone through every cloud; yet the clouds are mere
+single dashes of sepia, imitated by the brown stain of a photograph;
+similarly, in these plates from the Liber Studiorum the white paper
+becomes transparent or opaque, exactly as the master chooses. Here, on
+the granite rock of the St. Gothard (S. 302), in white paper made
+opaque, every light represents solid bosses of rock, or balls of foam.
+But in this study of twilight (S. 303), the same white paper (coarse old
+stuff it is, too!) is made as transparent as crystal, and every fragment
+of it represents clear and far away light in the sky of evening in
+Italy.
+
+From all which the practical conclusion for you is, that you are never
+to trouble yourselves with any questions as to the means of shade or
+light, but only with the right government of the means at your disposal.
+And it is a most grave error in the system of many of our public
+drawing-schools, that the students are permitted to spend weeks of
+labour in giving attractive appearance, by delicacy of texture, to
+chiaroscuro drawings in which every form is false, and every relation of
+depth, untrue. A most unhappy form of error; for it not only delays, and
+often wholly arrests, their advance in their own art; but it prevents
+what ought to take place correlatively with their executive practice,
+the formation of their taste by the accurate study of the models from
+which they draw. And I must so far anticipate what we shall discover
+when we come to the subject of sculpture, as to tell you the two main
+principles of good sculpture; first, that its masters think before all
+other matters of the right placing of masses; secondly, that they give
+life by flexure of surface, not by quantity of detail; for sculpture is
+indeed only light and shade drawing in stone.
+
+
+166. Much that I have endeavoured to teach on this subject has been
+gravely misunderstood, by both young painters and sculptors, especially
+by the latter. Because I am always urging them to imitate organic forms,
+they think if they carve quantities of flowers and leaves, and copy them
+from the life, they have done all that is needed. But the difficulty is
+not to carve quantities of leaves. Anybody can do that. The difficulty
+is, never anywhere to have an _unnecessary_ leaf. Over the arch on the
+right, you see there is a cluster of seven, with their short stalks
+springing from a thick stem. Now, you could not turn one of those leaves
+a hair's-breadth out of its place, nor thicken one of their stems, nor
+alter the angle at which each slips over the next one, without spoiling
+the whole as much as you would a piece of melody by missing a note. That
+is disposition of masses. Again, in the group on the left, while the
+placing of every leaf is just as skilful, they are made more interesting
+yet by the lovely undulation of their surfaces, so that not one of them
+is in equal light with another. And that is so in all good sculpture,
+without exception. From the Elgin marbles down to the lightest tendril
+that curls round a capital in the thirteenth century, every piece of
+stone that has been touched by the hand of a master, becomes soft with
+under-life, not resembling nature merely in skin-texture, nor in fibres
+of leaf, or veins of flesh; but in the broad, tender, unspeakably subtle
+undulation of its organic form.
+
+
+167. Returning then to the question of our own practice, I believe that
+all difficulties in method will vanish, if only you cultivate with care
+enough the habit of accurate observation, and if you think only of
+making your light and shade true, whether it be delicate or not. But
+there are three divisions or degrees of truth to be sought for, in light
+and shade, by three several modes of study, which I must ask you to
+distinguish carefully.
+
+I. When objects are lighted by the direct rays of the sun, or by direct
+light entering from a window, one side of them is of course in light,
+the other in shade, and the forms in the mass are exhibited
+systematically by the force of the rays falling on it; (those having
+most power of illumination which strike most vertically;) and note that
+there is, therefore, to every solid curvature of surface, a necessarily
+proportioned gradation of light, the gradation on a parabolic solid
+being different from the gradation on an elliptical or spherical one.
+Now, when your purpose is to represent and learn the anatomy, or
+otherwise characteristic forms, of any object, it is best to place it in
+this kind of direct light, and to draw it as it is seen when we look at
+it in a direction at right angles to that of the ray. This is the
+ordinary academical way of studying form. Lionardo seldom practises any
+other in his real work, though he directs many others in his treatise.
+
+
+168. The great importance of anatomical knowledge to the painters of the
+sixteenth century rendered this method of study very frequent with them;
+it almost wholly regulated their schools of engraving, and has been the
+most frequent system of drawing in art-schools since (to the very
+inexpedient exclusion of others). When you study objects in this
+way,--and it will indeed be well to do so often, though not
+exclusively,--observe always one main principle. Divide the light from
+the darkness frankly at first: all over the subject let there be no
+doubt which is which. Separate them one from the other as they are
+separated in the moon, or on the world itself, in day and night. Then
+gradate your lights with the utmost subtilty possible to you; but let
+your shadows alone, until near the termination of the drawing: then put
+quickly into them what farther energy they need, thus gaining the
+reflected lights out of their original flat gloom; but generally not
+looking much for reflected lights. Nearly all young students (and too
+many advanced masters) exaggerate them. It is good to see a drawing come
+out of its ground like a vision of light only; the shadows lost, or
+disregarded in the vague of space. In vulgar chiaroscuro the shades are
+so full of reflection that they look as if some one had been walking
+round the object with a candle, and the student, by that help, peering
+into its crannies.
+
+
+169. II. But, in the reality of nature, very few objects are seen in
+this accurately lateral manner, or lighted by unconfused direct rays.
+Some are all in shadow, some all in light, some near, and vigorously
+defined; others dim and faint in aerial distance. The study of these
+various effects and forces of light, which we may call aerial
+chiaroscuro, is a far more subtle one than that of the rays exhibiting
+organic form (which for distinction's sake we may call "formal"
+chiaroscuro), since the degrees of light from the sun itself to the
+blackness of night, are far beyond any literal imitation. In order to
+produce a mental impression of the facts, two distinct methods may be
+followed:--the first, to shade downwards from the lights, making
+everything darker in due proportion, until the scale of our power being
+ended, the mass of the picture is lost in shade. The second, to assume
+the points of extreme darkness for a basis, and to light everything
+above these in due proportion, till the mass of the picture is lost in
+light.
+
+
+170. Thus, in Turner's sepia drawing "Isis" (Edu. 31), he begins with
+the extreme light in the sky, and shades down from that till he is
+forced to represent the near trees and pool as one mass of blackness. In
+his drawing of the Greta (S. 2), he begins with the dark brown shadow of
+the bank on the left, and illuminates up from that, till, in his
+distance, trees, hills, sky, and clouds, are all lost in broad light, so
+that you can hardly see the distinction between hills and sky. The
+second of these methods is in general the best for colour, though great
+painters unite both in their practice, according to the character of
+their subject. The first method is never pursued in colour but by
+inferior painters. It is, nevertheless, of great importance to make
+studies of chiaroscuro in this first manner for some time, as a
+preparation for colouring; and this for many reasons, which it would
+take too long to state now. I shall expect you to have confidence in me
+when I assure you of the necessity of this study, and ask you to make
+good use of the examples from the Liber Studiorum which I have placed in
+your Educational series.
+
+
+171. III. Whether in formal or aerial chiaroscuro, it is optional with
+the student to make the local colour of objects a part of his shadow, or
+to consider the high lights of every colour as white. For instance, a
+chiaroscurist of Lionardo's school, drawing a leopard, would take no
+notice whatever of the spots, but only give the shadows which expressed
+the anatomy. And it is indeed necessary to be able to do this, and to
+make drawings of the forms of things as if they were sculptured, and had
+no colour. But in general, and more especially in the practice which is
+to guide you to colour, it is better to regard the local colour as part
+of the general dark and light to be imitated; and, as I told you at
+first, to consider all nature merely as a mosaic of different colours,
+to be imitated one by one in simplicity. But good artists vary their
+methods according to their subject and material. In general, Dürer takes
+little account of local colour; but in woodcuts of armorial bearings
+(one with peacock's feathers I shall get for you some day) takes great
+delight in it; while one of the chief merits of Bewick is the ease and
+vigour with which he uses his black and white for the colours of plumes.
+Also, every great artist looks for, and expresses, that character of his
+subject which is best to be rendered by the instrument in his hand, and
+the material he works on. Give Velasquez or Veronese a leopard to paint,
+the first thing they think of will be its spots; give it to Dürer to
+engrave, and he will set himself at the fur and whiskers; give it a
+Greek to carve, and he will only think of its jaws and limbs; each doing
+what is absolutely best with the means at his disposal.
+
+
+172. The details of practice in these various methods I will endeavour
+to explain to you by distinct examples in your Educational series, as we
+proceed in our work; for the present, let me, in closing, recommend to
+you once more with great earnestness the patient endeavour to render the
+chiaroscuro of landscape in the manner of the Liber Studiorum; and this
+the rather, because you might easily suppose that the facility of
+obtaining photographs which render such effects, as it seems, with
+absolute truth and with unapproachable subtilty, superseded the
+necessity of study, and the use of sketching. Let me assure you, once
+for all, that photographs supersede no single quality nor use of fine
+art, and have so much in common with Nature, that they even share her
+temper of parsimony, and will themselves give you nothing valuable that
+you do not work for. They supersede no good art, for the definition of
+art is "human labour regulated by human design," and this design, or
+evidence of active intellect in choice and arrangement, is the
+essential part of the work; which so long as you cannot perceive, you
+perceive no art whatsoever; which when once you do perceive, you will
+perceive also to be replaceable by no mechanism. But, farther,
+photographs will give you nothing you do not work for. They are
+invaluable for record of some kinds of facts, and for giving transcripts
+of drawings by great masters; but neither in the photographed scene, nor
+photographed drawing, will you see any true good, more than in the
+things themselves, until you have given the appointed price in your own
+attention and toil. And when once you have paid this price, you will not
+care for photographs of landscape. They are not true, though they seem
+so. They are merely spoiled nature. If it is not human design you are
+looking for, there is more beauty in the next wayside bank than in all
+the sun-blackened paper you could collect in a lifetime. Go and look at
+the real landscape, and take care of it; do not think you can get the
+good of it in a black stain portable in a folio. But if you care for
+human thought and passion, then learn yourselves to watch the course and
+fall of the light by whose influence you live, and to share in the joy
+of human spirits in the heavenly gifts of sunbeam and shade. For I tell
+you truly, that to a quiet heart, and healthy brain, and industrious
+hand, there is more delight, and use, in the dappling of one wood-glade
+with flowers and sunshine, than to the restless, heartless, and idle
+could be brought by a panorama of a belt of the world, photographed
+round the equator.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE VII
+
+COLOUR
+
+
+173. To-day I must try to complete our elementary sketch of schools of
+art, by tracing the course of those which were distinguished by faculty
+of colour, and afterwards to deduce from the entire scheme advisable
+methods of immediate practice.
+
+You remember that, for the type of the early schools of colour, I chose
+their work in glass; as for that of the early schools of chiaroscuro, I
+chose their work in clay.
+
+I had two reasons for this. First, that the peculiar skill of colourists
+is seen most intelligibly in their work in glass or in enamel; secondly,
+that Nature herself produces all her loveliest colours in some kind of
+solid or liquid glass or crystal. The rainbow is painted on a shower of
+melted glass, and the colours of the opal are produced in vitreous flint
+mixed with water; the green and blue, and golden or amber brown of
+flowing water is in surface glassy, and in motion "splendidior vitro."
+And the loveliest colours ever granted to human sight--those of morning
+and evening clouds before or after rain--are produced on minute
+particles of finely-divided water, or perhaps sometimes ice. But more
+than this. If you examine with a lens some of the richest colours of
+flowers, as, for instance, those of the gentian and dianthus, you will
+find their texture is produced by a crystalline or sugary frost-work
+upon them. In the lychnis of the high Alps, the red and white have a
+kind of sugary bloom, as rich as it is delicate. It is indescribable;
+but if you can fancy very powdery and crystalline snow mixed with the
+softest cream, and then dashed with carmine, it may give you some idea
+of the look of it. There are no colours, either in the nacre of shells,
+or the plumes of birds and insects, which are so pure as those of
+clouds, opal, or flowers; but the _force_ of purple and blue in some
+butterflies, and the methods of clouding, and strength of burnished
+lustre, in plumage like the peacock's, give them more universal
+interest; in some birds, also, as in our own kingfisher, the colour
+nearly reaches a floral preciousness. The lustre in most, however, is
+metallic rather than vitreous; and the vitreous always gives the purest
+hue. Entirely common and vulgar compared with these, yet to be noticed
+as completing the crystalline or vitreous system, we have the colours of
+gems. The green of the emerald is the best of these; but at its best is
+as vulgar as house-painting beside the green of bird's plumage or of
+clear water. No diamond shows colour so pure as a dewdrop; the ruby is
+like the pink of an ill-dyed and half-washed-out print, compared to the
+dianthus; and the carbuncle is usually quite dead unless set with a
+foil, and even then is not prettier than the seed of a pomegranate. The
+opal is, however, an exception. When pure and uncut in its native rock,
+it presents the most lovely colours that can be seen in the world,
+except those of clouds.
+
+We have thus in nature, chiefly obtained by crystalline conditions, a
+series of groups of entirely delicious hues; and it is one of the best
+signs that the bodily system is in a healthy state when we can see these
+clearly in their most delicate tints, and enjoy them fully and simply,
+with the kind of enjoyment that children have in eating sweet things.
+
+
+174. Now, the course of our main colour schools is briefly this:--First
+we have, returning to our hexagonal scheme, line; then _spaces_ filled
+with pure colour; and then _masses_ expressed or rounded with pure
+colour. And during these two stages the masters of colour delight in the
+purest tints, and endeavour as far as possible to rival those of opals
+and flowers. In saying "the purest tints," I do not mean the simplest
+types of red, blue, and yellow, but the most pure tints obtainable by
+their combinations.
+
+
+175. You remember I told you, when the colourists painted masses or
+projecting spaces, they, aiming always at colour, perceived from the
+first and held to the last the fact that shadows, though of course
+darker than the lights with reference to which they _are_ shadows, are
+not therefore necessarily less vigorous colours, but perhaps more
+vigorous. Some of the most beautiful blues and purples in nature, for
+instance, are those of mountains in shadow against amber sky; and the
+darkness of the hollow in the centre of a wild rose is one glow of
+orange fire, owing to the quantity of its yellow stamens. Well, the
+Venetians always saw this, and all great colourists see it, and are thus
+separated from the non-colourists or schools of mere chiaroscuro, not by
+difference in style merely, but by being right while the others are
+wrong. It is an absolute fact that shadows are as much colours as lights
+are; and whoever represents them by merely the subdued or darkened tint
+of the light, represents them falsely. I particularly want you to
+observe that this is no matter of taste, but fact. If you are especially
+sober-minded, you may indeed choose sober colours where Venetians would
+have chosen gay ones; that is a matter of taste; you may think it proper
+for a hero to wear a dress without patterns on it, rather than an
+embroidered one; that is similarly a matter of taste: but, though you
+may also think it would be dignified for a hero's limbs to be all black,
+or brown, on the shaded side of them, yet, if you are using colour at
+all, you cannot so have him to your mind, except by falsehood; he never,
+under any circumstances, could be entirely black or brown on one side of
+him.
+
+
+176. In this, then, the Venetians are separate from other schools by
+rightness, and they are so to their last days. Venetian painting is in
+this matter always right. But also, in their early days, the colourists
+are separated from other schools by their contentment with tranquil
+cheerfulness of light: by their never wanting to be dazzled. None of
+their lights are flashing or blinding; they are soft, winning, precious;
+lights of pearl, not of lime: only, you know, on this condition they
+cannot have sunshine: their day is the day of Paradise; they need no
+candle, neither light of the sun, in their cities; and everything is
+seen clear, as through crystal, far or near.
+
+This holds to the end of the fifteenth century. Then they begin to see
+that this, beautiful as it may be, is still a make-believe light; that
+we do not live in the inside of a pearl; but in an atmosphere through
+which a burning sun shines thwartedly, and over which a sorrowful night
+must far prevail. And then the chiaroscurists succeed in persuading them
+of the fact that there is a mystery in the day as in the night, and show
+them how constantly to see truly, is to see dimly. And also they teach
+them the brilliancy of light, and the degree in which it is raised from
+the darkness; and instead of their sweet and pearly peace, tempt them to
+look for the strength of flame and coruscation of lightning, and flash
+of sunshine on armour and on points of spears.
+
+
+177. The noble painters take the lesson nobly, alike for gloom or flame.
+Titian with deliberate strength, Tintoret with stormy passion, read it,
+side by side. Titian deepens the hues of his Assumption, as of his
+Entombment, into a solemn twilight; Tintoret involves his earth in coils
+of volcanic cloud, and withdraws, through circle flaming above circle,
+the distant light of Paradise. Both of them, becoming naturalist and
+human, add the veracity of Holbein's intense portraiture to the glow and
+dignity they had themselves inherited from the Masters of Peace: at the
+same moment another, as strong as they, and in pure felicity of
+art-faculty, even greater than they, but trained in a lower
+school,--Velasquez,--produced the miracles of colour and
+shadow-painting, which made Reynolds say of him, "What we all do with
+labour, he does with ease;" and one more, Correggio, uniting the sensual
+element of the Greek schools with their gloom, and their light with
+their beauty, and all these with the Lombardic colour, became, as since
+I think it has been admitted without question, the captain of the
+painter's art as such. Other men have nobler or more numerous gifts, but
+as a painter, master of the art of laying colour so as to be lovely,
+Correggio is alone.
+
+
+178. I said the noble men learned their lesson nobly. The base men also,
+and necessarily, learn it basely. The great men rise from colour to
+sunlight. The base ones fall from colour to candlelight. To-day, "non
+ragioniam di lor," but let us see what this great change which perfects
+the art of painting mainly consists in, and means. For though we are
+only at present speaking of technical matters, every one of them, I can
+scarcely too often repeat, is the outcome and sign of a mental
+character, and you can only understand the folds of the veil, by those
+of the form it veils.
+
+
+179. The complete painters, we find, have brought dimness and mystery
+into their method of colouring. That means that the world all round them
+has resolved to dream, or to believe, no more; but to know, and to see.
+And instantly all knowledge and sight are given, no more as in the
+Gothic times, through a window of glass, brightly, but as through a
+telescope-glass, darkly. Your cathedral window shut you from the true
+sky, and illumined you with a vision; your telescope leads you to the
+sky, but darkens its light, and reveals nebula beyond nebula, far and
+farther, and to no conceivable farthest--unresolvable. That is what the
+mystery means.
+
+
+180. Next, what does that Greek opposition of black and white mean?
+
+In the sweet crystalline time of colour, the painters, whether on glass
+or canvas, employed intricate patterns, in order to mingle hues
+beautifully with each other, and make one perfect melody of them all.
+But in the great naturalist school, they like their patterns to come in
+the Greek way, dashed dark on light,--gleaming light out of dark. That
+means also that the world round them has again returned to the Greek
+conviction, that all nature, especially human nature, is not entirely
+melodious nor luminous; but a barred and broken thing: that saints have
+their foibles, sinners their forces; that the most luminous virtue is
+often only a flash, and the blackest-looking fault is sometimes only a
+stain: and, without confusing in the least black with white, they can
+forgive, or even take delight in things that are like the [Greek:
+nebris], dappled.
+
+
+181. You have then--first, mystery. Secondly, opposition of dark and
+light. Then, lastly, whatever truth of form the dark and light can show.
+
+That is to say, truth altogether, and resignation to it, and quiet
+resolve to make the best of it. And therefore portraiture of living men,
+women, and children,--no more of saints, cherubs, or demons. So here I
+have brought for your standards of perfect art, a little maiden of the
+Strozzi family, with her dog, by Titian; and a little princess of the
+house of Savoy, by Vandyke; and Charles the Fifth, by Titian; and a
+queen, by Velasquez; and an English girl in a brocaded gown, by
+Reynolds; and an English physician in his plain coat, and wig, by
+Reynolds: and if you do not like them, I cannot help myself, for I can
+find nothing better for you.
+
+
+182. Better?--I must pause at the word. Nothing stronger, certainly, nor
+so strong. Nothing so wonderful, so inimitable, so keen in unprejudiced
+and unbiassed sight.
+
+Yet better, perhaps, the sight that was guided by a sacred will; the
+power that could be taught to weaker hands; the work that was faultless,
+though not inimitable, bright with felicity of heart, and consummate in
+a disciplined and companionable skill. You will find, when I can place
+in your hands the notes on Verona, which I read at the Royal
+Institution, that I have ventured to call the ĉra of painting
+represented by John Bellini, the time "of the Masters." Truly they
+deserved the name, who did nothing but what was lovely, and taught only
+what was right. These mightier, who succeeded them, crowned, but closed,
+the dynasties of art, and since their day, painting has never flourished
+more.
+
+
+183. There were many reasons for this, without fault of theirs. They
+were exponents, in the first place, of the change in all men's minds
+from civil and religious to merely domestic passion; the love of their
+gods and their country had contracted itself now into that of their
+domestic circle, which was little more than the halo of themselves. You
+will see the reflection of this change in painting at once by comparing
+the two Madonnas (S. 37, John Bellini's, and Raphael's, called "della
+Seggiola"). Bellini's Madonna cares for all creatures through her child;
+Raphael's, for her child only.
+
+Again, the world round these painters had become sad and proud, instead
+of happy and humble;--its domestic peace was darkened by irreligion, its
+national action fevered by pride. And for sign of its Love, the Hymen,
+whose statue this fair English girl, according to Reynolds' thought, has
+to decorate (S. 43), is blind, and holds a coronet.
+
+Again, in the splendid power of realisation, which these greatest of
+artists had reached, there was the latent possibility of amusement by
+deception, and of excitement by sensualism. And Dutch trickeries of base
+resemblance, and French fancies of insidious beauty, soon occupied the
+eyes of the populace of Europe, too restless and wretched now to care
+for the sweet earth-berries and Madonna's ivy of Cima, and too ignoble
+to perceive Titian's colour, or Correggio's shade.
+
+
+184. Enough sources of evil were here, in the temper and power of the
+consummate art. In its practical methods there was another, the
+fatallest of all. These great artists brought with them mystery,
+despondency, domesticity, sensuality: of all these, good came, as well
+as evil. One thing more they brought, of which nothing but evil ever
+comes, or can come--LIBERTY.
+
+By the discipline of five hundred years they had learned and inherited
+such power, that whereas all former painters could be right only by
+effort, they could be right with ease; and whereas all former painters
+could be right only under restraint, they could be right, free.
+Tintoret's touch, Luini's, Correggio's, Reynolds', and Velasquez's, are
+all as free as the air, and yet right. "How very fine!" said everybody.
+Unquestionably, very fine. Next, said everybody, "What a grand
+discovery! Here is the finest work ever done, and it is quite free. Let
+us all be free then, and what fine things shall we not do also!" With
+what results we too well know.
+
+Nevertheless, remember you are to delight in the freedom won by these
+mighty men through obedience, though you are not to covet it. Obey, and
+you also shall be free in time; but in these minor things, as well as in
+great, it is only right service which is perfect freedom.
+
+
+185. This, broadly, is the history of the early and late colour-schools.
+The first of these I shall call generally, henceforward, the school of
+crystal; the other that of clay: potter's clay, or human, are too
+sorrowfully the same, as far as art is concerned. But remember, in
+practice, you cannot follow both these schools; you must distinctly
+adopt the principles of one or the other. I will put the means of
+following either within your reach; and according to your dispositions
+you will choose one or the other: all I have to guard you against is the
+mistake of thinking you can unite the two. If you want to paint (even in
+the most distant and feeble way) in the Greek School, the school of
+Lionardo, Correggio, and Turner, you cannot design coloured windows, nor
+Angelican paradises. If, on the other hand, you choose to live in the
+peace of paradise, you cannot share in the gloomy triumphs of the earth.
+
+
+186. And, incidentally note, as a practical matter of immediate
+importance, that painted windows have nothing to do with
+chiaroscuro.[14] The virtue of glass is to be transparent everywhere. If
+you care to build a palace of jewels, painted glass is richer than all
+the treasures of Aladdin's lamp; but if you like pictures better than
+jewels, you must come into broad daylight to paint them. A picture in
+coloured glass is one of the most vulgar of barbarisms, and only fit to
+be ranked with the gauze transparencies and chemical illuminations of
+the sensational stage.
+
+[Footnote 14: There is noble chiaroscuro in the variations of their
+colour, but not as representative of solid form.]
+
+Also, put out of your minds at once all question about difficulty of
+getting colour; in glass we have all the colours that are wanted, only
+we do not know either how to choose, or how to connect them; and we are
+always trying to get them bright, when their real virtues are to be
+deep, mysterious, and subdued. We will have a thorough study of painted
+glass soon: mean while I merely give you a type of its perfect style, in
+two windows from Chalons-sur-Marne (S. 141).
+
+
+187. But for my own part, with what poor gift and skill is in me, I
+belong wholly to the chiaroscurist school; and shall teach you therefore
+chiefly that which I am best able to teach: and the rather, that it is
+only in this school that you can follow out the study either of natural
+history or landscape. The form of a wild animal, or the wrath of a
+mountain torrent, would both be revolting (or in a certain sense
+invisible) to the calm fantasy of a painter in the schools of crystal.
+He must lay his lion asleep in St. Jerome's study beside his tame
+partridge and easy slippers; lead the appeased river by alternate azure
+promontories, and restrain its courtly little streamlets with margins of
+marble. But, on the other hand, your studies of mythology and literature
+may best be connected with these schools of purest and calmest
+imagination; and their discipline will be useful to you in yet another
+direction, and that a very important one. It will teach you to take
+delight in little things, and develop in you the joy which all men
+should feel in purity and order, not only in pictures but in reality.
+For, indeed, the best art of this school of fantasy may at last be in
+reality, and the chiaroscurists, true in ideal, may be less helpful in
+act. We cannot arrest sunsets nor carve mountains, but we may turn every
+English homestead, if we choose, into a picture by Cima or John Bellini,
+which shall be "no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life
+indeed."
+
+
+188. For the present, however, and yet for some little time during your
+progress, you will not have to choose your school. For both, as we have
+seen, begin in delineation, and both proceed by filling flat spaces
+with an even tint. And therefore this following will be the course of
+work for you, founded on all that we have seen.
+
+Having learned to measure, and draw a pen line with some steadiness (the
+geometrical exercises for this purpose being properly school, not
+University work), you shall have a series of studies from the plants
+which are of chief importance in the history of art; first from their
+real forms, and then from the conventional and heraldic expressions of
+them; then we will take examples of the filling of ornamental forms with
+flat colour in Egyptian, Greek, and Gothic design; and then we will
+advance to animal forms treated in the same severe way, and so to the
+patterns and colour designs on animals themselves. And when we are sure
+of our firmness of hand and accuracy of eye, we will go on into light
+and shade.
+
+
+189. In process of time, this series of exercises will, I hope, be
+sufficiently complete and systematic to show its purpose at a glance.
+But during the present year, I shall content myself with placing a few
+examples of these different kinds of practice in your rooms for work,
+explaining in the catalogue the position they will ultimately occupy,
+and the technical points of process into which it is useless to enter in
+a general lecture. After a little time spent in copying these, your own
+predilections must determine your future course of study; only remember,
+whatever school you follow, it must be only to learn method, not to
+imitate result, and to acquaint yourself with the minds of other men,
+but not to adopt them as your own. Be assured that no good can come of
+our work but as it arises simply out of our own true natures, and the
+necessities of the time around us, though in many respects an evil one.
+We live in an age of base conceit and baser servility--an age whose
+intellect is chiefly formed by pillage, and occupied in desecration; one
+day mimicking, the next destroying, the works of all the noble persons
+who made its intellectual or art life possible to it:--an age without
+honest confidence enough in itself to carve a cherry-stone with an
+original fancy, but with insolence enough to abolish the solar system,
+if it were allowed to meddle with it.[15] In the midst of all this, you
+have to become lowly and strong; to recognise the powers of others and
+to fulfil your own. I shall try to bring before you every form of
+ancient art, that you may read and profit by it, not imitate it. You
+shall draw Egyptian kings dressed in colours like the rainbow, and Doric
+gods, and Runic monsters, and Gothic monks--not that you may draw like
+Egyptians or Norsemen, nor yield yourselves passively to be bound by the
+devotion, or inspired by the passion of the past, but that you may know
+truly what other men have felt during their poor span of life; and open
+your own hearts to what the heavens and earth may have to tell you in
+yours.
+
+[Footnote 15: Every day these bitter words become more sorrowfully true
+(September, 1887).]
+
+
+190. In closing this first course of lectures, I have one word more to
+say respecting the possible consequence of the introduction of art among
+the studies of the University. What art may do for scholarship, I have
+no right to conjecture; but what scholarship may do for art, I may in
+all modesty tell you. Hitherto, great artists, though always gentlemen,
+have yet been too exclusively craftsmen. Art has been less thoughtful
+than we suppose; it has taught much, but erred much, also. Many of the
+greatest pictures are enigmas; others, beautiful toys; others, harmful
+and corrupting enchantments. In the loveliest, there is something weak;
+in the greatest, there is something guilty. And this, gentlemen, if you
+will, is the new thing that may come to pass,--that the scholars of
+England may resolve to teach also with the silent power of the arts; and
+that some among you may so learn and use them, that pictures may be
+painted which shall not be enigmas any more, but open teachings of what
+can no otherwise be so well shown;--which shall not be fevered or broken
+visions any more, but filled with the indwelling light of self-possessed
+imagination;--which shall not be stained or enfeebled any more by evil
+passion, but glorious with the strength and chastity of noble human
+love;--and which shall no more degrade or disguise the work of God in
+heaven, but testify of Him as here dwelling with men, and walking with
+them, not angry, in the garden of the earth.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Lectures on Art, by John Ruskin
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