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+Project Gutenberg's On the Old Road  Vol. 1  (of 2), 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: On the Old Road  Vol. 1  (of 2)
+       A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature
+
+Author: John Ruskin
+
+Release Date: June 2, 2008 [EBook #25678]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON THE OLD ROAD  VOL. 1  (OF 2) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: RUSKIN'S MONUMENT
+FROM A PHOTOGRAPH]
+
+
+
+
+   THE COMPLETE WORKS
+   OF
+   JOHN RUSKIN
+
+
+   ON THE OLD ROAD
+   VOLUMES I-II
+
+
+   NATIONAL LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
+   NEW YORK        CHICAGO
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+ON THE OLD ROAD.
+
+_A COLLECTION OF MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS AND ARTICLES ON ART AND
+LITERATURE._
+
+VOL. I.
+
+
+PUBLISHED 1834-1885.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
+
+
+   INTRODUCTORY.                                                    PAGE
+
+   MY FIRST EDITOR. 1878                                               3
+
+
+   ART.
+
+   I. HISTORY AND CRITICISM.
+        LORD LINDSAY'S "CHRISTIAN ART." 1847                          17
+        EASTLAKE'S "HISTORY OF OIL PAINTING." 1848                    97
+        SAMUEL PROUT. 1849                                           148
+        SIR JOSHUA AND HOLBEIN. 1860                                 158
+
+   II. PRE-RAPHAELITISM.
+        ITS PRINCIPLES, AND TURNER. 1851                             171
+        ITS THREE COLORS. 1878                                       218
+
+   III. ARCHITECTURE.
+        THE OPENING OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 1854                      245
+        THE STUDY OF ARCHITECTURE IN OUR SCHOOLS. 1865               259
+
+   IV. INAUGURAL ADDRESS, CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL OF ART. 1858              279
+
+   V. THE CESTUS OF AGLAIA. 1865-66                                  305
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+   INTRODUCTORY: MY FIRST EDITOR.
+
+
+   ART.
+
+   I. HISTORY AND CRITICISM.
+
+   II. PRE-RAPHAELITISM.
+
+   III. ARCHITECTURE.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+   INTRODUCTORY.
+
+
+   MY FIRST EDITOR.
+
+   AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REMINISCENCE.
+
+   (_University Magazine, April 1878._)
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+MY FIRST EDITOR.[1]
+
+AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REMINISCENCE.
+
+
+   _1st February, 1878._
+
+1. In seven days more I shall be fifty-nine;--which (practically) is all
+the same as sixty; but, being asked by the wife of my dear old friend,
+W. H. Harrison, to say a few words of our old relations together, I find
+myself, in spite of all these years, a boy again,--partly in the mere
+thought of, and renewed sympathy with, the cheerful heart of my old
+literary master, and partly in instinctive terror lest, wherever he is
+in celestial circles, he should catch me writing bad grammar, or putting
+wrong stops, and should set the table turning, or the like. For he was
+inexorable in such matters, and many a sentence in "Modern Painters,"
+which I had thought quite beautifully turned out after a forenoon's work
+on it, had to be turned outside-in, after all, and cut into the smallest
+pieces and sewn up again, because he had found out there wasn't a
+nominative in it, or a genitive, or a conjunction, or something else
+indispensable to a sentence's decent existence and position in life. Not
+a book of mine, for good thirty years, but went, every word of it, under
+his careful eyes twice over--often also the last revises left to his
+tender mercy altogether on condition he wouldn't bother me any more.
+
+2. "For good thirty years": that is to say, from my first verse-writing
+in "Friendship's Offering" at fifteen, to my last orthodox and
+conservative compositions at forty-five.[2] But when I began to utter
+radical sentiments, and say things derogatory to the clergy, my old
+friend got quite restive--absolutely refused sometimes to pass even my
+most grammatical and punctuated paragraphs, if their contents savored of
+heresy or revolution; and at last I was obliged to print all my
+philanthropy and political economy on the sly.
+
+3. The heaven of the literary world through which Mr. Harrison moved in
+a widely cometary fashion, circling now round one luminary and now
+submitting to the attraction of another, not without a serenely
+erubescent luster of his own, differed _toto coelo_ from the celestial
+state of authorship by whose courses we have now the felicity of being
+dazzled and directed. Then, the publications of the months being very
+nearly concluded in the modest browns of _Blackwood_ and _Fraser_, and
+the majesty of the quarterlies being above the range of the properly
+so-called "public" mind, the simple family circle looked forward with
+chief complacency to their New Year's gift of the Annual--a delicately
+printed, lustrously bound, and elaborately illustrated small octavo
+volume, representing, after its manner, the poetical and artistic
+inspiration of the age. It is not a little wonderful to me, looking back
+to those pleasant years and their bestowings, to measure the difficultly
+imaginable distance between the periodical literature of that day and
+ours. In a few words, it may be summed by saying that the ancient Annual
+was written by meekly-minded persons, who felt that they knew nothing
+about anything, and did not want to know more. Faith in the usually
+accepted principles of propriety, and confidence in the Funds, the
+Queen, the English Church, the British Army and the perennial
+continuance of England, of her Annuals, and of the creation in general,
+were necessary then for the eligibility, and important elements in the
+success, of the winter-blowing author. Whereas I suppose that the
+popularity of our present candidates for praise, at the successive
+changes of the moon, may be considered as almost proportionate to their
+confidence in the abstract principles of dissolution, the immediate
+necessity of change, and the inconvenience, no less than the iniquity,
+of attributing any authority to the Church, the Queen, the Almighty, or
+anything else but the British Press. Such constitutional differences in
+the tone of the literary contents imply still greater contrasts in the
+lives of the editors of these several periodicals. It was enough for the
+editor of the "Friendship's Offering" if he could gather for his
+Christmas bouquet a little pastoral story, suppose, by Miss Mitford, a
+dramatic sketch by the Rev. George Croly, a few sonnets or impromptu
+stanzas to music by the gentlest lovers and maidens of his acquaintance,
+and a legend of the Apennines or romance of the Pyrenees by some
+adventurous traveler who had penetrated into the recesses of their
+mountains, and would modify the traditions of the country to introduce a
+plate by Clarkson Stanfield or J. D. Harding. Whereas nowadays the
+editor of a leading monthly is responsible to his readers for exhaustive
+views of the politics of Europe during the last fortnight; and would
+think himself distanced in the race with his lunarian rivals, if his
+numbers did not contain three distinct and entirely new theories of the
+system of the universe, and at least one hitherto unobserved piece of
+evidence of the nonentity of God.
+
+4. In one respect, however, the humilities of that departed time were
+loftier than the prides of to-day--that even the most retiring of its
+authors expected to be admired, not for what he had discovered, but for
+what he was. It did not matter in our dynasties of determined noblesse
+how many things an industrious blockhead knew, or how curious things a
+lucky booby had discovered. We claimed, and gave no honor but for real
+rank of human sense and wit; and although this manner of estimate led to
+many various collateral mischiefs--to much toleration of misconduct in
+persons who were amusing, and of uselessness in those of proved ability,
+there was yet the essential and constant good in it, that no one hoped
+to snap up for himself a reputation which his friend was on the point of
+achieving, and that even the meanest envy of merit was not embittered by
+a gambler's grudge at his neighbor's fortune.
+
+5. Into this incorruptible court of literature I was early brought,
+whether by good or evil hap, I know not; certainly by no very deliberate
+wisdom in my friends or myself. A certain capacity for rhythmic cadence
+(visible enough in all my later writings) and the cheerfulness of a much
+protected, but not foolishly indulged childhood, made me early a
+rhymester; and a shelf of the little cabinet by which I am now writing
+is loaded with poetical effusions which were the delight of my father
+and mother, and I have not yet the heart to burn. A worthy Scottish
+friend of my father's, Thomas Pringle, preceded Mr. Harrison in the
+editorship of "Friendship's Offering," and doubtfully, but with
+benignant sympathy, admitted the dazzling hope that one day rhymes of
+mine might be seen in real print, on those amiable and shining pages.
+
+6. My introduction by Mr. Pringle to the poet Rogers, on the ground of
+my admiration of the recently published "Italy," proved, as far as I
+remember, slightly disappointing to the poet, because it appeared on Mr.
+Pringle's unadvised cross-examination of me in the presence that I knew
+more of the vignettes than the verses; and also slightly discouraging to
+me because, this contretemps necessitating an immediate change of
+subject, I thenceforward understood none of the conversation, and when
+we came away was rebuked by Mr. Pringle for not attending to it. Had his
+grave authority been maintained over me, my literary bloom would
+probably have been early nipped; but he passed away into the African
+deserts; and the Favonian breezes of Mr. Harrison's praise revived my
+drooping ambition.
+
+7. I know not whether most in that ambition, or to please my father, I
+now began seriously to cultivate my skill in expression. I had always an
+instinct of possessing considerable word-power; and the series of essays
+written about this time for the _Architectural Magazine_, under the
+signature of Kata Phusin, contain sentences nearly as well put together
+as any I have done since. But without Mr. Harrison's ready praise, and
+severe punctuation, I should have either tired of my labor, or lost it;
+as it was, though I shall always think those early years might have been
+better spent, they had their reward. As soon as I had anything really to
+say, I was able sufficiently to say it; and under Mr. Harrison's
+cheerful auspices, and balmy consolations of my father under adverse
+criticism, the first volume of "Modern Painters" established itself in
+public opinion, and determined the tenor of my future life.
+
+8. Thus began a friendship, and in no unreal sense, even a family
+relationship, between Mr. Harrison, my father and mother, and me, in
+which there was no alloy whatsoever of distrust or displeasure on either
+side, but which remained faithful and loving, more and more conducive to
+every sort of happiness among us, to the day of my father's death.
+
+But the joyfulest days of it for _us_, and chiefly for me, cheered with
+concurrent sympathy from other friends--of whom only one now is
+left--were in the triumphal Olympiad of years which followed the
+publication of the second volume of "Modern Painters," when Turner
+himself had given to me his thanks, to my father and mother his true
+friendship, and came always for _their_ honor, to keep my birthday with
+them; the constant dinner party of the day remaining in its perfect
+chaplet from 1844 to 1850,--Turner, Mr. Thomas Richmond, Mr. George
+Richmond, Samuel Prout, and Mr. Harrison.
+
+9. Mr. Harrison, as my literary godfather, who had held me at the Font
+of the Muses, and was answerable to the company for my moral principles
+and my syntax, always made "the speech"; my father used most often to
+answer for me in few words, but with wet eyes: (there was a general
+understanding that any good or sorrow that might come to me in literary
+life were infinitely more his) and the two Mr. Richmonds held themselves
+responsible to him for my at least moderately decent orthodoxy in art,
+taking in that matter a tenderly inquisitorial function, and warning my
+father solemnly of two dangerous heresies in the bud, and of things
+really passing the possibilities of the indulgence of the Church, said
+against Claude or Michael Angelo. The death of Turner and other things,
+far more sad than death, clouded those early days, but the memory of
+them returned again after I had well won my second victory with the
+"Stones of Venice"; and the two Mr. Richmonds, and Mr. Harrison, and my
+father, were again happy on my birthday, and so to the end.
+
+10. In a far deeper sense than he himself knew, Mr. Harrison was all
+this time influencing my thoughts and opinions, by the entire
+consistency, contentment, and practical sense of his modest life. My
+father and he were both flawless types of the true London citizen of
+olden days: incorruptible, proud with sacred and simple pride, happy in
+their function and position; putting daily their total energy into the
+detail of their business duties, and finding daily a refined and perfect
+pleasure in the hearth-side poetry of domestic life. Both of them, in
+their hearts, as romantic as girls; both of them inflexible as soldier
+recruits in any matter of probity and honor, in business or out of it;
+both of them utterly hating radical newspapers, and devoted to the House
+of Lords; my father only, it seemed to me, slightly failing in his
+loyalty to the Worshipful the Mayor and Corporation of London. This
+disrespect for civic dignity was connected in my father with some little
+gnawing of discomfort--deep down in his heart--in his own position as a
+merchant, and with timidly indulged hope that his son might one day move
+in higher spheres; whereas Mr. Harrison was entirely placid and resigned
+to the will of Providence which had appointed him his desk in the Crown
+Life Office, never in his most romantic visions projected a marriage for
+any of his daughters with a British baronet or a German count, and
+pinned his little vanities prettily and openly on his breast, like a
+nosegay, when he went out to dinner. Most especially he shone at the
+Literary Fund, where he was Registrar and had proper official relations,
+therefore, always with the Chairman, Lord Mahon, or Lord Houghton, or
+the Bishop of Winchester, or some other magnificent person of that sort,
+with whom it was Mr. Harrison's supremest felicity to exchange a not
+unfrequent little joke--like a pinch of snuff--and to indicate for them
+the shoals to be avoided and the channels to be followed with flowing
+sail in the speech of the year; after which, if perchance there were any
+malignant in the company who took objection, suppose, to the claims of
+the author last relieved, to the charity of the Society, or to any claim
+founded on the production of a tale for _Blackwood's Magazine_, and of
+two sonnets for "Friendship's Offering"; or if perchance there were any
+festering sharp thorn in Mr. Harrison's side in the shape of some
+distinguished radical, Sir Charles Dilke, or Mr. Dickens, or anybody who
+had ever said anything against taxation, or the Post Office, or the
+Court of Chancery, or the Bench of Bishops,--then would Mr. Harrison, if
+he had full faith in his Chairman, cunningly arrange with him some
+delicate little extinctive operation to be performed on that malignant
+or that radical in the course of the evening, and would relate to us
+exultingly the next day all the incidents of the power of arms, and
+vindictively (for him) dwell on the barbed points and double edge of the
+beautiful episcopalian repartee with which it was terminated.
+
+11. Very seriously, in all such public duties, Mr. Harrison was a person
+of rarest quality and worth; absolutely disinterested in his zeal,
+unwearied in exertion, always ready, never tiresome, never absurd;
+bringing practical sense, kindly discretion, and a most wholesome
+element of good-humored, but incorruptible honesty, into everything his
+hand found to do. Everybody respected, and the best men sincerely
+regarded him, and I think those who knew most of the world were always
+the first to acknowledge his fine faculty of doing exactly the right
+thing to exactly the right point--and so pleasantly. In private life, he
+was to me an object of quite special admiration, in the quantity of
+pleasure he could take in little things; and he very materially modified
+many of my gravest conclusions, as to the advantages or mischiefs of
+modern suburban life. To myself scarcely any dwelling-place and duty in
+this world would have appeared (until, perhaps, I had tried them) less
+eligible for a man of sensitive and fanciful mind than the New Road,
+Camberwell Green, and the monotonous office work in Bridge Street. And
+to a certain extent, I am still of the same mind as to these matters,
+and do altogether, and without doubt or hesitation, repudiate the
+existence of New Road and Camberwell Green in general, no less than the
+condemnation of intelligent persons to a routine of clerk's work broken
+only by a three weeks' holiday in the decline of the year. On less
+lively, fanciful, and amiable persons than my old friend, the New Road
+and the daily desk do verily exercise a degrading and much to be
+regretted influence. But Mr. Harrison brought the freshness of pastoral
+simplicity into the most faded corners of the Green, lightened with his
+cheerful heart the most leaden hours of the office, and gathered during
+his three weeks' holiday in the neighborhood, suppose, of Guildford,
+Gravesend, Broadstairs, or Rustington, more vital recreation and
+speculative philosophy than another man would have got on the grand
+tour.
+
+12. On the other hand, I, who had nothing to do all day but what I
+liked, and could wander at will among all the best beauties of the
+globe--nor that without sufficient power to see and to feel them, was
+habitually a discontented person, and frequently a weary one; and the
+reproachful thought which always rose in my mind when in that
+unconquerable listlessness of surfeit from excitement I found myself
+unable to win even a momentary pleasure from the fairest scene, was
+always: "If but Mr. Harrison were here instead of me!"
+
+13. Many and many a time I planned very seriously the beguiling of him
+over the water. But there was always something to be done in a
+hurry--something to be worked out--something to be seen, as I thought,
+only in my own quiet way. I believe if I had but had the sense to take
+my old friend with me, he would have shown me ever so much more than I
+found out by myself. But it was not to be; and year after year I went to
+grumble and mope at Venice, or Lago Maggiore; and Mr. Harrison to enjoy
+himself from morning to night at Broadstairs or Box Hill. Let me not
+speak with disdain of either. No blue languor of tideless wave is worth
+the spray and sparkle of a South-Eastern English beach, and no one will
+ever rightly enjoy the pines of the Wengern Alp who despises the boxes
+of Box Hill.
+
+Nay, I remember me of a little rapture of George Richmond himself on
+those fair slopes of sunny sward, ending in a vision of Tobit and his
+dog--no less--led up there by the helpful angel. (I have always
+wondered, by the way, whether that blessed dog minded what the angel
+said to him.)
+
+14. But Mr. Harrison was independent of these mere ethereal visions, and
+surrounded himself only with a halo of sublunary beatitude. Welcome
+always he, as on his side frankly coming to be well, with the farmer,
+the squire, the rector, the--I had like to have said, dissenting
+minister, but I think Mr. Harrison usually evaded villages for summer
+domicile which were in any wise open to suspicion of Dissent in the
+air,--but with hunting rector, and the High Church curate, and the
+rector's daughters, and the curate's mother--and the landlord of the Red
+Lion, and the hostler of the Red Lion stables, and the tapster of the
+Pig and Whistle, and all the pigs in the backyard, and all the whistlers
+in the street--whether for want of thought or for gayety of it, and all
+the geese on the common, ducks in the horse-pond, and daws in the
+steeple, Mr. Harrison was known and beloved by every bird and body of
+them before half his holiday was over, and the rest of it was mere
+exuberance of festivity about him, and applauding coronation of his head
+and heart. Above all, he delighted in the ways of animals and children.
+He wrote a birthday ode--or at least a tumble-out-of-the-nest-day
+ode--to our pet rook, Grip, which encouraged that bird in taking such
+liberties with the cook, and in addressing so many impertinences to the
+other servants, that he became the mere plague, or as the French would
+express it, the "Black-beast," of the kitchen at Denmark Hill for the
+rest of his life. There was almost always a diary kept, usually, I
+think, in rhyme, of those summer hours of indolence; and when at last it
+was recognized, in due and reverent way, at the Crown Life Office, that
+indeed the time had drawn near when its constant and faithful servant
+should be allowed to rest, it was perhaps not the least of my friend's
+praiseworthy and gentle gifts to be truly capable of rest; withdrawing
+himself into the memories of his useful and benevolent life, and making
+it truly a holiday in its honored evening. The idea then occurred to him
+(and it was now my turn to press with hearty sympathy the sometimes
+intermitted task) of writing these Reminiscences: valuable--valuable to
+whom, and for what, I begin to wonder.
+
+15. For indeed these memories are of people who are passed away like the
+snow in harvest; and now, with the sharp-sickle reapers of full shocks
+of the fattening wheat of metaphysics, and fair novelists Ruth-like in
+the fields of barley, or more mischievously coming through the
+rye,--what will the public, so vigorously sustained by these, care to
+hear of the lovely writers of old days, quaint creatures that they
+were?--Merry Miss Mitford, actually living in the country, actually
+walking in it, loving it, and finding history enough in the life of the
+butcher's boy, and romance enough in the story of the miller's daughter,
+to occupy all her mind with, innocent of troubles concerning the Turkish
+question; steady-going old Barham, confessing nobody but the Jackdaw of
+Rheims, and fearless alike of Ritualism, Darwinism, or disestablishment;
+iridescent clearness of Thomas Hood--the wildest, deepest infinity of
+marvelously jestful men; manly and rational Sydney, inevitable,
+infallible, inoffensively wise of wit;[3]--they are gone their way, and
+ours is far diverse; and they and all the less-known, yet pleasantly and
+brightly endowed spirits of that time, are suddenly as unintelligible to
+us as the Etruscans--not a feeling they had that we can share in; and
+these pictures of them will be to us valuable only as the sculpture
+under the niches far in the shade there of the old parish church, dimly
+vital images of inconceivable creatures whom we shall never see the like
+of more.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] This paper was written as a preface to a series of "Reminiscences"
+from the pen of the late Mr. W. H. Harrison, commenced in the
+_University Magazine_ of May 1878. It was separately printed in that
+magazine in the preceding month, but owing to Mr. Ruskin's illness at
+the time, he was unable to see it through the press. A letter from Mr.
+Ruskin to Mr. Harrison, printed in "Arrows of the Chace," may be found
+of interest in connection with the opening statements of this
+paper.--[ED.]
+
+[2] "Friendship's Offering" of 1835 included two poems, signed "J. R.,"
+and entitled "Saltzburg" and "Fragments from a Metrical Journal;
+Andernacht and St. Goar."--[ED.]
+
+[3] In the "Life and Times of Sydney Smith," by Stuart J. Reid (London,
+1884, p. 374), appears a letter addressed to the author by Mr. Ruskin,
+to whom the book is dedicated:--
+
+                                 "OXFORD, _Nov. 15th, 1883_.
+
+"MY DEAR SIR,--I wanted to tell you what deep respect I had for Sydney
+Smith; but my time has been cut to pieces ever since your note reached
+me. He was the first in the literary circles of London to assert the
+value of 'Modern Painters,' and he has always seemed to me equally
+keen-sighted and generous in his estimate of literary efforts. His
+'Moral Philosophy' is the only book on the subject which I care that my
+pupils should read, and there is no man (whom I have not personally
+known) whose image is so vivid in my constant affection.--Ever your
+faithful servant,
+
+                                       "JOHN RUSKIN."--[ED.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+ART.
+
+I.
+
+HISTORY AND CRITICISM.
+
+
+   LORD LINDSAY'S "CHRISTIAN ART."
+
+   (_Quarterly Review, June 1847._)
+
+   EASTLAKE'S "HISTORY OF OIL PAINTING."
+
+   (_Quarterly Review, March 1848._)
+
+   SAMUEL PROUT.
+
+   (_Art Journal, March 1849._)
+
+   SIR JOSHUA AND HOLBEIN.
+
+   (_Cornhill Magazine, March 1860._)
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+"THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ART."[4]
+
+BY LORD LINDSAY.
+
+
+16. There is, perhaps, no phenomenon connected with the history of the
+first half of the nineteenth century, which will become a subject of
+more curious investigation in after ages, than the coincident
+development of the Critical faculty, and extinction of the Arts of
+Design. Our mechanical energies, vast though they be, are not singular
+nor characteristic; such, and so great, have before been manifested--and
+it may perhaps be recorded of us with wonder rather than respect, that
+we pierced mountains and excavated valleys, only to emulate the activity
+of the gnat and the swiftness of the swallow. Our discoveries in
+science, however accelerated or comprehensive, are but the necessary
+development of the more wonderful reachings into vacancy of past
+centuries; and they who struck the piles of the bridge of Chaos will
+arrest the eyes of Futurity rather than we builders of its towers and
+gates--theirs the authority of Light, ours but the ordering of courses
+to the Sun and Moon.
+
+17. But the Negative character of the age is distinctive.
+There has not before appeared a race like that of civilized
+Europe at this day, thoughtfully unproductive of all
+art--ambitious--industrious--investigative--reflective, and incapable.
+Disdained by the savage, or scattered by the soldier, dishonored by the
+voluptuary, or forbidden by the fanatic, the arts have not, till now,
+been extinguished by analysis and paralyzed by protection. Our
+lecturers, learned in history, exhibit the descents of excellence from
+school to school, and clear from doubt the pedigrees of powers which
+they cannot re-establish, and of virtues no more to be revived: the
+scholar is early acquainted with every department of the Impossible, and
+expresses in proper terms his sense of the deficiencies of Titian and
+the errors of Michael Angelo: the metaphysician weaves from field to
+field his analogies of gossamer, which shake and glitter fairly in the
+sun, but must be torn asunder by the first plow that passes: geometry
+measures out, by line and rule, the light which is to illustrate
+heroism, and the shadow which should veil distress; and anatomy counts
+muscles, and systematizes motion, in the wrestling of Genius with its
+angel. Nor is ingenuity wanting--nor patience; apprehension was never
+more ready, nor execution more exact--yet nothing is of us, or in us,
+accomplished;--the treasures of our wealth and will are spent in
+vain--our cares are as clouds without water--our creations fruitless and
+perishable; the succeeding Age will trample "sopra lor vanita che par
+persona," and point wonderingly back to the strange colorless tessera in
+the mosaic of human mind.
+
+18. No previous example can be shown, in the career of nations not
+altogether nomad or barbarous, of so total an absence of invention,--of
+any material representation of the mind's inward yearning and desire,
+seen, as soon as shaped, to be, though imperfect, in its essence good,
+and worthy to be rested in with contentment, and consisting
+self-approval--the Sabbath of contemplation which confesses and
+confirms the majesty of a style. All but ourselves have had this in
+measure; the Imagination has stirred herself in proportion to the
+requirements, capacity, and energy of each race: reckless or pensive,
+soaring or frivolous, still she has had life and influence; sometimes
+aiming at Heaven with brick for stone and slime for mortar--anon bound
+down to painting of porcelain, and carving of ivory, but always with an
+inward consciousness of power which might indeed be palsied or
+imprisoned, but not in operation vain. Altars have been rent,
+many--ashes poured out,--hands withered--but we alone have worshiped,
+and received no answer--the pieces left in order upon the wood, and our
+names writ in the water that runs roundabout the trench.
+
+19. It is easier to conceive than to enumerate the many circumstances
+which are herein against us, necessarily, and exclusive of all that
+wisdom might avoid, or resolution vanquish. First, the weight of mere
+numbers, among whom ease of communication rather renders opposition of
+judgment fatal, than agreement probable; looking from England to Attica,
+or from Germany to Tuscany, we may remember to what good purpose it was
+said that the magnetism of iron was found not in bars, but in needles.
+Together with this adversity of number comes the likelihood of many
+among the more available intellects being held back and belated in the
+crowd, or else prematurely outwearied; for it now needs both curious
+fortune and vigorous effort to give to any, even the greatest, such
+early positions of eminence and audience as may feed their force with
+advantage; so that men spend their strength in opening circles, and
+crying for place, and only come to speech of us with broken voices and
+shortened time. Then follows the diminution of importance in peculiar
+places and public edifices, as they engage national affection or vanity;
+no single city can now take such queenly lead as that the pride of the
+whole body of the people shall be involved in adorning her; the
+buildings of London or Munich are not charged with the fullness of the
+national heart as were the domes of Pisa and Florence:--their credit or
+shame is metropolitan, not acropolitan; central at the best, not
+dominant; and this is one of the chief modes in which the cessation of
+superstition, so far as it has taken place, has been of evil consequence
+to art, that the observance of local sanctities being abolished,
+meanness and mistake are anywhere allowed of, and the thoughts and
+wealth which were devoted and expended to good purpose in one place, are
+now distracted and scattered to utter unavailableness.
+
+20. In proportion to the increasing spirituality of religion, the
+conception of worthiness in material offering ceases, and with it the
+sense of beauty in the evidence of votive labor; machine-work is
+substituted for handwork, as if the value of ornament consisted in the
+mere multiplication of agreeable forms, instead of in the evidence of
+human care and thought and love about the separate stones;
+and--machine-work once tolerated--the eye itself soon loses its sense of
+this very evidence, and no more perceives the difference between the
+blind accuracy of the engine, and the bright, strange play of the living
+stroke--a difference as great as between the form of a stone pillar and
+a springing fountain. And on this blindness follow all errors and
+abuses--hollowness and slightness of framework, speciousness of surface
+ornament, concealed structure, imitated materials, and types of form
+borrowed from things noble for things base; and all these abuses must be
+resisted with the more caution, and less success, because in many ways
+they are signs or consequences of improvement, and are associated both
+with purer forms of religious feeling and with more general diffusion of
+refinements and comforts; and especially because we are critically aware
+of all our deficiencies, too cognizant of all that is greatest to pass
+willingly and humbly through the stages that rise to it, and oppressed
+in every honest effort by the bitter sense of inferiority. In every
+previous development the power has been in advance of the consciousness,
+the resources more abundant than the knowledge--the energy irresistible,
+the discipline imperfect. The light that led was narrow and
+dim--streakings of dawn--but it fell with kindly gentleness on eyes
+newly awakened out of sleep. But we are now aroused suddenly in the
+light of an intolerable day--our limbs fail under the sunstroke--we are
+walled in by the great buildings of elder times, and their fierce
+reverberation falls upon us without pause, in our feverish and
+oppressive consciousness of captivity; we are laid bedridden at the
+Beautiful Gate, and all our hope must rest in acceptance of the "such as
+I have," of the passers by.
+
+21. The frequent and firm, yet modest expression of this hope, gives
+peculiar value to Lord Lindsay's book on Christian Art; for it is seldom
+that a grasp of antiquity so comprehensive, and a regard for it so
+affectionate, have consisted with aught but gloomy foreboding with
+respect to our own times. As a contribution to the History of Art, his
+work is unquestionably the most valuable which has yet appeared in
+England. His research has been unwearied; he has availed himself of the
+best results of German investigation--his own acuteness of discernment
+in cases of approximating or derivative style is considerable--and he
+has set before the English reader an outline of the relations of the
+primitive schools of Sacred art which we think so thoroughly verified in
+all its more important ramifications, that, with whatever richness of
+detail the labor of succeeding writers may illustrate them, the leading
+lines of Lord Lindsay's chart will always henceforth be followed. The
+feeling which pervades the whole book is chastened, serious, and full of
+reverence for the strength ordained out of the lips of infant
+Art--accepting on its own terms its simplest teaching, sympathizing with
+all kindness in its unreasoning faith; the writer evidently looking back
+with most joy and thankfulness to hours passed in gazing upon the faded
+and faint touches of feeble hands, and listening through the stillness
+of uninvaded cloisters for fall of voices now almost spent; yet he is
+never contracted into the bigot, nor inflamed into the enthusiast; he
+never loses his memory of the outside world, never quits nor compromises
+his severe and reflective Protestantism, never gives ground of offense
+by despite or forgetfulness of any order of merit or period of effort.
+And the tone of his address to our present schools is therefore neither
+scornful nor peremptory; his hope, consisting with full apprehension of
+all that we have lost, is based on a strict and stern estimate of our
+power, position, and resource, compelling the assent even of the least
+sanguine to his expectancy of the revelation of a new world of Spiritual
+Beauty, of which whosoever
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"will dedicate his talents, as the bondsman of love, to his Redeemer's
+glory and the good of mankind, may become the priest and interpreter, by
+adopting in the first instance, and re-issuing with that outward
+investiture which the assiduous study of all that is beautiful, either
+in Grecian sculpture, or the later but less spiritual schools of
+painting, has enabled him to supply, such of its bright ideas as he
+finds imprisoned in the early and imperfect efforts of art--and
+secondly, by exploring further on his own account in the untrodden
+realms of feeling that lie before him, and calling into palpable
+existence visions as bright, as pure, and as immortal as those that have
+already, in the golden days of Raphael and Perugino, obeyed their
+creative mandate, Live!" (Vol. iii., p. 422).[5]
+
+       *       *       *
+
+22. But while we thus defer to the discrimination, respect the feeling,
+and join in the hope of the author, we earnestly deprecate the frequent
+assertion, as we entirely deny the accuracy or propriety, of the
+metaphysical analogies, in accordance with which his work has unhappily
+been arranged. Though these had been as carefully, as they are crudely,
+considered, it had still been no light error of judgment to thrust them
+with dogmatism so abrupt into the forefront of a work whose purpose is
+assuredly as much to win to the truth as to demonstrate it. The writer
+has apparently forgotten that of the men to whom he must primarily look
+for the working out of his anticipations, the most part are of limited
+knowledge and inveterate habit, men dexterous in practice, idle in
+thought; many of them compelled by ill-ordered patronage into directions
+of exertion at variance with their own best impulses, and regarding
+their art only as a means of life; all of them conscious of practical
+difficulties which the critic is too apt to under-estimate, and probably
+remembering disappointments of early effort rude enough to chill the
+most earnest heart. The shallow amateurship of the circle of their
+patrons early disgusts them with theories; they shrink back to the hard
+teaching of their own industry, and would rather read the book which
+facilitated their methods than the one that rationalized their aims.
+Noble exceptions there are, and more than might be deemed; but the labor
+spent in contest with executive difficulties renders even these better
+men unapt receivers of a system which looks with little respect on such
+achievement, and shrewd discerners of the parts of such system which
+have been feebly rooted, or fancifully reared. Their attention should
+have been attracted both by clearness and kindness of promise; their
+impatience prevented by close reasoning and severe proof of every
+statement which might seem transcendental. Altogether void of such
+consideration or care, Lord Lindsay never even so much as states the
+meaning or purpose of his appeal, but, clasping his hands desperately
+over his head, disappears on the instant in an abyss of curious and
+unsupported assertions of the philosophy of human nature: reappearing
+only, like a breathless diver, in the third page, to deprecate the
+surprise of the reader whom he has never addressed, at a conviction
+which he has never stated; and again vanishing ere we can well look him
+in the face, among the frankincensed clouds of Christian mythology:
+filling the greater part of his first volume with a _résumé_ of its
+symbols and traditions, yet never vouchsafing the slightest hint of the
+objects for which they are assembled, or the amount of credence with
+which he would have them regarded; and so proceeds to the historical
+portion of the book, leaving the whole theory which is its key to be
+painfully gathered from scattered passages, and in great part from the
+mere form of enumeration adopted in the preliminary chart of the
+schools; and giving as yet account only of that period to which the mere
+artist looks with least interest--while the work, even when completed,
+will be nothing more than a single pinnacle of the historical edifice
+whose ground-plan is laid in the preceding essay, "Progression by
+Antagonism":--a plan, by the author's confession, "too extensive for his
+own, or any single hand to execute," yet without the understanding of
+whose main relations it is impossible to receive the intended teaching
+of the completed portion.
+
+23. It is generally easier to plan what is beyond the reach of others
+than to execute what is within our own; and it had been well if the
+range of this introductory essay had been something less extensive, and
+its reasoning more careful. Its search after truth is honest and
+impetuous, and its results would have appeared as interesting as they
+are indeed valuable, had they but been arranged with ordinary
+perspicuity, and represented in simple terms. But the writer's evil
+genius pursues him; the demand for exertion of thought is remorseless,
+and continuous throughout, and the statements of theoretical principle
+as short, scattered, and obscure, as they are bold. We question whether
+many readers may not be utterly appalled by the aspect of an "Analysis
+of Human Nature"--the first task proposed to them by our intellectual
+Eurystheus--to be accomplished in the space of six semi-pages, followed
+in the seventh by the "Development of the Individual Man," and applied
+in the eighth to a "General Classification of Individuals": and we
+infinitely marvel that our author should have thought it unnecessary to
+support or explain a division of the mental attributes on which the
+treatment of his entire subject afterwards depends, and whose terms are
+repeated in every following page to the very dazzling of eye and
+deadening of ear (a division, we regret to say, as illogical as it is
+purposeless), otherwise than by a laconic reference to the assumptions
+of Phrenology.
+
+"The Individual Man, or Man considered by himself as an unit in
+creation, is compounded of three distinct primary elements.
+
+     1. Sense, or the animal frame, with its passions or affections;
+
+     2. Mind or Intellect;--of which the distinguishing
+     faculties--rarely, if ever, equally balanced, and by their
+     respective predominance determinative of his whole character,
+     conduct, and views of life--are,
+
+     i. Imagination, the discerner of Beauty,--
+
+     ii. Reason, the discerner of Truth,--
+
+     the former animating and informing the world of Sense or Matter,
+     the latter finding her proper home in the world of abstract or
+     immaterial existences --the former receiving the impress of things
+     Objectively, or _ab externo_, the latter impressing its own ideas
+     on them Subjectively, or _ab interno_--the former a feminine or
+     passive, the latter a masculine or active principle; and
+
+     iii. Spirit--the Moral or Immortal principle, ruling through the
+     Will, and breathed into Man by the Breath of God."--"Progression
+     by Antagonism," pp. 2, 3.
+
+
+24. On what authority does the writer assume that the moral is alone the
+_Immortal_ principle--or the only part of the human nature bestowed by
+the breath of God? Are imagination, then, and reason perishable? Is the
+Body itself? Are not all alike immortal; and when distinction is to be
+made among them, is not the first great division between their active
+and passive immortality, between the supported body and supporting
+spirit; that spirit itself afterwards rather conveniently to be
+considered as either exercising intellectual function, or receiving
+moral influence, and, both in power and passiveness, deriving its energy
+and sensibility alike from the sustaining breath of God--than actually
+divided into intellectual and moral parts? For if the distinction
+between us and the brute be the test of the nature of the living soul by
+that breath conferred, it is assuredly to be found as much in the
+imagination as in the moral principle. There is but one of the moral
+sentiments enumerated by Lord Lindsay, the sign of which is absent in
+the animal creation:--the enumeration is a bald one, but let it serve
+the turn--"Self-esteem and love of Approbation," eminent in horse and
+dog; "Firmness," not wanting either to ant or elephant; "Veneration,"
+distinct as far as the superiority of man can by brutal intellect be
+comprehended; "Hope," developed as far as its objects can be made
+visible; and "Benevolence," or Love, the highest of all, the most
+assured of all--together with all the modifications of opposite feeling,
+rage, jealousy, habitual malice, even love of mischief and comprehension
+of jest:--the one only moral sentiment wanting being that of
+responsibility to an Invisible being, or conscientiousness. But where,
+among brutes, shall we find the slightest trace of the Imaginative
+faculty, or of that discernment of beauty which our author most
+inaccurately confounds with it, or of the discipline of memory, grasping
+this or that circumstance at will, or of the still nobler foresight of,
+and respect towards, things future, except only instinctive and
+compelled?
+
+25. The fact is, that it is not in intellect added to the bodily sense,
+nor in moral sentiment superadded to the intellect, that the essential
+difference between brute and man consists: but in the elevation of all
+three to that point at which each becomes capable of communion with the
+Deity, and worthy therefore of eternal life;--the body more universal as
+an instrument--more exquisite in its sense--this last character carried
+out in the eye and ear to the perception of Beauty, in form, sound, and
+color--and herein distinctively raised above the brutal sense;
+intellect, as we have said, peculiarly separating and vast; the moral
+sentiments like in essence, but boundlessly expanded, as attached to an
+infinite object, and laboring in an infinite field: each part mortal in
+its shortcoming, immortal in the accomplishment of its perfection and
+purpose; the opposition which we at first broadly expressed as between
+body and spirit, being more strictly between the natural and spiritual
+condition of the entire creature--body natural, sown in death, body
+spiritual, raised in incorruption: Intellect natural, leading to
+skepticism; intellect spiritual, expanding into faith: Passion natural,
+suffered from things spiritual; passion spiritual, centered on things
+unseen: and the strife or antagonism which is throughout the subject of
+Lord Lindsay's proof, is not, as he has stated it, between the moral,
+intellectual, and sensual elements, but between the upward and downward
+tendencies of all three--between the spirit of Man which goeth upward,
+and the spirit of the Beast which goeth downward.
+
+26. We should not have been thus strict in our examination of these
+preliminary statements, if the question had been one of terms merely, or
+if the inaccuracy of thought had been confined to the Essay on
+Antagonism. If upon receiving a writer's terms of argument in the
+sense--however unusual or mistaken--which he chooses they should bear,
+we may without further error follow his course of thought, it is as
+unkind as unprofitable to lose the use of his result in quarrel with its
+algebraic expression; and if the reader will understand by Lord
+Lindsay's general term "Spirit" the susceptibility of right moral
+emotion, and the entire subjection of the Will to Reason; and receive
+his term "Sense" as not including the perception of Beauty either in
+sight or sound, but expressive of animal sensation only, he may follow
+without embarrassment to its close, his magnificently comprehensive
+statement of the forms of probation which the heart and faculties of man
+have undergone from the beginning of time. But it is far otherwise when
+the theory is to be applied, in all its pseudo-organization, to the
+separate departments of a particular art, and analogies the most subtle
+and speculative traced between the mental character and artistical
+choice or attainment of different races of men. Such analogies are
+always treacherous, for the amount of expression of individual mind
+which Art can convey is dependent on so many collateral circumstances,
+that it even militates against the truth of any particular system of
+interpretation that it should seem at first generally applicable, or its
+results consistent. The passages in which such interpretation has been
+attempted in the work before us, are too graceful to be regretted, nor
+is their brilliant suggestiveness otherwise than pleasing and profitable
+too, so long as it is received on its own grounds merely, and affects
+not with its uncertainty the very matter of its foundation. But all
+oscillation is communicable, and Lord Lindsay is much to be blamed for
+leaving it entirely to the reader to distinguish between the
+determination of his research and the activity of his fancy--between the
+authority of his interpretation and the aptness of his metaphor. He who
+would assert the true meaning of a symbolical art, in an age of strict
+inquiry and tardy imagination, ought rather to surrender something of
+the fullness which his own faith perceives, than expose the fabric of
+his vision, too finely woven, to the hard handling of the materialist;
+and we sincerely regret that discredit is likely to accrue to portions
+of our author's well-grounded statement of real significances, once of
+all men understood, because these are rashly blended with his own
+accidental perceptions of disputable analogy. He perpetually associates
+the present imaginative influence of Art with its ancient hieroglyphical
+teaching, and mingles fancies fit only for the framework of a sonnet,
+with the deciphered evidence which is to establish a serious point of
+history; and this the more frequently and grossly, in the endeavor to
+force every branch of his subject into illustration of the false
+division of the mental attributes which we have pointed out.
+
+27. His theory is first clearly stated in the following passage:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Man is, in the strictest sense of the word, a progressive being, and
+with many periods of inaction and retrogression, has still held, upon
+the whole, a steady course towards the great end of his existence, the
+re-union and re-harmonizing of the three elements of his being,
+dislocated by the Fall, in the service of his God. Each of these three
+elements, Sense, Intellect, and Spirit, has had its distinct development
+at three distant intervals, and in the personality of the three great
+branches of the human family. The race of Ham, giants in prowess if not
+in stature, cleared the earth of primeval forests and monsters, built
+cities, established vast empires, invented the mechanical arts, and gave
+the fullest expansion to the animal energies. After them, the Greeks,
+the elder line of Japhet, developed the intellectual faculties,
+Imagination and Reason, more especially the former, always the earlier
+to bud and blossom; poetry and fiction, history, philosophy, and
+science, alike look back to Greece as their birthplace; on the one hand
+they put a soul into Sense, peopling the world with their gay
+mythology--on the other they bequeathed to us, in Plato and Aristotle,
+the mighty patriarchs of human wisdom, the Darius and the Alexander of
+the two grand armies of thinking men whose antagonism has ever since
+divided the battlefield of the human intellect:--While, lastly, the race
+of Shem, the Jews, and the nations of Christendom, their _locum
+tenentes_ as the Spiritual Israel, have, by God's blessing, been
+elevated in Spirit to as near and intimate communion with Deity as is
+possible in this stage of being. Now the peculiar interest and dignity
+of Art consists in her exact correspondence in her three departments
+with these three periods of development, and in the illustration she
+thus affords--more closely and markedly even than literature--to the
+all-important truth that men stand or fall according as they look up to
+the Ideal or not. For example, the Architecture of Egypt, her pyramids
+and temples, cumbrous and inelegant, but imposing from their vastness
+and their gloom, express the ideal of Sense or Matter--elevated and
+purified indeed, and nearly approaching the Intellectual, but Material
+still; we think of them as of natural scenery, in association with caves
+or mountains, or vast periods of time; their voice is as the voice of
+the sea, or as that of 'many peoples,' shouting in unison:--But the
+Sculpture of Greece is the voice of Intellect and Thought, communing
+with itself in solitude, feeding on beauty and yearning after
+truth:--While the Painting of Christendom--(and we must remember that
+the glories of Christianity, in the full extent of the term, are yet to
+come)--is that of an immortal Spirit, conversing with its God. And as if
+to mark more forcibly the fact of continuous progress towards
+perfection, it is observable that although each of the three arts
+peculiarly reflects and characterizes one of the three epochs, each art
+of later growth has been preceded in its rise, progress, and decline, by
+an antecedent correspondent development of its elder sister or
+sisters--Sculpture, in Greece, by that of Architecture--Painting, in
+Europe, by that of Architecture and Sculpture. If Sculpture and Painting
+stand by the side of Architecture in Egypt, if Painting by that of
+Architecture and Sculpture in Greece, it is as younger sisters, girlish
+and unformed. In Europe alone are the three found linked together, in
+equal stature and perfection."--Vol. i, pp. xii.--xiv.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+28. The reader must, we think, at once perceive the bold fallacy of this
+forced analogy--the comparison of the architecture of one nation with
+the sculpture of another, and the painting of a third, and the
+assumption as a proof of difference in moral character, of changes
+necessarily wrought, always in the same order, by the advance of mere
+mechanical experience. Architecture must precede sculpture, not because
+sense precedes intellect, but because men must build houses before they
+adorn chambers, and raise shrines before they inaugurate idols; and
+sculpture must precede painting, because men must learn forms in the
+solid before they can project them on a flat surface, and must learn to
+conceive designs in light and shade before they can conceive them in
+color, and must learn to treat subjects under positive color and in
+narrow groups, before they can treat them under atmospheric effect and
+in receding masses, and all these are mere necessities of practice, and
+have no more connection with any divisions of the human mind than the
+equally paramount necessities that men must gather stones before they
+build walls, or grind corn before they bake bread. And that each
+following nation should take up either the same art at an advanced
+stage, or an art altogether more difficult, is nothing but the necessary
+consequence of its subsequent elevation and civilization. Whatever
+nation had succeeded Egypt in power and knowledge, after having had
+communication with her, must necessarily have taken up art at the point
+where Egypt left it--in its turn delivering the gathered globe of
+heavenly snow to the youthful energy of the nation next at hand, with an
+exhausted "à vous le dé!" In order to arrive at any useful or true
+estimate of the respective rank of each people in the scale of mind, the
+architecture of each must be compared with the architecture of the
+other--sculpture with sculpture--line with line; and to have done this
+broadly and with a surface glance, would have set our author's theory on
+firmer foundation, to outward aspect, than it now rests upon. Had he
+compared the accumulation of the pyramid with the proportion of the
+peristyle, and then with the aspiration of the spire; had he set the
+colossal horror of the Sphinx beside the Phidian Minerva, and this
+beside the Pietà of M. Angelo; had he led us from beneath the iridescent
+capitals of Denderah, by the contested line of Apelles, to the hues and
+the heaven of Perugino or Bellini, we might have been tempted to
+assoilzie from all staying of question or stroke of partisan the
+invulnerable aspect of his ghostly theory; but, if, with even partial
+regard to some of the circumstances which physically limited the
+attainments of each race, we follow their individual career, we shall
+find the points of superiority less salient and the connection between
+heart and hand more embarrassed.
+
+29. Yet let us not be misunderstood:--the great gulf between Christian
+and Pagan art we cannot bridge--nor do we wish to weaken one single
+sentence wherein its breadth or depth is asserted by our author. The
+separation is not gradual, but instant and final--the difference not of
+degree, but of condition; it is the difference between the dead vapors
+rising from a stagnant pool, and the same vapors touched by a torch. But
+we would brace the weakness which Lord Lindsay has admitted in his own
+assertion of this great inflaming instant by confusing its fire with the
+mere phosphorescence of the marsh, and explaining as a successive
+development of the several human faculties, what was indeed the bearing
+of them all at once, over a threshold strewed with the fragments of
+their idols, into the temple of the One God.
+
+We shall therefore, as fully as our space admits, examine the
+application of our author's theory to Architecture, Sculpture, and
+Painting, successively, setting before the reader some of the more
+interesting passages which respect each art, while we at the same time
+mark with what degree of caution their conclusions are, in our judgment,
+to be received.
+
+30. Accepting Lord Lindsay's first reference to Egypt, let us glance at
+a few of the physical accidents which influenced its types of
+architecture. The first of these is evidently the capability of carriage
+of large blocks of stone over perfectly level land. It was possible to
+roll to their destination along that uninterrupted plain, blocks which
+could neither by the Greek have been shipped in seaworthy vessels, nor
+carried over mountain-passes, nor raised except by extraordinary effort
+to the height of the rock-built fortress or seaward promontory. A small
+undulation of surface, or embarrassment of road, makes large difference
+in the portability of masses, and of consequence, in the breadth of the
+possible intercolumniation, the solidity of the column, and the whole
+scale of the building. Again, in a hill-country, architecture can be
+important only by position, in a level country only by bulk. Under the
+overwhelming mass of mountain-form it is vain to attempt the expression
+of majesty by size of edifice--the humblest architecture may become
+important by availing itself of the power of nature, but the mightiest
+must be crushed in emulating it: the watch-towers of Amalfi are more
+majestic than the Superga of Piedmont; St. Peter's would look like a toy
+if built beneath the Alpine cliffs, which yet vouchsafe some
+communication of their own solemnity to the smallest chalet that
+glitters among their glades of pine. On the other hand, a small building
+is in a level country lost, and the impressiveness of bulk
+proportionably increased; hence the instinct of nations has always led
+them to the loftiest efforts where the masses of their labor might be
+seen looming at incalculable distance above the open line of the
+horizon--hence rose her four square mountains above the flat of Memphis,
+while the Greek pierced the recesses of Phigaleia with ranges of
+columns, or crowned the sea-cliffs of Sunium with a single pediment,
+bright, but not colossal.
+
+31. The derivation of the Greek types of form from the forest-hut is too
+direct to escape observation; but sufficient attention has not been paid
+to the similar petrifaction, by other nations, of the rude forms and
+materials adopted in the haste of early settlement, or consecrated by
+the purity of rural life. The whole system of Swiss and German Gothic
+has thus been most characteristically affected by the structure of the
+intersecting timbers at the angles of the chalet. This was in some cases
+directly and without variation imitated in stone, as in the piers of the
+old bridge at Aarburg; and the practice obtained--partially in the
+German after-Gothic--universally, or nearly so, in Switzerland--of
+causing moldings which met at an angle to appear to interpenetrate each
+other, both being truncated immediately beyond the point of
+intersection. The painfulness of this ill-judged adaptation was
+conquered by association--the eye became familiarized to uncouth forms
+of tracery--and a stiffness and meagerness, as of cast-iron, resulted in
+the moldings of much of the ecclesiastical, and all the domestic Gothic
+of central Europe; the moldings of casements intersecting so as to form
+a small hollow square at the angles, and the practice being further
+carried out into all modes of decoration--pinnacles interpenetrating
+crockets, as in a peculiarly bold design of archway at Besançon. The
+influence at Venice has been less immediate and more fortunate; it is
+with peculiar grace that the majestic form of the ducal palace reminds
+us of the years of fear and endurance when the exiles of the Prima
+Venetia settled like home-less birds on the sea-sand, and that its
+quadrangular range of marble wall and painted chamber, raised upon
+multiplied columns of confused arcade,[6] presents but the exalted image
+of the first pile-supported hut that rose above the rippling of the
+lagoons.
+
+32. In the chapter on the "Influence of Habit and Religion," of Mr.
+Hope's Historical Essay,[7] the reader will find further instances of
+the same feeling, and, bearing immediately on our present purpose, a
+clear account of the derivation of the Egyptian temple from the
+excavated cavern; but the point to which in all these cases we would
+direct especial attention, is, that the first perception of the great
+laws of architectural _proportion_ is dependent for its acuteness less
+on the æsthetic instinct of each nation than on the mechanical
+conditions of stability and natural limitations of size in the primary
+type, whether hut, châlet, or tent.
+
+As by the constant reminiscence of the natural proportions of his first
+forest-dwelling, the Greek would be restrained from all inordinate
+exaggeration of size--the Egyptian was from the first left without hint
+of any system of proportion, whether constructive, or of visible parts.
+The cavern--its level roof supported by amorphous piers--might be
+extended indefinitely into the interior of the hills, and its outer
+façade continued almost without term along their flanks--the solid mass
+of cliff above forming one gigantic entablature, poised upon props
+instead of columns. Hence the predisposition to attempt in the built
+temple the expression of infinite extent, and to heap the ponderous
+architrave above the proportionless pier.
+
+33. The less direct influences of external nature in the two countries
+were still more opposed. The sense of beauty, which among the Greek
+peninsulas was fostered by beating of sea and rush of river, by waving
+of forest and passing of cloud, by undulation of hill and poise of
+precipice, lay dormant beneath the shadowless sky and on the objectless
+plain of the Egyptians; no singing winds nor shaking leaves nor gliding
+shadows gave life to the line of their barren mountains--no Goddess of
+Beauty rose from the pacing of their silent and foamless Nile. One
+continual perception of stability, or changeless revolution, weighed
+upon their hearts--their life depended on no casual alternation of cold
+and heat--of drought and shower; their gift-Gods were the risen River
+and the eternal Sun, and the types of these were forever consecrated in
+the lotus decoration of the temple and the wedge of the enduring
+Pyramid. Add to these influences, purely physical, those dependent on
+the superstitions and political constitution; of the overflowing
+multitude of "populous No"; on their condition of prolonged peace--their
+simple habits of life--their respect for the dead--their separation by
+incommunicable privilege and inherited occupation--and it will be
+evident to the reader that Lord Lindsay's broad assertion of the
+expression of "the Ideal of Sense or Matter" by their universal style,
+must be received with severe modification, and is indeed thus far only
+true, that the mass of Life supported upon that fruitful plain could,
+when swayed by a despotic ruler in any given direction, accomplish by
+mere weight and number what to other nations had been impossible, and
+bestow a pre-eminence, owed to mere bulk and evidence of labor, upon
+public works which among the Greek republics could be rendered admirable
+only by the intelligence of their design.
+
+34. Let us, for the present omitting consideration of the debasement of
+the Greek types which took place when their cycle of achievement had
+been fulfilled, pass to the germination of Christian architecture, out
+of one of the least important elements of those fallen forms--one which,
+less than the least of all seeds, has risen into the fair branching
+stature under whose shadow we still dwell.
+
+The principal characteristics of the new architecture, as exhibited in
+the Lombard cathedral, are well sketched by Lord Lindsay:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"The three most prominent features, the eastern aspect of the sanctuary,
+the cruciform plan, and the soaring octagonal cupola, are borrowed from
+Byzantium--the latter in an improved form--the cross with a
+difference--the nave, or arm opposite the sanctuary, being lengthened so
+as to resemble the supposed shape of the actual instrument of suffering,
+and form what is now distinctively called the Latin Cross. The crypt and
+absis, or tribune, are retained from the Romish basilica, but the absis
+is generally pierced with windows, and the crypt is much loftier and
+more spacious, assuming almost the appearance of a subterranean church.
+The columns of the nave, no longer isolated, are clustered so as to form
+compound piers, massive and heavy--their capitals either a rude
+imitation of the Corinthian, or, especially in the earlier structures,
+sculptured with grotesque imagery. Triforia, or galleries for women,
+frequently line the nave and transepts. The roof is of stone, and
+vaulted. The narthex, or portico, for excluded penitents, common alike
+to the Greek and Roman churches, and in them continued along the whole
+façade of entrance, is dispensed with altogether in the oldest Lombard
+ones, and when afterwards resumed, in the eleventh century, was
+restricted to what we should now call Porches, over each door,
+consisting generally of little more than a canopy open at the sides, and
+supported by slender pillars, resting on sculptured monsters. Three
+doors admit from the western front; these are generally covered with
+sculpture, which frequently extends in belts across the façade, and even
+along the sides of the building. Above the central door is usually seen,
+in the later Lombard churches, a S. Catherine's-wheel window. The roof
+slants at the sides, and ends in front sometimes in a single pediment,
+sometimes in three gables answering to three doors; while, in Lombardy
+at least, hundreds of slender pillars, of every form and device--those
+immediately adjacent to each other frequently interlaced in the true
+lover's knot, and all supporting round or trefoliate arches--run along,
+in continuous galleries, under the eaves, as if for the purpose of
+supporting the roof--run up the pediment in front, are continued along
+the side-walls and round the eastern absis, and finally engirdle the
+cupola. Sometimes the western front is absolutely covered with these
+galleries, rising tier above tier. Though introduced merely for
+ornament, and therefore on a vicious principle, these fairy-like
+colonnades win very much on one's affections. I may add to these general
+features the occasional and rare one, seen to peculiar advantage in the
+cathedral of Cremona, of numerous slender towers, rising, like minarets,
+in every direction, in front and behind, and giving the east end,
+specially, a marked resemblance to the mosques of the Mahometans.
+
+"The Baptistery and the Campanile, or bell-tower, are in theory
+invariable adjuncts to the Lombard cathedral, although detached from it.
+The Lombards seem to have built them with peculiar zest, and to have had
+a keen eye for the picturesque in grouping them with the churches they
+belong to.
+
+"I need scarcely add that the round arch is exclusively employed in pure
+Lombard architecture.
+
+"To translate this new style into its symbolical language is a
+pleasurable task. The three doors and three gable ends signify the
+Trinity, the Catherine-wheel window (if I mistake not) the Unity, as
+concentrated in Christ, the Light of the Church, from whose Greek
+monogram its shape was probably adopted. The monsters that support the
+pillars of the porch stand there as talismans to frighten away evil
+spirits. The crypt (as in older buildings) signifies the moral death of
+man, the cross, the atonement, the cupola heaven; and these three,
+taken in conjunction with the lengthened nave, express, reconcile, and
+give their due and balanced prominence to the leading ideas of the
+Militant and Triumphant Church, respectively embodied in the
+architecture of Rome and Byzantium. Add to this, the symbolism of the
+Baptistery, and the Christian pilgrimage, from the Font to the Door of
+Heaven, is complete,"--Vol. ii., p. 8-11.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+35. We have by-and-bye an equally comprehensive sketch of the essential
+characters of the Gothic cathedral; but this we need not quote, as it
+probably contains little that would be new to the reader. It is
+succeeded by the following interpretation of the spirit of the two
+styles:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Comparing, apart from enthusiasm, the two styles of Lombard and Pointed
+Architecture, they will strike you, I think, as the expression,
+respectively, of that alternate repose and activity which characterize
+the Christian life, exhibited in perfect harmony in Christ alone, who,
+on earth, spent His night in prayer to God, His day in doing good to
+man--in heaven, as we know by His own testimony, 'worketh hitherto,'
+conjointly with the Father--forever, at the same time, reposing on the
+infinity of His wisdom and of His power. Each, then, of these styles has
+its peculiar significance, each is perfect in its way. The Lombard
+Architecture, with its horizontal lines, its circular arches and
+expanding cupola, soothes and calms one; the Gothic, with its pointed
+arches, aspiring vaults and intricate tracery, rouses and excites--and
+why? Because the one symbolizes an infinity of Rest, the other of
+Action, in the adoration and service of God. And this consideration will
+enable us to advance a step farther:--The aim of the one style is
+definite, of the other indefinite; we look up to the dome of heaven and
+calmly acquiesce in the abstract idea of infinity; but we only realize
+the impossibility of conceiving it by the flight of imagination from
+star to star, from firmament to firmament. Even so Lombard Architecture
+attained perfection, expressed its idea, accomplished its purpose--but
+Gothic never; the Ideal is unapproachable."--Vol. ii., p. 23.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+36. This idea occurs not only in this passage:--it is carried out
+through the following chapters;--at page 38, the pointed arch associated
+with the cupola is spoken of as a "fop interrupting the meditations of a
+philosopher"; at page 65, the "earlier contemplative style of the
+Lombards" is spoken of; at page 114, Giottesque art is "the expression
+of that Activity of the Imagination which produced Gothic Architecture";
+and, throughout, the analogy is prettily expressed, and ably supported;
+yet it is one of those against which we must warn the reader: it is
+altogether superficial, and extends not to the minds of those whose
+works it accidentally, and we think disputably, characterizes. The
+transition from Romanesque (we prefer using the generic term) to Gothic
+is natural and straightforward, in many points traceable to mechanical
+and local necessities (of which one, the dangerous weight of snow on
+flat roofs, has been candidly acknowledged by our author), and directed
+by the tendency, common to humanity in all ages, to push every
+newly-discovered means of delight to its most fantastic extreme, to
+exhibit every newly-felt power in its most admirable achievement, and to
+load with intrinsic decoration forms whose essential varieties have been
+exhausted. The arch, carelessly struck out by the Etruscan, forced by
+mechanical expediencies on the unwilling, uninventive Roman, remained
+unfelt by either. The noble form of the apparent Vault of Heaven--the
+line which every star follows in its journeying, extricated by the
+Christian architect from the fosse, the aqueduct, and the sudarium--grew
+into long succession of proportioned colonnade, and swelled into the
+white domes that glitter above the plain of Pisa, and fretted channels
+of Venice, like foam globes at rest.
+
+37. But the spirit that was in these Aphrodites of the earth was not
+then, nor in them, to be restrained. Colonnade rose over colonnade; the
+pediment of the western front was lifted into a detached and scenic
+wall; story above story sprang the multiplied arches of the Campanile,
+and the eastern pyramidal fire-type, lifted from its foundation, was
+placed upon the summit. With the superimposed arcades of the principal
+front arose the necessity, instantly felt by their subtle architects, of
+a new proportion in the column; the lower wall inclosure, necessarily
+for the purposes of Christian worship continuous, and needing no
+peristyle, rendered the lower columns a mere facial decoration, whose
+proportions were evidently no more to be regulated by the laws hitherto
+observed in detached colonnades. The column expanded into the shaft, or
+into the huge pilaster rising unbanded from tier to tier; shaft and
+pilaster were associated in ordered groups, and the ideas of singleness
+and limited elevation once attached to them, swept away for ever; the
+stilted and variously centered arch existed already: the pure ogive
+followed--where first exhibited we stay not to inquire;--finally, and
+chief of all, the great mechanical discovery of the resistance of
+lateral pressure by the weight of the superimposed flanking pinnacle.
+Daring concentrations of pressure upon narrow piers were the immediate
+consequence, and the recognition of the buttress as a feature in itself
+agreeable and susceptible of decoration. The glorious art of painting on
+glass added its temptations; the darkness of northern climes both
+rendering the typical character of Light more deeply felt than in Italy,
+and necessitating its admission in larger masses; the Italian, even at
+the period of his most exquisite art in glass, retaining the small
+Lombard window, whose expediency will hardly be doubted by anyone who
+has experienced the transition from the scorching reverberation of the
+white-hot marble front, to the cool depth of shade within, and whose
+beauty will not be soon forgotten by those who have seen the narrow
+lights of the Pisan duomo announce by their redder burning, not like
+transparent casements, but like characters of fire searing the western
+wall, the decline of day upon Capraja.
+
+38. Here, then, arose one great distinction between Northern and
+Transalpine Gothic, based, be it still observed, on mere necessities of
+climate. While the architect of Santa Maria Novella admitted to the
+frescoes of Ghirlandajo scarcely more of purple lancet light than had
+been shed by the morning sun through the veined alabasters of San
+Miniato; and looked to the rich blue of the quinquipartite vault above,
+as to the mosaic of the older concha, for conspicuous aid in the color
+decoration of the whole; the northern builder burst through the walls of
+his apse, poured over the eastern altar one unbroken blaze, and lifting
+his shafts like pines, and his walls like precipices, ministered to
+their miraculous stability by an infinite phalanx of sloped buttress and
+glittering pinnacle. The spire was the natural consummation. Internally,
+the sublimity of space in the cupola had been superseded by another kind
+of infinity in the prolongation of the nave; externally, the spherical
+surface had been proved, by the futility of Arabian efforts, incapable
+of decoration; its majesty depended on its simplicity, and its
+simplicity and leading forms were alike discordant with the rich
+rigidity of the body of the building. The campanile became, therefore,
+principal and central; its pyramidal termination was surrounded at the
+base by a group of pinnacles, and the spire itself, banded, or pierced
+into aërial tracery, crowned with its last enthusiastic effort the
+flamelike ascent of the perfect pile.
+
+39. The process of change was thus consistent throughout, though at
+intervals accelerated by the sudden discovery of resource, or invention
+of design; nor, had the steps been less traceable, do we think the
+suggestiveness of Repose, in the earlier style, or of Imaginative
+Activity in the latter, definite or trustworthy. We much question
+whether the Duomo of Verona, with its advanced guard of haughty
+gryphons--the mailed peers of Charlemagne frowning from its vaulted
+gate,--that vault itself ribbed with variegated marbles, and peopled by
+a crowd of monsters---the Evangelical types not the least stern or
+strange; its stringcourses replaced by flat cut friezes, combats between
+gryphons and chain-clad paladins, stooping behind their triangular
+shields and fetching sweeping blows with two-handled swords; or that of
+Lucca--its fantastic columns clasped by writhing snakes and winged
+dragons, their marble scales spotted with inlaid serpentine, every
+available space alive with troops of dwarfish riders, with spur on heel
+and hawk in hood, sounding huge trumpets of chase, like those of the
+Swiss Urus-horn, and cheering herds of gaping dogs upon harts and hares,
+boars and wolves, every stone signed with its grisly beast--be one whit
+more soothing to the contemplative, or less exciting to the imaginative
+faculties, than the successive arch? and visionary shaft, and dreamy
+vault, and crisped foliage, and colorless stone, of our own fair abbeys,
+checkered with sunshine through the depth of ancient branches, or seen
+far off, like clouds in the valley, risen out of the pause of its river.
+
+40. And with respect to the more fitful and fantastic expression of the
+"Italian Gothic," our author is again to be blamed for his loose
+assumption, from the least reflecting of preceding writers, of this
+general term, as if the pointed buildings of Italy could in any wise be
+arranged in one class, or criticised in general terms. It is true that
+so far as the church interiors are concerned, the system is nearly
+universal, and always bad; its characteristic features being arches of
+enormous span, and banded foliage capitals divided into three fillets,
+rude in design, unsuggestive of any structural connection with the
+column, and looking consequently as if they might be slipped up or down,
+and had been only fastened in their places for the temporary purposes of
+a festa. But the exteriors of Italian pointed buildings display
+variations of principle and transitions of type quite as bold as either
+the advance from the Romanesque to the earliest of their forms, or the
+recoil from their latest to the cinque-cento.
+
+41. The first and grandest style resulted merely from the application of
+the pointed arch to the frequent Romanesque window, the large
+semicircular arch divided by three small ones. Pointing both the
+superior and inferior arches, and adding to the grace of the larger one
+by striking another arch above it with a more removed center, and
+placing the voussoirs at an acute angle to the curve, we have the truly
+noble form of domestic Gothic, which--more or less enriched by moldings
+and adorned by penetration, more or less open of the space between the
+including and inferior arches--was immediately adopted in almost all the
+proudest palaces of North Italy--in the Brolettos of Como, Bergamo,
+Modena, and Siena---in the palace of the Scaligers at Verona--of the
+Gambacorti at Pisa--of Paolo Guinigi at Lucca--besides inferior
+buildings innumerable:--nor is there any form of civil Gothic except the
+Venetian, which can be for a moment compared with it in simplicity or
+power. The latest is that most vicious and barbarous style of which the
+richest types are the lateral porches and upper pinnacles of the
+Cathedral of Como, and the whole of the Certosa of Pavia:--characterized
+by the imitative sculpture of large buildings on a small scale by way of
+pinnacles and niches; the substitution of candelabra for columns; and
+the covering of the surfaces with sculpture, often of classical subject,
+in high relief and daring perspective, and finished with delicacy which
+rather would demand preservation in a cabinet, and exhibition under a
+lens, than admit of exposure to the weather and removal from the eye,
+and which, therefore, architecturally considered, is worse than
+valueless, telling merely as unseemly roughness and rustication. But
+between these two extremes are varieties nearly countless--some of them
+both strange and bold, owing to the brilliant color and firm texture of
+the accessible materials, and the desire of the builders to crowd the
+greatest expression of value into the smallest space.
+
+42. Thus it is in the promontories of serpentine which meet with their
+polished and gloomy green the sweep of the Gulf of Genoa, that we find
+the first cause of the peculiar spirit of the Tuscan and Ligurian
+Gothic--carried out in the Florentine duomo to the highest pitch of
+colored finish--adorned in the upper story of the Campanile by a
+transformation, peculiarly rich and exquisite, of the narrowly-pierced
+heading of window already described, into a veil of tracery--and aided
+throughout by an accomplished precision of design in its moldings which
+we believe to be unique. In St. Petronio of Bologna, another and a
+barbarous type occurs; the hollow niche of Northern Gothic wrought out
+with diamond-shaped penetrations inclosed in squares; at Bergamo
+another, remarkable for the same square penetrations of its rich and
+daring foliation;--while at Monza and Carrara the square is adopted as
+the leading form of decoration on the west fronts, and a grotesque
+expression results--barbarous still;--which, however, in the latter
+duomo is associated with the arcade of slender niches--the translation
+of the Romanesque arcade into pointed work, which forms the second
+perfect order of Italian Gothic, entirely ecclesiastical, and well
+developed in the churches of Santa Caterina and Santa Maria della Spina
+at Pisa. The Veronese Gothic, distinguished by the extreme purity and
+severity of its ruling lines, owing to the distance of the centers of
+circles from which its cusps are struck, forms another, and yet a more
+noble school--and passes through the richer decoration of Padua and
+Vicenza to the full magnificence of the Venetian--distinguished by the
+introduction of the ogee curve without pruriency or effeminacy, and by
+the breadth and decision of moldings as severely determined in all
+examples of the style as those of any one of the Greek orders.
+
+43. All these groups are separated by distinctions clear and bold--and
+many of them by that broadest of all distinctions which lies between
+disorganization and consistency--accumulation and adaptation, experiment
+and design;--yet to all one or two principles are common, which again
+divide the whole series from that of the Transalpine Gothic--and whose
+importance Lord Lindsay too lightly passes over in the general
+description, couched in somewhat ungraceful terms, "the vertical
+principle snubbed, as it were, by the horizontal." We have already
+alluded to the great school of color which arose in the immediate
+neighborhood of the Genoa serpentine. The accessibility of marble
+throughout North Italy similarly modified the aim of all design, by the
+admission of undecorated surfaces. A blank space of freestone wall is
+always uninteresting, and sometimes offensive; there is no suggestion of
+preciousness in its dull color, and the stains and rents of time upon it
+are dark, coarse, and gloomy. But a marble surface receives in its age
+hues of continually increasing glow and grandeur; its stains are never
+foul nor dim; its undecomposing surface preserves a soft, fruit-like
+polish forever, slowly flushed by the maturing suns of centuries. Hence,
+while in the Northern Gothic the effort of the architect was always so
+to diffuse his ornament as to prevent the eye from permanently resting
+on the blank material, the Italian fearlessly left fallow large fields
+of uncarved surface, and concentrated the labor of the chisel on
+detached portions, in which the eye, being rather directed to them by
+their isolation than attracted by their salience, required perfect
+finish and pure design rather than force of shade or breadth of parts;
+and further, the intensity of Italian sunshine articulated by perfect
+gradations, and defined by sharp shadows at the edge, such inner anatomy
+and minuteness of outline as would have been utterly vain and valueless
+under the gloom of a northern sky; while again the fineness of material
+both admitted of, and allured to, the precision of execution which the
+climate was calculated to exhibit.
+
+44. All these influences working together, and with them that of
+classical example and tradition, induced a delicacy of expression, a
+slightness of salience, a carefulness of touch, and refinement of
+invention, in all, even the rudest, Italian decorations, utterly
+unrecognized in those of Northern Gothic: which, however picturesquely
+adapted to their place and purpose, depend for most of their effect upon
+bold undercutting, accomplish little beyond graceful embarrassment of
+the eye, and cannot for an instant be separately regarded as works of
+accomplished art. Even the later and more imitative examples profess
+little more than picturesque vigor or ingenious intricacy. The oak
+leaves and acorns of the Beauvais moldings are superbly wreathed, but
+rigidly repeated in a constant pattern; the stems are without character,
+and the acorns huge, straight, blunt, and unsightly. Round the southern
+door of the Florentine duomo runs a border of fig-leaves, each leaf
+modulated as if dew had just dried from off it--yet each alike, so as to
+secure the ordered symmetry of classical enrichment. But the Gothic
+fullness of thought is not therefore left without expression; at the
+edge of each leaf is an animal, first a cicala, then a lizard, then a
+bird, moth, serpent, snail--all different, and each wrought to the very
+life--panting--plumy--writhing--glittering--full of breath and power.
+This harmony of classical restraint with exhaustless fancy, and of
+architectural propriety with imitative finish, is found throughout all
+the fine periods of the Italian Gothic, opposed to the wildness without
+invention, and exuberance without completion, of the North.
+
+45. One other distinction we must notice, in the treatment of the Niche
+and its accessories. In Northern Gothic the niche frequently consists
+only of a bracket and canopy--the latter attached to the wall,
+independent of columnar support, pierced into openwork profusely rich,
+and often prolonged upwards into a crocketed pinnacle of indefinite
+height. But in the niche of pure Italian Gothic the classic principle of
+columnar support is never lost sight of. Even when its canopy is
+actually supported by the wall behind, it is apparently supported by two
+columns in front, perfectly formed with bases and capitals:--(the
+support of the Northern niche--if it have any--commonly takes the form
+of a buttress):--when it appears as a detached pinnacle, it is supported
+on four columns, the canopy trefoliated with very obtuse cusps, richly
+charged with foliage in the foliating space, but undecorated at the cusp
+points, and terminating above in a smooth pyramid, void of all ornament,
+and never very acute. This form, modified only by various grouping, is
+that of the noble sepulchral monuments of Verona, Lucca, Pisa, and
+Bologna; on a small scale it is at Venice associated with the cupola,
+in St. Mark's, as well as in Santa Fosca, and other minor churches. At
+Pisa, in the Spina chapel it occurs in its most exquisite form, the
+columns there being chased with checker patterns of great elegance. The
+windows of the Florence cathedral are all placed under a flat canopy of
+the same form, the columns being elongated, twisted, and enriched with
+mosaic patterns. The reader must at once perceive how vast is the
+importance of the difference in system with respect to this member; the
+whole of the rich, cavernous chiaroscuro of Northern Gothic being
+dependent on the accumulation of its niches.
+
+46. In passing to the examination of our Author's theory as tested by
+the progress of Sculpture, we are still struck by his utter want of
+attention to physical advantages or difficulties. He seems to have
+forgotten from the first, that the mountains of Syene are not the rocks
+of Paros. Neither the social habits nor intellectual powers of the Greek
+had so much share in inducing his advance in Sculpture beyond the
+Egyptian, as the difference between marble and syenite, porphyry or
+alabaster. Marble not only gave the power, it actually introduced the
+_thought_ of representation or realization of form, as opposed to the
+mere suggestive abstraction: its translucency, tenderness of surface,
+and equality of tint tempting by utmost reward to the finish which of
+all substances it alone admits:--even ivory receiving not so delicately,
+as alabaster endures not so firmly, the lightest, latest touches of the
+completing chisel. The finer feeling of the hand cannot be put upon a
+hard rock like syenite--the blow must be firm and fearless--the
+traceless, tremulous difference between common and immortal sculpture
+cannot be set upon it--it cannot receive the enchanted strokes which,
+like Aaron's incense, separate the Living and the Dead. Were it
+otherwise, were finish possible, the variegated and lustrous surface
+would not exhibit it to the eye. The imagination itself is blunted by
+the resistance of the material, and by the necessity of absolute
+predetermination of all it would achieve. Retraction of all thought into
+determined and simple forms, such as might be fearlessly wrought,
+necessarily remained the characteristic of the school. The size of the
+edifice induced by other causes above stated, further limited the
+efforts of the sculptor. No colossal figure can be minutely finished;
+nor can it easily be conceived except under an imperfect form. It is a
+representation of Impossibility, and every effort at completion adds to
+the monstrous sense of Impossibility. Space would altogether fail us
+were we even to name one-half of the circumstances which influence the
+treatment of light and shade to be seen at vast distances upon surfaces
+of variegated or dusky color; or of the necessities by which, in masses
+of huge proportion, the mere laws of gravity, and the difficulty of
+clearing the substance out of vast hollows neither to be reached nor
+entered, bind the realization of absolute form. Yet all these Lord
+Lindsay ought rigidly to have examined, before venturing to determine
+anything respecting the mental relations of the Greek and Egyptian. But
+the fact of his overlooking these inevitablenesses of material is
+intimately connected with the worst flaw of his theory--his idea of a
+Perfection resultant from a balance of elements; a perfection which all
+experience has shown to be neither desirable nor possible.
+
+47. His account of Niccola Pisano, the founder of the first great school
+of middle age sculpture, is thus introduced:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Niccola's peculiar praise is this,--that, in practice at least, if not
+in theory, he first established the principle that the study of nature,
+corrected by the ideal of the antique, and animated by the spirit of
+Christianity, personal and social, can alone lead to excellence in
+art:--each of the three elements of human nature--Matter, Mind, and
+Spirit--being thus brought into union and co-operation in the service of
+God, in due relative harmony and subordination. I cannot over-estimate
+the importance of this principle; it was on this that, consciously or
+unconsciously, Niccola himself worked--it has been by following it that
+Donatello and Ghiberti, Leonardo, Raphael, and Michael Angelo have
+risen to glory. The Sienese school and the Florentine, minds
+contemplative and dramatic, are alike beholden to it for whatever
+success has attended their efforts. Like a treble-stranded rope, it
+drags after it the triumphal car of Christian Art. But if either of the
+strands be broken, if either of the three elements be pursued
+disjointedly from the other two, the result is, in each respective case,
+grossness, pedantry, or weakness:--the exclusive imitation of Nature
+produces a Caravaggio, a Rubens, a Rembrandt--that of the Antique, a
+Pellegrino di Tibaldo and a David; and though there be a native chastity
+and taste in religion, which restrains those who worship it too
+abstractedly from Intellect and Sense, from running into such extremes,
+it cannot at least supply that mechanical apparatus which will enable
+them to soar:--such devotees must be content to gaze up into heaven,
+like angels cropt of their wings."--Vol. ii., p. 102-3.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+48. This is mere Bolognese eclecticism in other terms, and those terms
+incorrect. We are amazed to find a writer usually thoughtful, if not
+accurate, thus indolently adopting the worn-out falsities of our weakest
+writers on Taste. Does he--can he for an instant suppose that the
+ruffian Caravaggio, distinguished only by his preference of candlelight
+and black shadows for the illustration and re-enforcement of villainy,
+painted nature--mere nature--exclusive nature, more painfully or
+heartily than John Bellini or Raphael? Does he not see that whatever men
+imitate must be nature of some kind, material nature or spiritual,
+lovely or foul, brutal or human, but nature still? Does he himself see
+in mere, external, copyable nature, no more than Caravaggio saw, or in
+the Antique no more than has been comprehended by David? The fact is,
+that all artists are primarily divided into the two great groups of
+Imitators and Suggesters--their falling into one or other being
+dependent partly on disposition, and partly on the matter they have to
+subdue--(thus Perugino imitates line by line with penciled gold, the
+hair which Nino Pisano can only suggest by a gilded marble mass, both
+having the will of representation alike). And each of these classes is
+again divided into the faithful and unfaithful imitators and suggesters;
+and that is a broad question of blind eye and hard heart, or seeing eye
+and serious heart, always co-existent; and then the faithful imitators
+and suggesters--artists proper, are appointed, each with his peculiar
+gift and affection, over the several orders and classes of things
+natural, to be by them illumined and set forth.
+
+49. And that is God's doing and distributing; and none is rashly to be
+thought inferior to another, as if by his own fault; nor any of them
+stimulated to emulation, and changing places with others, although their
+allotted tasks be of different dignities, and their granted instruments
+of different keenness; for in none of them can there be a perfection or
+balance of all human attributes;--the great colorist becomes gradually
+insensible to the refinements of form which he at first intentionally
+omitted; the master of line is inevitably dead to many of the delights
+of color; the study of the true or ideal human form is inconsistent with
+the love of its most spiritual expressions. To one it is intrusted to
+record the historical realities of his age; in him the perception of
+character is subtle, and that of abstract beauty in measure diminished;
+to another, removed to the desert, or inclosed in the cloister, is
+given, not the noting of things transient, but the revealing of things
+eternal. Ghirlandajo and Titian painted men, but could not angels;
+Duccio and Angelico painted Saints, but could not senators. One is
+ordered to copy material form lovingly and slowly--his the fine finger
+and patient will: to another are sent visions and dreams upon the
+bed--his the hand fearful and swift, and impulse of passion irregular
+and wild. We may have occasion further to insist upon this great
+principle of the incommunicableness and singleness of all the highest
+powers; but we assert it here especially, in opposition to the idea,
+already so fatal to art, that either the aim of the antique may take
+place together with the purposes, or its traditions become elevatory of
+the power, of Christian art; or that the glories of Giotto and the
+Sienese are in any wise traceable through Niccola Pisano to the
+venerable relics of the Campo Santo.
+
+50. Lord Lindsay's statement, as far as it regards Niccola himself, is
+true.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"His improvement in Sculpture is attributable, in the first instance, to
+the study of an ancient sarcophagus, brought from Greece by the ships of
+Pisa in the eleventh century, and which, after having stood beside the
+door of the Duomo for many centuries as the tomb of the Countess
+Beatrice, mother of the celebrated Matilda, has been recently removed to
+the Campo Santo. The front is sculptured in bas-relief, in two
+compartments, the one representing Hippolytus rejecting the suit of
+Phædra, the other his departure for the chase:--such at least is the
+most plausible interpretation. The sculpture, if not super-excellent, is
+substantially good, and the benefit derived from it by Niccola is
+perceptible on the slightest examination of his works. Other remains of
+antiquity are preserved at Pisa, which he may have also studied, but
+this was the classic well from which he drew those waters which became
+wine when poured into the hallowing chalice of Christianity. I need
+scarcely add that the mere presence of such models would have availed
+little, had not nature endowed him with the quick eye and the intuitive
+apprehension of genius, together with a purity of taste which taught him
+how to select, how to modify and how to reinspire the germs of
+excellence thus presented to him."--Vol. ii., pp. 104, 105.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+51. But whatever characters peculiarly classical were impressed upon
+Niccola by this study, died out gradually among his scholars; and in
+Orcagna the Byzantine manner finally triumphed, leading the way to the
+purely Christian sculpture of the school of Fiesole, in its turn swept
+away by the returning wave of classicalism. The sculpture of Orcagna,
+Giotto, and Mino da Fiesole, would have been what it was, if Niccola had
+been buried in his sarcophagus; and this is sufficiently proved by
+Giotto's remaining entirely uninfluenced by the educated excellence of
+Andrea Pisano, while he gradually bent the Pisan down to his own
+uncompromising simplicity. If, as Lord Lindsay asserts, "Giotto had
+learned from the works of Niccola the grand principle of Christian art,"
+the sculptures of the Campanile of Florence would not now have stood
+forth in contrasted awfulness of simplicity, beside those of the south
+door of the Baptistery.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+52. "Andrea's merit was indeed very great; his works, compared with
+those of Giovanni and Niccola Pisano, exhibit a progress in design,
+grace, composition and mechanical execution, at first sight
+unaccountable--a chasm yawns between them, deep and broad, over which
+the younger artist seems to have leapt at a bound,--the stream that sank
+into the earth at Pisa emerges a river at Florence. The solution of the
+mystery lies in the peculiar plasticity of Andrea's genius, and the
+ascendency acquired over it by Giotto, although a younger man, from the
+first moment they came into contact. Giotto had learnt from the works of
+Niccola the grand principle of Christian art, imperfectly apprehended by
+Giovanni and his other pupils, and by following up which he had in the
+natural course of things improved upon his prototype. He now repaid to
+Sculpture, in the person of Andrea, the sum of improvement in which he
+stood her debtor in that of Niccola:--so far, that is to say, as the
+treasury of Andrea's mind was capable of taking it in, for it would be
+an error to suppose that Andrea profited by Giotto in the same
+independent manner or degree that Giotto profited by Niccola. Andrea's
+was not a mind of strong individuality; he became completely Giottesque
+in thought and style, and as Giotto and he continued intimate friends
+through life, the impression never wore off:--most fortunate, indeed,
+that it was so, for the welfare of Sculpture in general, and for that
+of the buildings in decorating which the friends worked in concert.
+
+"Happily, Andrea's most important work, the bronze door of the
+Baptistery, still exists, and with every prospect of preservation. It is
+adorned with bas-reliefs from the history of S. John, with allegorical
+figures of virtues and heads of prophets, all most beautiful,--the
+historical compositions distinguished by simplicity and purity of
+feeling and design, the allegorical virtues perhaps still more
+expressive, and full of poetry in their symbols and attitudes; the whole
+series is executed with a delicacy of workmanship till then unknown in
+bronze, a precision yet softness of touch resembling that of a skillful
+performer on the pianoforte. Andrea was occupied upon it for nine years,
+from 1330 to 1339, and when finished, fixed in its place, and exposed to
+view, the public enthusiasm exceeded all bounds; the Signoria, with
+unexampled condescension, visited it in state, accompanied by the
+ambassadors of Naples and Sicily, and bestowed on the fortunate artist
+the honor and privilege of citizenship, seldom accorded to foreigners
+unless of lofty rank or exalted merit. The door remained in its original
+position--facing the Cathedral--till superseded in that post of honor by
+the 'Gate of Paradise,' cast by Ghiberti. It was then transferred to the
+Southern entrance of the Baptistery, facing the Misericordia."--Vol.
+ii., pp. 125-128.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+53. A few pages farther on, the question of _Giotto's_ claim to the
+authorship of the designs for this door is discussed at length, and, to
+the annihilation of the honor here attributed to _Andrea_, determined
+affirmatively, partly on the testimony of Vasari, partly on internal
+evidence--these designs being asserted by our author to be "thoroughly
+Giottesque." But, not to dwell on Lord Lindsay's inconsistency, in the
+ultimate decision his discrimination seems to us utterly at fault.
+Giotto has, we conceive, suffered quite enough in the abduction of the
+work in the Campo Santo, which was worthy of him, without being made
+answerable for these designs of Andrea. That he gave a rough draft of
+many of them, is conceivable; but if even he did this, Andrea has added
+cadenzas of drapery, and other scholarly commonplace, as a bad singer
+puts ornament into an air. It was not of such teaching that came the
+"Jabal" of Giotto. Sitting at his tent door, he withdraws its rude
+drapery with one hand: three sheep only are feeding before him, the
+watchdog sitting beside them; but he looks forth like a Destiny,
+beholding the ruined cities of the earth become places, like the valley
+of Achor, for herds to lie down in.
+
+54. We have not space to follow our author through his very interesting
+investigation of the comparatively unknown schools of Teutonic
+sculpture. With one beautiful anecdote, breathing the whole spirit of
+the time--the mingling of deep piety with the modest, manly pride of
+art--our readers must be indulged:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"The Florentine Ghiberti gives a most interesting account of a sculptor
+of Cologne in the employment of Charles of Anjou, King of Naples, whose
+skill he parallels with that of the statuaries of ancient Greece; his
+heads, he says, and his design of the naked, were 'maravigliosamente
+bene,' his style full of grace, his sole defect the somewhat curtailed
+stature of his figures. He was no less excellent in minuter works as a
+goldsmith, and in that capacity had worked for his patron a 'tavola
+d'oro,' a tablet or screen (apparently) of gold, with his utmost care
+and skill; it was a work of exceeding beauty--but in some political
+exigency his patron wanted money, and it was broken up before his eyes.
+Seeing his labor vain and the pride of his heart rebuked, he threw
+himself on the ground, and uplifting his eyes and hands to heaven,
+prayed in contrition, 'Lord God Almighty, Governor and disposer of
+heaven and earth! Thou hast opened mine eyes that I follow from
+henceforth none other than Thee--Have mercy upon me!'--He forthwith gave
+all he had to the poor for the love of God, and went up into a mountain
+where there was a great hermitage, and dwelt there the rest of his days
+in penitence and sanctity, surviving down to the days of Pope Martin,
+who reigned from 1281 to 1284. 'Certain youths,' adds Ghiberti, 'who
+sought to be skilled in statuary, told me how he was versed both in
+painting and sculpture, and how he had painted in the Romitorio where he
+lived; he was an excellent draughtsman and very courteous. When the
+youths who wished to improve visited him, he received them with much
+humility, giving them learned instructions, showing them various
+proportions, and drawing for them many examples, for he was most
+accomplished in his art. And thus,' he concludes, 'with great humility,
+he ended his days in that hermitage.'"--Vol. iii., pp. 257-259.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+55. We could have wished that Lord Lindsay had further insisted on what
+will be found to be a characteristic of all the truly Christian or
+spiritual, as opposed to classical, schools of sculpture--the scenic or
+painter-like management of effect. The marble is not cut into the actual
+form of the thing imaged, but oftener into a perspective suggestion of
+it--the bas-reliefs sometimes almost entirely under cut, and sharpedged,
+so as to come clear off a dark ground of shadow; even heads the size of
+life being in this way rather shadowed out than carved out, as the
+Madonna of Benedetto de Majano in Santa Maria Novella, one of the cheeks
+being advanced half an inch out of its proper place--and often the most
+audacious violations of proportion admitted, as in the limbs of Michael
+Angelo's sitting Madonna in the Uffizii; all artifices, also, of deep
+and sharp cutting being allowed, to gain the shadowy and spectral
+expressions about the brow and lip which the mere actualities of form
+could not have conveyed;--the sculptor never following a material model,
+but feeling after the most momentary and subtle aspects of the
+countenance--striking these out sometimes suddenly, by rude chiseling,
+and stopping the instant they are attained--never risking the loss of
+thought by the finishing of flesh surface. The heads of the Medici
+sacristy we believe to have been thus left unfinished, as having
+already the utmost expression which the marble could receive, and
+incapable of anything but loss from further touches. So with Mino da
+Fiesole and Jacopo della Quercia, the workmanship is often hard,
+sketchy, and angular, having its full effect only at a little distance;
+but at that distance the statue becomes ineffably alive, even to
+startling, bearing an aspect of change and uncertainty, as if it were
+about to vanish, and withal having a light, and sweetness, and incense
+of passion upon it that silences the looker-on, half in delight, half in
+expectation. This daring stroke--this transfiguring tenderness--may be
+shown to characterize all truly Christian sculpture, as compared with
+the antique, or the pseudo-classical of subsequent periods. We agree
+with Lord Lindsay in thinking the Psyche of Naples the nearest approach
+to the Christian ideal of all ancient efforts; but even in this the
+approximation is more accidental than real--a fair type of feature,
+further exalted by the mode in which the imagination supplies the lost
+upper folds of the hair. The fountain of life and emotion remains
+sealed; nor was the opening of that fountain due to any study of the far
+less pure examples accessible by the Pisan sculptors. The sound of its
+waters had been heard long before in the aisles of the Lombard; nor was
+it by Ghiberti, still less by Donatello, that the bed of that Jordan was
+dug deepest, but by Michael Angelo (the last heir of the Byzantine
+traditions descending through Orcagna), opening thenceforward through
+thickets darker and more dark, and with waves ever more soundless and
+slow, into the Dead Sea wherein its waters have been stayed.
+
+56. It is time for us to pass to the subject which occupies the largest
+portion of the work---the History
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"of Painting, as developed contemporaneously with her sister, Sculpture,
+and (like her) under the shadow of the Gothic Architecture, by Giotto
+and his successors throughout Italy, by Mino, Duccio, and their scholars
+at Siena, by Orcagna and Fra Angelico da Fiesole at Florence, and by the
+obscure but interesting primitive school of Bologna, during the
+fourteenth and the early years of the fifteenth century. The period is
+one, comparatively speaking, of repose and tranquillity,--the storm
+sleeps and the winds are still, the currents set in one direction, and
+we may sail from isle to isle over a sunny sea, dallying with the time,
+secure of a cloudless sky and of the greetings of innocence and love
+wheresoever the breeze may waft us. There is in truth a holy purity, an
+innocent naïveté, a childlike grace and simplicity, a freshness, a
+fearlessness, an utter freedom from affectation, a yearning after all
+things truthful, lovely and of good report, in the productions of this
+early time, which invest them with a charm peculiar in its kind, and
+which few even of the most perfect works of the maturer era can boast
+of,--and hence the risk and danger of becoming too passionately attached
+to them, of losing the power of discrimination, of admiring and
+imitating their defects as well as their beauties, of running into
+affectation in seeking after simplicity and into exaggeration in our
+efforts to be in earnest,--in a word, of forgetting that in art as in
+human nature, it is the balance, harmony, and co-equal development of
+Sense, Intellect, and Spirit, which constitute perfection."--Vol. ii.,
+pp. 161-163.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+57. To the thousand islands, or how many soever they may be, we shall
+allow ourselves to be wafted with all willingness, but not in Lord
+Lindsay's three-masted vessel, with its balancing topmasts of Sense,
+Intellect, and Spirit. We are utterly tired of the triplicity; and we
+are mistaken if its application here be not as inconsistent as it is
+arbitrary. Turning back to the introduction, which we have quoted, the
+reader will find that while Architecture is there taken for the exponent
+of Sense, Painting is chosen as the peculiar expression of Spirit. "The
+painting of Christendom is that of an immortal spirit conversing with
+its God." But in a note to the first chapter of the second volume, he
+will be surprised to find painting become a "twin of intellect," and
+architecture suddenly advanced from a type of sense to a type of
+spirit:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Sculpture and Painting, twins of Intellect, rejoice and breathe freest
+in the pure ether of Architecture, or Spirit, like Castor or Pollux
+under the breezy heaven of their father Jupiter."--Vol. ii., p. 14.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+58. Prepared by this passage to consider painting either as spiritual or
+intellectual, his patience may pardonably give way on finding in the
+sixth letter--(what he might, however, have conjectured from the heading
+of the third period in the chart of the schools)--that the peculiar
+prerogative of painting--color, is to be considered as a _sensual_
+element, and the exponent of sense, in accordance with a new analogy,
+here for the first time proposed, between spirit, intellect, and sense,
+and expression, form, and color. Lord Lindsay is peculiarly unfortunate
+in his adoptions from previous writers. He has taken this division of
+art from Fuseli and Reynolds, without perceiving that in those writers
+it is one of convenience merely, and, even so considered, is as
+injudicious as illogical. In what does expression consist but in form
+and color? It is one of the ends which these accomplish, and may be
+itself an attribute of both. Color may be expressive or inexpressive,
+like music; form expressive or inexpressive, like words; but expression
+by itself cannot exist; so that to divide painting into color, form, and
+expression, is precisely as rational as to divide music into notes,
+words, and expression. Color may be pensive, severe, exciting,
+appalling, gay, glowing, or sensual; in all these modes it is
+expressive: form may be tender or abrupt, mean or majestic, attractive
+or overwhelming, discomfortable or delightsome; in all these modes, and
+many more, it is expressive; and if Lord Lindsay's analogy be in anywise
+applicable to either form or color, we should have color sensual
+(Correggio), color intellectual (Tintoret), color spiritual
+(Angelico)--form sensual (French sculpture), form intellectual
+(Phidias), form spiritual (Michael Angelo). Above all, our author should
+have been careful how he attached the epithet "sensual" to the element
+of color--not only on account of the glaring inconsistency with his own
+previous assertion of the spirituality of painting--(since it is
+certainly not merely by being flat instead of solid, representative
+instead of actual, that painting is--if it be--more spiritual than
+sculpture); but also, because this idea of sensuality in color has had
+much share in rendering abortive the efforts of the modern German
+religious painters, inducing their abandonment of its consecrating,
+kindling, purifying power.
+
+59. Lord Lindsay says, in a passage which we shall presently quote, that
+the most sensual as well as the most religious painters have always
+loved the brightest colors. Not so; no painters ever were more sensual
+than the modern French, who are alike insensible to, and incapable of
+color--depending altogether on morbid gradation, waxy smoothness of
+surface, and lusciousness of line, the real elements of sensuality
+wherever it eminently exists. So far from good color being sensual, it
+saves, glorifies, and guards from all evil: it is with Titian, as with
+all great masters of flesh-painting, the redeeming and protecting
+element; and with the religious painters, it is a baptism with fire, an
+under-song of holy Litanies. Is it in sensuality that the fair flush
+opens upon the cheek of Francia's chanting angel,[8] until we think it
+comes, and fades, and returns, as his voice and his harping are louder
+or lower--or that the silver light rises upon wave after wave of his
+lifted hair; or that the burning of the blood is seen on the unclouded
+brows of the three angels of the Campo Santo, and of folded fire within
+their wings; or that the hollow blue of the highest heaven mantles the
+Madonna with its depth, and falls around her like raiment, as she sits
+beneath the throne of the Sistine Judgment? Is it in sensuality that the
+visible world about us is girded with an eternal iris?--is there
+pollution in the rose and the gentian more than in the rocks that are
+trusted to their robing?--is the sea-blue a stain upon its water, or
+the scarlet spring of day upon the mountains less holy than their snow?
+As well call the sun itself, or the firmament, sensual, as the color
+which flows from the one, and fills the other.
+
+60. We deprecate this rash assumption, however, with more regard to the
+forthcoming portion of the history, in which we fear it may seriously
+diminish the value of the author's account of the school of Venice, than
+to the part at present executed. This is written in a spirit rather
+sympathetic than critical, and rightly illustrates the feeling of early
+art, even where it mistakes, or leaves unanalyzed, the technical modes
+of its expression. It will be better, perhaps, that we confine our
+attention to the accounts of the three men who may be considered as
+sufficient representatives not only of the art of their time, but of all
+subsequent; Giotto, the first of the great line of dramatists,
+terminating in Raffaelle; Orcagna, the head of that branch of the
+contemplative school which leans towards sadness or terror, terminating
+in Michael Angelo; and Angelico, the head of the contemplatives
+concerned with the heavenly ideal, around whom may be grouped first
+Duccio, and the Sienese, who preceded him, and afterwards Pinturiccio,
+Perugino, and Leonardo da Vinci.
+
+61. The fourth letter opens in the fields of Vespignano. The
+circumstances of the finding of Giotto by Cimabue are well known.
+Vasari's anecdote of the fly painted upon the nose of one of Cimabue's
+figures might, we think, have been spared, or at least not instanced as
+proof of study from nature "nobly rewarded." Giotto certainly never
+either attempted or accomplished any small imitation of this kind; the
+story has all the look of one of the common inventions of the ignorant
+for the ignorant; nor, if true, would Cimabue's careless mistake of a
+black spot in the shape of a fly for one of the living annoyances of
+which there might probably be some dozen or more upon his panel at any
+moment, have been a matter of much credit to his young pupil. The first
+point of any real interest is Lord Lindsay's confirmation of Förster's
+attribution of the Campo Santo Life of Job, till lately esteemed
+Giotto's, to Francesco da Volterra. Förster's evidence appears
+incontrovertible; yet there is curious internal evidence, we think, in
+favor of the designs being Giotto's, if not the execution. The landscape
+is especially Giottesque, the trees being all boldly massed first with
+dark brown, within which the leaves are painted separately in light:
+this very archaic treatment had been much softened and modified by the
+Giotteschi before the date assigned to these frescoes by Förster. But,
+what is more singular, the figure of Eliphaz, or the foremost of the
+three friends, occurs in a tempera picture of Giotto's in the Academy of
+Florence, the Ascension, among the apostles on the left; while the face
+of another of the three friends is again repeated in the "Christ
+disputing with the Doctors" of the small tempera series, also in the
+Academy; the figure of Satan shows much analogy to that of the Envy of
+the Arena chapel; and many other portions of the design are evidently
+either sketches of this very subject by Giotto himself, or dexterous
+compilations from his works by a loving pupil. Lord Lindsay has not done
+justice to the upper division--the Satan before God: it is one of the
+very finest thoughts ever realized by the Giotteschi. The serenity of
+power in the principal figure is very noble; no expression of wrath, or
+even of scorn, in the look which commands the evil spirit. The position
+of the latter, and countenance, are less grotesque and more demoniacal
+than is usual in paintings of the time; the triple wings expanded--the
+arms crossed over the breast, and holding each other above the elbow,
+the claws fixing in the flesh; a serpent buries its head in a cleft in
+the bosom, and the right hoof is lifted, as if to stamp.
+
+62. We should have been glad if Lord Lindsay had given us some clearer
+idea of the internal evidence on which he founds his determination of
+the order or date of the works of Giotto. When no trustworthy records
+exist, we conceive this task to be of singular difficulty, owing to the
+differences of execution universally existing between the large and
+small works of the painter. The portrait of Dante in the chapel of the
+Podestá is proved by Dante's exile, in 1302, to have been painted before
+Giotto was six and twenty; yet we remember no head in any of his works
+which can be compared with it for carefulness of finish and truth of
+drawing; the crudeness of the material vanquished by dexterous hatching;
+the color not only pure, but deep--a rare virtue with Giotto; the eye
+soft and thoughtful, the brow nobly modeled. In the fresco of the Death
+of the Baptist, in Santa Croce, which we agree with Lord Lindsay in
+attributing to the same early period, the face of the musician is drawn
+with great refinement, and considerable power of rounding
+surfaces--(though in the drapery may be remarked a very singular piece
+of archaic treatment: it is warm white, with yellow stripes; the dress
+itself falls in deep folds, but the striped pattern does not follow the
+foldings--it is drawn across, as if with a straight ruler).
+
+63. But passing from these frescoes, which are nearly the size of life,
+to those of the Arena chapel at Padua, erected in 1303, decorated in
+1306, which are much smaller, we find the execution proportionably less
+dexterous. Of this famous chapel Lord Lindsay says--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"nowhere (save in the Duomo of Orvieto) is the legendary history of the
+Virgin told with such minuteness.
+
+"The heart must indeed be cold to the charms of youthful art that can
+enter this little sanctuary without a glow of delight. From the roof,
+with its sky of ultramarine, powdered with stars and interspersed with
+medallions containing the heads of our Saviour, the Virgin and the
+Apostles, to the mock paneling of the nave, below the windows, the whole
+is completely covered with frescoes, in excellent preservation, and all
+more or less painted by Giotto's own hand, except six in the tribune,
+which however have apparently been executed from his cartoons....
+
+"These frescoes form a most important document in the history of
+Giotto's mind, exhibiting all his peculiar merits, although in a state
+as yet of immature development. They are full of fancy and invention;
+the composition is almost always admirable, although sometimes too
+studiously symmetrical; the figures are few and characteristic, each
+speaking for itself, the impersonation of a distinct idea, and most
+dramatically grouped and contrasted; the attitudes are appropriate,
+easy, and natural; the action and gesticulation singularly vivid; the
+expression is excellent, except when impassioned grief induces
+caricature:--devoted to the study of Nature as he is, Giotto had not yet
+learnt that it is suppressed feeling which affects one most. The head of
+our Saviour is beautiful throughout--that of the Virgin not so good--she
+is modest, but not very graceful or celestial:--it was long before he
+succeeded in his Virgins--they are much too matronly: among the
+accessory figures, graceful female forms occasionally appear,
+foreshadowing those of his later works at Florence and Naples, yet they
+are always clumsy about the waist and bust, and most of them are
+under-jawed, which certainly detracts from the sweetness of the female
+countenance. His delineation of the naked is excellent, as compared with
+the works of his predecessors, but far unequal to what he attained in
+his later years,--the drapery, on the contrary, is noble, majestic, and
+statuesque; the coloring is still pale and weak,--it was long ere he
+improved in this point; the landscape displays little or no amendment
+upon the Byzantine; the architecture, that of the fourteenth century, is
+to the figures that people it in the proportion of dolls' houses to the
+children that play with them,--an absurdity long unthinkingly acquiesced
+in, from its occurrence in the classic bas-reliefs from which it had
+been traditionally derived;--and, finally, the lineal perspective is
+very fair, and in three of the compositions an excellent effect is
+produced by the introduction of the same background with varied
+_dramatis personæ_, reminding one of Retszch's illustrations of Faust.
+The animals too are always excellent, full of spirit and
+character."--Vol. ii., pp. 183-199.
+
+64. This last characteristic is especially to be noticed. It is a
+touching proof of the influence of early years. Giotto was only ten
+years old when he was taken from following the sheep. For the rest, as
+we have above stated, the manipulation of these frescoes is just as far
+inferior to that of the Podestà chapel as their dimensions are less; and
+we think it will be found generally that the smaller the work the more
+rude is Giotto's hand. In this respect he seems to differ from all other
+masters.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"It is not difficult, gazing on these silent but eloquent walls, to
+repeople them with the group once, as we know-five hundred years
+ago--assembled within them,--Giotto intent upon his work, his wife Ciuta
+admiring his progress, and Dante, with abstracted eye, alternately
+conversing with his friend and watching the gambols of the children
+playing on the grass before the door. It is generally affirmed that
+Dante, during this visit, inspired Giotto with his taste for allegory,
+and that the Virtues and Vices of the Arena were the first fruits of
+their intercourse; it is possible, certainly, but I doubt it,--allegory
+was the universal language of the time, as we have seen in the history
+of the Pisan school."--Vol. ii., pp. 199, 200.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+It ought to have been further mentioned, that the representation of the
+Virtues and Vices under these Giottesque figures continued long
+afterwards. We find them copied, for instance, on the capitals of the
+Ducal Palace at Venice, with an amusing variation on the "Stultitia,"
+who has neither Indian dress nor club, as with Giotto, but is to the
+Venetians sufficiently distinguished by riding a horse.
+
+65. The notice of the frescoes at Assisi consists of little more than an
+enumeration of the subjects, accompanied by agreeable translations of
+the traditions respecting St. Francis, embodied by St. Buonaventura. Nor
+have we space to follow the author through his examination of Giotto's
+works at Naples and Avignon. The following account of the erection of
+the Campanile of Florence is too interesting to be omitted:---
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Giotto was chosen to erect it, on the ground avowedly of the
+universality of his talents, with the appointment of Capomaestro, or
+chief architect of the Cathedral and its dependencies, a yearly salary
+of one hundred gold florins, and the privilege of citizenship, and under
+the special understanding that he was not to quit Florence. His designs
+being approved of, the republic passed a decree in the spring of 1334,
+that 'the Campanile should be built so as to exceed in magnificence,
+height and excellence of workmanship whatever in that kind had been
+achieved of old by the Greeks and Romans in the time of their utmost
+power and greatness--"della loro più florida potenza."' The first stone
+was laid accordingly, with great pomp, on the 18th of July following,
+and the work prosecuted with such vigor and with such costliness and
+utter disregard of expense, that a citizen of Verona, looking on,
+exclaimed that the republic was taxing her strength too far,--that the
+united resources of two great monarchs would be insufficient to complete
+it; a _criticism which the Signoria resented by confining him for two
+months in prison_, and afterwards conducting him through the public
+treasury, to teach him that the Florentines could build their whole city
+of marble, and not one poor steeple only, were they so inclined.
+
+"Giotto made a model of his proposed structure, on which every stone was
+marked, and the successive courses painted red and white, according to
+his design, so as to match with the Cathedral and Baptistery; this model
+was of course adhered to strictly during the short remnant of his life,
+and the work was completed in strict conformity to it after his death,
+with the exception of the spire, which, the taste having changed, was
+never added. He had intended it to be one hundred _braccia_, or one
+hundred and fifty feet high."--Vol. ii., pp. 247-249.
+
+The deficiency of the spire Lord Lindsay does not regret:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Let the reader stand before the Campanile, and ask himself whether,
+with Michael Scott at his elbow, or Aladdin's lamp in his hand, he would
+supply the deficiency? I think not."--p. 38.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+We have more faith in Giotto than our author--and we will reply to his
+question by two others--whether, looking down upon Florence from the
+hill of San Miniato, his eye rested oftener and more affectionately on
+the Campanile of Giotto, or on the simple tower and spire of Santa Maria
+Novella?--and whether, in the backgrounds of Perugino, he would
+willingly substitute for the church spires invariably introduced,
+flat-topped campaniles like the unfinished tower of Florence?
+
+66. Giotto sculptured with his own hand two of the bas-reliefs of this
+campanile, and probably might have executed them all. But the purposes
+of his life had been accomplished; he died at Florence on the 8th of
+January, 1337. The concluding notice of his character and achievement is
+highly valuable.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+67. "Painting indeed stands indebted to Giotto beyond any of her
+children. His history is a most instructive one. Endowed with the
+liveliest fancy, and with that facility which so often betrays genius,
+and achieving in youth a reputation which the age of Methuselah could
+not have added to, he had yet the discernment to perceive how much still
+remained to be done, and the resolution to bind himself (as it were) to
+Nature's chariot wheel, confident that she would erelong emancipate and
+own him as her son. Calm and unimpassioned, he seems to have commenced
+his career with a deliberate survey of the difficulties he had to
+encounter and of his resources for the conflict, and then to have worked
+upon a system steadily and perseveringly, prophetically sure of victory.
+His life was indeed one continued triumph,--and no conqueror ever
+mounted to the Capitol with a step more equal and sedate. We find him,
+at first, slowly and cautiously endeavoring to infuse new life into the
+traditional compositions, by substituting the heads, attitudes, and
+drapery of the actual world for the spectral forms and conventional
+types of the mosaics and the Byzantine painters,--idealizing them when
+the personages represented were of higher mark and dignity, but in none
+ever outstepping truth. Advancing in his career, we find year by year
+the fruits of continuous unwearied study in a consistent and equable
+contemporary improvement in all the various minuter though most
+important departments of his art, in his design, his drapery, his
+coloring, in the dignity and expression of his men and in the grace of
+his women--asperities softened down, little graces unexpectedly born and
+playing about his path, as if to make amends for the deformity of his
+actual offspring--touches, daily more numerous, of that nature which
+makes the world akin--and ever and always a keen yet cheerful sympathy
+with life, a playful humor mingling with his graver lessons, which
+affects us the more as coming from one who, knowing himself an object
+personally of disgust and ridicule, could yet satirize with a smile.
+
+"Finally, throughout his works, we are conscious of an earnest, a lofty,
+a religious aim and purpose, as of one who felt himself a pioneer of
+civilization in a newly-discovered world, the Adam of a new Eden freshly
+planted in the earth's wilderness, a mouthpiece of God and a preacher of
+righteousness to mankind.--And here we must establish a distinction very
+necessary to be recognized before we can duly appreciate the relative
+merits of the elder painters in this, the most important point in which
+we can view their character. Giotto's genius, however universal, was
+still (as I have repeatedly observed) Dramatic rather than
+Contemplative,--a tendency in which his scholars and successors almost
+to a man resembled him. Now, just as in actual life--where, with a few
+rare exceptions, all men rank under two great categories according as
+Imagination or Reason predominates in their intellectual character--two
+individuals may be equally impressed with the truths of Christianity and
+yet differ essentially in its outward manifestation, the one dwelling in
+action, the other in contemplation, the one in strife, the other in
+peace, the one (so to speak) in hate, the other in love, the one
+struggling with devils, the other communing with angels, yet each
+serving as a channel of God's mercies to man, each (we may believe)
+offering Him service equally acceptable in His sight--even so shall we
+find it in art and with artists; few in whom the Dramatic power
+predominates will be found to excel in the expression of religious
+emotions of the more abstract and enthusiastic cast, even although men
+of indisputably pure and holy character themselves; and _vice versâ_,
+few of the more Contemplative but will feel bewildered and at fault, if
+they descend from their starry region of light into the grosser
+atmosphere that girdles in this world of action. The works of artists
+are their minds' mirror; they cannot express what they do not feel; each
+class dwells apart and seeks its ideal in a distinct sphere of
+emotion,--their object is different, and their success proportioned to
+the exclusiveness with which they pursue that object. A few indeed there
+have been in all ages, monarchs of the mind and types of our Saviour,
+who have lived a twofold existence of action and contemplation in art,
+in song, in politics, and in daily life; of these have been Abraham,
+Moses, David, and Cyrus in the elder world--Alfred, Charlemagne, Dante,
+and perhaps Shakespeare, in the new,--and in art, Niccola Pisano,
+Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo. But Giotto, however great as the
+patriarch of his peculiar tribe, was not of these few, and we ought not
+therefore to misapprehend him, or be disappointed at finding his
+Madonnas (for instance) less exquisitely spiritual than the Sienese, or
+those of Fra Angelico and some later painters, who seem to have dipped
+their pencils in the rainbow that circles the throne of God,--they are
+pure and modest, but that is all; on the other hand, where his
+Contemplative rivals lack utterance, he speaks most feelingly to the
+heart in his own peculiar language of Dramatic composition--he glances
+over creation with the eye of love, all the charities of life follow in
+his steps, and his thoughts are as the breath of the morning. A man of
+the world, living in it and loving it, yet with a heart that it could
+not spoil nor wean from its allegiance to God--'non meno buon Cristiano
+che eccellente pittore,' as Vasari emphatically describes him--his
+religion breathes of the free air of heaven rather than the cloister,
+neither enthusiastic nor superstitious, but practical, manly and
+healthy--and this, although the picturesque biographer of S.
+Francis!"--Vol. ii., pp. 260-264.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+68. This is all as admirably felt as expressed, and to those acquainted
+with and accustomed to love the works of the painter, it leaves nothing
+to be asked for; but we must again remind Lord Lindsay, that he has
+throughout left the _artistical_ orbit of Giotto undefined, and the
+offense of his manner unremoved, as far as regards the uninitiated
+spectator. We question whether from all that he has written, the
+untraveled reader could form any distinct idea of the painter's peculiar
+merits or methods, or that the estimate, if formed, might not afterwards
+expose him to severe disappointment. It ought especially to have been
+stated, that the Giottesque system of chiaroscuro is one of pure, quiet,
+pervading daylight. No _cast_ shadows ever occur, and this remains a
+marked characteristic of all the works of the Giotteschi. Of course, all
+subtleties of reflected light or raised color are unthought of. Shade is
+only given as far as it is necessary to the articulation of simple
+forms, nor even then is it rightly adapted to the color of the light;
+the folds of the draperies are well drawn, but the entire rounding of
+them always missed--the general forms appearing flat, and terminated by
+equal and severe outlines, while the masses of ungradated color often
+seem to divide the figure into fragments. Thus, the Madonna in the small
+tempera series of the Academy of Florence, is usually divided exactly in
+half by the dark mass of her blue robe, falling in a vertical line. In
+consequence of this defect, the grace of Giotto's composition can hardly
+be felt until it is put into outline. The colors themselves are of good
+quality, never glaring, always gladdening, the reds inclining to orange
+more than purple, yellow frequent, the prevalent tone of the color
+groups warm; the sky always blue, the whole effect somewhat resembling
+that of the Northern painted glass of the same century--and chastened in
+the same manner by noble neutral tints or greens; yet all somewhat
+unconsidered and unsystematic, painful discords not unfrequent. The
+material and ornaments of dress are never particularized, no imitations
+of texture or jewelry, yet shot stuffs of two colors frequent. The
+drawing often powerful, though of course uninformed; the mastery of
+mental expression by bodily motion, and of bodily motion, past and
+future, by a single gesture, altogether unrivaled even by Raffaelle;--it
+is obtained chiefly by throwing the emphasis always on the right line,
+admitting straight lines of great severity, and never dividing the main
+drift of the drapery by inferior folds; neither are accidents allowed to
+interfere--the garments fall heavily and in marked angles--nor are they
+affected by the wind, except under circumstances of very rapid motion.
+The ideal of the face is often solemn--seldom beautiful; occasionally
+ludicrous failures occur: in the smallest designs the face is very often
+a dead letter, or worse: and in all, Giotto's handling is generally to
+be distinguished from that of any of his followers by its bluntness. In
+the school work we find sweeter types of feature, greater finish,
+stricter care, more delicate outline, fewer errors, but on the whole
+less life.
+
+69. Finally, and on this we would especially insist, Giotto's genius is
+not to be considered as struggling with difficulty and repressed by
+ignorance, but as appointed, for the good of men, to come into the world
+exactly at the time when its rapidity of invention was not likely to be
+hampered by demands for imitative dexterity or neatness of finish; and
+when, owing to the very ignorance which has been unwisely regretted, the
+simplicity of his thoughts might be uttered with a childlike and
+innocent sweetness, never to be recovered in times of prouder knowledge.
+The dramatic power of his works, rightly understood, could receive no
+addition from artificial arrangement of shade, or scientific exhibition
+of anatomy, and we have reason to be deeply grateful when afterwards
+"inland far" with Buonaroti and Titian, that we can look back to the
+Giotteschi--to see those children
+
+       "Sport upon the shore
+   And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore."
+
+We believe Giotto himself felt this--unquestionably he could have
+carried many of his works much farther in finish, had he so willed it;
+but he chose rather to multiply motives than to complete details. Thus
+we recur to our great principle of Separate gift. The man who spends his
+life in toning colors must leave the treasures of his invention
+untold--let each have his perfect work; and while we thank Bellini and
+Leonardo for their deeply wrought dyes, and life-labored utterance of
+passionate thought; let us remember also what cause, but for the
+remorseless destruction of myriads of his works, we should have had to
+thank Giotto, in that, abandoning all proud effort, he chose rather to
+make the stones of Italy cry out with one voice of pauseless praise, and
+to fill with perpetual remembrance of the Saints he loved, and perpetual
+honor of the God he worshiped, palace chamber and convent cloister,
+lifted tower and lengthened wall, from the utmost blue of the plain of
+Padua to the Southern wildernesses of the hermit-haunted Apennine.
+
+70. From the head of the Dramatic branch of Art, we turn to the first of
+the great Contemplative Triad, associated, as it most singularly happens
+in name as well as in heart; Orcagna--Arcagnuolo; Fra Giovanni--detto
+Angelico; and Michael Angelo:--the first two names being bestowed by
+contemporary admiration.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Orcagna was born apparently about the middle of the (14th) century, and
+was christened Andrea, by which name, with the addition of that of his
+father, Cione, he always designated himself; that, however, of Orcagna,
+a corruption of Arcagnuolo, or 'The Archangel,' was given him by his
+contemporaries, and by this he has become known to posterity.
+
+"The earliest works of Orcagna will be found in that sanctuary of
+Semi-Byzantine art, the Campo Santo of Pisa. He there painted three of
+the four 'Novissima,' Death, Judgment, Hell, and Paradise--the two
+former entirely himself, the third with the assistance of his brother
+Bernardo, who is said to have colored it after his designs. The first of
+the series, a most singular performance, had for centuries been
+popularly known as the 'Trionfo della Morte.' It is divided by an
+immense rock into two irregular portions. In that to the right, Death,
+personified as a female phantom, batwinged, claw-footed, her robe of
+linked mail [?] and her long hair streaming on the wind, swings back her
+scythe in order to cut down a company of the rich ones of the earth,
+Castruccio Castracani and his gay companions, seated under an
+orange-grove, and listening to the music of a troubadour and a female
+minstrel; little genii or Cupids, with reversed torches, float in the
+air above them; one young gallant caresses his hawk, a lady her
+lapdog,--Castruccio alone looks abstractedly away, as if his thoughts
+were elsewhere. But all are alike heedless and unconscious, though the
+sand is run out, the scythe falling and their doom sealed. Meanwhile the
+lame and the halt, the withered and the blind, to whom the heavens are
+brass and life a burthen, cry on Death with impassioned gestures, to
+release them from their misery,--but in vain; she sweeps past, and will
+not hear them. Between these two groups lie a heap of corpses, mown down
+already in her flight--kings, queens, bishops, cardinals, young men and
+maidens, secular and ecclesiastical--ensigned by their crowns, coronets,
+necklaces, miters and helmets--huddled together in hideous confusion;
+some are dead, others dying,--angels and devils draw the souls out of
+their mouths; that of a nun (in whose hand a purse, firmly clenched,
+betokens her besetting sin) shrinks back aghast at the unlooked-for
+sight of the demon who receives it--an idea either inherited or adopted
+from Andrea Tafi. The whole upper half of the fresco, on this side, is
+filled with angels and devils carrying souls to heaven or to hell;
+sometimes a struggle takes place, and a soul is rescued from a demon who
+has unwarrantably appropriated it; the angels are very graceful, and
+their intercourse with their spiritual charge is full of tenderness and
+endearment; on the other hand, the wicked are hurried off by the devils
+and thrown headlong into the mouths of hell, represented as the crater
+of a volcano, belching out flames nearly in the center of the
+composition. These devils exhibit every variety of horror in form and
+feature."--Vol. iii., pp. 130-134.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+71. We wish our author had been more specific in his account of this
+wonderful fresco. The portrait of Castruccio ought to have been
+signalized as a severe disappointment to the admirers of the heroic
+Lucchese: the face is flat, lifeless, and sensual, though fine in
+feature. The group of mendicants occupying the center are especially
+interesting, as being among the first existing examples of hard study
+from the model: all are evidently portraits--and the effect of deformity
+on the lines of the countenance rendered with appalling truth; the
+retractile muscles of the mouth wrinkled and fixed--the jaws
+projecting--the eyes hungry and glaring--the eyebrows grisly and stiff,
+the painter having drawn each hair separately: the two stroppiati with
+stumps instead of arms are especially characteristic, as the observer
+may at once determine by comparing them with the descendants of the
+originals, of whom he will at any time find two, or more, waiting to
+accompany his return across the meadow in front of the Duomo: the old
+woman also, nearest of the group, with gray disheveled hair and gray
+coat, with a brown girdle and gourd flask, is magnificent, and the
+archetype of all modern conceptions of witch. But the crowning stroke of
+feeling is dependent on a circumstance seldom observed. As Castruccio
+and his companions are seated under the shade of an orange grove, so the
+mendicants are surrounded by a thicket of _teasels_, and a branch of
+ragged thorn is twisted like a crown about their sickly temples and
+weedy hair.
+
+72. We do not altogether agree with our author in thinking that the
+devils exhibit every variety of horror; we rather fear that the
+spectator might at first be reminded by them of what is commonly known
+as the Dragon pattern of Wedgwood ware. There is invention in them
+however--and energy; the eyes are always terrible, though simply
+drawn--a black ball set forward, and two-thirds surrounded by a narrow
+crescent of white, under a shaggy brow; the mouths are frequently
+magnificent; that of a demon accompanying a thrust of a spear with a
+growl, on the right of the picture, is interesting as an example of the
+development of the canine teeth noticed by Sir Charles Bell ("Essay on
+Expression," p. 138)--its capacity of laceration is unlimited: another,
+snarling like a tiger at an angel who has pulled a soul out of his
+claws, is equally well conceived; we know nothing like its ferocity
+except Rembrandt's sketches of wounded wild beasts. The angels we think
+generally disappointing; they are for the most part diminutive in size,
+and the crossing of the extremities of the two wings that cover the
+feet, gives them a coleopterous, cockchafer look, which is not a little
+undignified; the colors of their plumes are somewhat coarse and
+dark--one is covered with silky hair, instead of feathers. The souls
+they contend for are indeed of sweet expression; but exceedingly earthly
+in contour, the painter being unable to deal with the nude form. On the
+whole, he seems to have reserved his highest powers for the fresco which
+follows next in order, the scene of Resurrection and Judgment.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"It is, in the main, the traditional Byzantine composition, even more
+rigidly symmetrical than usual, singularly contrasting in this respect
+with the rush and movement of the preceding compartment. Our Saviour and
+the Virgin, seated side by side, each on a rainbow and within a vesica
+piscis, appear in the sky--Our Saviour uttering the words of
+malediction with uplifted arm, showing the wound in his side, and nearly
+in the attitude of Michael Angelo, but in wrath, not in fury--the Virgin
+timidly drawing back and gazing down in pity and sorrow. I never saw
+this co-equal juxtaposition in any other representation of the Last
+Judgment."--Vol. iii., p. 136.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+73. The positions of our Saviour and of the Virgin are not strictly
+co-equal; the glory in which the Madonna is seated is both lower and
+less; but the equality is more complete in the painting of the same
+subject in Santa M. Novella. We believe Lord Lindsay is correct in
+thinking Orcagna the only artist who has dared it. We question whether
+even wrath be intended in the countenance of the principal figure; on
+the contrary, we think it likely to disappoint at first, and appear
+lifeless in its exceeding tranquillity; the brow is indeed slightly
+knit, but the eyes have no local direction. They comprehend all
+things--are set upon all spirits alike, as in that _word-fresco_ of our
+own, not unworthy to be set side by side with this, the Vision of the
+Trembling Man in the House of the Interpreter. The action is as majestic
+as the countenance--the right hand seems raised rather to show its wound
+(as the left points at the same instant to the wound in the side), than
+in condemnation, though its gesture has been adopted as one of
+threatening--first (and very nobly) by Benozzo Gozzoli, in the figure of
+the Angel departing, looking towards Sodom--and afterwards, with
+unfortunate exaggeration, by Michael Angelo. Orcagna's Madonna we think
+a failure, but his strength has been more happily displayed in the
+Apostolic circle. The head of St. John is peculiarly beautiful. The
+other Apostles look forward or down as in judgment--some in indignation,
+some in pity, some serene--but the eyes of St. John are fixed upon the
+Judge Himself with the stability of love--intercession and sorrow
+struggling for utterance with awe--and through both is seen a tremor of
+submissive astonishment, that the lips which had once forbidden his to
+call down fire from heaven should now themselves burn with irrevocable
+condemnation.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+74. "One feeling for the most part pervades this side of the
+composition,--there is far more variety in the other; agony is depicted
+with fearful intensity and in every degree and character; some clasp
+their hands, some hide their faces, some look up in despair, but none
+towards Christ; others seem to have grown idiots with horror:--a few
+gaze, as if fascinated, into the gulf of fire towards which the whole
+mass of misery are being urged by the ministers of doom--the flames bite
+them, the devils fish for and catch them with long grappling-hooks:--in
+sad contrast to the group on the opposite side, a queen, condemned
+herself but self-forgetful, vainly struggles to rescue her daughter from
+a demon who has caught her by the gown and is dragging her backwards
+into the abyss--her sister, wringing her hands, looks on in agony--it is
+a fearful scene.
+
+"A vast rib or arch in the walls of pandemonium admits one into the
+contiguous gulf of Hell, forming the third fresco, or rather a
+continuation of the second--in which Satan sits in the midst, in
+gigantic terror, cased in armor and crunching sinners--of whom Judas,
+especially, is eaten and ejected, re-eaten and re-ejected again and
+again forever. The punishments of the wicked are portrayed in circles
+numberless around him. But in everything save horror this compartment is
+inferior to the preceding, and it has been much injured and
+repainted."--Vol. iii., p. 138.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+75. We might have been spared all notice of this last compartment.
+Throughout Italy, owing, it may be supposed, to the interested desire of
+the clergy to impress upon the populace as forcibly as possible the
+verity of purgatorial horrors, nearly every representation of the
+Inferno has been repainted, and vulgar butchery substituted for the
+expressions of punishment which were too chaste for monkish purposes.
+The infernos of Giotto at Padua, and of Orcagna at Florence, have thus
+been destroyed; but in neither case have they been replaced by anything
+so merely disgusting as these restorations by Solazzino in the Campo
+Santo. Not a line of Orcagna's remains, except in one row of figures
+halfway up the wall, where his firm black drawing is still
+distinguishable: throughout the rest of the fresco, hillocks of pink
+flesh have been substituted for his severe forms--and for his agonized
+features, puppets' heads with roaring mouths and staring eyes, the whole
+as coarse and sickening, and quite as weak, as any scrabble on the
+lowest booths of a London Fair.
+
+76. Lord Lindsay's comparison of these frescoes of Orcagna with the
+great work in the Sistine, is, as a specimen of his writing, too good
+not to be quoted.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"While Michael Angelo's leading idea seems to be the self-concentration
+and utter absorption of all feeling into the one predominant thought,
+_Am I, individually, safe?_ resolving itself into two emotions only,
+doubt and despair--all diversities of character, all kindred sympathies
+annihilated under their pressure--those emotions uttering themselves,
+not through the face but the form, by bodily contortion, rendering the
+whole composition, with all its overwhelming merits, a mighty
+hubbub--Orcagna's on the contrary embraces the whole world of passions
+that make up the economy of man, and these not confused or crushed
+into each other, but expanded and enhanced in quality and
+intensity commensurably with the 'change' attendant upon the
+resurrection--variously expressed indeed, and in reference to the
+diversities of individual character, which will be nowise compromised by
+that change, yet from their very intensity suppressed and subdued,
+stilling the body and informing only the soul's index, the countenance.
+All therefore is calm; the saved have acquiesced in all things, they can
+mourn no more--the damned are to them as if they had never been;--among
+the lost, grief is too deep, too settled for caricature, and while every
+feeling of the spectator, every key of the soul's organ, is played upon
+by turns, tenderness and pity form the under-song throughout and
+ultimately prevail; the curse is uttered in sorrow rather than wrath,
+and from the pitying Virgin and the weeping archangel above, to the
+mother endeavoring to rescue her daughter below, and the young secular
+led to paradise under the approving smile of S. Michael, all resolves
+itself into sympathy and love.--Michael Angelo's conception may be more
+efficacious for teaching by terror--it was his object, I believe, as the
+heir of Savonarola and the representative of the Protestant spirit
+within the bosom of Catholicism; but Orcagna's is in better taste, truer
+to human nature, sublimer in philosophy, and (if I mistake not) more
+scriptural."--Vol. iii., pp. 139-141.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+77. We think it somewhat strange that the object of teaching by terror
+should be attributed to M. Angelo more than to Orcagna, seeing that the
+former, with his usual dignity, has refused all representation of
+infernal punishment--except in the figure dragged down with the hand
+over the face, the serpent biting the thigh, and in the fiends of the
+extreme angle; while Orcagna, whose intention may be conjectured even
+from Solazzino's restoration, exhausted himself in detailing Dante's
+distribution of torture, and brings into successive prominence every
+expedient of pain; the prong, the spit, the rack, the chain, venomous
+fang and rending beak, harrowing point and dividing edge, biting fiend
+and calcining fire. The objects of the two great painters were indeed
+opposed, but not in this respect. Orcagna's, like that of every great
+painter of his day, was to write upon the wall, as in a book, the
+greatest possible number of those religious facts or doctrines which the
+Church desired should be known to the people. This he did in the
+simplest and most straightforward way, regardless of artistical
+reputation, and desiring only to be read and understood. But Michael
+Angelo's object was from the beginning that of an artist. He addresses
+not the sympathies of his day, but the understanding of all time, and he
+treats the subject in the mode best adapted to bring every one of his
+own powers into full play. As might have been expected, while the
+self-forgetfulness of Orcagna has given, on the one hand, an awfulness
+to his work, and verity, which are wanting in the studied composition of
+the Sistine, on the other it has admitted a puerility commensurate with
+the narrowness of the religion he had to teach.
+
+78. Greater differences still result from the opposed powers and
+idiosyncrasies of the two men. Orcagna was unable to draw the nude--on
+this inability followed a coldness to the value of flowing lines, and to
+the power of unity in composition--neither could he indicate motion or
+buoyancy in flying or floating figures, nor express violence of action
+in the limbs--he cannot even show the difference between pulling and
+pushing in the muscles of the arm. In M. Angelo these conditions were
+directly reversed. Intense sensibility to the majesty of writhing,
+flowing, and connected lines, was in him associated with a power,
+unequaled except by Angelico, of suggesting aërial motion--motion
+deliberate or disturbed, inherent or impressed, impotent or
+inspired--gathering into glory, or gravitating to death. Orcagna was
+therefore compelled to range his figures symmetrically in ordered lines,
+while Michael Angelo bound them into chains, or hurled them into heaps,
+or scattered them before him as the wind does leaves. Orcagna trusted
+for all his expression to the countenance, or to rudely explained
+gesture aided by grand fall of draperies, though in all these points he
+was still immeasurably inferior to his colossal rival. As for his
+"embracing the whole world of passions which make up the economy of
+man," he had no such power of delineation--nor, we believe, of
+conception. The expressions on the inferno side are all of them
+varieties of grief and fear, differing merely in degree, not in
+character or operation: there is something dramatic in the raised hand
+of a man wearing a green bonnet with a white plume--but the only really
+far-carried effort in the group is the head of a Dominican monk (just
+above the queen in green), who, in the midst of the close crowd,
+struggling, shuddering, and howling on every side, is fixed in quiet,
+total despair, insensible to all things, and seemingly poised in
+existence and sensation upon that one point in his past life when his
+steps first took hold on hell; this head, which is opposed to a face
+distorted by horror beside it, is, we repeat, the only highly wrought
+piece of expression in the group.
+
+79. What Michael Angelo could do by expression of countenance alone, let
+the Pietà of Genoa tell, or the Lorenzo, or the parallel to this very
+head of Orcagna's, the face of the man borne down in the Last Judgment
+with the hand clenched over one of the eyes. Neither in that fresco is
+he wanting in dramatic episode; the adaptation of the Niobe on the
+spectator's left hand is far finer than Orcagna's condemned queen and
+princess; the groups rising below, side by side, supporting each other,
+are full of tenderness, and reciprocal devotion; the contest in the
+center for the body which a demon drags down by the hair is another kind
+of quarrel from that of Orcagna between a feathered angel and bristly
+fiend for a diminutive soul--reminding us, as it forcibly did at first,
+of a vociferous difference in opinion between a cat and a cockatoo. But
+Buonaroti knew that it was useless to concentrate interest in the
+countenances, in a picture of enormous size, ill lighted; and he
+preferred giving full play to the powers of line-grouping, for which he
+could have found no nobler field. Let us not by unwise comparison mingle
+with our admiration of these two sublime works any sense of weakness in
+the naïveté of the one, or of coldness in the science of the other. Each
+painter has his own sufficient dominion, and he who complains of the
+want of knowledge in Orcagna, or of the display of it in Michael Angelo,
+has probably brought little to his judgment of either.
+
+80. One passage more we must quote, well worthy of remark in these days
+of hollowness and haste, though we question the truth of the particular
+fact stated in the second volume respecting the shrine of Or San
+Michele. Cement is now visible enough in all the joints, but whether
+from recent repairs we cannot say:--
+
+"There is indeed another, a technical merit, due to Orcagna, which I
+would have mentioned earlier, did it not partake so strongly of a moral
+virtue. Whatever he undertook to do, he did well--by which I mean,
+better than anybody else. His Loggia, in its general structure and its
+provisions against injury from wet and decay, is a model of strength no
+less than symmetry and elegance; the junction of the marbles in the
+tabernacle of Or San Michele, and the exquisite manual workmanship of
+the bas-reliefs, have been the theme of praise for five centuries; his
+colors in the Campo Santo have maintained a freshness unrivaled by those
+of any of his successors there;--nay, even had his mosaics been
+preserved at Orvieto, I am confident the _commettitura_ would be found
+more compact and polished than any previous to the sixteenth century.
+The secret of all this was that he made himself thoroughly an adept in
+the mechanism of the respective arts, and therefore his works have
+stood. Genius is too apt to think herself independent of form and
+matter--never was there such a mistake; she cannot slight either without
+hamstringing herself. But the rule is of universal application; without
+this thorough mastery of their respective tools, this determination
+honestly to make the best use of them, the divine, the soldier, the
+statesman, the philosopher, the poet--however genuine their enthusiasm,
+however lofty their genius--are mere empirics, pretenders to crowns they
+will not run for, children not men--sporters with Imagination, triflers
+with Reason, with the prospects of humanity, with Time, and with
+God."--Vol. iii., pp. 148, 149.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+A noble passage this, and most true, provided we distinguish always
+between mastery of tool together with thorough strength of workmanship,
+and mere neatness of outside polish or fitting of measurement, of which
+ancient masters are daringly scornful.
+
+81. None of Orcagna's pupils, except Francisco Traini, attained
+celebrity--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"nothing in fact is known of them except their names. Had their works,
+however inferior, been preserved, we might have had less difficulty in
+establishing the links between himself and his successor in the
+supremacy of the Semi-Byzantine school at Florence, the Beato Fra
+Angelico da Fiesole.... He was born at Vicchio, near Florence, it is
+said in 1387, and was baptized by the name of Guido. Of a gentle nature,
+averse to the turmoil of the world, and pious to enthusiasm, though as
+free from fanaticism as his youth was innocent of vice, he determined,
+at the age of twenty, though well provided for in a worldly point of
+view, to retire to the cloister; he professed himself accordingly a
+brother of the monastery of S. Domenico at Fiesole in 1407, assuming his
+monastic name from the Apostle of love, S. John. He acquired from his
+residence there the distinguishing surname 'da Fiesole;' and a calmer
+retreat for one weary of earth and desirous of commerce with heaven
+would in vain be sought for;--the purity of the atmosphere, the
+freshness of the morning breeze, the starry clearness and delicious
+fragrance of the nights, the loveliness of the valley at one's feet,
+lengthening out, like a life of happiness, between the Apennine and the
+sea--with the intermingling sounds that ascend perpetually from below,
+softened by distance into music, and by an agreeable compromise at once
+giving a zest to solitude and cheating it of its loneliness--rendering
+Fiesole a spot which angels might alight upon by mistake in quest of
+paradise, a spot where it would be at once sweet to live and sweet to
+die."--Vol. iii., pp. 151-153.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+82. Our readers must recollect that the convent where Fra Giovanni first
+resided is not that whose belfry tower and cypress grove crown the "top
+of Fésole." The Dominican convent is situated at the bottom of the slope
+of olives, distinguished only by its narrow and low spire; a cypress
+avenue recedes from it towards Florence--a stony path, leading to the
+ancient Badia of Fiesole, descends in front of the three-arched loggia
+which protects the entrance to the church. No extended prospect is open
+to it; though over the low wall, and through the sharp, thickset olive
+leaves, may be seen one silver gleam of the Arno, and, at evening, the
+peaks of the Carrara mountains, purple against the twilight, dark and
+calm, while the fire-flies glance beneath, silent and intermittent, like
+stars upon the rippling of mute, soft sea.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"It is by no means an easy task to adjust the chronology of Fra
+Angelico's works; he has affixed no dates to them, and consequently,
+when external evidence is wanting, we are thrown upon internal, which in
+his case is unusually fallacious. It is satisfactory therefore to
+possess a fixed date in 1433, the year in which he painted the great
+tabernacle for the Company of Flax-merchants, now removed to the gallery
+of the Uffizii. It represents the Virgin and child, with attendant
+Saints, on a gold ground--very dignified and noble, although the Madonna
+has not attained the exquisite spirituality of his later efforts. Round
+this tabernacle as a nucleus, may be classed a number of paintings, all
+of similar excellence--admirable that is to say, but not of his very
+best, and in which, if I mistake not, the type of the Virgin bears
+throughout a strong family resemblance."--Vol. iii., pp. 160, 161.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+83. If the painter ever increased in power after this period (he was
+then forty-three), we have been unable to systematize the improvement.
+We much doubt whether, in his modes of execution, advance were possible.
+Men whose merit lies in record of natural facts, increase in knowledge;
+and men whose merit is in dexterity of hand increase in facility; but we
+much doubt whether the faculty of design, or force of feeling, increase
+after the age of twenty-five. By Fra Angelico, who drew always in fear
+and trembling, dexterous execution had been from the first repudiated;
+he neither needed nor sought technical knowledge of the form, and the
+inspiration, to which his power was owing, was not less glowing in youth
+than in age. The inferiority traceable (we grant) in this Madonna
+results not from its early date, but from Fra Angelico's incapability,
+always visible, of drawing the head of life size. He is, in this
+respect, the exact reverse of Giotto; he was essentially a miniature
+painter, and never attained the mastery of muscular play in the features
+necessary in a full-sized drawing. His habit, almost constant, of
+surrounding the iris of the eye by a sharp black line, is, in small
+figures, perfectly successful, giving a transparency and tenderness not
+otherwise expressible. But on a larger scale it gives a stony stare to
+the eyeball, which not all the tenderness of the brow and mouth can
+conquer or redeem.
+
+84. Further, in this particular instance, the ear has by accident been
+set too far back--(Fra Angelico, drawing only from feeling, was liable
+to gross errors of this kind,--often, however, more beautiful than other
+men's truths)--and the hair removed in consequence too far off the brow;
+in other respects the face is very noble--still more so that of the
+Christ. The child _stands_ upon the Virgin's knees,[9] one hand raised
+in the usual attitude of benediction, the other holding a globe. The
+face looks straightforward, quiet, Jupiter-like, and very sublime, owing
+to the smallness of the features in proportion to the head, the eyes
+being placed at about three-sevenths of the whole height, leaving
+four-sevenths for the brow, and themselves only in length about
+one-sixth of the breadth of the face, half closed, giving a peculiar
+appearance of repose. The hair is short, golden, symmetrically curled,
+statuesque in its contour; the mouth tender and full of life: the red
+cross of the glory about the head of an intense ruby enamel, almost fire
+color; the dress brown, with golden girdle. In all the treatment Fra
+Angelico maintains his assertion of the authority of abstract
+imagination, which, depriving his subject of all material or actual
+being, contemplates it as retaining qualities eternal only--adorned by
+incorporeal splendor. The eyes of the beholder are supernaturally
+unsealed: and to this miraculous vision whatever is of the earth
+vanishes, and all things are seen endowed with an harmonious glory--the
+garments falling with strange, visionary grace, glowing with indefinite
+gold--the walls of the chamber dazzling as of a heavenly city--the
+mortal forms themselves impressed with divine changelessness--no
+domesticity--no jest--no anxiety--no expectation--no variety of action
+or of thought. Love, all fulfilling, and various modes of power, are
+alone expressed; the Virgin never shows the complacency or petty
+watchfulness of maternity; she sits serene, supporting the child whom
+she ever looks upon, as a stranger among strangers; "Behold the handmaid
+of the Lord" forever written upon her brow.
+
+85. An approach to an exception in treatment is found in the
+Annunciation of the upper corridor of St. Mark's, most unkindly treated
+by our author:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Probably the earliest of the series--full of faults, but imbued with
+the sweetest feeling; there is a look of naïve curiosity, mingling with
+the modest and meek humility of the Virgin, which almost provokes a
+smile."--iii., 176.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+Many a Sabbath evening of bright summer have we passed in that lonely
+corridor--but not to the finding of faults, nor the provoking of smiles.
+The angel is perhaps something less majestic than is usual with the
+painter; but the Virgin is only the more to be worshiped, because here,
+for once, set before us in the verity of life. No gorgeous robe is upon
+her; no lifted throne set for her; the golden border gleams faintly on
+the dark blue dress; the seat is drawn into the shadow of a lowly
+loggia. The face is of no strange, far-sought loveliness; the features
+might even be thought hard, and they are worn with watching, and severe,
+though innocent. She stoops forward with her arms folded on her bosom:
+no casting down of eye nor shrinking of the frame in fear; she is too
+earnest, too self-forgetful for either: wonder and inquiry are there,
+but chastened and free from doubt; meekness, yet mingled with a patient
+majesty; peace, yet sorrowfully sealed, as if the promise of the Angel
+were already underwritten by the prophecy of Simeon. They who pass and
+repass in the twilight of that solemn corridor, need not the adjuration
+inscribed beneath:--
+
+   "Virginis intactae cum veneris ante figuram
+   Praetereundo cave ne sileatur Ave."[10]
+
+We in general allow the inferiority of Angelico's fresco to his tempera
+works; yet even that which of all these latter we think the most
+radiant, the Annunciation on the reliquary of Santa Maria Novella,
+would, we believe, if repeatedly compared with this of St. Mark's, in
+the end have the disadvantage. The eminent value of the tempera
+paintings results partly from their delicacy of line, and partly from
+the purity of color and force of decoration of which the material is
+capable.
+
+86. The passage, to which we have before alluded, respecting Fra
+Angelico's color in general, is one of the most curious and fanciful in
+the work:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"His coloring, on the other hand, is far more beautiful, although of
+questionable brilliancy. This will be found invariably the case in minds
+constituted like his. Spirit and Sense act on each other with livelier
+reciprocity the closer their approximation, the less intervention there
+is of Intellect. Hence the most religious and the most sensual painters
+have always loved the brightest colors--Spiritual Expression and a
+clearly defined (however inaccurate) outline forming the distinction of
+the former class; Animal Expression and a confused and uncertain outline
+(reflecting that lax morality which confounds the limits of light and
+darkness, right and wrong) of the latter. On the other hand, the more
+that Intellect, or the spirit of Form, intervenes in its severe
+precision, the less pure, the paler grow the colors, the nearer they
+tend to the hue of marble, of the bas-relief. We thus find the purest
+and brightest colors only in Fra Angelico's pictures, with a general
+predominance of blue, which we have observed to prevail more or less in
+so many of the Semi-Byzantine painters, and which, fanciful as it may
+appear, I cannot but attribute, independently of mere tradition, to an
+inherent, instinctive sympathy between their mental constitution and the
+color in question; as that of red, or of blood, may be observed to
+prevail among painters in whom Sense or Nature predominates over
+Spirit--for in this, as in all things else, the moral and the material
+world respond to each other as closely as shadow and substance. But, in
+Painting as in Morals, perfection implies the due intervention of
+Intellect between Spirit and Sense--of Form between Expression and
+Coloring--as a power at once controlling and controlled--and therefore,
+although acknowledging its fascination, I cannot unreservedly praise the
+Coloring of Fra Angelico."--Vol. iii., pp. 193, 194.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+87. There is much ingenuity, and some truth, here, but the reader, as in
+other of Lord Lindsay's speculations, must receive his conclusions with
+qualification. It is the natural character of strong effects of color,
+as of high light, to confuse outlines; and it is a necessity in all fine
+harmonies of color that many tints should merge imperceptibly into their
+following or succeeding ones:--we believe Lord Lindsay himself would
+hardly wish to mark the hues of the rainbow into divided zones, or to
+show its edge, as of an iron arch, against the sky, in order that it
+might no longer reflect (a reflection of which we profess ourselves up
+to this moment altogether unconscious) "that lax morality which
+confounds the limits of right and wrong." Again, there is a character of
+energy in all warm colors, as of repose in cold, which necessarily
+causes the former to be preferred by painters of savage subject--that
+is to say, commonly by the coarsest and most degraded;--but when
+sensuality is free from ferocity, it leans to blue more than to red (as
+especially in the flesh tints of Guido), and when intellect prevails
+over this sensuality, its first step is invariably to put more red into
+every color, and so "rubor est virtutis color." We hardly think Lord
+Lindsay would willingly include Luca Giordano among his spiritual
+painters, though that artist's servant was materially enriched by
+washing the ultramarine from the brushes with which he painted the
+Ricardi palace; nor would he, we believe, degrade Ghirlandajo to
+fellowship with the herd of the sensual, though in the fresco of the
+vision of Zacharias there are seventeen different reds in large masses,
+and not a shade of blue. The fact is, there is no color of the spectrum,
+as there is no note of music, whose key and prevalence may not be made
+pure in expression, and elevating in influence, by a great and good
+painter, or degraded to unhallowed purpose by a base one.
+
+88. We are sorry that our author "cannot unreservedly praise the
+coloring of Angelico;" but he is again curbed by his unhappy system of
+balanced perfectibility, and must quarrel with the gentle monk because
+he finds not in him the flames of Giorgione, nor the tempering of
+Titian, nor the melody of Cagliari. This curb of perfection we took
+between our teeth from the first, and we will give up our hearts to
+Angelico without drawback or reservation. His color is, in its sphere
+and to its purpose, as perfect as human work may be: wrought to radiance
+beyond that of the ruby and opal, its inartificialness prevents it from
+arresting the attention it is intended only to direct; were it composed
+with more science it would become vulgar from the loss of its
+unconsciousness; if richer, it must have parted with its purity, if
+deeper, with its joyfulness, if more subdued, with its sincerity.
+Passages are, indeed, sometimes unsuccessful; but it is to be judged in
+its rapture, and forgiven in its fall: he who works by law and system
+may be blamed when he sinks below the line above which he proposes no
+elevation, but to him whose eyes are on a mark far off, and whose
+efforts are impulsive, and to the utmost of his strength, we may not
+unkindly count the slips of his sometime descent into the valley of
+humiliation.
+
+89. The concluding notice of Angelico is true and interesting, though
+rendered obscure by useless recurrence to the favorite theory.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Such are the surviving works of a painter, who has recently been as
+unduly extolled as he had for three centuries past been unduly
+depreciated,--depreciated, through the amalgamation during those
+centuries of the principle of which he was the representative with
+baser, or at least less precious matter--extolled, through the
+recurrence to that principle, in its pure, unsophisticated essence, in
+the present --in a word, to the simple Imaginative Christianity of the
+middle ages, as opposed to the complex Reasoning Christianity of recent
+times. Creeds therefore are at issue, and no exclusive partisan, neither
+Catholic nor Protestant in the absolute sense of the terms, can fairly
+appreciate Fra Angelico. Nevertheless, to those who regard society as
+progressive through the gradual development of the component elements of
+human nature, and who believe that Providence has accommodated the mind
+of man, individually, to the perception of half-truths only, in order to
+create that antagonism from which Truth is generated in the abstract,
+and by which the progression is effected, his rank and position in art
+are clear and definite. All that Spirit could achieve by herself,
+anterior to that struggle with Intellect and Sense which she must in all
+cases pass through in order to work out her destiny, was accomplished by
+him. Last and most gifted of a long and imaginative race--the heir of
+their experience, with collateral advantages which they possessed
+not--and flourishing at the moment when the transition was actually
+taking place from the youth to the early manhood of Europe; he gave
+full, unreserved, and enthusiastic expression to that Love and Hope
+which had winged the Faith of Christendom in her flight towards heaven
+for fourteen centuries,--to those yearnings of the Heart and the
+Imagination which ever precede, in Universal as well as Individual
+development, the severer and more chastened intelligence of
+Reason."--Vol. iii., pp. 188-190.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+90. We must again repeat that if our author wishes to be truly
+serviceable to the schools of England, he must express himself in terms
+requiring less laborious translation. Clearing the above statement of
+its mysticism and metaphor, it amounts only to this,--that Fra Angelico
+was a man of (humanly speaking) _perfect_ piety--humility, charity, and
+faith--that he never employed his art but as a means of expressing his
+love to God and man, and with the view, single, simple, and
+straightforward, of glory to the Creator, and good to the Creature.
+Every quality or subject of art by which these ends were not to be
+attained, or to be attained secondarily only, he rejected; from all
+study of art, as such, he withdrew; whatever might merely please the
+eye, or interest the intellect, he despised, and refused; he used his
+colors and lines, as David his harp, after a kingly fashion, for
+purposes of praise and not of science. To this grace and gift of
+holiness were added, those of a fervent imagination, vivid invention,
+keen sense of loveliness in lines and colors, unwearied energy, and to
+all these gifts the crowning one of quietness of life and mind, while
+yet his convent-cell was at first within view, and afterwards in the
+center, of a city which had lead of all the world in Intellect, and in
+whose streets he might see daily and hourly the noblest setting of manly
+features. It would perhaps be well to wait until we find another man
+thus actuated, thus endowed, and thus circumstanced, before we speak of
+"unduly extolling" the works of Fra Angelico.
+
+91. His artistical attainments, as might be conjectured, are nothing
+more than the development, through practice, of his natural powers in
+accordance with his sacred instincts. His power of expression by bodily
+gesture is greater even than Giotto's, wherever he could feel or
+comprehend the passion to be expressed; but so inherent in him was his
+holy tranquillity of mind, that he could not by any exertion, even for a
+moment, conceive either agitation, doubt, or fear--and all the actions
+proceeding from such passions, or, _à fortiori_, from any yet more
+criminal, are absurdly and powerlessly portrayed by him; while
+contrariwise, every gesture, consistent with emotion pure and saintly,
+is rendered with an intensity of truth to which there is no existing
+parallel; the expression being carried out into every bend of the hand,
+every undulation of the arm, shoulder, and neck, every fold of the dress
+and every wave of the hair. His drawing of movement is subject to the
+same influence; vulgar or vicious motion he cannot represent; his
+running, falling, or struggling figures are drawn with childish
+incapability; but give him for his scene the pavement of heaven, or
+pastures of Paradise, and for his subject the "inoffensive pace" of
+glorified souls, or the spiritual speed of Angels, and Michael Angelo
+alone can contend with him in majesty,--in grace and musical
+continuousness of motion, no one. The inspiration was in some degree
+caught by his pupil Benozzo, but thenceforward forever lost. The angels
+of Perugino appear to be let down by cords and moved by wires; that of
+Titian, in the sacrifice of Isaac, kicks like an awkward swimmer;
+Raphael's Moses and Elias of the Transfiguration are cramped at the
+knees; and the flight of Domenichino's angels is a sprawl paralyzed. The
+authority of Tintoret over movement is, on the other hand, too
+unlimited; the descent of his angels is the swoop of a whirlwind or the
+fall of a thunderbolt; his mortal impulses are oftener impetuous than
+pathetic, and majestic more than melodious.
+
+92. But it is difficult by words to convey to the reader unacquainted
+with Angelico's works, any idea of the thoughtful variety of his
+rendering of movement--Earnest haste of girded faith in the Flight into
+Egypt, the haste of obedience, not of fear; and unweariedness, but
+through spiritual support, and not in human strength--Swift obedience of
+passive earth to the call of its Creator, in the Resurrection of
+Lazarus--March of meditative gladness in the following of the Apostles
+down the Mount of Olives--Rush of adoration breaking through the chains
+and shadows of death, in the Spirits in Prison. Pacing of mighty angels
+above the Firmament, poised on their upright wings, half opened, broad,
+bright, quiet, like eastern clouds before the sun is up;--or going
+forth, with timbrels and with dances, of souls more than conquerors,
+beside the shore of the last great Red Sea, the sea of glass mingled
+with fire, hand knit with hand, and voice with voice, the joyful winds
+of heaven following the measure of their motion, and the flowers of the
+new earth looking on, like stars pausing in their courses.
+
+93. And yet all this is but the lowest part and narrowest reach of
+Angelico's conceptions. Joy and gentleness, patience and power, he could
+indicate by gesture--but Devotion could be told by the countenance only.
+There seems to have been always a stern limit by which the thoughts of
+other men were stayed; the religion that was painted even by Perugino,
+Francia, and Bellini, was finite in its spirit--the religion of earthly
+beings, checked, not indeed by the corruption, but by the veil and the
+sorrow of clay. But with Fra Angelico the glory of the countenance
+reaches to actual transfiguration; eyes that see no more darkly,
+incapable of all tears, foreheads flaming, like Belshazzar's marble
+wall, with the writing of the Father's name upon them, lips tremulous
+with love, and crimson with the light of the coals of the altar--and all
+this loveliness, thus enthusiastic and ineffable, yet sealed with the
+stability which the coming and going of ages as countless as sea-sand
+cannot dim nor weary, and bathed by an ever flowing river of holy
+thought, with God for its source, God for its shore, and God for its
+ocean.
+
+94. We speak in no inconsiderate enthusiasm. We feel assured that to any
+person of just feeling who devotes sufficient time to the examination of
+these works, all terms of description must seem derogatory. Where such
+ends as these have been reached, it ill becomes us to speak of minor
+deficiencies as either to be blamed or regretted: it cannot be
+determined how far even what we deprecate may be accessory to our
+delight, nor by what intricate involution what we deplore may be
+connected with what we love. Every good that nature herself bestows, or
+accomplishes, is given with a counterpoise, or gained at a sacrifice;
+nor is it to be expected of Man that he should win the hardest battles
+and tread the narrowest paths, without the betrayal of a weakness, or
+the acknowledgment of an error.
+
+95. With this final warning against our author's hesitating approbation
+of what is greatest and best, we must close our specific examination of
+the mode in which his design has been worked out. We have done enough to
+set the reader upon his guard against whatever appears slight or
+inconsiderate in his theory or statements, and with the more severity,
+because this was alone wanting to render the book one of the most
+valuable gifts which Art has ever received. Of the translations from the
+lives of the saints we have hardly spoken; they are gracefully rendered,
+and all of them highly interesting--but we could wish to see these, and
+the enumerations of fresco subjects[11] with which the other volumes are
+in great part occupied, published separately for the convenience of
+travelers in Italy. They are something out of place in a work like that
+before us. For the rest, we might have more interested the reader, and
+gratified ourselves, by setting before him some of the many passages of
+tender feeling and earnest eloquence with which the volumes are
+replete--but we felt it necessary rather to anticipate the hesitation
+with which they were liable to be received, and set limits to the halo
+of fancy by which their light is obscured--though enlarged. One or two
+paragraphs, however, of the closing chapter must be given before we
+part:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+96. "What a scene of beauty, what a flower-garden of art--how bright and
+how varied--must Italy have presented at the commencement of the
+sixteenth century, at the death of Raphael! The sacrileges we lament
+took place for the most part after that period; hundreds of frescoes,
+not merely of Giotto and those other elders of Christian Art, but of
+Gentile da Fabriano, Pietro della Francesca, Perugino and their
+compeers, were still existing, charming the eye, elevating the mind, and
+warming the heart. Now alas! few comparatively and fading are the relics
+of those great and good men. While Dante's voice rings as clear as ever,
+communing with us as friend with friend, theirs is dying gradually away,
+fainter and fainter, like the farewell of a spirit. Flaking off the
+walls, uncared for and neglected save in a few rare instances, scarce
+one of their frescoes will survive the century, and the labors of the
+next may not improbably be directed to the recovery and restoration of
+such as may still slumber beneath the whitewash and the daubs with which
+the Bronzinos and Zuccheros 'et id genus omne' have unconsciously sealed
+them up for posterity--their best title to our gratitude.--But why not
+begin at once? at all events in the instances numberless, where merely
+whitewash interposes between us and them.
+
+"It is easy to reply--what need of this? They--the artists--have Moses
+and the prophets, the frescoes of Raphael and Michael Angelo--let them
+study them. Doubtless,--but we still reply, and with no impiety--they
+will not repent, they will not forsake their idols and their evil
+ways--they will not abandon Sense for Spirit, oils for fresco--unless
+these great ones of the past, these Sleepers of Ephesus, arise from the
+dead.... It is not by studying art in its perfection--by worshiping
+Raphael and Michael Angelo exclusively of all other excellence--that we
+can expect to rival them, but by re-ascending to the fountain-head--by
+planting ourselves as acorns in the ground those oaks are rooted in, and
+growing up to their level--in a word, by studying Duccio and Giotto that
+we may paint like Taddeo di Bartolo and Masaccio, Taddeo di Bartolo and
+Masaccio that we may paint like Perugino and Luca Signorelli, Perugino
+and Luca Signorelli that we may paint like Raphael and Michael Angelo.
+And why despair of this, or even of shaming the Vatican? For with genius
+and God's blessing nothing is impossible.
+
+"I would not be a blind partisan, but, with all their faults, the old
+masters I plead for knew how to touch the heart. It may be difficult at
+first to believe this; like children, they are shy with us--like
+strangers, they bear an uncouth mien and aspect--like ghosts from the
+other world, they have an awkward habit of shocking our
+conventionalities with home truths. But with the dead as with the living
+all depends on the frankness with which we greet them, the sincerity
+with which we credit their kindly qualities; sympathy is the key to
+truth--we must love, in order to appreciate."--iii., p. 418.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+97. These are beautiful sentences; yet this let the young painter of
+these days remember always, that whomsoever he may love, or from
+whomsoever learn, he can now no more go back to those hours of infancy
+and be born again.[12] About the faith, the questioning and the
+teaching of childhood there is a joy and grace, which we may often envy,
+but can no more assume:--the voice and the gesture must not be imitated
+when the innocence is lost. Incapability and ignorance in the act of
+being struggled against and cast away are often endowed with a peculiar
+charm--but both are only contemptible when they are pretended. Whatever
+we have now to do, we may be sure, first, that its strength and life
+must be drawn from the real nature with us and about us always, and
+secondly, that, if worth doing, it will be something altogether
+different from what has ever been done before. The visions of the
+cloister must depart with its superstitious peace--the quick,
+apprehensive symbolism of early Faith must yield to the abstract
+teaching of disciplined Reason. Whatever else we may deem of the
+Progress of Nations, one character of that progress is determined and
+discernible. As in the encroaching of the land upon the sea, the
+strength of the sandy bastions is raised out of the sifted ruin of
+ancient inland hills--for every tongue of level land that stretches into
+the deep, the fall of Alps has been heard among the clouds, and as the
+fields of industry enlarge, the intercourse with Heaven is shortened.
+Let it not be doubted that as this change is inevitable, so it is
+expedient, though the form of teaching adopted and of duty prescribed be
+less mythic and contemplative, more active and unassisted: for the light
+of Transfiguration on the Mountain is substituted the Fire of Coals upon
+the Shore, and on the charge to hear the Shepherd, follows that to feed
+the Sheep. Doubtful we may be for a time, and apparently deserted; but
+if, as we wait, we still look forward with steadfast will and humble
+heart, so that our Hope for the Future may be fed, not dulled or
+diverted by our Love for the Past, we shall not long be left without a
+Guide:--the way will be opened, the Precursor appointed--the Hour will
+come, and the Man.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[4] This essay is a review of two books by Lord Lindsay, viz.,
+"Progression by Antagonism," published in 1846, and the "Sketches of the
+History of Christian Art," which appeared in the following year. It is,
+with the paper on Sir C. Eastlake's "History of Oil Painting," one of
+the very few anonymous writings of its author. "I never felt at ease"
+(says Mr. Ruskin, in speaking of anonymous criticism) "in my graduate
+incognito, and although I consented, some nine years ago, to review Lord
+Lindsay's 'Christian Art,' and Sir Charles Eastlake's 'Essay on Oil
+Painting,' in the _Quarterly_, I have ever since steadily refused to
+write even for that once respectable periodical" ("Academy Notes," No.
+II., 1856). For Mr. Ruskin's estimate of Lord Lindsay's work, see the
+"Eagle's Nest," § 46, and "Val d'Arno," § 264, where he speaks of him as
+his "first master in Italian art."--[ED.]
+
+[5] With one exception (see p. 25) the quotations from Lord Lindsay
+are always from the "Christian Art."--ED.
+
+[6] The reader must remember that this arcade was originally quite open,
+the inner wall having been built after the fire, in 1574.
+
+[7] "An Historical Essay on Architecture" by the late Thomas Hope.
+(Murray, 1835) chap, iv., pp. 23-31.
+
+[8] At the feet of his Madonna, in the Gallery of Bologna.
+
+[9] In many pictures of Angelico, the Infant Christ appears
+self-supported--the Virgin not touching the child.
+
+[10] The upper inscription Lord Lindsay has misquoted--it runs thus:--
+
+"Salve Mater Pietatis Et Totius Trinitatis Nobile Triclinium."
+
+
+
+[11] We have been much surprised by the author's frequent reference to
+Lasinio's engravings of various frescoes, unaccompanied by any warning
+of their inaccuracy. No work of Lasinio's can be trusted for _anything_
+except the number and relative position of the figures. All masters are
+by him translated into one monotony of commonplace:--he dilutes
+eloquence, educates naïveté, prompts ignorance, stultifies intelligence,
+and paralyzes power; takes the chill off horror, the edge off wit, and
+the bloom off beauty. In all artistical points he is utterly valueless,
+neither drawing nor expression being ever preserved by him. Giotto,
+Benozzo, or Ghirlandajo are all alike to him; and we hardly know whether
+he injures most when he robs or when he redresses.
+
+[12] We do not perhaps enough estimate the assistance which was once
+given both to purpose and perception, by the feeling of wonder which
+with us is destroyed partly by the ceaseless calls upon it, partly by
+our habit of either discovering or anticipating a reason for everything.
+Of the simplicity and ready surprise of heart which supported the spirit
+of the older painters, an interesting example is seen in the diary of
+Albert Dürer, lately published in a work every way valuable, but
+especially so in the carefulness and richness of its illustrations,
+"Divers Works of Early Masters in Christian Decoration," edited by John
+Weale, London, 2 vols. folio, 1846.
+
+
+
+
+EASTLAKE'S HISTORY OF OIL-PAINTING.[13]
+
+
+98. The stranger in Florence who for the first time passes through the
+iron gate which opens from the Green Cloister of Santa Maria Novella
+into the Spezieria, can hardly fail of being surprised, and that perhaps
+painfully, by the suddenness of the transition from the silence and
+gloom of the monastic inclosure, its pavement rough with epitaphs, and
+its walls retaining, still legible, though crumbling and mildewed, their
+imaged records of Scripture History, to the activity of a traffic not
+less frivolous than flourishing, concerned almost exclusively with the
+appliances of bodily adornment or luxury. Yet perhaps, on a moment's
+reflection, the rose-leaves scattered on the floor, and the air filled
+with odor of myrtle and myrrh, aloes and cassia, may arouse associations
+of a different and more elevated character; the preparation of these
+precious perfumes may seem not altogether unfitting the hands of a
+religious brotherhood--or if this should not be conceded, at all events
+it must be matter of rejoicing to observe the evidence of intelligence
+and energy interrupting the apathy and languor of the cloister; nor will
+the institution be regarded with other than respect, as well as
+gratitude, when it is remembered that, as to the convent library we owe
+the preservation of ancient literature, to the convent laboratory we owe
+the duration of mediæval art.
+
+99. It is at first with surprise not altogether dissimilar, that we find
+a painter of refined feeling and deep thoughtfulness, after manifesting
+in his works the most sincere affection for what is highest in the reach
+of his art, devoting himself for years (there is proof of this in the
+work before us) to the study of the mechanical preparation of its
+appliances, and whatever documentary evidence exists respecting their
+ancient use. But it is with a revulsion of feeling more entire, that we
+perceive the value of the results obtained--the accuracy of the varied
+knowledge by which their sequence has been established--and above all,
+their immediate bearing upon the practice and promise of the schools of
+our own day.
+
+Opposite errors, we know not which the least pardonable, but both
+certainly productive of great harm, have from time to time possessed the
+masters of modern art. It has been held by some that the great early
+painters owed the larger measure of their power to secrets of material
+and method, and that the discovery of a lost vehicle or forgotten
+process might at any time accomplish the regeneration of a fallen
+school. By others it has been asserted that all questions respecting
+materials or manipulation are idle and impertinent; that the methods of
+the older masters were either of no peculiar value, or are still in our
+power; that a great painter is independent of all but the simplest
+mechanical aids, and demonstrates his greatness by scorn of system and
+carelessness of means.
+
+100. It is evident that so long as incapability could shield itself
+under the first of these creeds, or presumption vindicate itself by the
+second; so long as the feeble painter could lay his faults on his
+palette and his panel; and the self-conceited painter, from the assumed
+identity of materials proceed to infer equality of power--(for we
+believe that in most instances those who deny the evil of our present
+methods will deny also the weakness of our present works)--little good
+could be expected from the teaching of the abstract principles of the
+art; and less, if possible, from the example of any mechanical
+qualities, however admirable, whose means might be supposed
+irrecoverable on the one hand, or indeterminate on the other, or of any
+excellence conceived to have been either summoned by an incantation, or
+struck out by an accident. And of late, among our leading masters, the
+loss has not been merely of the system of the ancients, but of all
+system whatsoever: the greater number paint as if the virtue of oil
+pigment were its opacity, or as if its power depended on its polish; of
+the rest, no two agree in use or choice of materials; not many are
+consistent even in their own practice; and the most zealous and earnest,
+therefore the most discontented, reaching impatiently and desperately
+after better things, purchase the momentary satisfaction of their
+feelings by the sacrifice of security of surface and durability of hue.
+The walls of our galleries are for the most part divided between
+pictures whose dead coating of consistent paint, laid on with a heavy
+hand and a cold heart, secures for them the stability of dullness and
+the safety of mediocrity; and pictures whose reckless and experimental
+brilliancy, unequal in its result as lawless in its means, is as
+evanescent as the dust of an insect's wing, and presents in its chief
+perfections so many subjects of future regret.
+
+101. But if these evils now continue, it can only be through rashness
+which no example can warn, or through apathy which no hope can
+stimulate, for Mr. Eastlake has alike withdrawn license from
+experimentalism and apology from indolence. He has done away with all
+legends of forgotten secrets; he has shown that the masters of the great
+Flemish and early Venetian schools possessed no means, followed no
+methods, but such as we may still obtain and pursue; but he has shown
+also, among all these masters, the most admirable care in the
+preparation of materials and the most simple consistency in their use;
+he has shown that their excellence was reached, and could only have been
+reached, by stern and exact science, condescending to the observance,
+care, and conquest of the most minute physical particulars and
+hindrances; that the greatest of them never despised an aid nor avoided
+a difficulty. The loss of imaginative liberty sometimes involved in a
+too scrupulous attention to methods of execution is trivial compared to
+the evils resulting from a careless or inefficient practice. The modes
+in which, with every great painter, realization falls short of
+conception are necessarily so many and so grievous, that he can ill
+afford to undergo the additional discouragement caused by uncertain
+methods and bad materials. Not only so, but even the choice of subjects,
+the amount of completion attempted, nay, even the modes of conception
+and measure of truth are in no small degree involved in the great
+question of materials. On the habitual use of a light or dark ground may
+depend the painter's preference of a broad and faithful, or partial and
+scenic chiaroscuro; correspondent with the facility or fatality of
+alterations, may be the exercise of indolent fancy, or disciplined
+invention; and to the complexities of a system requiring time, patience,
+and succession of process, may be owing the conversion of the ready
+draughtsman into the resolute painter. Farther than this, who shall say
+how unconquerable a barrier to all self-denying effort may exist in the
+consciousness that the best that is accomplished can last but a few
+years, and that the painter's travail must perish with his life?
+
+102. It cannot have been without strong sense of this, the true dignity
+and relation of his subject, that Mr. Eastlake has gone through a toil
+far more irksome, far less selfish than any he could have undergone in
+the practice of his art. The value which we attach to the volume
+depends, however, rather on its preceptive than its antiquarian
+character. As objects of historical inquiry merely, we cannot conceive
+any questions less interesting than those relating to mechanical
+operations generally, nor any honors less worthy of prolonged dispute
+than those which are grounded merely on the invention or amelioration of
+processes and pigments. The subject can only become historically
+interesting when the means ascertained to have been employed at any
+period are considered in their operation upon or procession from the
+artistical aim of such period, the character of its chosen subjects, and
+the effects proposed in their treatment upon the national mind. Mr.
+Eastlake has as yet refused himself the indulgence of such speculation;
+his book is no more than its modest title expresses. For ourselves,
+however, without venturing in the slightest degree to anticipate the
+expression of his ulterior views--though we believe that we can trace
+their extent and direction in a few suggestive sentences, as pregnant as
+they are unobtrusive--we must yet, in giving a rapid sketch of the facts
+established, assume the privilege of directing the reader to one or two
+of their most obvious consequences, and, like honest 'prentices, not
+suffer the abstracted retirement of our master in the back parlor to
+diminish the just recommendation of his wares to the passers-by.
+
+103. Eminently deficient in works representative of the earliest and
+purest tendencies of art, our National Gallery nevertheless affords a
+characteristic and sufficient series of examples of the practice of the
+various schools of painting, after oil had been finally substituted for
+the less manageable glutinous vehicles which, under the general name of
+tempera, were principally employed in the production of easel pictures
+up to the middle of the fifteenth century. If the reader were to make
+the circuit of this collection for the purpose of determining which
+picture represented with least disputable fidelity the first intention
+of its painter, and united in its modes of execution the highest reach
+of achievement with the strongest assurance of durability, we believe
+that--after hesitating long over hypothetical degrees of blackened
+shadow and yellowed light, of lost outline and buried detail, of chilled
+luster, dimmed transparency, altered color, and weakened force--he would
+finally pause before a small picture on panel, representing two quaintly
+dressed figures in a dimly lighted room--dependent for its interest
+little on expression, and less on treatment--but eminently remarkable
+for reality of substance, vacuity of space, and vigor of quiet color;
+nor less for an elaborate finish, united with energetic freshness,
+which seem to show that time has been much concerned in its production,
+and has had no power over its fate.
+
+104. We do not say that the total force of the material is exhibited in
+this picture, or even that it in any degree possesses the lusciousness
+and fullness which are among the chief charms of oil-painting; but that
+upon the whole it would be selected as uniting imperishable firmness
+with exquisite delicacy; as approaching more unaffectedly and more
+closely than any other work to the simple truths of natural color and
+space; and as exhibiting, even in its quaint and minute treatment,
+conquest over many of the difficulties which the boldest practice of art
+involves.
+
+This picture, bearing the inscription "Johannes Van Eyck (fuit?) hic,
+1434," is probably the portrait, certainly the work, of one of those
+brothers to whose ingenuity the first invention of the art of
+oil-painting has been long ascribed. The volume before us is occupied
+chiefly in determining the real extent of the improvements they
+introduced, in examining the processes they employed, and in tracing the
+modifications of those processes adopted by later Flemings, especially
+Rubens, Rembrandt, and Vandyck. Incidental notices of the Italian system
+occur, so far as, in its earlier stages, it corresponded with that of
+the north; but the consideration of its separate character is reserved
+for a following volume, and though we shall expect with interest this
+concluding portion of the treatise, we believe that, in the present
+condition of the English school, the choice of the methods of Van Eyck,
+Bellini, or Rubens, is as much as we could modestly ask or prudently
+desire.
+
+105. It would have been strange indeed if a technical perfection like
+that of the picture above described (equally characteristic of all the
+works of those brothers), had been at once reached by the first
+inventors of the art. So far was this from being the case, and so
+distinct is the evidence of the practice of oil-painting in antecedent
+periods, that of late years the discoveries of the Van Eycks have not
+unfrequently been treated as entirely fabulous; and Raspe, in
+particular, rests their claims to gratitude on the contingent
+introduction of amber-varnish and poppy-oil:--"Such _perhaps_," he says,
+"might have been the misrepresented discovery of the Van Eycks." That
+tradition, however, for which the great painters of Italy, and their
+sufficiently vain historian, had so much respect as never to put forward
+any claim in opposition to it, is not to be clouded by incautious
+suspicion. Mr. Eastlake has approached it with more reverence, stripped
+it of its exaggeration, and shown the foundations for it in the fact
+that the Van Eycks, though they did not create the art, yet were the
+first to enable it for its function; that having found it in servile
+office and with dormant power--laid like the dead Adonis on his
+lettuce-bed--they gave it vitality and dominion. And fortunate it is for
+those who look for another such reanimation, that the method of the Van
+Eycks was not altogether their own discovery. Had it been so, that
+method might still have remained a subject of conjecture; but after
+being put in possession of the principles commonly acknowledged before
+their time, it is comparatively easy to trace the direction of their
+inquiry and the nature of their improvements.
+
+106. With respect to remote periods of antiquity, we believe that the
+use of a hydrofuge oil-varnish for the protection of works in tempera,
+the only fact insisted upon by Mr. Eastlake, is also the only one which
+the labor of innumerable ingenious writers has established: nor up to
+the beginning of the twelfth century is there proof of any practice of
+painting except in tempera, encaustic (wax applied by the aid of heat),
+and fresco. Subsequent to that period, notices of works executed in
+solid color mixed with oil are frequent, but all that can be proved
+respecting earlier times is a gradually increasing acquaintance with the
+different kinds of oil and the modes of their adaptation to artistical
+uses.
+
+Several drying oils are mentioned by the writers of the first three
+centuries of the Christian era--walnut by Pliny and Galen, walnut,
+poppy, and castor-oil (afterwards used by the painters of the twelfth
+century as a varnish) by Dioscorides--yet these notices occur only with
+reference to medicinal or culinary purposes. But at length a drying oil
+is mentioned in connection with works of art by Aetius, a medical writer
+of the fifth century. His words are:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Walnut oil is prepared like that of almonds, either by pounding or
+pressing the nuts, or by throwing them, after they have been bruised,
+into boiling water. The (medicinal) uses are the same: but it has a use
+besides these, being employed by gilders or encaustic painters; for it
+dries, and preserves gildings and encaustic paintings for a long time."
+
+"It is therefore clear," says Mr. Eastlake, "that an oil varnish,
+composed either of inspissated nut oil, or of nut oil combined with a
+dissolved resin, was employed on gilt surfaces and pictures, with a view
+to preserve them, at least as early as the fifth century. It may be
+added that a writer who could then state, as if from his own experience,
+that such varnishes had the effect of preserving works 'for a long
+time,' can hardly be understood to speak of a new invention."--P. 22.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+Linseed-oil is also mentioned by Aetius, though still for medicinal uses
+only; but a varnish, composed of linseed-oil mixed with a variety of
+resins, is described in a manuscript at Lucca, belonging probably to the
+eighth century:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"The age of Charlemagne was an era in the arts; and the addition of
+linseed-oil to the materials of the varnisher and decorator may on the
+above evidence be assigned to it. From this time, and during many ages,
+the linseed-oil varnish, though composed of simpler materials (such as
+sandarac and mastic resin boiled in the oil), alone appears in the
+recipes hitherto brought to light."--_Ib._, p. 24.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+107. The modes of bleaching and thickening oil in the sun, as well as
+the siccative power of metallic oxides, were known to the classical
+writers, and evidence exists of the careful study of Galen, Dioscorides,
+and others by the painters of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: the
+loss (recorded by Vasari) of Antonio Veneziano to the arts, "per che
+studio in Dioscoride le cose dell'erbe," is a remarkable instance of its
+less fortunate results. Still, the immixture of solid color with the
+oil, which had been commonly used as a varnish for tempera paintings and
+gilt surfaces, was hitherto unsuggested; and no distinct notice seems to
+occur of the first occasion of this important step, though in the
+twelfth century, as above stated, the process is described as frequent
+both in Italy and England. Mr. Eastlake's instances have been selected,
+for the most part, from four treatises, two of which, though in an
+imperfect form, have long been known to the public; the third,
+translated by Mrs. Merrifield, is in course of publication; the fourth,
+"Tractatus de Coloribus illuminatorum," is of less importance.
+
+Respecting the dates of the first two, those of Eraclius and Theophilus,
+some difference of opinion exists between Mr. Eastlake and their
+respective editors. The former MS. was published by Raspe,[14] who
+inclines to the opinion of its having been written soon after the time
+of St. Isidore of Seville, probably therefore in the eighth century, but
+insists only on its being prior to the thirteenth. That of Theophilus,
+published first by M. Charles de l'Escalopier, and lately from a more
+perfect MS. by Mr. Hendrie, is ascribed by its English editor (who
+places Eraclius in the tenth) to the early half of the eleventh century.
+Mr. Hendrie maintains his opinion with much analytical ingenuity, and we
+are disposed to think that Mr. Eastlake attaches too much importance to
+the absence of reference to oil-painting in the Mappæ Clavicula (a MS.
+of the twelfth century), in placing Theophilus a century and a half
+later on that ground alone. The question is one of some importance in an
+antiquarian point of view, but the general reader will perhaps be
+satisfied with the conclusion that in MSS. which cannot possibly be
+later than the close of the twelfth century, references to oil-painting
+are clear and frequent.
+
+108. Nothing is known of the personality of either Eraclius or
+Theophilus, but what may be collected from their works; amounting, in
+the first case, to the facts of the author's "language being barbarous,
+his credulity exceptionable, and his knowledge superficial," together
+with his written description as "vir sapientissimus;" while all that is
+positively known of Theophilus is that he was a monk, and that
+Theophilus was not his real name. The character, however, of which the
+assumed name is truly expressive, deserves from us no unrespectful
+attention; we shall best possess our readers of it by laying before them
+one or two passages from the preface. We shall make some use of Mr.
+Hendrie's translation; it is evidently the work of a tasteful man, and
+in most cases renders the feeling of the original faithfully; but the
+Latin, monkish though it be, deserved a more accurate following, and
+many of Mr. Hendrie's deviations bear traces of unsound scholarship. An
+awkward instance occurs in the first paragraph:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Theophilus, humilis presbyter, servus servorum Dei, indignus nomine et
+professione monachi, omnibus mentis desidiam animique vagationem utili
+manuum occupatione, et delectabili novitatum meditatione declinare et
+calcare volentibus, retributionem coelestis præmii!"
+
+"I, Theophilus, an humble priest, servant of the servants of God,
+unworthy of the name and profession of a monk, to all wishing to
+overcome and avoid sloth of the mind or wandering of the soul, by useful
+manual occupation and the delightful contemplation of novelties, send a
+recompense of heavenly price."--_Theophilus_, p. 1.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+_Proemium_ is not "price," nor is the verb understood before
+_retributionem_ "send." Mr. Hendrie seems even less familiar with
+Scriptural than with monkish language, or in this and several other
+cases he would have recognized the adoption of apostolic formulæ. The
+whole paragraph is such a greeting and prayer as stands at the head of
+the sacred epistles:--"Theophilus, to all who desire to overcome
+wandering of the soul, etc., etc. (wishes) recompense of heavenly
+reward." Thus also the dedication of the Byzantine manuscript, lately
+translated by M. Didron, commences "A tous les peintres, et à tous ceux
+qui, aimant l'instruction, étudieront ce livre, salut dans le Seigneur."
+So, presently afterwards, in the sentence, "divina dignatio quæ dat
+omnibus affluenter et non improperat" (translated, "divine _authority_
+which affluently and not precipitately gives to all"), though Mr.
+Hendrie might have perhaps been excused for not perceiving the
+transitive sense of _dignatio_ after _indignus_ in the previous text,
+which indeed, even when felt, is sufficiently difficult to render in
+English; and might not have been aware that the word _impropero_
+frequently bears the sense of _opprobo_; he ought still to have
+recognized the Scriptural "who giveth to all men liberally and
+_upbraideth_ not." "Qui," in the first page, translated "wherefore,"
+mystifies a whole sentence; "ut mereretur," rendered with a schoolboy's
+carelessness "as he merited," reverses the meaning of another;
+"jactantia," in the following page, is less harmfully but not less
+singularly translated "jealousy." We have been obliged to alter several
+expressions in the following passages, in order to bring them near
+enough to the original for our immediate purpose:
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Which knowledge, when he has obtained, let no one magnify himself in
+his own eyes, as if it had been received from himself, and not from
+elsewhere; but let him rejoice humbly in the Lord, from whom and by whom
+are all things, and without whom is nothing; nor let him wrap his gifts
+in the folds of envy, nor hide them in the closet of an avaricious
+heart; but all pride of heart being repelled, let him with a cheerful
+mind give with simplicity to all who ask of him, and let him fear the
+judgment of the Gospel upon that merchant, who, failing to return to his
+lord a talent with accumulated interest, deprived of all reward,
+merited the censure from the mouth of his judge of 'wicked servant.'
+
+"Fearing to incur which sentence, I, a man unworthy and almost without
+name, offer gratuitously to all desirous with humility to learn, that
+which the divine condescension, which giveth to all men liberally and
+upbraideth not, gratuitously conceded to me: and I admonish them that in
+me they acknowledge the goodness, and admire the generosity of God; and
+I would persuade them to believe that if they also add their labor, the
+same gifts are within their reach.
+
+"Wherefore, gentle son, whom God has rendered perfectly happy in this
+respect, that those things are offered to thee gratis, which many,
+plowing the sea waves with the greatest danger to life, consumed by the
+hardship of hunger and cold, or subjected to the weary servitude of
+teachers, and altogether worn out by the desire of learning, yet acquire
+with intolerable labor, covet with greedy looks this 'BOOK OF VARIOUS
+ARTS,' read it through with a tenacious memory, embrace it with an
+ardent love.
+
+"Should you carefully peruse this, you will there find out whatever
+Greece possesses in kinds and mixtures of various colors; whatever
+Tuscany knows of in mosaic-work, or in variety of enamel; whatever
+Arabia shows forth in work of fusion, ductility, or chasing; whatever
+Italy ornaments with gold, in diversity of vases and sculpture of gems
+or ivory; whatever France loves in a costly variety of windows; whatever
+industrious Germany approves in work of gold, silver, copper, and iron,
+of woods and of stones.
+
+"When you shall have re-read this often, and have committed it to your
+tenacious memory, you shall thus recompense me for this care of
+instruction, that as often as you shall have successfully made use of my
+work, you pray for me for the pity of Omnipotent God, who knows that I
+have written these things, which are here arranged, neither through love
+of human approbation, nor through desire of temporal reward, nor have I
+stolen anything precious or rare through envious jealousy, nor have I
+kept back anything reserved served for myself alone; but in
+augmentation of the honor and glory of His name, I have consulted the
+progress and hastened to aid the necessities of many men."--_Ib._ pp.
+xlvii.-li.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+109. There is perhaps something in the naive seriousness with which
+these matters of empiricism, to us of so small importance, are regarded
+by the good monk, which may at first tempt the reader to a smile. It is,
+however, to be kept in mind that some such mode of introduction was
+customary in all works of this order and period. The Byzantine MS.,
+already alluded to, is prefaced still more singularly: "Que celui qui
+veut apprendre la science de la peinture commence à s'y préparer
+d'avance quelque temps en dessinant sans relache ... puis qu'il adresse
+à Jesus Christ la prière et oraison suivante," etc.:--the prayer being
+followed by a homily respecting envy, much resembling that of
+Theophilus. And we may rest assured that until we have again begun to
+teach and to learn in this spirit, art will no more recover its true
+power or place than springs which flow from no heavenward hills can rise
+to useful level in the wells of the plain. The tenderness, tranquillity,
+and resoluteness which we feel in such men's words and thoughts found a
+correspondent expression even in the movements of the hand; precious
+qualities resulted from them even in the most mechanical of their works,
+such as no reward can evoke, no academy teach, nor any other merits
+replace. What force can be summoned by authority, or fostered by
+patronage, which could for an instant equal in intensity the labor of
+this humble love, exerting itself for its own pleasure, looking upon its
+own works by the light of thankfulness, and finishing all, offering all,
+with the irrespective profusion of flowers opened by the wayside, where
+the dust may cover them, and the foot crush them?
+
+110. Not a few passages conceived in the highest spirit of self-denying
+piety would, of themselves, have warranted our sincere thanks to Mr.
+Hendrie for his publication of the manuscript. The practical value of
+its contents is however very variable; most of the processes described
+have been either improved or superseded, and many of the recipes are
+quite as illustrative of the writer's credulity in reception, as
+generosity in communication. The references to the "land of Havilah" for
+gold, and to "Mount Calybe" for iron, are characteristic of monkish
+geographical science; the recipe for the making of Spanish gold is
+interesting, as affording us a clew to the meaning of the mediæval
+traditions respecting the basilisk. Pliny says nothing about the
+hatching of this chimera from cocks' eggs, and ascribes the power of
+killing at sight to a different animal, the catoblepas, whose head,
+fortunately, was so heavy that it could not be held up. Probably the
+word "basiliscus" in Theophilus would have been better translated
+"cockatrice."
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"There is also a gold called Spanish gold, which is composed from red
+copper, powder of basilisk, and human blood, and acid. The Gentiles,
+whose skillfulness in this art is commendable, make basilisks in this
+manner. They have, underground, a house walled with stones everywhere,
+above and below, with two very small windows, so narrow that scarcely
+any light can appear through them; in this house they place two old
+cocks of twelve or fifteen years, and they give them plenty of food.
+When these have become fat, through the heat of their good condition,
+they agree together and lay eggs. Which being laid, the cocks are taken
+out and toads are placed in, which may hatch the eggs, and to which
+bread is given for food. The eggs being hatched, chickens issue out,
+like hens' chickens, to which after seven days grow the tails of
+serpents, and immediately, if there were not a stone pavement to the
+house, they would enter the earth. Guarding against which, their masters
+have round brass vessels of large size, perforated all over, the mouths
+of which are narrow, in which they place these chickens, and close the
+mouths with copper coverings and inter them underground, and they are
+nourished with the fine earth entering through the holes for six
+months. After this they uncover them and apply a copious fire, until the
+animals' insides are completely burnt. Which done, when they have become
+cold, they are taken out and carefully ground, adding to them a third
+part of the blood of a red man, which blood has been dried and ground.
+These two compositions are tempered with sharp acid in a clean vessel;
+they then take very thin sheets of the purest red copper, and anoint
+this composition over them on both sides, and place them in the fire.
+And when they have become glowing, they take them out and quench and
+wash them in the same confection; and they do this for a long time,
+until this composition eats through the copper, and it takes the color
+of gold. This gold is proper for all work."--_Ib._ p. 267.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+Our readers will find in Mr. Hendrie's interesting note the explanation
+of the symbolical language of this recipe; though we cannot agree with
+him in supposing Theophilus to have so understood it. We have no doubt
+the monk wrote what he had heard in good faith, and with no equivocal
+meaning; and we are even ourselves much disposed to regret and resist
+the transformation of toads into nitrates of potash, and of basilisks
+into sulphates of copper.
+
+111. But whatever may be the value of the recipes of Theophilus, couched
+in the symbolical language of the alchemist, his evidence is as clear as
+it is conclusive, as far as regards the general processes adopted in his
+own time. The treatise of Peter de St. Audemar, contained in a volume
+transcribed by Jehan le Begue in 1431, bears internal evidence of being
+nearly coeval with that of Theophilus. And in addition to these MSS.,
+Mr. Eastlake has examined the records of Ely and Westminster, which are
+full of references to decorative operations. From these sources it is
+not only demonstrated that oil-painting, at least in the broadest sense
+(striking colors mixed with oil on surfaces of wood or stone), was
+perfectly common both in Italy and England in the 12th, 13th, and 14th
+centuries, but every step of the process is determinable. Stone
+surfaces were primed with white lead mixed with linseed oil, applied in
+successive coats, and carefully smoothed when dry. Wood was planed
+smooth (or, for delicate work, covered with leather of horse-skin or
+parchment), then coated with a mixture of white lead, wax, and
+pulverized tile, on which the oil and lead priming was laid. In the
+successive application of the coats of this priming, the painter is
+warned by Eraclius of the danger of letting the superimposed coat be
+more oily than that beneath, the shriveling of the surface being a
+necessary consequence.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"The observation respecting the cause, or one of the causes, of a
+wrinkled and shriveled surface, is not unimportant. Oil, or an oil
+varnish, used in abundance with the colors over a perfectly dry
+preparation, will produce this appearance: the employment of an oil
+varnish is even supposed to be detected by it.... As regards the effect
+itself, the best painters have not been careful to avoid it. Parts of
+Titian's St. Sebastian (now in the Gallery of the Vatican) are
+shriveled; the Giorgione in the Louvre is so; the drapery of the figure
+of Christ in the Duke of Wellington's Correggio exhibits the same
+appearance; a Madonna and Child by Reynolds, at Petworth, is in a
+similar state, as are also parts of some pictures by Greuze. It is the
+reverse of a cracked surface, and is unquestionably the less evil of the
+two."--"Eastlake," pp. 36-38.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+112. On the white surface thus prepared, the colors, ground finely with
+linseed oil, were applied, according to the advice of Theophilus, in not
+less than three successive coats, and finally protected with amber or
+sandarac varnish: each coat of color being carefully dried by the aid of
+heat or in the sun before a second was applied, and the entire work
+before varnishing. The practice of carefully drying each coat was
+continued in the best periods of art, but the necessity of exposure to
+the sun intimated by Theophilus appears to have arisen only from his
+careless preparation of the linseed oil, and ignorance of a proper
+drying medium. Consequent on this necessity is the restriction in
+Theophilus, St. Audemar, and in the British Museum MS., of oil-painting
+to wooden surfaces, because movable panels could be dried in the sun;
+while, for walls, the colors are to be mixed with water, wine, gum, or
+the usual tempera vehicles, egg and fig-tree juice; white lead and
+verdigris, themselves dryers, being the only pigments which could be
+mixed with oil for walls. But the MS. of Eraclius and the records of our
+English cathedrals imply no such absolute restriction. They mention the
+employment of oil for the painting or varnishing of columns and interior
+walls, and in quantity very remarkable. Among the entries relating to
+St. Stephen's chapel, occur--"For 19 flagons of painter's oil, at 3_s._
+4_d._ the flagon, 43_s._ 4_d._" (It might be as well, in the next
+edition, to correct the copyist's reverse of the position of the X and
+L, lest it should be thought that the principles of the science of
+arithmetic have been progressive, as well as those of art.) And
+presently afterwards, in May of the same year, "to John de Hennay, for
+_seventy_ flagons and a half of painter's oil for the painting of the
+same chapel, at 20_d._ the flagon, 117_s._ 6_d._" The expression
+"painter's oil" seems to imply more careful preparation than that
+directed by Theophilus, probably purification from its mucilage in the
+sun; but artificial heat was certainly employed to assist the drying,
+and after reading of flagons supplied by the score, we can hardly be
+surprised at finding charcoal furnished by the cartload--see an entry
+relating to the Painted Chamber. In one MS. of Eraclius, however, a
+distinct description of a drying oil in the modern sense, occurs, white
+lead and lime being added, and the oil thickened by exposure to the sun,
+as was the universal practice in Italy.
+
+113. Such was the system of oil-painting known before the time of Van
+Eyck; but it remains a question in what kind of works and with what
+degree of refinement this system had been applied. The passages in
+Eraclius refer only to ornamental work, imitations of marble, etc.; and
+although, in the records of Ely cathedral, the words "pro ymaginibus
+super columnas depingendis" may perhaps be understood as referring to
+paintings of figures, the applications of oil, which are distinctly
+determinable from these and other English documents, are merely
+decorative; and "the large supplies of it which appear in the
+Westminster and Ely records indicate the coarseness of the operations
+for which it was required." Theophilus, indeed, mentions tints for
+faces--_mixturas vultuum_; but it is to be remarked that Theophilus
+painted with a liquid oil, the drying of which in the sun he expressly
+says "in _ymaginibus_ et aliis picturis diuturnum et tædiosum nimis
+est." The oil generally employed was thickened to the consistence of a
+varnish. Cennini recommends that it be kept in the sun until reduced one
+half; and in the Paris copy of Eraclius we are told that "the longer the
+oil remains in the sun the better it will be." Such a vehicle entirely
+precluded delicacy of execution.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Paintings entirely executed with the thickened vehicle, at a time when
+art was in the very lowest state, and when its votaries were ill
+qualified to contend with unnecessary difficulties, must have been of
+the commonest description. Armorial bearings, patterns, and similar
+works of mechanical decoration, were perhaps as much as could be
+attempted.
+
+"Notwithstanding the general reference to flesh-painting, 'e così fa
+dello incarnare,' in Cennini's directions, there are no certain examples
+of pictures of the fourteenth century, in which the flesh is executed in
+oil colors. This leads us to inquire what were the ordinary applications
+of oil-painting in Italy at that time. It appears that the method, when
+adopted at all, was considered to belong to the complemental and merely
+decorative parts of a picture. It was employed in portions of the work
+only, on draperies, and over gilding and foils. Cennini describes such
+operations as follows. 'Gild the surface to be occupied by the drapery;
+draw on it what ornaments or patterns you please; glaze the unornamented
+intervals with verdigris ground in oil, shading some folds twice. Then,
+when this is dry, glaze the same color over the whole drapery, both
+ornaments and plain portions.'
+
+"These operations, together with the gilt field round the figures, the
+stucco decorations, and the carved framework, tabernacle, or _ornamento_
+itself of the picture, were completed first; the faces and hands, which
+in Italian pictures of the fourteenth century were always in tempera,
+were added afterwards, or at all events after the draperies and
+background were finished. Cennini teaches the practice of all but the
+carving. In later times the work was divided, and the decorator or
+gilder was sometimes a more important person than the painter. Thus some
+works of an inferior Florentine artist were ornamented with stuccoes,
+carving, and gilding, by the celebrated Donatello, who, in his youth,
+practiced this art in connection with sculpture. Vasari observed the
+following inscription under a picture:--'Simone Cini, a Florentine,
+wrought the carved work; Gabriello Saracini executed the gilding; and
+Spinello di Luca, of Arezzo, painted the picture, in the year
+1385.'"--_Ib._ pp. 71, 72, and 80.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+114. We may pause to consider for a moment what effect upon the mental
+habits of these earlier schools might result from this separate and
+previous completion of minor details. It is to be remembered that the
+painter's object in the backgrounds of works of this period
+(universally, or nearly so, of religious subject) was not the deceptive
+representation of a natural scene, but the adornment and setting forth
+of the central figures with precious work--the conversion of the
+picture, as far as might be, into a gem, flushed with color and alive
+with light. The processes necessary for this purpose were altogether
+mechanical; and those of stamping and burnishing the gold, and of
+enameling, were necessarily performed before any delicate tempera-work
+could be executed. Absolute decision of design was therefore necessary
+throughout; hard linear separations were unavoidable between the
+oil-color and the tempera, or between each and the gold or enamel.
+General harmony of effect, aërial perspective, or deceptive chiaroscuro,
+became totally impossible; and the dignity of the picture depended
+exclusively on the lines of its design, the purity of its ornaments, and
+the beauty of expression which could be attained in those portions (the
+faces and hands) which, set off and framed by this splendor of
+decoration, became the cynosure of eyes. The painter's entire energy was
+given to these portions; and we can hardly imagine any discipline more
+calculated to insure a grand and thoughtful school of art than the
+necessity of discriminated character and varied expression imposed by
+this peculiarly separate and prominent treatment of the features. The
+exquisite drawing of the hand also, at least in outline, remained for
+this reason even to late periods one of the crowning excellences of the
+religious schools. It might be worthy the consideration of our present
+painters whether some disadvantage may not result from the exactly
+opposite treatment now frequently adopted, the finishing of the head
+before the addition of its accessories. A flimsy and indolent background
+is almost a necessary consequence, and probably also a false
+flesh-color, irrecoverable by any after-opposition.
+
+115. The reader is in possession of most of the conclusions relating to
+the practice of oil-painting up to about the year 1406.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Its inconveniences were such that tempera was not unreasonably
+preferred to it for works that required careful design, precision, and
+completeness. Hence the Van Eycks seem to have made it their first
+object to overcome the stigma that attached to oil-painting, as a
+process fit only for ordinary purposes and mechanical decorations. With
+an ambition partly explained by the previous coarse applications of the
+method, they sought to raise wonder by surpassing the finish of tempera
+with the very material that had long been considered intractable. Mere
+finish was, however, the least of the excellences of these reformers.
+The step was short which sufficed to remove the self-imposed
+difficulties of the art; but that effort would probably not have been so
+successful as it was, in overcoming long-established prejudices, had it
+not been accompanied by some of the best qualities which oil-painting,
+as a means of imitating nature, can command."--_Ib._ p. 88.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+116. It has been a question to which of the two brothers, Hubert or
+John, the honor of the invention is to be attributed. Van Mander gives
+the date of the birth of Hubert 1366; and his interesting epitaph in the
+cathedral of St. Bavon, at Ghent, determines that of his death:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Take warning from me, ye who walk over me. I was as you are, but am now
+buried dead beneath you. Thus it appears that neither art nor medicine
+availed me. Art, honor, wisdom, power, affluence, are spared not when
+death comes. I was called Hubert Van Eyck; I am now food for worms.
+Formerly known and highly honored in painting; this all was shortly
+after turned to nothing. It was in the year of the Lord one thousand
+four hundred and twenty-six, on the eighteenth day of September, that I
+rendered up my soul to God, in sufferings. Pray God for me, ye who love
+art, that I may attain to His sight. Flee sin; turn to the best
+[objects]: for you must follow me at last."
+
+       *       *       *
+
+John Van Eyck appears by sufficient evidence to have been born between
+1390 and 1395; and, as the improved oil-painting was certainly
+introduced about 1410, the probability is greater that the system had
+been discovered by the elder brother than by the youth of 15. What the
+improvement actually was is a far more important question. Vasari's
+account, in the Life of Antonello da Messina, is the first piece of
+evidence here examined (p. 205); and it is examined at once with more
+respect and more advantage than the half-negligent, half-embarrassed
+wording of the passage might appear either to deserve or to promise.
+Vasari states that "_Giovanni_ of Bruges," having finished a
+tempera-picture on panel, and varnished it as usual, placed it in the
+sun to dry--that the heat opened the joinings--and that the artist,
+provoked at the destruction of his work--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"began to devise means for preparing a kind of varnish which should dry
+in the shade, so as to avoid placing his pictures in the sun. Having
+made experiments with many things, both pure and mixed together, he at
+last found that linseed-oil and nut-oil, among the many which he had
+tested, were more drying than all the rest. These, therefore, boiled
+with _other mixtures of his_, made him the varnish which he, nay, which
+all the painters of the world, had long desired. Continuing his
+experiments with many other things, he saw that the immixture of the
+colors with these kinds of oils gave them a very firm consistence,
+which, when dry, was proof against wet; and, moreover, that the vehicle
+lit up the colors so powerfully, that it gave a gloss of itself without
+varnish; and that which appeared to him still more admirable was, that
+it allowed of blending [the colors] infinitely better than tempera.
+Giovanni, rejoicing in this invention, and being a person of
+discernment, began many works."
+
+       *       *       *
+
+117. The reader must observe that this account is based upon and
+clumsily accommodated to the idea, prevalent in Vasari's time throughout
+Italy, that Van Eyck not merely improved, but first introduced, the art
+of oil-painting, and that no mixture of color with linseed or nut oil
+had taken place before his time. We are only informed of the new and
+important part of the invention, under the pointedly specific and
+peculiarly Vasarian expression--"altre sue misture." But the real value
+of the passage is dependent on the one fact of which it puts us in
+possession, and with respect to which there is every reason to believe
+it trustworthy, that it was in search of a _Varnish_ which would dry in
+the shade that Van Eyck discovered the new vehicle. The next point to be
+determined is the nature of the Varnish ordinarily employed, and spoken
+of by Cennini and many other writers under the familiar title of Vernice
+liquida. The derivation of the word Vernix bears materially on the
+question, and will not be devoid of interest for the general reader, who
+may perhaps be surprised at finding himself carried by Mr. Eastlake's
+daring philology into regions poetical and planetary:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Eustathius, a writer of the twelfth century, in his commentary on
+Homer, states that the Greeks of his day called amber ([Greek:
+êlektron]) Veronice ([Greek: beronikê]). Salmasius, quoting from a
+Greek medical MS. of the same period, writes it Verenice ([Greek:
+berenikê]). In the Lucca MS. (8th century) the word Veronica more than
+once occurs among the ingredients of varnishes, and it is remarkable
+that in the copies of the same recipes in the _Mappæ Clavicula_ (12th
+century) the word is spelt, in the genitive, Verenicis and Vernicis.
+This is probably the earliest instance of the use of the Latinized word
+nearly in its modern form; the original nominative Vernice being
+afterwards changed to Vernix.
+
+"Veronice or Verenice, as a designation for amber, must have been common
+at an earlier period than the date of the Lucca MS., since it there
+occurs as a term in ordinary use. It is scarcely necessary to remark
+that the letter [Greek: beta] was sounded v by the mediæval Greeks,
+as it is by their present descendants. Even during the classic ages of
+Greece [Greek: beta] represented [Greek: phi] in certain dialects. The
+name Berenice or Beronice, borne by more than one daughter of the
+Ptolemies, would be more correctly written Pherenice or Pheronice. The
+literal coincidence of this name and its modifications with the Vernice
+of the middle ages, might almost warrant the supposition that amber,
+which by the best ancient authorities was considered a mineral, may, at
+an early period, have been distinguished by the name of a constellation,
+the constellation of Berenice's (golden) hair."--_Eastlake_, p. 230.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+118. We are grieved to interrupt our reader's voyage among the
+constellations; but the next page crystallizes us again like ants in
+amber, or worse, in gum-sandarach. It appears, from conclusive and
+abundant evidence, that the greater cheapness of sandarach, and its
+easier solubility in oil rendered it the usual substitute for amber, and
+that the word Vernice, when it occurs alone, is the common synonym for
+dry sandarach resin. This, dissolved by heat in linseed oil, three parts
+oil to one of resin, was the Vernice liquida of the Italians, sold in
+Cennini's time ready prepared, and the customary varnish of tempera
+pictures. Concrete turpentine ("oyle of fir-tree," "Pece Greca,"
+"Pegola"), previously prepared over a slow fire until it ceased to
+swell, was added to assist the liquefaction of the sandarach, first in
+Venice, where the material could easily be procured, and afterwards in
+Florence. The varnish so prepared, especially when it was long boiled to
+render it more drying, was of a dark color, materially affecting the
+tints over which it was passed.[15]
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"It is not impossible that the lighter style of coloring introduced by
+Giotto may have been intended by him to counteract the effects of this
+varnish, the appearance of which in the Greek pictures he could not fail
+to observe. Another peculiarity in the works of the painters of the time
+referred to, particularly those of the Florentine and Sienese schools,
+is the greenish tone of their coloring in the flesh; produced by the
+mode in which they often prepared their works, viz. by a green
+under-painting. The appearance was neutralized by the red sandarac
+varnish, and pictures executed in the manner described must have looked
+better before it was removed."--_Ib._ p. 252.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+Farther on, this remark is thus followed out:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"The paleness or freshness of the tempera may have been sometimes
+calculated for this brown glazing (for such it was in effect), and when
+this was the case, the picture was, strictly speaking, unfinished
+without its varnish. It is, therefore, quite conceivable that a painter,
+averse to mere mechanical operations, would, in his final process, still
+have an eye to the harmony of his work, and, seeing that the tint of his
+varnish was more or less adapted to display the hues over which it was
+spread, would vary that tint, so as to heighten the effect of the
+picture. The practice of tingeing varnishes was not even new, as the
+example given by Cardanus proves. The next step to this would be to
+treat the tempera picture still more as a preparation, and to calculate
+still further on the varnish, by modifying and adapting its color to a
+greater extent. A work so completed must have nearly approached the
+appearance of an oil picture. This was perhaps the moment when the new
+method opened itself to the mind of Hubert Van Eyck.... The next change
+necessarily consisted in using opaque as well as transparent colors; the
+former being applied over the light, the latter over the darker,
+portions of the picture; while the work in tempera was now reduced to a
+light chiaroscuro preparation.... It was now that the hue of the
+original varnish became an objection; for, as a medium, it required to
+be itself colorless."--_Ib._ pp. 271-273.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+119. Our author has perhaps somewhat embarrassed this part of the
+argument, by giving too much importance to the conjectural adaptation of
+the tints of the tempera picture to the brown varnish, and too little to
+the bold transition from transparent to opaque color on the lights. Up
+to this time, we must remember, the entire drawing of the flesh had been
+in tempera; the varnish, however richly tinted, however delicately
+adjusted to the tints beneath, was still broadly applied over the whole
+surface, the design being seen through the transparent glaze. But the
+mixture of opaque color at once implies that portions of the design
+itself were executed with the varnish for a vehicle, and therefore that
+the varnish had been entirely changed both in color and consistence. If,
+as above stated, the improvement in the varnish had been made only after
+it had been mixed with opaque color, it does not appear why the idea of
+so mixing it should have presented itself to Van Eyck more than to any
+other painter of the day, and Vasari's story of the split panel becomes
+nugatory. But we apprehend, from a previous passage (p. 258),
+that Mr. Eastlake would not have us so interpret him. We rather suppose
+that we are expressing his real opinion in stating our own, that Van
+Eyck, seeking for a varnish which would dry in the shade, first
+perfected the methods of dissolving amber or copal in oil, then sought
+for and added a good dryer, and thus obtained a varnish which, having
+been subjected to no long process of boiling, was nearly colorless; that
+in using this new varnish over tempera works he might cautiously and
+gradually mix it with the opaque color, whose purity he now found
+unaffected, by the transparent vehicle; and, finally, as the thickness
+of the varnish in its less perfect state was an obstacle to precision of
+execution, increase the proportion of its oil to the amber, or add a
+diluent, as occasion required.
+
+120. Such, at all events, in the sum, whatever might be the order or
+occasion of discovery, were Van Eyck's improvements in the vehicle of
+color, and to these, applied by singular ingenuity and affection to the
+imitation of nature, with a fidelity hitherto unattempted, Mr. Eastlake
+attributes the influence which his works obtained over his
+contemporaries:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"If we ask in what the chief novelty of his practice consisted, we shall
+at once recognize it in an amount of general excellence before unknown.
+At all times, from Van Eyck's day to the present, whenever nature has
+been surprisingly well imitated in pictures, the first and last question
+with the ignorant has been--What materials did the artist use? The
+superior mechanical secret is always supposed to be in the hands of the
+greatest genius; and an early example of sudden perfection in art, like
+the fame of the heroes of antiquity, was likely to monopolize and
+represent the claims of many."--_Ib._ p. 266.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+This is all true; that Van Eyck saw nature more truly than his
+predecessors is certain; but it is disputable whether this rendering of
+nature recommended his works to the imitation of the Italians. On the
+contrary, Mr. Eastlake himself observes in another place (p. 220), that
+the character of delicate imitation common to the Flemish pictures
+militated _against_ the acceptance of their method:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"The specimens of Van Eyck, Hugo van der Goes, Memling, and others,
+which the Florentines had seen, may have appeared, in the eyes of some
+severe judges (for example, those who daily studied the frescoes of
+Masaccio), to indicate a certain connection between oil painting and
+minuteness, if not always of size, yet of style. The method, by its very
+finish and the possible completeness of its gradations, must have seemed
+well calculated to exhibit numerous objects on a small scale. That this
+was really the impression produced, at a later period, on one who
+represented the highest style of design, has been lately proved by means
+of an interesting document, in which the opinions of Michael Angelo on
+the character of Flemish pictures are recorded by a contemporary
+artist."[16]
+
+       *       *       *
+
+121. It was not, we apprehend, the resemblance to nature, but the
+abstract power of color, which inflamed with admiration and jealousy the
+artists of Italy; it was not the delicate touch nor the precise verity
+of Van Eyck, but the "vivacita de' colori" (says Vasari) which at the
+first glance induced Antonello da Messina to "put aside every other
+avocation and thought, and at once set out for Flanders," assiduously to
+cultivate the friendship of _Giovanni_, presenting to him many drawings
+and other things, until _Giovanni_, finding himself already old, was
+content that Antonello should see the method of his coloring in oil, nor
+then to quit Flanders until he had "thoroughly learned that _process_."
+It was this _process_, separate, mysterious, and admirable, whose
+communication the Venetian, Domenico, thought the most acceptable
+kindness which could repay his hospitality; and whose solitary
+possession Castagno thought cheaply purchased by the guilt of the
+betrayer and murderer; it was in this process, the deduction of watchful
+intelligence, not by fortuitous discovery, that the first impulse was
+given to European art. Many a plank had yawned in the sun before Van
+Eyck's; but he alone saw through the rent, as through an opening portal,
+the lofty perspective of triumph widening its rapid wedge;--many a spot
+of opaque color had clouded the transparent amber of earlier times; but
+the little cloud that rose over Van Eyck's horizon was "like unto a
+man's hand."
+
+What this process was, and how far it differed from preceding practice,
+has hardly, perhaps, been pronounced by Mr. Eastlake with sufficient
+distinctness. One or two conclusions which he has not marked are, we
+think, deducible from his evidence, In one point, and that not an
+unimportant one, we believe that many careful students of coloring will
+be disposed to differ with him: our own intermediate opinion we will
+therefore venture to state, though with all diffidence.
+
+122. We must not, however, pass entirely without notice the two chapters
+on the preparation of oils, and on the oleo-resinous vehicles, though to
+the general reader the recipes contained in them are of little interest;
+and in the absence of all expression of opinion on the part of Mr.
+Eastlake as to their comparative excellence, even to the artist, their
+immediate utility appears somewhat doubtful. One circumstance, however,
+is remarkable in all, the care taken by the great painters, without
+exception, to avoid the yellowing of their oil. Perfect and stable
+clearness is the ultimate aim of all the processes described (many of
+them troublesome and tedious in the extreme): and the effect of the
+altered oil is of course most dreaded on pale and cold colors. Thus
+Philippe Nunez tells us how to purify linseed oil "for white and blues;"
+and Pacheco, "el de linaza no me quele mal: aunque ai quien diga que no
+a de ver el Azul ni el Blanco este Azeite."[17] De Mayerne recommends
+poppy oil "for painting white, blue, and similar colors, so that they
+shall not yellow;" and in another place, "for air-tints and
+blue;"--while the inclination to green is noticed as an imperfection in
+hempseed oil: so Vasari--speaking of linseed-oil in contemporary
+practice--"benchè il noce e meglio, perchè ingialla meno." The Italians
+generally mixed an essential oil with their delicate tints, including
+flesh tints (p. 431). Extraordinary methods were used by the Flemish
+painters to protect their blues; they were sometimes painted with size,
+and varnished; sometimes strewed in powder on fresh white-lead (p.
+456). Leonardo gives a careful recipe for preventing the change of color
+in nut oil, supposing it to be owing to neglect in removing the skin of
+the nut. His words, given at p. 321, are incorrectly translated: "una
+certa bucciolina," is not a husk or rind--but "a thin skin," meaning the
+white membranous covering of the nut itself, of which it is almost
+impossible to detach all the inner laminæ. This, "che tiene della natura
+del mallo," Leonardo supposes to give the expressed oil its property of
+forming a _skin_ at the surface.
+
+123. We think these passages interesting, because they are entirely
+opposed to the modern ideas of the desirableness of yellow lights and
+green blues, which have been introduced chiefly by the study of altered
+pictures. The anxiety of Rubens, expressed in various letters, quoted at
+p. 516, lest any of his whites should have become yellow, and his
+request that his pictures might be exposed to the sun to remedy the
+defect, if it occurred, are conclusive on this subject, as far as
+regards the feeling of the Flemish painters: we shall presently see that
+the _coolness_ of their light was an essential part of their scheme of
+color.
+
+The testing of the various processes given in these two chapters must be
+a matter of time: many of them have been superseded by recent
+discoveries. Copal varnish is in modern practice no inefficient
+substitute for amber, and we believe that most artists will agree with
+us in thinking that the vehicles now in use are sufficient for all
+purposes, if used rightly. We shall, therefore, proceed in the first
+place to give a rapid sketch of the entire process of the Flemish school
+as it is stated by Mr. Eastlake in the 11th chapter, and then examine
+the several steps of it one by one, with the view at once of marking
+what seems disputable, and of deducing from what is certain some
+considerations respecting the consequences of its adoption in subsequent
+art.
+
+124. The ground was with all the early masters pure _white_, plaster of
+Paris, or washed chalk with size; a preparation which has been employed
+without change from remote antiquity--witness the Egyptian mummy-cases.
+Such a ground, becoming brittle with age, is evidently unsafe on canvas,
+unless exceedingly thin; and even on panel is liable to crack and detach
+itself, unless it be carefully guarded against damp. The precautions of
+Van Eyck against this danger, as well as against the warping of his
+panel, are remarkable instances of his regard to points apparently
+trivial:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"In large altar-pieces, necessarily composed of many pieces, it may be
+often remarked that each separate plank has become slightly convex in
+front: this is particularly observable in the picture of the
+Transfiguration by Raphael. The heat of candles on altars is supposed to
+have been the cause of this not uncommon defect; but heat, if
+considerable, would rather produce the contrary appearance. It would
+seem that the layer of paint, with its substratum, slightly operates to
+prevent the wood from contracting or becoming concave on that side; it
+might therefore be concluded that a similar protection at the back, by
+equalizing the conditions, would tend to keep the wood flat. The oak
+panel on which the picture by Van Eyck in the National Gallery is
+painted is protected at the back by a composition of gesso, size, and
+tow, over which a coat of black oil-paint was passed. This, whether
+added when the picture was executed or subsequently, has tended to
+preserve the wood (which is not at all worm-eaten), and perhaps to
+prevent its warping."--_Ib._ pp. 373, 374.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+On the white ground, scraped, when it was perfectly dry, till it was "as
+white as milk and as smooth as ivory" (Cennini), the outline of the
+picture was drawn, and its light and shade expressed, usually with the
+pen, with all possible care; and over this outline a coating of size was
+applied in order to render the gesso ground _non_-absorbent. The
+establishment of this fact is of the greatest importance, for the whole
+question of the true function and use of the gesso ground hangs upon it.
+That use has been supposed by all previous writers on the technical
+processes of painting to be, by absorbing the oil, to remove in some
+degree the cause of yellowness in the colors. Had this been so, the
+ground itself would have lost its brilliancy, and it would have followed
+that a dark ground, equally absorbent, would have answered the purpose
+as well. But the evidence adduced by Mr. Eastlake on this subject is
+conclusive:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Pictures are sometimes transferred from panel to cloth. The front being
+secured by smooth paper or linen, the picture is laid on its face, and
+the wood is gradually planed and scraped away. At last the ground
+appears; first, the 'gesso grosso,' then, next the painted surface, the
+'gesso sottile.' On scraping this it is found that it is whitest
+immediately next the colors; for on the inner side it may sometimes
+have received slight stains from the wood, if the latter was not first
+sized. When a picture which happens to be much cracked has been oiled or
+varnished, the fluid will sometimes penetrate through the cracks into
+the ground, which in such parts had become accessible. In that case the
+white ground is stained in lines only, corresponding in their direction
+with the cracks of the picture. This last circumstance also proves that
+the ground was not sufficiently hard in itself to prevent the absorption
+of oil. Accordingly, it required to be rendered non-absorbent by a
+coating of size; and this was passed _over_ the outline, before the
+oil-priming was applied."--_Ib._ pp. 383, 384.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+The perfect whiteness of the ground being thus secured, a transparent
+warm oil-priming, in early practice flesh-colored, was usually passed
+over the entire picture. This custom, says Mr. Eastlake, appears to have
+been "a remnant of the old habit of covering tempera pictures with a
+warm varnish, and was sometimes omitted." When used it was permitted to
+dry thoroughly, and over it the shadows were painted in with a rich
+transparent brown, mixed with a somewhat thick oleo-resinous vehicle;
+the lighter colors were then added with a thinner vehicle, taking care
+not to disturb the transparency of the shadows by the unnecessary
+mixture of opaque pigments, and leaving the ground bearing bright
+_through the thin lights_. (?) As the art advanced, the lights were more
+and more loaded, and afterwards glazed, the shadows being still left in
+untouched transparency. This is the method of Rubens. The later Italian
+colorists appear to have laid opaque local color without fear even into
+the shadows, and to have recovered transparency by ultimate glazing.
+
+125. Such are the principal heads of the method of the early Flemish
+masters, as stated by Mr. Eastlake. We have marked as questionable the
+influence of the ground in supporting the lights: our reasons for doing
+so we will give, after we have stated what we suppose to be the
+advantages or disadvantages of the process in its earlier stages,
+guiding ourselves as far as possible by the passages in which any
+expression occurs of Mr. Eastlake's opinion.
+
+The reader cannot but see that the _eminent_ character of the whole
+system is its predeterminateness. From first to last its success
+depended on the decision and clearness of each successive step. The
+drawing and light and shade were secured without any interference of
+color; but when over these the oil-priming was once laid, the design
+could neither be altered nor, if lost, recovered; a color laid too
+opaquely in the shadow destroyed the inner organization of the picture,
+and remained an irremediable blemish; and it was necessary, in laying
+color even on the lights, to follow the guidance of the drawing beneath
+with a caution and precision which rendered anything like freedom of
+handling, in the modern sense, totally impossible. Every quality which
+depends on rapidity, accident, or audacity was interdicted; no
+affectation of ease was suffered to disturb the humility of patient
+exertion. Let our readers consider in what temper such a work must be
+undertaken and carried through--a work in which error was irremediable,
+change impossible--which demanded the drudgery of a student, while it
+involved the deliberation of a master--in which the patience of a
+mechanic was to be united with the foresight of a magician--in which no
+license could be indulged either to fitfulness of temper or felicity of
+invention--in which haste was forbidden, yet languor fatal, and
+consistency of conception no less incumbent than continuity of toil. Let
+them reflect what kind of men must have been called up and trained by
+work such as this, and then compare the tones of mind which are likely
+to be produced by our present practice,--a practice in which alteration
+is admitted to any extent in any stage--in which neither foundation is
+laid nor end foreseen--in which all is dared and nothing resolved,
+everything periled, nothing provided for--in which men play the
+sycophant in the courts of their humors, and hunt wisps in the marshes
+of their wits--a practice which invokes accident, evades law,
+discredits application, despises system, and sets forth with chief
+exultation, contingent beauty, and extempore invention.
+
+126. But it is not only the fixed nature of the successive steps which
+influenced the character of these early painters. A peculiar _direction_
+was given to their efforts by the close attention to drawing which, as
+Mr. Eastlake has especially noticed, was involved in the preparation of
+the design on the white ground. That design was secured with a care and
+finish which in many instances might seem altogether supererogatory.[18]
+The preparation by John Bellini in the Florentine gallery is completed
+with exhaustless diligence into even the portions farthest removed from
+the light, where the thick brown of the shadows must necessarily have
+afterwards concealed the greater part of the work. It was the discipline
+undergone in producing this preparation which fixed the character of the
+school. The most important part of the picture was executed not with the
+brush, but with the point, and the refinements attainable by this
+instrument dictated the treatment of their subject. Hence the transition
+to etching and engraving, and the intense love of minute detail,
+accompanied by an imaginative communication of dignity and power to the
+smallest forms, in Albert Dürer and others. But this attention to
+minutiæ was not the only result; the disposition of light and shade was
+also affected by the method. Shade was not to be had at small cost; its
+masses could not be dashed on in impetuous generalization, fields for
+the future recovery of light. They were measured out and wrought to
+their depths only by expenditure of toil and time; and, as future
+grounds for color, they were necessarily restricted to the _natural_
+shadow of every object, white being left for high lights of whatever
+hue. In consequence, the character of pervading daylight, almost
+inevitably produced in the preparation, was afterwards assumed as a
+standard in the painting. Effectism, accidental shadows, all obvious
+and vulgar artistical treatment, were excluded, or introduced only as
+the lights became more loaded, and were consequently imposed with more
+facility on the dark ground. Where shade was required in large mass, it
+was obtained by introducing an object of locally dark color. The Italian
+masters who followed Van Eyck's system were in the constant habit of
+relieving their principal figures by the darkness of some object,
+foliage, throne, or drapery, introduced behind the head, the open sky
+being left visible on each side. A green drapery is thus used with great
+quaintness by John Bellini in the noble picture of the Brera Gallery; a
+black screen, with marbled veins, behind the portraits of himself and
+his brother in the Louvre; a crimson velvet curtain behind the Madonna,
+in Francia's best picture at Bologna. Where the subject was sacred, and
+the painter great, this system of pervading light produced pictures of a
+peculiar and tranquil majesty; where the mind of the painter was
+irregularly or frivolously imaginative, its temptations to accumulative
+detail were too great to be resisted--the spectator was by the German
+masters overwhelmed with the copious inconsistency of a dream, or
+compelled to traverse the picture from corner to corner like a museum of
+curiosities.
+
+127. The chalk or pen preparation being completed, and the oil-priming
+laid, we have seen that the shadows were laid in with a transparent
+_brown_ in considerable body. The question next arises--What influence
+is this part of the process likely to have had upon the _coloring_ of
+the school? It is to be remembered that the practice was continued to
+the latest times, and that when the thin light had been long abandoned,
+and a loaded body of color had taken its place, the brown transparent
+shadow was still retained, and is retained often to this day, when
+asphaltum is used as its base, at the risk of the destruction of the
+picture. The utter loss of many of Reynolds' noblest works has been
+caused by the lavish use of this pigment. What the pigment actually was
+in older times is left by Mr. Eastlake undecided:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"A rich brown, which, whether an earth or mineral alone, or a substance
+of the kind enriched by the addition of a transparent yellow or orange,
+is not an unimportant element of the glowing coloring which is
+remarkable in examples of the school. Such a color, by artificial
+combinations at least, is easily supplied; and it is repeated, that, in
+general, the materials now in use are quite as good as those which the
+Flemish masters had at their command."--_Ib._ p. 488.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+At p. 446 it is also asserted that the peculiar glow of the brown of
+Rubens is hardly to be accounted for by any accidental variety in the
+Cassel earths, but was obtained by the mixture of a transparent yellow.
+Evidence, however, exists of asphaltum having been used in Flemish
+pictures, and with safety, even though prepared in the modern manner:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"It is not ground" (says De Mayerne), "but a drying oil is prepared with
+litharge, and the pulverized asphaltum mixed with this oil is placed in
+a glass vessel, suspended by a thread [in a water bath]. Thus exposed to
+the fire it melts like butter; when it begins to boil it is instantly
+removed. It is an excellent color for shadows, and may be glazed like
+lake; it lasts well."--_Ib._ p. 463.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+128. The great advantage of this primary laying in of the darks in brown
+was the obtaining an unity of shadow throughout the picture, which
+rendered variety of hue, where it occurred, an instantly accepted
+evidence of light. It mattered not how vigorous or how deep in tone the
+masses of local color might be, the eye could not confound them with
+true shadow; it everywhere distinguished the transparent browns as
+indicative of gloom, and became acutely sensible of the presence and
+preciousness of light wherever local tints rose out of their depths. But
+however superior this method may be to the arbitrary use of polychrome
+shadows, utterly unrelated to the lights, which has been admitted in
+modern works; and however beautiful or brilliant its results might be
+in the hands of colorists as faithful as Van Eyck, or as inventive as
+Rubens; the principle on which it is based becomes dangerous whenever,
+in assuming that the ultimate hue of every shadow is brown, it
+presupposes a peculiar and conventional light. It is true, that so long
+as the early practice of finishing the under-drawing with the pen was
+continued, the gray of that preparation might perhaps diminish the force
+of the upper color, which became in that case little more than a glowing
+varnish--even thus sometimes verging on too monotonous warmth, as the
+reader may observe in the head of Dandolo, by John Bellini, in the
+National Gallery. But when, by later and more impetuous hands, the point
+tracing was dispensed with, and the picture boldly thrown in with the
+brown pigment, it became matter of great improbability that the force of
+such a prevalent tint could afterwards be softened or melted into a pure
+harmony; the painter's feeling for truth was blunted; brilliancy and
+richness became his object rather than sincerity or solemnity; with the
+palled sense of color departed the love of light, and the diffused
+sunshine of the early schools died away in the narrowed rays of
+Rembrandt. We think it a deficiency in the work before us that the
+extreme peril of such a principle, incautiously applied, has not been
+pointed out, and that the method of Rubens has been so highly extolled
+for its technical perfection, without the slightest notice of the gross
+mannerism into which its facile brilliancy too frequently betrayed the
+mighty master.
+
+129. Yet it remains a question how far, under certain limitations and
+for certain effects, this system of pure brown shadow may be
+successfully followed. It is not a little singular that it has already
+been revived in water-colors by a painter who, in his realization of
+light and splendor of hue, stands without a rival among living
+schools--Mr. Hunt; his neutral shadows being, we believe, first thrown
+in frankly with sepia, the color introduced upon the lights, and the
+central lights afterwards further raised by body color, and glazed. But
+in this process the sepia shadows are admitted only on objects whose
+local colors are warm or neutral; wherever the tint of the illumined
+portion is delicate or peculiar, a relative hue of shade is at once laid
+on the white paper; and the correspondence with the Flemish school is in
+the use of brown as the ultimate representative of deep gloom, and in
+the careful preservation of its transparency, not in the application of
+brown universally as the shade of all colors. We apprehend that this
+practice represents, in another medium, the very best mode of applying
+the Flemish system; and that when the result proposed is an effect of
+vivid color under bright cool sunshine, it would be impossible to adopt
+any more perfect means. But a system which in any stage prescribes the
+use of a certain pigment, implies the adoption of a constant aim, and
+becomes, in that degree, conventional. Suppose that the effect desired
+be neither of sunlight nor of bright color, but of grave color subdued
+by atmosphere, and we believe that the use of brown for an ultimate
+shadow would be highly inexpedient. With Van Eyck and with Rubens the
+aim was always consistent: clear daylight, diffused in the one case,
+concentrated in the other, was yet the hope, the necessity of both; and
+any process which admitted the slightest dimness, coldness, or opacity,
+would have been considered an error in their system by either. Alike, to
+Rubens, came subjects of tumult or tranquillity, of gayety or terror;
+the nether, earthly, and upper world were to him animated with the same
+feeling, lighted by the same sun; he dyed in the same lake of fire the
+warp of the wedding-garment or of the winding-sheet; swept into the same
+delirium the recklessness of the sensualist, and rapture of the
+anchorite; saw in tears only their glittering, and in torture only its
+flush. To such a painter, regarding every subject in the same temper,
+and all as mere motives for the display of the power of his art, the
+Flemish system, improved as it became in his hands, was alike sufficient
+and habitual. But among the greater colorists of Italy the aim was not
+always so simple nor the method so determinable. We find Tintoret
+passing like a fire-fly from light to darkness in one oscillation,
+ranging from the fullest prism of solar color to the coldest grays of
+twilight, and from the silver tingeing of a morning cloud to the lava
+fire of a volcano: one moment shutting himself into obscure chambers of
+imagery, the next plunged into the revolutionless day of heaven, and
+piercing space, deeper than the mind can follow or the eye fathom; we
+find him by turns appalling, pensive, splendid, profound, profuse; and
+throughout sacrificing every minor quality to the power of his prevalent
+mood. By such an artist it might, perhaps, be presumed that a different
+system of color would be adopted in almost every picture, and that if a
+chiaroscuro ground were independently laid, it would be in a neutral
+gray, susceptible afterwards of harmony with any tone he might determine
+upon, and not in the vivid brown which necessitated brilliancy of
+subsequent effect. We believe, accordingly, that while some of the
+pieces of this master's richer color, such as the Adam and Eve in the
+Gallery of Venice, and we suspect also the miracle of St. Mark, may be
+executed on the pure Flemish system, the greater number of his large
+compositions will be found based on a gray shadow; and that this gray
+shadow was independently laid we have more direct proof in the assertion
+of Boschini, who received his information from the younger Palma:
+"Quando haveva stabilita questa importante distribuzione, _abboggiava il
+quadro tutto di chiaroscuro_;" and we have, therefore, no doubt that
+Tintoret's well-known reply to the question, "What were the most
+beautiful colors?" "_Il nero, e il bianco_," is to be received in a
+perfectly literal sense, beyond and above its evident reference to
+abstract principle. Its main and most valuable meaning was, of course,
+that the design and light and shade of a picture were of greater
+importance than its color; (and this Tintoret felt so thoroughly that
+there is not one of his works which would seriously lose in power if it
+were translated into chiaroscuro); but it implied also that Tintoret's
+idea of a shadowed preparation was in gray, and not in brown.
+
+130. But there is a farther and more essential ground of difference in
+system of shadow between the Flemish and Italian colorists. It is a
+well-known optical fact that the color of shadow is complemental to that
+of light: and that therefore, in general terms, warm light has cool
+shadow, and cool light hot shadow. The noblest masters of the northern
+and southern schools respectively adopted these contrary keys; and while
+the Flemings raised their lights in frosty white and pearly grays out of
+a glowing shadow, the Italians opposed the deep and burning rays of
+their golden heaven to masses of solemn gray and majestic blue. Either,
+therefore, their preparation must have been different, or they were
+able, when they chose, to conquer the warmth of the ground by
+superimposed color. We believe, accordingly, that Correggio will be
+found--as stated in the notes of Reynolds quoted at p. 495--to have
+habitually grounded with black, white, and ultramarine, then glazing
+with golden transparent colors; while Titian used the most vigorous
+browns, and conquered them with cool color in mass above. The remarkable
+sketch of Leonardo in the Uffizii of Florence is commenced in
+brown--over the brown is laid an olive green, on which the highest
+lights are struck with white.
+
+Now it is well known to even the merely decorative painter that no color
+can be brilliant which is laid over one of a corresponding key, and that
+the best ground for any given opaque color will be a comparatively
+subdued tint of the complemental one; of green under red, of violet
+under yellow, and of _orange_ or _brown_ therefore under _blue_. We
+apprehend accordingly that the real value of the brown ground with
+Titian was far greater than even with Rubens; it was to support and give
+preciousness to cool color above, while it remained itself untouched as
+the representative of warm reflexes and extreme depth of transparent
+gloom. We believe this employment of the brown ground to be the only
+means of uniting majesty of hue with profundity of shade. But its value
+to the Fleming is connected with the management of the lights, which we
+have next to consider. As we here venture for the first time to disagree
+in some measure with Mr. Eastlake, let us be sure that we state his
+opinion fairly. He says:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"The light warm tint which Van Mander assumes to have been generally
+used in the oil-priming was sometimes omitted, as unfinished pictures
+prove. Under such circumstances, the picture may have been executed at
+once on the sized outline. In the works of Lucas van Leyden, and
+sometimes in those of Albert Dürer, the thin yet brilliant lights
+exhibit a still brighter ground underneath (p. 389).... It thus
+appears that the method proposed by the inventors of oil-painting, of
+preserving light within the colors, involved a certain order of
+processes. The principal conditions were: first, that the outline should
+be completed on the panel before the painting, properly so called, was
+begun. The object, in thus defining the forms, was to avoid alterations
+and repaintings, which might ultimately render the ground useless
+without supplying its place. Another condition was to avoid loading _the
+opaque_ colors. _This limitation was not essential with regard to the
+transparent colors, as such could hardly exclude the bright ground_
+(p. 398).... The system of coloring adopted by the Van Eycks may have
+been influenced by the practice of glass-painting. They appear, in their
+first efforts at least, to have considered the white panel as
+representing light behind a colored and transparent medium, and aimed at
+giving brilliancy to their tints by allowing the white ground to shine
+through them. If those painters and their followers erred, it was in
+sometimes too literally carrying out this principle. _Their lights are
+always transparent_ (mere white excepted) and their shadows sometimes
+want depth. This is in accordance with the effect of glass-staining, in
+which transparency may cease with darkness, but never with light. The
+superior method of Rubens consisted in preserving transparency chiefly
+in his darks, and in contrasting their lucid depth with solid lights
+(p. 408).... Among the technical improvements on the older process may
+be especially mentioned the preservation of transparency in the darker
+masses, the lights being loaded as required. The system of exhibiting
+the bright ground through the shadows still involved an adherence to the
+original method of defining the composition at first; and the solid
+painting of the lights opened the door to that freedom of execution
+which the works of the early masters wanted." (p. 490.)
+
+       *       *       *
+
+131. We think we cannot have erred in concluding from these scattered
+passages that Mr. Eastlake supposes the brilliancy of the high lights of
+the earlier schools to be attributable to the under-power of the white
+ground. This we admit, so far as that ground gave value to the
+transparent flesh-colored or brown preparation above it; but we doubt
+the transparency of the highest lights, and the power of any white
+ground to add brilliancy to opaque colors. We have ourselves never seen
+an instance of a _painted brilliant_ light that was not loaded to the
+exclusion of the ground. Secondary lights indeed are often perfectly
+transparent, a warm hatching over the under-white; the highest light
+itself may be so--but then it is the white ground itself subdued by
+transparent _darker_ color, not supporting a light color. In the Van
+Eyck in the National Gallery all the brilliant lights are loaded; mere
+white, Mr. Eastlake himself admits, was always so; and we believe that
+the flesh-color and carnations are painted with color as _opaque_ as the
+white head-dress, but fail of brilliancy from not being _loaded enough_;
+the white ground beneath being utterly unable to add to the power of
+such tints, while its effect on more subdued tones depended in great
+measure on its receiving a transparent coat of warm color first. This
+_may_ have been sometimes omitted, as stated at p. 389; when it was
+so, we believe that an utter loss of brilliancy must have resulted; but
+when it was used, the highest lights must have been raised from it by
+opaque color as distinctly by Van Eyck as by Rubens. Rubens' Judgment of
+Paris is quoted at [p. 388] as an example of the best use of the
+bright gesso ground:--and how in that picture, how in all Rubens' best
+pictures, is it used? Over the ground is thrown a transparent glowing
+brown tint, varied and deepened in the shadow; boldly over that brown
+glaze, and into it, are struck and painted the opaque gray middle tints,
+already concealing the ground totally; and above these are loaded the
+high lights like gems--note the sparkling strokes on the peacock's
+plumes. We believe that Van Eyck's high lights were either, in
+proportion to the scale of picture and breadth of handling, as loaded as
+these, or, in the degree of their thinness, less brilliant. Was then his
+system the same as Rubens'? Not so; but it differed more in the
+management of middle tints than in the lights: the main difference was,
+we believe, between the careful preparation of the gradations of drawing
+in the one, and the daring assumption of massy light in the other. There
+are theorists who would assert that their system was the same--but they
+forget the primal work, with the point underneath, and all that it
+implied of transparency above. Van Eyck secured his drawing in dark,
+then threw a pale transparent middle tint over the whole, and recovered
+his _highest_ lights; all was _transparent_ except these. Rubens threw a
+dark middle tint over the whole at first, and then gave the _drawing_
+with opaque gray. All was _opaque_ except the shadows. No slight
+difference this, when we reflect on the contrarieties of practice
+ultimately connected with the opposing principles; above all on the
+eminent one that, as all Van Eyck's color, except the high lights, must
+have been equivalent to a glaze, while the great body of _color_ in
+Rubens was solid (ultimately glazed occasionally, but not necessarily),
+it was possible for Van Eyck to mix his tints to the local hues
+required, with far less danger of heaviness in effect than would have
+been incurred in the solid painting of Rubens. This is especially
+noticed by Mr. Eastlake, with whom we are delighted again to concur:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"The practice of using compound tints has not been approved by
+colorists; the method, as introduced by the early masters, was adapted
+to certain conditions, but, like many of their processes, was afterwards
+misapplied. Vasari informs us that Lorenzo di Credi, whose exaggerated
+nicety in technical details almost equaled that of Gerard Dow, was in
+the habit of mixing about thirty tints before he began to work. The
+opposite extreme is perhaps no less objectionable. Much may depend on
+the skillful use of the ground. The purest color in an opaque state and
+superficially light only, is less brilliant than the foulest mixture
+through which light shines. Hence, as long as the white ground was
+visible within the tints, the habit of matching colors from nature (no
+matter by what complication of hues, provided the ingredients were not
+chemically injurious to each other) was likely to combine the truth of
+negative hues with clearness."--_Ib._ p. 400.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+132. These passages open to us a series of questions far too intricate
+to be even cursorily treated within our limits. It is to be held in mind
+that one and the same quality of color or kind of brilliancy is not
+always the best; the phases and phenomena of color are innumerable in
+reality, and even the modes of imitating them become expedient or
+otherwise, according to the aim and scale of the picture. It is no
+question of mere authority whether the mixture of tints to a compound
+one, or their juxtaposition in a state of purity, be the better
+practice. There is not the slightest doubt that, the ground being the
+same, a stippled tint is more brilliant and rich than a mixed one; nor
+is there doubt on the other hand that in some subjects such a tint is
+impossible, and in others vulgar. We have above alluded to the power of
+Mr. Hunt in water-color. The fruit-pieces of that artist are dependent
+for their splendor chiefly on the juxtaposition of pure color for
+compound tints, and we may safely affirm that the method is for such
+purpose as exemplary as its results are admirable. Yet would you desire
+to see the same means adopted in the execution of the fruit in Rubens'
+Peace and War? Or again, would the lusciousness of tint obtained by
+Rubens himself, adopting the same means on a grander scale in his
+painting of flesh, have been conducive to the ends or grateful to the
+feelings of the Bellinis or Albert Dürer? Each method is admirable as
+applied by its master; and Hemling and Van Eyck are as much to be
+followed in the mingling of color, as Rubens and Rembrandt in its
+decomposition. If an award is absolutely to be made of superiority to
+either system, we apprehend that the palm of mechanical skill must be
+rendered to the latter, and higher dignity of moral purpose confessed in
+the former; in proportion to the nobleness of the subject and the
+thoughtfulness of its treatment, simplicity of color will be found more
+desirable. Nor is the far higher perfection of drawing attained by the
+earlier method to be forgotten. Gradations which are expressed by
+delicate execution of the _darks_, and then aided by a few strokes of
+recovered light, must always be more subtle and true than those which
+are struck violently forth with opaque color; and it is to be remembered
+that the handling of the brush, with the early Italian masters,
+approached in its refinement to drawing with the point--the more
+definitely, because the work was executed, as we have just seen, with
+little change or play of local color. And--whatever discredit the looser
+and bolder practice of later masters may have thrown on the hatched and
+penciled execution of earlier periods--we maintain that this method,
+necessary in fresco, and followed habitually in the first oil pictures,
+has produced the noblest renderings of human expression in the whole
+range of the examples of art: the best works of Raphael, all the
+glorious portraiture of Ghirlandajo and Masaccio, all the mightiest
+achievements of religious zeal in Francia, Perugino, Bellini, and such
+others. Take as an example in fresco Masaccio's hasty sketch of himself
+now in the Uffizii; and in oil, the two heads of monks by Perugino in
+the Academy of Florence; and we shall search in vain for any work in
+portraiture, executed in opaque colors, which could contend with them in
+depth of expression or in fullness of _recorded_ life--not mere
+imitative vitality, but chronicled action. And we have no hesitation in
+asserting that where the object of the painter is expression, and the
+picture is of a size admitting careful execution, the transparent
+system, developed as it is found in Bellini or Perugino, will attain the
+most profound and serene color, while it will never betray into
+looseness or audacity. But if in the mind of the painter invention
+prevail over veneration,--if his eye be creative rather than
+penetrative, and his hand more powerful than patient--let him not be
+confined to a system where light, once lost, is as irrecoverable as
+time, and where all success depends on husbandry of resource. Do not
+measure out to him his sunshine in inches of gesso; let him have the
+power of striking it even out of darkness and the deep.
+
+133. If human life were endless, or human spirit could fit its compass
+to its will, it is possible a perfection might be reached which should
+unite the majesty of invention with the meekness of love. We might
+conceive that the thought, arrested by the readiest means, and at first
+represented by the boldest symbols, might afterwards be set forth with
+solemn and studied expression, and that the power might know no
+weariness in clothing which had known no restraint in creating. But
+dilation and contraction are for molluscs, not for men; we are not
+ringed into flexibility like worms, nor gifted with opposite sight and
+mutable color like chameleons. The mind which molds and summons cannot
+at will transmute itself into that which clings and contemplates; nor is
+it given to us at once to have the potter's power over the lump, the
+fire's upon the clay, and the gilder's upon the porcelain. Even the
+temper in which we behold these various displays of mind must be
+different; and it admits of more than doubt whether, if the bold work of
+rapid thought were afterwards in all its forms completed with
+microscopic care, the result would be other than painful. In the shadow
+at the foot of Tintoret's picture of the Temptation, lies a broken
+rock-bowlder.[19] The dark ground has been first laid in, of color
+nearly uniform; and over it a few, not more than fifteen or twenty,
+strokes of the brush, loaded with a light gray, have quarried the solid
+block of stone out of the vacancy. Probably ten minutes are the utmost
+time which those strokes have occupied, though the rock is some four
+feet square. It may safely be affirmed that no other method, however
+laborious, could have reached the truth of form which results from the
+very freedom with which the conception has been expressed; but it is a
+truth of the simplest kind--the definition of a stone, rather than the
+painting of one--and the lights are in some degree dead and cold--the
+natural consequence of striking a mixed opaque pigment over a dark
+ground. It would now be possible to treat this skeleton of a stone,
+which could only have been knit together by Tintoret's rough temper,
+with the care of a Fleming; to leave its fiercely-stricken lights
+emanating from a golden ground, to gradate with the pen its ponderous
+shadows, and in its completion, to dwell with endless and intricate
+precision upon fibers of moss, bells of heath, blades of grass, and
+films of lichen. Love like Van Eyck's would separate the fibers as if
+they were stems of forest, twine the ribbed grass into fanciful
+articulation, shadow forth capes and islands in the variegated film, and
+hang the purple bells in counted chiming. A year might pass away, and
+the work yet be incomplete; yet would the purpose of the great picture
+have been better answered when all had been achieved? or if so, is it to
+be wished that a year of the life of Tintoret (could such a thing be
+conceived possible) had been so devoted?
+
+134. We have put in as broad and extravagant a view as possible the
+difference of object in the two systems of loaded and transparent light;
+but it is to be remembered that both are in a certain degree compatible,
+and that whatever exclusive arguments may be adduced in favor of the
+loaded system apply only to the ultimate stages of the work. The
+question is not whether the white ground be expedient in the
+commencement--but how far it must of necessity be preserved to the
+close? There cannot be the slightest doubt that, whatever the object,
+whatever the power of the painter, the white ground, as intensely bright
+and perfect as it can be obtained, should be the base of his
+operations; that it should be preserved as long as possible, shown
+wherever it is possible, and sacrificed only upon good cause. There are
+indeed many objects which do not admit of imitation unless the hand have
+power of superimposing and modeling the light; but there are others
+which are equally unsusceptible of every rendering except that of
+transparent color over the pure ground.
+
+It appears from the evidence now produced that there are at least three
+distinct systems traceable in the works of good colorists, each having
+its own merit and its peculiar application. First, the white ground,
+with careful chiaroscuro preparation, transparent color in the middle
+tints, and opaque high lights only (Van Eyck). Secondly, white ground,
+transparent brown preparation, and solid painting of lights above
+(Rubens). Thirdly, white ground, brown preparation, and solid painting
+both of lights and shadows above (Titian); on which last method,
+indisputably the noblest, we have not insisted, as it has not yet been
+examined by Mr. Eastlake. But in all these methods the white ground was
+indispensable. It mattered not what transparent color were put over it:
+red, frequently, we believe, by Titian, before the brown shadows--yellow
+sometimes by Rubens:--whatever warm tone might be chosen for the key of
+the composition, and for the support of its grays, depended for its own
+value upon the white gesso beneath; nor can any system of color be
+ultimately successful which excludes it. Noble arrangement, choice, and
+relation of color, will indeed redeem and recommend the falsest system:
+our own Reynolds, and recently Turner, furnish magnificent examples of
+the power attainable by colorists of high caliber, after the light
+ground is lost--(we cannot agree with Mr. Eastlake in thinking the
+practice of painting first in white and black, with cool reds only,
+"equivalent to its preservation"):--but in the works of both, diminished
+splendor and sacrificed durability attest and punish the neglect of the
+best resources of their art.
+
+135. We have stated, though briefly, the major part of the data which
+recent research has furnished respecting the early colorists; enough,
+certainly, to remove all theoretical obstacles to the attainment of a
+perfection equal to theirs. A few carefully conducted experiments, with
+the efficient aids of modern chemistry, would probably put us in
+possession of an amber varnish, if indeed this be necessary, at least
+not inferior to that which they employed; the rest of their materials
+are already in our hands, soliciting only such care in their preparation
+as it ought, we think, to be no irksome duty to bestow. Yet we are not
+sanguine of the immediate result. Mr. Eastlake has done his duty
+excellently; but it is hardly to be expected that, after being long in
+possession of means which we could apply to no profit, the knowledge
+that the greatest men possessed no better, should at once urge to
+emulation and gift with strength. We believe that some consciousness of
+their true position already existed in the minds of many living artists;
+example had at least been given by two of our Academicians, Mr. Mulready
+and Mr. Etty, of a splendor based on the Flemish system, and consistent,
+certainly, in the first case, with a high degree of permanence; while
+the main direction of artistic and public sympathy to works of a
+character altogether opposed to theirs, showed fatally how far more
+perceptible and appreciable to our present instincts is the mechanism of
+handling than the melody of hue. Indeed we firmly believe, that of all
+powers of enjoyment or of judgment, that which is concerned with
+nobility of color is least communicable: it is also perhaps the most
+rare. The achievements of the draughtsman are met by the curiosity of
+all mankind; the appeals of the dramatist answered by their sympathy;
+the creatures of imagination acknowledged by their fear; but the voice
+of the colorist has but the adder's listening, charm he never so wisely.
+Men vie with each other, untaught, in pursuit of smoothness and
+smallness--of Carlo Dolci and Van Huysum; their domestic hearts may
+range them in faithful armies round the throne of Raphael; meditation
+and labor may raise them to the level of the great mountain pedestal of
+Buonarotti--"vestito gia de' raggi del pianeta, che mena dritto altrui
+per ogni calle;" but neither time nor teaching will bestow the sense,
+when it is not innate, of that wherein consists the power of Titian and
+the great Venetians. There is proof of this in the various degrees of
+cost and care devoted to the preservation of their works. The glass, the
+curtain, and the cabinet guard the preciousness of what is petty, guide
+curiosity to what is popular, invoke worship to what is mighty;--Raphael
+has his palace--Michael his dome--respect protects and crowds traverse
+the sacristy and the saloon; but the frescoes of Titian fade in the
+solitudes of Padua, and the gesso falls crumbled from the flapping
+canvas, as the sea-winds shake the Scuola di San Rocco.
+
+136. But if, on the one hand, mere abstract excellence of color be thus
+coldly regarded, it is equally certain that no work ever attains
+enduring celebrity which is eminently deficient in this great respect.
+Color cannot be indifferent; it is either beautiful and auxiliary to the
+purposes of the picture, or false, froward, and opposite to them. Even
+in the painting of Nature herself, this law is palpable; chiefly
+glorious when color is a predominant element in her working, she is in
+the next degree most impressive when it is withdrawn altogether: and
+forms and scenes become sublime in the neutral twilight, which were
+indifferent in the colors of noon. Much more is this the case in the
+feebleness of imitation; all color is bad which is less than beautiful;
+all is gross and intrusive which is not attractive; it repels where it
+cannot inthrall, and destroys what it cannot assist. It is besides the
+painter's peculiar craft; he who cannot color is no painter. It is not
+painting to grind earths with oil and lay them smoothly on a surface. He
+only is a painter who can melodize and harmonize _hue_--if he fail in
+this, he is no member of the brotherhood. Let him etch, or draw, or
+carve: better the unerring graver than the unfaithful pencil--better the
+true sling and stone than the brightness of the unproved armor. And let
+not even those who deal in the deeper magic, and feel in themselves the
+loftier power, presume upon that power--nor believe in the reality of
+any success unless that which has been deserved by deliberate, resolute,
+successive operation. We would neither deny nor disguise the influences
+of sensibility or of imagination, upon this, as upon every other
+admirable quality of art;--we know that there is that in the very stroke
+and fall of the pencil in a master's hand, which creates color with an
+unconscious enchantment--we know that there is a brilliancy which
+springs from the joy of the painter's heart--a gloom which sympathizes
+with its seriousness--a power correlative with its will; but these are
+all vain unless they be ruled by a seemly caution--a manly
+moderation--an indivertible foresight. This we think the one great
+conclusion to be received from the work we have been examining, that all
+power is vain--all invention vain--all enthusiasm vain--all devotion
+even, and fidelity vain, unless these are guided by such severe and
+exact law as we see take place in the development of every great natural
+glory; and, even in the full glow of their bright and burning operation,
+sealed by the cold, majestic, deep-graven impress of the signet on the
+right hand of Time.
+
+
+SAMUEL PROUT.[20]
+
+137. The first pages in the histories of artists, worthy the name, are
+generally alike; records of boyish resistance to every scheme, parental
+or tutorial, at variance with the ruling desire and bent of the opening
+mind. It is so rare an accident that the love of drawing should be
+noticed and fostered in the child, that we are hardly entitled to form
+any conclusions respecting the probable result of an indulgent
+foresight; it is enough to admire the strength of will which usually
+accompanies every noble intellectual gift, and to believe that, in early
+life, direct resistance is better than inefficient guidance. Samuel
+Prout--with how many rich and picturesque imaginations is the name now
+associated!--was born at Plymouth, September 17th, 1783, and intended by
+his father for his own profession; but although the delicate health of
+the child might have appeared likely to induce a languid acquiescence in
+his parent's wish, the love of drawing occupied every leisure hour, and
+at last trespassed upon every other occupation. Reproofs were
+affectionately repeated, and every effort made to dissuade the boy from
+what was considered an "idle amusement," but it was soon discovered that
+opposition was unavailing, and the attachment too strong to be checked.
+It might perhaps have been otherwise, but for some rays of encouragement
+received from the observant kindness of his first schoolmaster. To watch
+the direction of the little hand when it wandered from its task, to draw
+the culprit to him with a smile instead of a reproof, to set him on the
+high stool beside his desk, and stimulate him, by the loan of his own
+pen, to a more patient and elaborate study of the child's usual subject,
+his favorite cat, was a modification of preceptorial care as easy as it
+was wise; but it perhaps had more influence on the mind and after-life
+of the boy than all the rest of his education together.
+
+138. Such happy though rare interludes in school-hours, and occasional
+attempts at home, usually from the carts and horses which stopped at a
+public-house opposite, began the studentship of the young artist before
+he had quitted his pinafore. An unhappy accident which happened about
+the same time, and which farther enfeebled his health, rendered it still
+less advisable to interfere with his beloved occupation. We have heard
+the painter express, with a melancholy smile, the distinct recollection
+remaining with him to this day, of a burning autumn morning, on which he
+had sallied forth alone, himself some four autumns old, armed with a
+hooked stick, to gather nuts. Unrestrainable alike with pencil or crook,
+he was found by a farmer, towards the close of the day, lying moaning
+under a hedge, prostrated by a sunstroke, and was brought home
+insensible. From that day forward he was subject to attacks of violent
+pain in the head, recurring at short intervals; and until thirty years
+after marriage not a week passed without one or two days of absolute
+confinement to his room or to his bed. "Up to this hour," we may perhaps
+be permitted to use his own touching words, "I have to endure a great
+fight of afflictions; can I therefore be sufficiently thankful for the
+merciful gift of a buoyant spirit?"
+
+139. That buoyancy of spirit--one of the brightest and most marked
+elements of his character--never failed to sustain him between the
+recurrences even of his most acute suffering; and the pursuit of his
+most beloved Art became every year more determined and independent. The
+first beginnings in landscape study were made in happy truant
+excursions, now fondly remembered, with the painter Haydon, then also a
+youth. This companionship was probably rather cemented by the energy
+than the delicacy of Haydon's sympathies. The two boys were directly
+opposed in their habits of application and modes of study. Prout
+unremitting in diligence, patient in observation, devoted in copying
+what he loved in nature, never working except with his model before
+him; Haydon restless, ambitious, and fiery; exceedingly imaginative,
+never captivated with simple truth, nor using his pencil on the spot,
+but trusting always to his powers of memory. The fates of the two youths
+were inevitably fixed by their opposite characters. The humble student
+became the originator of a new School of Art, and one of the most
+popular painters of his age. The self-trust of the wanderer in the
+wilderness of his fancy betrayed him into the extravagances, and
+deserted him in the suffering, with which his name must remain sadly,
+but not unjustly, associated.
+
+140. There was, however, little in the sketches made by Prout at this
+period to indicate the presence of dormant power. Common prints, at a
+period when engraving was in the lowest state of decline, were the only
+guides which the youth could obtain; and his style, in endeavoring to
+copy these, became cramped and mannered; but the unremitting sketching
+from nature saved him. Whole days, from dawn till night, were devoted to
+the study of the peculiar objects of his early interest, the ivy-mantled
+bridges, mossy water-mills, and rock-built cottages, which characterize
+the valley scenery of Devon. In spite of every disadvantage, the strong
+love of truth, and the instinctive perception of the chief points of
+shade and characters of form on which his favorite effects mainly
+depended, enabled him not only to obtain an accumulated store of
+memoranda, afterwards valuable, but to publish several elementary works
+which obtained extensive and deserved circulation, and to which many
+artists, now high in reputation, have kindly and frankly confessed their
+early obligations.
+
+141. At that period the art of water-color drawing was little understood
+at Plymouth, and practiced only by Payne, then an engineer in the
+citadel. Though mannered in the extreme, his works obtained reputation;
+for the best drawings of the period were feeble both in color and
+execution, with commonplace light and shadow, a dark foreground being a
+_rule absolute_, as may be seen in several of Turner's first
+productions. But Turner was destined to annihilate such rules, breaking
+through and scattering them with an expansive force commensurate with
+the rigidity of former restraint. It happened "fortunately," as it is
+said,--naturally and deservedly, as it _should_ be said,--that Prout was
+at this period removed from the narrow sphere of his first efforts to
+one in which he could share in, and take advantage of, every progressive
+movement.
+
+142. The most respectable of the Plymouth amateurs was the Rev. Dr.
+Bidlake, who was ever kind in his encouragement of the young painter,
+and with whom many delightful excursions were made. At his house, Mr.
+Britton, the antiquarian, happening to see some of the cottages
+sketches, and being pleased with them, proposed that Prout should
+accompany him into Cornwall, in order to aid him in collecting materials
+for his "Beauties of England and Wales." This was the painter's first
+recognized artistical employment, as well as the occasion of a
+friendship ever gratefully and fondly remembered. On Mr. Britton's
+return to London, after sending to him a portfolio of drawings, which
+were almost the first to create a sensation with lovers of Art, Mr.
+Prout received so many offers of encouragement, if he would consent to
+reside in London, as to induce him to take this important step--the
+first towards being established as an artist.
+
+143. The immediate effect of this change of position was what might
+easily have been foretold, upon a mind naturally sensitive, diffident,
+and enthusiastic. It was a heavy discouragement. The youth felt that he
+had much to eradicate and more to learn, and hardly knew at first how to
+avail himself of the advantages presented by the study of the works of
+Turner, Girtin, Cousins, and others. But he had resolution and ambition
+as well as modesty; he knew that
+
+   "The noblest honors of the mind
+   On rigid terms descend."
+
+He had every inducement to begin the race, in the clearer guidance and
+nobler ends which the very works that had disheartened him afforded and
+pointed out; and the first firm and certain step was made. His range of
+subject was as yet undetermined, and was likely at one time to have been
+very different from that in which he has since obtained pre-eminence so
+confessed. Among the picturesque material of his native place, the forms
+of its shipping had not been neglected, though there was probably less
+in the order of Plymouth dockyard to catch the eye of the boy, always
+determined in its preference of purely picturesque arrangements, than
+might have been afforded by the meanest fishing hamlet. But a strong and
+lasting impression was made upon him by the wreck of the "Dutton" East
+Indiaman on the rocks under the citadel; the crew were saved by the
+personal courage and devotion of Sir Edward Pellew, afterwards Lord
+Exmouth. The wreck held together for many hours under the cliff, rolling
+to and fro as the surges struck her. Haydon and Prout sat on the crags
+together and watched her vanish fragment by fragment into the gnashing
+foam. Both were equally awe-struck at the time; both, on the morrow,
+resolved to paint their first pictures; both failed; but Haydon, always
+incapable of acknowledging and remaining loyal to the majesty of what he
+had seen, lost himself in vulgar thunder and lightning. Prout struggled
+to some resemblance of the actual scene, and the effect upon his mind
+was never effaced.
+
+144. At the time of his first residence in London, he painted more
+marines than anything else. But other work was in store for him. About
+the year 1818, his health, which as we have seen had never been
+vigorous, showed signs of increasing weakness, and a short trial of
+continental air was recommended. The route by Havre to Rouen was chosen,
+and Prout found himself, for the first time, in the grotesque labyrinths
+of the Norman streets. There are few minds so apathetic as to receive no
+impulse of new delight from their first acquaintance with continental
+scenery and architecture; and Rouen was, of all the cities of France,
+the richest in those objects with which the painter's mind had the
+profoundest sympathy. It was other then than it is now; revolutionary
+fury had indeed spent itself upon many of its noblest monuments, but the
+interference of modern restoration or improvement was unknown. Better
+the unloosed rage of the fiend than the scrabble of self-complacent
+idiocy. The façade of the cathedral was as yet unencumbered by the
+blocks of new stonework, never to be carved, by which it is now defaced;
+the Church of St. Nicholas existed, (the last fragments of the niches of
+its gateway were seen by the writer dashed upon the pavement in 1840 to
+make room for the new "Hotel St. Nicholas"); the Gothic turret had not
+vanished from the angle of the Place de la Pucelle, the Palais de
+Justice remained in its gray antiquity, and the Norman houses still
+lifted their fantastic ridges of gable along the busy quay (now fronted
+by as formal a range of hotels and offices as that of the West Cliff of
+Brighton). All was at unity with itself, and the city lay under its
+guarding hills, one labyrinth of delight, its gray and fretted towers,
+misty in their magnificence of height, letting the sky like blue enamel
+through the foiled spaces of their crowns of open work; the walls and
+gates of its countless churches wardered by saintly groups of solemn
+statuary, clasped about by wandering stems of sculptured leafage, and
+crowned by fretted niche and fairy pediment--meshed like gossamer with
+inextricable tracery: many a quaint monument of past times standing to
+tell its far-off tale in the place from which it has since perished--in
+the midst of the throng and murmur of those shadowy streets--all grim
+with jutting props of ebon woodwork, lightened only here and there by a
+sunbeam glancing down from the scaly backs, and points, and pyramids of
+the Norman roofs, or carried out of its narrow range by the gay progress
+of some snowy cap or scarlet camisole. The painter's vocation was fixed
+from that hour. The first effect upon his mind was irrepressible
+enthusiasm, with a strong feeling of a new-born attachment to Art, in a
+new world of exceeding interest. Previous impressions were presently
+obliterated, and the old embankments of fancy gave way to the force of
+overwhelming anticipations, forming another and a wider channel for its
+future course.
+
+145. From this time excursions were continually made to the continent,
+and every corner of France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy
+ransacked for its fragments of carved stone. The enthusiasm of the
+painter was greater than his ambition, and the strict limitation of his
+aim to the rendering of architectural character permitted him to adopt a
+simple and consistent method of execution, from which he has rarely
+departed. It was adapted in the first instance to the necessities of the
+moldering and mystic character of Northern Gothic; and though
+impressions received afterwards in Italy, more especially at Venice,
+have retained as strong a hold upon the painter's mind as those of his
+earlier excursions, his methods of drawing have always been influenced
+by the predilections first awakened. How far his love of the
+picturesque, already alluded to, was reconcilable with an entire
+appreciation of the highest characters of Italian architecture we do not
+pause to inquire; but this we may assert, without hesitation, that the
+picturesque _elements_ of that architecture were unknown until he
+developed them, and that since Gentile Bellini, no one had regarded the
+palaces of Venice with so affectionate an understanding of the purpose
+and expression of their wealth of detail. In this respect the City of
+the Sea has been, and remains, peculiarly his own. There is, probably,
+no single piazza nor sea-paved street from St. Georgio in Aliga to the
+Arsenal, of which Prout has not in order drawn every fragment of
+pictorial material. Probably not a pillar in Venice but occurs in some
+one of his innumerable studies; while the peculiarly beautiful and
+varied arrangements under which he has treated the angle formed by St.
+Mark's Church with the Doge's palace, have not only made every
+successful drawing of those buildings by any other hand look like
+plagiarism, but have added (and what is this but indeed to paint the
+lily!) another charm to the spot itself.
+
+146. This exquisite dexterity of arrangement has always been one of his
+leading characteristics as an artist. Notwithstanding the deserved
+popularity of his works, his greatness in composition remains altogether
+unappreciated. Many modern works exhibit greater pretense at
+arrangement, and a more palpable system; masses of well-concentrated
+light or points of sudden and dextrous color are expedients in the works
+of our second-rate artists as attractive as they are commonplace. But
+the moving and natural crowd, the decomposing composition, the frank and
+unforced, but marvelously intricate grouping, the breadth of
+inartificial and unexaggerated shadow, these are merits of an order only
+the more elevated because unobtrusive. Nor is his system of color less
+admirable. It is a quality from which the character of his subjects
+naturally withdraws much of his attention, and of which sometimes that
+character precludes any high attainment; but, nevertheless, the truest
+and happiest association of hues in sun and shade to be found in modern
+water-color art,[21] (excepting only the studies of Hunt and De Wint)
+will be found in portions of Prout's more important works.
+
+147. Of his _peculiar_ powers we need hardly speak; it would be
+difficult to conceive the circle of their influence widened. There is
+not a landscape of recent times in which the treatment of the
+architectural features has not been affected, however unconsciously, by
+principles which were first developed by Prout. Of those principles the
+most original was his familiarization of the sentiment, while he
+elevated the subject, of the picturesque. That character had been
+sought, before his time, either in solitude or in rusticity; it was
+supposed to belong only to the savageness of the desert or the
+simplicity of the hamlet; it lurked beneath the brows of rocks and the
+eaves of cottages; to seek it in a city would have been deemed an
+extravagance, to raise it to the height of a cathedral, an heresy. Prout
+did both, and both simultaneously; he found and proved in the busy
+shadows and sculptured gables of the Continental street sources of
+picturesque delight as rich and as interesting as those which had been
+sought amidst the darkness of thickets and the eminence of rocks; and he
+contrasted with the familiar circumstances of urban life, the majesty
+and the aërial elevation of the most noble architecture, expressing its
+details in more splendid accumulation, and with a more patient love than
+ever had been reached or manifested before his time by any artist who
+introduced such subjects as members of a general composition. He thus
+became the interpreter of a great period of the world's history, of that
+in which age and neglect had cast the interest of ruin over the noblest
+ecclesiastical structures of Europe, and in which there had been born at
+their feet a generation other in its feelings and thoughts than that to
+which they owed their existence, a generation which understood not their
+meaning, and regarded not their beauty, and which yet had a character of
+its own, full of vigor, animation, and originality, which rendered the
+grotesque association of the circumstances of its ordinary and active
+life with the solemn memorialism of the elder building, one which rather
+pleased by the strangeness than pained by the violence of its contrast.
+
+148. That generation is passing away, and another dynasty is putting
+forth its character and its laws. Care and observance, more mischievous
+in their misdirection than indifference or scorn, have in many places
+given the mediæval relics the aspect and associations of a kind of
+cabinet preservation, instead of that air of majestic independence, or
+patient and stern endurance, with which they frowned down the insult of
+the regardless crowd. Nominal restoration has done tenfold worse, and
+has hopelessly destroyed what time, and storm, and anarchy, and impiety
+had spared. The picturesque material of a lower kind is fast
+departing--and forever. There is not, so far as we know, one city scene
+in central Europe which has not suffered from some jarring point of
+modernization. The railroad and the iron wheel have done their work, and
+the characters of Venice, Florence, and Rouen are yielding day by day
+to a lifeless extension of those of Paris and Birmingham. A few lusters
+more, and the modernization will be complete: the archæologist may still
+find work among the wrecks of beauty, and here and there a solitary
+fragment of the old cities may exist by toleration, or rise strangely
+before the workmen who dig the new foundations, left like some isolated
+and tottering rock in the midst of sweeping sea. But the life of the
+middle ages is dying from their embers, and the warm mingling of the
+past and present will soon be forever dissolved. The works of Prout, and
+of those who have followed in his footsteps, will become memorials the
+most precious of the things that have been; to their technical value,
+however great, will be added the far higher interest of faithful and
+fond records of a strange and unreturning era of history. May he long be
+spared to us, and enabled to continue the noble series, conscious of a
+purpose and function worthy of being followed with all the zeal of even
+his most ardent and affectionate mind. A time will come when that zeal
+will be understood, and his works will be cherished with a melancholy
+gratitude when the pillars of Venice shall lie moldering in the salt
+shallows of her sea, and the stones of the goodly towers of Rouen have
+become ballast for the barges of the Seine.
+
+
+SIR JOSHUA AND HOLBEIN.[22]
+
+149. Long ago discarded from our National Gallery, with the contempt
+logically due to national or English pictures,--lost to sight and memory
+for many a year in the Ogygian seclusions of Marlborough House--there
+have reappeared at last, in more honorable exile at Kensington, two
+great pictures by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Two, with others; but these alone
+worth many an entanglement among the cross-roads of the West, to see for
+half an hour by spring sunshine:--the _Holy Family_, and the _Graces_,
+side by side now in the principal room. Great, as ever was work wrought
+by man. In placid strength, and subtlest science, unsurpassed;--in sweet
+felicity, incomparable.
+
+150. If you truly want to know what good work of painter's hand is,
+study those two pictures from side to side, and miss no inch of them
+(you will hardly, eventually, be inclined to miss one): in some respects
+there is no execution like it; none so open in the magic. For the work
+of other great men is hidden in its wonderfulness--you cannot see how it
+was done. But in Sir Joshua's there is no mystery: it is all amazement.
+No question but that the touch was so laid; only that it _could_ have
+been so laid, is a marvel forever. So also there is no painting so
+majestic in sweetness. He is lily-sceptered: his power blossoms, but
+burdens not. All other men of equal dignity paint more slowly; all
+others of equal force paint less lightly. Tintoret lays his line like a
+king marking the boundaries of conquered lands; but Sir Joshua leaves it
+as a summer wind its trace on a lake; he could have painted on a silken
+veil, where it fell free, and not bent it.
+
+151. Such at least is his touch when it is life that he paints: for
+things lifeless he has a severer hand. If you examine that picture of
+the _Graces_ you will find it reverses all the ordinary ideas of
+expedient treatment. By other men flesh is firmly painted, but
+accessories lightly. Sir Joshua paints accessories firmly,[23] flesh
+lightly;--nay, flesh not at all, but spirit. The wreath of flowers he
+feels to be material; and gleam by gleam strikes fearlessly the silver
+and violet leaves out of the darkness. But the three maidens are less
+substantial than rose petals. No flushed nor frosted tissue that ever
+faded in night wind is so tender as they; no hue may reach, no line
+measure, what is in them so gracious and so fair. Let the hand move
+softly--itself as a spirit; for this is Life, of which it touches the
+imagery.
+
+152. "And yet----" Yes: you do well to pause. There is a "yet" to be
+thought of. I did not bring you to these pictures to see wonderful work
+merely, or womanly beauty merely. I brought you chiefly to look at that
+Madonna, believing that you might remember other Madonnas, unlike her;
+and might think it desirable to consider wherein the difference
+lay:--other Madonnas not by Sir Joshua, who painted Madonnas but seldom.
+Who perhaps, if truth must be told, painted them never: for surely this
+dearest pet of an English girl, with the little curl of lovely hair
+under her ear, is _not_ one.
+
+153. Why did not Sir Joshua--or could not--or would not Sir
+Joshua--paint Madonnas? neither he, nor his great rival-friend
+Gainsborough? Both of them painters of women, such as since Giorgione
+and Correggio had not been; both painters of men, such as had not been
+since Titian. How is it that these English friends can so brightly paint
+that particular order of humanity which we call "gentlemen and ladies,"
+but neither heroes, nor saints, nor angels? Can it be because they were
+both country-bred boys, and for ever after strangely sensitive to
+courtliness? Why, Giotto also was a country-bred boy. Allegri's native
+Correggio, Titian's Cadore, were but hill villages; yet these men
+painted, not the court, nor the drawing-room, but the Earth: and not a
+little of Heaven besides: while our good Sir Joshua never trusts himself
+outside the park palings. He could not even have drawn the strawberry
+girl, unless she had got through a gap in them--or rather, I think, she
+must have been let in at the porter's lodge, for her strawberries are in
+a pottle, ready for the ladies at the Hall. Giorgione would have set
+them, wild and fragrant, among their leaves, in her hand. Between his
+fairness, and Sir Joshua's May-fairness, there is a strange, impassable
+limit--as of the white reef that in Pacific isles encircles their inner
+lakelets, and shuts them from the surf and sound of sea. Clear and calm
+they rest, reflecting fringed shadows of the palm-trees, and the passing
+of fretted clouds across their own sweet circle of blue sky. But beyond,
+and round and round their coral bar, lies the blue of sea and heaven
+together--blue of eternal deep.
+
+154. You will find it a pregnant question, if you follow it forth, and
+leading to many others, not trivial, Why it is, that in Sir Joshua's
+girl, or Gainsborough's, we always think first of the Ladyhood; but in
+Giotto's, of the Womanhood? Why, in Sir Joshua's hero, or Vandyck's, it
+is always the Prince or the Sir whom we see first; but in Titian's, the
+man.
+
+Not that Titian's gentlemen are less finished than Sir Joshua's; but
+their gentlemanliness[24] is not the principal thing about them; their
+manhood absorbs, conquers, wears it as a despised thing. Nor--and this
+is another stern ground of separation--will Titian make a gentleman of
+everyone he paints. He will make him so if he is so, not otherwise; and
+this not merely in general servitude to truth, but because in his
+sympathy with deeper humanity, the courtier is not more interesting to
+him than anyone else. "You have learned to dance and fence; you can
+speak with clearness, and think with precision; your hands are small,
+your senses acute, and your features well-shaped. Yes: I see all this in
+you, and will do it justice. You shall stand as none but a well-bred man
+could stand; and your fingers shall fall on the sword-hilt as no fingers
+could but those that knew the grasp of it. But for the rest, this grisly
+fisherman, with rusty cheek and rope-frayed hand, is a man as well as
+you, and might possibly make several of you, if souls were divisible.
+His bronze color is quite as interesting to me, Titian, as your
+paleness, and his hoary spray of stormy hair takes the light as well as
+your waving curls. Him also I will paint, with such picturesqueness as
+he may have; yet not putting the picturesqueness first in him, as in you
+I have not put the gentlemanliness first. In him I see a strong human
+creature, contending with all hardship: in you also a human creature,
+uncontending, and possibly not strong. Contention or strength, weakness
+or picturesqueness, and all other such accidents in either, shall have
+due place. But the immortality and miracle of you--this clay that burns,
+this color that changes--are in truth the awful things in both: these
+shall be first painted--and last."
+
+155. With which question respecting treatment of character we have to
+connect also this further one: How is it that the attempts of so great
+painters as Reynolds and Gainsborough are, beyond portraiture, limited
+almost like children's? No domestic drama--no history--no noble natural
+scenes, far less any religious subject:--only market carts; girls with
+pigs; woodmen going home to supper; watering-places; gray cart-horses in
+fields, and such like. Reynolds, indeed, once or twice touched higher
+themes,--"among the chords his fingers laid," and recoiled: wisely; for,
+strange to say, his very sensibility deserts him when he leaves his
+courtly quiet. The horror of the subjects he chose (Cardinal Beaufort
+and Ugolino) showed inherent apathy: had he felt deeply, he would not
+have sought for this strongest possible excitement of feeling,--would
+not willingly have dwelt on the worst conditions of despair--the despair
+of the ignoble. His religious subjects are conceived even with less care
+than these. Beautiful as it is, this Holy Family by which we stand has
+neither dignity nor sacredness, other than those which attach to every
+group of gentle mother and ruddy babe; while his Faiths, Charities, or
+other well-ordered and emblem-fitted virtues are even less lovely than
+his ordinary portraits of women.
+
+It was a faultful temper, which, having so mighty a power of realization
+at command, never became so much interested in any fact of human history
+as to spend one touch of heartfelt skill upon it;--which, yielding
+momentarily to indolent imagination, ended, at best, in a Puck, or a
+Thais; a Mercury as Thief, or a Cupid as Linkboy. How wide the interval
+between this gently trivial humor, guided by the wave of a feather, or
+arrested by the enchantment of a smile,--and the habitual dwelling of
+the thoughts of the great Greeks and Florentines among the beings and
+the interests of the eternal world!
+
+156. In some degree it may indeed be true that the modesty and sense of
+the English painters are the causes of their simple practice. All that
+they did, they did well, and attempted nothing over which conquest was
+doubtful. They knew they could paint men and women: it did not follow
+that they could paint angels. Their own gifts never appeared to them so
+great as to call for serious question as to the use to be made of them.
+"They could mix colors and catch likeness--yes; but were they therefore
+able to teach religion, or reform the world? To support themselves
+honorably, pass the hours of life happily, please their friends, and
+leave no enemies, was not this all that duty could require, or prudence
+recommend? Their own art was, it seemed, difficult enough to employ all
+their genius: was it reasonable to hope also to be poets or theologians?
+Such men had, indeed, existed; but the age of miracles and prophets was
+long past; nor, because they could seize the trick of an expression, or
+the turn of a head, had they any right to think themselves able to
+conceive heroes with Homer, or gods with Michael Angelo."
+
+157. Such was, in the main, their feeling: wise, modest, unenvious, and
+unambitious. Meaner men, their contemporaries or successors, raved of
+high art with incoherent passion; arrogated to themselves an equality
+with the masters of elder time, and declaimed against the degenerate
+tastes of a public which acknowledged not the return of the Heraclidæ.
+But the two great--the two only painters of their age--happy in a
+reputation founded as deeply in the heart as in the judgment of mankind,
+demanded no higher function than that of soothing the domestic
+affections; and achieved for themselves at last an immortality not the
+less noble, because in their lifetime they had concerned themselves less
+to claim it than to bestow.
+
+158. Yet, while we acknowledge the discretion and simple-heartedness of
+these men, honoring them for both: and the more when we compare their
+tranquil powers with the hot egotism and hollow ambition of their
+inferiors: we have to remember, on the other hand, that the measure they
+thus set to their aims was, if a just, yet a narrow one; that amiable
+discretion is not the highest virtue; nor to please the frivolous, the
+best success. There is probably some strange weakness in the painter,
+and some fatal error in the age, when in thinking over the examples of
+their greatest work, for some type of culminating loveliness or
+veracity, we remember no expression either of religion or heroism, and
+instead of reverently naming a Madonna di San Sisto, can only whisper,
+modestly, "Mrs. Pelham feeding chickens."
+
+159. The nature of the fault, so far as it exists in the painters
+themselves, may perhaps best be discerned by comparing them with a man
+who went not far beyond them in his general range of effort, but who did
+all his work in a wholly different temper--Hans Holbein.
+
+The first great difference between them is of course in completeness of
+execution. Sir Joshua's and Gainsborough's work, at its best, is only
+magnificent sketching; giving indeed, in places, a perfection of result
+unattainable by other methods, and possessing always a charm of grace
+and power exclusively its own; yet, in its slightness addressing itself,
+purposefully, to the casual glance, and common thought--eager to arrest
+the passer-by, but careless to detain him; or detaining him, if at all,
+by an unexplained enchantment, not by continuance of teaching, or
+development of idea. But the work of Holbein is true and thorough;
+accomplished, in the highest as the most literal sense, with a calm
+entireness of unaffected resolution, which sacrifices nothing, forgets
+nothing, and fears nothing.
+
+160. In the portrait of the Hausmann George Gyzen,[25] every accessory
+is perfect with a fine perfection: the carnations in the glass vase by
+his side--the ball of gold, chased with blue enamel, suspended on the
+wall--the books--the steelyard--the papers on the table, the seal-ring,
+with its quartered bearings,--all intensely there, and there in beauty
+of which no one could have dreamed that even flowers or gold were
+capable, far less parchment or steel. But every change of shade is felt,
+every rich and rubied line of petal followed; every subdued gleam in the
+soft blue of the enamel and bending of the gold touched with a hand
+whose patience of regard creates rather than paints. The jewel itself
+was not so precious as the rays of enduring light which form it, and
+flash from it, beneath that errorless hand. The man himself, what he
+was--not more; but to all conceivable proof of sight--in all aspect of
+life or thought--not less. He sits alone in his accustomed room, his
+common work laid out before him; he is conscious of no presence, assumes
+no dignity, bears no sudden or superficial look of care or interest,
+lives only as he lived--but forever.
+
+161. The time occupied in painting this portrait was probably twenty
+times greater than Sir Joshua ever spent on a single picture, however
+large. The result is, to the general spectator, less attractive. In some
+qualities of force and grace it is absolutely inferior. But it is
+inexhaustible. Every detail of it wins, retains, rewards the attention
+with a continually increasing sense of wonderfulness. It is also wholly
+true. So far as it reaches, it contains the absolute facts of color,
+form, and character, rendered with an unaccusable faithfulness. There is
+no question respecting things which it is best worth while to know, or
+things which it is unnecessary to state, or which might be overlooked
+with advantage. What of this man and his house were visible to Holbein,
+are visible to us: we may despise if we will; deny or doubt, we shall
+not; if we care to know anything concerning them, great or small, so
+much as may by the eye be known is forever knowable, reliable,
+indisputable.
+
+162. Respecting the advantage, or the contrary, of so great earnestness
+in drawing a portrait of an uncelebrated person, we raise at present no
+debate: I only wish the reader to note this quality of earnestness, as
+entirely separating Holbein from Sir Joshua,--raising him into another
+sphere of intellect. For here is no question of mere difference in style
+or in power, none of minuteness or largeness. It is a question of
+Entireness. Holbein is _complete_ in intellect: what he sees, he sees
+with his whole soul: what he paints, he paints with his whole might. Sir
+Joshua sees partially, slightly, tenderly--catches the flying lights of
+things, the momentary glooms: paints also partially, tenderly, never
+with half his strength; content with uncertain visions, insecure
+delights; the truth not precious nor significant to him, only pleasing;
+falsehood also pleasurable, even useful on occasion--must, however, be
+discreetly touched, just enough to make all men noble, all women lovely:
+"we do not need this flattery often, most of those we know being such;
+and it is a pleasant world, and with diligence--for nothing can be done
+without diligence--every day till four" (says Sir Joshua)--"a painter's
+is a happy life."
+
+Yes: and the Isis; with her swans, and shadows of Windsor Forest, is a
+sweet stream, touching her shores softly. The Rhine at Basle is of
+another temper, stern and deep, as strong, however bright its face:
+winding far through the solemn plain, beneath the slopes of Jura, tufted
+and steep: sweeping away into its regardless calm of current the waves
+of that little brook of St. Jakob, that bathe the Swiss Thermopylæ;[26]
+the low village nestling beneath a little bank of sloping fields--its
+spire seen white against the deep blue shadows of the Jura pines.
+
+163. Gazing on that scene day by day, Holbein went his own way, with the
+earnestness and silent swell of the strong river--not unconscious of the
+awe, nor of the sanctities of his life. The snows of the eternal Alps
+giving forth their strength to it; the blood of the St. Jakob brook
+poured into it as it passes by--not in vain. He also could feel his
+strength coming from white snows far off in heaven. He also bore upon
+him the purple stain of the earth sorrow. A grave man, knowing what
+steps of men keep truest time to the chanting of Death. Having grave
+friends also;--the same singing heard far off, it seems to me, or,
+perhaps, even low in the room, by that family of Sir Thomas More; or
+mingling with the hum of bees in the meadows outside the towered wall of
+Basle; or making the words of the book more tunable, which meditative
+Erasmus looks upon. Nay, that same soft Death-music is on the lips even
+of Holbein's Madonna. Who, among many, is the Virgin you had best
+compare with the one before whose image we have stood so long.
+
+Holbein's is at Dresden, companioned by the Madonna di San Sisto; but
+both are visible enough to you here, for, by a strange coincidence, they
+are (at least so far as I know) the only two great pictures in the world
+which have been faultlessly engraved.
+
+164. The received tradition respecting the Holbein Madonna is beautiful;
+and I believe the interpretation to be true. A father and mother have
+prayed to her for the life of their sick child. She appears to them, her
+own Christ in her arms. She puts down her Christ beside them--takes
+their child into her arms instead. It lies down upon her bosom, and
+stretches its hand to its father and mother, saying farewell.
+
+This interpretation of the picture has been doubted, as nearly all the
+most precious truths of pictures have been doubted, and forgotten. But
+even supposing it erroneous, the design is not less characteristic of
+Holbein. For that there are signs of suffering on the features of the
+child in the arms of the Virgin, is beyond question; and if this child
+be intended for the Christ, it would not be doubtful to my mind, that,
+of the two--Raphael and Holbein--the latter had given the truest aspect
+and deepest reading of the early life of the Redeemer. Raphael sought to
+express His power only; but Holbein His labor and sorrow.
+
+165. There are two other pictures which you should remember together
+with this (attributed, indeed, but with no semblance of probability, to
+the elder Holbein, none of whose work, preserved at Basle, or elsewhere,
+approaches in the slightest degree to their power), the St. Barbara and
+St. Elizabeth.[27] I do not know among the pictures of the great sacred
+schools any at once so powerful, so simple, so pathetically expressive
+of the need of the heart that conceived them. Not ascetic, nor quaint,
+nor feverishly or fondly passionate, nor wrapt in withdrawn solemnities
+of thought. Only entirely true--entirely pure. No depth of glowing
+heaven beyond them--but the clear sharp sweetness of the northern air:
+no splendor of rich color, striving to adorn them with better brightness
+than of the day: a gray glory, as of moonlight without mist, dwelling on
+face and fold of dress;--all faultless-fair. Creatures they are, humble
+by nature, not by self-condemnation; merciful by habit, not by tearful
+impulse; lofty without consciousness; gentle without weakness; wholly in
+this present world, doing its work calmly; beautiful with all that
+holiest life can reach--yet already freed from all that holiest death
+can cast away.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[13] A review of the following-books:--
+
+1. "Materials for a History of Oil-Painting." By Charles Lock Eastlake,
+R.A., F.R.S., F.S.A., Secretary to the Royal Commission for promoting
+the Fine Arts in Connection with the Rebuilding of the Houses of
+Parliament, etc., etc. London, 1847.
+
+2. "Theophili, qui et Rugerus, Presbyteri et Monachi, Libri III. de
+Diversis Artibus; seu Diversarum Artium Schedula. (An Essay upon Various
+Arts, in Three Books, by Theophilus, called also Rugerus, Priest and
+Monk, forming an Encyclopædia of Christian Art of the Eleventh Century."
+Translated, with Notes, by Robert Hendrie.) London, 1847.
+
+[14] "A Critical Essay on Oil-Painting," London, 1781.
+
+[15] "The mediæval painters were so accustomed to this appearance in
+varnishes, and considered it so indispensable, that they even supplied
+the tint when it did not exist. Thus Cardanus observes that when white
+of eggs was used as a varnish, it was customary to tinge it with red
+lead."--_Eastlake_, p. 270.
+
+[16] "Si je dis tant de mal de la peinture flamande, ce n'est pas
+qu'elle soit entièrement mauvaise, mais elle veut _rendre avec
+perfection_ tant de choses, dont une seule suffirait par son importance,
+qu'elle n'en fait aucune d'une manière satisfaisante." This opinion of
+M. Angelo's is preserved by Francisco de Ollanda, quoted by Comte
+Raczynski, "Les Arts en Portugal," Paris, 1846.
+
+[17] "Arte de Pintura." Sevilla, 1649.
+
+[18] The preparations of Hemling, at Bruges, we imagine to have been in
+water-color, and perhaps the picture was carried to some degree of
+completion in this material. Van Mander observes that Van Eyck's dead
+colorings "were cleaner and sharper than the finished works of other
+painters."
+
+[19] [See _Stones of Venice_, vol. iii. Venetian Index, _s._ Rocco,
+Scuola di San, § 20, _Temptation_.--ED. 1899.]
+
+[20] _Art Journal_, March 1849.--ED.
+
+[21] We do not mean under this term to include the drawings of professed
+oil-painters, as of Stothard or Turner.
+
+[22] _Cornhill Magazine_, March, 1860.--ED.
+
+[23] As showing gigantic power of hand, joined with utmost accuracy and
+rapidity, the folds of drapery under the breast of the Virgin are,
+perhaps, as marvelous a piece of work as could be found in any picture,
+of whatever time or master.
+
+[24] The reader must observe that I use the word here in a limited
+sense, as meaning only the effect of careful education, good society,
+and refined habits of life, on average temper and character. Of deep and
+true gentlemanliness--based as it is on intense sensibility and
+sincerity, perfected by courage, and other qualities of race; as well as
+of that union of insensibility with cunning, which is the essence of
+vulgarity, I shall have to speak at length in another place.
+
+[25] Museum of Berlin.
+
+[26] Of 1,200 Swiss, who fought by that brookside, ten only returned.
+The battle checked the attack of the French, led by Louis XI. (then
+Dauphin) in 1444; and was the first of the great series of efforts and
+victories which were closed at Nancy by the death of Charles of
+Burgundy.
+
+[27] Pinacothek of Munich.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+ART.
+
+II.
+
+PRE-RAPHAELITISM.
+
+ITS PRINCIPLES, AND TURNER.
+
+(_Pamphlet_, 1851.)
+
+ITS THREE COLORS.
+
+(_Nineteenth Century, Nov.-Dec. 1878._)
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+_Eight years ago, in the close of the first volume of "Modern Painters,"
+I ventured to give the following advice to the young artists of
+England:--_
+
+_"They should go to nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her
+laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to
+penetrate her meaning; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and
+scorning nothing." Advice which, whether bad or good, involved infinite
+labor and humiliation in the following it, and was therefore, for the
+most part, rejected._
+
+_It has, however, at last been carried out, to the very letter, by a
+group of men who, for their reward, have been assailed with the most
+scurrilous abuse which I ever recollect seeing issue from the public
+press. I have, therefore, thought it due to them to contradict the
+directly false statements which have been made respecting their works;
+and to point out the kind of merit which, however deficient in some
+respects, those works possess beyond the possibility of dispute._
+
+_Denmark Hill, August, 1851._
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+PRE-RAPHAELITISM.[28]
+
+
+166. It may be proved, with much certainty, that God intends no man to
+live in this world without working: but it seems to me no less evident
+that He intends every man to be happy in his work. It is written, "in
+the sweat of thy brow," but it was never written, "in the breaking of
+thine heart," thou shalt eat bread: and I find that, as on the one hand,
+infinite misery is caused by idle people, who both fail in doing what
+was appointed for them to do, and set in motion various springs of
+mischief in matters in which they should have had no concern, so on the
+other hand, no small misery is caused by overworked and unhappy people,
+in the dark views which they necessarily take up themselves, and force
+upon others, of work itself. Were it not so, I believe the fact of their
+being unhappy is in itself a violation of divine law, and a sign of some
+kind of folly or sin in their way of life. Now in order that people may
+be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit
+for it: They must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense of
+success in it--not a doubtful sense, such as needs some testimony of
+other people for its confirmation, but a sure sense, or rather
+knowledge, that so much work has been done well, and fruitfully done,
+whatever the world may say or think about it. So that in order that a
+man may be happy, it is necessary that he should not only be capable of
+his work, but a good judge of his work.
+
+167. The first thing then that he has to do, if unhappily his parents or
+masters have not done it for him, is to find out what he is fit for. In
+which inquiry a man may be safely guided by his likings, if he be not
+also guided by his pride. People usually reason in some such fashion as
+this: "I don't seem quite fit for a head-manager in the firm of ---- &
+Co., therefore, in all probability, I am fit to be Chancellor of the
+Exchequer." Whereas, they ought rather to reason thus: "I don't seem
+quite fit to be head-manager in the firm of ---- & Co., but I dare say I
+might do something in a small green-grocery business; I used to be a
+good judge of pease;" that is to say, always trying lower instead of
+trying higher, until they find bottom: once well set on the ground, a
+man may build up by degrees, safely, instead of disturbing everyone in
+his neighborhood by perpetual catastrophes. But this kind of humility is
+rendered especially difficult in these days, by the contumely thrown on
+men in humble employments. The very removal of the massy bars which once
+separated one class of society from another, has rendered it tenfold
+more shameful in foolish people's, _i.e._, in most people's eyes, to
+remain in the lower grades of it, than ever it was before. When a man
+born of an artisan was looked upon as an entirely different species of
+animal from a man born of a noble, it made him no more uncomfortable or
+ashamed to remain that different species of animal, than it makes a
+horse ashamed to remain a horse, and not to become a giraffe. But now
+that a man may make money, and rise in the world, and associate himself,
+unreproached, with people once far above him, not only is the natural
+discontentedness of humanity developed to an unheard-of extent, whatever
+a man's position, but it becomes a veritable shame to him to remain in
+the state he was born in, and everybody thinks it his _duty_ to try to
+be a "gentleman." Persons who have any influence in the management of
+public institutions for charitable education know how common this
+feeling has become. Hardly a day passes but they receive letters from
+mothers who want all their six or eight sons to go to college, and make
+the grand tour in the long vacation, and who think there is something
+wrong in the foundations of society because this is not possible. Out of
+every ten letters of this kind, nine will allege, as the reason of the
+writers' importunity, their desire to keep their families in such and
+such a "station of life."[29] There is no real desire for the safety,
+the discipline, or the moral good of the children, only a panic horror
+of the inexpressibly pitiable calamity of their living a ledge or two
+lower on the molehill of the world--a calamity to be averted at any cost
+whatever, of struggle, anxiety, and shortening of life itself. I do not
+believe that any greater good could be achieved for the country, than
+the change in public feeling on this head, which might be brought about
+by a few benevolent men, undeniably in the class of "gentlemen," who
+would, on principle, enter into some of our commonest trades, and make
+them honorable; showing that it was possible for a man to retain his
+dignity, and remain, in the best sense, a gentleman, though part of his
+time was every day occupied in manual labor, or even in serving
+customers over a counter. I do not in the least see why courtesy, and
+gravity, and sympathy with the feelings of others, and courage, and
+truth, and piety, and what else goes to make up a gentleman's character,
+should not be found behind a counter as well as elsewhere, if they were
+demanded, or even hoped for, there.
+
+168. Let us suppose, then, that the man's way of life, and manner of
+work have been discreetly chosen; then the next thing to be required is,
+that he do not overwork himself therein. I am not going to say anything
+here about the various errors in our systems of society and commerce,
+which appear (I am not sure if they ever do more than appear) to force
+us to overwork ourselves merely that we may live; nor about the still
+more fruitful cause of unhealthy toil--the incapability, in many men, of
+being content with the little that is indeed necessary to their
+happiness. I have only a word or two to say about one special cause of
+overwork--the ambitious desire of doing great or clever things, and the
+hope of accomplishing them by immense efforts: hope as vain as it is
+pernicious; not only making men overwork themselves, but rendering all
+the work they do unwholesome to them. I say it is a vain hope, and let
+the reader be assured of this (it is a truth all-important to the best
+interests of humanity). _No great intellectual thing was ever done by
+great effort_; a great thing can only be done by a great man, and he
+does it _without_ effort. Nothing is, at present, less understood by us
+than this--nothing is more necessary to be understood. Let me try to say
+it as clearly, and explain it as fully as I may.
+
+169. I have said no great _intellectual_ thing: for I do not mean the
+assertion to extend to things moral. On the contrary, it seems to me
+that just because we are intended, as long as we live, to be in a state
+of intense moral effort, we are _not_ intended to be in intense physical
+or intellectual effort. Our full energies are to be given to the soul's
+work--to the great fight with the Dragon--the taking the kingdom of
+heaven by force. But the body's work and head's work are to be done
+quietly, and comparatively without effort. Neither limbs nor brain are
+ever to be strained to their utmost; that is not the way in which the
+greatest quantity of work is to be got out of them: they are never to be
+worked furiously, but with tranquillity and constancy. We are to follow
+the plow from sunrise to sunset, but not to pull in race-boats at the
+twilight: we shall get no fruit of that kind of work, only disease of
+the heart.
+
+170. How many pangs would be spared to thousands, if this great truth
+and law were but once sincerely, humbly understood--that if a great
+thing can be done at all, it can be done easily; that, when it is needed
+to be done, there is perhaps only one man in the world who can do it;
+but _he_ can do it without any trouble--without more trouble, that is,
+than it costs small people to do small things; nay, perhaps, with less.
+And yet what truth lies more openly on the surface of all human
+phenomena? Is not the evidence of Ease on the very front of all the
+greatest works in existence? Do they not say plainly to us, not, "there
+has been a great _effort_ here," but, "there has been a great _power_
+here"? It is not the weariness of mortality, but the strength of
+divinity, which we have to recognize in all mighty things; and that is
+just what we now _never_ recognize, but think that we are to do great
+things, by help of iron bars and perspiration:--alas! we shall do
+nothing that way but lose some pounds of our own weight.
+
+171. Yet let me not be misunderstood, nor this great truth be supposed
+anywise resolvable into the favorite dogma of young men, that they need
+not work if they have genius. The fact is that a man of genius is always
+far more ready to work than other people, and gets so much more good
+from the work that he does, and is often so little conscious of the
+inherent divinity in himself, that he is very apt to ascribe all his
+capacity to his work, and to tell those who ask how he came to be what
+he is: "If I _am_ anything, which I much doubt, I made myself so merely
+by labor." This was Newton's way of talking, and I suppose it would be
+the general tone of men whose genius had been devoted to the physical
+sciences. Genius in the Arts must commonly be more self-conscious, but
+in whatever field, it will always be distinguished by its perpetual,
+steady, well-directed, happy, and faithful labor in accumulating and
+disciplining its powers, as well as by its gigantic, incommunicable
+facility in exercising them. Therefore, literally, it is no man's
+business whether he has genius or not: work he must, whatever he is, but
+quietly and steadily; and the natural and unforced results of such work
+will be always the things that God meant him to do, and will be his
+best. No agonies nor heart-rendings will enable him to do any better. If
+he be a great man, they will be great things; if a small man, small
+things; but always, if thus peacefully done, good and right; always, if
+restlessly and ambitiously done, false, hollow, and despicable.
+
+172. Then the third thing needed was, I said, that a man should be a
+good judge of his work; and this chiefly that he may not be dependent
+upon popular opinion for the manner of doing it, but also that he may
+have the just encouragement of the sense of progress, and an honest
+consciousness of victory; how else can he become
+
+   "That awful independent on to-morrow,
+   Whose yesterdays look backwards with a smile "?
+
+I am persuaded that the real nourishment and help of such a feeling as
+this is nearly unknown to half the workmen of the present day. For
+whatever appearance of self-complacency there may be in their outward
+bearing, it is visible enough, by their feverish jealousy of each other,
+how little confidence they have in the sterling value of their several
+doings. Conceit may puff a man up, but never prop him up; and there is
+too visible distress and hopelessness in men's aspects to admit of the
+supposition that they have any stable support of faith in themselves.
+
+173. I have stated these principles generally, because there is no
+branch of labor to which they do not apply: but there is one in which
+our ignorance or forgetfulness of them has caused an incalculable amount
+of suffering; and I would endeavor now to reconsider them with special
+reference to it--the branch of the Arts.
+
+In general, the men who are employed in the Arts have freely chosen
+their profession, and suppose themselves to have special faculty for it;
+yet, as a body, they are not happy men. For which this seems to me the
+reason--that they are expected, and themselves expect, to make their
+bread _by being clever_--not by steady or quiet work; and are therefore,
+for the most part, trying to be clever, and so living in an utterly
+false state of mind and action.
+
+174. This is the case, to the same extent, in no other profession or
+employment. A lawyer may indeed suspect that, unless he has more wit
+than those around him, he is not likely to advance in his profession;
+but he will not be always thinking how he is to display his wit. He
+will generally understand, early in his career, that wit must be left to
+take care of itself, and that it is hard knowledge of law and vigorous
+examination and collation of the facts of every case intrusted to him,
+which his clients will mainly demand: this it is which he is to be paid
+for; and this is healthy and measurable labor, payable by the hour. If
+he happen to have keen natural perception and quick wit, these will come
+into play in their due time and place, but he will not think of them as
+his chief power; and if he have them not, he may still hope that
+industry and conscientiousness may enable him to rise in his profession
+without them. Again in the case of clergymen: that they are sorely
+tempted to display their eloquence or wit, none who know their own
+hearts will deny, but then they _know_ this to _be_ a temptation: they
+never would suppose that cleverness was all that was to be expected from
+them, or would sit down deliberately to write a clever sermon: even the
+dullest or vainest of them would throw some veil over their vanity, and
+pretend to some profitableness of purpose in what they did. They would
+not openly ask of their hearers--Did you think my sermon ingenious, or
+my language poetical? They would early understand that they were not
+paid for being ingenious, nor called to be so, but to preach truth; that
+if they happened to possess wit, eloquence, or originality, these would
+appear and be of service in due time, but were not to be continually
+sought after or exhibited; and if it should happen that they had them
+not, they might still be serviceable pastors without them.
+
+175. Not so with the unhappy artist. No one expects any honest or useful
+work of him; but everyone expects him to be ingenious. Originality,
+dexterity, invention, imagination, everything is asked of him except
+what alone is to be had for asking--honesty and sound work, and the due
+discharge of his function as a painter. What function? asks the reader
+in some surprise. He may well ask; for I suppose few painters have any
+idea what their function is, or even that they have any at all.
+
+176. And yet surely it is not so difficult to discover. The faculties,
+which when a man finds in himself, he resolves to be a painter, are, I
+suppose, intenseness of observation and facility of imitation. The man
+is created an observer and an imitator; and his function is to convey
+knowledge to his fellow-men, of such things as cannot be taught
+otherwise than ocularly. For a long time this function remained a
+religious one: it was to impress upon the popular mind the reality of
+the objects of faith, and the truth of the histories of Scripture, by
+giving visible form to both. That function has now passed away, and none
+has as yet taken its place. The painter has no profession, no purpose.
+He is an idler on the earth, chasing the shadows of his own fancies.
+
+177. But he was never meant to be this. The sudden and universal
+Naturalism, or inclination to copy ordinary natural objects, which
+manifested itself among the painters of Europe, at the moment when the
+invention of printing superseded their legendary labors, was no false
+instinct. It was misunderstood and misapplied, but it came at the right
+time, and has maintained itself through all kinds of abuse; presenting,
+in the recent schools of landscape, perhaps only the first fruits of its
+power. That instinct was urging every painter in Europe at the same
+moment to his true duty--_the faithful representation of all objects of
+historical interest, or of natural beauty existent at the period_;
+representation such as might at once aid the advance of the sciences,
+and keep faithful record of every monument of past ages which was likely
+to be swept away in the approaching eras of revolutionary change.
+
+178. The instinct came, as I said, exactly at the right moment; and let
+the reader consider what amount and kind of general knowledge might by
+this time have been possessed by the nations of Europe, had their
+painters understood and obeyed it. Suppose that, after disciplining
+themselves so as to be able to draw, with unerring precision, each the
+particular kind of subject in which he most delighted, they had
+separated into two great armies of historians and naturalists;--that
+the first had painted with absolute faithfulness every edifice, every
+city, every battlefield, every scene of the slightest historical
+interest, precisely and completely rendering their aspect at the time;
+and that their companions, according to their several powers, had
+painted with like fidelity the plants and animals, the natural scenery,
+and the atmospheric phenomena of every country on the earth--suppose
+that a faithful and complete record were now in our museums of every
+building destroyed by war, or time, or innovation, during these last 200
+years--suppose that each recess of every mountain chain of Europe had
+been penetrated, and its rocks drawn with such accuracy that the
+geologist's diagram was no longer necessary--suppose that every tree of
+the forest had been drawn in its noblest aspect, every beast of the
+field in its savage life--that all these gatherings were already in our
+national galleries, and that the painters of the present day were
+laboring, happily and earnestly, to multiply them, and put such means of
+knowledge more and more within reach of the common people--would not
+that be a more honorable life for them, than gaining precarious bread by
+"bright effects"? They think not, perhaps. They think it easy, and
+therefore contemptible, to be truthful; they have been taught so all
+their lives. But it is not so, whoever taught it them. It is most
+difficult, and worthy of the greatest men's greatest effort, to render,
+as it should be rendered, the simplest of the natural features of the
+earth; but also be it remembered, no man is confined to the simplest;
+each may look out work for himself where he chooses, and it will be
+strange if he cannot find something hard enough for him. The excuse is,
+however, one of the lips only; for every painter knows, that when he
+draws back from the attempt to render nature as she is, it is oftener in
+cowardice than in disdain.
+
+179. I must leave the reader to pursue this subject for himself; I have
+not space to suggest to him the tenth part of the advantages which would
+follow, both to the painter from such an understanding of his mission,
+and to the whole people, in the results of his labor. Consider how the
+man himself would be elevated; how content he would become, how earnest,
+how full of all accurate and noble knowledge, how free from
+envy--knowing creation to be infinite, feeling at once the value of what
+he did, and yet the nothingness. Consider the advantage to the people:
+the immeasurably larger interest given to art itself; the easy,
+pleasurable, and perfect knowledge conveyed by it, in every subject; the
+far greater number of men who might be healthily and profitably occupied
+with it as a means of livelihood; the useful direction of myriads of
+inferior talents now left fading away in misery. Conceive all this, and
+then look around at our exhibitions, and behold the "cattle pieces," and
+"sea pieces," and "fruit pieces," and "family pieces"; the eternal brown
+cows in ditches, and white sails in squalls, and sliced lemons in
+saucers, and foolish faces in simpers;--and try to feel what we are, and
+what we might have been.
+
+180. Take a single instance in one branch of archæology. Let those who
+are interested in the history of Religion consider what a treasure we
+should now have possessed, if, instead of painting pots, and vegetables,
+and drunken peasantry, the most accurate painters of the seventeenth and
+eighteenth centuries had been set to copy, line for line, the religious
+and domestic sculpture on the German, Flemish, and French cathedrals and
+castles; and if every building destroyed in the French or in any other
+subsequent revolution, had thus been drawn in all its parts with the
+same precision with which Gerard Dow or Mieris paint bas-reliefs of
+Cupids. Consider, even now, what incalculable treasure is still left in
+ancient bas-reliefs, full of every kind of legendary interest, of subtle
+expression, of priceless evidence as to the character, feelings, habits,
+histories, of past generations, in neglected and shattered churches and
+domestic buildings, rapidly disappearing over the whole of
+Europe--treasure which, once lost, the labor of all men living cannot
+bring back again; and then look at the myriads of men, with skill
+enough, if they had but the commonest schooling, to record all this
+faithfully, who are making their bread by drawing dances of naked women
+from academy models, or idealities of chivalry fitted out with Wardour
+Street armor, or eternal scenes from Gil Blas, Don Quixote, and the
+Vicar of Wakefield, or mountain sceneries with young idiots of Londoners
+wearing Highland bonnets and brandishing rifles in the foregrounds. Do
+but think of these things in the breadth of their inexpressible
+imbecility, and then go and stand before that broken bas-relief in the
+southern gate of Lincoln Cathedral, and see if there is no fiber of the
+heart in you that will break too.
+
+181. But is there to be no place left, it will be indignantly asked, for
+imagination and invention, for poetical power, or love of ideal beauty?
+Yes, the highest, the noblest place--that which these only can attain
+when they are all used in the cause, and with the aid of truth. Wherever
+imagination and sentiment are, they will either show themselves without
+forcing, or, if capable of artificial development, the kind of training
+which such a school of art would give them would be the best they could
+receive. The infinite absurdity and failure of our present training
+consists mainly in this, that we do not rank imagination and invention
+high enough, and suppose that they _can_ be taught. Throughout every
+sentence that I ever have written, the reader will find the same rank
+attributed to these powers--the rank of a purely divine gift, not to be
+attained, increased, or in anywise modified by teaching, only in various
+ways capable of being concealed or quenched. Understand this thoroughly;
+know once for all, that a poet on canvas is exactly the same species of
+creature as a poet in song, and nearly every error in our methods of
+teaching will be done away with. For who among us now thinks of bringing
+men up to be poets?--of producing poets by any kind of general recipe or
+method of cultivation? Suppose even that we see in a youth that which we
+hope may, in its development, become a power of this kind, should we
+instantly, supposing that we wanted to make a poet of him, and nothing
+else, forbid him all quiet, steady, rational labor? Should we force him
+to perpetual spinning of new crudities out of his boyish brain, and set
+before him, as the only objects of his study, the laws of versification
+which criticism has supposed itself to discover in the works of previous
+writers? Whatever gifts the boy had, would much be likely to come of
+them so treated? unless, indeed, they were so great as to break through
+all such snares of falsehood and vanity, and build their own foundation
+in spite of us; whereas if, as in cases numbering millions against
+units, the natural gifts were too weak to do this, could anything come
+of such training but utter inanity and spuriousness of the whole man?
+But if we had sense, should we not rather restrain and bridle the first
+flame of invention in early youth, heaping material on it as one would
+on the first sparks and tongues of a fire which we desired to feed into
+greatness? Should we not educate the whole intellect into general
+strength, and all the affections into warmth and honesty, and look to
+heaven for the rest? This, I say, we should have sense enough to do, in
+order to produce a poet in words: but, it being required to produce a
+poet on canvas, what is our way of setting to work? We begin, in all
+probability, by telling the youth of fifteen or sixteen, that Nature is
+full of faults, and that he is to improve her; but that Raphael is
+perfection, and that the more he copies Raphael the better; that after
+much copying of Raphael, he is to try what he can do himself in a
+Raphaelesque, but yet original manner: that is to say, he is to try to
+do something very clever, all out of his own head, but yet this clever
+something is to be properly subjected to Raphaelesque rules, is to have
+a principal light occupying one-seventh of its space, and a principal
+shadow occupying one-third of the same; that no two people's heads in
+the picture are to be turned the same way, and that all the personages
+represented are to possess ideal beauty of the highest order, which
+ideal beauty consists partly in a Greek outline of nose, partly in
+proportions expressible in decimal fractions between the lips and chin;
+but mostly in that degree of improvement which the youth of sixteen is
+to bestow upon God's work in general. This I say is the kind of teaching
+which through various channels, Royal Academy lecturings, press
+criticisms, public enthusiasm, and not least by solid weight of gold, we
+give to our young men. And we wonder we have no painters!
+
+182. But we do worse than this. Within the last few years some sense of
+the real tendency of such teaching has appeared in some of our younger
+painters. It only _could_ appear in the younger ones, our older men
+having become familiarized with the false system, or else having
+passed through it and forgotten it, not well knowing the degree
+of harm they had sustained. This sense appeared, among our
+youths,--increased,--matured into resolute action. Necessarily, to exist
+at all, it needed the support both of strong instincts and of
+considerable self-confidence, otherwise it must at once have been borne
+down by the weight of general authority and received canon law. Strong
+instincts are apt to make men strange and rude; self-confidence, however
+well founded, to give much of what they do or say the appearance of
+impertinence. Look at the self-confidence of Wordsworth, stiffening
+every other sentence of his prefaces into defiance; there is no more of
+it than was needed to enable him to do his work, yet it is not a little
+ungraceful here and there. Suppose this stubbornness and self-trust in a
+youth, laboring in an art of which the executive part is confessedly to
+be best learnt from masters, and we shall hardly wonder that much of his
+work has a certain awkwardness and stiffness in it, or that he should be
+regarded with disfavor by many, even the most temperate, of the judges
+trained in the system he was breaking through, and with utter contempt
+and reprobation by the envious and the dull. Consider, further, that the
+particular system to be overthrown was, in the present case, one of
+which the main characteristic was the pursuit of beauty at the expense
+of manliness and truth; and it will seem likely _à priori_, that the men
+intended successfully to resist the influence of such a system should be
+endowed with little natural sense of beauty, and thus rendered dead to
+the temptation it presented. Summing up these conditions, there is
+surely little cause for surprise that pictures painted, in a temper of
+resistance, by exceedingly young men, of stubborn instincts and positive
+self-trust, and with little natural perception of beauty, should not be
+calculated, at the first glance, to win us from works enriched by
+plagiarism, polished by convention, invested with all the attractiveness
+of artificial grace, and recommended to our respect by established
+authority.
+
+183. We should, however, on the other hand, have anticipated, that in
+proportion to the strength of character required for the effort, and to
+the absence of distracting sentiments, whether respect for precedent, or
+affection for ideal beauty, would be the energy exhibited in the pursuit
+of the special objects which the youths proposed to themselves, and
+their success in attaining them.
+
+All this has actually been the case, but in a degree which it would have
+been impossible to anticipate. That two youths, of the respective ages
+of eighteen and twenty, should have conceived for themselves a totally
+independent and sincere method of study, and enthusiastically persevered
+in it against every kind of dissuasion and opposition, is strange
+enough; that in the third or fourth year of their efforts they should
+have produced works in many parts not inferior to the best of Albert
+Dürer, this is perhaps not less strange. But the loudness and
+universality of the howl which the common critics of the press have
+raised against them, the utter absence of all generous help or
+encouragement from those who can both measure their toil and appreciate
+their success, and the shrill, shallow laughter of those who can do
+neither the one nor the other--these are strangest of all--unimaginable
+unless they had been experienced.
+
+184. And as if these were not enough, private malice is at work against
+them, in its own small, slimy way. The very day after I had written my
+second letter to the "Times" in the defense of the Pre-Raphaelites,[30]
+I received an anonymous letter respecting one of them, from some person
+apparently hardly capable of spelling, and about as vile a specimen of
+petty malignity as ever blotted paper. I think it well that the public
+should know this, and so get some insight into the sources of the spirit
+which is at work against these men: how first roused it is difficult to
+say, for one would hardly have thought that mere eccentricity in young
+artists could have excited an hostility so determined and so cruel;
+hostility which hesitated at no assertion, however impudent. That of the
+"absence of perspective" was one of the most curious pieces of the hue
+and cry which began with the "Times," and died away in feeble maundering
+in the Art Union; I contradicted it in the "Times"--I here contradict it
+directly for the second time. There was not a single error in
+perspective in three out of the four pictures in question. But if
+otherwise, would it have been anything remarkable in them? I doubt if,
+with the exception of the pictures of David Roberts, there were one
+architectural drawing in perspective on the walls of the Academy; I
+never met but with two men in my life who knew enough of perspective to
+draw a Gothic arch in a retiring plane, so that its lateral dimensions
+and curvatures might be calculated to scale from the drawing. Our
+architects certainly do not, and it was but the other day that, talking
+to one of the most distinguished among them, the author of several most
+valuable works, I found he actually did not know how to draw a circle in
+perspective. And in this state of general science our writers for the
+press take it upon them to tell us, that the forest-trees in Mr. Hunt's
+_Sylvia_, and the bunches of lilies in Mr. Collins's _Convent Thoughts_,
+are out of perspective.[31]
+
+185. It might not, I think, in such circumstances, have been ungraceful
+or unwise in the Academicians themselves to have defended their young
+pupils, at least by the contradiction of statements directly false
+respecting them,[32] and the direction of the mind and sight of the
+public to such real merit as they possess. If Sir Charles Eastlake,
+Mulready, Edwin and Charles Landseer, Cope, and Dyce would each of them
+simply state their own private opinion respecting their paintings, sign
+it, and publish it, I believe the act would be of more service to
+English art than anything the Academy has done since it was founded. But
+as I cannot hope for this, I can only ask the public to give their
+pictures careful examination, and to look at them at once with the
+indulgence and the respect which I have endeavored to show they deserve.
+
+Yet let me not be misunderstood. I have adduced them only as examples of
+the kind of study which I would desire to see substituted for that of
+our modern schools, and of singular success in certain characters,
+finish of detail, and brilliancy of color. What faculties, higher than
+imitative, may be in these men, I do not yet venture to say; but I do
+say, that if they exist, such faculties will manifest themselves in due
+time all the more forcibly because they have received training so
+severe.
+
+186. For it is always to be remembered that no one mind is like another,
+either in its powers or perceptions; and while the main principles of
+training must be the same for all, the result in each will be as various
+as the kinds of truth which each will apprehend; therefore, also, the
+modes of effort, even in men whose inner principles and final aims are
+exactly the same. Suppose, for instance, two men, equally honest,
+equally industrious, equally impressed with a humble desire to render
+some part of what they saw in nature faithfully; and, otherwise, trained
+in convictions such as I have above endeavored to induce. But one of
+them is quiet in temperament, has a feeble memory, no invention, and
+excessively keen sight. The other is impatient in temperament, has a
+memory which nothing escapes, an invention which never rests, and is
+comparatively near-sighted.
+
+187. Set them both free in the same field in a mountain valley. One sees
+everything, small and large, with almost the same clearness; mountains
+and grasshoppers alike; the leaves on the branches, the veins in the
+pebbles, the bubbles in the stream; but he can remember nothing, and
+invent nothing. Patiently he sets himself to his mighty task; abandoning
+at once all thoughts of seizing transient effects, or giving general
+impressions of that which his eyes present to him in microscopical
+dissection, he chooses some small portion out of the infinite scene, and
+calculates with courage the number of weeks which must elapse before he
+can do justice to the intensity of his perceptions, or the fullness of
+matter in his subject.
+
+188. Meantime, the other has been watching the change of the clouds, and
+the march of the light along the mountain sides; he beholds the entire
+scene in broad, soft masses of true gradation, and the very feebleness
+of his sight is in some sort an advantage to him, in making him more
+sensible of the aërial mystery of distance, and hiding from him the
+multitudes of circumstances which it would have been impossible for him
+to represent. But there is not one change in the casting of the jagged
+shadows along the hollows of the hills, but it is fixed on his mind
+forever; not a flake of spray has broken from the sea of cloud about
+their bases, but he has watched it as it melts away, and could recall it
+to its lost place in heaven by the slightest effort of his thoughts. Not
+only so, but thousands and thousands of such images, of older scenes,
+remain congregated in his mind, each mingling in new associations with
+those now visibly passing before him, and these again confused with
+other images of his own ceaseless, sleepless imagination, flashing by in
+sudden troops. Fancy how his paper will be covered with stray symbols
+and blots, and undecipherable shorthand:--as for his sitting down to
+"draw from Nature," there was not one of the things which he wished to
+represent, that stayed for so much as five seconds together: but none of
+them escaped for all that: they are sealed up in that strange storehouse
+of his; he may take one of them out perhaps, this day twenty years, and
+paint it in his dark room, far away. Now, observe, you may tell both of
+these men, when they are young, that they are to be honest, that they
+have an important function, and that they are not to care what Raphael
+did. This you may wholesomely impress on them both. But fancy the
+exquisite absurdity of expecting either of them to possess any of the
+qualities of the other.
+
+189. I have supposed the feebleness of sight in the last, and of
+invention in the first painter, that the contrast between them might be
+more striking; but, with very slight modification, both the characters
+are real. Grant to the first considerable inventive power, with
+exquisite sense of color; and give to the second, in addition to all his
+other faculties, the eye of an eagle; and the first is John Everett
+Millais, the second Joseph Mallard William Turner.
+
+They are among the few men who have defied all false teaching, and have
+therefore, in great measure, done justice to the gifts with which they
+were intrusted. They stand at opposite poles, marking culminating points
+of art in both directions; between them, or in various relations to
+them, we may class five or six more living artists who, in like manner,
+have done justice to their powers. I trust that I may be pardoned for
+naming them, in order that the reader may know how the strong innate
+genius in each has been invariably accompanied with the same humility,
+earnestness, and industry in study.
+
+190. It is hardly necessary to point out the earnestness or humility in
+the works of William Hunt; but it may be so to suggest the high value
+they possess as records of English rural life, and _still_ life. Who is
+there who for a moment could contend with him in the unaffected, yet
+humorous truth with which he has painted our peasant children? Who is
+there who does not sympathize with him in the simple love with which he
+dwells on the brightness and bloom of our summer fruit and flowers? And
+yet there is something to be regretted concerning him: why should he be
+allowed continually to paint the same bunches of hot-house grapes, and
+supply to the Water Color Society a succession of pine-apples with the
+regularity of a Covent Garden fruiterer? He has of late discovered that
+primrose banks are lovely, but there are other things grow wild besides
+primroses: what undreamt-of loveliness might he not bring back to us, if
+he would lose himself for a summer in Highland foregrounds; if he would
+paint the heather as it grows, and the foxglove and the harebell as they
+nestle in the clefts of the rocks, and the mosses and bright lichens of
+the rocks themselves. And then, cross to the Jura, and bring back a
+piece of Jura pasture in spring; with the gentians in their earliest
+blue, and a soldanelle beside the fading snow! And return again, and
+paint a gray wall of alpine crag, with budding roses crowning it like a
+wreath of rubies. That is what he was meant to do in this world; not to
+paint bouquets in china vases.
+
+191. I have in various other places expressed my sincere respect for the
+works of Samuel Prout: his shortness of sight has necessarily prevented
+their possessing delicacy of finish or fullness of minor detail; but I
+think that those of no other living artist furnish an example so
+striking of innate and special instinct, sent to do a particular work at
+the exact and only period when it was possible. At the instant when
+peace had been established all over Europe, but when neither national
+character nor national architecture had as yet been seriously changed by
+promiscuous intercourse or modern "improvement"; when, however, nearly
+every ancient and beautiful building had been long left in a state of
+comparative neglect, so that its aspect of partial ruinousness, and of
+separation from recent active life, gave to every edifice a peculiar
+interest--half sorrowful, half sublime;--at that moment Prout was
+trained among the rough rocks and simple cottages of Cornwall, until his
+eye was accustomed to follow with delight the rents and breaks, and
+irregularities which, to another man, would have been offensive; and
+then, gifted with infinite readiness in composition, but also with
+infinite affection for the kind of subjects he had to portray, he was
+sent to preserve, in an almost innumerable series of drawings, _every
+one made on the spot_, the aspect borne, at the beginning of the
+nineteenth century, by cities which, in a few years more, re-kindled
+wars, or unexpected prosperities, were to ravage, or renovate, into
+nothingness.[33]
+
+192. It seems strange to pass from Prout to John Lewis; but there is
+this fellowship between them, that both seem to have been intended to
+appreciate the characters of foreign countries more than of their own,
+nay, to have been born in England chiefly that the excitement of
+strangeness might enhance to them the interest of the scenes they had to
+represent. I believe John Lewis to have done more entire justice to all
+his powers (and they are magnificent ones), than any other man amongst
+us. His mission was evidently to portray the comparatively animal life
+of the southern and eastern families of mankind. For this he was
+prepared in a somewhat singular way--by being led to study, and endowed
+with altogether peculiar apprehension of, the most sublime characters of
+animals themselves. Rubens, Rembrandt, Snyders, Tintoret, and Titian,
+have all, in various ways, drawn wild beasts magnificently; but they
+have in some sort humanized or demonized them, making them either
+ravenous fiends, or educated beasts, that would draw cars, and had
+respect for hermits. The sullen isolation of the brutal nature; the
+dignity and quietness of the mighty limbs; the shaggy mountainous power,
+mingled with grace as of a flowing stream; the stealthy restraint of
+strength and wrath in every soundless motion of the gigantic frame; all
+this seems never to have been seen, much less drawn, until Lewis drew
+and himself engraved a series of animal subjects, now many years ago.
+Since then, he has devoted himself to the portraiture of those European
+and Asiatic races, among whom the refinements of civilization exist
+without its laws or its energies, and in whom the fierceness, indolence,
+and subtlety of animal nature are associated with brilliant imagination
+and strong affections. To this task he has brought not only intense
+perception of the kind of character, but powers of artistical
+composition like those of the great Venetians, displaying, at the same
+time, a refinement of drawing almost miraculous, and appreciable only,
+as the minutiæ of nature itself are appreciable, by the help of the
+microscope. The value, therefore, of his works, as records of the aspect
+of the scenery and inhabitants of the south of Spain and of the East, in
+the earlier part of the nineteenth century, is quite above all estimate.
+
+193. I hardly know how to speak of Mulready: in delicacy and completion
+of drawing, and splendor of color, he takes place beside John Lewis and
+the Pre-Raphaelites; but he has, throughout his career, displayed no
+definiteness in choice of subject. He must be named among the painters
+who have studied with industry, and have made themselves great by doing
+so; but, having obtained a consummate method of execution, he has thrown
+it away on subjects either altogether uninteresting, or above his
+powers, or unfit for pictorial representation. "The Cherry Woman,"
+exhibited in 1850, may be named as an example of the first kind; the
+"Burchell and Sophia" of the second (the character of Sir William
+Thornhill being utterly missed); the "Seven Ages" of the third; for this
+subject cannot be painted. In the written passage, the thoughts are
+progressive and connected; in the picture they must be co-existent, and
+yet separate; nor can all the characters of the ages be rendered in
+painting at all. One may represent the soldier at the cannon's mouth,
+but one cannot paint the "bubble reputation" which he seeks. Mulready,
+therefore, while he has always produced exquisite pieces of painting,
+has failed in doing anything which can be of true or extensive use. He
+has, indeed, understood how to discipline his genius, but never how to
+direct it.
+
+194. Edwin Landseer is the last painter but one whom I shall name: I
+need not point out to anyone acquainted with his earlier works, the
+labor, or watchfulness of nature which they involve, nor need I do more
+than allude to the peculiar faculties of his mind. It will at once be
+granted that the highest merits of his pictures are throughout found in
+those parts of them which are least like what had before been
+accomplished; and that it was not by the study of Raphael that he
+attained his eminent success, but by a healthy love of Scotch terriers.
+
+None of these painters, however, it will be answered, afford examples of
+the rise of the highest imaginative power out of close study of matters
+of fact. Be it remembered, however, that the imaginative power, in its
+magnificence, is not to be found every day. Lewis has it in no mean
+degree, but we cannot hope to find it at its highest more than once in
+an age. We _have_ had it once, and must be content.
+
+195. Towards the close of the last century, among the various drawings
+executed, according to the quiet manner of the time, in grayish blue,
+with brown foregrounds, some began to be noticed as exhibiting rather
+more than ordinary diligence and delicacy, signed W. Turner.[34] There
+was nothing, however, in them at all indicative of genius, or even of
+more than ordinary talent, unless in some of the subjects a large
+perception of space, and excessive clearness and decision in the
+arrangement of masses. Gradually and cautiously the blues became mingled
+with delicate green, and then with gold; the browns in the foreground
+became first more positive, and then were slightly mingled with other
+local colors; while the touch, which had at first been heavy and broken,
+like that of the ordinary drawing masters of the time, grew more and
+more refined and expressive, until it lost itself in a method of
+execution often too delicate for the eye to follow, rendering, with a
+precision before unexampled, both the texture and the form of every
+object. The style may be considered as perfectly formed about the year
+1800, and it remained unchanged for twenty years.
+
+During that period the painter had attempted, and with more or less
+success had rendered, every order of landscape subject, but always on
+the same principle, subduing the colors of nature into a harmony of
+which the keynotes are grayish green and brown; pure blues, and
+delicate golden yellows being admitted in small quantity as the lowest
+and highest limits of shade and light: and bright local colors in
+extremely small quantity in figures or other minor accessories.
+
+196. Pictures executed on such a system are not, properly speaking,
+works in _color_ at all; they are studies of light and shade, in which
+both the shade and the distance are rendered in the general hue which
+best expresses their attributes of coolness and transparency; and the
+lights and the foreground are executed in that which best expresses
+their warmth and solidity. This advantage may just as well be taken as
+not, in studies of light and shadow to be executed with the hand; but
+the use of two, three, or four colors, always in the same relations and
+places, does not in the least constitute the work a study of color, any
+more than the brown engravings of the Liber Studiorum; nor would the
+idea of color be in general more present to the artist's mind when he
+was at work on one of these drawings, than when he was using pure brown
+in the mezzotint engraving. But the idea of space, warmth, and freshness
+being not successfully expressible in a single tint, and perfectly
+expressible by the admission of three or four, he allows himself this
+advantage when it is possible, without in the least embarrassing himself
+with the actual color of the objects to be represented. A stone in the
+foreground might in nature have been cold gray, but it will be drawn
+nevertheless of a rich brown, because it is in the foreground; a hill in
+the distance might in nature be purple with heath, or golden with furze;
+but it will be drawn, nevertheless, of a cool gray, because it is in the
+distance.
+
+197. This at least was the general theory,--carried out with great
+severity in many, both of the drawings and pictures executed by him
+during the period: in others more or less modified by the cautious
+introduction of color, as the painter felt his liberty increasing; for
+the system was evidently never considered as final, or as anything more
+than a means of progress: the conventional, easily manageable color,
+was visibly adopted, only that his mind might be at perfect liberty to
+address itself to the acquirement of the first and most necessary
+knowledge in all art--that of form. But as form, in landscape, implies
+vast bulk and space, the use of the tints which enabled him best to
+express them, was actually auxiliary to the mere drawing; and,
+therefore, not only permissible, but even necessary, while more
+brilliant or varied tints were never indulged in, except when they might
+be introduced without the slightest danger of diverting his mind for an
+instant from his principal object. And, therefore, it will be generally
+found in the works of this period, that exactly in proportion to the
+importance and general toil of the composition, is the severity of the
+tint; and that the play of color begins to show itself first in slight
+and small drawings, where he felt that he could easily secure all that
+he wanted in form.
+
+198. Thus the "Crossing the Brook," and such other elaborate and large
+compositions, are actually painted in nothing but gray, brown, and blue,
+with a point or two of severe local color in the figures; but in the
+minor drawings, tender passages of complicated color occur not
+unfrequently in easy places; and even before the year 1800 he begins to
+introduce it with evident joyfulness and longing in his rude and simple
+studies, just as a child, if it could be supposed to govern itself by a
+fully developed intellect, would cautiously, but with infinite pleasure,
+add now and then a tiny dish of fruit or other dangerous luxury to the
+simple order of its daily fare. Thus, in the foregrounds of his most
+severe drawings, we not unfrequently find him indulging in the luxury of
+a peacock; and it is impossible to express the joyfulness with which he
+seems to design its graceful form, and deepen with soft penciling the
+bloom of its blue, after he has worked through the stern detail of his
+almost colorless drawing. A rainbow is another of his most frequently
+permitted indulgences; and we find him very early allowing the edges of
+his evening clouds to be touched with soft rose-color or gold; while,
+whenever the hues of nature in anywise fall into his system, and can be
+caught without a dangerous departure from it, he instantly throws his
+whole soul into the faithful rendering of them. Thus the usual brown
+tones of his foreground become warmed into sudden vigor, and are varied
+and enhanced with indescribable delight, when he finds himself by the
+shore of a moorland stream, where they truly express the stain of its
+golden rocks, and the darkness of its clear, Cairngorm-like pools, and
+the usual serenity of his aërial blue is enriched into the softness and
+depth of the sapphire, when it can deepen the distant slumber of some
+Highland lake, or temper the gloomy shadows of the evening upon its
+hills.
+
+199. The system of his color being thus simplified, he could address all
+the strength of his mind to the accumulation of facts of form; his
+choice of subject, and his methods of treatment, are therefore as
+various as his color is simple; and it is not a little difficult to give
+the reader who is unacquainted with his works, an idea either of their
+infinitude of aims, on the one hand, or of the kind of feeling which
+pervades them all, on the other. No subject was too low or too high for
+him; we find him one day hard at work on a cock and hen, with their
+family of chickens in a farm-yard; and bringing all the refinement of
+his execution into play to express the texture of the plumage; next day
+he is drawing the Dragon of Colchis. One hour he is much interested in a
+gust of wind blowing away an old woman's cap; the next, he is painting
+the fifth plague of Egypt. Every landscape painter before him had
+acquired distinction by confining his efforts to one class of subject.
+Hobbima painted oaks; Ruysdael, waterfalls and copses; Cuyp, river or
+meadow scenes in quiet afternoons; Salvator and Poussin, such kind of
+mountain scenery as people could conceive, who lived in towns in the
+seventeenth century. But I am well persuaded that if all the works of
+Turner, up to the year 1820, were divided into classes (as he has
+himself divided them in the Liber Studiorum), no preponderance could be
+assigned to one class over another. There is architecture, including a
+large number of formal "gentlemen's seats," I suppose drawings
+commissioned by the owners; then lowland pastoral scenery of every kind,
+including nearly all farming operations---plowing, harrowing, hedging
+and ditching, felling trees, sheep-washing, and I know not what else;
+then all kinds of town life--courtyards of inns, starting of mail
+coaches, interiors of shops, house-buildings, fairs, elections, etc.;
+then all kinds of inner domestic life--interiors of rooms, studies of
+costumes, of still life, and heraldry, including multitudes of
+symbolical vignettes; then marine scenery of every kind, full of local
+incident; every kind of boat and method of fishing for particular fish,
+being specifically drawn, round the whole coast of England--pilchard
+fishing at St. Ives, whiting fishing at Margate, herring at Loch Fyne;
+and all kinds of shipping, including studies of every separate part of
+the vessels, and many marine battle pieces, two in particular of
+Trafalgar, both of high importance--one of the Victory after the battle,
+now in Greenwich Hospital; another of the death of Nelson, in his own
+gallery; then all kinds of mountain scenery, some idealized into
+compositions, others of definite localities; together with classical
+compositions, Romes, and Carthages, and such others, by the myriad, with
+mythological, historical, or allegorical figures--nymphs, monsters, and
+specters; heroes and divinities.[35]
+
+200. What general feeling, it may be asked incredulously, can possibly
+pervade all this? This, the greatest of all feelings--an utter
+forgetfulness of self. Throughout the whole period with which we are at
+present concerned, Turner appears as a man of sympathy absolutely
+infinite--a sympathy so all-embracing, that I know nothing but that of
+Shakspeare comparable with it. A soldier's wife resting by the roadside
+is not beneath it;[36] Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, watching the dead
+bodies of her sons, not above it. Nothing can possibly be so mean as
+that it will not interest his whole mind, and carry away his whole
+heart; nothing so great or solemn but that he can raise himself into
+harmony with it; and it is impossible to prophesy of him at any moment,
+whether, the next, he will be in laughter or in tears.
+
+201. This is the root of the man's greatness; and it follows as a matter
+of course that this sympathy must give him a subtle power of expression,
+even of the characters of mere material things, such as no other painter
+ever possessed. The man who can best feel the difference between
+rudeness and tenderness in humanity, perceives also more difference
+between the branches of an oak and a willow than anyone else would; and,
+therefore, necessarily the most striking character of the drawings
+themselves is the speciality of whatever they represent--the thorough
+stiffness of what is stiff, and grace of what is graceful, and vastness
+of what is vast; but through and beyond all this, the condition of the
+mind of the painter himself is easily enough discoverable by comparison
+of a large number of the drawings. It is singularly serene and peaceful:
+in itself quite passionless, though entering with ease into the external
+passion which it contemplates. By the effort of its will it sympathizes
+with tumult or distress, even in their extremes, but there is no tumult,
+no sorrow in itself, only a chastened and exquisitely peaceful
+cheerfulness, deeply meditative; touched, without loss of its own
+perfect balance, by sadness on the one side, and stooping to playfulness
+upon the other. I shall never cease to regret the destruction, by fire,
+now several years ago, of a drawing which always seemed to me to be the
+perfect image of the painter's mind at this period,--the drawing of
+Brignal Church near Rokeby, of which a feeble idea may still be gathered
+from the engraving (in the Yorkshire series). The spectator stands on
+the "Brignal banks," looking down into the glen at twilight; the sky is
+still full of soft rays, though the sun is gone, and the Greta glances
+brightly in the valley, singing its even-song; two white clouds,
+following each other, move without wind through the hollows of the
+ravine, and others lie couched on the far away moorlands; every leaf of
+the woods is still in the delicate air; a boy's kite, incapable of
+rising, has become entangled in their branches, he is climbing to
+recover it; and just behind it in the picture, almost indicated by it,
+the lowly church is seen in its secluded field between the rocks and the
+stream; and around, it the low churchyard wall, and a few white stones
+which mark the resting places of those who can climb the rocks no more,
+nor hear the river sing as it passes.
+
+There are many other existing drawings which indicate the same character
+of mind, though I think none so touching or so beautiful: yet they are
+not, as I said above, more numerous than those which express his
+sympathy with sublimer or more active scenes; but they are almost always
+marked by a tenderness of execution, and have a look of being beloved in
+every part of them, which shows them to be the truest expression of his
+own feelings.
+
+202. One other characteristic of his mind at this period remains to be
+noticed--its reverence for talent in others. Not the reverence which
+acts upon the practices of men as if they were the laws of nature, but
+that which is ready to appreciate the power, and receive the assistance,
+of every mind which has been previously employed in the same direction,
+so far as its teaching seems to be consistent with the great text-book
+of nature itself. Turner thus studied almost every preceding landscape
+painter, chiefly Claude, Poussin, Vandevelde, Loutherbourg, and Wilson.
+It was probably by the Sir George Beaumonts and other feeble
+conventionalists of the period, that he was persuaded to devote his
+attention to the works of these men; and his having done so will be
+thought, a few scores of years hence, evidence of perhaps the greatest
+modesty ever shown by a man of original power. Modesty at once admirable
+and unfortunate, for the study of the works of Vandevelde and Claude was
+productive of unmixed mischief to him: he spoiled many of his marine
+pictures, as for instance Lord Ellesmere's, by imitation of the former;
+and from the latter learned a false ideal, which, confirmed by the
+notions of Greek art prevalent in London in the beginning of this
+century, has manifested itself in many vulgarities in his composition
+pictures, vulgarities which may perhaps be best expressed by the general
+term "Twickenham Classicism," as consisting principally in conceptions
+of ancient or of rural life such as have influenced the erection of most
+of our suburban villas. From Nicole Poussin and Loutherbourg he seems to
+have derived advantage; perhaps also from Wilson; and much in his
+subsequent travels from far higher men, especially Tintoret and Paul
+Veronese. I have myself heard him speaking with singular delight of the
+putting in of the beech leaves in the upper right-hand corner of
+Titian's Peter Martyr. I cannot in any of his works trace the slightest
+influence of Salvator; and I am not surprised at it, for though Salvator
+was a man of far higher powers than either Vandevelde or Claude, he was
+a willful and gross caricaturist. Turner would condescend to be helped
+by feeble men, but could not be corrupted by false men. Besides, he had
+never himself seen classical life, and Claude was represented to him as
+competent authority for it. But he _had_ seen mountains and torrents,
+and knew therefore that Salvator could not paint them.
+
+203. One of the most characteristic drawings of this period fortunately
+bears a date, 1818, and brings us within two years of another dated
+drawing, no less characteristic of what I shall henceforward call
+Turner's Second period. It is in the possession of Mr. Hawkesworth
+Fawkes of Farnley, one of Turner's earliest and truest friends; and
+bears the inscription, unusually conspicuous, heaving itself up and down
+over the eminences of the foreground--"PASSAGE OF MONT CENIS. J. M. W.
+TURNER, January 15th, 1820."
+
+The scene is on the summit of the pass close to the hospice, or what
+seems to have been a hospice at that time,--I do not remember any such
+at present,--a small square built house, built as if partly for a
+fortress, with a detached flight of stone steps in front of it, and a
+kind of drawbridge to the door. This building, about 400 or 500 yards
+off, is seen in a dim, ashy gray against the light, which by help of a
+violent blast of mountain wind has broken through the depth of clouds
+which hang upon the crags. There is no sky, properly so called, nothing
+but this roof of drifting cloud; but neither is there any weight of
+darkness--the high air is too thin for it,--all savage, howling, and
+luminous with cold, the massy bases of the granite hills jutting out
+here and there grimly through the snow wreaths. There is a
+desolate-looking refuge on the left, with its number 16, marked on it in
+long ghastly figures, and the wind is drifting the snow off the roof and
+through its window in a frantic whirl; the near ground is all wan with
+half-thawed, half-trampled snow; a diligence in front, whose horses,
+unable to face the wind, have turned right round with fright, its
+passengers struggling to escape, jammed in the window; a little farther
+on is another carriage off the road, some figures pushing at its wheels,
+and its driver at the horses' heads, pulling and lashing with all his
+strength, his lifted arm stretched out against the light of the
+distance, though too far off for the whip to be seen.
+
+204. Now I am perfectly certain that anyone thoroughly accustomed to the
+earlier works of the painter, and shown this picture for the first time,
+would be struck by two altogether new characters in it.
+
+The first, a seeming enjoyment of the excitement of the scene, totally
+different from the contemplative philosophy with which it would formerly
+have been regarded. Every incident of motion and of energy is seized
+upon with indescribable delight, and every line of the composition
+animated with a force and fury which are now no longer the mere
+expression of a contemplated external truth, but have origin in some
+inherent feeling in the painter's mind.
+
+The second, that although the subject is one in itself almost incapable
+of color, and although, in order to increase the wildness of the
+impression, all brilliant local color has been refused even where it
+might easily have been introduced, as in the figures; yet in the low
+minor key which has been chosen, the melodies of _color_ have been
+elaborated to the utmost possible pitch, so as to become a leading,
+instead of a subordinate, element in the composition; the subdued warm
+hues of the granite promontories, the dull stone color of the walls of
+the buildings, clearly opposed, even in shade, to the gray of the snow
+wreaths heaped against them, and the faint greens and ghastly blues of
+the glacier ice, being all expressed with delicacies of transition
+utterly unexampled in any previous drawings.
+
+205. These, accordingly, are the chief characteristics of the works of
+Turner's second period, as distinguished from the first,--a new energy
+inherent in the mind of the painter, diminishing the repose and exalting
+the force and fire of his conceptions, and the presence of Color, as at
+least an essential, and often a principal, element of design.
+
+Not that it is impossible, or even unusual, to find drawings of serene
+subject, and perfectly quiet feeling, among the compositions of this
+period; but the repose is in them, just as the energy and tumult were in
+the earlier period, an external quality, which the painter images by an
+effort of the will: it is no longer a character inherent in himself. The
+"Ulleswater," in the England series, is one of those which are in most
+perfect peace; in the "Cowes," the silence is only broken by the dash of
+the boat's oars, and in the "Alnwick" by a stag drinking; but in at
+least nine drawings out of ten, either sky, water, or figures are in
+rapid motion, and the grandest drawings are almost always those which
+have even violent action in one or other, or in all; _e.g._ high force
+of Tees, Coventry, Llanthony, Salisbury, Llanberis, and such others.
+
+206. The color is, however, a more absolute distinction; and we must
+return to Mr. Fawkes's collection in order to see how the change in it
+was effected. That such a change would take place at one time or other
+was of course to be securely anticipated, the conventional system of the
+first period being, as above stated, merely a means of study. But the
+immediate cause was the journey of the year 1820. As might be guessed
+from the legend on the drawing above described, "Passage of Mont Cenis,
+January 15th, 1820," that drawing represents what happened on the day in
+question to the painter himself. He passed the Alps then in the winter
+of 1820; and either in the previous or subsequent summer, but on the
+same journey, he made a series of sketches on the Rhine, in body color,
+now in Mr. Fawkes's collection. Every one of those sketches is the
+almost instantaneous record of an _effect_ of color or atmosphere, taken
+strictly from nature, the drawing and the details of every subject being
+comparatively subordinate, and the color nearly as principal as the
+light and shade had been before,--certainly the leading feature, though
+the light and shade are always exquisitely harmonized with it. And
+naturally, as the color becomes the leading object, those times of day
+are chosen in which it is most lovely; and whereas before, at least five
+out of six of Turner's drawings represented ordinary daylight, we now
+find his attention directed constantly to the evening: and, for the
+first time, we have those rosy lights upon the hills, those gorgeous
+falls of sun through flaming heavens, those solemn twilights, with the
+blue moon rising as the western sky grows dim, which have ever since
+been the themes of his mightiest thoughts.
+
+207. I have no doubt, that the _immediate_ reason of this change was the
+impression made upon him by the colors of the continental skies. When he
+first traveled on the Continent (1800), he was comparatively a young
+student; not yet able to draw form as he wanted, he was forced to give
+all his thoughts and strength to this primary object. But now he was
+free to receive other impressions; the time was come for perfecting his
+art, and the first sunset which he saw on the Rhine taught him that all
+previous landscape art was vain and valueless, that in comparison with
+natural color, the things that had been called paintings were mere ink
+and charcoal, and that all precedent and all authority must be cast away
+at once, and trodden underfoot. He cast them away: the memories of
+Vandevelde and Claude were at once weeded out of the great mind they had
+encumbered; they and all the rubbish of the schools together with them;
+the waves of the Rhine swept them away forever: and a new dawn rose over
+the rocks of the Siebengebirge.
+
+208. There was another motive at work, which rendered the change still
+more complete. His fellow artists were already conscious enough of his
+superior power in drawing, and their best hope was that he might not be
+able to color. They had begun to express this hope loudly enough for it
+to reach his ears. The engraver of one of his most important marine
+pictures told me, not long ago, that one day about the period in
+question, Turner came into his room to examine the progress of the
+plate, not having seen his own picture for several months. It was one of
+his dark early pictures, but in the foreground was a little piece of
+luxury, a pearly fish wrought into hues like those of an opal. He stood
+before the picture for some moments; then laughed, and pointed joyously
+to the fish:--"They say that Turner can't color!" and turned away.
+
+209. Under the force of these various impulses the change was total.
+_Every subject thenceforward was primarily conceived in color_; and no
+engraving ever gave the slightest idea of any drawing of this period.
+
+The artists who had any perception of the truth were in despair; the
+Beaumontites, classicalists, and "owl species" in general, in as much
+indignation as their dullness was capable of. They had deliberately
+closed their eyes to all nature, and had gone on inquiring, "Where do
+you put your brown 'tree'?" A vast revelation was made to them at once,
+enough to have dazzled anyone; but to _them_, light unendurable as
+incomprehensible. They "did to the moon complain," in one vociferous,
+unanimous, continuous "Tu whoo." Shrieking rose from all dark places at
+the same instant, just the same kind of shrieking that is now raised
+against the Pre-Raphaelites. Those glorious old Arabian Nights, how true
+they are! Mocking and whispering, and abuse loud and low by turns, from
+all the black stones beside the road, when one living soul is toiling up
+the hill to get the golden water. Mocking and whispering, that he may
+look back, and become a black stone like themselves.
+
+210. Turner looked not back, but he went on in such a temper as a strong
+man must be in, when he is forced to walk with his fingers in his ears.
+He retired into himself; he could look no longer for help, or counsel,
+or sympathy from anyone; and the spirit of defiance in which he was
+forced to labor led him sometimes into violences, from which the
+slightest expression of sympathy would have saved him. The new energy
+that was upon him, and the utter isolation into which he was driven,
+were both alike dangerous, and many drawings of the time show the evil
+effects of both; some of them being hasty, wild, or experimental, and
+others little more than magnificent expressions of defiance of public
+opinion.
+
+But all have this noble virtue--they are in everything his own: there
+are no more reminiscences of dead masters, no more trials of skill in
+the manner of Claude or Poussin; every faculty of his soul is fixed upon
+nature only, as he saw her, or as he remembered her.
+
+211. I have spoken above of his gigantic memory: it is especially
+necessary to notice this, in order that we may understand the kind of
+grasp which a man of real imagination takes of all things that are once
+brought within his reach--grasp thenceforth not to be relaxed forever.
+
+On looking over any catalogues of his works, or of particular series of
+them, we shall notice the recurrence of the same subject two, three, or
+even many times. In any other artist this would be nothing remarkable.
+Probably, most modern landscape painters multiply a favorite subject
+twenty, thirty, or sixty fold, putting the shadows and the clouds in
+different places, and "inventing," as they are pleased to call it, a new
+"effect" every time. But if we examine the successions of Turner's
+subjects, we shall find them either the records of a succession of
+impressions actually received by him at some favorite locality, or else
+repetitions of one impression received in early youth, and again and
+again realized as his increasing powers enabled him to do better
+justice to it. In either case we shall find them records of _seen
+facts_; _never_ compositions in his room to fill up a favorite outline.
+
+212. For instance, every traveler--at least, every traveler of thirty
+years' standing--must love Calais, the place where he first felt himself
+in a strange world. Turner evidently loved it excessively. I have never
+catalogued his studies of Calais, but I remember, at this moment, five:
+there is first the "Pas de Calais," a very large oil painting, which is
+what he saw in broad daylight as he crossed over, when he got near the
+French side. It is a careful study of French fishing-boats running for
+the shore before the wind, with the picturesque old city in the
+distance. Then there is the "Calais Harbor" in the Liber Studiorum: that
+is what he saw just as he was going into the harbor--a heavy brig
+warping out, and very likely to get in his way or run against the pier,
+and bad weather coming on. Then there is the "Calais Pier," a large
+painting, engraved some years ago by Mr. Lupton:[37] that is what he saw
+when he had landed, and ran back directly to the pier to see what had
+become of the brig. The weather had got still worse, the fishwomen were
+being blown about in a distressful manner on the pier head, and some
+more fishing-boats were running in with all speed. Then there is the
+"Fortrouge," Calais: that is what he saw after he had been home to
+Dessein's, and dined, and went out again in the evening to walk on the
+sands, the tide being down. He had never seen such a waste of sands
+before, and it made an impression on him. The shrimp girls were all
+scattered over them too, and moved about in white spots on the wild
+shore; and the storm had lulled a little, and there was a sunset--such a
+sunset!--and the bars of Fortrouge seen against it, skeleton-wise. He
+did not paint that directly; thought over it--painted it a long while
+afterwards.
+
+213. Then there is the vignette in the illustrations to Scott. That is
+what he saw as he was going home, meditatively; and the revolving
+lighthouse came blazing out upon him suddenly, and disturbed him. He
+did not like that so much; made a vignette of it, however, when he was
+asked to do a bit of Calais, twenty or thirty years afterwards, having
+already done all the rest.
+
+Turner never told me all this, but anyone may see it if he will compare
+the pictures. They might, possibly, not be impressions of a single day,
+but of two days or three; though, in all human probability, they were
+seen just as I have stated them;[38] but they _are_ records of
+successive impressions, as plainly written as ever traveler's diary. All
+of them pure veracities. Therefore immortal.
+
+214. I could multiply these series almost indefinitely from the rest of
+his works. What is curious, some of them have a kind of private mark
+running through all the subjects. Thus, I know three drawings of
+Scarborough, and all of them have a starfish in the foreground: I do not
+remember any others of his marine subjects which have a starfish.
+
+The other kind of repetition--the recurrence to one early
+impression--is, however, still more remarkable. In the collection of F.
+H. Bale, Esq., there is a small drawing of Llanthony Abbey. It is in his
+boyish manner, its date probably about 1795; evidently a sketch from
+nature, finished at home. It had been a showery day; the hills were
+partially concealed by the rain, and gleams of sunshine breaking out at
+intervals. A man was fishing in the mountain stream. The young Turner
+sought a place of some shelter under the bushes; made his sketch; took
+great pains when he got home to imitate the rain, as he best could;
+added his child's luxury of a rainbow; put in the very bush under which
+he had taken shelter, and the fisherman, a somewhat ill-jointed and
+long-legged fisherman, in the courtly short breeches which were the
+fashion of the time.
+
+215. Some thirty years afterwards, with all his powers in their
+strongest training, and after the total change in his feelings and
+principles, which I have endeavored to describe, he undertook the series
+of "England and Wales," and in that series introduced the subject of
+Llanthony Abbey. And behold, he went back to his boy's sketch and boy's
+thought. He kept the very bushes in their places, but brought the
+fisherman to the other side of the river, and put him, in somewhat less
+courtly dress, under their shelter, instead of himself. And then he set
+all his gained strength and new knowledge at work on the well-remembered
+shower of rain, that had fallen thirty years before, to do it better.
+The resultant drawing[39] is one of the very noblest of his second
+period.
+
+216. Another of the drawings of the England series, Ulleswater, is the
+repetition of one in Mr. Fawkes's collection, which, by the method of
+its execution, I should conjecture to have been executed about the year
+1808 or 1810: at all events, it is a very quiet drawing of the first
+period. The lake is quite calm; the western hills in gray shadow, the
+eastern massed in light. Helvellyn rising like a mist between them, all
+being mirrored in the calm water. Some thin and slightly evanescent cows
+are standing in the shallow water in front; a boat floats motionless
+about a hundred yards from the shore; the foreground is of broken rocks,
+with some lovely pieces of copse on the right and left.
+
+This was evidently Turner's record of a quiet evening by the shore of
+Ulleswater, but it was a feeble one. He could not at that time render
+the sunset colors: he went back to it, therefore, in the England series,
+and painted it again with his new power. The same hills are there, the
+same shadows, the same cows,--they had stood in his mind, on the same
+spot, for twenty years,--the same boat, the same rocks, only the copse
+is cut away--it interfered with the masses of his color. Some figures
+are introduced bathing; and what was gray, and feeble gold in the first
+drawing, becomes purple and burning rose-color in the last.
+
+217. But perhaps one of the most curious examples is in the series of
+subjects from Winchelsea. That in the Liber Studiorum, "Winchelsea,
+Sussex," bears date 1812, and its figures consist of a soldier speaking
+to a woman, who is resting on the bank beside the road. There is another
+small subject, with Winchelsea in the distance, of which the engraving
+bears date 1817. It has _two_ women with bundles, and _two_ soldiers
+toiling along the embankment in the plain, and a baggage wagon in the
+distance. Neither of these seems to have satisfied him, and at last he
+did another for the England series, of which the engraving bears date
+1830. There is now a regiment on the march; the baggage wagon is there,
+having got no farther on in the thirteen years, but one of the women is
+tired, and has fainted on the bank; another is supporting her against
+her bundle, and giving her drink; a third sympathetic woman is added,
+and the two soldiers have stopped, and one is drinking from his
+canteen.[40]
+
+218. Nor is it merely of entire scenes, or of particular incidents that
+Turner's memory is thus tenacious. The slightest passages of color or
+arrangement that have pleased him--the fork of a bough, the casting of a
+shadow, the fracture of a stone--will be taken up again and again, and
+strangely worked into new relations with other thoughts. There is a
+single sketch from nature in one of the portfolios at Farnley, of a
+common wood-walk on the estate, which has furnished passages to no fewer
+than three of the most elaborate compositions in the Liber Studiorum.
+
+219. I am thus tedious in dwelling on Turner's powers of memory, because
+I wish it to be thoroughly seen how all his greatness, all his infinite
+luxuriance of invention, depends on his taking possession of everything
+that he sees,--on his grasping all, and losing hold of nothing,--on his
+forgetting himself, and forgetting nothing else. I wish it to be
+understood how every great man paints what he sees or did see, his
+greatness being indeed little else than his intense sense of fact. And
+thus Pre-Raphaelitism and Raphaelitism, and Turnerism, are all one and
+the same, so far as education can influence them. They are different in
+their choice, different in their faculties, but all the same in this,
+that Raphael himself, so far as he was great, and all who preceded or
+followed him who ever were great, became so by painting the truths
+around them as they appeared to each man's own mind, not as he had been
+taught to see them, except by the God who made both him and them.
+
+220. There is, however, one more characteristic of Turner's second
+period, on which I have still to dwell, especially with reference to
+what has been above advanced respecting the fallacy of overtoil; namely,
+the magnificent ease with which all is done when it is _successfully_
+done. For there are one or two drawings of this time which are _not_
+done easily. Turner had in these set himself to do a fine thing to
+exhibit his powers; in the common phrase, to excel himself; so sure as
+he does this, the work is a failure. The worst drawings that have ever
+come from his hands are some of this second period, on which he has
+spent much time and laborious thought; drawings filled with incident
+from one side to the other, with skies stippled into morbid blue, and
+warm lights set against them in violent contrast; one of Bamborough
+Castle, a large water-color, may be named as an example. But the truly
+noble works are those in which, without effort, he has expressed his
+thoughts as they came, and forgotten himself; and in these the
+outpouring of invention is not less miraculous than the swiftness and
+obedience of the mighty hand that expresses it. Anyone who examines the
+drawings may see the evidence of this facility, in the strange freshness
+and sharpness of every touch of color; but when the multitude of
+delicate touches, with which all the aërial tones are worked, is taken
+into consideration, it would still appear impossible that the drawing
+could have been completed with _ease_, unless we had direct evidence on
+the matter: fortunately, it is not wanting. There is a drawing in Mr.
+Fawkes's collection of a man-of-war taking in stores: it is of the usual
+size of those of the England series, about sixteen inches by eleven: it
+does not appear one of the most highly finished, but it is still farther
+removed from slightness. The hull of a first-rate occupies nearly
+one-half of the picture on the right, her bows towards the spectator,
+seen in sharp perspective from stem to stern, with all her port-holes,
+guns, anchors, and lower rigging elaborately detailed; there are two
+other ships of the line in the middle distance, drawn with equal
+precision; a noble breezy sea dancing against their broad bows, full of
+delicate drawing in its waves; a store-ship beneath the hull of the
+larger vessel, and several other boats, and a complicated cloudy sky. It
+might appear no small exertion of mind to draw the detail of all this
+shipping down to the smallest ropes, from memory, in the drawing-room of
+a mansion in the middle of Yorkshire, even if considerable time had been
+given for the effort. But Mr. Fawkes sat beside the painter from the
+first stroke to the last. Turner took a piece of blank paper one morning
+after breakfast, outlined his ships, finished the drawing in three
+hours, and went out to shoot.
+
+221. Let this single fact be quietly meditated upon by our ordinary
+painters, and they will see the truth of what was above asserted,--that
+if a great thing can be done at all, it can be done easily; and let them
+not torment themselves with twisting of compositions this way and that,
+and repeating, and experimenting, and scene-shifting. If a man can
+compose at all, he can compose at once, or rather he must compose in
+spite of himself. And this is the reason of that silence which I have
+kept in most of my works, on the subject of Composition. Many critics,
+especially the architects, have found fault with me for not "teaching
+people how to arrange masses;" for not "attributing sufficient
+importance to composition." Alas! I attribute far more importance to it
+than they do;--so much importance, that I should just as soon think of
+sitting down to teach a man how to write a Divina Commedia, or King
+Lear, as how to "compose," in the true sense, a single building or
+picture. The marvelous stupidity of this age of lecturers is, that they
+do not see that what they call, "principles of composition," are mere
+principles of common sense in everything, as well as in pictures and
+buildings;--A picture is to have a principal light? Yes; and so a dinner
+is to have a principal dish, and an oration a principal point, and an
+air of music a principal note, and every man a principal object. A
+picture is to have harmony of relation among its parts? Yes; and so is a
+speech well uttered, and an action well ordered, and a company well
+chosen, and a ragout well mixed. Composition! As if a man were not
+composing every moment of his life, well or ill, and would not do it
+instinctively in his picture as well as elsewhere, if he could.
+Composition of this lower or common kind is of exactly the same
+importance in a picture that it is in anything else,--no more. It is
+well that a man should say what he has to say in good order and
+sequence, but the main thing is to say it truly. And yet we go on
+preaching to our pupils as if to have a principal light was everything,
+and so cover our academy walls with Shacabac feasts, wherein the courses
+are indeed well ordered, but the dishes empty.
+
+222. It is not, however, only in invention that men overwork themselves,
+but in execution also; and here I have a word to say to the
+Pre-Raphaelites specially. They are working too hard. There is evidence
+in failing portions of their pictures, showing that they have wrought so
+long upon them that their very sight has failed for weariness, and that
+the hand refused any more to obey the heart. And, besides this, there
+are certain qualities of drawing which they miss from over-carefulness.
+For, let them be assured, there is a great truth lurking in that common
+desire of men to see things done in what they call a "masterly," or
+"bold," or "broad," manner: a truth oppressed and abused, like almost
+every other in this world, but an eternal one nevertheless; and whatever
+mischief may have followed from men's looking for nothing else but this
+facility of execution, and supposing that a picture was assuredly all
+right if only it were done with broad dashes of the brush, still the
+truth remains the same:--that because it is not intended that men shall
+torment or weary themselves with any earthly labor, it is appointed that
+the noblest results should only be attainable by a certain ease and
+decision of manipulation. I only wish people understood this much of
+sculpture, as well as of painting, and could see that the finely
+finished statue is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a far more
+vulgar work than that which shows rough signs of the right hand laid to
+the workman's hammer: but at all events, in painting it is felt by all
+men, and justly felt. The freedom of the lines of nature can only be
+represented by a similar freedom in the hand that follows them; there
+are curves in the flow of the hair, and in the form of the features, and
+in the muscular outline of the body, which can in no wise be caught but
+by a sympathetic freedom in the stroke of the pencil. I do not care what
+example is taken; be it the most subtle and careful work of Leonardo
+himself, there will be found a play and power and ease in the outlines,
+which no _slow_ effort could ever imitate. And if the Pre-Raphaelites do
+not understand how this kind of power, in its highest perfection, may be
+united with the most severe rendering of all other orders of truth, and
+especially of those with which they themselves have most sympathy, let
+them look at the drawings of John Lewis.
+
+223. These then are the principal lessons which we have to learn from
+Turner, in his second or central period of labor. There is one more,
+however, to be received; and that is a warning; for towards the close of
+it, what with doing small conventional vignettes for publishers, making
+showy drawings from sketches taken by other people of places he had
+never seen, and touching up the bad engravings from his works submitted
+to him almost every day,--engravings utterly destitute of animation, and
+which had to be raised into a specious brilliancy by scratching them
+over with white, spotty lights, he gradually got inured to many
+conventionalities, and even falsities; and, having trusted for ten or
+twelve years almost entirely to his memory and invention, living, I
+believe, mostly in London, and receiving a new sensation only from the
+burning of the Houses of Parliament, he painted many pictures between
+1830 and 1840 altogether unworthy of him. But he was not thus to close
+his career.
+
+224. In the summer either of 1840 or 1841, he undertook another journey
+into Switzerland. It was then at least forty years since he had first
+seen the Alps; (the source of the Arveron, in Mr. Fawkes's collection,
+which could not have been painted till he had seen the thing itself,
+bears date 1800,) and the direction of his journey in 1840 marks his
+fond memory of that earliest one; for, if we look over the Swiss studies
+and drawings executed in his first period, we shall be struck by his
+fondness for the pass of the St. Gothard; the most elaborate drawing in
+the Farnley collection is one of the Lake of Lucerne from Fluelen; and,
+counting the Liber Studiorum subjects, there are, to my knowledge, six
+compositions taken at the same period from the pass of St. Gothard, and,
+probably, several others are in existence. The valleys of Sallenche and
+Chamouni, and Lake of Geneva, are the only other Swiss scenes which seem
+to have made very profound impressions on him.
+
+He returned in 1841 to Lucerne; walked up Mont Pilate on foot, crossed
+the St. Gothard, and returned by Lausanne and Geneva. He made a large
+number of colored sketches on this journey, and realized several of them
+on his return. The drawings thus produced are different from all that
+had preceded them, and are the first which belong definitely to what I
+shall henceforward call his Third period.
+
+The perfect repose of his youth had returned to his mind, while the
+faculties of imagination and execution appeared in renewed strength; all
+conventionality being done away by the force of the impression which he
+had received from the Alps, after his long separation from them. The
+drawings are marked by a peculiar largeness and simplicity of thought:
+most of them by deep serenity, passing into melancholy; all by a
+richness of color, such as he had never before conceived. They, and the
+works done in following years, bear the same relation to those of the
+rest of his life that the colors of sunset do to those of the day; and
+will be recognized, in a few years more, as the noblest landscapes ever
+yet conceived by human intellect.
+
+225. Such has been the career of the greatest painter of this century.
+Many a century may pass away before there rises such another; but what
+greatness any among us may be capable of, will, at least, be best
+attained by following in his path;--by beginning in all quietness and
+hopefulness to use whatever powers we may possess to represent the
+things around us as we see and feel them; trusting to the close of life
+to give the perfect crown to the course of its labors, and knowing
+assuredly that the determination of the degree in which watchfulness is
+to be exalted into invention, rests with a higher will than our own.
+And, if not greatness, at least a certain good, is thus to be achieved;
+for though I have above spoken of the mission of the more humble artist,
+as if it were merely to be subservient to that of the antiquarian or the
+man of science, there is an ulterior aspect, in which it is not
+subservient, but superior. Every archæologist, every natural
+philosopher, knows that there is a peculiar rigidity of mind brought on
+by long devotion to logical and analytical inquiries. Weak men, giving
+themselves to such studies, are utterly hardened by them, and become
+incapable of understanding anything nobler, or even of feeling the value
+of the results to which they lead. But even the best men are in a sort
+injured by them, and pay a definite price, as in most other matters, for
+definite advantages. They gain a peculiar strength, but lose in
+tenderness, elasticity, and impressibility. The man who has gone, hammer
+in hand, over the surface of a romantic country, feels no longer, in the
+mountain ranges he has so laboriously explored, the sublimity or mystery
+with which they were veiled when he first beheld them, and with which
+they are adorned in the mind of the passing traveler. In his more
+informed conception, they arrange themselves like a dissected model:
+where another man would be awe-struck by the magnificence of the
+precipice, he sees nothing but the emergence of a fossiliferous rock,
+familiarized already to his imagination as extending in a shallow
+stratum, over a perhaps uninteresting district; where the unlearned
+spectator would be touched with strong emotion by the aspect of the
+snowy summits which rise in the distance, he sees only the culminating
+points of a metamorphic formation, with an uncomfortable web of fanlike
+fissures radiating, in his imagination, though their centers.[41] That
+in the grasp he has obtained of the inner relations of all these things
+to the universe, and to man, that in the views which have been opened to
+him of natural energies such as no human mind would have ventured to
+conceive, and of past states of being, each in some new way bearing
+witness to the unity of purpose and everlastingly consistent providence
+of the Maker of all things, he has received reward well worthy the
+sacrifice, I would not for an instant deny; but the sense of the loss is
+not less painful to him if his mind be rightly constituted; and it would
+be with infinite gratitude that he would regard the man, who, retaining
+in his delineation of natural scenery a fidelity to the facts of science
+so rigid as to make his work at once acceptable and credible to the most
+sternly critical intellect, should yet invest its features again with
+the sweet veil of their daily aspect; should make them dazzling with the
+splendor of wandering light, and involve them in the unsearchableness of
+stormy obscurity; should restore to the divided anatomy its visible
+vitality of operation, clothe the naked crags with soft forests, enrich
+the mountain ruins with bright pastures, and lead the thoughts from the
+monotonous recurrence of the phenomena of the physical world, to the
+sweet interests and sorrows of human life and death.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[28] This essay was first published in 1851 as a separate pamphlet
+entitled "Pre-Raphaelitism," by the author of "Modern Painters." (8vo,
+pp. 68. London: Smith, Elder, & Co.) It was afterwards reprinted in
+1862, without alteration, except that the later issue bore the author's
+name, and omitted a dedication which in the first edition ran as
+follows:--"To Francis Hawkesworth Fawkes, Esq., of Farnley, These pages,
+Which owe their present form to advantages granted By his kindness, Are
+affectionately inscribed, By his obliged friend, John Ruskin."--ED.
+
+[29] Compare "Sesame and Lilies," § 2.--ED.
+
+[30] See "Arrows of the Chace," vol. i., which gives several letters
+there collected under the head of Pre-Raphaelitism.--ED.
+
+[31] It was not a little curious, that in the very number of the Art
+Union which repeated this direct falsehood about the Pre-Raphaelite
+rejection of "linear perspective" (by-the-bye, the next time J. B. takes
+upon him to speak of anyone connected with the Universities, he may as
+well first ascertain the difference between a Graduate and an
+Under-Graduate), the second plate given should have been of a picture of
+Bonington's--a professional landscape painter, observe--for the want of
+_aërial_ perspective in which the Art Union itself was obliged to
+apologize, and in which, the artist has committed nearly as many
+blunders in _linear_ perspective as there are lines in the picture.
+
+[32] These false statements may be reduced to three principal heads, and
+directly contradicted in succession.
+
+The first, the current fallacy of society as well as of the press, was,
+that the Pre-Raphaelites imitated the _errors_ of early painters.
+
+A falsehood of this kind could not have obtained credence anywhere but
+in England, few English people, comparatively, having ever seen a
+picture of early Italian Masters. If they had they would have known that
+the Pre-Raphaelite pictures are just as superior to the early Italian in
+skill of manipulation, power of drawing, and knowledge of effect, as
+inferior to them in grace of design; and that in a word, there is not a
+shadow of resemblance between the two styles. The Pre-Raphaelites
+imitate no pictures: they paint from nature only. But they have opposed
+themselves as a body, to that kind of teaching above described, which
+only began after Raphael's time: and they have opposed themselves as
+sternly to the entire feeling of the Renaissance schools; a feeling
+compounded of indolence, infidelity, sensuality, and shallow pride.
+Therefore they have called themselves Pre-Raphaelite. If they adhere to
+their principles, and paint nature as it is around them, with the help
+of modern science, with the earnestness of the men of the thirteenth and
+fourteenth centuries, they will, as I said, found a new and noble school
+in England. If their sympathies with the early artists lead them into
+mediævalism or Romanism, they will of course come to nothing. But I
+believe there is no danger of this, at least for the strongest among
+them. There may be some weak ones, whom the Tractarian heresies may
+touch; but if so, they will drop off like decayed branches from a strong
+stem. I hope all things from the school.
+
+The second falsehood was, that the Pre-Raphaelites did not draw well.
+This was asserted, and could have been asserted only by persons who had
+never looked at the pictures.
+
+The third falsehood was, that they had no system of light and shade. To
+which it may be simply replied that their system of light and shade is
+exactly the same as the Sun's; which is, I believe, likely to outlast
+that of the Renaissance, however brilliant.
+
+[33] See ante, pp. 148-157.--ED.
+
+[34] He did not use his full signature, "J. M. W.," until about the year
+1800.
+
+[35] I shall give a _catalogue raisonnée_ of all this in the third
+volume of _Modern Painters_.
+
+[36] See _post_, § 217.
+
+[37] The plate was, however, never published.
+
+[38] And the more probably because Turner was never fond of staying long
+at any place, and was least of all likely to make a pause of two or
+three days at the beginning of his journey.
+
+[39] _Vide Modern Painters_, Part II. Sect. III. Chap. IV. § 13.
+
+[40] See _ante_, § 200.
+
+[41] This state of mind appears to have been the only one which
+Wordsworth had been able to discern in men of science; and in disdain of
+which, he wrote that short-sighted passage in the Excursion, Book III,
+P. 165-190, which is, I think, the only one in the whole range of his
+works which his true friends would have desired to see blotted out. What
+else has been found fault with as feeble or superfluous, is not so in
+the intense distinctive relief which it gives to his character. But
+these lines are written in mere ignorance of the matter they treat; in
+mere want of sympathy with the men they describe: for, observe, though
+the passage is put into the mouth of the Solitary, it is fully
+confirmed, and even rendered more scornful, by the speech which follows.
+
+
+
+
+THE THREE COLORS OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM.[42]
+
+I.
+
+
+226. I was lately staying in a country house, in which, opposite each
+other at the sides of the drawing-room window, were two pictures,
+belonging to what in the nineteenth century must be called old times,
+namely Rossetti's "Annunciation," and Millais' "Blind Girl"; while, at
+the corner of the chimney-piece in the same room, there was a little
+drawing of a Marriage-dance, by Edward Burne Jones. And in my bedroom,
+at one side of my bed, there was a photograph of the tomb of Ilaria di
+Caretto at Lucca, and on the other, an engraving, in long since
+superannuated manner, from Raphael's "Transfiguration." Also over the
+looking-glass in my bedroom, there was this large illuminated text,
+fairly well written, but with more vermilion in it than was needful;
+"Lord, teach us to pray."
+
+And for many reasons I would fain endeavor to tell my Oxford pupils some
+facts which seem to me worth memory about these six works of art; which,
+if they will reflect upon, being, in the present state of my health, the
+best I can do for them in the way of autumn lecturing, it will be kind
+to me. And as I cannot speak what I would say, and believe my pupils are
+more likely to read it if printed in the _Nineteenth Century_ than in a
+separate pamphlet, I have asked, and obtained of the editor, space in
+columns which ought, nevertheless, I think, usually to be occupied with
+sterner subjects, as the Fates are now driving the nineteenth century on
+its missionary path.
+
+227. The first picture I named, Rossetti's "Annunciation," was, I
+believe, among the earliest that drew some public attention to the
+so-called "Pre-Raphaelite" school. The one opposite to it,--Millais'
+"Blind Girl," is among those chiefly characteristic of that school in
+its determined manner. And the third, though small and unimportant, is
+no less characteristic, in its essential qualities, of the mind of the
+greatest master whom that school has yet produced.
+
+I believe most readers will start at the application of the term
+"master," to any English painter. For the hope of the nineteenth century
+is more and more distinctly every day, to teach all men how to live
+without mastership either in art or morals (primarily, of course,
+substituting for the words of Christ, "Ye say well, for so I am,"--the
+probable emendation, "Ye say ill, for so I am not"); and to limit the
+idea of magistracy altogether, no less than the functions of the
+magistrate, to the suppression of disturbance in the manufacturing
+districts.
+
+Nor would I myself use the word "Master" in any but the most qualified
+sense, of any "modern painter"; scarcely even of Turner, and not at all,
+except for convenience and as a matter of courtesy, of any workman of
+the Pre-Raphaelite school, as yet. In such courtesy, only, let the
+masterless reader permit it me.
+
+228. I must endeavor first to give, as well as I can by description,
+some general notion of the subjects and treatment of the three pictures.
+
+Rossetti's "Annunciation" differs from every previous conception of the
+scene known to me, in representing the angel as waking the Virgin from
+sleep to give her his message. The Messenger himself also differs from
+angels as they are commonly represented, in not depending, for
+recognition of his supernatural character, on the insertion of bird's
+wings at his shoulders. If we are to know him for an angel at all, it
+must be by his face, which is that simply of youthful, but grave,
+manhood. He is neither transparent in body, luminous in presence, nor
+auriferous in apparel;--wears a plain, long, white robe,--casts a
+natural and undiminished shadow,--and, although there are flames beneath
+his feet, which upbear him, so that he does not touch the earth, these
+are unseen by the Virgin.
+
+She herself is an English, not a Jewish girl, of about sixteen or
+seventeen, of such pale and thoughtful beauty as Rossetti could best
+imagine for her; concerning which effort, and its degree of success, we
+will inquire farther presently.
+
+She has risen half up, not _started_ up, in being awakened; and is not
+looking at the angel, but only thinking, it seems, with eyes cast down,
+as if supposing herself in a strange dream. The morning light fills the
+room, and shows at the foot of her little pallet-bed, her embroidery
+work, left off the evening before,--an upright lily.
+
+Upright, and very accurately upright, as also the edges of the piece of
+cloth in its frame,--as also the gliding form of the angel,--as also, in
+severe foreshortening, that of the Virgin herself. It has been studied,
+so far as it has been studied at all, from a very thin model; and the
+disturbed coverlid is thrown into confused angular folds, which admit no
+suggestion whatever of ordinary girlish grace. So that, to any spectator
+little inclined towards the praise of barren "uprightnesse," and
+accustomed on the contrary to expect radiance in archangels, and grace
+in Madonnas, the first effect of the design must be extremely
+displeasing, and the first is perhaps, with most art-amateurs of modern
+days, likely to be the last.
+
+229. The background of the second picture (Millais' "Blind Girl"), is an
+open English common, skirted by the tidy houses of a well-to-do village
+in the cockney rural districts. I have no doubt the scene is a real one
+within some twenty miles from London, and painted mostly on the spot.
+The houses are entirely uninteresting, but decent, trim, as human
+dwellings should be, and on the whole inoffensive--not "cottages," mind
+you, in any sense, but respectable brick-walled and slated
+constructions, old-fashioned in the sense of "old" at, suppose, Bromley
+or Sevenoaks, and with a pretty little church belonging to them, its
+window traceries freshly whitewashed by order of the careful warden.
+
+The common is a fairly spacious bit of ragged pasture, with a couple of
+donkeys feeding on it, and a cow or two, and at the side of the public
+road passing over it, the blind girl has sat down to rest awhile. She is
+a simple beggar, not a poetical or vicious one;--being peripatetic with
+musical instrument, she will, I suppose, come under the general term of
+tramp; a girl of eighteen or twenty, extremely plain-featured, but
+healthy, and just now resting, as any one of us would rest, not because
+she is much tired, but because the sun has but this moment come out
+after a shower, and the smell of the grass is pleasant.
+
+The shower has been heavy, and is so still in the distance, where an
+intensely bright double rainbow is relieved against the departing
+thunder-cloud. The freshly wet grass is all radiant through and through
+with the new sunshine; full noon at its purest, the very donkeys bathed
+in the rain-dew, and prismatic with it under their rough breasts as they
+graze; the weeds at the girl's side as bright as a Byzantine enamel, and
+inlaid with blue veronica; her upturned face all aglow with the light
+that seeks its way through her wet eyelashes (wet only with the rain).
+Very quiet she is,--so quiet that a radiant butterfly has settled on her
+shoulder, and basks there in the warm sun. Against her knee, on which
+her poor instrument of musical beggary rests (harmonium), leans another
+child, half her age--her guide;--indifferent, this one, either to sun or
+rain, only a little tired of waiting. No more than a half profile of her
+face is seen; and that is quite expressionless, and not the least
+pretty.
+
+230. Both of these pictures are oil-paintings. The third, Mr. Burne
+Jones's "Bridal," is a small water-color drawing, scarcely more than a
+sketch; but full and deep in such color as it admits. Any careful
+readers of my recent lectures at Oxford know that I entirely ignore the
+difference of material between oil and water as diluents of color, when
+I am examining any grave art question: nor shall I hereafter, throughout
+this paper, take notice of it. Nor do I think it needful to ask the
+pardon of any of the three artists for confining the reader's attention
+at present to comparatively minor and elementary examples of their
+works. If I can succeed in explaining the principles involved in them,
+their application by the reader will be easily extended to the enjoyment
+of better examples.
+
+This drawing of Mr. Jones's, however, is far less representative of his
+scale of power than either of the two pieces already described, which
+have both cost their artists much care and time; while this little
+water-color has been perhaps done in the course of a summer afternoon.
+It is only about seven inches by nine: the figures of the average size
+of Angelico's on any altar predella; and the heads, of those on an
+average Corinthian or Syracusan coin. The bride and bridegroom sit on a
+slightly raised throne at the side of the picture, the bride nearest us;
+her head seen in profile, a little bowed. Before them, the three
+bridesmaids and their groomsmen dance in circle, holding each other's
+hands, bare-footed, and dressed in long dark blue robes. Their figures
+are scarcely detached from the dark background, which is a willful
+mingling of shadow and light, as the artist chose to put them,
+representing, as far as I remember, nothing in particular. The deep tone
+of the picture leaves several of the faces in obscurity, and none are
+drawn with much care, not even the bride's; but with enough to show that
+her features are at least as beautiful as those of an ordinary Greek
+goddess, while the depth of the distant background throws out her pale
+head in an almost lunar, yet unexaggerated, light; and the white and
+blue flowers of her narrow coronal, though _merely_ white and blue,
+shine, one knows not how, like gems. Her bridegroom stoops forward a
+little to look at her, so that we see his front face, and can see also
+that he loves her.
+
+231. Such being the respective effort and design of the three pictures,
+although I put by, for the moment, any question of their mechanical
+skill or manner, it must yet, I believe, be felt by the reader that, as
+works of young men, they contained, and even nailed to the Academy
+gates, a kind of Lutheran challenge to the then accepted teachers in
+all European schools of Art: perhaps a little too shrill and petulant in
+the tone of it, but yet curiously resolute and steady in its triple
+Fraternity, as of William of Burglen with his Melchthal and Stauffacher,
+in the Grutli meadow, not wholly to be scorned by even the knightliest
+powers of the Past.
+
+We have indeed, since these pictures were first exhibited, become
+accustomed to many forms both of pleasing and revolting innovation: but
+consider, in those early times, how the pious persons who had always
+been accustomed to see their Madonnas dressed in scrupulously folded and
+exquisitely falling robes of blue, with edges embroidered in gold,--to
+find them also, sitting under arcades of exquisitest architecture by
+Bernini,--and reverently to observe them receive the angel's message
+with their hands folded on their breasts in the most graceful positions,
+and the missals they had been previously studying laid open on their
+knees, (see my own outline from Angelico of the "Ancilla Domini," the
+first plate of the fifth volume of _Modern Painters_);--consider, I
+repeat, the shock to the feelings of all these delicately minded
+persons, on being asked to conceive a Virgin waking from her sleep on a
+pallet bed, in a plain room, startled by sudden words and ghostly
+presence which she does not comprehend, and casting in her mind what
+manner of Salutation this should be.
+
+232. Again, consider, with respect to the second picture, how the
+learned possessors of works of established reputation by the ancient
+masters, classically catalogued as "landscapes with figures"; and who
+held it for eternal, artistic law that such pictures should either
+consist of a rock, with a Spanish chestnut growing out of the side of
+it, and three banditti in helmets and big feathers on the top, or else
+of a Corinthian temple, built beside an arm of the sea, with the Queen
+of Sheba beneath, preparing for embarkation to visit Solomon,--the whole
+properly toned down with amber varnish;--imagine the first
+consternation, and final wrath, of these _cognoscenti_, at being asked
+to contemplate, deliberately, and to the last rent of her ragged gown,
+and for principal object in a finished picture, a vagrant who ought at
+once to have been sent to the workhouse; and some really green grass and
+blue flowers, as they actually may any day be seen on an English
+common-side.
+
+And finally, let us imagine, if imagination fail us not, the far more
+wide and weighty indignation of the public, accustomed always to see its
+paintings of marriages elaborated in Christian propriety and splendor;
+with a bishop officiating, assisted by a dean and an archdeacon; the
+modesty of the bride expressed by a veil of the most expensive
+Valenciennes, and the robes of the bridesmaids designed by the
+perfectest of Parisian artists, and looped up with stuffed robins or
+other such tender rarities;--think with what sense of hitherto
+unheard-of impropriety, the British public must have received a picture
+of a marriage, in which the bride was only crowned with flowers,--at
+which the bridesmaids danced barefoot,--and in which nothing was known,
+or even conjecturable, respecting the bridegroom, but his love!
+
+233. Such being the manifestly opponent and agonistic temper of these
+three pictures (and admitting, which I will crave the reader to do for
+the nonce, their real worth and power to be considerable), it surely
+becomes a matter of no little interest to see what spirit it is that
+they have in common, which, recognized as revolutionary in the minds of
+the young artists themselves, caused them, with more or less of
+firmness, to constitute themselves into a society, partly monastic,
+partly predicatory, called "Pre-Raphaelite": and also recognized as
+such, with indignation, by the public, caused the youthfully didactic
+society to be regarded with various degrees of contempt, passing into
+anger (as of offended personal dignity), and embittered farther, among
+certain classes of persons, even into a kind of instinctive abhorrence.
+
+234. I believe the reader will discover, on reflection, that there is
+really only one quite common and sympathetic impulse shown in these
+three works, otherwise so distinct in aim and execution. And this
+fraternal link he will, if careful in reflection, discover to be an
+effort to represent, so far as in these youths lay either the choice or
+the power, things as they are, or were, or may be, instead of, according
+to the practice of their instructors and the wishes of their public,
+things as they are _not_, never were, and never can be: this effort
+being founded deeply on a conviction that it is at first better, and
+finally more pleasing, for human minds to contemplate things as they
+are, than as they are not.
+
+Thus, Mr. Rossetti, in this and subsequent works of the kind, thought it
+better for himself and his public to make some effort towards a real
+notion of what actually did happen in the carpenter's cottage at
+Nazareth, giving rise to the subsequent traditions delivered in the
+Gospels, than merely to produce a variety in the pattern of Virgin,
+pattern of Virgin's gown, and pattern of Virgin's house, which had been
+set by the jewelers of the fifteenth century.
+
+Similarly, Mr. Millais, in this and other works of the kind, thought it
+desirable rather to paint such grass and foliage as he saw in Kent,
+Surrey, and other solidly accessible English counties, than to imitate
+even the most Elysian fields enameled by Claude, or the gloomiest
+branches of Hades forest rent by Salvator: and yet more, to manifest his
+own strong personal feeling that the humanity, no less than the herbage,
+near us and around, was that which it was the painter's duty first to
+portray; and that, if Wordsworth were indeed right in feeling that the
+meanest flower that blows can give,--much more, for any kindly heart it
+should be true that the meanest tramp that walks can give--"thoughts
+that do often lie too deep for tears."
+
+235. And if at first--or even always to careless sight--the third of
+these pictures seem opposite to the two others in the very point of
+choice, between what is and what is not; insomuch that while _they_ with
+all their strength avouch realities, _this_ with simplest confession
+dwells upon a dream,--yet in this very separation from them it sums
+their power and seals their brotherhood; reaching beyond them to the
+more perfect truth of things, not only that once were,--not only that
+now are,--but which are the same yesterday, to-day, and forever;--the
+love by whose ordaining the world itself, and all that dwell therein,
+live, and move, and have their being; by which the Morning stars rejoice
+in their courses--in which the virgins of deathless Israel rejoice in
+the dance--and in whose constancy the Giver of light to stars, and love
+to men, Himself is glad in the creatures of His hand,--day by new day
+proclaiming to His Church of all the ages, "As the bridegroom rejoiceth
+over the bride, so shall thy Lord rejoice over thee."
+
+Such, the reader will find, if he cares to learn it, is indeed the
+purport and effort of these three designs--so far as, by youthful hands
+and in a time of trouble and rebuke, such effort could be brought to
+good end. Of their visible weaknesses, with the best justice I may,--of
+their veritable merits with the best insight I may, and of the farther
+history of the school which these masters founded, I hope to be
+permitted to speak more under the branches that do not "remember their
+green felicity"; adding a corollary or two respecting the other pieces
+of art above named[43] as having taken part in the tenor of my country
+hours of idleness.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[42] _Nineteenth Century_, NOV.-DEC. 1878.--ED.
+
+[43] May I in the meantime recommend any reader interested in these
+matters to obtain for himself such photographic representation as may be
+easily acquirable of the tomb of Ilaria? It is in the north transept of
+the Cathedral of Lucca; and is certainly the most beautiful work
+existing by the master who wrought it,--Jacopo della Quercia.
+
+
+
+
+THE THREE COLORS OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM.
+
+II.
+
+
+236. The feeling which, in the foregoing notes on the pictures that
+entertained my vacation, I endeavored to illustrate as dominant over
+early Pre-Raphaelite work, is very far from being new in the world.
+Demonstrations in support of fact against fancy have been periodical
+motives of earthquake and heartquake, under the two rigidly incumbent
+burdens of drifted tradition, which, throughout the history of humanity,
+during phases of languid thought, cover the vaults of searching fire
+that must at last try every man's work, what it is.
+
+But the movement under present question derived unusual force, and in
+some directions a morbid and mischievous force, from the vulgarly
+called[44] "scientific" modes of investigation which had destroyed in
+the minds of the public it appealed to, all possibility, or even
+conception, of reverence for anything, past, present, or future,
+invisible to the eyes of a mob, and inexpressible by popular
+vociferation. It was indeed, and had long been, too true, as the wisest
+of us felt, that the mystery of the domain between things that are
+universally visible, and are only occasionally so to some persons,--no
+less than the myths or words in which those who had entered that kingdom
+related what they had seen, had become, the one uninviting, and the
+other useless, to men dealing with the immediate business of our day; so
+that the historian of the last of European kings might most reasonably
+mourn that "the Berlin Galleries, which are made up, like other
+galleries, of goat-footed Pan, Europa's Bull, Romulus's She-wolf, and
+the Correggiosity of Correggio, 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 of 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."
+
+       *       *       *
+
+237. But we must surely, in fairness to modernism, remember that
+although no portraits of great Frederick, of a trustworthy character,
+may be found at Berlin, portraits of the English squire, be he great or
+small, may usually be seen at his country house. And Edinburgh, as I
+lately saw,--if she boasts of no Venetian perfectness of art in the
+portraiture of her Bruce or James, her Douglas or Knox, at Holyrood, has
+at least a charming portrait of a Scottish beauty in the Attic
+Institution, whose majesty, together with that of the more extensive
+glass roofs of the railway station, and the tall chimney of the
+gasworks, inflates the Caledonian mind, contemplative around the spot
+where the last of its minstrels appears to be awaiting eternal
+extinction under his special extinguisher;--and pronouncing of all its
+works and ways that they are very good.
+
+And are there not also sufficiently resembling portraits of all the
+mouthpieces of constituents in British Parliament--as their vocal powers
+advance them into that worshipful society--presented to the people, with
+due felicitation on the new pipe it has got to its organ, in the
+_Illustrated_ or other graphic _News_? Surely, therefore, it cannot be
+portraiture of merely human greatness of mind that we are anyway short
+of; but another manner of greatness altogether? And may we not regret
+that as great Frederick is dead, so also great Pan is dead, and only the
+goat-footed Pan, or rather the goat's feet of him without the Pan, left
+for portraiture?
+
+       *       *       *
+
+238. I chanced to walk, to-day, 9th of November, through the gallery of
+the Liverpool Museum, in which the good zeal and sense of Mr. Gatty have
+already, in beautiful order, arranged the Egyptian antiquities, but have
+not yet prevailed far enough to group, in like manner, the scattered
+Byzantine and Italian ivories above. Out of which collection, every way
+valuable, two primarily important pieces, it seems to me, may be
+recommended for accurate juxtaposition, bringing then for us into
+briefest compass an extensive story of the Arts of Mankind.
+
+The first is an image of St. John the Baptist, carved in the eleventh
+century; being then conceived by the image-maker as decently covered by
+his raiment of camel's hair; bearing a gentle aspect, because the herald
+of a gentle Lord; and pointing to his quite legibly written message
+concerning the Lamb which is that gentle Lord's heraldic symbol.
+
+The other carving is also of St. John the Baptist, Italian work of the
+sixteenth century. He is represented thereby as bearing no aspect, for
+he is without his head;--wearing no camel's hair, for he is without his
+raiment;--and indicative of no message, for he has none to bring.
+
+239. Now if these two carvings are ever put in due relative position,
+they will constitute a precise and permanent art-lecture to the
+museum-visitants of Liverpool-burg; exhibiting to them instantly, and in
+sum, the conditions of the change in the aims of art which, beginning in
+the thirteenth century under Niccolo Pisano, consummated itself three
+hundred years afterwards in Raphael and his scholars. Niccolo, first
+among Italians, thought mainly in carving the Crucifixion, not how heavy
+Christ's head was when He bowed it;--but how heavy His body was when
+people came to take it down. And the apotheosis of flesh, or, in modern
+scientific terms, the molecular development of flesh, went steadily on,
+until at last, as we see in the instance before us, it became really of
+small consequence to the artists of the Renaissance Incarnadine, whether
+a man had his head on or not, so only that his legs were handsome: and
+the decapitation, whether of St. John or St. Cecilia; the massacre of
+any quantity of Innocents; the flaying, whether of Marsyas or St.
+Bartholomew, and the deaths, it might be of Laocoon by his vipers, it
+might be of Adonis by his pig, or it might be of Christ by His people,
+became, one and all, simply subjects for analysis of muscular
+mortification; and the vast body of artists accurately, therefore,
+little more than a chirurgically useless sect of medical students.
+
+Of course there were many reactionary tendencies among the men who had
+been trained in the pure Tuscan schools, which partly concealed, or
+adorned, the materialism of their advance; and Raphael himself, after
+profoundly studying the arabesques of Pompeii and of the palace of the
+Cæsars, beguiled the tedium, and illustrated the spirituality of the
+converse of Moses and Elias with Christ concerning His decease which He
+should accomplish at Jerusalem, by placing them, above the Mount of
+Transfiguration, in the attitudes of two humming-birds on the top of a
+honeysuckle.
+
+240. But the best of these ornamental arrangements were insufficient to
+sustain the vivacity, while they conclusively undermined the sincerity,
+of the Christian faith, and "the real consequences of the acceptance of
+this kind (Roman Bath and Sarcophagus kind)" of religious idealism were
+instant and manifold.[45]
+
+       *       *       *
+
+So far as it was received and trusted in by thoughtful persons, it only
+served to chill all the conceptions of sacred history which they might
+otherwise have obtained. Whatever they could have fancied for themselves
+about the wild, strange, infinitely stern, infinitely tender, infinitely
+varied veracities of the life of Christ, was blotted out by the vapid
+fineries of Raphael: the rough Galilean pilot, the orderly custom
+receiver, and all the questioning wonder and fire of uneducated
+apostleship, were obscured under an antique mask of philosophical faces
+and long robes. The feeble, subtle, suffering, ceaseless energy and
+humiliation of St. Paul were confused with an idea of a meditative
+Hercules leaning on a sweeping sword; and the mighty presences of Moses
+and Elias were softened by introductions of delicate grace, adopted from
+dancing nymphs and rising Auroras.
+
+Now no vigorously minded religious person could possibly receive
+pleasure or help from such art as this; and the necessary result was the
+instant rejection of it by the healthy religion of the world. Raphael
+ministered, with applause, to the impious luxury of the Vatican, but was
+trampled underfoot at once by every believing and advancing Christian of
+his own and subsequent times; and thenceforward pure Christianity and
+"high art" took separate roads, and fared on, as best they might,
+independently of each other.
+
+But although Calvin, and Knox, and Luther, and their flocks, with all
+the hardest-headed and truest-hearted faithful left in Christendom, thus
+spurned away the spurious art, and all art with it (not without harm to
+themselves, such as a man must needs sustain in cutting off a decayed
+limb), certain conditions of weaker Christianity suffered the false
+system to retain influence over them; and to this day the clear and
+tasteless poison of the art of Raphael infects with sleep of infidelity
+the hearts of millions of Christians. It is the first cause of all that
+pre-eminent _dullness_ which characterizes what Protestants call sacred
+art; a dullness not merely baneful in making religion distasteful to the
+young, but in sickening, as we have seen, all vital belief of religion
+in the old. A dim sense of impossibility attaches itself always to the
+graceful emptiness of the representation; we feel instinctively that the
+painted Christ and painted apostle are not beings that ever did or could
+exist; and this fatal sense of fair fabulousness, and well-composed
+impossibility, steals gradually from the picture into the history, until
+we find ourselves reading St. Mark or St. Luke with the same admiring,
+but uninterested, incredulity, with which we contemplate Raphael.
+
+241. Without claiming,--nay, so far as my knowledge can reach, utterly
+disclaiming--any personal influence over, or any originality of
+suggestion to, the men who founded our presently realistic schools, I
+may yet be permitted to point out the sympathy which I had as an
+outstanding spectator with their effort; and the more or less active
+fellowship with it, which, unrecognized, I had held from the beginning.
+The passage I have just quoted (with many others enforcing similar
+truths) is in the third volume of _Modern Painters_; but if the reader
+can refer to the close of the preface to the second edition[46] of the
+first, he will find this very principle of realism asserted for the
+groundwork of all I had to teach in that volume. The lesson so far
+pleased the public of that day, that ever since, they have refused to
+listen to any corollaries or conclusions from it, assuring me, year by
+year, continually, that the older I grew, the less I knew, and the worse
+I wrote. Nevertheless, that first volume of _Modern Painters_ did by no
+means contain all that even then I knew; and in the third, nominally
+treating of "Many Things," will be found the full expression of what I
+knew best; namely, that all "things," many or few, which we ought to
+paint, must be first distinguished boldly from the nothings which we
+ought not; and that a faithful realist, before he could question whether
+his art was representing anything truly, had first to ask whether it
+meant seriously to represent anything at all!
+
+242. And such definition has in these days become more needful than ever
+before, in this solid, or spectral--which-ever the reader pleases to
+consider it--world of ours. For some of us, who have no perception but
+of solidity, are agreed to consider all that is not solid, or weighably
+liquid, nothing. And others of us, who have also perception of the
+spectral, are sometimes too much inclined to call what is no more than
+solid, or weighably liquid, nothing. But the general reader may be at
+least assured that it is not at all possible for the student to enter
+into useful discussion concerning the qualities of art which takes on
+itself to represent things as they are, unless he include in its
+subjects the spectral, no less than the substantial, reality; and
+understand what difference must be between the powers of veritable
+representation, for the men whose models are of ponderable flesh, as for
+instance, the "Sculptor's model," lately under debate in Liverpool,--and
+the men whose models pause perhaps only for an instant--painted on the
+immeasurable air,--forms which they themselves can but discern darkly,
+and remember uncertainly, saying: "A vision passed before me, but I
+could not discern the form thereof."
+
+243. And the most curious, yet the most common, deficiency in the modern
+contemplative mind, is its inability to comprehend that these phenomena
+of true imagination are yet no less real, and often more vivid than
+phenomena of matter. We continually hear artists blamed or praised for
+having painted this or that (either of material or spectral kind),
+without the slightest implied inquiry whether they _saw_ this, or that.
+Whereas the quite primal difference between the first and second order
+of artists, is that the first is indeed painting what he has seen; and
+the second only what he would like to see! But as the one that can paint
+what he would like, has therefore the power, if he chooses, of painting
+more or less what also his public likes, he has a chance of being
+received with sympathetic applause, on all hands, while the first, it
+may be, meets only reproach for not having painted something more
+agreeable. Thus Mr. Millais, going out at Tunbridge or Sevenoaks, sees a
+blind vagrant led by an ugly child; and paints that highly objectionable
+group, as they appeared to him. But your pliably minded painter gives
+you a beautiful young lady guiding a sightless Belisarius (see the gift
+by one of our most tasteful modistes to our National Gallery), and the
+gratified public never troubles itself to ask whether these ethereal
+mendicants were ever indeed apparent in this world, or any other. Much
+more, if, in deeper vistas of his imagination, some presently graphic
+Zechariah paint--(let us say) four carpenters, the public will most
+likely declare that he ought to have painted persons in a higher class
+of life, without ever inquiring whether the Lord had shown him four
+carpenters or not. And the worst of the business is that the public
+impatience, in such sort, is not wholly unreasonable. For truly, a
+painter who has eyes can, for the most part, see what he "likes" with
+them; and is, by divine law, answerable for his liking. And, even at
+this late hour of the day, it is still conceivable that such of them as
+would _verily_ prefer to see, suppose, instead of a tramp with a
+harmonium, Orpheus with his lute, or Arion on his dolphin, pleased
+Proteus rising beside him from the sea,--might, standing on the
+"pleasant lea" of Margate or Brighton, have sight of those personages.
+
+Orpheus with his lute,--Jubal with his harp and horn,--Harmonia, bride
+of the warrior seed-sower,--Musica herself, lady of all timely thought
+and sweetly ordered things,--Cantatrice and Incantatrice to all but the
+museless adder; these the Amphion of Fésole saw, as he shaped the marble
+of his tower; these, Memmi of Siena, fair-figured on the shadows of his
+vault;--but for us, here is the only manifestation granted to our best
+practical painter--a vagrant with harmonium--and yonder blackbirds and
+iridescent jackasses, to be harmonized thereby.
+
+244. Our best _painter_ (among the living) I say;--no question has ever
+been of that. Since Van Eyck and Dürer there has nothing been seen so
+well done in laying of clear oil-color within definite line. And what he
+might have painted for us, if _we_ had only known what we would have of
+him! Heaven only knows. But we none of us knew,--nor he neither; and on
+the whole the perfectest of his works, and the representative picture of
+that generation--was no Annunciate Maria bowing herself; but only a
+Newsless Mariana stretching herself: which is indeed the best symbol of
+the mud-moated Nineteenth century; in _its_ Grange, Stable--Sty, or
+whatever name of dwelling may best befit the things it calls Houses and
+Cities: imprisoned therein by the unassailablest of walls, and blackest
+of ditches--by the pride of Babel, and the filthiness of Aholah and
+Aholibamah; and their worse younger sister;--craving for any manner of
+News from any world--and getting none trustworthy even of its own.
+
+245. I said that in this second paper I would try to give some brief
+history of the rise, and the issue, of that Pre-Raphaelite school: but,
+as I look over two of the essays[47] that were printed with mine in that
+last number of the _Nineteenth Century_--the first--in laud of the
+Science which accepts for practical spirits, inside of men, only Avarice
+and Indolence; and the other,--in laud of the Science which "rejects the
+Worker" outside of Men, I am less and less confident in offering to the
+readers of the _Nineteenth Century_ any History relating to such
+despised things as unavaricious industry,--or incorporeal vision. I will
+be as brief as I can.
+
+246. The central branch of the school, represented by the central
+picture above described:--"The Blind Girl"--was essentially and vitally
+an uneducated one. It was headed, in literary power, by Wordsworth; but
+the first pure example of its mind and manner of Art, as opposed to the
+erudite and _artificial_ schools, will be found, so far as I know, in
+Molière's song: _j'aime mieux ma mie_.
+
+Its mental power consisted in discerning what was lovely in present
+nature, and in pure moral emotion concerning it.
+
+Its physical power, in an intense veracity of direct realization to the
+eye.
+
+So far as Mr. Millais saw what was beautiful in vagrants, or commons, or
+crows, or donkeys, or the straw under children's feet in the Ark (Noah's
+or anybody else's does not matter),--in the Huguenot and his mistress,
+or the ivy behind them,--in the face of Ophelia, or in the flowers
+floating over it as it sank;--much more, so far as he saw what
+instantly comprehensible nobleness of passion might be in the binding
+of a handkerchief,--in the utterance of two words, "Trust me" or the
+like: he prevailed, and rightly prevailed, over all prejudice and
+opposition; to that extent he will in what he has done, or may yet do,
+take, as a standard-bearer, an honorable place among the reformers of
+our day.
+
+So far as he could not see what was beautiful, but what was essentially
+and forever common (in that God had not cleansed it), and so far as he
+did not see truly what he thought he saw; (as for instance, in this
+picture, under immediate consideration, when he paints the spark of
+light in a crow's eye a hundred yards off, as if he were only painting a
+miniature of a crow close by,)--he failed of his purpose and hope; but
+how far I have neither the power nor the disposition to consider.
+
+247. The school represented by Mr. Rossetti's picture and adopted for
+his own by Mr. Holman Hunt, professed, necessarily, to be a learned one;
+and to represent things which had happened long ago, in a manner
+credible to any moderns who were interested in them. The value to us of
+such a school necessarily depends on the things it chooses to represent,
+out of the infinite history of mankind. For instance, David, of the
+first Republican Academe, was a true master of this school; and,
+painting the Horatii receiving their swords, foretold the triumph of
+that Republican Power. Gérôme, of the latest Republican Academe, paints
+the dying Polichinelle, and the _morituri_ gladiators: foretelling, in
+like manner, the shame and virtual ruin of modern Republicanism. What
+our own painters have done for us in this kind has been too unworthy of
+their real powers, for Mr. Rossetti threw more than half his strength
+into literature, and, in that precise measure, left himself unequal to
+his appointed task in painting; while Mr. Hunt, not knowing the
+necessity of masters any more than the rest of our painters, and
+attaching too great importance to the externals of the life of Christ,
+separated himself for long years from all discipline by the recognized
+laws of his art; and fell into errors which wofully shortened his hand
+and discredited his cause--into which again I hold it no part of my duty
+to enter. But such works as either of these painters have done, without
+antagonism or ostentation, and in their own true instincts; as all
+Rossetti's drawing from the life of Christ, more especially that of the
+Madonna gathering the bitter herbs for the Passover when He was twelve
+years old; and that of the Magdalen leaving her companions to come to
+Him; these, together with all the mythic scenes which he painted from
+the _Vita Nuova_ and _Paradiso_ of Dante, are of quite imperishable
+power and value: as also many of the poems to which he gave up part of
+his painter's strength. Of Holman Hunt's "Light of the World," and
+"Awakening Conscience," I have publicly spoken and written, now for many
+years, as standard in their kind: the study of sunset on the Egean,
+lately placed by me in the schools of Oxford, is not less authoritative
+in landscape, so far as its aim extends.
+
+248. But the School represented by the third painting, "The Bridal," is
+that into which the greatest masters of _all_ ages are gathered, and in
+which they are walled round as in Elysian fields, unapproachable but by
+the reverent and loving souls, in some sort already among the Dead.
+
+They interpret to those of us who can read them, so far as they already
+see and know, the things that are forever. "Charity never faileth; but
+whether there be prophecies, they shall fail--tongues, they shall
+cease--knowledge, it shall vanish."
+
+And the one message they bear to us is the commandment of the Eternal
+Charity. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with _all_ thine heart, and
+thy neighbor as thyself." As thyself--no more, even the dearest of
+neighbors.
+
+"Therefore let every man see that he love his wife even as himself."
+
+No more--else she has become an idol, not a fellow-servant; a creature
+between us and our Master.
+
+And they teach us that what higher creatures exist between Him and us,
+we are also bound to know, and to love in their place and state, as
+they ascend and descend on the stairs of their watch and ward.
+
+The principal masters of this faithful religious school in painting,
+known to me, are Giotto, Angelico, Sandro Botticelli, Filippo Lippi,
+Luini, and Carpaccio; but for a central illustration of their mind, I
+take that piece of work by the sculptor of Quercia,[48] of which some
+shadow of representation, true to an available degree, is within reach
+of my reader.
+
+249. This sculpture is central in every respect; being the last
+Florentine work in which the proper form of the Etruscan tomb is
+preserved, and the first in which all right Christian sentiment
+respecting death is embodied. It is perfectly severe in classical
+tradition, and perfectly frank in concession to the passions of existing
+life. It submits to all the laws of the past, and expresses all the
+hopes of the future.
+
+Now every work of the great Christian schools expresses primarily,
+conquest over death; conquest not grievous, but absolute and serene;
+rising with the greatest of them, into rapture.
+
+But this, as a _central_ work, has all the peace of the Christian
+Eternity, but only in part its gladness. Young children wreathe round
+the tomb a garland of abundant flowers, but she herself, Ilaria, yet
+sleeps; the time is not yet come for her to be awakened out of sleep.
+
+Her image is a simple portrait of her--how much less beautiful than she
+was in life, we cannot know--but as beautiful as marble can be.
+
+And through and in the marble we may see that the damsel is not dead,
+but sleepeth: yet as visibly a sleep that shall know no ending until
+the last day break, and the last shadow flee away; until then, she
+"shall not return." Her hands are laid on her breast--not praying--she
+has no need to pray now. She wears her dress of every day, clasped at
+her throat, girdled at her waist, the hem of it drooping over her feet.
+No disturbance of its folds by pain of sickness, no binding, no
+shrouding of her sweet form, in death more than in life. As a soft, low
+wave of summer sea, her breast rises; no more: the rippled gathering of
+its close mantle droops to the belt, then sweeps to her feet, straight
+as drifting snow. And at her feet her dog lies watching her; the mystery
+of his mortal life joined, by love, to her immortal one.
+
+Few know, and fewer love, the tomb and its place,--not shrine, for it
+stands bare by the cathedral wall: only, by chance, a cross is cut deep
+into one of the foundation stones behind her head. But no goddess statue
+of the Greek cities, no nun's image among the cloisters of Apennine, no
+fancied light of angel in the homes of heaven, has more divine rank
+among the thoughts of men.
+
+250. In so much as the reader can see of it, and learn, either by print
+or cast, or beside it; (and he would do well to stay longer in that
+transept than in the Tribune at Florence,) he may receive from it,
+unerring canon of what is evermore Lovely and Right in the dealing of
+the Art of Man with his fate, and his passions. Evermore _lovely_, and
+_right_. These two virtues of visible things go always hand in hand: but
+the workman is bound to assure himself of his Rightness first; then the
+loveliness will come.
+
+And primarily, from this sculpture, you are to learn what a "Master" is.
+Here was one man at least, who knew his business, once upon a time!
+Unaccusably;--none of your fool's heads or clown's hearts can find a
+fault here! "Dog-fancier,[49] cobbler, tailor, or churl, look
+here"--says Master Jacopo--"look! I know what a brute is, better than
+you, I know what a silken tassel is--what a leathern belt is--Also,
+what a woman is; and also--what a Law of God is, if you care to know."
+This it is, to be a Master.
+
+Then secondly--you are to note that with all the certain rightness of
+its material fact, this sculpture still is the Sculpture of a Dream.
+Ilaria is dressed as she was in life. But she never lay so on her
+pillow! nor so, in her grave. Those straight folds, straightly laid as a
+snowdrift, are impossible; known by the Master to be so--chiseled with a
+hand as steady as an iron beam, and as true as a ray of light--in
+defiance of your law of Gravity to the Earth. _That_ law prevailed on
+her shroud, and prevails on her dust: but not on herself, nor on the
+Vision of her.
+
+Then thirdly, and lastly. You are to learn that the doing of a piece of
+Art such as this is _possible_ to the hand of Man just in the measure of
+his obedience to the laws which are indeed over his heart, and not over
+his dust: primarily, as I have said, to that great one, "Thou shalt
+_Love_ the Lord thy God." Which command is straight and clear; and all
+men may obey it if they will,--so only that they be early taught to know
+Him.
+
+And that is precisely the piece of exact Science which is not taught at
+present in our Board Schools--so that although my friend, with whom I
+was staying, was not himself, in the modern sense, ill-educated; neither
+did he conceive me to be so,--he yet thought it good for himself and me
+to have that Inscription, "Lord, teach us to Pray," illuminated on the
+house wall--if perchance either he or I could yet learn what John (when
+he still had his head) taught _his_ Disciples.
+
+251. But alas, for us only at last, among the people of all ages and in
+all climes, the lesson has become too difficult; and the Father of all,
+in every age, in every clime adored, is Rejected of science, as an
+Outside Worker, in Cockneydom of the nineteenth century.
+
+Rejected of Science: well; but not yet, not yet--by the men who can do,
+as well as know. And though I have neither strength nor time, nor at
+present the mind to go into any review of the work done by the Third and
+chief School of our younger painters, headed by Burne Jones;[50] and
+though I know its faults, palpable enough, like those of Turner, to the
+poorest sight; and though I am discouraged in all its discouragements, I
+still hold in fullness to the hope of it in which I wrote the close of
+the third lecture I ever gave in Oxford--of which I will ask the reader
+here in conclusion to weigh the words, set down in the days of my best
+strength, so far as I know; and with the uttermost care given to that
+inaugural Oxford work, to "speak only that which I did know."
+
+252. "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' or
+'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.
+
+"And perfect the day shall be, when it is of all men understood that the
+beauty of Holiness must be in labor as well as in rest. Nay! more, if it
+may be, in labor; 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 labor 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."[51]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[44] "Vulgarly"; the use of the word "scientia," as if it differed from
+"knowledge," being a modern barbarism; enhanced usually by the
+assumption that the knowledge of the difference between acids and
+alkalies is a more respectable one than that of the difference between
+vice and virtue.
+
+[45] _Modern Painters_, volume iii. I proceed in my old words, of which
+I cannot better the substance, though--with all deference to the taste
+of those who call that book my best--I could, the expression.
+
+[46] The _third_ edition was published in 1846, while the Pre-Raphaelite
+School was still in swaddling clothes.
+
+[47] These essays were, "Recent Attacks on Political Economy," by Robert
+Lowe, and "Virchow and Evolution," by Prof. Tyndall,--ED.
+
+[48] James of Quercia: see the rank assigned to this master in _Ariadne
+Florentina_. The best photographs of the monument are, I believe, those
+published by the Arundel Society; of whom I would very earnestly request
+that if ever they quote _Modern Painters_, they would not interpolate
+its text with unmarked parentheses of modern information such as "emblem
+of conjugal fidelity." I must not be made to answer for either the
+rhythm or the contents of sentences thus manipulated.
+
+[49] I foolishly, in _Modern Painters_, used the generic word "hound" to
+make my sentence prettier. He is a flat-nosed bulldog.
+
+[50] It would be utterly vain to attempt any general account of the
+works of this painter, unless I were able also to give abstract of the
+subtlest mythologies of Greek worship and Christian romance. Besides,
+many of his best designs are pale pencil drawings like Florentine
+engravings, of which the delicacy is literally invisible, and the manner
+irksome, to a public trained among the black scrabblings of modern
+wood-cutter's and etcher's prints. I will only say that the single
+series of these pencil-drawings, from the story of Psyche, which I have
+been able to place in the schools of Oxford, together with the two
+colored beginnings from the stories of Jason and Alcestis, are, in my
+estimate, quite the most precious gift, not excepting even the Loire
+series of Turners, in the ratified acceptance of which my University has
+honored with some fixed memorial the aims of her first Art-Teacher.
+
+[51] _Lectures on Art_, §§ 95-6.--ED.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+ART.
+
+III.
+
+ARCHITECTURE.
+
+
+THE OPENING OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE.
+
+(_Pamphlet, 1854._)
+
+THE STUDY OF ARCHITECTURE IN OUR SCHOOLS.
+
+(_R.I.B.A. Transactions, 1865._)
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE OPENING OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE.[52]
+
+
+253. I read the account in the _Times_ newspaper of the opening of the
+Crystal Palace at Sydenham as I ascended the hill between Vevay and
+Chatel St. Denis, and the thoughts which it called up haunted me all day
+long as my road wound among the grassy slopes of the Simmenthal. There
+was a strange contrast between the image of that mighty palace, raised
+so high above the hills on which it is built as to make them seem little
+else than a basement for its glittering stateliness, and those lowland
+huts, half hidden beneath their coverts of forest, and scattered like
+gray stones along the masses of far-away mountain. Here man contending
+with the power of Nature for his existence; there commanding them for
+his recreation; here a feeble folk nested among the rocks with the wild
+goat and the coney, and retaining the same quiet thoughts from
+generation to generation; there a great multitude triumphing in the
+splendor of immeasurable habitation, and haughty with hope of endless
+progress and irresistible power.
+
+254. It is indeed impossible to limit, in imagination, the beneficent
+results which may follow from the undertaking thus happily begun.[53]
+For the first time in the history of the world, a national museum is
+formed in which a whole nation is interested; formed on a scale which
+permits the exhibition of monuments of art in unbroken symmetry, and of
+the productions of nature in unthwarted growth,--formed under the
+auspices of science which can hardly err, and of wealth which can
+hardly be exhausted; and placed in the close neighborhood of a
+metropolis overflowing with a population weary of labor, yet thirsting
+for knowledge, where contemplation may be consistent with rest, and
+instruction with enjoyment. It is impossible, I repeat, to estimate the
+influence of such an institution on the minds of the working-classes.
+How many hours once wasted may now be profitably dedicated to pursuits
+in which interest was first awakened by some accidental display in the
+Norwood palace; how many constitutions, almost broken, may be restored
+by the healthy temptation into the country air; how many intellects,
+once dormant, may be roused into activity within the crystal walls, and
+how these noble results may go on multiplying and increasing and bearing
+fruit seventy times seven-fold, as the nation pursues its career,--are
+questions as full of hope as incapable of calculation. But with all
+these grounds for hope there are others for despondency, giving rise to
+a group of melancholy thoughts, of which I can neither repress the
+importunity nor forbear the expression.
+
+255. For three hundred years, the art of architecture has been the
+subject of the most curious investigation; its principles have been
+discussed with all earnestness and acuteness; its models in all
+countries and of all ages have been examined with scrupulous care, and
+imitated with unsparing expenditure. And of all this refinement of
+inquiry,--this lofty search after the ideal,--this subtlety of
+investigation and sumptuousness of practice,--the great result, the
+admirable and long-expected conclusion is, that in the center of the
+19th century, we suppose ourselves to have invented a new style of
+architecture, when we have magnified a conservatory!
+
+256. In Mr. Laing's speech, at the opening of the palace, he declares
+that "_an entirely novel order of architecture_, producing, by means of
+unrivaled mechanical ingenuity, the most marvelous and beautiful
+effects, sprang into existence to provide a building."[54] In these
+words, the speaker is not merely giving utterance to his own feelings.
+He is expressing the popular view of the facts, nor that a view merely
+popular, but one which has been encouraged by nearly all the professors
+of art of our time.
+
+It is to this, then, that our Doric and Palladian pride is at last
+reduced! We have vaunted the divinity of the Greek ideal--we have plumed
+ourselves on the purity of our Italian taste--we have cast our whole
+souls into the proportions of pillars and the relations of orders--and
+behold the end! Our taste, thus exalted and disciplined, is dazzled by
+the luster of a few rows of panes of glass; and the first principles of
+architectural sublimity, so far sought, are found all the while to have
+consisted merely in sparkling and in space.
+
+Let it not be thought that I would depreciate (were it possible to
+depreciate) the mechanical ingenuity which has been displayed in the
+erection of the Crystal Palace, or that I underrate the effect which its
+vastness may continue to produce on the popular imagination. But
+mechanical ingenuity is _not_ the essence either of painting or
+architecture, and largeness of dimension does not necessarily involve
+nobleness of design. There is assuredly as much ingenuity required to
+build a screw frigate, or a tubular bridge, as a hall of glass;--all
+these are works characteristic of the age; and all, in their several
+ways, deserve our highest admiration, but not admiration of the kind
+that is rendered to poetry or to art. We may cover the German Ocean with
+frigates, and bridge the Bristol Channel with iron, and roof the county
+of Middlesex with crystal, and yet not possess one Milton, or Michael
+Angelo.
+
+257. Well, it may be replied, we need our bridges, and have pleasure in
+our palaces; but we do not want Miltons, nor Michael Angelos.
+
+Truly, it seems so; for, in the year in which the first Crystal Palace
+was built, there died among us a man whose name, in after-ages, will
+stand with those of the great of all time. Dying, he bequeathed to the
+nation the whole mass of his most cherished works; and for these three
+years, while we have been building this colossal receptacle for casts
+and copies of the art of other nations, these works of our own greatest
+painter have been left to decay in a dark room near Cavendish Square,
+under the custody of an aged servant.
+
+This is quite natural. But it is also memorable.
+
+258. There is another interesting fact connected with the history of the
+Crystal Palace as it bears on that of the art of Europe, namely, that in
+the year 1851, when all that glittering roof was built, in order to
+exhibit the paltry arts of our fashionable luxury--the carved bedsteads
+of Vienna, and glued toys of Switzerland, and gay jewelry of France--in
+that very year, I say, the greatest pictures of the Venetian masters
+were rotting at Venice in the rain, for want of roof to cover them, with
+holes made by cannon shot through their canvas.
+
+There is another fact, however, more curious than either of these, which
+will hereafter be connected with the history of the palace now in
+building; namely, that at the very period when Europe is congratulated
+on the invention of a new style of architecture, because fourteen acres
+of ground have been covered with glass, the greatest examples in
+existence of true and noble Christian architecture are being resolutely
+destroyed, and destroyed by the effects of the very interest which was
+beginning to be excited by them.
+
+259. Under the firm and wise government of the third Napoleon, France
+has entered on a new epoch of prosperity, one of the signs of which is a
+zealous care for the preservation of her noble public buildings. Under
+the influence of this healthy impulse, repairs of the most extensive
+kind are at this moment proceeding, on the cathedrals of Rheims, Amiens,
+Rouen, Chartres, and Paris; (probably also in many other instances
+unknown to me). These repairs were, in many cases, necessary up to a
+certain point; and they have been executed by architects as skillful and
+learned as at present exist,--executed with noble disregard of expense,
+and sincere desire on the part of their superintendents that they
+should be completed in a manner honorable to the country.
+
+260. They are, nevertheless, more fatal to the monuments they are
+intended to preserve, than fire, war, or revolution. For they are
+undertaken, in the plurality of instances, under an impression, which
+the efforts of all true antiquaries have as yet been unable to remove,
+that it is impossible to reproduce the mutilated sculpture of past ages
+in its original beauty.
+
+"Reproduire avec une exactitude mathematique," are the words used, by
+one of the most intelligent writers on this subject,[55] of the proposed
+regeneration of the statue of Ste. Modeste, on the north porch of the
+Cathedral of Chartres.
+
+Now it is not the question at present whether thirteenth century
+sculpture be of value, or not. Its value is assumed by the authorities
+who have devoted sums so large to its so-called restoration, and may
+therefore be assumed in my argument. The worst state of the sculptures
+whose restoration is demanded may be fairly represented by that of the
+celebrated group of the Fates, among the Elgin Marbles in the British
+Museum. With what favor would the guardians of those marbles, or any
+other persons interested in Greek art, receive a proposal from a living
+sculptor to "reproduce with mathematical exactitude" the group of the
+Fates, in a perfect form, and to destroy the original? For with exactly
+such favor, those who are interested in Gothic art should receive
+proposals to reproduce the sculpture of Chartres or Rouen.
+
+261. In like manner, the state of the architecture which it is proposed
+to restore may, at its worst, be fairly represented to the British
+public by that of the best preserved portions of Melrose Abbey. With
+what encouragement would those among us who are sincerely interested in
+history, or in art, receive a proposal to pull down Melrose Abbey, and
+"reproduce it mathematically"? There can be no doubt of the answer
+which, in the instances supposed, it would be proper to return. "By all
+means, if you can, reproduce mathematically, elsewhere, the group of the
+Fates, and the Abbey of Melrose. But leave unharmed the original
+fragment, and the existing ruin."[56] And an answer of the same tenor
+ought to be given to every proposal to restore a Gothic sculpture or
+building. Carve or raise a model of it in some other part of the city;
+but touch not the actual edifice, except only so far as may be necessary
+to sustain, to protect it. I said above that repairs were in many
+instances necessary. These necessary operations consist in substituting
+new stones for decayed ones, where they are absolutely essential to the
+stability of the fabric; in propping, with wood or metal, the portions
+likely to give way; in binding or cementing into their places the
+sculptures which are ready to detach themselves; and in general care to
+remove luxuriant weeds and obstructions of the channels for the
+discharge of the rain. But no modern or imitative sculpture ought
+_ever_, under any circumstances, to be mingled with the ancient work.
+
+262. Unfortunately, repairs thus conscientiously executed are always
+unsightly, and meet with little approbation from the general public; so
+that a strong temptation is necessarily felt by the superintendents of
+public works to execute the required repairs in a manner which, though
+indeed fatal to the monument, may be, in appearance, seemly. But a far
+more cruel temptation is held out to the architect. He who should
+propose to a municipal body to build in the form of a new church, to be
+erected in some other part of their city, models of such portions of
+their cathedral as were falling into decay, would be looked upon as
+merely asking for employment, and his offer would be rejected with
+disdain. But let an architect declare that the existing fabric stands in
+need of repairs, and offer to restore it to its original beauty, and he
+is instantly regarded as a lover of his country, and has a chance of
+obtaining a commission which will furnish him with a large and ready
+income, and enormous patronage, for twenty or thirty years to come.
+
+263. I have great respect for human nature. But I would rather leave it
+to others than myself to pronounce how far such a temptation is always
+likely to be resisted, and how far, when repairs are once permitted to
+be undertaken, a fabric is likely to be spared from mere interest in its
+beauty, when its destruction, under the name of restoration, has become
+permanently remunerative to a large body of workmen.
+
+Let us assume, however, that the architect is always
+conscientious--always willing, the moment he has done what is strictly
+necessary for the safety and decorous aspect of the building, to abandon
+his income, and declare his farther services unnecessary. Let us
+presume, also, that every one of the two or three hundred workmen who
+must be employed under him is equally conscientious, and, during the
+course of years of labor, will never destroy in carelessness what it may
+be inconvenient to save, or in cunning what it is difficult to imitate.
+Will all this probity of purpose preserve the hand from error, and the
+heart from weariness? Will it give dexterity to the awkward--sagacity to
+the dull--and at once invest two or three hundred imperfectly educated
+men with the feeling, intention, and information of the freemasons of
+the thirteenth century? Grant that it can do all this, and that the new
+building is both equal to the old in beauty, and precisely correspondent
+to it in detail. Is it, therefore, altogether _worth_ the old building?
+Is the stone carved to-day in their masons' yards altogether the same in
+value to the hearts of the French people as that which the eyes of St.
+Louis saw lifted to its place? Would a loving daughter, in mere desire
+for gaudy dress, ask a jeweler for a bright fac-simile of the worn cross
+which her mother bequeathed to her on her deathbed?--would a thoughtful
+nation, in mere fondness for splendor of streets, ask its architects to
+provide for it fac-similes of the temples which for centuries had given
+joy to its saints, comfort to its mourners, and strength to its
+chivalry?
+
+264. But it may be replied, that all this is already admitted by the
+antiquaries of France and England; and that it is impossible that works
+so important should now be undertaken with due consideration and
+faithful superintendence.
+
+I answer, that the men who justly feel these truths are rarely those who
+have much influence in public affairs. It is the poor abbé, whose little
+garden is sheltered by the mighty buttresses from the north wind, who
+knows the worth of the cathedral. It is the bustling mayor and the
+prosperous architect who determine its fate.
+
+I answer farther, by the statement of a simple fact. I have given many
+years, in many cities, to the study of Gothic architecture; and of all
+that I know, or knew, the entrance to the north transept of Rouen
+Cathedral was, on the whole, the most beautiful--beautiful, not only as
+an elaborate and faultless work of the finest time of Gothic art, but
+yet more beautiful in the partial, though not dangerous, decay which had
+touched its pinnacles with pensive coloring, and softened its severer
+lines with unexpected change and delicate fracture, like sweet breaks in
+a distant music. The upper part of it has been already restored to the
+white accuracies of novelty; the lower pinnacles, which flanked its
+approach, far more exquisite in their partial ruin than the loveliest
+remains of our English abbeys, have been entirely destroyed, and rebuilt
+in rough blocks, now in process of sculpture. This restoration, so far
+as it has gone, has been executed by peculiarly skillful workmen; it is
+an unusually favorable example of restoration, especially in the care
+which has been taken to preserve intact the exquisite, and hitherto
+almost uninjured sculptures which fill the quatrefoils of the tracery
+above the arch. But I happened myself to have made, five years ago,
+detailed drawings of the buttress decorations on the right and left of
+this tracery, which are part of the work that has been completely
+restored. And I found the restorations as inaccurate as they were
+unnecessary.
+
+265. If this is the case in a most favorable instance, in that of a
+well-known monument, highly esteemed by every antiquary in France, what,
+during the progress of the now almost universal repair, is likely to
+become of architecture which is unwatched and despised?
+
+Despised! and more than despised--even hated! It is a sad truth, that
+there is something in the solemn aspect of ancient architecture which,
+in rebuking frivolity and chastening gayety, has become at this time
+literally _repulsive_ to a large majority of the population of Europe.
+Examine the direction which is taken by all the influences of fortune
+and of fancy, wherever they concern themselves with art, and it will be
+found that the real, earnest effort of the upper classes of European
+society is to make every place in the world as much like the Champs
+Elysées of Paris as possible. Wherever the influence of that educated
+society is felt, the old buildings are relentlessly destroyed; vast
+hotels, like barracks, and rows of high, square-windowed
+dwelling-houses, thrust themselves forward to conceal the hated
+antiquities of the great cities of France and Italy. Gay promenades,
+with fountains and statues, prolong themselves along the quays once
+dedicated to commerce; ball-rooms and theaters rise upon the dust of
+desecrated chapels, and thrust into darkness the humility of domestic
+life. And when the formal street, in all its pride of perfumery and
+confectionery, has successfully consumed its way through wrecks of
+historical monuments, and consummated its symmetry in the ruin of all
+that once prompted a reflection, or pleaded for regard, the whitened
+city is praised for its splendor, and the exulting inhabitants for their
+patriotism--patriotism which consists in insulting their fathers with
+forgetfulness, and surrounding their children with temptation.
+
+266. I am far from intending my words to involve any disrespectful
+allusion to the very noble improvements in the city of Paris itself,
+lately carried out under the encouragement of the Emperor. Paris, in its
+own peculiar character of bright magnificence, had nothing to fear, and
+everything to gain, from the gorgeous prolongation of the Rue Rivoli.
+But I speak of the general influence of the rich travelers and
+proprietors of Europe on the cities which they pretend to admire, or
+endeavor to improve. I speak of the changes wrought during my own
+lifetime on the cities of Venice, Florence, Geneva, Lucerne, and chief
+of all on Rouen, a city altogether inestimable for its retention of
+mediæval character in the infinitely varied streets in which one half of
+the existing and inhabited houses date from the 15th or early 16th
+century, and the only town left in France in which the effect of old
+French domestic architecture can yet be seen in its collective groups.
+But when I was there, this last spring, I heard that these noble old
+Norman houses are all, as speedily as may be, to be stripped of the dark
+slates which protected their timbers, and deliberately whitewashed over
+all their sculptures and ornaments, in order to bring the interior of
+the town into some conformity with the "handsome fronts" of the hotels
+and offices on the quay.
+
+Hotels and offices, and "handsome fronts" in general--they can be built
+in America or Australia--built at any moment, and in any height of
+splendor. But who shall give us back, when once destroyed, the
+habitations of the French chivalry and bourgeoisie in the days of the
+Field of the Cloth of Gold?
+
+267. It is strange that no one seems to think of this! What do men
+travel for, in this Europe of ours? Is it only to gamble with French
+dies--to drink coffee out of French porcelain--to dance to the beat of
+German drums, and sleep in the soft air of Italy? Are the ball-room, the
+billiard-room, and the Boulevard, the only attractions that win us into
+wandering, or tempt us to repose? And when the time is come, as come it
+will, and that shortly, when the parsimony--or lassitude--which, for the
+most part, are the only protectors of the remnants of elder time, shall
+be scattered by the advance of civilization--when all the monuments,
+preserved only because it was too costly to destroy them, shall have
+been crushed by the energies of the new world, will the proud nations of
+the twentieth century, looking round on the plains of Europe,
+disencumbered of their memorial marbles,--will those nations indeed
+stand up with no other feeling than one of triumph, freed from the
+paralysis of precedent and the entanglement of memory, to thank us, the
+fathers of progress, that no saddening shadows can any more trouble the
+enjoyments of the future,--no moments of reflection retard its
+activities; and that the new-born population of a world without a record
+and without a ruin may, in the fullness of ephemeral felicity, dispose
+itself to eat, and to drink, and to die?
+
+268. Is this verily the end at which we aim, and will the mission of the
+age have been then only accomplished, when the last castle has fallen
+from our rocks, the last cloisters faded from our valleys, the last
+streets, in which the dead have dwelt, been effaced from our cities, and
+regenerated society is left in luxurious possession of towns composed
+only of bright saloons, overlooking gay parterres? If this indeed be our
+end, yet why must it be so laboriously accomplished? Are there no new
+countries on the earth, as yet uncrowned by thorns of cathedral spires,
+untenanted by the consciousness of a past? Must this little Europe--this
+corner of our globe, gilded with the blood of old battles, and gray with
+the temples of old pieties--this narrow piece of the world's pavement,
+worn down by so many pilgrims' feet, be utterly swept and garnished for
+the masque of the Future? Is America not wide enough for the
+elasticities of our humanity? Asia not rich enough for its pride? or
+among the quiet meadowlands and solitary hills of the old land, is there
+not yet room enough for the spreadings of power, or the indulgences of
+magnificence, without founding all glory upon ruin, and prefacing all
+progress with obliteration?
+
+269. We must answer these questions speedily, or we answer them in vain.
+The peculiar character of the evil which is being wrought by this age is
+its utter irreparableness. Its newly formed schools of art, its
+extending galleries, and well-ordered museums will assuredly bear some
+fruit in time, and give once more to the popular mind the power to
+discern what is great, and the disposition to protect what is precious.
+But it will be too late. We shall wander through our palaces of
+crystal, gazing sadly on copies of pictures torn by cannon-shot, and on
+casts of sculpture dashed to pieces long ago. We shall gradually learn
+to distinguish originality and sincerity from the decrepitudes of
+imitation and palsies of repetition; but it will be only in hopelessness
+to recognize the truth, that architecture and painting can be "restored"
+when the dead can be raised,--and not till then.
+
+270. Something might yet be done, if it were but possible thoroughly to
+awaken and alarm the men whose studies of archæology have enabled them
+to form an accurate judgment of the importance of the crisis. But it is
+one of the strange characters of the human mind, necessary indeed to its
+peace, but infinitely destructive of its power, that we never thoroughly
+feel the evils which are not actually set before our eyes. If, suddenly,
+in the midst of the enjoyments of the palate and lightnesses of heart of
+a London dinner-party, the walls of the chamber were parted, and through
+their gap, the nearest human beings who were famishing, and in misery,
+were borne into the midst of the company--feasting and fancy-free--if,
+pale with sickness, horrible in destitution, broken by despair, body by
+body, they were laid upon the soft carpet, one beside the chair of every
+guest, would only the crumbs of the dainties be cast to them--would only
+a passing glance, a passing thought be vouchsafed to them? Yet the
+actual facts, the real relations of each Dives and Lazarus, are not
+altered by the intervention of the house wall between the table and the
+sick-bed--by the few feet of ground (how few!) which are indeed all that
+separate the merriment from the misery.
+
+271. It is the same in the matters of which I have hitherto been
+speaking. If every one of us, who knows what food for the human heart
+there is in the great works of elder time, could indeed see with his own
+eyes their progressive ruin; if every earnest antiquarian, happy in his
+well-ordered library, and in the sense of having been useful in
+preserving an old stone or two out of his parish church, and an old coin
+or two out of a furrow in the next plowed field, could indeed behold,
+each morning as he awaked, the mightiest works of departed nations
+moldering to the ground in disregarded heaps; if he could always have in
+clear phantasm before his eyes the ignorant monk trampling on the
+manuscript, the village mason striking down the monument, the court
+painter daubing the despised and priceless masterpiece into freshness of
+fatuity, he would not always smile so complacently in the thoughts of
+the little learnings and petty preservations of his own immediate
+sphere. And if every man, who has the interest of Art and of History at
+heart, would at once devote himself earnestly--not to enrich his own
+collection--not even to enlighten his own neighbors or investigate his
+own parish-territory--but to far-sighted and _fore_-sighted endeavor in
+the great field of Europe, there is yet time to do much. An association
+might be formed, thoroughly organized so as to maintain active watchers
+and agents in every town of importance, who, in the first place, should
+furnish the society with a _perfect_ account of every monument of
+interest in its neighborhood, and then with a yearly or half-yearly
+report of the state of such monuments, and of the changes proposed to be
+made upon them; the society then furnishing funds, either to buy,
+freehold, such buildings or other works of untransferable art as at any
+time might be offered for sale, or to assist their proprietors, whether
+private individuals or public bodies, in the maintenance of such
+guardianship as was really necessary for their safety; and exerting
+itself, with all the influence which such an association would rapidly
+command, to prevent unwise restoration and unnecessary destruction.
+
+272. Such a society would of course be rewarded only by the
+consciousness of its usefulness. Its funds would have to be supplied, in
+pure self-denial, by its members, who would be required, so far as they
+assisted it, to give up the pleasure of purchasing prints or pictures
+for their own walls, that they might save pictures which in their
+lifetime they might never behold; they would have to forego the
+enlargement of their own estates, that they might buy, for a European
+property, ground on which their feet might never tread. But is it absurd
+to believe that men are capable of doing this? Is the love of art
+altogether a selfish principle in the heart? and are its emotions
+altogether incompatible with the exertions of self-denial or enjoyments
+of generosity?
+
+273. I make this appeal at the risk of incurring only contempt for my
+Utopianism. But I should forever reproach myself if I were prevented
+from making it by such a risk; and I pray those who may be disposed in
+any wise to favor it to remember that it must be answered at once or
+never. The next five years determine what is to be saved--what
+destroyed. The restorations have actually begun like cancers on every
+important piece of Gothic architecture in Christendom; the question is
+only how much can yet be saved. All projects, all pursuits, having
+reference to art, are at this moment of less importance than those which
+are simply protective. There is time enough for everything else. Time
+enough for teaching--time enough for criticising--time enough for
+inventing. But time little enough for saving. Hereafter we can create,
+but it is now only that we can preserve. By the exertion of great
+national powers, and under the guidance of enlightened monarchs, we may
+raise magnificent temples and gorgeous cities; we may furnish labor for
+the idle, and interest for the ignorant. But the power neither of
+emperors, nor queens, nor kingdoms, can ever print again upon the sands
+of time the effaced footsteps of departed generations, or gather
+together from the dust the stones which had been stamped with the spirit
+of our ancestors.
+
+
+THE STUDY OF ARCHITECTURE IN OUR SCHOOLS.[57]
+
+274. I suppose there is no man who, permitted to address, for the first
+time, the Institute of British Architects, would not feel himself
+abashed and restrained, doubtful of his claim to be heard by them, even
+if he attempted only to describe what had come under his personal
+observation, much more if on the occasion he thought it would be
+expected of him to touch upon any of the general principles of the art
+of architecture before its principal English masters.
+
+But if any more than another should feel thus abashed, it is certainly
+one who has first to ask their pardon for the petulance of boyish
+expressions of partial thought; for ungraceful advocacy of principles
+which needed no support from him, and discourteous blame of work of
+which he had never felt the difficulty.
+
+275. Yet, when I ask this pardon, gentlemen--and I do it sincerely and
+in shame--it is not as desiring to retract anything in the general tenor
+and scope of what I have hitherto tried to say. Permit me the pain, and
+the apparent impertinence, of speaking for a moment of my own past work;
+for it is necessary that what I am about to submit to you to-night
+should be spoken in no disadvantageous connection with that; and yet
+understood as spoken, in no discordance of purpose with that. Indeed
+there is much in old work of mine which I could wish to put out of mind.
+Reasonings, perhaps not in themselves false, but founded on
+insufficient data and imperfect experience--eager preferences, and
+dislikes, dependent on chance circumstances of association, and
+limitations of sphere of labor: but, while I would fain now, if I could,
+modify the applications, and chasten the extravagance of my writings,
+let me also say of them that they were the expression of a delight in
+the art of architecture which was too intense to be vitally deceived,
+and of an inquiry too honest and eager to be without some useful result;
+and I only wish I had now time, and strength and power of mind, to carry
+on, more worthily, the main endeavor of my early work. That main
+endeavor has been throughout to set forth the life of the individual
+human spirit as modifying the application of the formal laws of
+architecture, no less than of all other arts; and to show that the power
+and advance of this art, even in conditions of formal nobleness, were
+dependent on its just association with sculpture as a means of
+expressing the beauty of natural forms: and I the more boldly ask your
+permission to insist somewhat on this main meaning of my past work,
+because there are many buildings now rising in the streets of London, as
+in other cities of England, which appear to be designed in accordance
+with this principle, and which are, I believe, more offensive to all who
+thoughtfully concur with me in accepting the principle of Naturalism
+than they are to the classical architect to whose modes of design they
+are visibly antagonistic. These buildings, in which the mere cast of a
+flower, or the realization of a vulgar face, carved without pleasure by
+a workman who is only endeavoring to attract attention by novelty, and
+then fastened on, or appearing to be fastened, as chance may dictate, to
+an arch, or a pillar, or a wall, hold such relation to nobly
+naturalistic architecture as common sign-painter's furniture landscapes
+do to painting, or commonest wax-work to Greek sculpture; and the
+feelings with which true naturalists regard such buildings of this class
+are, as nearly as might be, what a painter would experience, if, having
+contended earnestly against conventional schools, and having asserted
+that Greek vase-painting and Egyptian wall-painting, and Mediæval
+glass-painting, though beautiful, all, in their place and way, were yet
+subordinate arts, and culminated only in perfectly naturalistic work
+such as Raphael's in fresco, and Titian's on canvas;--if, I say, a
+painter, fixed in such faith in an entire, intellectual and manly truth,
+and maintaining that an Egyptian profile of a head, however decoratively
+applicable, was only noble for such human truth as it contained, and was
+imperfect and ignoble beside a work of Titian's, were shown, by his
+antagonist, the colored daguerreotype of a human body in its nakedness,
+and told that it was art such as that which he really advocated, and to
+such art that his principles, if carried out, would finally lead.
+
+276. And because this question lies at the very root of the organization
+of the system of instruction for our youth, I venture boldly to express
+the surprise and regret with which I see our schools still agitated by
+assertions of the opposition of Naturalism to Invention, and to the
+higher conditions of art. Even in this very room I believe there has
+lately been question whether a sculptor should look at a real living
+creature of which he had to carve the image. I would answer in one
+sense,--no; that is to say, he ought to carve no living creature while
+he still needs to look at it. If we do not know what a human body is
+like, we certainly had better look, and look often, at it, before we
+carve it; but if we already know the human likeness so well that we can
+carve it by light of memory, we shall not need to ask whether we ought
+now to look at it or not; and what is true of man is true of all other
+creatures and organisms--of bird, and beast, and leaf. No assertion is
+more at variance with the laws of classical as well as of subsequent art
+than the common one that species should not be distinguished in great
+design. We might as well say that we ought to carve a man so as not to
+know him from an ape, as that we should carve a lily so as not to know
+it from a thistle. It is difficult for me to conceive how this can be
+asserted in the presence of any remains either of great Greek or Italian
+art. A Greek looked at a cockle-shell or a cuttlefish as carefully as
+he looked at an Olympic conqueror. The eagle of Elis, the lion of Velia,
+the horse of Syracuse, the bull of Thurii, the dolphin of Tarentum, the
+crab of Agrigentum, and the crawfish of Catana, are studied as closely,
+every one of them, as the Juno of Argos, or Apollo of Clazomenæ.
+Idealism, so far from being contrary to special truth, is the very
+abstraction of speciality from everything else. It is the earnest
+statement of the characters which make man man, and cockle cockle, and
+flesh flesh, and fish fish. Feeble thinkers, indeed, always suppose that
+distinction of kind involves meanness of style; but the meanness is in
+the treatment, not in the distinction. There is a noble way of carving a
+man, and a mean one; and there is a noble way of carving a beetle, and a
+mean one; and a great sculptor carves his scarabæus grandly, as he
+carves his king, while a mean sculptor makes vermin of both. And it is a
+sorrowful truth, yet a sublime one, that this greatness of treatment
+cannot be taught by talking about it. No, nor even by enforced imitative
+practice of it. Men treat their subjects nobly only when they themselves
+become noble; not till then. And that elevation of their own nature is
+assuredly not to be effected by a course of drawing from models, however
+well chosen, or of listening to lectures, however well intended.
+
+Art, national or individual, is the result of a long course of previous
+life and training; a necessary result, if that life has been loyal, and
+an impossible one, if it has been base. Let a nation be healthful,
+happy, pure in its enjoyments, brave in its acts, and broad in its
+affections, and its art will spring round and within it as freely as the
+foam from a fountain; but let the spring of its life be impure, and its
+course polluted, and you will not get the bright spray by treatises on
+the mathematical structure of bubbles.
+
+277. And I am to-night the more restrained in addressing you, because,
+gentlemen--I tell you honestly--I am weary of all writing and speaking
+about art, and most of my own. No good is to be reached that way. The
+last fifty years have, in every civilized country of Europe, produced
+more brilliant thought, and more subtle reasoning about art than the
+five thousand before them, and what has it all come to? Do not let it be
+thought that I am insensible to the high merits of much of our modern
+work. It cannot be for a moment supposed that in speaking of the
+inefficient expression of the doctrines which writers on art have tried
+to enforce, I was thinking of such Gothic as has been designed and built
+by Mr. Scott, Mr. Butterfield, Mr. Street, Mr. Waterhouse, Mr. Godwin,
+or my dead friend, Mr. Woodward. Their work has been original and
+independent. So far as it is good, it has been founded on principles
+learned not from books, but by study of the monuments of the great
+schools, developed by national grandeur, not by philosophical
+speculation. But I am entirely assured that those who have done best
+among us are the least satisfied with what they have done, and will
+admit a sorrowful concurrence in my belief that the spirit, or rather, I
+should say, the dispirit, of the age, is heavily against them; that all
+the ingenious writing or thinking which is so rife amongst us has failed
+to educate a public capable of taking true pleasure in any kind of art,
+and that the best designers never satisfy their own requirements of
+themselves, unless by vainly addressing another temper of mind, and
+providing for another manner of life, than ours. All lovely architecture
+was designed for cities in cloudless air; for cities in which piazzas
+and gardens opened in bright populousness and peace; cities built that
+men might live happily in them, and take delight daily in each other's
+presence and powers. But our cities, built in black air which, by its
+accumulated foulness, first renders all ornament invisible in distance,
+and then chokes its interstices with soot; cities which are mere crowded
+masses of store, and warehouse, and counter, and are therefore to the
+rest of the world what the larder and cellar are to a private house;
+cities in which the object of men is not life, but labor; and in which
+all chief magnitude of edifice is to inclose machinery; cities in which
+the streets are not the avenues for the passing and procession of a
+happy people, but the drains for the discharge of a tormented mob, in
+which the only object in reaching any spot is to be transferred to
+another; in which existence becomes mere transition, and every creature
+is only one atom in a drift of human dust, and current of interchanging
+particles, circulating here by tunnels underground, and there by tubes
+in the air; for a city, or cities, such as this no architecture is
+possible--nay, no desire of it is possible to their inhabitants.
+
+278. One of the most singular proofs of the vanity of all hope that
+conditions of art may be combined with the occupations of such a city,
+has been given lately in the design of the new iron bridge over the
+Thames at Blackfriars. Distinct attempt has been there made to obtain
+architectural effect on a grand scale. Nor was there anything in the
+nature of the work to prevent such an effort being successful. It is not
+edifices, being of iron, or of glass, or thrown into new forms, demanded
+by new purposes, which need hinder its being beautiful. But it is the
+absence of all desire of beauty, of all joy in fancy, and of all freedom
+in thought. If a Greek, or Egyptian, or Gothic architect had been
+required to design such a bridge, he would have looked instantly at the
+main conditions of its structure, and dwelt on them with the delight of
+imagination. He would have seen that the main thing to be done was to
+hold a horizontal group of iron rods steadily and straight over stone
+piers. Then he would have said to himself (or felt without saying), "It
+is this holding,--this grasp,--this securing tenor of a thing which
+might be shaken, so that it cannot be shaken, on which I have to
+insist." And he would have put some life into those iron tenons. As a
+Greek put human life into his pillars and produced the caryatid; and an
+Egyptian lotus life into his pillars and produced the lily capital: so
+here, either of them would have put some gigantic or some angelic life
+into those colossal sockets. He would perhaps have put vast winged
+statues of bronze, folding their wings, and grasping the iron rails with
+their hands; or monstrous eagles, or serpents holding with claw or
+coil, or strong four-footed animals couchant, holding with the paw, or
+in fierce action, holding with teeth. Thousands of grotesque or of
+lovely thoughts would have risen before him, and the bronze forms,
+animal or human, would have signified, either in symbol or in legend,
+whatever might be gracefully told respecting the purposes of the work
+and the districts to which it conducted. Whereas, now, the entire
+invention of the designer seems to have exhausted itself in exaggerating
+to an enormous size a weak form of iron nut, and in conveying the
+information upon it, in large letters, that it belongs to the London,
+Chatham, and Dover Railway Company. I believe then, gentlemen, that if
+there were any life in the national mind in such respects, it would be
+shown in these its most energetic and costly works. But that there is no
+such life, nothing but a galvanic restlessness and covetousness, with
+which it is for the present vain to strive; and in the midst of which,
+tormented at once by its activities and its apathies, having their work
+continually thrust aside and dishonored, always seen to disadvantage,
+and overtopped by huge masses, discordant and destructive, even the best
+architects must be unable to do justice to their own powers.
+
+279. But, gentlemen, while thus the mechanisms of the age prevent even
+the wisest and best of its artists from producing entirely good work,
+may we not reflect with consternation what a marvelous ability the
+luxury of the age, and the very advantages of education, confer on the
+unwise and ignoble for the production of attractively and infectiously
+_bad_ work? I do not think that this adverse influence, necessarily
+affecting all conditions of so-called civilization, has been ever enough
+considered. It is impossible to calculate the power of the false workman
+in an advanced period of national life, nor the temptation to all
+workmen, to _become_ false.
+
+280. First, there is the irresistible appeal to vanity. There is hardly
+any temptation of the kind (there cannot be) while the arts are in
+progress. The best men must then always be ashamed of themselves; they
+never can be satisfied with their work absolutely, but only as it is
+progressive. Take, for instance, any archaic head intended to be
+beautiful; say, the Attic Athena, or the early Arethusa of Syracuse. In
+that, and in all archaic work of promise, there is much that is
+inefficient, much that to us appears ridiculous--but nothing sensual,
+nothing vain, nothing spurious or imitative. It is a child's work, a
+childish nation's work, but not a fool's work. You find in children the
+same tolerance of ugliness, the same eager and innocent delight in their
+own work for the moment, however feeble; but next day it is thrown
+aside, and something better is done. Now, in this careless play, a child
+or a childish nation differs inherently from a foolish educated person,
+or a nation advanced in pseudo-civilization. The educated person has
+seen all kinds of beautiful things, of which he would fain do the
+like--not to add to their number--but for his own vanity, that he also
+may be called an artist. Here is at once a singular and fatal
+difference. The childish nation sees nothing in its own past work to
+satisfy itself. It is pleased at having done this, but wants something
+better; it is struggling forward always to reach this better, this ideal
+conception. It wants more beauty to look at, it wants more subject to
+feel. It calls out to all its artists--stretching its hands to them as a
+little child does--"Oh, if you would but tell me another story,"--"Oh,
+if I might but have a doll with bluer eyes." That's the right temper to
+work in, and to get work done for you in. But the vain, aged,
+highly-educated nation is satiated with beautiful things--it has myriads
+more than it can look at; it has fallen into a habit of inattention; it
+passes weary and jaded through galleries which contain the best fruit of
+a thousand years of human travail; it gapes and shrugs over them, and
+pushes its way past them to the door.
+
+281. But there is one feeling that is always distinct; however jaded and
+languid we may be in all other pleasures, we are never languid in
+vanity, and we would still paint and carve for fame. What other motive
+have the nations of Europe to-day? If they wanted art for art's sake
+they would take care of what they have already got. But at this instant
+the two noblest pictures in Venice are lying rolled up in outhouses, and
+the noblest portrait of Titian in existence is hung forty feet from the
+ground. We have absolutely no motive but vanity and the love of
+money--no others, as nations, than these, whatever we may have as
+individuals. And as the thirst of vanity thus increases, so the
+temptation to it. There was no fame of artists in these archaic days.
+Every year, every hour, saw someone rise to surpass what had been done
+before. And there was always better work to be done, but never any
+credit to be got by it. The artist lived in an atmosphere of perpetual,
+wholesome, inevitable eclipse. Do as well as you choose to-day,--make
+the whole Borgo dance with delight, they would dance to a better man's
+pipe to-morrow. _Credette Cimabue nella pittura, tener lo campo, et ora
+ha Giotto il grido._ This was the fate, the necessary fate, even of the
+strongest. They could only hope to be remembered as links in an endless
+chain. For the weaker men it was no use even to put their name on their
+works. They did not. If they could not work for joy and for love, and
+take their part simply in the choir of human toil, they might throw up
+their tools. But now it is far otherwise--now, the best having been
+done--and for a couple of hundred years, the best of us being confessed
+to have come short of it, everybody thinks that he may be the great man
+once again, and this is certain, that whatever in art is done for
+display, is invariably wrong.
+
+282. But, secondly, consider the attractive power of false art,
+completed, as compared with imperfect art advancing to completion.
+Archaic work, so far as faultful, is repulsive, but advanced work is, in
+all its faults, attractive. The moment that art has reached the point at
+which it becomes sensitively and delicately imitative, it appeals to a
+new audience. From that instant it addresses the sensualist and the
+idler. Its deceptions, its successes, its subtleties, become interesting
+to every condition of folly, of frivolity, and of vice. And this new
+audience brings to bear upon the art in which its foolish and wicked
+interest has been unhappily awakened, the full power of its riches: the
+largest bribes of gold as well as of praise are offered to the artist
+who will betray his art, until at last, from the sculpture of Phidias
+and fresco of Luini, it sinks into the cabinet ivory and the picture
+kept under lock and key. Between these highest and lowest types, there
+is a vast mass of merely imitative and delicately sensual
+sculpture;--veiled nymphs--chained slaves--soft goddesses seen by
+roselight through suspended curtains--drawing room portraits and
+domesticities, and such like, in which the interest is either merely
+personal and selfish, or dramatic and sensational; in either case,
+destructive of the power of the public to sympathize with the aims of
+great architects.
+
+283. Gentlemen,--I am no Puritan, and have never praised or advocated
+puritanical art. The two pictures which I would last part with out of
+our National Gallery, if there were question of parting with any, would
+be Titian's Bacchus and Correggio's Venus. But the noble naturalism of
+these was the fruit of ages of previous courage, continence, and
+religion--it was the fullness of passion in the life of a Britomart. But
+the mid-age and old age of nations is not like the mid-age or old age of
+noble women. National decrepitude must be criminal. National death can
+only be by disease, and yet it is almost impossible, out of the history
+of the art of nations, to elicit the true conditions relating to its
+decline in any demonstrable manner. The history of Italian art is that
+of a struggle between superstition and naturalism on one side, between
+continence and sensuality on another. So far as naturalism prevailed
+over superstition, there is always progress; so far as sensuality over
+chastity, death. And the two contests are simultaneous. It is impossible
+to distinguish one victory from the other. Observe, however, I say
+victory over superstition, not over religion. Let me carefully define
+the difference. Superstition, in all times and among all nations, is the
+fear of a spirit whose passions are those of a man, whose acts are the
+acts of a man; who is present in some places, not in others; who makes
+some places holy and not others; who is kind to one person, unkind to
+another; who is pleased or angry according to the degree of attention
+you pay to him, or praise you refuse to him; who is hostile generally to
+human pleasure, but may be bribed by sacrifice of a part of that
+pleasure into permitting the rest. This, whatever form of faith it
+colors, is the essence of superstition. And religion is the belief in a
+Spirit whose mercies are over all His works--who is kind even to the
+unthankful and the evil; who is everywhere present, and therefore is in
+no place to be sought, and in no place to be evaded; to whom all
+creatures, times, and things are everlastingly holy, and who claims--not
+tithes of wealth, nor sevenths of days--but all the wealth that we have,
+and all the days that we live, and all the beings that we are, but who
+claims that totality because He delights only in the delight of His
+creatures; and because, therefore, the one duty that they owe to Him,
+and the only service they can render Him, is to be happy. A Spirit,
+therefore, whose eternal benevolence cannot be angered, cannot be
+appeased; whose laws are everlasting and inexorable, so that heaven and
+earth must indeed pass away if one jot of them failed: laws which attach
+to every wrong and error a measured, inevitable penalty; to every
+rightness and prudence, an assured reward; penalty, of which the
+remittance cannot be purchased; and reward, of which the promise cannot
+be broken.
+
+284. And thus, in the history of art, we ought continually to endeavor
+to distinguish (while, except in broadest lights, it is impossible to
+distinguish) the work of religion from that of superstition, and the
+work of reason from that of infidelity. Religion devotes the artist,
+hand and mind, to the service of the gods; superstition makes him the
+slave of ecclesiastical pride, or forbids his work altogether, in terror
+or disdain. Religion perfects the form of the divine statue,
+superstition distorts it into ghastly grotesque. Religion contemplates
+the gods as the lords of healing and life, surrounds them with glory of
+affectionate service, and festivity of pure human beauty. Superstition
+contemplates its idols as lords of death, appeases them with blood, and
+vows itself to them in torture and solitude. Religion proselytes by
+love, superstition by war; religion teaches by example, superstition by
+persecution. Religion gave granite shrine to the Egyptian, golden temple
+to the Jew, sculptured corridor to the Greek, pillared aisle and
+frescoed wall to the Christian. Superstition made idols of the splendors
+by which Religion had spoken: reverenced pictures and stones, instead of
+truths; letters and laws, instead of acts, and forever, in various
+madness of fantastic desolation, kneels in the temple while it crucifies
+the Christ.
+
+285. On the other hand, to reason resisting superstition, we owe the
+entire compass of modern energies and sciences; the healthy laws of
+life, and the possibilities of future progress. But to infidelity
+resisting religion (or which is often enough the case, taking the mask
+of it), we owe sensuality, cruelty, and war, insolence and avarice,
+modern political economy, life by conservation of forces, and salvation
+by every man's looking after his own interest; and, generally,
+whatsoever of guilt, and folly, and death, there is abroad among us. And
+of the two, a thousand-fold rather let us retain some color of
+superstition, so that we may keep also some strength of religion, than
+comfort ourselves with color of reason for the desolation of
+godlessness. I would say to every youth who entered our schools--Be a
+Mahometan, a Diana-worshiper, a Fire-worshiper, Root-worshiper, if you
+will; but at least be so much a man as to know what worship means. I had
+rather, a million-fold rather, see you one of those "quibus hæc
+nascuntur in hortis numina," than one of those "quibus hæc _non_
+nascuntur in cordibus lumina"; and who are, by everlasting orphanage,
+divided from the Father of Spirits, who is also the Father of lights,
+from whom cometh every good and perfect gift.
+
+286. "So much of man," I say, feeling profoundly that all right exercise
+of any human gift, so descended from the Giver of good, depends on the
+primary formation of the character of true manliness in the youth--that
+is to say, of a majestic, grave, and deliberate strength. How strange
+the words sound; how little does it seem possible to conceive of
+majesty, and gravity, and deliberation in the daily track of modern
+life. Yet, gentlemen, we need not hope that our work will be majestic if
+there is no majesty in ourselves. The word "manly" has come to mean
+practically, among us, a schoolboy's character, not a man's. We are, at
+our best, thoughtlessly impetuous, fond of adventure and excitement;
+curious in knowledge for its novelty, not for its system and results;
+faithful and affectionate to those among whom we are by chance cast, but
+gently and calmly insolent to strangers: we are stupidly conscientious,
+and instinctively brave, and always ready to cast away the lives we take
+no pains to make valuable, in causes of which we have never ascertained
+the justice. This is our highest type--notable peculiarly among nations
+for its gentleness, together with its courage; but in lower conditions
+it is especially liable to degradation by its love of jest and of vulgar
+sensation. It is against this fatal tendency to vile play that we have
+chiefly to contend. It is the spirit of Milton's Comus; bestial itself,
+but having power to arrest and paralyze all who come within its
+influence, even pure creatures sitting helpless, mocked by it on their
+marble thrones. It is incompatible, not only with all greatness of
+character, but with all true gladness of heart, and it develops itself
+in nations in proportion to their degradation, connected with a peculiar
+gloom and a singular tendency to play with death, which is a morbid
+reaction from the morbid excess.
+
+287. A book has lately been published on the Mythology of the Rhine,
+with illustrations by Gustave Doré. The Rhine god is represented in the
+vignette title-page with a pipe in one hand and a pot of beer in the
+other. You cannot have a more complete type of the tendency which is
+chiefly to be dreaded in this age than in this conception, as opposed to
+any possibility of representation of a river-god, however playful, in
+the mind of a Greek painter. The example is the more notable because
+Gustave Doré's is not a common mind, and, if born in any other epoch, he
+would probably have done valuable (though never first rate) work; but by
+glancing (it will be impossible for you to do more than glance) at his
+illustrations of Balzac's "Contes Drolatiques," you will see further how
+this "drolatique," or semi-comic mask is, in the truth of it, the mask
+of a skull, and how the tendency to burlesque jest is both in France and
+England only an effervescence from the _cloaca maxima_ of the putrid
+instincts which fasten themselves on national sin, and are in the midst
+of the luxury of European capitals, what Dante meant when he wrote "quel
+mi sveglio col puzzo," of the body of the Wealth-Siren; the mocking
+levity and mocking gloom being equally signs of the death of the soul;
+just as, contrariwise, a passionate seriousness and passionate
+joyfulness are signs of its full life in works such as those of
+Angelico, Luini, Ghiberti, or La Robbia.
+
+It is to recover this stern seriousness, this pure and thrilling joy,
+together with perpetual sense of spiritual presence, that all true
+education of youth must now be directed. This seriousness, this passion,
+this universal human religion, are the first principles, the true roots
+of all art, as they are of all doing, of all being. Get this _vis viva_
+first and all great work will follow. Lose it, and your schools of art
+will stand among other living schools as the frozen corpses stand by the
+winding stair of the St. Michael's Convent of Mont Cenis, holding their
+hands stretched out under their shrouds, as if beseeching the passer by
+to look upon the wasting of their death.
+
+288. And all the higher branches of technical teaching are vain without
+this; nay are in some sort vain altogether, for they are superseded by
+this. You may teach imitation, because the meanest man can imitate; but
+you can neither teach idealism nor composition, because only a great man
+can choose, conceive, or compose; and he does all these necessarily, and
+because of his nature. His greatness is in his choice of things, in his
+analysis of them, and his combining powers involve the totality of his
+knowledge in life. His methods of observation and abstraction are
+essential habits of his thought, conditions of his being. If he looks at
+a human form he recognizes the signs of nobility in it, and loves
+them--hates whatever is diseased, frightful, sinful, or _designant_ of
+decay. All ugliness, and abortion, and fading away; all signs of vice
+and foulness, he turns away from, as inherently diabolic and horrible;
+all signs of unconquered emotion he regrets, as weaknesses. He looks
+only for the calm purity of the human creature, in living conquests of
+its passions and of fate. That is idealism; but you cannot teach anyone
+else that preference. Take a man who likes to see and paint the
+gambler's rage; the hedge-ruffian's enjoyment; the debauched soldier's
+strife; the vicious woman's degradation;--take a man fed on the dusty
+picturesque of rags and guilt; talk to him of principles of beauty! make
+him draw what you will, how you will, he will leave the stain of himself
+on whatever he touches. You had better go lecture to a snail, and tell
+it to leave no slime behind it. Try to make a mean man compose; you will
+find nothing in his thoughts consecutive or proportioned--nothing
+consistent in his sight--nothing in his fancy. He cannot comprehend two
+things in relation at once--how much less twenty! How much less all!
+Everything is uppermost with him in its turn, and each as large as the
+rest; but Titian or Veronese compose as tranquilly as they would
+speak--inevitably. The thing comes to them so--they see it so--rightly,
+and in harmony: they will not talk to you of composition, hardly even
+understanding how lower people see things otherwise, but knowing that if
+they _do_ see otherwise, there is for them the end there, talk as you
+will.
+
+289. I had intended, in conclusion, gentlemen, to incur such blame of
+presumption as might be involved in offering some hints for present
+practical methods in architectural schools, but here again I am checked,
+as I have been throughout, by a sense of the uselessness of all minor
+means, and helps, without the establishment of a true and broad
+educational system. My wish would be to see the profession of the
+architect united, not with that of the engineer, but of the sculptor. I
+think there should be a separate school and university course for
+engineers, in which the principal branches of study connected with that
+of practical building should be the physical and exact sciences, and
+honors should be taken in mathematics; but I think there should be
+another school and university course for the sculptor and architect, in
+which literature and philosophy should be the associated branches of
+study, and honors should be taken _in literis humanioribus_; and I think
+a young architect's examination for his degree (for mere pass), should
+be much stricter than that of youths intending to enter other
+professions. The quantity of scholarship necessary for the efficiency of
+a country clergyman is not great. So that he be modest and kindly, the
+main truths he has to teach may be learned better in his heart than in
+books, and taught in very simple English. The best physicians I have
+known spent very little time in their libraries; and though my lawyer
+sometimes chats with me over a Greek coin, I think he regards the time
+so spent in the light rather of concession to my idleness than as
+helpful to his professional labors.
+
+But there is no task undertaken by a true architect of which the
+honorable fulfillment will not require a range of knowledge and habitual
+feeling only attainable by advanced scholarship.
+
+290. Since, however, such expansion of system is, at present, beyond
+hope, the best we can do is to render the studies undertaken in our
+schools thoughtful, reverent, and refined, according to our power.
+Especially, it should be our aim to prevent the minds of the students
+from being distracted by models of an unworthy or mixed character. A
+museum is one thing--a school another; and I am persuaded that as the
+efficiency of a school of literature depends on the mastering a few good
+books, so the efficiency of a school of art will depend on the
+understanding a few good models. And so strongly do I feel this that I
+would, for my own part, at once consent to sacrifice my personal
+predilections in art, and to vote for the exclusion of all Gothic or
+Mediæval models whatsoever, if by this sacrifice I could obtain also the
+exclusion of Byzantine, Indian, Renaissance-French, and other more or
+less attractive but barbarous work; and thus concentrate the mind of the
+student wholly upon the study of natural form, and upon its treatment by
+the sculptors and metal workers of Greece, Ionia, Sicily, and Magna
+Græcia, between 500 and 350 B.C. But I should hope that exclusiveness
+need not be carried quite so far. I think Donatello, Mino of Fiesole,
+the Robbias, Ghiberti, Verrocchio, and Michael Angelo, should be
+adequately represented in our schools--together with the Greeks--and
+that a few carefully chosen examples of the floral sculpture of the
+North in the thirteenth century should be added, with especial view to
+display the treatment of naturalistic ornament in subtle connection with
+constructive requirements; and in the course of study pursued with
+reference to these models, as of admitted perfection, I should endeavor
+first to make the student thoroughly acquainted with the natural forms
+and characters of the objects he had to treat, and then to exercise him
+in the abstraction of these forms, and the suggestion of these
+characters, under due sculptural limitation. He should first be taught
+to draw largely and simply; then he should make quick and firm sketches
+of flowers, animals, drapery, and figures, from nature, in the simplest
+terms of line, and light and shade; always being taught to look at the
+organic, actions and masses, not at the textures or accidental effects
+of shade; meantime his sentiment respecting all these things should be
+cultivated by close and constant inquiry into their mythological
+significance and associated traditions; then, knowing the things and
+creatures thoroughly, and regarding them through an atmosphere of
+enchanted memory, he should be shown how the facts he has taken so long
+to learn are summed by a great sculptor in a few touches; how those
+touches are invariably arranged in musical and decorative relations; how
+every detail unnecessary for his purpose is refused; how those
+necessary for his purpose are insisted upon, or even exaggerated, or
+represented by singular artifice, when literal representation is
+impossible; and how all this is done under the instinct and passion of
+an inner commanding spirit which it is indeed impossible to imitate, but
+possible, perhaps, to share.
+
+291. Perhaps! Pardon me that I speak despondingly. For my own part, I
+feel the force of mechanism and the fury of avaricious commerce to be at
+present so irresistible, that I have seceded from the study not only of
+architecture, but nearly of all art; and have given myself, as I would
+in a besieged city, to seek the best modes of getting bread and water
+for its multitudes, there remaining no question, it seems, to me, of
+other than such grave business for the time. But there is, at least,
+this ground for courage, if not for hope: As the evil spirits of avarice
+and luxury are directly contrary to art, so, also, art is directly
+contrary to them; and according to its force, expulsive of them and
+medicinal against them; so that the establishment of such schools as I
+have ventured to describe--whatever their immediate success or ill
+success in the teaching of art--would yet be the directest method of
+resistance to those conditions of evil among which our youth are cast at
+the most critical period of their lives. We may not be able to produce
+architecture, but, at the least, we shall resist vice. I do not know if
+it has been observed that while Dante rightly connects architecture, as
+the most permanent expression of the pride of humanity, whether just or
+unjust, with the first cornice of Purgatory, he indicates its noble
+function by engraving upon it, in perfect sculpture, the stories which
+rebuke the errors and purify the purposes of noblest souls. In the
+fulfillment of such function, literally and practically, here among men,
+is the only real use of pride of noble architecture, and on its
+acceptance or surrender of that function it depends whether, in future,
+the cities of England melt into a ruin more confused and ghastly than
+ever storm wasted or wolf inhabited, or purge and exalt themselves into
+true habitations of men, whose walls shall be Safety, and whose gates
+shall be Praise.
+
+NOTE.--In the course of the discussion which followed this paper the
+meeting was addressed by Prof. Donaldson, who alluded to the
+architectural improvements in France under the Third Napoleon, by Mr.
+George Edmund Street, by Prof. Kerr, Mr. Digby Wyatt, and others. The
+President then proposed a vote of thanks to Mr. Ruskin, who, in
+acknowledging the high compliment paid him, said he would detain the
+meeting but a few minutes, but he felt he ought to make some attempt to
+explain what he had inefficiently stated in his paper; and there was
+hardly anything said in the discussion in which he did not concur: the
+supposed differences of opinion were either because he had ill-expressed
+himself, or because of things left unsaid. In the first place he was
+surprised to hear dissent from Professor Donaldson while he expressed
+his admiration of some of the changes which had been developed in modern
+architecture. There were two conditions of architecture adapted for
+different climates; one with narrow streets, calculated for shade;
+another for broad avenues beneath bright skies; but both conditions had
+their beautiful effects. He sympathized with the admirers of Italy, and
+he was delighted with Genoa. He had been delighted also by the view of
+the long vistas from the Tuileries. Mr. Street had showed that he had
+not sufficiently dwelt on the distinction between near and distant
+carving--between carving and sculpture. He (Mr. Ruskin) could allow of
+no distinction. Sculpture which was to be viewed at a height of 500 feet
+above the eye might be executed with a few touches of the chisel;
+opposed to that there was the exquisite finish which was the perfection
+of sculpture as displayed in the Greek statues, after a full knowledge
+of the whole nature of the object portrayed; both styles were admirable
+in their true application--both were "sculpture"--perfect according to
+their places and requirements. The attack of Professor Kerr he regarded
+as in play, and in that spirit he would reply to him that he was afraid
+a practical association with bricks and mortar would hardly produce the
+effects upon him which had been suggested, for having of late in his
+residence experienced the transition of large extents of ground into
+bricks and mortar, it had had no effect in changing his views; and when
+he said he was tired of writing upon art, it was not that he was ashamed
+of what he had written, but that he was tired of writing in vain, and of
+knocking his head, thick as it might be, against a wall. There was
+another point which he would answer very gravely. It was referred to by
+Mr. Digby Wyatt, and was the one point he had mainly at heart all
+through--viz., that religion and high morality were at the root of all
+great art in all great times. The instances referred to by Mr. Digby
+Wyatt did not counteract that proposition. Modern and ancient forms of
+life might be different, nor could all men be judged by formal canons,
+but a true human heart was in the breast of every really great artist.
+He had the greatest detestation of anything approaching to cant in
+respect of art; but, after long investigation of the historical
+evidence, as well as of the metaphysical laws bearing on this question,
+he was absolutely certain that a high moral and religious training was
+the only way to get good fruits from our youth; make them good men
+first, and only so, if at all, they would become good artists. With
+regard to the points mooted respecting the practical and poetical uses
+of architecture, he thought they did not sufficiently define their
+terms; they spoke of poetry as rhyme. He thanked the President for his
+definition to-night, and he was sure he would concur with him that
+poetry meant as its derivation implied--"the _doing_." What was rightly
+done was done forever, and that which was only a crude work for the time
+was not poetry; poetry was only that which would recreate or remake the
+human soul. In that sense poetical architecture was separated from all
+utilitarian work. He had said long ago men could not decorate their
+shops and counters; they could decorate only where they lived in peace
+and rest--where they existed to be happy. There ornament would find use,
+and there their "doing" would be permanent. In other cases they wasted
+their money if they attempted to make utilitarian work ornamental. He
+might be wrong in that principle, but he had always asserted it, and had
+seen no reason in recent works for any modification of it. He thanked
+the meeting sincerely for the honor they had conferred upon him by their
+invitation to address them that evening, and for the indulgence with
+which they had heard him.--ED.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[52] pamphlet, the full title of which was "The Opening of the Crystal
+Palace Considered in some of its Relations to the Progress of Art," by
+John Ruskin, M.A. London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1854.--ED.
+
+[53] But see now _Aratra Pentelici_, § 53.--ED.
+
+[54] See the _Times_ of Monday, June 12th.
+
+[55] M. l'Abbé Bulteau, Description de la Cathédral de Chartres (8vo,
+Paris, Sagnier et Bray, 1850), p. 98, _note_.
+
+[56] See _Arrows of the Chace_.
+
+[57] This paper was read by Mr. Ruskin at the ordinary meeting of the
+Royal Institute of British Architects, May 15, 1865, and was afterwards
+published in the Sessional Papers of the Institute, 1864-5, Part III.,
+No. 2, pp. 139-147. Its full title (as there appears) was "An Inquiry
+into some of the conditions at present affecting the Study of
+Architecture in our Schools."--ED.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+ART.
+
+IV.
+
+INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
+
+
+
+CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL OF ART.
+
+(_Pamphlet, 1858._)
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+INAUGURAL ADDRESS[58]
+
+DELIVERED AT THE
+
+CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL OF ART,
+
+OCTOBER 29TH, 1858.
+
+
+1. I suppose the persons interested in establishing a School of Art for
+workmen may in the main be divided into two classes, namely, first,
+those who chiefly desire to make the men themselves happier, wiser, and
+better; and secondly, those who desire to enable them to produce better
+and more valuable work. These two objects may, of course, be kept both
+in view at the same time; nevertheless, there is a wide difference in
+the spirit with which we shall approach our task, according to the
+motive of these two which weighs most with us--a difference great enough
+to divide, as I have said, the promoters of any such scheme into two
+distinct classes; one philanthropic in the gist of its aim, and the
+other commercial in the gist of its aim; one desiring the workman to be
+better informed chiefly for his own sake, and the other chiefly that he
+may be enabled to produce for us commodities precious in themselves,
+and which shall successfully compete with those of other countries.
+
+2. And this separation in motives must lead also to a distinction in the
+machinery of the work. The philanthropists address themselves, not to
+the artisan merely, but to the laborer in general, desiring in any
+possible way to refine the habits or increase the happiness of our whole
+working population, by giving them new recreations or new thoughts: and
+the principles of Art-Education adopted in a school which has this wide
+but somewhat indeterminate aim, are, or should be, very different from
+those adopted in a school meant for the special instruction of the
+artisan in his own business. I do not think this distinction is yet
+firmly enough fixed in our minds, or calculated upon in our plans of
+operation. We have hitherto acted, it seems to me, under a vague
+impression that the arts of drawing and painting might be, up to a
+certain point, taught in a general way to everyone, and would do
+everyone equal good; and that each class of operatives might afterwards
+bring this general knowledge into use in their own trade, according to
+its requirements. Now, that is not so. A wood-carver needs for his
+business to learn drawing in quite a different way from a china-painter,
+and a jeweler from a worker in iron. They must be led to study quite
+different characters in the natural forms they introduce in their
+various manufacture. It is no use to teach an iron-worker to observe the
+down on a peach, and of none to teach laws of atmospheric effect to a
+carver in wood. So far as their business is concerned, their brains
+would be vainly occupied by such things, and they would be prevented
+from pursuing, with enough distinctness or intensity, the qualities of
+Art which can alone be expressed in the materials with which they each
+have to do.
+
+3. Now, I believe it to be wholly impossible to teach special
+application of Art principles to various trades in a single school. That
+special application can be only learned rightly by the experience of
+years in the particular work required. The power of each material, and
+the difficulties connected with its treatment are not so much to be
+taught as to be felt; it is only by repeated touch and continued trial
+beside the forge or the furnace, that the goldsmith can find out how to
+govern his gold, or the glass-worker his crystal; and it is only by
+watching and assisting the actual practice of a master in the business,
+that the apprentice can learn the efficient secrets of manipulation, or
+perceive the true limits of the involved conditions of design. It seems
+to me, therefore, that all idea of reference to definite businesses
+should be abandoned in such schools as that just established: we can
+have neither the materials, the conveniences, nor the empirical skill in
+the master, necessary to make such teaching useful. All specific
+Art-teaching must be given in schools established by each trade for
+itself: and when our operatives are a little more enlightened on these
+matters, there will be found, as I have already stated in my lectures on
+the political economy of Art,[59] absolute necessity for the
+establishment of guilds of trades in an active and practical form, for
+the purposes of ascertaining the principles of Art proper to their
+business, and instructing their apprentices in them, as well as making
+experiments on materials, and on newly-invented methods of procedure;
+besides many other functions which I cannot now enter into account of.
+All this for the present, and in a school such as this, I repeat, we
+cannot hope for: we shall obtain no satisfactory result, unless we give
+up such hope, and set ourselves to teaching the operative, however
+employed--be he farmer's laborer, or manufacturer's; be he mechanic,
+artificer, shopman, sailor, or plowman--teaching, I say, as far as we
+can, one and the same thing to all; namely, Sight.
+
+4. Not a slight thing to teach, this: perhaps, on the whole, the most
+important thing to be taught in the whole range of teaching. To be
+taught to read--what is the use of that, if you know not whether what
+you read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speak--but what
+is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to
+think--nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing
+to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at
+once, and both true. There is a vague acknowledgment of this in the way
+people are continually expressing their longing for light, until all the
+common language of our prayers and hymns has sunk into little more than
+one monotonous metaphor, dimly twisted into alternate languages,--asking
+first in Latin to be illuminated; and then in English to be enlightened;
+and then in Latin again to be delivered out of obscurity; and then in
+English to be delivered out of darkness; and then for beams, and rays,
+and suns, and stars, and lamps, until sometimes one wishes that, at
+least for religious purposes, there were no such words as light or
+darkness in existence. Still, the main instinct which makes people
+endure this perpetuity of repetition is a true one; only the main thing
+they want and ought to ask for is, not light, but Sight. It doesn't
+matter how much light you have if you don't know how to use it. It may
+very possibly put out your eyes, instead of helping them. Besides, we
+want, in this world of ours, very often to be able to see in the
+dark--that's the great gift of all;--but at any rate to see no matter by
+what light, so only we can see things as they are. On my word, we should
+soon make it a different world, if we could get but a little--ever so
+little--of the dervish's ointment in the Arabian Nights, not to show us
+the treasures of the earth, but the facts of it.
+
+5. However, whether these things be generally true or not, at all events
+it is certain that our immediate business, in such a school as this,
+will prosper more by attending to eyes than to hands; we shall always do
+most good by simply endeavoring to enable the student to see natural
+objects clearly and truly. We ought not even to try too strenuously to
+give him the power of representing them. That power may be acquired,
+more or less, by exercises which are no wise conducive to accuracy of
+sight: and, _vice versâ_, accuracy of sight may be gained by exercises
+which in no wise conduce to ease of representation. For instance, it
+very much assists the power of drawing to spend many hours in the
+practice of washing in flat tints; but all this manual practice does not
+in the least increase the student's power of determining what the tint
+of a given object actually is. He would be more advanced in the
+knowledge of the facts by a single hour of well-directed and
+well-_corrected_ effort, rubbing out and putting in again, lightening,
+and darkening, and scratching, and blotching, in patient endeavors to
+obtain concordance with fact, issuing perhaps, after all, in total
+destruction or unpresentability of the drawing; but also in acute
+perception of the things he has been attempting to copy in it. Of
+course, there is always a vast temptation, felt both by the master and
+student, to struggle towards visible results, and obtain something
+beautiful, creditable, or salable, in way of actual drawing: but the
+more I see of schools, the more reason I see to look with doubt upon
+those which produce too many showy and complete works by pupils. A showy
+work will always be found, on stern examination of it, to have been done
+by some conventional rule;--some servile compliance with directions
+which the student does not see the reason for; and representation of
+truths which he has not himself perceived: the execution of such
+drawings will be found monotonous and lifeless; their light and shade
+specious and formal, but false. A drawing which the pupil has learned
+much in doing, is nearly always full of blunders and mishaps, and it is
+highly necessary for the formation of a truly public or universal school
+of Art, that the masters should not try to conceal or anticipate such
+blunders, but only seek to employ the pupil's time so as to get the most
+precious results for his understanding and his heart, not for his hand.
+
+6. For, observe, the best that you can do in the production of drawing,
+or of draughtsmanship, must always be nothing in itself, unless the
+whole life be given to it. An amateur's drawing, or a workman's
+drawing--anybody's drawing but an artist's, is always valueless in
+itself. It may be, as you have just heard Mr. Redgrave tell you, most
+precious as a memorial, or as a gift, or as a means of noting useful
+facts; but as _Art_, an amateur's drawing is always wholly worthless;
+and it ought to be one of our great objects to make the pupil understand
+and feel that, and prevent his trying to make his valueless work look,
+in some superficial, hypocritical, eye-catching, penny-catching way,
+like work that is really good.
+
+7. If, therefore, we have to do with pupils belonging to the higher
+ranks of life, our main duty will be to make them good judges of Art,
+rather than artists; for though I had a month to speak to you, instead
+of an hour, time would fail me if I tried to trace the various ways in
+which we suffer, nationally, for want of powers of enlightened judgment
+of Art in our upper and middle classes. Not that this judgment can ever
+be obtained without discipline of the hand: no man ever was a thorough
+judge of painting who could not draw; but the drawing should only be
+thought of as a means of fixing his attention upon the subtleties of the
+Art put before him, or of enabling him to record such natural facts as
+are necessary for comparison with it. I should also attach the greatest
+importance to severe limitation of choice in the examples submitted to
+him. To study one good master till you understand him will teach you
+more than a superficial acquaintance with a thousand: power of criticism
+does not consist in knowing the names or the manner of many painters,
+but in discerning the excellence of a few.
+
+If, on the contrary, our teaching is addressed more definitely to the
+operative, we need not endeavor to render his powers of criticism very
+acute. About many forms of existing Art, the less he knows the better.
+His sensibilities are to be cultivated with respect to nature chiefly;
+and his imagination, if possible, to be developed, even though somewhat
+to the disadvantage of his judgment. It is better that his work should
+be bold, than faultless: and better that it should be delightful, than
+discreet.
+
+8. And this leads me to the second, or commercial, question; namely, how
+to get from the workman, after we have trained him, the best and most
+precious work, so as to enable ourselves to compete with foreign
+countries, or develop new branches of commerce in our own.
+
+Many of us, perhaps, are under the impression that plenty of schooling
+will do this; that plenty of lecturing will do it; that sending abroad
+for patterns will do it; or that patience, time, and money, and good
+will may do it. And, alas, none of these things, nor all of them put
+together, will do it. If you want really good work, such as will be
+acknowledged by all the world, there is but one way of getting it, and
+that is a difficult one. You may offer any premium you choose for
+it--but you will find it can't be done for premiums. You may send for
+patterns to the antipodes--but you will find it can't be done upon
+patterns. You may lecture on the principles of Art to every school in
+the kingdom--and you will find it can't be done upon principles. You may
+wait patiently for the progress of the age--and you will find your Art
+is unprogressive. Or you may set yourselves impatiently to urge it by
+the inventions of the age--and you will find your chariot of Art
+entirely immovable either by screw or paddle. There's no way of getting
+good Art, I repeat, but one--at once the simplest and most
+difficult--namely, to enjoy it. Examine the history of nations, and you
+will find this great fact clear and unmistakable on the front of
+it--that good Art has only been produced by nations who rejoiced in it;
+fed themselves with it, as if it were bread; basked in it, as if it were
+sunshine; shouted at the sight of it; danced with the delight of it;
+quarreled for it; fought for it; starved for it; did, in fact, precisely
+the opposite with it of what we want to do with it--they made it to
+keep, and we to sell.
+
+9. And truly this is a serious difficulty for us as a commercial nation.
+The very primary motive with which we set about the business, makes the
+business impossible. The first and absolute condition of the thing's
+ever becoming salable is, that we shall make it without wanting to sell
+it; nay, rather with a determination not to sell it at any price, if
+once we get hold of it. Try to make your Art popular, cheap--a fair
+article for your foreign market; and the foreign market will always show
+something better. But make it only to please yourselves, and even be
+resolved that you won't let anybody else have any; and forthwith you
+will find everybody else wants it. And observe, the insuperable
+difficulty is this making it to please ourselves, while we are incapable
+of pleasure. Take, for instance, the simplest example, which we can all
+understand, in the art of dress. We have made a great fuss about the
+patterns of silk lately; wanting to vie with Lyons, and make a Paris of
+London. Well, we may try forever: so long as we don't really enjoy silk
+patterns, we shall never get any. And we don't enjoy them. Of course,
+all ladies like their dresses to sit well, and be becoming; but of real
+enjoyment of the beauty of the silk, for the silk's own sake, I find
+none; for the test of that enjoyment is, that they would like it also to
+sit well, and look well, on somebody else. The pleasure of being well
+dressed, or even of seeing well-dressed people--for I will suppose in my
+fair hearers that degree of unselfishness--be that pleasure great or
+small, is quite a different thing from delight in the beauty and play of
+the silken folds and colors themselves, for their own gorgeousness or
+grace.
+
+10. I have just had a remarkable proof of the total want of this feeling
+in the modern mind. I was staying part of this summer in Turin, for the
+purpose of studying one of the Paul Veroneses there--the presentation of
+the Queen of Sheba to Solomon. Well, one of the most notable characters
+in this picture is the splendor of its silken dresses: and, in
+particular, there was a piece of white brocade, with designs upon it in
+gold, which it was one of my chief objects in stopping at Turin to copy.
+You may, perhaps, be surprised at this; but I must just note in passing,
+that I share this weakness of enjoying dress patterns with all good
+students and all good painters. It doesn't matter what school they
+belong to,--Fra Angelico, Perugino, John Bellini, Giorgione, Titian,
+Tintoret, Veronese, Leonardo da Vinci--no matter how they differ in
+other respects, all of them like dress patterns; and what is more, the
+nobler the painter is, the surer he is to do his patterns well.
+
+11. I stayed then, as I say, to make a study of this white brocade. It
+generally happens in public galleries that the best pictures are the
+worst placed; and this Veronese is not only hung at considerable height
+above the eye, but over a door, through which, however, as all the
+visitors to the gallery must pass, they cannot easily overlook the
+picture, though they would find great difficulty in examining it. Beside
+this door, I had a stage erected for my work, which being of some height
+and rather in a corner, enabled me to observe, without being observed
+myself, the impression made by the picture on the various visitors. It
+seemed to me that if ever a work of Art caught popular attention, this
+ought to do so. It was of very large size; of brilliant color, and of
+agreeable subject. There are about twenty figures in it, the principal
+ones being life size: that of Solomon, though in the shade, is by far
+the most perfect conception of the young king in his pride of wisdom and
+beauty which I know in the range of Italian art; the queen is one of the
+loveliest of Veronese's female figures; all the accessories are full of
+grace and imagination; and the finish of the whole so perfect that one
+day I was upwards of two hours vainly trying to render, with perfect
+accuracy, the curves of two leaves of the brocaded silk. The English
+travelers used to walk through the room in considerable numbers; and
+were invariably directed to the picture by their laquais de place, if
+they missed seeing it themselves. And to this painting--in which it took
+me six weeks to examine rightly two figures--I found that on an average,
+the English traveler who was doing Italy conscientiously, and seeing
+everything as he thought he ought, gave about half or three-quarters of
+a minute; but the flying or fashionable traveler, who came to do as much
+as he could in a given time, never gave more than a single glance, most
+of such people turning aside instantly to a bad landscape hung on the
+right, containing a vigorously painted white wall, and an opaque green
+moat. What especially impressed me, however, was that none of the
+ladies ever stopped to look at the dresses in the Veronese. Certainly
+they were far more beautiful than any in the shops in the great square,
+yet no one ever noticed them. Sometimes when any nice, sharp-looking,
+bright-eyed girl came into the room, I used to watch her all the way,
+thinking--"Come, at least _you'll_ see what the Queen of Sheba has got
+on." But no--on she would come carelessly, with a little toss of the
+head, apparently signifying "nothing in _this_ room worth looking
+at--except myself," and so trip through the door, and away.
+
+12. The fact is, we don't care for pictures: in very deed we don't. The
+Academy exhibition is a thing to talk of and to amuse vacant hours;
+those who are rich amongst us buy a painting or two, for mixed reasons,
+sometimes to fill the corner of a passage--sometimes to help the
+drawing-room talk before dinner--sometimes because the painter is
+fashionable--occasionally because he is poor--not unfrequently that we
+may have a collection of specimens of painting, as we have specimens of
+minerals or butterflies--and in the best and rarest case of all, because
+we have really, as we call it, taken a fancy to the picture; meaning the
+same sort of fancy which one would take to a pretty arm-chair or a
+newly-shaped decanter. But as for real love of the picture, and joy of
+it when we have got it, I do not believe it is felt by one in a
+thousand.
+
+13. I am afraid this apathy of ours will not be easily conquered; but
+even supposing it should, and that we should begin to enjoy pictures
+properly, and that the supply of good ones increased as in that case it
+_would_ increase--then comes another question. Perhaps some of my
+hearers this evening may occasionally have heard it stated of me that I
+am rather apt to contradict myself. I hope I am exceedingly apt to do
+so. I never met with a question yet, of any importance, which did not
+need, for the right solution of it, at least one positive and one
+negative answer, like an equation of the second degree. Mostly, matters
+of any consequence are three-sided, or four-sided, or polygonal; and the
+trotting round a polygon is severe work for people any way stiff in
+their opinions. For myself, I am never satisfied that I have handled a
+subject properly till I have contradicted myself at least three times:
+but once must do for this evening. I have just said that there is no
+chance of our getting good Art unless we delight in it: next I say, and
+just as positively, that there is no chance of our getting good Art
+unless we resist our delight in it. We must love it first, and restrain
+our love for it afterwards.
+
+14. This sounds strange; and yet I assure you it is true. In fact,
+whenever anything does not sound strange, you may generally doubt its
+being true; for all truth is wonderful. But take an instance in physical
+matters, of the same kind of contradiction. Suppose you were explaining
+to a young student in astronomy how the earth was kept steady in its
+orbit; you would have to state to him--would you not?--that the earth
+always had a tendency to fall to the sun; and that also it always had a
+tendency to fly away from the sun. These are two precisely contrary
+statements for him to digest at his leisure, before he can understand
+how the earth moves. Now, in like manner, when Art is set in its true
+and serviceable course, it moves under the luminous attraction of
+pleasure on the one side, and with a stout moral purpose of going about
+some useful business on the other. If the artist works without delight,
+he passes away into space, and perishes of cold: if he works only for
+delight, he falls into the sun, and extinguishes himself in ashes. On
+the whole, this last is the fate, I do not say the most to be feared,
+but which Art has generally hitherto suffered, and which the great
+nations of the earth have suffered with it.
+
+15. For, while most distinctly you may perceive in past history that Art
+has never been produced, except by nations who took pleasure in it, just
+as assuredly, and even more plainly, you may perceive that Art has
+always destroyed the power and life of those who pursued it for pleasure
+only. Surely this fact must have struck you as you glanced at the career
+of the great nations of the earth: surely it must have occurred to you
+as a point for serious questioning, how far, even in our days, we were
+wise in promoting the advancement of pleasures which appeared as yet
+only to have corrupted the souls and numbed the strength of those who
+attained to them. I have been complaining of England that she despises
+the Arts; but I might, with still more appearance of justice, complain
+that she does not rather dread them than despise. For, what has been the
+source of the ruin of nations since the world began? Has it been plague,
+or famine, earthquake-shock or volcano-flame? None of these ever
+prevailed against a great people, so as to make their name pass from the
+earth. In every period and place of national decline, you will find
+other causes than these at work to bring it about, namely, luxury,
+effeminacy, love of pleasure, fineness in Art, ingenuity in enjoyment.
+What is the main lesson which, as far as we seek any in our classical
+reading, we gather for our youth from ancient history? Surely this--that
+simplicity of life, of language, and of manners gives strength to a
+nation; and that luxuriousness of life, subtlety of language, and
+smoothness of manners bring weakness and destruction on a nation. While
+men possess little and desire less, they remain brave and noble: while
+they are scornful of all the arts of luxury, and are in the sight of
+other nations as barbarians, their swords are irresistible and their
+sway illimitable: but let them become sensitive to the refinements of
+taste, and quick in the capacities of pleasure, and that instant the
+fingers that had grasped the iron rod, fail from the golden scepter. You
+cannot charge me with any exaggeration in this matter; it is impossible
+to state the truth too strongly, or as too universal. Forever you will
+see the rude and simple nation at once more virtuous and more victorious
+than one practiced in the arts. Watch how the Lydian is overthrown by
+the Persian; the Persian by the Athenian; the Athenian by the Spartan;
+then the whole of polished Greece by the rougher Roman; the Roman, in
+his turn refined, only to be crushed by the Goth: and at the turning
+point of the middle ages, the liberty of Europe first asserted, the
+virtues of Christianity best practiced, and its doctrines best attested,
+by a handful of mountain shepherds, without art, without literature,
+almost without a language, yet remaining unconquered in the midst of the
+Teutonic chivalry, and uncorrupted amidst the hierarchies of Rome.[60]
+
+16. I was strangely struck by this great fact during the course of a
+journey last summer among the northern vales of Switzerland. My mind had
+been turned to the subject of the ultimate effects of Art on national
+mind before I left England, and I went straight to the chief fields of
+Swiss history: first to the center of her feudal power, Hapsburg, the
+hawk's nest from which the Swiss Rodolph rose to found the Austrian
+empire; and then to the heart of her republicanism, that little glen of
+Morgarten, where first in the history of Europe the shepherd's staff
+prevailed over the soldier's spear. And it was somewhat depressing to me
+to find, as day by day I found more certainly, that this people which
+first asserted the liberties of Europe, and first conceived the idea of
+equitable laws, was in all the--shall I call them the slighter, or the
+higher?--sensibilities of the human mind, utterly deficient; and not
+only had remained from its earliest ages till now, without poetry,
+without Art, and without music, except a mere modulated cry; but as far
+as I could judge from the rude efforts of their early monuments, would
+have been, at the time of their greatest national probity and power,
+incapable of producing good poetry or Art under any circumstances of
+education.
+
+17. I say, this was a sad thing for me to find. And then, to mend the
+matter, I went straight over into Italy, and came at once upon a
+curious instance of the patronage of Art, of the character that usually
+inclines most to such patronage, and of the consequences thereof.
+
+From Morgarten and Grutli, I intended to have crossed to the Vaudois
+Valleys, to examine the shepherd character there; but on the way I had
+to pass through Turin, where unexpectedly I found the Paul Veroneses,
+one of which, as I told you just now, stayed me at once for six weeks.
+Naturally enough, one asked how these beautiful Veroneses came there:
+and found they had been commissioned by Cardinal Maurice of Savoy.
+Worthy Cardinal, I thought: that's what Cardinals were made for.
+However, going a little farther in the gallery, one comes upon four very
+graceful pictures by Albani--these also commissioned by the Cardinal,
+and commissioned with special directions, according to the Cardinal's
+fancy. Four pictures, to be illustrative of the four elements.
+
+18. One of the most curious things in the mind of the people of that
+century is their delight in these four elements, and in the four
+seasons. They had hardly any other idea of decorating a room, or of
+choosing a subject for a picture, than by some renewed reference to fire
+and water, or summer and winter; nor were ever tired of hearing that
+summer came after spring, and that air was not earth, until these
+interesting pieces of information got finally and poetically expressed
+in that well-known piece of elegant English conversation about the
+weather, Thomson's "Seasons." So the Cardinal, not appearing to have any
+better idea than the popular one, orders the four elements; but thinking
+that the elements pure would be slightly dull, he orders them, in one
+way or another, to be mixed up with Cupids; to have, in his own words,
+"una copiosa quantita di Amorini." Albani supplied the Cardinal
+accordingly with Cupids in clusters: they hang in the sky like bunches
+of cherries; and leap out of the sea like flying fish; grow out of the
+earth in fairy rings; and explode out of the fire like squibs. No work
+whatsoever is done in any of the four elements, but by the Cardinal's
+Cupids. They are plowing the earth with their arrows; fishing in the
+sea with their bowstrings; driving the clouds with their breath; and
+fanning the fire with their wings. A few beautiful nymphs are assisting
+them here and there in pearl-fishing, flower-gathering, and other such
+branches of graceful industry; the moral of the whole being, that the
+sea was made for its pearls, the earth for its flowers, and all the
+world for pleasure.
+
+19. Well, the Cardinal, this great encourager of the arts, having these
+industrial and social theories, carried them out in practice, as you may
+perhaps remember, by obtaining a dispensation from the Pope to marry his
+own niece, and building a villa for her on one of the slopes of the
+pretty hills which rise to the east of the city. The villa which he
+built is now one of the principal objects of interest to the traveler as
+an example of Italian domestic architecture: to me, during my stay in
+the city, it was much more than an object of interest; for its deserted
+gardens were by much the pleasantest place I could find for walking or
+thinking in, in the hot summer afternoons.
+
+I say thinking, for these gardens often gave me a good deal to think
+about. They are, as I told you, on the slope of the hill above the city,
+to the east; commanding, therefore, the view over it and beyond it,
+westward--a view which, perhaps, of all those that can be obtained north
+of the Apennines, gives the most comprehensive idea of the nature of
+Italy, considered as one great country. If you glance at the map, you
+will observe that Turin is placed in the center of the crescent which
+the Alps form round the basin of Piedmont; it is within ten miles of the
+foot of the mountains at the nearest point; and from that point the
+chain extends half round the city in one unbroken Moorish crescent,
+forming three-fourths of a circle from the Col de Tende to the St.
+Gothard; that is to say, just two hundred miles of Alps, as the bird
+flies. I don't speak rhetorically or carelessly; I speak as I ought to
+speak here--with mathematical precision. Take the scale on your map;
+measure fifty miles of it accurately; try that measure from the Col de
+Tende to the St. Gothard, and you will find that four cords of fifty
+miles will not quite reach to the two extremities of the curve.
+
+20. You see, then, from this spot, the plain of Piedmont, on the north
+and south, literally as far as the eye can reach; so that the plain
+terminates as the sea does, with a level blue line, only tufted with
+woods instead of waves, and crowded with towers of cities instead of
+ships. Then in the luminous air beyond and behind this blue
+horizon-line, stand, as it were, the shadows of mountains, they
+themselves dark, for the southern slopes of the Alps of the Lago
+Maggiore and Bellinzona are all without snow; but the light of the
+unseen snowfields, lying level behind the visible peaks, is sent up with
+strange reflection upon the clouds; an everlasting light of calm Aurora
+in the north. Then, higher and higher around the approaching darkness of
+the plain, rise the central chains, not as on the Switzer's side, a
+recognizable group and following of successive and separate hills, but a
+wilderness of jagged peaks, cast in passionate and fierce profusion
+along the circumference of heaven; precipice behind precipice, and gulf
+beyond gulf, filled with the flaming of the sunset, and forming mighty
+channels for the flowings of the clouds, which roll up against them out
+of the vast Italian plain, forced together by the narrowing crescent,
+and breaking up at last against the Alpine wall in towers of spectral
+spray; or sweeping up its ravines with long moans of complaining
+thunder. Out from between the cloudy pillars, as they pass, emerge
+forever the great battlements of the memorable and perpetual hills:
+Viso, with her shepherd-witnesses to ancient faith; Rocca-Melone, the
+highest place of Alpine pilgrimage;[61] Iseran, who shed her burial
+sheets of snow about the march of Hannibal; Cenis, who shone with her
+glacier light on the descent of Charlemagne; Paradiso, who watched with
+her opposite crest the stoop of the French eagle to Marengo; and
+underneath all these, lying in her soft languor, this tender Italy,
+lapped in dews of sleep, or more than sleep--one knows not if it is
+trance, from which morning shall yet roll the blinding mists away, or if
+the fair shadows of her quietude are indeed the shades of purple death.
+And, lifted a little above this solemn plain, and looking beyond it to
+its snowy ramparts, vainly guardian, stands this palace dedicate to
+pleasure, the whole legend of Italy's past history written before it by
+the finger of God, written as with an iron pen upon the rock forever, on
+all those fronting walls of reproachful Alp; blazoned in gold of
+lightning upon the clouds that still open and close their unsealed
+scrolls in heaven; painted in purple and scarlet upon the mighty missal
+pages of sunset after sunset, spread vainly before a nation's eyes for a
+nation's prayer. So stands this palace of pleasure; desolate as it
+deserves--desolate in smooth corridor and glittering chamber--desolate
+in pleached walk and planted bower--desolate in that worst and bitterest
+abandonment which leaves no light of memory. No ruins are here of walls
+rent by war, and falling above their defenders into mounds of graves: no
+remnants are here of chapel-altar, or temple porch, left shattered or
+silent by the power of some purer worship: no vestiges are here of
+sacred hearth and sweet homestead, left lonely through vicissitudes of
+fate, and heaven-sent sorrow. Nothing is here but the vain apparelings
+of pride sunk into dishonor, and vain appanages of delight now no more
+delightsome. The hill-waters, that once flowed and plashed in the
+garden fountains, now trickle sadly through the weeds that encumber
+their basins, with a sound as of tears: the creeping, insidious,
+neglected flowers weave their burning nets about the white marble of the
+balustrades, and rend them slowly, block from block, and stone from
+stone: the thin, sweet-scented leaves tremble along the old masonry
+joints as if with palsy at every breeze; and the dark lichens, golden
+and gray, make the footfall silent in the path's center.
+
+And day by day as I walked there, the same sentence seemed whispered by
+every shaking leaf, and every dying echo, of garden and chamber. "Thus
+end all the arts of life, only in death; and thus issue all the gifts of
+man, only in his dishonor, when they are pursued or possessed in the
+service of pleasure only."
+
+21. This then is the great enigma of Art History,--you must not follow
+Art without pleasure, nor must you follow it for the sake of pleasure.
+And the solution of that enigma is simply this fact; that wherever Art
+has been followed _only_ for the sake of luxury or delight, it has
+contributed, and largely contributed, to bring about the destruction of
+the nation practicing it: but wherever Art has been used _also_ to teach
+any truth, or supposed truth--religious, moral, or natural--there it has
+elevated the nation practicing it, and itself with the nation.
+
+22. Thus the Art of Greece rose, and did service to the people, so long
+as it was to them the earnest interpreter of a religion they believed
+in: the Arts of northern sculpture and architecture rose, as
+interpreters of Christian legend and doctrine: the Art of painting in
+Italy, not only as religious, but also mainly as expressive of truths of
+moral philosophy, and powerful in pure human portraiture. The only great
+painters in our schools of painting in England have either been of
+portrait--Reynolds and Gainsborough; of the philosophy of social
+life--Hogarth; or of the facts of nature in landscape--Wilson and
+Turner. In all these cases, if I had time, I could show you that the
+success of the painter depended on his desire to convey a truth, rather
+than to produce a merely beautiful picture; that is to say, to get a
+likeness of a man, or of a place; to get some moral principle rightly
+stated, or some historical character rightly described, rather than
+merely to give pleasure to the eyes. Compare the feeling with which a
+Moorish architect decorated an arch of the Alhambra, with that of
+Hogarth painting the "Marriage à la Mode," or of Wilkie painting the
+"Chelsea Pensioners," and you will at once feel the difference between
+Art pursued for pleasure only, and for the sake of some useful principle
+or impression.
+
+23. But what you might not so easily discern is, that even when painting
+does appear to have been pursued for pleasure only, if ever you find it
+rise to any noble level, you will also find that a stern search after
+truth has been at the root of its nobleness. You may fancy, perhaps,
+that Titian, Veronese, and Tintoret were painters for the sake of
+pleasure only: but in reality they were the only painters who ever
+sought entirely to master, and who did entirely master, the truths of
+light and shade as associated with color, in the noblest of all physical
+created things, the human form. They were the only men who ever painted
+the human body; all other painters of the great schools are mere
+anatomical draughtsmen compared to them; rather makers of maps of the
+body, than painters of it. The Venetians alone, by a toil almost
+super-human, succeeded at last in obtaining a power almost super-human;
+and were able finally to paint the highest visible work of God with
+unexaggerated structure, undegraded color, and unaffected gesture. It
+seems little to say this; but I assure you it is much to have _done_
+this--so much, that no other men but the Venetians ever did it: none of
+them ever painted the human body without in some degree caricaturing the
+anatomy, forcing the action, or degrading the hue.
+
+24. Now, therefore, the sum of all is, that you who wish to encourage
+Art in England have to do two things with it: you must delight in it, in
+the first place; and you must get it to serve some serious work, in the
+second place. I don't mean by serious, necessarily moral: all that I
+mean by serious is in some way or other useful, not merely selfish,
+careless, or indolent. I had, indeed, intended before closing my
+address, to have traced out a few of the directions in which, as it
+seems to me, Art may be seriously and practically serviceable to us in
+the career of civilization. I had hoped to show you how many of the
+great phenomena of nature still remained unrecorded by it, for _us_ to
+record; how many of the historical monuments of Europe were perishing
+without memorial, for the want of but a little honest, simple,
+laborious, loving draughtsmanship; how many of the most impressive
+historical events of the day failed of teaching us half of what they
+were meant to teach, for want of painters to represent them faithfully,
+instead of fancifully, and with historical truth for their aim, instead
+of national self-glorification. I had hoped to show you how many of the
+best impulses of the heart were lost in frivolity or sensuality, for
+want of purer beauty to contemplate, and of noble thoughts to associate
+with the fervor of hallowed human passion; how, finally, a great part of
+the vital power of our religious faith was lost in us, for want of such
+art as would realize in some rational, probable, believable way, those
+events of sacred history which, as they visibly and intelligibly
+occurred, may also be visibly and intelligibly represented. But all this
+I dare not do yet. I felt, as I thought over these things, that the time
+was not yet come for their declaration: the time will come for it, and I
+believe soon; but as yet, the man would only lay himself open to the
+charge of vanity, of imagination, and of idle fondness of hope, who
+should venture to trace in words the course of the higher blessings
+which the Arts may have yet in store for mankind. As yet there is no
+need to do so: all that we have to plead for is an earnest and
+straightforward exertion in those courses of study which are opened to
+us day by day, believing only that they are to be followed gravely and
+for grave purposes, as by men, and not by children. I appeal, finally,
+to all those who are to become the pupils of these schools, to keep
+clear of the notion of following Art as dilettantism: it ought to
+delight you, as your reading delights you--but you never think of your
+reading as dilettantism. It ought to delight you as your studies of
+physical science delight you--but you don't call physical science
+dilettantism. If you are determined only to think of Art as a play or a
+pleasure, give it up at once: you will do no good to yourselves, and you
+will degrade the pursuit in the sight of others. Better, infinitely
+better, that you should never enter a picture gallery, than that you
+should enter only to saunter and to smile: better, infinitely better,
+that you should never handle a pencil at all, than handle it only for
+the sake of complacency in your small dexterity: better, infinitely
+better, that you should be wholly uninterested in pictures, and
+uninformed respecting them, than that you should just know enough to
+detect blemishes in great works,--to give a color of reasonableness to
+presumption, and an appearance of acuteness to misunderstanding. Above
+all, I would plead for this so far as the teaching of these schools may
+be addressed to the junior Members of the University. Men employed in
+any kind of manual labor, by which they must live, are not likely to
+take up the notion that they can learn any other art for amusement only;
+but amateurs are: and it is of the highest importance, nay, it is just
+the one thing of all importance, to show them what drawing really means;
+and not so much to teach them to produce a good work themselves, as to
+know it when they see it done by others. Good work, in the stern sense
+of the word, as I before said, no mere amateur can do; and good work, in
+any sense, that is to say, profitable work for himself or for anyone
+else, he can only do by being made in the beginning to see what is
+possible for him, and what not;--what is accessible, and what not; and
+by having the majesty and sternness of the everlasting laws of fact set
+before him in their infinitude. It is no matter for appalling him: the
+man is great already who is made well capable of being appalled; nor do
+we even wisely hope, nor truly understand, till we are humiliated by our
+hope, and awe-struck by our understanding. Nay, I will go farther than
+this, and say boldly, that what you have mainly to teach the young men
+here is, not so much what they can do, as what they cannot;--to make
+them see how much there is in nature which cannot be imitated, and how
+much in man which cannot be emulated. He only can be truly said to be
+educated in Art to whom all his work is only a feeble sign of glories
+which he cannot convey, and a feeble means of measuring, with
+ever-enlarging admiration, the great and untraversable gulf which God
+has set between the great and the common intelligences of mankind: and
+all the triumphs of Art which man can commonly achieve are only truly
+crowned by pure delight in natural scenes themselves, and by the sacred
+and self-forgetful veneration which can be nobly abashed, and
+tremblingly exalted, in the presence of a human spirit greater than his
+own.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[58] This Address has been already printed in three forms,--(_a_) in a
+pamphlet printed at Cambridge "for the committee of the School of Art,"
+by Naylor & Co., _Chronicle_ office, 1858; (_b_) in a second pamphlet,
+Cambridge, Deighton & Bell; London, Bell & Daldy, 1858; and (_c_) a new
+edition, published for Mr. Ruskin by Mr. George Allen in 1879. The first
+of these pamphlets contains, in addition to the address, a full account
+of the "inaugural soirée" at which it was read, and a report of speeches
+then made by Mr. Redgrave, R.A., and Mr. George Cruikshank; and both the
+first and second pamphlet also contain a few introductory words spoken,
+by Mr. Ruskin, before proceeding to deliver his address.--ED.
+
+[59] See "A Joy For Ever," § 113, and "Time and Tide," § 78.--ED.
+
+[60] I ought perhaps to remind the reader that this statement refers to
+two different societies among the Alps; the Waldenses in the 13th, and
+the people of the Forest Cantons in the 14th and following centuries.
+Protestants are perhaps apt sometimes to forget that the virtues of
+these mountaineers were shown in connection with vital forms of opposing
+religions; and that the patriots of Schwytz and Uri were as zealous
+Roman Catholics as they were good soldiers. We have to lay to their
+charge the death of Zuinglius as well as of Gessler.
+
+[61] The summit of Rocca-Melone is the sharp peak seen from Turin on the
+right hand of the gorge of the Cenis, dominant over the low projecting
+pyramid of the hill called by De Saussure Montagne de Musinet.
+Rocca-Melone rises to a height of 11,000 feet above the sea, and its
+peak is a place of pilgrimage to this day, though it seems temporarily
+to have ceased to be so in the time of De Saussure, who thus speaks of
+it:
+
+"Il y a eu pendant longtemps sur cette cime, une petite chapelle avec
+une image de Notre Dame qui étoit en grande vénération dans le pays, et
+où un grand nombre de gens alloient au mois d'août en procession, de
+Suze et des environs; mais le sentier qui conduit à cette chapelle est
+si étroit et si scabreux qu'il n'y avoit presque pas d'années qu'il n'y
+périt du monde; la fatigue et la rareté de l'air saisissoient ceux qui
+avoient plutôt consulté leur dévotion que leurs forces; ils tombérent en
+défalliance, et de là dans le précipice."
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+ART.
+
+V.
+
+THE CESTUS OF AGLAIA.
+
+
+(_Art Journal, January-July 1865; January, February, and April 1866._)
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE CESTUS OF AGLAIA.
+
+
+   "[Greek: Poikilon ô eni panta teteuchatai oude se phêmi
+   Aprêkton ge neesthai, ho ti phresi sêsi menoinas.]"
+
+   (HOM. _Il._ xiv. 220-21.)
+
+
+
+
+PREFATORY.[62]
+
+
+25. Not many months ago, a friend, whose familiarity with both living
+and past schools of Art rendered his opinion of great authority, said
+casually to me in the course of talk, "I believe we have now as able
+painters as ever lived; but they never paint as good pictures as were
+once painted." That was the substance of his saying; I forget the exact
+words, but their tenor surprised me, and I have thought much of them
+since. Without pressing the statement too far, or examining it with an
+unintended strictness, this I believe to be at all events true, that we
+have men among us, now in Europe, who might have been noble painters,
+and are not; men whose doings are altogether as wonderful in skill, as
+inexhaustible in fancy, as the work of the really great painters; and
+yet these doings of theirs are not great. Shall I write the commonplace
+that rings in sequence in my ear, and draws on my hand--"are not Great,
+for they are not (in the broad human and ethical sense) Good"? I write
+it, and ask forgiveness for the truism, with its implied
+uncharitableness of blame; for this trite thing is ill understood and
+little thought upon by any of us, and the implied blame is divided among
+us all; only let me at once partly modify it, and partly define.
+
+26. In one sense, modern Art has more goodness in it than ever Art had
+before. Its kindly spirit, its quick sympathy with pure domestic and
+social feeling, the occasional seriousness of its instructive purpose,
+and its honest effort to grasp the reality of conceived scenes, are all
+eminently "good," as compared with the insane picturesqueness and
+conventional piety of many among the old masters. Such domestic
+painting, for instance, as Richter's in Germany, Edward Frere's in
+France, and Hook's in England, together with such historical and ideal
+work as----perhaps the reader would be offended with me were I to set
+down the several names that occur to me here, so I will set down one
+only, and say--as that of Paul de la Roche; such work, I repeat, as
+these men have done, or are doing, is entirely good in its influence on
+the public mind; and may, in thankful exultation, be compared with the
+renderings of besotted, vicious, and vulgar human life perpetrated by
+Dutch painters, or with the deathful formalism and fallacy of what was
+once called "Historical Art." Also, this gentleness and veracity of
+theirs, being in part communicable, are gradually learned, though in a
+somewhat servile manner, yet not without a sincere sympathy, by many
+inferior painters, so that our exhibitions and currently popular books
+are full of very lovely and pathetic ideas, expressed with a care, and
+appealing to an interest, quite unknown in past times. I will take two
+instances of merely average power, as more illustrative of what I mean
+than any more singular and distinguished work could be. Last year, in
+the British Institution, there were two pictures by the same painter,
+one of a domestic, the other of a sacred subject. I will say nothing of
+the way in which they were painted; it may have been bad, or good, or
+neither: it is not to my point. I wish to direct attention only to the
+conception of them. One, "Cradled in his Calling," was of a fisherman
+and his wife, and helpful grown-up son, and helpless new-born little
+one; the two men carrying the young child up from the shore, rocking it
+between them in the wet net for a hammock, the mother looking on
+joyously, and the baby laughing. The thought was pretty and good, and
+one might go on dreaming over it long--not unprofitably. But the second
+picture was more interesting. I describe it only in the circumstances
+of the invented scene--sunset after the crucifixion. The bodies have
+been taken away, and the crosses are left lying on the broken earth; a
+group of children have strayed up the hill, and stopped beside them in
+such shadowy awe as is possible to childhood, and they have picked up
+one or two of the drawn nails to feel how sharp they are. Meantime a
+girl with her little brother--goat-herds both--have been watering their
+flock at Kidron, and are driving it home. The girl, strong in grace and
+honor of youth, carrying her pitcher of water on her erect head, has
+gone on past the place steadily, minding her flock; but her little
+curly-headed brother, with cheeks of burning Eastern brown, has lingered
+behind to look, and is feeling the point of one of the nails, held in
+another child's hand. A lovely little kid of the goats has stayed behind
+to keep him company, and is amusing itself by jumping backwards and
+forwards over an arm of the cross. The sister looks back, and, wondering
+what he can have stopped in that dreadful place for, waves her hand for
+the little boy to come away.
+
+I have no hesitation in saying that, as compared with the ancient and
+stereotyped conceptions of the "Taking down from the Cross," there is a
+living feeling in that picture which is of great price. It may perhaps
+be weak, nay, even superficial, or untenable--that will depend on the
+other conditions of character out of which it springs--but, so far as it
+reaches, it is pure and good; and we may gain more by looking
+thoughtfully at such a picture than at any even of the least formal
+types of the work of older schools. It would be unfair to compare it
+with first-rate, or even approximately first-rate designs; but even
+accepting such unjust terms, put it beside Rembrandt's ghastly white
+sheet, laid over the two poles at the Cross-foot, and see which has most
+good in it for you of any communicable kind.
+
+27. I trust, then, that I fully admit whatever may, on due deliberation,
+be alleged in favor of modern Art. Nay, I have heretofore asserted more
+for some modern Art than others were disposed to admit, nor do I
+withdraw one word from such assertion. But when all has been said and
+granted that may be, there remains this painful fact to be dealt
+with,--the consciousness, namely, both in living artists themselves and
+in us their admirers, that something, and that not a little, is wrong
+with us; that they, relentlessly examined, could not say they thoroughly
+knew how to paint, and that we, relentlessly examined, could not say we
+thoroughly know how to judge. The best of our painters will look a
+little to us, the beholders, for confirmation of his having done well.
+We, appealed to, look to each other to see what we ought to say. If we
+venture to find fault, however submissively, the artist will probably
+feel a little uncomfortable: he will by no means venture to meet us with
+a serenely crushing "Sir, it cannot be better done," in the manner of
+Albert Dürer. And yet, if it could not be better done, he, of all men,
+should know that best, nor fear to say so; it is good for himself, and
+for us, that he should assert that, if he knows that. The last time my
+dear old friend William Hunt came to see me, I took down one of his
+early drawings for him to see (three blue plums and one amber one, and
+two nuts). So he looked at it, happily, for a minute or two and then
+said, "Well, it's very nice, isn't it? I did not think I could have done
+so well." The saying was entirely right, exquisitely modest and true;
+only I fear he would not have had the courage to maintain that his
+drawing was good, if anybody had been there to say otherwise. Still,
+having done well, he knew it; and what is more no man ever does do well
+without knowing it: he may not know _how_ well, nor be conscious of the
+best of his own qualities; nor measure, or care to measure, the relation
+of his power to that of other men, but he will know that what he has
+done is, in an intended, accomplished, and ascertainable degree, good.
+Every able and honest workman, as he wins a right to rest, so he wins a
+right to approval,--his own if no one's beside; nay, his only true rest
+_is_ in the calm consciousness that the thing has been honorably
+done--[Greek: suneidêsis hoti kalon]. I do not use the Greek words in
+pedantry, I want them for future service and interpretation; no English
+words, nor any of any other language, would do as well. For I mean to
+try to show, and believe I _can_ show, that a simple and sure conviction
+of our having done rightly is not only an attainable, but a necessary
+seal and sign of our having so done; and that the doing well or rightly,
+and ill or wrongly, are both conditions of the whole being of each
+person, coming of a nature in him which affects all things that he may
+do, from the least to the greatest, according to the noble old phrase
+for the conquering rightness, of "integrity," "wholeness," or
+"wholesomeness." So that when we do external things (that are our
+business) ill, it is a sign that internal, and, in fact, that all
+things, are ill with us; and when we do external things well, it is a
+sign that internal and all things are well with us. And I believe there
+are two principal adversities to this wholesomeness of work, and to all
+else that issues out of wholeness of inner character, with which we have
+in these days specially to contend. The first is the variety of Art
+round us, tempting us to thoughtless imitation; the second our own want
+of belief in the existence of a rule of right.
+
+28. I. I say the first is the variety of Art around us. No man can
+pursue his own track in peace, nor obtain consistent guidance, if
+doubtful of his track. All places are full of inconsistent example, all
+mouths of contradictory advice, all prospects of opposite temptations.
+The young artist sees myriads of things he would like to do, but cannot
+learn from their authors how they were done, nor choose decisively any
+method which he may follow with the accuracy and confidence necessary to
+success. He is not even sure if his thoughts are his own; for the whole
+atmosphere round him is full of floating suggestion: those which are his
+own he cannot keep pure, for he breathes a dust of decayed ideas, wreck
+of the souls of dead nations, driven by contrary winds. He may stiffen
+himself (and all the worse for him) into an iron self-will, but if the
+iron has any magnetism in it, he cannot pass a day without finding
+himself, at the end of it, instead of sharpened or tempered, covered
+with a ragged fringe of iron filings. If there be anything better than
+iron--living wood fiber--in him, he cannot be allowed any natural
+growth, but gets hacked in every extremity, and bossed over with lumps
+of frozen clay;--grafts of incongruous blossom that will never set;
+while some even recognize no need of knife or clay (though both are good
+in a gardener's hand), but deck themselves out with incongruous
+glittering, like a Christmas-tree. Even were the style chosen true to
+his own nature, and persisted in, there is harm in the very eminence of
+the models set before him at the beginning of his career. If he feels
+their power, they make him restless and impatient, it may be despondent,
+it may be madly and fruitlessly ambitious. If he does not feel it, he is
+sure to be struck by what is weakest or slightest of their peculiar
+qualities; fancies that _this_ is what they are praised for; tries to
+catch the trick of it; and whatever easy vice or mechanical habit the
+master may have been betrayed or warped into, the unhappy pupil watches
+and adopts, triumphant in its ease:--has not sense to steal the
+peacock's feather, but imitates its voice. Better for him, far better,
+never to have seen what had been accomplished by others, but to have
+gained gradually his own quiet way, or at least with his guide only a
+step in advance of him, and the lantern low on the difficult path.
+Better even, it has lately seemed, to be guideless and lightless;
+fortunate those who, by desolate effort, trying hither and thither, have
+groped their way to some independent power. So, from Cornish rock, from
+St. Giles's Lane, from Thames mudshore, you get your Prout, your Hunt,
+your Turner; not, indeed, any of them well able to spell English, nor
+taught so much of their own business as to lay a color safely; but yet
+at last, or first, doing somehow something, wholly ineffective on the
+national mind, yet real, and valued at last after they are dead, in
+money;--valued otherwise not even at so much as the space of dead brick
+wall it would cover; their work being left for years packed in parcels
+at the National Gallery, or hung conclusively out of sight under the
+shadowy iron vaults of Kensington. The men themselves, quite
+inarticulate, determine nothing of their Art, interpret nothing of their
+own minds; teach perhaps a trick or two of their stage business in
+early life--as, for instance, that it is good where there is much black
+to break it with white, and where there is much white to break it with
+black, etc., etc.; in later life remain silent altogether, or speak only
+in despair (fretful or patient according to their character); one who
+might have been among the best of them,[63] the last we heard of,
+finding refuge for an entirely honest heart from a world which declares
+honesty to be impossible, only in a madness nearly as sorrowful as its
+own;--the religious madness which makes a beautiful soul ludicrous and
+ineffectual; and so passes away, bequeathing for our inheritance from
+its true and strong life, a pretty song about a tiger, another about a
+bird-cage, two or three golden couplets, which no one will ever take the
+trouble to understand,--the spiritual portrait of the ghost of a
+flea,--and the critical opinion that "the unorganized blots of Rubens
+and Titian are not Art." Which opinion the public mind perhaps not
+boldly indorsing, is yet incapable of pronouncing adversely to it, that
+the said blots of Titian and Rubens _are_ Art, perceiving for itself
+little good in them, and hanging _them_ also well out of its way, at
+tops of walls (Titian's portrait of Charles V. at Munich, for example;
+Tintoret's Susannah, and Veronese's Magdalen, in the Louvre), that it
+may have room and readiness for what may be generally termed "railroad
+work," bearing on matters more immediately in hand; said public looking
+to the present pleasure of its fancy, and the portraiture of itself in
+official and otherwise imposing or entertaining circumstances, as the
+only "Right" cognizable by it.
+
+29. II. And this is a deeper source of evil, by far, than the former
+one, for though it is ill for us to strain towards a right for which we
+have never ripened it is worse for us to believe in no right at all.
+"Anything," we say, "that a clever man can do to amuse us is good; what
+does not amuse us we do not want. Taste is assuredly a frivolous,
+apparently a dangerous gift; vicious persons and vicious nations have
+it; we are a practical people, content to know what we like, wise in
+not liking it too much, and when tired of it, wise in getting something
+we like better. Painting is of course an agreeable ornamental Art,
+maintaining a number of persons respectably, deserving therefore
+encouragement, and getting it pecuniarily, to a hitherto unheard-of
+extent. What would you have more?" This is, I believe, very nearly our
+Art-creed. The fact being (very ascertainably by anyone who will take
+the trouble to examine the matter), that there is a cultivated Art among
+all great nations, inevitably necessary to them as the fulfillment of
+one part of their human nature. None but savage nations are without Art,
+and civilized nations who do their Art ill, do it because there is
+something deeply wrong at their hearts. They paint badly as a paralyzed
+man stammers, because his life is touched somewhere within; when the
+deeper life is full in a people, they speak clearly and rightly; paint
+clearly and rightly; think clearly and rightly. There is some reverse
+effect, but very little. Good pictures do not teach a nation; they are
+the signs of its having been taught. Good thoughts do not form a nation;
+it must be formed before it can think them. Let it once decay at the
+heart, and its good work and good thoughts will become subtle luxury and
+aimless sophism; and it and they will perish together.
+
+30. It is my purpose, therefore, in some subsequent papers, with such
+help as I may anywise receive, to try if there may not be determined
+some of the simplest laws which are indeed binding on Art practice and
+judgment. Beginning with elementary principle, and proceeding upwards as
+far as guiding laws are discernible, I hope to show, that if we do not
+yet know them, there are at least such laws to be known, and that it is
+of a deep and intimate importance to any people, especially to the
+English at this time, that their children should be sincerely taught
+whatever arts they learn, and in riper age become capable of a just
+choice and wise pleasure in the accomplished works of the artist. But I
+earnestly ask for help in this task. It is one which can only come to
+good issue by the consent and aid of many thinkers; and I would, with
+the permission of the Editor of this Journal, invite debate on the
+subject of each paper, together with brief and clear statements of
+consent or objection, with name of consenter or objector; so that after
+courteous discussion had, and due correction of the original statement,
+we may get something at last set down, as harmoniously believed by such
+and such known artists. If nothing can thus be determined, at least the
+manner and variety of dissent will show whether it is owing to the
+nature of the subject, or to the impossibility, under present
+circumstances, that different persons should approach it from similar
+points of view; and the inquiry, whatever its immediate issue, cannot be
+ultimately fruitless.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[62] _Art Journal_, New Series, vol. iv., pp. 5-6. January 1865.--ED.
+
+[63] See p. 353, § 83, for a further mention of William Blake.--ED.
+
+
+
+
+THE CESTUS OF AGLAIA
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.[64]
+
+
+31. Our knowledge of human labor, if intimate enough, will, I think,
+mass it for the most part into two kinds--mining and molding; the labor
+that seeks for things, and the labor that shapes them. Of these the last
+should be always orderly, for we ought to have some conception of the
+whole of what we have to make before we try to make any part of it; but
+the labor of seeking must be often methodless, following the veins of
+the mine as they branch, or trying for them where they are broken. And
+the mine, which we would now open into the souls of men, as they govern
+the mysteries of their handicrafts, being rent into many dark and
+divided ways, it is not possible to map our work beforehand, or resolve
+on its directions. We will not attempt to bind ourselves to any
+methodical treatment of our subject, but will get at the truths of it
+here and there, as they seem extricable; only, though we cannot know to
+what depth we may have to dig, let us know clearly what we are digging
+for. We desire to find by what rule some Art is called good, and other
+Art bad: we desire to find the conditions of character in the artist
+which are essentially connected with the goodness of his work: we desire
+to find what are the methods of practice which form this character or
+corrupt it; and finally, how the formation or corruption of this
+character is connected with the general prosperity of nations.
+
+32. And all this we want to learn practically: not for mere pleasant
+speculation on things that have been; but for instant direction of those
+that are yet to be. My first object is to get at some fixed principles
+for the teaching of Art to our youth; and I am about to ask, of all who
+may be able to give me a serviceable answer, and with and for all who
+are anxious for such answer, what arts should be generally taught to the
+English boy and girl,--by what methods,--and to what ends? How well, or
+how imperfectly, our youth of the higher classes should be disciplined
+in the practice of music and painting?--how far, among the lower
+classes, exercise in certain mechanical arts might become a part of
+their school life?--how far, in the adult life of this nation, the Fine
+Arts may advisably supersede or regulate the mechanical Arts? Plain
+questions these, enough; clearly also important ones; and, as clearly,
+boundless ones--mountainous--infinite in contents--only to be mined into
+in a scrambling manner by poor inquirers, as their present tools and
+sight may serve.
+
+33. I have often been accused of dogmatism, and confess to the holding
+strong opinions on some matters; but I tell the reader in sincerity, and
+entreat him in sincerity to believe, that I do not think myself able to
+dictate anything positive respecting questions of this magnitude. The
+one thing I am sure of is, the need of some form of dictation; or, where
+that is as yet impossible, at least of consistent experiment, for the
+just solution of doubts which present themselves every day in more
+significant and more impatient temper of interrogation.
+
+Here is one, for instance, lying at the base of all the rest--namely,
+what may be the real dignity of mechanical Art itself? I cannot express
+the amazed awe, the crushed humility, with which I sometimes watch a
+locomotive take its breath at a railway station, and think what work
+there is in its bars and wheels, and what manner of men they must be who
+dig brown iron-stone out of the ground, and forge it into THAT! What
+assemblage of accurate and mighty faculties in them; more than fleshly
+power over melting crag and coiling fire, fettered, and finessed at last
+into the precision of watchmaking; Titanian hammer-strokes beating, out
+of lava, these glittering cylinders and timely-respondent valves, and
+fine ribbed rods, which touch each other as a serpent writhes, in
+noiseless gliding, and omnipotence of grasp; infinitely complex anatomy
+of active steel, compared with which the skeleton of a living creature
+would seem, to a careless observer, clumsy and vile--a mere morbid
+secretion and phosphatous prop of flesh! What would the men who thought
+out this--who beat it out, who touched it into its polished calm of
+power, who set it to its appointed task, and triumphantly saw it fulfill
+this task to the utmost of their will--feel or think about this weak
+hand of mine, timidly leading a little stain of water-color, which I
+cannot manage, into an imperfect shadow of something else--mere failure
+in every motion, and endless disappointment; what, I repeat, would these
+Iron-dominant Genii think of me? and what ought I to think of them?
+
+34. But as I reach this point of reverence, the unreasonable thing is
+sure to give a shriek as of a thousand unanimous vultures, which leaves
+me shuddering in real physical pain for some half minute following; and
+assures me, during slow recovery, that a people which can endure such
+fluting and piping among them is not likely soon to have its modest ear
+pleased by aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song. Perhaps I am then led
+on into meditation respecting the spiritual nature of the Tenth Muse,
+who invented this gracious instrument, and guides its modulation by
+stokers' fingers; meditation, also, as to the influence of her invention
+amidst the other parts of the Parnassian melody of English education.
+Then it cannot but occur to me to inquire how far this modern "pneuma,"
+Steam, may be connected with other pneumatic powers talked of in that
+old religious literature, of which we fight so fiercely to keep the
+letters bright, and the working valves, so to speak, in good order
+(while we let the steam of it all carefully off into the cold
+condenser), what connection, I say, this modern "spiritus," in its
+valve-directed inspiration, has with that more ancient spiritus, or warm
+breath, which people used to think they might be "born of." Whether, in
+fine, there be any such thing as an entirely human Art, with spiritual
+motive power, and signal as of human voice, distinct inherently from
+this mechanical Art, with its mechanical motive force, and signal of
+vulture voice. For after all, this shrieking thing, whatever the fine
+make of it may be, can but pull or push, and do oxen's work in an
+impetuous manner. That proud king of Assyria, who lost his reason, and
+ate oxen's food, would he have much more cause for pride, if he had been
+allowed to spend his reason in doing oxen's work?
+
+35. These things, then, I would fain consult about, and plead with the
+reader for his patience in council, even while we begin with the
+simplest practical matters; for raveled briers of thought entangle our
+feet, even at our first step. We would teach a boy to draw. Well, what
+shall he draw?--Gods, or men, or beasts, or clouds, or leaves, or iron
+cylinders? Are there any gods to be drawn? any men or women worth
+drawing, or only worth caricaturing? What are the æsthetic laws
+respecting iron cylinders; and would Titian have liked them rusty, or
+fresh cleaned with oil and rag, to fill the place once lightened by St.
+George's armor? How can we begin the smallest practical business, unless
+we get first some whisper of answer to such questions? We may tell a boy
+to draw a straight line straight, and a crooked one crooked; but what
+else?
+
+And it renders the dilemma, or multilemma, more embarrassing, that
+whatever teaching is to be had from the founders and masters of art is
+quite unpractical. The first source from which we should naturally seek
+for guidance would, of course, be the sayings of great workmen; but a
+sorrowful perception presently dawns on us that the great workmen have
+nothing to say. They are silent, absolutely in proportion to their
+creative power. The contributions to our practical knowledge
+of the principles of Art, furnished by the true captains of its
+hosts, may, I think, be arithmetically summed by the +O+ of
+Giotto: the inferior teachers become didactic in the degree of their
+inferiority; and those who can do nothing have always much to advise.
+
+36. This however, observe, is only true of advice direct. You never, I
+grieve to say, get from the great men a plain answer to a plain
+question; still less can you entangle them in any agreeable gossip, out
+of which something might unawares be picked up. But of enigmatical
+teaching, broken signs and sullen mutterings, of which you can
+understand nothing, and may make anything;--of confused discourse in the
+work itself, about the work, as in Dürer's Melancolia;--and of discourse
+not merely confused, but apparently unreasonable and ridiculous, about
+all manner of things _except_ the work,--the great Egyptian and Greek
+artists give us much: from which, however, all that by utmost industry
+may be gathered, comes briefly to this,--that they have no conception of
+what modern men of science call the "Conservation of forces," but deduce
+all the force they feel in themselves, and hope for in others, from
+certain fountains or centers of perpetually supplied strength, to which
+they give various names: as, for instance, these seven following, more
+specially:--
+
+     1. The Spirit of Light, moral and physical, by name the
+     "Physician-Destroyer," bearing arrows in his hand, and a lyre;
+     pre-eminently the destroyer of human pride, and the guide of human
+     harmony. Physically, Lord of the Sun; and a mountain Spirit,
+     because the sun seems first to rise and set upon hills.
+
+     2. The Spirit of helpful Darkness--of shade and rest. Night the
+     Restorer.
+
+     3. The Spirit of Wisdom in _Conduct_, bearing, in sign of conquest
+     over troublous and disturbing evil, the skin of the wild goat, and
+     the head of the slain Spirit of physical storm. In her hand, a
+     weaver's shuttle, or a spear.
+
+     4. The Spirit of Wisdom in _Arrangement_; called the Lord or Father
+     of Truth: throned on a four-square cubit, with a measuring-rod in
+     his hand, or a potter's wheel.
+
+     5. The Spirit of Wisdom in _Adaptation_; or of serviceable labor:
+     the Master of human effort in its glow; and Lord of useful fire,
+     moral and physical.
+
+     6. The Spirit, first of young or nascent grace, and then of
+     fulfilled beauty: the wife of the Lord of Labor. I have taken the
+     two lines in which Homer describes her girdle, for the motto of
+     these essays: partly in memory of these outcast fancies of the
+     great masters: and partly for the sake of a meaning which we shall
+     find as we go on.
+
+     7. The Spirit of pure human life and gladness. Master of wholesome
+     vital passion; and physically, Lord of the Vine.
+
+
+37. From these ludicrous notions of motive force, inconsistent as they
+are with modern physiology and organic chemistry, we may, nevertheless,
+hereafter gather, in the details of their various expressions, something
+useful to us. But I grieve to say that when our provoking teachers
+descend from dreams about the doings of Gods to assertions respecting
+the deeds of Men, little beyond the blankest discouragement is to be had
+from them. Thus, they represent the ingenuity, and deceptive or
+imitative Arts of men, under the type of a Master who builds labyrinths,
+and makes images of living creatures, for evil purposes, or for none;
+and pleases himself and the people with idle jointing of toys, and
+filling of them with quicksilver motion; and brings his child to
+foolish, remediless catastrophe, in fancying his father's work as good,
+and strong, and fit to bear sunlight, as if it had been God's work. So,
+again, they represent the foresight and kindly zeal of men by a most
+rueful figure of one chained down to a rock by the brute force and bias
+and methodical hammer-stroke of the merely practical Arts, and by the
+merciless Necessities or Fates of present time; and so having his very
+heart torn piece by piece out of him by a vulturous hunger and sorrow,
+respecting things he cannot reach, nor prevent, nor achieve. So, again,
+they describe the sentiment and pure soul-power of Man, as moving the
+very rocks and trees, and giving them life, by its sympathy with them;
+but losing its own best-beloved thing by mere venomous accident: and
+afterwards going down to hell for it, in vain; being impatient and
+unwise, though full of gentleness; and, in the issue, after as vainly
+trying to teach this gentleness to others, and to guide them out of
+their lower passions to sunlight of true healing Life, it drives the
+sensual heart of them, and the gods that govern it, into mere and pure
+frenzy of resolved rage, and gets torn to pieces by them, and ended;
+only the nightingale staying by its grave to sing. All which appearing
+to be anything rather than helpful or encouraging instruction for
+beginners, we shall, for the present, I think, do well to desire these
+enigmatical teachers to put up their pipes and be gone; and betaking
+ourselves in the humblest manner to intelligible business, at least set
+down some definite matter for decision, to be made a first
+stepping-stone at the shore of this brook of despond and difficulty.
+
+38. Most masters agree (and I believe they are right) that the first
+thing to be taught to any pupil, is how to draw an outline of such
+things as can be outlined.
+
+Now, there are two kinds of outline--the soft and hard. One must be
+executed with a soft instrument, as a piece of chalk or lead; and the
+other with some instrument producing for ultimate result a firm line of
+equal darkness; as a pen with ink, or the engraving tool on wood or
+metal.
+
+And these two kinds of outline have both of them their particular
+objects and uses, as well as their proper scale of size in work. Thus
+Raphael will sketch a miniature head with his pen, but always takes
+chalk if he draws of the size of life. So also Holbein, and generally
+the other strong masters.
+
+But the black outline seems to be peculiarly that which we ought to
+begin to reason upon, because it is simple and open-hearted, and does
+not endeavor to escape into mist. A pencil line may be obscurely and
+undemonstrably wrong; false in a cowardly manner, and without
+confession: but the ink line, if it goes wrong at all, goes wrong with a
+will, and may be convicted at our leisure, and put to such shame as its
+black complexion is capable of. May we, therefore, begin with the hard
+line? It will lead us far, if we can come to conclusions about it.
+
+39. Presuming, then, that our schoolboys are such as Coleridge would
+have them--_i.e._ that they are
+
+           "Innocent, steady, and wise,
+   And delight in the things of earth, water, and skies,"
+
+and, above all, in a moral state in which they may be trusted with
+ink--we put a pen into their hands (shall it be steel?) and a piece of
+smooth white paper, and something before them to draw. But what? "Nay,"
+the reader answers, "you had surely better give them pencil first, for
+that may be rubbed out." Perhaps so; but I am not sure that the power of
+rubbing out is an advantage; at all events, we shall best discover what
+the pencil outline ought to be, by investigating the power of the black
+one, and the kind of things we can draw with it.
+
+40. Suppose, for instance, my first scholar has a turn for entomology,
+and asks me to draw for him a wasp's leg, or its sting; having first
+humanely provided me with a model by pulling one off or out. My pen must
+clearly be fine at the point, and my execution none of the boldest, if I
+comply with his request. If I decline, and he thereupon challenges me at
+least to draw the wasp's body, with its pretty bands of black
+crinoline--behold us involved instantly in the profound question of
+local color! Am I to tell him he is not to draw outlines of bands or
+spots? How, then, shall he know a wasp's body from a bee's? I escape,
+for the present, by telling him the story of Dædalus and the honeycomb;
+set him to draw a pattern of hexagons, and lay the question of black
+bands up in my mind.
+
+41. The next boy, we may suppose, is a conchologist, and asks me to draw
+a white snail-shell for him! Veiling my consternation at the idea of
+having to give a lesson on the perspective of geometrical spirals, with
+an "austere regard of control" I pass on to the next student:--Who,
+bringing after him, with acclamation, all the rest of the form,
+requires of me contemptuously, to "draw a horse."
+
+And I retreat in final discomfiture; for not only I cannot myself
+execute, but I have never seen, an outline, quite simply and rightly
+done, either of a shell or a pony; nay, not so much as of a pony's nose.
+At a girls' school we might perhaps take refuge in rosebuds: but these
+boys, with their impatient battle-cry, "my kingdom for a horse," what is
+to be done for them?
+
+42. Well, this is what I should like to be able to do for them. To show
+them an enlarged black outline, nobly done, of the two sides of a coin
+of Tarentum, with that fiery rider kneeling, careless, on his horse's
+neck, and reclined on his surging dolphin, with the curled sea lapping
+round them; and then to convince my boys that no one (unless it were
+Taras's father himself, with the middle prong of his trident) could draw
+a horse like that, without learning;--that for poor mortals like us
+there must be sorrowful preparatory stages; and, having convinced them
+of this, set them to draw (if I had a good copy to give them) a horse's
+hoof, or his rib, or a vertebra of his thunder-clothed neck, or any
+other constructive piece of him.
+
+43. Meanwhile, all this being far out of present reach, I am fain to
+shrink back into my snail-shell, both for shelter and calm of peace; and
+ask of artists in general how the said shell, or any other simple object
+involving varied contour, _should_ be outlined in ink?--how thick the
+lines should be, and how varied? My own idea of an elementary outline is
+that it should be unvaried; distinctly visible; not thickened towards
+the shaded sides of the object; not express any exaggerations of aërial
+perspective, nor fade at the further side of a cup as if it were the
+further side of a crater of a volcano; and therefore, in objects of
+ordinary size, show no gradation at all, unless where the real outline
+disappears, as in soft contours and folds. Nay, I think it may even be a
+question whether we ought not to resolve that the line should never
+gradate itself at all, but terminate quite bluntly! Albert Dürer's
+"Cannon" furnishes a very peculiar and curious example of this entirely
+equal line, even to the extreme distance; being in that respect opposed
+to nearly all his other work, which is wrought mostly by tapering lines;
+and his work in general, and Holbein's, which appear to me entirely
+typical of rightness in use of the graver and pen, are to be considered
+carefully in their relation to Rembrandt's loose etching, as in the
+"Spotted Shell."
+
+44. But I do not want to press my own opinions now, even when I have
+been able to form them distinctly. I want to get at some unanimous
+expression of opinion and method; and would propose, therefore, in all
+modesty, this question for discussion, by such artists as will favor me
+with answer,[65] giving their names:--_How ought the pen to be used to
+outline a form of varied contour; and ought outline to be entirely pure,
+or, even in its most elementary types, to pass into some suggestion of
+shade in the inner masses?_ For there are no examples whatever of pure
+outlines by the great masters. They are always touched or modified by
+inner lines, more or less suggestive of solid form, and they are lost or
+accentuated in certain places, not so much in conformity with any
+explicable law, as in expression of the master's future purpose, or of
+what he wishes immediately to note in the character of the object. Most
+of them are irregular memoranda, not systematic elementary work: of
+those which are systematized, the greater part are carried far beyond
+the initiative stage; and Holbein's are nearly all washed with color:
+the exact degree in which he depends upon the softening and extending
+his touch of ink by subsequent solution of it, being indeterminable,
+though exquisitely successful. His stupendous drawings in the British
+Museum (I can justly use no other term than "stupendous," of their
+consummately decisive power) furnish finer instances of this treatment
+than any at Basle; but it would be very difficult to reduce them to a
+definable law. Venetian outlines are rare, except preparations on
+canvas, often shaded before coloring;--while Raphael's, if not shaded,
+are quite loose, and useless as examples to a beginner: so that we are
+left wholly without guide as to the preparatory steps on which we should
+decisively insist; and I am myself haunted by the notion that the
+students were forced to shade firmly from the very beginning, in all the
+greatest schools; only we never can get hold of any beginnings, or any
+weak work of those schools: whatever is bad in them comes of decadence,
+not infancy.
+
+45. I purpose in the next essay[66] to enter upon quite another part of
+the inquiry, so as to leave time for the reception of communications
+bearing upon the present paper: and, according to their importance, I
+shall ask leave still to defer our return to the subject until I have
+had time to reflect upon them, and to collect for public service the
+concurrent opinions they may contain.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[64] _Art Journal_, vol. iv., pp. 33-5. February 1865. The first word
+being printed in plain capitals instead of with an ornamental initial
+letter generally used by the _Art Journal_, the following note was added
+by the author:--"I beg the Editor's and reader's pardon for an
+informality in the type; but I shrink from ornamental letters, and have
+begged for a legible capital instead."--ED.
+
+[65] I need not say that this inquiry can only be pursued by the help of
+those who will take it up good-humoredly and graciously: such help I
+will receive in the spirit in which it is given; entering into no
+controversy, but questioning further where there is doubt: gathering all
+I can into focus, and passing silently by what seems at last
+irreconcilable.
+
+[66] This essay, Chapter II. in the _Art Journal_, is here omitted as
+having been already reprinted with only a few verbal alterations in _The
+Queen of the Air_, §§ 135 to 142 inclusive, which see. The _Art
+Journal_, however, contained a final paragraph, introductory of Chapter
+III., which is omitted in _The Queen of the Air_, and was as
+follows:--"To the discernment of this law" (_i.e._, that to which the
+arts are subject, see _Queen of the Air_, § 142) "we will now address
+ourselves slowly, beginning with the consideration of little things, and
+of easily definable virtues. And since Patience is the pioneer of all
+the others, I shall endeavor in the next paper to show how that modest
+virtue has been either held of no account, or else set to vilest work in
+our modern Art-schools; and what harm has resulted from such disdain, or
+such employment of her."--ED.
+
++----------------------------------------+
+|Transcriber's note:                     |
+|                                        |
+|Chapter II is missing from the original.|
++----------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.[67]
+
+   "Dame Paciencë sitting there I fonde,
+   With facë pale, upon an hill of sonde."
+
+
+46. As I try to summon this vision of Chaucer's into definiteness, and
+as it fades before me, and reappears, like the image of Piccarda in the
+moon, there mingles with it another;--the image of an Italian child,
+lying, she also, upon a hill of sand, by Eridanus' side; a vision which
+has never quite left me since I saw it. A girl of ten or twelve, it
+might be; one of the children to whom there has never been any other
+lesson taught than that of patience:--patience of famine and thirst;
+patience of heat and cold; patience of fierce word and sullen blow;
+patience of changeless fate and giftless time. She was lying with her
+arms thrown back over her head, all languid and lax, on an earth-heap by
+the river side (the softness of the dust being the only softness she had
+ever known), in the southern suburb of Turin, one golden afternoon in
+August, years ago. She had been at play, after her fashion, with other
+patient children, and had thrown herself down to rest, full in the sun,
+like a lizard. The sand was mixed with the draggled locks of her black
+hair, and some of it sprinkled over her face and body, in an
+"ashes to ashes" kind of way; a few black rags about her loins,
+but her limbs nearly bare, and her little breasts, scarce dimpled
+yet,--white,--marble-like--but, as wasted marble, thin with the
+scorching and the rains of Time. So she lay, motionless; black and white
+by the shore in the sun; the yellow light flickering back upon her from
+the passing eddies of the river, and burning down on her from the west.
+So she lay, like a dead Niobid: it seemed as if the Sun-God, as he sank
+towards gray Viso (who stood pale in the southwest, and pyramidal as a
+tomb), had been wroth with Italy for numbering her children too
+carefully, and slain this little one. Black and white she lay, all
+breathless, in a sufficiently pictorial manner: the gardens of the Villa
+Regina gleamed beyond, graceful with laurel-grove and labyrinthine
+terrace; and folds of purple mountain were drawn afar, for curtains
+round her little dusty bed.
+
+47. Pictorial enough, I repeat; and yet I might not now have remembered
+her, so as to find her figure mingling, against my will, with other
+images, but for her manner of "revival." For one of her playmates coming
+near, cast some word at her which angered her; and she rose--"en ego,
+victa situ"--she rose with a single spring, like a snake; one hardly saw
+the motion; and with a shriek so shrill that I put my hands upon my
+ears; and so uttered herself, indignant and vengeful, with words of
+justice,--Alecto standing by, satisfied, teaching her acute, articulate
+syllables, and adding her own voice to carry them thrilling through the
+blue laurel shadows. And having spoken, she went her way, wearily: and I
+passed by on the other side, meditating, with such Levitical propriety
+as a respectable person should, on the asplike Passion, following the
+sorrowful Patience; and on the way in which the saying, "Dust shalt thou
+eat all thy days" has been confusedly fulfilled, first by much provision
+of human dust for the meat of what Keats calls "human serpentry;" and
+last, by gathering the Consumed and Consumer into dust together, for the
+meat of the death spirit, or serpent Apap. Neither could I, for long,
+get rid of the thought of this strange dust-manufacture under the
+mill-stones, as it were, of Death; and of the two colors of the grain,
+discriminate beneath, though indiscriminately cast into the hopper. For
+indeed some of it seems only to be made whiter for its patience, and
+becomes kneadable into spiced bread, where they sell in Babylonian
+shops "slaves, and souls of men;" but other some runs dark from under
+the mill-stones; a little sulphurous and nitrous foam being mingled in
+the conception of it; and is ominously stored up in magazines near
+river-embankments; patient enough--for the present.
+
+48. But it is provoking to me that the image of this child mingles
+itself now with Chaucer's; for I should like truly to know what Chaucer
+means by his sand-hill. Not but that this is just one of those
+enigmatical pieces of teaching which we have made up our minds not to be
+troubled with, since it may evidently mean just what we like. Sometimes
+I would fain have it to mean the ghostly sand of the horologe of the
+world: and I think that the pale figure is seated on the recording heap,
+which rises slowly, and ebbs in giddiness, and flows again, and rises,
+tottering; and still she sees, falling beside her, the never-ending
+stream of phantom sand. Sometimes I like to think that she is seated on
+the sand because she is herself the Spirit of Staying, and victor over
+all things that pass and change;--quicksand of the desert in moving
+pillar; quicksand of the sea in moving floor; roofless all, and
+unabiding, but she abiding;--to herself, her home. And sometimes I
+think, though I do not like to think (neither did Chaucer mean this, for
+he always meant the lovely thing first, not the low one), that she is
+seated on her sand-heap as the only treasure to be gained by human toil;
+and that the little ant-hill, where the best of us creep to and fro,
+bears to angelic eyes, in the patientest gathering of its galleries,
+only the aspect of a little heap of dust; while for the worst of us, the
+heap, still lower by the leveling of those winged surveyors, is high
+enough, nevertheless, to overhang, and at last to close in judgment, on
+the seventh day, over the journeyers to the fortunate Islands; while to
+their dying eyes, through the mirage, "the city sparkles like a grain of
+salt."
+
+49. But of course it does not in the least matter what it means. All
+that matters specially to us in Chaucer's vision, is that, next to
+Patience (as the reader will find by looking at the context in the
+"Assembly of Foules"), were "Beheste" and "Art;"--Promise, that is, and
+Art: and that, although these visionary powers are here waiting only in
+one of the outer courts of Love, and the intended patience is here only
+the long-suffering of love; and the intended beheste, its promise; and
+the intended art, its cunning,--the same powers companion each other
+necessarily in the courts and antechamber of every triumphal home of
+man. I say triumphal home, for, indeed, triumphal _arches_ which you
+pass under, are but foolish things, and may be nailed together any day,
+out of pasteboard and filched laurel; but triumphal _doors_, which you
+can enter in at, with living laurel crowning the Lares, are not so easy
+of access: and outside of them waits always this sad portress, Patience;
+that is to say, the submission to the eternal laws of Pain and Time, and
+acceptance of them as inevitable, smiling at the grief. So much pains
+you shall take--so much time you shall wait: that is the Law. Understand
+it, honor it; with peace of heart accept the pain, and attend the hours;
+and as the husbandman in his waiting, you shall see, first the blade,
+and then the ear, and then the laughing of the valleys. But refuse the
+Law, and seek to do your work in your own time, or by any serpentine way
+to evade the pain, and you shall have no harvest--nothing but apples of
+Sodom: dust shall be your meat, and dust in your throat--there is no
+singing in such harvest time.
+
+50. And this is true for all things, little and great. There is a time
+and a way in which they can be done: none shorter--none smoother. For
+all noble things, the time is long and the way rude. You may fret and
+fume as you will; for every start and struggle of impatience there shall
+be so much attendant failure; if impatience become a habit, nothing but
+failure: until on the path you have chosen for your better swiftness,
+rather than the honest flinty one, there shall follow you, fast at hand,
+instead of Beheste and Art for companions, those two wicked hags,
+
+   "With hoary locks all loose, and visage grim;
+   Their feet unshod, their bodies wrapt in rags,
+   And both as swift on foot as chased stags;
+   And yet the one her other legge had lame,
+   Which with a staff all full of little snags
+   She did support, and Impotence her name:
+   But th' other was Impatience, armed with raging flame."
+
+"_Raging_ flame," note; unserviceable;--flame of the black grain. But
+the fire which Patience carries in her hand is that truly stolen from
+Heaven, in the _pith_ of the rod--fire of the slow match; persistent
+Fire like it also in her own body,--fire in the marrow; unquenchable
+incense of life: though it may seem to the bystanders that there is no
+breath in her, and she holds herself like a statue, as Hermione, "the
+statue lady," or Griselda, "the stone lady;" unless indeed one looks
+close for the glance _forward_, in the eyes, which distinguishes such
+pillars from the pillars, not of flesh, but of salt, whose eyes are set
+backwards.
+
+51. I cannot get to my work in this paper, somehow; the web of these old
+enigmas entangles me again and again. That rough syllable which begins
+the name of Griselda, "Gries," "the stone;" the roar of the long fall of
+the Toccia seems to mix with the sound of it, bringing thoughts of the
+great Alpine patience; mute snow wreathed by gray rock, till avalanche
+time comes--patience of mute tormented races till the time of the Gray
+league came; at last impatient. (Not that, hitherto, it has hewn its way
+to much: the Rhine-foam of the Via Mala seeming to have done its work
+better.) But it is a noble color that Grison Gray;--dawn color--graceful
+for a faded silk to ride in, and wonderful, in paper, for getting a glow
+upon, if you begin wisely, as you may some day perhaps see by those
+Turner sketches at Kensington, if ever anybody can see them.
+
+52. But we _will_ get to work now; the work being to understand, if we
+may, what tender creatures are indeed riding with us, the British
+public, in faded silk, and handing our plates for us with tender little
+thumbs, and never wearing, or doing, anything else (not always having
+much to put on their own plates). The loveliest arts, the arts of
+noblest descent, have been long doing this for us, and are still, and we
+have no idea of their being Princesses, but keep them ill-entreated and
+enslaved: vociferous as we are against Black slavery, while we are
+gladly acceptant of Gray; and fain to keep Aglaia and her
+sisters--Urania and hers,--serving us in faded silk, and taken for
+kitchen-wenches. We are mad Sanchos, not mad Quixotes: our eyes enchant
+_Down_wards.
+
+53. For one instance only: has the reader ever reflected on the
+patience, and deliberate subtlety, and unostentatious will, involved in
+the ordinary process of steel engraving; that process of which engravers
+themselves now with doleful voices deplore the decline, and with
+sorrowful hearts expect the extinction, after their own days?
+
+By the way--my friends of the field of steel,--you need fear nothing of
+the kind. What there is of mechanical in your work; of habitual and
+thoughtless, of vulgar or servile--for that, indeed, the time has come;
+the sun will burn it up for you, very ruthlessly; but what there is of
+human liberty, and of sanguine life, in finger and fancy, is kindred of
+the sun, and quite inextinguishable by him. He is the very last of
+divinities who would wish to extinguish it. With his red right hand,
+though full of lightning coruscation, he will faithfully and tenderly
+clasp yours, warm blooded; you will see the vermilion in the
+flesh-shadows all the clearer; but your hand will not be withered. I
+tell you--(dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well)--a
+square inch of man's engraving is worth all the photographs that ever
+were dipped in acid (or left half-washed afterwards, which is saying
+much)--only it must be man's engraving; not machine's engraving. You
+have founded a school on patience and labor--only. That school must soon
+be extinct. You will have to found one on thought, which is Phoenician
+in immortality and fears no fire. Believe me, photography can do against
+line engraving just what Madame Tussaud's wax-work can do against
+sculpture. That, and no more. You are too timid in this matter; you are
+like Isaac in that picture of Mr. Schnorr's in the last number of this
+Journal, and with Teutonically metaphysical precaution, shade your eyes
+from the sun with your back to it. Take courage; turn your eyes to it
+in an aquiline manner; put more sunshine on your steel, and less burr;
+and leave the photographers to their Phoebus of Magnesium wire.
+
+54. Not that I mean to speak disrespectfully of magnesium. I honor it to
+its utmost fiery particle (though I think the soul a fierier one); and I
+wish the said magnesium all comfort and triumph; nightly-lodging in
+lighthouses, and utter victory over coal gas. Could Titian but have
+known what the gnomes who built his dolomite crags above Cadore had
+mixed in the make of them,--and that one day--one night, I mean--his
+blue distances would still be seen pure blue, by light got out of his
+own mountains!
+
+Light out of limestone--color out of coal--and white wings out of hot
+water! It is a great age this of ours, for traction and extraction, if
+it only knew what to extract from itself, or where to drag itself to!
+
+55. But in the meantime I want the public to admire this patience of
+yours, while they have it, and to understand what it has cost to give
+them even this, which has to pass away. We will not take instance in
+figure engraving, of which the complex skill and textural gradation by
+dot and checker must be wholly incomprehensible to amateurs; but we will
+take a piece of average landscape engraving, such as is sent out of any
+good workshop--the master who puts his name at the bottom of the plate
+being of course responsible only for the general method, for the
+sufficient skill of subordinate hands, and for the few finishing touches
+if necessary. We will take, for example, the plate of Turner's "Mercury
+and Argus," engraved in this Journal.[68]
+
+56. I suppose most people, looking at such a plate, fancy it is produced
+by some simple mechanical artifice, which is to drawing only what
+printing is to writing. They conclude, at all events, that there is
+something complacent, sympathetic, and helpful in the nature of steel;
+so that while a pen-and-ink sketch may always be considered an
+achievement proving cleverness in the sketcher, a sketch on steel comes
+out by mere favor of the indulgent metal: or perhaps they think the
+plate is woven like a piece of pattern silk, and the pattern is
+developed by pasteboard cards punched full of holes. Not so. Look close
+at that engraving--imagine it to be a drawing in pen and ink, and
+yourself required similarly to produce its parallel! True, the steel
+point has the one advantage of not blotting, but it has tenfold or
+twentyfold disadvantage, in that you cannot slur, nor efface, except in
+a very resolute and laborious way, nor play with it, nor even see what
+you are doing with it at the moment, far less the effect that is to be.
+You must _feel_ what you are doing with it, and know precisely what you
+have got to do; how deep--how broad--how far apart--your lines must be,
+etc. and etc. (a couple of lines of etc.'s would not be enough to imply
+all you must know). But suppose the plate _were_ only a pen drawing:
+take your pen--your finest--and just try to copy the leaves that
+entangle the nearest cow's head and the head itself; remembering always
+that the kind of work required here is mere child's play compared to
+that of fine figure engraving. Nevertheless, take a strong magnifying
+glass to this--count the dots and lines that gradate the nostrils and
+the edges of the facial bone; notice how the light is left on the top of
+the head by the stopping at its outline of the coarse touches which form
+the shadows under the leaves; examine it well, and then--I humbly ask of
+you--try to do a piece of it yourself! You clever sketcher--you young
+lady or gentleman of genius--you eye-glassed dilettante--you current
+writer of criticism royally plural,--I beseech you--do it yourself; do
+the merely etched outline yourself, if no more. Look you,--you hold your
+etching needle this way, as you would a pencil, nearly; and then,--you
+scratch with it! it is as easy as lying. Or if you think that too
+difficult, take an easier piece;--take either of the light sprays of
+foliage that rise against the fortress on the right, put your glass over
+them--look how their fine outline is first drawn, leaf by leaf; then
+how the distant rock is put in between, with broken lines, mostly
+stopping before they touch the leaf outline, and--again, I pray you, do
+it yourself; if not on that scale, on a larger. Go on into the hollows
+of the distant rock--traverse its thickets--number its towers--count how
+many lines there are in a laurel bush--in an arch--in a casement: some
+hundred and fifty, or two hundred, deliberately drawn lines, you will
+find, in every square quarter of an inch;--say three thousand to the
+inch,--each with skillful intent put in its place! and then consider
+what the ordinary sketcher's work must appear to the men who have been
+trained to this!
+
+57. "But might not more have been done by three thousand lines to a
+square inch?" you will perhaps ask. Well, possibly. It may be with lines
+as with soldiers: three hundred, knowing their work thoroughly, may be
+stronger than three thousand less sure of their game. We shall have
+to press close home this question about numbers and purpose
+presently;--it is not the question now. Supposing certain results
+required,--atmospheric effects, surface textures, transparencies of
+shade, confusions of light,--more could _not_ be done with less. There
+are engravings of this modern school, of which, with respect to their
+particular aim, it may be said, most truly, they "_cannot_ be better
+done."
+
+58. Whether an engraving should aim at effects of atmosphere, may be
+disputable (just as also whether a sculptor should aim at effects of
+perspective); but I do not raise these points to-day. Admit the aim--let
+us note the patience; nor this in engraving only. I have taken an
+engraving for my instance, but I might have taken any form of Art. I
+call upon all good artists, painters, sculptors, metal-workers, to bear
+witness with me in what I now tell the public in their name,--that the
+same Fortitude, the same deliberation, the same perseverance in resolute
+act--is needed to do _anything_ in Art that is worthy. And why is it,
+you workmen, that you are silent always concerning your toil; and mock
+at us in your hearts, within that shrine at Eleusis, to the gate of
+which you have hewn your way through so deadly thickets of thorn; and
+leave us, foolish children, outside, in our conceited thinking either
+that we can enter it in play, or that we are grander for not entering?
+Far more earnestly is it to be asked, why do you _stoop_ to us as you
+mock us? If your secrecy were a noble one,--if, in that incommunicant
+contempt, you wrought your own work with majesty, whether we would
+receive it or not, it were kindly, though ungraciously, done; but now
+you make yourselves our toys, and do our childish will in servile
+silence. If engraving were to come to an end this day, and no guided
+point should press metal more, do you think it would be in a blaze of
+glory that your art would expire?--that those plates in the annuals, and
+black proofs in broad shop windows, are of a nobly monumental
+character,--"chalybe perennius"? I am afraid your patience has been too
+much like yonder poor Italian child's; and over that genius of yours,
+low laid by the Matin shore, if it expired so, the lament for Archytas
+would have to be sung again;--"pulveris exigui--munera." Suppose you
+were to shake off the dust again! cleanse your wings, like the morning
+bees on that Matin promontory; rise, in noble _im_patience, for there is
+such a thing: the Impatience of the Fourth Cornice.
+
+   "Cui buon voler, e giusto amor cavalca."
+
+Shall we try, together, to think over the meaning of that Haste, when
+the May mornings come?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[67] A small portion of this chapter was read by Mr. Ruskin, at Oxford,
+in November 1884, as a by-lecture, during the delivery of the course on
+the "Pleasures of England."--ED.
+
+[68] The rest of this and the whole of the succeeding paragraph is also
+reprinted in _Ariadne Florentina_, § 115, and para. i. of 116.--ED.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.[69]
+
+
+59. It is a wild March day,--the 20th; and very probably due course of
+English Spring will bring as wild a May-day by the time this writing
+meets anyone's eyes; but at all events, as yet the days are rough, and
+as I look out of my fitfully lighted window into the garden, everything
+seems in a singular hurry. The dead leaves; and yonder two living ones,
+on the same stalk, tumbling over and over each other on the lawn, like a
+quaint mechanical toy; and the fallen sticks from the rooks' nests, and
+the twisted straws out of the stable-yard--all going one way, in the
+hastiest manner! The puffs of steam, moreover, which pass under the
+wooded hills where what used to be my sweetest field-walk ends now,
+prematurely, in an abyss of blue clay; and which signify, in their
+silvery expiring between the successive trunks of wintry trees, that
+some human beings, thereabouts, are in a hurry as well as the sticks and
+straws, and, having fastened themselves to the tail of a manageable
+breeze, are being blown down to Folkestone.
+
+60. In the general effect of these various passages and passengers, as
+seen from my quiet room, they look all very much alike. One begins
+seriously to question with one's self whether those passengers by the
+Folkestone train are in truth one whit more in a hurry than the dead
+leaves. The difference consists, of course, in the said passengers
+knowing where they are going to, and why; and having resolved to go
+there--which, indeed, as far as Folkestone, may, perhaps, properly
+distinguish them from the leaves: but will it distinguish them any
+farther? Do many of them know what they are going to Folkestone
+for?--what they are going anywhere for? and where, at last, by sum of
+all the days' journeys, of which this glittering transit is one, they
+are going for peace? For if they know not this, certainly they are no
+more making haste than the straws are. Perhaps swiftly going the wrong
+way; more likely going no way--any way, as the winds and their own
+wills, wilder than the winds, dictate; to find themselves at last at the
+end which would have come to them quickly enough without their seeking.
+
+61. And, indeed, this is a very preliminary question to all measurement
+of the rate of going, this "where to?" or, even before that, "are we
+going on at all?"--"getting on" (as the world says) on any road
+whatever? Most men's eyes are so fixed on the mere swirl of the wheel of
+their fortunes, and their souls so vexed at the reversed cadences of it
+when they come, that they forget to ask if the curve they have been
+carried through on its circumference was circular or cycloidal; whether
+they have been bound to the ups and downs of a mill-wheel or of a
+chariot-wheel.
+
+That phrase, of "getting on," so perpetually on our lips (as indeed it
+should be), do any of us take it to our hearts, and seriously ask where
+we can get on _to_? That instinct of hurry has surely good grounds. It
+is all very well for lazy and nervous people (like myself for instance)
+to retreat into tubs, and holes, and corners, anywhere out of the dust,
+and wonder within ourselves, "what all the fuss can be about?" The fussy
+people might have the best of it, if they know their end. Suppose they
+were to answer this March or May morning thus:--"Not bestir ourselves,
+indeed! and the spring sun up these four hours!--and this first of May,
+1865, never to come back again; and of Firsts of May in perspective,
+supposing ourselves to be 'nel mezzo del cammin,' perhaps some twenty or
+twenty-five to be, not without presumption, hoped for, and by no means
+calculated upon. Say, twenty of them, with their following groups of
+summer days; and though they may be long, one cannot make much more than
+sixteen hours apiece out of them, poor sleepy wretches that we are; for
+even if we get up at four, we must go to bed while the red yet stays
+from the sunset: and half the time we are awake, we must be lying among
+haycocks, or playing at something, if we are wise; not to speak of
+eating, and previously earning whereof to eat, which takes time: and
+then, how much of us and of our day will be left for getting on? Shall
+we have a seventh, or even a tithe, of our twenty-four hours?--two hours
+and twenty-four minutes clear, a day, or, roughly, a thousand hours a
+year, and (violently presuming on fortune, as we said) twenty years of
+working life: twenty thousand hours to get on in, altogether? Many men
+would think it hard to be limited to an utmost twenty thousand pounds
+for their fortunes, but here is a sterner limitation; the Pactolus of
+time, sand, and gold together, would, with such a fortune, count us a
+pound an hour, through our real and serviceable life. If this time
+capital would reproduce itself! and for our twenty thousand hours we
+could get some rate of interest, if well spent? At all events, we will
+do something with them; not lie moping out of the way of the dust, as
+you do."
+
+62. A sufficient answer, indeed; yet, friends, if you would _make_ a
+little less dust, perhaps we should all see our way better. But I am
+ready to take the road with you, if you mean it so seriously--only let
+us at least consider where we are now, at starting.
+
+Here, on a little spinning, askew-axised thing we call a
+planet--(impertinently enough, since we are far more planetary
+ourselves). A round, rusty, rough little metallic ball--very hard to
+live upon; most of it much too hot or too cold: a couple of narrow
+habitable belts about it, which, to wandering spirits, must look like
+the places where it has got damp, and green-moldy, with accompanying
+small activities of animal life in the midst of the lichen. Explosive
+gases, seemingly, inside it, and possibilities of very sudden
+dispersion.
+
+63. This is where we are; and roundabout us, there seem to be more of
+such balls, variously heated and chilled, ringed and mooned, moved and
+comforted; the whole giddy group of us forming an atom in a milky mist,
+itself another atom in a shoreless phosphorescent sea of such Volvoces
+and Medusæ.
+
+Whereupon, I presume, one would first ask, have we any chance of getting
+off this ball of ours, and getting on to one of those finer ones? Wise
+people say we have, and that it is very wicked to think otherwise. So we
+will think no otherwise; but, with their permission, think nothing about
+the matter now, since it is certain that the more we make of our little
+rusty world, such as it is, the more chance we have of being one day
+promoted into a merrier one.
+
+64. And even on this rusty and moldy Earth, there appear to be things
+which may be seen with pleasure, and things which might be done with
+advantage. The stones of it have strange shapes; the plants and the
+beasts of it strange ways. Its air is coinable into wonderful sounds;
+its light into manifold colors: the trees of it bring forth pippins, and
+the fields cheese (though both of these may be, in a finer sense, "to
+come"). There are bright eyes upon it which reflect the light of other
+eyes quite singularly; and foolish feelings to be cherished upon it; and
+gladdenings of dust by neighbor dust, not easily explained, but
+pleasant, and which take time to win. One would like to know something
+of all this, I suppose?--to divide one's score of thousand hours as
+shrewdly as might be. Ten minutes to every herb of the field is not
+much; yet we shall not know them all, so, before the time comes to be
+made grass of ourselves! Half an hour for every crystalline form of clay
+and flint, and we shall be near the need of shaping the gray flint stone
+that is to weigh upon our feet. And we would fain dance a measure or two
+before that cumber is laid upon them: there having been hitherto much
+piping to which we have not danced. And we must leave time for loving,
+if we are to take Marmontel's wise peasant's word for it, "_Il n'y a de
+bon que c'a!_" And if there should be fighting to do also? and weeping?
+and much burying? truly, we had better make haste.
+
+65. Which means, simply, that we must lose neither strength nor moment.
+Hurry is not haste; but economy is, and rightness is. Whatever is
+rightly done stays with us, to support another right beyond, or higher
+up: whatever is wrongly done, vanishes; and by the blank, betrays what
+we would have built above. Wasting no word, no thought, no doing, we
+shall have speed enough; but then there is that farther question, what
+shall we do?--what we are fittest (worthiest, that is) to do, and what
+is best worth doing? Note that word "worthy," both of the man and the
+thing, for the two dignities go together. Is _it_ worth the pains? Are
+we worth the task? The dignity of a man depends wholly upon this
+harmony. If his task is above him, he will be undignified in failure; if
+he is above it, he will be undignified in success. His own composure and
+nobleness must be according to the composure of his thought to his toil.
+
+66. As I was dreaming over this, my eyes fell by chance on a page of my
+favorite thirteenth century psalter, just where two dragons, one with
+red legs, and another with green,--one with a blue tail on a purple
+ground, and the other with a rosy tail on a golden ground, follow the
+verse "_Quis ascendet in montem Domini_," and begin the solemn "_Qui non
+accepit in vano animam suam_." Who hath not lift up his soul unto
+vanity, we have it; and [Greek: elaben epi mataiô], the Greeks (not that
+I know what that means accurately): broadly, they all mean, "who has not
+received nor given his soul in vain," this is the man who can make
+haste, even uphill, the only haste worth making; and it must be up the
+right hill, too: not that Corinthian Acropolis, of which, I suppose, the
+white specter stood eighteen hundred feet high, in Hades, for Sisyphus
+to roll his fantastic stone up--image, himself, forever of the greater
+part of our wise mortal work.
+
+67. Now all this time, whatever the reader may think, I have never for a
+moment lost sight of that original black line with which is our own
+special business. The patience, the speed, the dignity, we can give to
+that, the choice to be made of subject for it, are the matters I want to
+get at. You think, perhaps, that an engraver's function is one of no
+very high dignity;--does not involve a serious choice of work. Consider
+a little of it. Here is a steel point, and 'tis like Job's "iron
+pen"--and you are going to cut into steel with it, in a most deliberate
+way, as into the rock forever. And this scratch or inscription of yours
+will be seen of a multitude of eyes. It is not like a single picture or
+a single wall painting; this multipliable work will pass through
+thousand thousand hands, strengthen and inform innumerable souls, if it
+be worthy; vivify the folly of thousands if unworthy. Remember, also, it
+will mix in the very closest manner in domestic life. This engraving
+will not be gossiped over and fluttered past at private views of
+academies; listlessly sauntered by in corners of great galleries. Ah,
+no! This will hang over parlor chimney-pieces--shed down its hourly
+influence on children's forenoon work. This will hang in little luminous
+corners by sick beds; mix with flickering dreams by candlelight, and
+catch the first rays from the window's "glimmering square." You had
+better put something good into it! I do not know a more solemn field of
+labor than that _champ d'acier_. From a pulpit, perhaps a man can only
+reach one or two people, for that time,--even your book, once carelessly
+read, probably goes into a bookcase catacomb, and is thought of no more.
+But this; taking the eye unawares again and again, and always again:
+persisting and inevitable! where will you look for a chance of saying
+something nobly, if it is not here?
+
+68. And the choice is peculiarly free; to you of all men most free. An
+artist, at first invention, cannot always choose what shall come into
+his mind, nor know what it will eventually turn into. But you, professed
+copyists, unless you have mistaken your profession, have the power of
+governing your own thoughts, and of following and interpreting the
+thoughts of others. Also, you see the work to be done put plainly before
+you; you can deliberately choose what seems to you best, out of myriads
+of examples of perfect Art. You can count the cost accurately; saying,
+"It will take me a year--two years--five--a fourth or fifth, probably,
+of my remaining life, to do this." Is the thing worth it? There is no
+excuse for choosing wrongly; no other men whatever have data so full,
+and position so firm, for forecast of their labor.
+
+69. I put my psalter aside (not, observe, vouching for its red and
+green dragons:--men lifted up their souls to vanity sometimes in the
+thirteenth as in the nineteenth century), and I take up, instead, a book
+of English verses, published--there is no occasion to say when. It is
+full of costliest engravings--large, skillful, appallingly laborious;
+dotted into textures like the dust on a lily leaf,--smoothed through
+gradations like clouds,--graved to surfaces like mother-of-pearl; and by
+all this toil there is set forth for the delight of Englishwomen, a
+series of the basest dreams that ungoverned feminine imagination can
+coin in sickliest indolence,--ball-room amours, combats of curled
+knights, pilgrimages of disguised girl-pages, romantic pieties,
+charities in costume,--a mass of disguised sensualism and feverish
+vanity--impotent, pestilent, prurient, scented with a venomous elixir,
+and rouged with a deadly dust of outward good; and all this done, as
+such things only can be done, in a boundless ignorance of all natural
+veracity; the faces falsely drawn--the lights falsely cast--the forms
+effaced or distorted, and all common human wit and sense extinguished in
+the vicious scum of lying sensation.
+
+And this, I grieve to say, is only a characteristic type of a large mass
+of popular English work. This is what we spend our Teutonic lives in;
+engraving with an iron pen in the rock forever; this, the passion of the
+Teutonic woman (as opposed to Virgilia), just as foxhunting is the
+passion of the Teutonic man, as opposed to Valerius.
+
+70. And while we deliberately spend all our strength, and all our
+tenderness, all our skill, and all our money, in doing, relishing,
+buying, this absolute Wrongness, of which nothing can ever come but
+disease in heart and brain, remember that all the mighty works of the
+great painters of the world, full of life, truth, and blessing, remain
+to this present hour of the year 1865 unengraved! There literally exists
+no earnestly studied and fully accomplished engraving of any very great
+work, except Leonardo's Cena. No large Venetian picture has ever been
+thoroughly engraved. Of Titian's Peter Martyr, there is even no worthy
+memorial transcript but Le Febre's. The Cartoons have been multiplied
+in false readings; never in faithful ones till lately by photography. Of
+the Disputa and the Parnassus, what can the English public know? of the
+thoughtful Florentines and Milanese, of Ghirlandajo, and Luini, and
+their accompanying hosts--what do they yet so much as care to know?
+
+"The English public will not pay," you reply, "for engravings from the
+great masters. The English public will only pay for pictures of itself;
+of its races, its rifle-meetings, its rail stations, its
+parlor-passions, and kitchen interests; you must make your bread as you
+may, by holding the mirror to it."
+
+71. Friends, there have been hard fighting and heavy sleeping, this many
+a day, on the other side of the Atlantic, in the cause, as you suppose,
+of Freedom against slavery; and you are all, open-mouthed, expecting the
+glories of Black Emancipation. Perhaps a little White Emancipation on
+this side of the water might be still more desirable, and more easily
+and guiltlessly won.
+
+Do you know what slavery means? Suppose a gentleman taken by a Barbary
+corsair--set to field-work; chained and flogged to it from dawn to eve.
+Need he be a slave therefore? By no means; he is but a hardly-treated
+prisoner. There is some work which the Barbary corsair will not be able
+to make him do; such work as a Christian gentleman may not do, that he
+will not, though he die for it. Bound and scourged he may be, but he has
+heard of a Person's being bound and scourged before now, who was not
+therefore a slave. He is not a whit more slave for that. But suppose he
+take the pirate's pay, and stretch his back at piratical oars, for due
+salary, how then? Suppose for fitting price he betray his fellow
+prisoners, and take up the scourge instead of enduring it--become the
+smiter instead of the smitten, at the African's bidding--how then? Of
+all the sheepish notions in our English public "mind," I think the
+simplest is that slavery is neutralized when you are well paid for it!
+Whereas it is precisely that fact of its being paid for which makes it
+complete. A man who has been sold by another, may be but half a slave
+or none; but the man who has sold himself! He is the accurately Finished
+Bondsman.
+
+72. And gravely I say that I know _no_ captivity so sorrowful as that of
+an artist doing, consciously, bad work for pay. It is the serfdom of the
+finest gifts--of all that should lead and master men, offering itself to
+be spit upon, and that for a bribe. There is much serfdom, in Europe, of
+speakers and writers, but they only sell words; and their talk, even
+honestly uttered, might not have been worth much; it will not be thought
+of ten years hence; still less a hundred years hence. No one will buy
+our parliamentary speeches to keep in portfolios this time next century;
+and if people are weak enough now to pay for any special and flattering
+cadence of syllable, it is little matter. But _you_, with your painfully
+acquired power, your unwearied patience, your admirable and manifold
+gifts, your eloquence in black and white, which people will buy, if it
+is good (and has a broad margin), for fifty guineas a copy--in the year
+2000; to sell it all, ás Ananias his land, "yea, for so much," and hold
+yourselves at every fool's beck, with your ready points, polished and
+sharp, hasting to scratch what _he_ wills! To bite permanent mischief in
+with acid; to spread an inked infection of evil all your days, and pass
+away at last from a life of the skillfulest industry--having done
+whatsoever your hand found (remuneratively) to do, with your might, and
+a great might, but with cause to thank God only for this--that the end
+of it all has at last come, and that "there is no device nor work in the
+Grave." One would get quit of _this_ servitude, I think, though we
+reached the place of Rest a little sooner, and reached it fasting.
+
+73. My English fellow-workmen, you have the name of liberty often on
+your lips; get the fact of it oftener into your business! talk of it
+less, and try to understand it better. You have given students many
+copy-books of free-hand outlines--give them a few of free _heart_
+outlines.
+
+It appears, however, that you do not intend to help me with any
+utterance respecting these same outlines.[70] Be it so: I must make out
+what I can by myself. And under the influence of the Solstitial sign of
+June I will go backwards, or askance, to the practical part of the
+business, where I left it three months ago, and take up that question
+first, touching Liberty, and the relation of the loose swift line to the
+resolute slow one and of the etched line to the engraved one. It is a
+worthy question, for the open field afforded by illustrated works is
+tempting even to our best painters, and many an earnest hour and active
+fancy spend and speak themselves in the black line, vigorously enough,
+and dramatically, at all events: if wisely, may be considered. The
+French also are throwing great passion into their _eaux fortes_--working
+with a vivid haste and dark, brilliant freedom, which looked as if they
+etched with very energetic waters indeed--quite waters of life (it does
+not look so well, written in French). So we will take, with the reader's
+permission, for text next month, "Rembrandt, and strong waters."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[69] _Art Journal_, vol. iv., pp. 129-30. May 1865.--ED.
+
+[70] I have received some interesting private letters, but cannot make
+use of them at present, because they enter into general discussion
+instead of answering the specific question I asked, respecting the power
+of the black line; and I must observe to correspondents that in future
+their letters should be addressed to the Editor of this Journal, not to
+me; as I do not wish to incur the responsibility of selection.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.[71]
+
+
+74. The work I have to do in this paper ought, rightly, to have been
+thrown into the form of an appendix to the last chapter; for it is no
+link of the cestus of Aglaia we have to examine, but one of the crests
+of canine passion in the cestus of Scylla. Nevertheless, the girdle of
+the Grace cannot be discerned in the full brightness of it, but by
+comparing it with the dark torment of that other; and (in what place or
+form matters little) the work has to be done.
+
+"Rembrandt Van Rhyn"--it is said, in the last edition of a very valuable
+work[72] (for which, nevertheless, I could wish that greater lightness
+in the hand should be obtained by the publication of its information in
+one volume, and its criticism in another)--was "the most attractive and
+original of painters." It may be so; but there are attractions, and
+attractions. The sun attracts the planets--and a candle, night-moths;
+the one with perhaps somewhat of benefit to the planets;--but with what
+benefit the other to the moths, one would be glad to learn from those
+desert flies, of whom, one company having extinguished Mr. Kinglake's
+candle with their bodies, the remainder, "who had failed in obtaining
+this martyrdom, became suddenly serious, and clung despondingly to the
+canvas."
+
+75. Also, there are originalities, and originalities. To invent a new
+thing, which is also a precious thing; to be struck by a divinely-guided
+Rod, and become a sudden fountain of life to thirsty multitudes--this is
+enviable. But to be distinct of men in an original Sin; elect for the
+initial letter of a Lie; the first apparent spot of an unknown plague; a
+Root of bitterness, and the first-born worm of a company, studying an
+original De-Composition,--this is perhaps not so enviable. And if we
+think of it, most human originality is apt to be of that kind. Goodness
+is one, and immortal; it may be received and communicated--not
+originated: but Evil is various and recurrent, and may be misbegotten in
+endlessly surprising ways.
+
+76. But, that we may know better in what this originality consists, we
+find that our author, after expatiating on the vast area of the
+Pantheon, "illuminated solely by the small circular opening in the dome
+above," and on other similar conditions of luminous contraction, tells
+us that "to Rembrandt belongs the glory of having first embodied in Art,
+and perpetuated, these rare and beautiful effects of nature." Such
+effects are indeed rare in nature; but they are not rare, absolutely.
+The sky, with the sun in it, does not usually give the impression of
+being dimly lighted through a circular hole; but you may observe a very
+similar effect any day in your coal-cellar. The light is not
+Rembrandtesque on the current, or banks, of a river; but it is on those
+of a drain. Color is not Rembrandtesque, usually, in a clean house; but
+is presently obtainable of that quality in a dirty one. And without
+denying the pleasantness of the mode of progression which Mr. Hazlitt,
+perhaps too enthusiastically, describes as attainable in a background of
+Rembrandt's--"You stagger from one abyss of obscurity to another"--I
+cannot feel it an entirely glorious speciality to be distinguished, as
+Rembrandt was, from other great painters, chiefly by the liveliness of
+his darkness, and the dullness of his light. Glorious, or inglorious,
+the speciality itself is easily and accurately definable. It is the aim
+of the best painters to paint the noblest things they can see by
+sunlight. It was the aim of Rembrandt to paint the foulest things he
+could see--by rushlight.
+
+77. By rushlight, observe: material and spiritual. As the sun for the
+outer world; so in the inner world of man, that which "[Greek: ereuna
+tameua koilias]"[73]--"the candle of God, searching the inmost parts."
+If that light within become but a more active kind of darkness;--if,
+abdicating the measuring reed of modesty for scepter, and ceasing to
+measure with it, we dip it in such unctuous and inflammable refuse as we
+can find, and make our soul's light into a _tallow_ candle, and
+thenceforward take our guttering, sputtering, ill-smelling illumination
+about with us, holding it out in fetid fingers--encumbered with its
+lurid warmth of fungous wick, and drip of stalactitic grease--that we
+may see, when another man would have seen, or dreamed he saw, the flight
+of a divine Virgin--only the lamplight upon the hair of a costermonger's
+ass;--that, having to paint the good Samaritan, we may see only in
+distance the back of the good Samaritan, and in nearness the back of the
+good Samaritan's dog;--that having to paint the Annunciation to the
+Shepherds, we may turn the announcement of peace to men, into an
+announcement of mere panic to beasts; and, in an unsightly firework of
+unsightlier angels, see, as we see always, the feet instead of the head,
+and the shame instead of the honor;--and finally concentrate and rest
+the sum of our fame, as Titian on the Assumption of a spirit, so we on
+the dissection of a carcass,--perhaps by such fatuous fire, the less we
+walk, and by such phosphoric glow, the less we shine, the better it may
+be for us, and for all who would follow us.
+
+78. Do not think I deny the greatness of Rembrandt. In mere technical
+power (none of his eulogists know that power better than I, nor declare
+it in more distinct terms) he might, if he had been educated in a true
+school, have taken rank with the Venetians themselves. But that type of
+distinction between Titian's Assumption, and Rembrandt's Dissection,
+will represent for you with sufficient significance the manner of choice
+in all their work; only it should be associated with another
+characteristic example of the same opposition (which I have dwelt upon
+elsewhere) between Veronese and Rembrandt, in their conception of
+domestic life. Rembrandt's picture, at Dresden, of himself, with his
+wife sitting on his knee, a roasted peacock on the table, and a glass of
+champagne in his hand, is the best work I know of all he has left; and
+it marks his speciality with entire decision. It is, of course, a dim
+candlelight; and the choice of the sensual passions as the things
+specially and forever to be described and immortalized out of his own
+private life and love, is exactly that "painting the foulest thing by
+rushlight" which I have stated to be the enduring purpose of his mind.
+And you will find this hold in all minor treatment; and that to the
+uttermost: for as by your broken rushlight you see little, and only
+corners and points of things, and those very corners and points ill and
+distortedly; so, although Rembrandt knows the human face and hand, and
+never fails in these, when they are ugly, and he chooses to take pains
+with them, he knows nothing else: the more pains he takes with even
+familiar animals, the worse they are (witness the horse in that plate of
+the Good Samaritan), and any attempts to finish the first scribbled
+energy of his imaginary lions and tigers, end always only in the loss of
+the fiendish power and rage which were all he could conceive in an
+animal.
+
+79. His landscape, and foreground vegetation, I mean afterwards to
+examine in comparison with Dürer's; but the real caliber and nature of
+the man are best to be understood by comparing the puny, ill-drawn,
+terrorless, helpless, beggarly skeleton in his "Youth Surprised by
+Death," with the figure behind the tree in Dürer's plate (though it is
+quite one of Dürer's feeblest) of the same subject. Absolutely ignorant
+of all natural phenomena and law; absolutely careless of all lovely
+living form, or growth, or structure; able only to render with some
+approach to veracity, what alone he had looked at with some approach to
+attention,--the pawnbroker's festering heaps of old clothes, and caps,
+and shoes--Rembrandt's execution is one grand evasion, and his temper
+the grim contempt of a strong and sullen animal in its defiled den, for
+the humanity with which it is at war, for the flowers which it tramples,
+and the light which it fears.
+
+80. Again, do not let it be thought that when I call his execution
+evasive, I ignore the difference between his touch, on brow or lip, and
+a common workman's; but the whole school of etching which he founded,
+(and of painting, so far as it differs from Venetian work) is inherently
+loose and experimental. Etching is the very refuge and mask of
+sentimental uncertainty, and of vigorous ignorance. If you know anything
+clearly, and have a firm hand, depend upon it, you will draw it clearly;
+you will not care to hide it among scratches and burrs. And herein is
+the first grand distinction between etching and engraving--that in the
+etching needle you have an almost irresistible temptation to a wanton
+speed. There is, however, no real necessity for such a distinction; an
+etched line may have been just as steadily drawn, and seriously meant,
+as an engraved one; and for the moment, waiving consideration of this
+distinction, and opposing Rembrandt's work, considered merely as work of
+the black line, to Holbein's and Dürer's, as work of the black line, I
+assert Rembrandt's to be inherently _evasive_. You cannot unite his
+manner with theirs; choice between them is sternly put to you, when
+first you touch the steel. Suppose, for instance, you have to engrave,
+or etch, or draw with pen and ink, a single head, and that the head is
+to be approximately half an inch in height more or less (there is a
+reason for assigning this condition respecting size, which we will
+examine in due time): you have it in your power to do it in one of two
+ways. You may lay down some twenty or thirty entirely firm and visible
+lines, of which every one shall be absolutely right, and do the utmost a
+line can do. By their curvature they shall render contour; by their
+thickness, shade; by their place and form, every truth of expression,
+and every condition of design. The head of the soldier drawing his
+sword, in Dürer's "Cannon," is about half an inch high, supposing the
+brow to be seen. The chin is drawn with three lines, the lower lip with
+two, the upper, including the shadow from the nose, with five. Three
+separate the cheek from the chin, giving the principal points of
+character. Six lines draw the cheek, and its incised traces of care;
+four are given to each of the eyes; one, with the outline, to the nose;
+three to the frown of the forehead. None of these touches could anywhere
+be altered--none removed, without instantly visible harm; and their
+result is a head as perfect in character as a portrait by Reynolds.
+
+81. You may either do this--which, if you can, it will generally be very
+advisable to do--or, on the other hand, you may cover the face with
+innumerable scratches, and let your hand play with wanton freedom, until
+the graceful scrabble concentrates itself into shade. You may
+soften--efface--retouch--rebite--dot, and hatch, and redefine. If you
+are a great master, you will soon get your character, and probably keep
+it (Rembrandt often gets it at first, nearly as securely as Dürer); but
+the design of it will be necessarily seen through loose work, and
+modified by accident (as you think) fortunate. The accidents which occur
+to a practiced hand are always at first pleasing--the details which can
+be hinted, however falsely, through the gathering mystery, are always
+seducing. You will find yourself gradually dwelling more and more on
+little meannesses of form and texture, and lusters of surface: on cracks
+of skin, and films of fur and plume. You will lose your way, and then
+see two ways, and then many ways, and try to walk a little distance on
+all of them in turn, and so, back again. You will find yourself thinking
+of colors, and vexed because you cannot imitate them; next, struggling
+to render distances by indecision, which you cannot by tone. Presently
+you will be contending with finished pictures; laboring at the etching,
+as if it were a painting. You will leave off, after a whole day's work
+(after many days' work if you choose to give them), still unsatisfied.
+For final result--if you are as great as Rembrandt--you will have most
+likely a heavy, black, cloudy stain, with less character in it than the
+first ten lines had. If you are not as great as Rembrandt, you will have
+a stain by no means cloudy; but sandy and broken,--instead of a face,
+a speckled phantom of a face, patched, blotched, discomfited in every
+texture and form--ugly, assuredly; dull, probably; an unmanageable and
+manifold failure ill concealed by momentary, accidental, undelightful,
+ignoble success.
+
+Undelightful; note this especially, for it is the peculiar character of
+etching that it cannot render beauty. You may hatch and scratch your way
+to picturesqueness or to deformity--never to beauty. You can etch an old
+woman, or an ill-conditioned fellow. But you cannot etch a girl--nor,
+unless in his old age, or with very partial rendering of him, a
+gentleman.
+
+82. And thus, as farther belonging to, and partly causative of, their
+choice of means, there is always a tendency in etchers to fasten on
+unlovely objects; and the whole scheme of modern rapid work of this kind
+is connected with a peculiar gloom which results from the confinement of
+men, partially informed, and wholly untrained, in the midst of foul and
+vicious cities. A sensitive and imaginative youth, early driven to get
+his living by his art, has to lodge, we will say, somewhere in the
+by-streets of Paris, and is left there, tutorless, to his own devices.
+Suppose him also vicious or reckless, and there need be no talk of his
+work farther; he will certainly do nothing in a Düreresque manner. But
+suppose him self-denying, virtuous, full of gift and power--what are the
+elements of living study within his reach? All supreme beauty is
+confined to the higher salons. There are pretty faces in the streets,
+but no stateliness nor splendor of humanity; all pathos and grandeur is
+in suffering; no purity of nature is accessible, but only a terrible
+picturesqueness, mixed with ghastly, with ludicrous, with base
+concomitants. Huge walls and roofs, dark on the sunset sky, but
+plastered with advertisement bills, monstrous-figured, seen farther than
+ever Parthenon shaft, or spire of Sainte Chapelle. Interminable lines of
+massy streets, wearisome with repetition of commonest design, and
+degraded by their gilded shops, wide-fuming, flaunting, glittering, with
+apparatus of eating or of dress. Splendor of palace-flank and goodly
+quay, insulted by floating cumber of barge and bath, trivial, grotesque,
+indecent, as cleansing vessels in a royal reception room. Solemn avenues
+of blossomed trees, shading puppet-show and baby-play; glades of
+wild-wood, long withdrawn, purple with faded shadows of blood; sweet
+windings and reaches of river far among the brown vines and white
+orchards, checked here by the Ile Notre Dame, to receive their nightly
+sacrifice, and after playing with it among their eddies, to give it up
+again, in those quiet shapes that lie on the sloped slate tables of the
+square-built Temple of the Death-Sibyl, who presides here over spray of
+Seine, as yonder at Tiber over spray of Anio. Sibylline, indeed, in her
+secrecy, and her sealing of destinies, by the baptism of the quick
+water-drops which fall on each fading face, unrecognized, nameless in
+_this_ Baptism forever. Wreathed thus throughout, that Paris town, with
+beauty, and with unseemly sin, unseemlier death, as a fiend-city with
+fair eyes; forever letting fall her silken raiment so far as that one
+may "behold her bosom and half her side." Under whose whispered
+teaching, and substitution of "Contes Drolatiques" for the tales of the
+wood fairy, her children of Imagination will do, what Gérôme and Gustave
+Doré are doing, and her whole world of lesser Art will sink into shadows
+of the street and of the boudoir-curtain, wherein the etching point may
+disport itself with freedom enough.[74]
+
+83. Nor are we slack in our companionship in these courses. Our
+imagination is slower and clumsier than the French--rarer also, by far,
+in the average English mind. The only man of power equal to Doré's whom
+we have had lately among us, was William Blake, whose temper fortunately
+took another turn. But in the calamity and vulgarity of daily
+circumstance, in the horror of our streets, in the discordance of our
+thoughts, in the laborious looseness and ostentatious cleverness of our
+work, we are alike. And to French faults we add a stupidity of our own;
+for which, so far as I may in modesty take blame for anything, as
+resulting from my own teaching, I am more answerable than most men.
+Having spoken earnestly against painting without thinking, I now find
+our exhibitions decorated with works of students who think without
+painting; and our books illustrated by scratched wood-cuts, representing
+very ordinary people, who are presumed to be interesting in the picture,
+because the text tells a story about them. Of this least lively form of
+modern sensational work, however, I shall have to speak on other
+grounds; meantime, I am concerned only with its manner; its incontinence
+of line and method, associated with the slightness of its real thought,
+and morbid acuteness of irregular sensation; ungoverned all, and one of
+the external and slight phases of that beautiful Liberty which we are
+proclaiming as essence of gospel to all the earth, and shall presently,
+I suppose, when we have had enough of it here, proclaim also to the
+stars, with invitation to them _out_ of their courses.
+
+84. "But you asked us for 'free-heart' outlines, and told us not to be
+slaves, only thirty days ago."[75]
+
+Inconsistent that I am! so I did. But as there are attractions, and
+attractions; originalities, and originalities, there are liberties, and
+liberties. Yonder torrent, crystal-clear, and arrow-swift, with its
+spray leaping into the air like white troops of fawns, is free, I think.
+Lost, yonder, amidst bankless, boundless marsh--soaking in slow
+shallowness, as it will, hither and thither, listless, among the
+poisonous reeds and unresisting slime--it is free also. You may choose
+which liberty you will, and restraint of voiceful rock, or the dumb and
+edgeless shore of darkened sand. Of that evil liberty, which men are now
+glorifying,--and of its opposite continence--which is the clasp and
+[Greek: chruseê peronê] of Aglaia's cestus--we will try to find out
+something in next chapter.[76]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[71] _Art Journal_, vol. iv., pp. 177-8. June 1865.--ED.
+
+[72] Wórnum's "Epochs of Painting." I have continual occasion to quarrel
+with my friend on these matters of critical question; but I have deep
+respect for his earnest and patient research, and we remain friends--on
+the condition that I am to learn much from him, and he (though it may be
+questionable whose fault that is) nothing from me.
+
+[73] Prov. xx, 27.
+
+[74] As I was preparing these sheets for press, I chanced on a passage
+in a novel of Champfleury's, in which one young student is encouraging
+another in his contest with these and other such evils;--the evils are
+in this passage accepted as necessities; the inevitable deadliness of
+the element is not seen, as it can hardly be except by those who live
+out of it. The encouragement, on such view, is good and right; the
+connection of the young etcher's power with his poverty is curiously
+illustrative of the statements in the text, and the whole passage,
+though long, is well worth such space as it will ask here, in our small
+print.
+
+    "Cependant," dit Thomas, "on a vu des peintres de talent qui étaient
+    partis de Paris après avoir exposé de bons tableaux et qui s'en
+    revenaient classiquement ennuyeux. C'est done la faute de
+    l'enseignement de l'Académie."
+
+    "Bah!" dit Gérard, "rien n'arrête le développement d'un homme
+    puisqu'il comprend l'art, pourquoi ne fait-il pas d'art?"
+
+    "Parce qu'il gagne à peu près sa vie en faisant du commerce."
+
+    "On dirait que tu ne veux pas me comprendre, toi qui as justement
+    passé par là. Comment faisais-tu quand tu étais compositeur d'une
+    imprimerie?"
+
+    "Le soir," dit Thomas, "et le matin en hiver, à partir de quatre
+    heures, je faisais des études à la lampe pendant deux heures,
+    jusqu'au moment où j'allais à l'atelier."
+
+    "Et tu ne vivais pas de la peinture?"
+
+    "Je ne gagnais pas un sou."
+
+    "Bon!" dit Gérard; "tu vois bien que tu faisais du commerce en
+    dehors de l'art et que cependant tu étudiais. Quand tu es sorti de
+    l'imprimerie comment as-tu vécu?"
+
+    "Je faisais cinq ou six petites aquarelles par jour, que je vendais,
+    sous les arcades de l'Institut, six sous pièce."
+
+    "Et tu en vivais; c'est encore du commerce. Tu vois done que ni
+    l'imprimerie, ni les petits dessins, à cinq sous, ni la privation,
+    ni la misère ne t'ont empêché d'arriver."
+
+    "Je ne suis pas arrivé."
+
+    "N'importe, tu arriveras certainement. . . . Si tu veux d'autres
+    exemples qui prouvent que la misère et les autres piéges tendus sous
+    nos pas ne doivent rien arrêter, tu te rappelles bien ce pauvre
+    garçon dont vous admiriez les eaux-fortes, que vous mettiez aussi
+    haut que Rembrandt, et qui aurait été lion, disiez-vous, s'il
+    n'avait tant souffert de la faim. Qu'a-t-il fait le jour où il lui
+    est tombé un petit héritage du ciel?"
+
+    "Il est vrai," dit Thomas, embarrassé; "qu'il a perdu tout son
+    sentiment."
+
+    "Ce n'etait pas cependant une de ces grosses fortunes qui tuent un
+    homme, qui le rendent lourd, fier et insolent: il avait juste de
+    quoi vivre, six cents francs de rentes, une fortune pour lui, qui
+    vivait avec cinq francs par mois. Il a continué à travailler; mais
+    ses eaux-fortes n'étaient plus supportables; tandis qu'avant, il
+    vivait avec un morceau de pain et des légumes; alors il avait du
+    talent. Cela, Thomas, doit te prouver que ni les mauvais
+    enseignements, ni les influences, ni la misère, ni la faim, ni la
+    maladie, ne peuvent corrompre une nature bien douée. Elle souffre;
+    mais trouve moi un grand artiste qui n'ait pas souffert. Il n'y a
+    pas un seul homme de dénie heureux depuis que l'humanité existe."
+
+    "J'ai envie," dit Thomas, "de te faire cadeau d'une jolie cravate."
+
+    "Pourquoi?" dit Gérard.
+
+    "Parce que tu as bien parlé."
+
+[75] See _ante_, p. 343, § 73.--ED.
+
+[76] Chapter VI., which is here omitted, having been already reprinted
+in _The Queen of the Air_ (§§ 142-159), together with the last paragraph
+(somewhat altered) of the present chapter. After the publication of
+Chapter VI. the essays were discontinued until January 1866.--ED.
+
+
++----------------------------------------+
+|Transcriber's note:                     |
+|                                        |
+|Chapter VI is missing from the original.|
++----------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.[77]
+
+
+85. In recommencing this series of papers, I may perhaps take permission
+briefly to remind the reader of the special purpose which my desultory
+way of writing, (of so vast a subject I find it impossible to write
+otherwise than desultorily), may cause him sometimes to lose sight of;
+the ascertainment, namely, of some laws for present practice of Art in
+our schools, which may be admitted, if not with absolute, at least with
+a sufficient consent, by leading artists.
+
+There are indeed many principles on which different men must ever be at
+variance; others, respecting which it may be impossible to obtain any
+practical consent in certain phases of particular schools. But there are
+a few, which, I think, in all times of meritorious Art, the leading
+painters would admit; and others which, by discussion, might be arrived
+at, as, at all events, the best discoverable for the time.
+
+86. One of those which I suppose great workmen would always admit, is,
+that, whatever material we use, the virtues of that material are to be
+exhibited, and its defects frankly admitted; no effort being made to
+conquer those defects by such skill as may make the material resemble
+another. For instance, in the dispute so frequently revived by the
+public, touching the relative merits of oil color and water color; I do
+not think a great painter would ever consider it a merit in a water
+color to have the "force of oil." He would like it to have the peculiar
+delicacy, paleness, and transparency belonging specially to its own
+material. On the other hand, I think he would not like an oil painting
+to have the deadness or paleness of a water color. He would like it to
+have the deep shadows, and the rich glow, and crumbling and bossy
+touches which are alone attainable in oil color. And if he painted in
+fresco, he would neither aim at the transparency of water color, nor the
+richness of oil; but at luminous bloom of surface, and dignity of
+clearly visible form. I do not think that this principle would be
+disputed by artists of great power at any time, or in any country;
+though, if by mischance they had been compelled to work in one material,
+while desiring the qualities only attainable in another, they might
+strive, and meritoriously strive, for those better results, with what
+they had under their hand. The change of manner in William Hunt's work,
+in the later part of his life, was an example of this. As his art became
+more developed, he perceived in his subjects qualities which it was
+impossible to express in a transparent medium; and employed opaque white
+to draw with, when the finer forms of relieved light could not be
+otherwise followed. It was out of his power to do more than this, since
+in later life any attempt to learn the manipulation of oil color would
+have been unadvisable; and he obtained results of singular beauty;
+though their preciousness and completion would never, in a well-founded
+school of Art, have been trusted to the frail substance of water color.
+
+87. But although I do not suppose that the abstract principle of doing
+with each material what it is best fitted to do, would be, in terms,
+anywhere denied; the practical question is always, not what should be
+done with this, or that, if everything were in our power; but what can
+be, or ought to be, accomplished with the means at our disposal, and in
+the circumstances under which we must necessarily work. Thus, in the
+question immediately before us, of the proper use of the black line--it
+is easy to establish the proper virtue of Line work, as essentially
+"De-Lineation," the expressing by outline the true limits of forms,
+which distinguish and part them from other forms; just as the virtue of
+brush work is essentially breadth, softness, and blending of forms. And,
+in the abstract, the point ought not to be used where the aim is not
+that of definition, nor the brush to be used where the aim is not that
+of breadth. Every painting in which the aim is primarily that of
+drawing, and every drawing in which the aim is primarily that of
+painting, must alike be in a measure erroneous. But it is one thing to
+determine what should be done with the black line, in a period of highly
+disciplined and widely practiced art, and quite another thing to say
+what should be done with it, at this present time, in England.
+Especially, the increasing interest and usefulness of our illustrated
+books render this an inquiry of very great social and educational
+importance. On the one side, the skill and felicity of the work spent
+upon them, and the advantage which young readers, if not those of all
+ages, _might_ derive from having examples of good drawing put familiarly
+before their eyes, cannot be overrated; yet, on the other side, neither
+the admirable skill nor free felicity of the work can ultimately be held
+a counterpoise for the want--if there be a want--of sterling excellence:
+while, farther, this increased power of obtaining examples of art for
+private possession, at an almost nominal price, has two accompanying
+evils: it prevents the proper use of what we have, by dividing the
+attention, and continually leading us restlessly to demand new subjects
+of interest, while the old are as yet not half exhausted; and it
+prevents us--satisfied with the multiplication of minor art in our own
+possession--from looking for a better satisfaction in great public
+works.
+
+88. Observe, first, it prevents the proper use of what we have. I often
+endeavor, though with little success, to conceive what would have been
+the effect on my mind, when I was a boy, of having such a book given me
+as Watson's "Illustrated Robinson Crusoe."[78] The edition I had was a
+small octavo one, in two volumes, printed at the _Chiswick Press_ in
+1812. It has, in each volume, eight or ten very rude vignettes, about a
+couple of inches wide; cut in the simple, but legitimate, manner of
+Bewick, and, though wholly commonplace and devoid of beauty, yet, as far
+as they go, rightly done; and here and there sufficiently suggestive of
+plain facts. I am quite unable to say how far I wasted,--how far I spent
+to advantage,--the unaccountable hours during which I pored over these
+wood-cuts; receiving more real sensation of sympathetic terror from the
+drifting hair and fear-stricken face of Crusoe dashed against the rock,
+in the rude attempt at the representation of his escape from the wreck,
+than I can now from the highest art; though the rocks and water are
+alike cut only with a few twisted or curved lines, and there is not the
+slightest attempt at light and shade, or imitative resemblance. For one
+thing, I am quite sure that being forced to make all I could out of very
+little things, and to remain long contented with them, not only in great
+part formed the power of close analysis in my mind, and the habit of
+steady contemplation; but rendered the power of greater art over me,
+when I first saw it, as intense as that of magic; so that it appealed to
+me like a vision out of another world.
+
+89. On the other hand this long contentment with inferior work, and the
+consequent acute enjoyment of whatever was the least suggestive of truth
+in a higher degree, rendered me long careless of the highest virtues of
+execution, and retarded by many years the maturing and balancing of the
+general power of judgment. And I am now, as I said, quite unable to
+imagine what would have been the result upon me, of being enabled to
+study, instead of these coarse vignettes, such lovely and expressive
+work as that of Watson; suppose, for instance, the vignette at p. 87,
+which would have been sure to have caught my fancy, because of the dog,
+with its head on Crusoe's knee, looking up and trying to understand what
+is the matter with his master. It remains to be seen, and can only be
+known by experience, what will actually be the effect of these treasures
+on the minds of children that possess them. The result must be in some
+sort different from anything yet known; no such art was ever yet
+attainable by the youth of any nation. Yet of this there can, as I have
+just said, be no reasonable doubt;--that it is not well to make the
+imagination indolent, or take its work out of its hands by supplying
+continual pictures of what might be sufficiently conceived without
+pictures.
+
+90. Take, for instance, the preceding vignette, in the same book,
+"Crusoe looking at the first shoots of barley." Nothing can be more
+natural or successful as a representation; but, after all, whatever the
+importance of the moment in Crusoe's history, the picture can show us
+nothing more than a man in a white shirt and dark pantaloons, in an
+attitude of surprise; and the imagination ought to be able to compass so
+much as this without help. And if so laborious aid be given, much more
+ought to be given. The virtue of Art, as of life, is that no line shall
+be in vain. Now the number of lines in this vignette, applied with full
+intention of thought in every touch, as they would have been by Holbein
+or Dürer, are quite enough to have produced,--not a merely deceptive
+dash of local color, with evanescent background,--but an entirely
+perfect piece of chiaroscuro, with its lights all truly limited and
+gradated, and with every form of leaf and rock in the background
+entirely right, complete,--and full not of mere suggestion, but of
+accurate information, exactly such as the fancy by itself cannot
+furnish. A work so treated by any man of power and sentiment such as the
+designer of this vignette possesses, would be an eternal thing; ten in
+the volume, for real enduring and educational power, were worth two
+hundred in imperfect development, and would have been a perpetual
+possession to the reader; whereas one certain result of the
+multiplication of these lovely but imperfect drawings, is to increase
+the feverish thirst for excitement, and to weaken the power of attention
+by endless diversion and division. This volume, beautiful as it is, will
+be forgotten; the strength in it is, in final outcome, spent for naught;
+and others, and still others, following it, will "come like shadows, so
+depart."
+
+91. There is, however, a quite different disadvantage, but no less
+grave, to be apprehended from this rich multiplication of private
+possession. The more we have of books, and cabinet pictures, and cabinet
+ornaments, and other such domestic objects of art, the less capable we
+shall become of understanding or enjoying the lofty character of work
+noble in scale, and intended for public service. The most practical and
+immediate distinction between the orders of "mean" and "high" Art, is
+that the first is private,--the second public; the first for the
+individual, the second for all. It may be that domestic Art is the only
+kind which is likely to flourish in a country of cold climate, and in
+the hands of a nation tempered as the English are; but it is necessary
+that we should at least understand the disadvantage under which we thus
+labor; and the duty of not allowing the untowardness of our
+circumstances, or the selfishness of our dispositions, to have
+unresisted and unchecked influence over the adopted style of our art.
+But this part of the subject requires to be examined at length, and I
+must therefore reserve it for the following paper.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[77] _Art Journal_, vol. v., pp. 9, 10. January 1866.--ED.
+
+[78] Routledge, 1864. The engraving is all by Dalziel. I do not ask the
+reader's pardon for speaking of myself, with reference to the point at
+issue. It is perhaps quite as modest to relate personal experience as to
+offer personal opinion; and the accurate statement of such experience
+is, in questions of this sort, the only contribution at present possible
+towards their solution.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.[79]
+
+
+92. In pursuing the question put at the close of the last paper, it must
+be observed that there are essentially two conditions under which we
+have to examine the difference between the effects of public and private
+Art on national prosperity. The first in immediate influence is their
+Economical function, the second their Ethical. We have first to consider
+what class of persons they in each case support; and, secondly, what
+classes they teach or please.
+
+Looking over the list of the gift-books of this year, perhaps the first
+circumstance which would naturally strike us would be the number of
+persons living by this industry; and, in any consideration of the
+probable effects of a transference of the public attention to other
+kinds of work, we ought first to contemplate the result on the interests
+of the workman. The guinea spent on one of our ordinary illustrated
+gift-books is divided among--
+
+   1. A number of second-rate or third-rate artists, producing
+   designs as fast as they can, and realizing them up to
+   the standard required by the public of that year. Men
+   of consummate power may sometimes put their hands
+   to the business; but exceptionally.
+
+   2. Engravers, trained to mechanical imitation of this
+   second or third-rate work; of these engravers the inferior
+   classes are usually much overworked.
+
+   3. Printers, paper-makers, ornamental binders, and other
+   craftsmen.
+
+   4. Publishers and booksellers.
+
+93. Let us suppose the book can be remuneratively produced if there is
+a sale of five thousand copies. Then £5000, contributed for it by the
+public, are divided among the different workers; it does not matter what
+actual rate of division we assume, for the mere object of comparison
+with other modes of employing the money; but let us say these £5000 are
+divided among five hundred persons, giving on an average £10 to each.
+And let us suppose these £10 to be a fortnight's maintenance to each.
+Then, to maintain them through the year, twenty-five such books must be
+published; or to keep certainly within the mark of the probable cost of
+our autumnal gift-books, suppose £100,000 are spent by the public, with
+resultant supply of 100,000 households with one illustrated book, of
+second or third-rate quality each (there being twenty different books
+thus supplied), and resultant maintenance of five hundred persons for
+the year, at severe work of a second or third-rate order, mostly
+mechanical.
+
+94. Now, if the mind of the nation, instead of private, be set on public
+work, there is of course no expense incurred for multiplication, or
+mechanical copying of any kind, or for retail dealing. The £5000,
+instead of being given for five thousand _copies_ of the work, and
+divided among five hundred persons, are given for one original work, and
+given to one person. This one person will of course employ assistants;
+but these will be chosen by himself, and will form a superior class of
+men, out of whom the future leading artists of the time will rise in
+succession. The broad difference will therefore be, that, in the one
+case, £5000 are divided among five hundred persons of different classes,
+doing second-rate or wholly mechanical work; and in the other case, the
+same sum is divided among a few chosen persons of the best material of
+mind producible by the state at the given epoch. It may seem an unfair
+assumption that work for the public will be more honestly and earnestly
+done than that for private possession. But every motive that can touch
+either conscience or ambition is brought to bear upon the artist who is
+employed on a public service, and only a few such motives in other modes
+of occupation. The greater permanence, scale, dignity of office, and
+fuller display of Art in a National building, combine to call forth the
+energies of the artist; and if a man will not do his best under such
+circumstances, there is no "best" in him.
+
+95. It might also at first seem an unwarrantable assumption that fewer
+persons would be employed in the private than in the national work,
+since, at least in architecture, quite as many subordinate craftsmen are
+employed as in the production of a book. It is, however, necessary, for
+the purpose of clearly seeing the effect of the two forms of occupation,
+that we should oppose them where their contrast is most complete; and
+that we should compare, not merely bookbinding with bricklaying, but the
+presentation of Art in books, necessarily involving much subordinate
+employment, with its presentation in statues or wall-pictures, involving
+only the labor of the artist and of his immediate assistants. In the one
+case, then, I repeat, the sum set aside by the public for Art-purposes
+is divided among many persons, very indiscriminately chosen; in the
+other among few carefully chosen. But it does not, for that reason,
+support fewer persons. The few artists live on their larger incomes,[80]
+by expenditure among various tradesmen, who in no wise produce Art, but
+the means of pleasant life; so that the real economical question is, not
+how many men shall we maintain, but at what work shall they be
+kept?--shall they every one be set to produce Art for us, in which case
+they must all live poorly, and produce bad Art; or out of the whole
+number shall ten be chosen who can and will produce noble Art; and shall
+the others be employed in providing the means of pleasant life for these
+chosen ten? Will you have, that is to say, four hundred and ninety
+tradesmen, butchers, carpet-weavers, carpenters, and the like, and ten
+fine artists, or will you, under the vain hope of finding, for each of
+them within your realm, "five hundred good as he," have your full
+complement of bad draughtsmen, and retail distributors of their bad
+work?
+
+96. It will be seen in a moment that this is no question of economy
+merely; but, as all economical questions become, when set on their true
+foundation, a dilemma relating to modes of discipline and education. It
+is only one instance of the perpetually recurring offer to our
+choice--shall we have one man educated perfectly, and others trained
+only to serve him, or shall we have all educated equally ill?--Which,
+when the outcries of mere tyranny and pride-defiant on one side, and of
+mere envy and pride-concupiscent on the other, excited by the peril and
+promise of a changeful time, shall be a little abated, will be found to
+be, in brief terms, the one social question of the day.
+
+Without attempting an answer which would lead us far from the business
+in hand, I pass to the Ethical part of the inquiry; to examine, namely,
+the effect of this cheaply diffused Art on the public mind.
+
+97. The first great principle we have to hold by in dealing with the
+matter is, that the end of Art is NOT to _amuse_; and that all Art which
+proposes amusement as its end, or which is sought for that end, must be
+of an inferior, and is probably of a harmful, class.
+
+The end of Art is as serious as that of all other beautiful things--of
+the blue sky and the green grass, and the clouds and the dew. They are
+either useless, or they are of much deeper function than giving
+amusement. Whatever delight we take in them, be it less or more, is not
+the delight we take in play, or receive from momentary surprise. It
+might be a matter of some metaphysical difficulty to define the two
+kinds of pleasure, but it is perfectly easy for any of us to feel that
+there _is_ generic difference between the delight we have in seeing a
+comedy and in watching a sunrise. Not but that there is a kind of Divina
+Commedia,--a dramatic change and power,--in all beautiful things: the
+joy of surprise and incident mingles in music, painting, architecture,
+and natural beauty itself, in an ennobled and enduring manner, with the
+perfectness of eternal hue and form. But whenever the desire of change
+becomes principal; whenever we care only for new tunes, and new
+pictures, and new scenes, all power of enjoying Nature or Art is so far
+perished from us: and a child's love of toys has taken its place. The
+continual advertisement of new music (as if novelty were its virtue)
+signifies, in the inner fact of it, that no one now cares for music. The
+continual desire for new exhibitions means that we do not care for
+pictures; the continual demand for new books means that nobody cares to
+read.
+
+98. Not that it would necessarily, and at all times, mean this; for in a
+living school of Art there will always be an exceeding thirst for, and
+eager watching of freshly-developed thought. But it specially and
+sternly means this, when the interest is merely in the novelty; and
+great work in our possession is forgotten, while mean work, because
+strange and of some personal interest, is annually made the subject of
+eager observation and discussion. As long as (for one of many instances
+of such neglect) two great pictures of Tintoret's lie rolled up in an
+outhouse at Venice, all the exhibitions and schools in Europe mean
+nothing but promotion of costly commerce. Through that, we might indeed
+arrive at better things; but there is no proof, in the eager talk of the
+public about Art, that we _are_ arriving at them. Portraiture of the
+said public's many faces, and tickling of its twice as many eyes, by
+changeful phantasm, are all that the patron-multitudes of the present
+day in reality seek; and this may be supplied to them in multiplying
+excess forever, yet no steps made to the formation of a school of Art
+now, or to the understanding of any that have hitherto existed.
+
+99. It is the carrying of this annual Exhibition into the recesses of
+home which is especially to be dreaded in the multiplication of inferior
+Art for private possession. Public amusement or excitement may often be
+quite wholesomely sought, in gay spectacles, or enthusiastic festivals;
+but we must be careful to the uttermost how we allow the desire for any
+kind of excitement to mingle among the peaceful continuities of home
+happiness. The one stern condition of that happiness is that our
+possessions should be no more than we can thoroughly use; and that to
+this use they should be practically and continually put. Calculate the
+hours which, during the possible duration of life, can, under the most
+favorable circumstances, be employed in reading, and the number of books
+which it is possible to read in that utmost space of time;--it will be
+soon seen what a limited library is all that we need, and how careful we
+ought to be in choosing its volumes. Similarly, the time which most
+people have at their command for any observation of Art is not more than
+would be required for the just understanding of the works of one great
+master. How are we to estimate the futility of wasting this fragment of
+time on works from which nothing can be learned? For the only real
+pleasure, and the richest of all amusements, to be derived from either
+reading or looking, are in the steady progress of the mind and heart,
+which day by day are more deeply satisfied, and yet more divinely
+athirst.
+
+100. As far as I know the homes of England of the present day, they show
+a grievous tendency to fall, in these important respects, into the two
+great classes of over-furnished and unfurnished:--of those in which the
+Greek marble in its niche, and the precious shelf-loads of the luxurious
+library, leave the inmates nevertheless dependent for all their true
+pastime on horse, gun, and croquet-ground;--and those in which Art,
+honored only by the presence of a couple of engravings from Landseer,
+and literature, represented by a few magazines and annuals arranged in a
+star on the drawing-room table, are felt to be entirely foreign to the
+daily business of life, and entirely unnecessary to its domestic
+pleasures.
+
+101. The introduction of furniture of Art into households of this latter
+class is now taking place rapidly; and, of course, by the usual system
+of the ingenious English practical mind, will take place under the
+general law of supply and demand; that is to say, that whatever a class
+of consumers, entirely unacquainted with the different qualities of the
+article they are buying, choose to ask for, will be duly supplied to
+them by the trade. I observe that this beautiful system is gradually
+extending lower and lower in education; and that children, like grown-up
+persons, are more and more able to obtain their toys without any
+reference to what is useful or useless, or right or wrong; but on the
+great horseleech's law of "demand and supply." And, indeed, I write
+these papers, knowing well how effectless all speculations on abstract
+proprieties or possibilities must be in the present ravening state of
+national desire for excitement; but the tracing of moral or of
+mathematical law brings its own quiet reward; though it may be, for the
+time, impossible to apply either to use.
+
+The power of the new influences which have been brought to bear on the
+middle-class mind, with respect to Art, may be sufficiently seen in the
+great rise in the price of pictures which has taken place (principally
+during the last twenty years) owing to the interest occasioned by
+national exhibitions, coupled with facilities of carriage, stimulating
+the activity of dealers, and the collateral discovery by mercantile men
+that pictures are not a bad investment.
+
+102. The following copy of a document in my own possession will give us
+a sufficiently accurate standard of Art-price at the date of it:--
+
+                                   "London, June 11th, 1814.
+
+     "Received of Mr. Cooke the sum of twenty-two pounds ten shillings
+     for three drawings, viz., Lyme, Land's End, and Poole.
+
+       "£22, 10s.
+
+                                          "J. M. W. TURNER."
+
+
+
+It would be a very pleasant surprise to me if any _one_ of these three
+(southern coast) drawings, for which the artist received seven guineas
+each (the odd nine shillings being, I suppose, for the great resource of
+tale-tellers about Turner--"coach-hire") were now offered to me by any
+dealer for a hundred. The rise is somewhat greater in the instance of
+Turner than of any other unpopular[81] artist; but it is at least three
+hundred per cent. on all work by artists of established reputation,
+whether the public can themselves see anything in it, or not. A certain
+quantity of intelligent interest mixes, of course, with the mere fever
+of desire for novelty; and the excellent book illustrations, which are
+the special subjects of our inquiry, are peculiarly adapted to meet
+this; for there are at least twenty people who know a good engraving or
+wood-cut, for one who knows a good picture. The best book illustrations
+fall into three main classes: fine line engravings (always grave in
+purpose), typically represented by Goodall's illustrations to Rogers's
+poems;--fine wood-cuts, or etchings, grave in purpose, such as those by
+Dalziel, from Thomson and Gilbert;--and fine wood-cuts, or etchings, for
+purpose of caricature, such as Leech's and Tenniel's in _Punch_. Each of
+these have a possibly instructive power special to them, which we will
+endeavor severally to examine in the next chapter.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[79] _Art Journal_, vol. v., pp. 33-4. February 1866,--ED.
+
+[80] It may be, they would not ask larger incomes in a time of highest
+national life; and that then the noble art would be far cheaper to the
+nation than the ignoble. But I speak of existing circumstances.
+
+[81] I have never found more than two people (students excepted) in the
+room occupied by Turner's drawings at Kensington, and one of the two, if
+there _are_ two, always looks as if he had got in by mistake.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.[82]
+
+
+103. I purpose in this chapter, as intimated in the last, to sketch
+briefly what I believe to be the real uses and powers of the three kinds
+of engraving, by black line; either for book illustration, or general
+public instruction by distribution of multiplied copies. After thus
+stating what seems to me the proper purpose of each kind of work, I may,
+perhaps, be able to trace some advisable limitations of its technical
+methods.
+
+I. And first, of pure line engraving.
+
+This is the only means by which entire refinement of intellectual
+representation can be given to the public. Photographs have an
+inimitable mechanical refinement, and their legal evidence is of great
+use if you know how to cross-examine them. They are popularly supposed
+to be "true," and, at the worst, they are so, in the sense in which an
+echo is true to a conversation of which it omits the most important
+syllables and reduplicates the rest. But this truth of mere transcript
+has nothing to do with Art properly so called; and will never supersede
+it. Delicate art of design, or of selected truth, can only be presented
+to the general public by true line engraving. It will be enough for my
+purpose to instance three books in which its power has been sincerely
+used. I am more in fields than libraries, and have never cared to look
+much into book illustrations; there are, therefore, of course, numbers
+of well-illustrated works of which I know nothing: but the three I
+should myself name as typical of good use of the method, are I. Rogers's
+Poems, II. the Leipsic edition of Heyne's Virgil (1800), and III. the
+great "Description de l'Egypte."
+
+104. The vignettes in the first named volumes (considering the Italy
+and Poems as one book) I believe to be as skillful and tender as any
+hand work, of the kind, ever done; they are also wholly free from
+affectation of overwrought fineness, on the one side, and from hasty or
+cheap expediencies on the other; and they were produced, under the
+direction and influence of a gentleman and a scholar. Multitudes of
+works, imitative of these, and far more attractive, have been produced
+since; but none of any sterling quality: the good books were (I was
+told) a loss to their publisher, and the money spent since in the same
+manner has been wholly thrown away. Yet these volumes are enough to show
+what lovely service line engraving might be put upon, if the general
+taste were advanced enough to desire it. Their vignettes from Stothard,
+however conventional, show in the grace and tenderness of their living
+subjects how types of innocent beauty, as pure as Angelico's, and far
+lovelier, might indeed be given from modern English life, to exalt the
+conception of youthful dignity and sweetness in every household. I know
+nothing among the phenomena of the present age more sorrowful than that
+the beauty of our youth should remain wholly unrepresented in Fine Art,
+because unfelt by ourselves; and that the only vestiges of a likeness to
+it should be in some of the more subtle passages of caricatures, popular
+(and justly popular) as much because they were the only attainable
+reflection of the prettiness, as because they were the only sympathizing
+records of the humors, of English girls and boys. Of our oil portraits
+of them, in which their beauty is always conceived as consisting in a
+fixed simper--feet not more than two inches long, and accessory grounds,
+pony, and groom--our sentence need not be "_guarda e passa_," but
+"_passa_" only. Yet one oil picture has been painted, and so far as I
+know, one only, representing the deeper loveliness of English youth--the
+portraits of the three children of the Dean of Christ Church, by the son
+of the great portrait painter, who has recorded whatever is tender and
+beautiful in the faces of the aged men of England, bequeathing, as it
+seems, the beauty of their children to the genius of his child.
+
+105. The second book which I named, Heyne's Virgil, shows, though
+unequally and insufficiently, what might be done by line engraving to
+give vital image of classical design, and symbol of classical thought.
+It is profoundly to be regretted that none of these old and
+well-illustrated classics can be put frankly into the hands of youth;
+while all books lately published for general service, pretending to
+classical illustration, are, in point of Art, absolutely dead and
+harmful rubbish. I cannot but think that the production of
+well-illustrated classics would at least leave free of money-scathe, and
+in great honor, any publisher who undertook it; and although schoolboys
+in general might not care for any such help, to one, here and there, it
+would make all the difference between loving his work and hating it. For
+myself, I am quite certain that a single vignette, like that of the
+fountain of Arethusa in Heyne, would have set me on an eager quest,
+which would have saved me years of sluggish and fruitless labor.
+
+106. It is the more strange, and the more to be regretted, that no such
+worthy applications of line engraving are now made, because, merely to
+gratify a fantastic pride, works are often undertaken in which, for want
+of well-educated draughtsmen, the mechanical skill of the engraver has
+been wholly wasted, and nothing produced useful, except for common
+reference. In the great work published by the Dilettanti Society, for
+instance, the engravers have been set to imitate, at endless cost of
+sickly fineness in dotted and hatched execution, drawings in which the
+light and shade is always forced and vulgar, if not utterly false.
+Constantly (as in the 37th plate of the first volume), waving hair casts
+a straight shadow, not only on the forehead, but even on the ripples of
+other curls emerging beneath it: while the publication of plate 41, as a
+representation of the most beautiful statue in the British Museum, may
+well arouse any artist's wonder what kind of "diletto" in antiquity it
+might be, from which the Society assumed its name.
+
+107. The third book above named as a typical example of right work in
+line, the "Description de l'Egypte," is one of the greatest monuments
+of calm human industry, honestly and delicately applied, which exist in
+the world. The front of Rouen Cathedral, or the most richly-wrought
+illuminated missal, as pieces of resolute industry, are mere child's
+play compared to any group of the plates of natural history in this
+book. Of unemotional, but devotedly earnest and rigidly faithful labor,
+I know no other such example. The lithographs to Agassiz's "poissons
+fossiles" are good in their kind, but it is a far lower and easier kind,
+and the popularly visible result is in larger proportion to the skill;
+whereas none but workmen can know the magnificent devotion of
+unpretending and observant toil, involved in even a single figure of an
+insect or a starfish on these unapproachable plates. Apply such skill to
+the simple presentation of the natural history of every English county,
+and make the books portable in size, and I cannot conceive any other
+book-gift to our youth so precious.
+
+108. II. Wood-cutting and etching for serious purpose.
+
+The tendency of wood-cutting in England has been to imitate the fineness
+and manner of engraving. This is a false tendency; and so far as the
+productions obtained under its influence have been successful, they are
+to be considered only as an inferior kind of engraving, under the last
+head. But the real power of wood-cutting is, with little labor, to
+express in clear delineation the most impressive essential qualities of
+form and light and shade, in objects which owe their interest not to
+grace, but to power and character. It can never express beauty of the
+subtlest kind, and is not in any way available on a large scale; but
+used rightly, on its own ground, it is the _most purely intellectual_ of
+all Art; sculpture, even of the highest order, being slightly sensual
+and imitative; while fine wood-cutting is entirely abstract, thoughtful,
+and passionate. The best wood-cuts that I know in the whole range of Art
+are those of Dürer's "Life of the Virgin;" after these come the other
+works of Dürer, slightly inferior from a more complex and wiry treatment
+of line. I have never seen any other work in wood deserving to be named
+with his; but the best vignettes of Bewick approach Dürer in execution
+of plumage, as nearly as a clown's work can approach a gentleman's.
+
+109. Some very brilliant execution on an inferior system--less false,
+however, than the modern English one--has been exhibited by the French;
+and if we accept its false conditions, nothing can surpass the
+cleverness of our own school of Dalziel, or even of the average
+wood-cutting in our daily journals, which however, as aforesaid, is only
+to be reckoned an inferior method of engraving. These meet the demand of
+the imperfectly-educated public in every kind; and it would be absurd to
+urge any change in the method, as long as the public remain in the same
+state of knowledge or temper. But, allowing for the time during which
+these illustrated papers have now been bringing whatever information and
+example of Art they could to the million, it seems likely that the said
+million will remain in the same stage of knowledge yet for some time.
+Perhaps the horse is an animal as antagonistic to Art in England, as he
+was in harmony with it in Greece; still, allowing for the general
+intelligence of the London bred lower classes, I was surprised by a
+paragraph in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, quoting the _Star_ of November 6th
+of last year, in its report upon the use made of illustrated papers by
+the omnibus stablemen,--to the following effect:--
+
+
+"They are frequently employed in the omnibus yards from five o'clock in
+the morning till twelve at night, so that a fair day's work for a
+'horse-keeper' is about eighteen hours. For this enormous labor they
+receive a guinea per week, which for them means seven, not six, days;
+though they do contrive to make Sunday an 'off-day' now and then. The
+ignorance of aught in the world save ''orses and 'buses' which prevails
+amongst these stablemen is almost incredible. A veteran horse-keeper,
+who had passed his days in an omnibus-yard, was once overheard praising
+the 'Lus-trated London News with much enthusiasm, as the best periodical
+in London, 'leastways at the coffee-shop.' When pressed for the reason
+of his partiality, he confessed it was the 'pickshers' which delighted
+him. He amused himself during his meal-times by 'counting the images!'"
+
+
+110. But for the classes among whom there is a real demand for
+educational art, it is highly singular that no systematic use has yet
+been made of wood-cutting on its own terms; and only here and there,
+even in the best books, is there an example of what might be done by it.
+The frontispieces to the two volumes of Mr. Birch's "Ancient Pottery and
+Porcelain," and such simpler cuts as that at p. 273 of the first volume,
+show what might be cheaply done for illustration of archaic classical
+work; two or three volumes of such cuts chosen from the best vases of
+European collections and illustrated by a short and trustworthy
+commentary, would be to any earnest schoolboy worth a whole library of
+common books. But his father can give him nothing of the kind--and if
+the father himself wish to study Greek Art, he must spend something like
+a hundred pounds to put himself in possession of any sufficiently
+illustrative books of reference. As to any use of such means for
+representing objects in the round, the plate of the head of Pallas
+facing p. 168 in the same volume sufficiently shows the hopelessness of
+setting the modern engraver to such service. Again, in a book like
+Smith's dictionary of geography, the wood-cuts of coins are at present
+useful only for comparison and reference. They are absolutely valueless
+as representations of the art of the coin.
+
+111. Now, supposing that an educated scholar and draughtsman had drawn
+each of these blocks, and that they had been cut with as much average
+skill as that employed in the wood-cuts of _Punch_, each of these
+vignettes of coins might have been an exquisite lesson, both of high Art
+treatment in the coin, and of beautiful black and white drawing in the
+representation; and this just as cheaply--nay, more cheaply--than the
+present common and useless drawing. The things necessary are indeed not
+small,--nothing less than well educated intellect and feeling in the
+draughtsmen; but intellect and feeling, as I have often said before now,
+are always to be had cheap if you go the right way about it--and they
+cannot otherwise be had for any price. There are quite brains enough,
+and there is quite sentiment enough, among the gentlemen of England to
+answer all the purposes of England: but if you so train your youths of
+the richer classes that they shall think it more gentlemanly to scrawl a
+figure on a bit of note paper, to be presently rolled up to light a
+cigar with, than to draw one nobly and rightly for the seeing of all
+men;--and if you practically show your youths, of all classes, that they
+will be held gentlemen, for babbling with a simper in Sunday pulpits; or
+grinning through, not a horse's, but a hound's, collar, in Saturday
+journals; or dirtily living on the public money in government
+non-offices:--but that they shall be held less than gentlemen for doing
+a man's work honestly with a man's right hand--you will of course find
+that intellect and feeling cannot be had when you want them. But if you
+like to train some of your best youth into scholarly artists,--men of
+the temper of Leonardo, of Holbein, of Dürer, or of Velasquez, instead
+of decomposing them into the early efflorescences and putrescences of
+idle clerks, sharp lawyers, soft curates, and rotten journalists,--you
+will find that you can always get a good line drawn when you need it,
+without paying large subscriptions to schools of Art.
+
+112. III. This relation of social character to the possible supply
+of good Art is still more direct when we include in our survey the
+mass of illustration coming under the general head of dramatic
+caricature--caricature, that is to say, involving right understanding of
+the true grotesque in human life; caricature of which the worth or
+harmfulness cannot be estimated, unless we can first somewhat answer the
+wide question, What is the meaning and worth of English laughter? I say,
+"of English laughter," because if you can well determine the value of
+that, you determine the value of the true laughter of all men--the
+English laugh being the purest and truest in the metal that can be
+minted. And indeed only Heaven can know what the country owes to it, on
+the lips of such men as Sydney Smith and Thomas Hood. For indeed the
+true wit of all countries, but especially English wit (because the
+openest), must always be essentially on the side of truth--for the
+nature of wit is one with truth. Sentiment may be false--reasoning
+false--reverence false---love false,--everything false except wit; that
+_must_ be true--and even if it is ever harmful, it is as divided against
+itself--a small truth undermining a mightier.
+
+On the other hand, the spirit of levity, and habit of mockery, are among
+the chief instruments of final ruin both to individual and nations. I
+believe no business will ever be rightly done by a laughing Parliament:
+and that the public perception of vice or of folly which only finds
+expression in caricature, neither reforms the one, nor instructs the
+other. No man is fit for much, we know, "who has not a good laugh in
+him"--but a sad wise valor is the only complexion for a leader; and if
+there was ever a time for laughing in this dark and hollow world, I do
+not think it is now. This is a wide subject, and I must follow it in
+another place; for our present purpose, all that needs to be noted is
+that, for the expression of true humor, few and imperfect lines are
+often sufficient, and that in this direction lies the only opening for
+the serviceable presentation of amateur work to public notice.
+
+113. I have said nothing of lithography, because, with the exception of
+Samuel Prout's sketches, no work of standard Art-value has ever been
+produced by it, nor can be: its opaque and gritty texture being wholly
+offensive to the eye of any well trained artist. Its use in connection
+with color is, of course, foreign to our present subject. Nor do I take
+any note of the various current patents for cheap modes of drawing,
+though they are sometimes to be thanked for rendering possible the
+publication of sketches like those of the pretty little "Voyage en
+Zigzag" ("how we spent the summer") published by Longmans--which are
+full of charming humor, character, and freshness of expression; and
+might have lost more by the reduction to the severe terms of
+wood-cutting than they do by the ragged interruptions of line which are
+an inevitable defect in nearly all these cheap processes. It will be
+enough, therefore, for all serious purpose, that we confine ourselves
+to the study of the black line, as produced in steel and wood; and I
+will endeavor in the next paper[83] to set down some of the technical
+laws belonging to each mode of its employment.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[82] _Art Journal_, vol. v., pp. 97-8. April 1866.--ED.
+
+[83] The present paper was, however, the last.--ED.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's On the Old Road  Vol. 1  (of 2), by John Ruskin
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+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of On the Old Road, Vol I, by John Ruskin.
+    </title>
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's On the Old Road  Vol. 1  (of 2), 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: On the Old Road  Vol. 1  (of 2)
+       A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature
+
+Author: John Ruskin
+
+Release Date: June 2, 2008 [EBook #25678]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON THE OLD ROAD  VOL. 1  (OF 2) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 412px;">
+<img src="images/frontis-0389-1.jpg" width="412" height="600" alt="RUSKIN&#39;S MONUMENT" title="" />
+<span class="caption">RUSKIN&#39;S MONUMENT<br />From a Photograph</span>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+ <h1>THE COMPLETE WORKS<br /></h1>
+
+  <h4>OF<br /></h4>
+
+  <h2>JOHN RUSKIN<br /></h2>
+
+  <h2>ON THE OLD ROAD</h2>
+
+<h4><i>A COLLECTION OF<br />
+  MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS AND ARTICLES<br />
+  ON ART AND LITERATURE.</i></h4>
+
+  <h2>Volumes I-II<br /><br /></h2>
+
+   <h1>Vol. II.</h1>
+
+  <p class="center">NATIONAL LIBRARY ASSOCIATION<br />
+  NEW YORK&mdash;CHICAGO<br /><br />
+  Published 1834-1885.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS_OF_VOL_I" id="CONTENTS_OF_VOL_I"></a>CONTENTS OF VOL. I.</h2>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<div class='centered'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="CONTENTS">
+<tr><td align='left'>INTRODUCTORY.</td><td align='right'>PAGE</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 2em;">MY FIRST EDITOR. 1878</span></td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_3'><b>3</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><th align='center'>ART.</th></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>I. HISTORY AND CRITICISM.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap" style="margin-left: 2em;"> Lord Lindsay's "Christian Art." 1847</span> </td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_17'><b>17</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap" style="margin-left: 2em;"> Eastlake's "History of Oil Painting." 1848</span> </td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_97'><b>97</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap" style="margin-left: 2em;"> Samuel Prout. 1849</span> </td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_148'><b>148</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap" style="margin-left: 2em;"> Sir Joshua and Holbein. 1860</span> </td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_158'><b>158</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>II. PRE-RAPHAELITISM.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap" style="margin-left: 2em;"> Its Principles, and Turner. 1851</span> </td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_169'><b>171</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap" style="margin-left: 2em;"> Its Three Colors. 1878</span> </td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_218'><b>218</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>III. ARCHITECTURE.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap" style="margin-left: 2em;"> The Opening of the Crystal Palace. 1854</span> </td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_245'><b>245</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap" style="margin-left: 2em;"> The Study of Architecture in our Schools. 1865</span> </td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_259'><b>259</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>IV. INAUGURAL ADDRESS, CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL OF ART. 1858</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_279'><b>279</b></a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='left'>V. THE CESTUS OF AGLAIA. 1865-66</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_305'><b>305</b></a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+   <h2><br /><br />INTRODUCTORY: MY FIRST EDITOR.</h2>
+
+
+   <h2>ART.</h2>
+
+   <h3>I. HISTORY AND CRITICISM.</h3>
+
+   <h3>II. PRE-RAPHAELITISM.</h3>
+
+   <h3>III. ARCHITECTURE.<br /><br /></h3>
+
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="MY_FIRST_EDITOR1" id="MY_FIRST_EDITOR1"></a>MY FIRST EDITOR.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></h2>
+
+<h3>AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REMINISCENCE.</h3>
+
+ <h4>(<i>University Magazine, April 1878.</i>)<br /><br /></h4>
+
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;"><i>1st February, 1878.</i></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>1. In seven days more I shall be fifty-nine;&mdash;which (practically) is all
+the same as sixty; but, being asked by the wife of my dear old friend,
+W. H. Harrison, to say a few words of our old relations together, I find
+myself, in spite of all these years, a boy again,&mdash;partly in the mere
+thought of, and renewed sympathy with, the cheerful heart of my old
+literary master, and partly in instinctive terror lest, wherever he is
+in celestial circles, he should catch me writing bad grammar, or putting
+wrong stops, and should set the table turning, or the like. For he was
+inexorable in such matters, and many a sentence in "Modern Painters,"
+which I had thought quite beautifully turned out after a forenoon's work
+on it, had to be turned outside-in, after all, and cut into the smallest
+pieces and sewn up again, because he had found out there wasn't a
+nominative in it, or a genitive, or a conjunction, or something else
+indispensable to a sentence's decent existence and position in life. Not
+a book of mine, for good thirty years, but went, every word of it, under
+his careful eyes twice over&mdash;often also the last revises left to his
+tender mercy altogether on condition he wouldn't bother me any more.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>2. "For good thirty years": that is to say, from my first verse-writing
+in "Friendship's Offering" at fifteen, to my last orthodox and
+conservative compositions at forty-five.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> But when I began to utter
+radical sentiments, and say things derogatory to the clergy, my old
+friend got quite restive&mdash;absolutely refused sometimes to pass even my
+most grammatical and punctuated paragraphs, if their contents savored of
+heresy or revolution; and at last I was obliged to print all my
+philanthropy and political economy on the sly.</p>
+
+<p>3. The heaven of the literary world through which Mr. Harrison moved in
+a widely cometary fashion, circling now round one luminary and now
+submitting to the attraction of another, not without a serenely
+erubescent luster of his own, differed <i>toto c&oelig;lo</i> from the celestial
+state of authorship by whose courses we have now the felicity of being
+dazzled and directed. Then, the publications of the months being very
+nearly concluded in the modest browns of <i>Blackwood</i> and <i>Fraser</i>, and
+the majesty of the quarterlies being above the range of the properly
+so-called "public" mind, the simple family circle looked forward with
+chief complacency to their New Year's gift of the Annual&mdash;a delicately
+printed, lustrously bound, and elaborately illustrated small octavo
+volume, representing, after its manner, the poetical and artistic
+inspiration of the age. It is not a little wonderful to me, looking back
+to those pleasant years and their bestowings, to measure the difficultly
+imaginable distance between the periodical literature of that day and
+ours. In a few words, it may be summed by saying that the ancient Annual
+was written by meekly-minded persons, who felt that they knew nothing
+about anything, and did not want to know more. Faith in the usually
+accepted principles of propriety, and confidence in the Funds, the
+Queen, the English Church, the British Army and the perennial
+continuance of England, of her Annuals, and of the creation in general,
+were neces<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>sary then for the eligibility, and important elements in the
+success, of the winter-blowing author. Whereas I suppose that the
+popularity of our present candidates for praise, at the successive
+changes of the moon, may be considered as almost proportionate to their
+confidence in the abstract principles of dissolution, the immediate
+necessity of change, and the inconvenience, no less than the iniquity,
+of attributing any authority to the Church, the Queen, the Almighty, or
+anything else but the British Press. Such constitutional differences in
+the tone of the literary contents imply still greater contrasts in the
+lives of the editors of these several periodicals. It was enough for the
+editor of the "Friendship's Offering" if he could gather for his
+Christmas bouquet a little pastoral story, suppose, by Miss Mitford, a
+dramatic sketch by the Rev. George Croly, a few sonnets or impromptu
+stanzas to music by the gentlest lovers and maidens of his acquaintance,
+and a legend of the Apennines or romance of the Pyrenees by some
+adventurous traveler who had penetrated into the recesses of their
+mountains, and would modify the traditions of the country to introduce a
+plate by Clarkson Stanfield or J. D. Harding. Whereas nowadays the
+editor of a leading monthly is responsible to his readers for exhaustive
+views of the politics of Europe during the last fortnight; and would
+think himself distanced in the race with his lunarian rivals, if his
+numbers did not contain three distinct and entirely new theories of the
+system of the universe, and at least one hitherto unobserved piece of
+evidence of the nonentity of God.</p>
+
+<p>4. In one respect, however, the humilities of that departed time were
+loftier than the prides of to-day&mdash;that even the most retiring of its
+authors expected to be admired, not for what he had discovered, but for
+what he was. It did not matter in our dynasties of determined noblesse
+how many things an industrious blockhead knew, or how curious things a
+lucky booby had discovered. We claimed, and gave no honor but for real
+rank of human sense and wit; and although this manner of estimate led to
+many various col<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>lateral mischiefs&mdash;to much toleration of misconduct in
+persons who were amusing, and of uselessness in those of proved ability,
+there was yet the essential and constant good in it, that no one hoped
+to snap up for himself a reputation which his friend was on the point of
+achieving, and that even the meanest envy of merit was not embittered by
+a gambler's grudge at his neighbor's fortune.</p>
+
+<p>5. Into this incorruptible court of literature I was early brought,
+whether by good or evil hap, I know not; certainly by no very deliberate
+wisdom in my friends or myself. A certain capacity for rhythmic cadence
+(visible enough in all my later writings) and the cheerfulness of a much
+protected, but not foolishly indulged childhood, made me early a
+rhymester; and a shelf of the little cabinet by which I am now writing
+is loaded with poetical effusions which were the delight of my father
+and mother, and I have not yet the heart to burn. A worthy Scottish
+friend of my father's, Thomas Pringle, preceded Mr. Harrison in the
+editorship of "Friendship's Offering," and doubtfully, but with
+benignant sympathy, admitted the dazzling hope that one day rhymes of
+mine might be seen in real print, on those amiable and shining pages.</p>
+
+<p>6. My introduction by Mr. Pringle to the poet Rogers, on the ground of
+my admiration of the recently published "Italy," proved, as far as I
+remember, slightly disappointing to the poet, because it appeared on Mr.
+Pringle's unadvised cross-examination of me in the presence that I knew
+more of the vignettes than the verses; and also slightly discouraging to
+me because, this contretemps necessitating an immediate change of
+subject, I thenceforward understood none of the conversation, and when
+we came away was rebuked by Mr. Pringle for not attending to it. Had his
+grave authority been maintained over me, my literary bloom would
+probably have been early nipped; but he passed away into the African
+deserts; and the Favonian breezes of Mr. Harrison's praise revived my
+drooping ambition.</p>
+
+<p>7. I know not whether most in that ambition, or to please<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> my father, I
+now began seriously to cultivate my skill in expression. I had always an
+instinct of possessing considerable word-power; and the series of essays
+written about this time for the <i>Architectural Magazine</i>, under the
+signature of Kata Phusin, contain sentences nearly as well put together
+as any I have done since. But without Mr. Harrison's ready praise, and
+severe punctuation, I should have either tired of my labor, or lost it;
+as it was, though I shall always think those early years might have been
+better spent, they had their reward. As soon as I had anything really to
+say, I was able sufficiently to say it; and under Mr. Harrison's
+cheerful auspices, and balmy consolations of my father under adverse
+criticism, the first volume of "Modern Painters" established itself in
+public opinion, and determined the tenor of my future life.</p>
+
+<p>8. Thus began a friendship, and in no unreal sense, even a family
+relationship, between Mr. Harrison, my father and mother, and me, in
+which there was no alloy whatsoever of distrust or displeasure on either
+side, but which remained faithful and loving, more and more conducive to
+every sort of happiness among us, to the day of my father's death.</p>
+
+<p>But the joyfulest days of it for <i>us</i>, and chiefly for me, cheered with
+concurrent sympathy from other friends&mdash;of whom only one now is
+left&mdash;were in the triumphal Olympiad of years which followed the
+publication of the second volume of "Modern Painters," when Turner
+himself had given to me his thanks, to my father and mother his true
+friendship, and came always for <i>their</i> honor, to keep my birthday with
+them; the constant dinner party of the day remaining in its perfect
+chaplet from 1844 to 1850,&mdash;Turner, Mr. Thomas Richmond, Mr. George
+Richmond, Samuel Prout, and Mr. Harrison.</p>
+
+<p>9. Mr. Harrison, as my literary godfather, who had held me at the Font
+of the Muses, and was answerable to the company for my moral principles
+and my syntax, always made "the speech"; my father used most often to
+answer for me in few words, but with wet eyes: (there was a general<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span>
+understanding that any good or sorrow that might come to me in literary
+life were infinitely more his) and the two Mr. Richmonds held themselves
+responsible to him for my at least moderately decent orthodoxy in art,
+taking in that matter a tenderly inquisitorial function, and warning my
+father solemnly of two dangerous heresies in the bud, and of things
+really passing the possibilities of the indulgence of the Church, said
+against Claude or Michael Angelo. The death of Turner and other things,
+far more sad than death, clouded those early days, but the memory of
+them returned again after I had well won my second victory with the
+"Stones of Venice"; and the two Mr. Richmonds, and Mr. Harrison, and my
+father, were again happy on my birthday, and so to the end.</p>
+
+<p>10. In a far deeper sense than he himself knew, Mr. Harrison was all
+this time influencing my thoughts and opinions, by the entire
+consistency, contentment, and practical sense of his modest life. My
+father and he were both flawless types of the true London citizen of
+olden days: incorruptible, proud with sacred and simple pride, happy in
+their function and position; putting daily their total energy into the
+detail of their business duties, and finding daily a refined and perfect
+pleasure in the hearth-side poetry of domestic life. Both of them, in
+their hearts, as romantic as girls; both of them inflexible as soldier
+recruits in any matter of probity and honor, in business or out of it;
+both of them utterly hating radical newspapers, and devoted to the House
+of Lords; my father only, it seemed to me, slightly failing in his
+loyalty to the Worshipful the Mayor and Corporation of London. This
+disrespect for civic dignity was connected in my father with some little
+gnawing of discomfort&mdash;deep down in his heart&mdash;in his own position as a
+merchant, and with timidly indulged hope that his son might one day move
+in higher spheres; whereas Mr. Harrison was entirely placid and resigned
+to the will of Providence which had appointed him his desk in the Crown
+Life Office, never in his most romantic visions projected a marriage for
+any of his daugh<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>ters with a British baronet or a German count, and
+pinned his little vanities prettily and openly on his breast, like a
+nosegay, when he went out to dinner. Most especially he shone at the
+Literary Fund, where he was Registrar and had proper official relations,
+therefore, always with the Chairman, Lord Mahon, or Lord Houghton, or
+the Bishop of Winchester, or some other magnificent person of that sort,
+with whom it was Mr. Harrison's supremest felicity to exchange a not
+unfrequent little joke&mdash;like a pinch of snuff&mdash;and to indicate for them
+the shoals to be avoided and the channels to be followed with flowing
+sail in the speech of the year; after which, if perchance there were any
+malignant in the company who took objection, suppose, to the claims of
+the author last relieved, to the charity of the Society, or to any claim
+founded on the production of a tale for <i>Blackwood's Magazine</i>, and of
+two sonnets for "Friendship's Offering"; or if perchance there were any
+festering sharp thorn in Mr. Harrison's side in the shape of some
+distinguished radical, Sir Charles Dilke, or Mr. Dickens, or anybody who
+had ever said anything against taxation, or the Post Office, or the
+Court of Chancery, or the Bench of Bishops,&mdash;then would Mr. Harrison, if
+he had full faith in his Chairman, cunningly arrange with him some
+delicate little extinctive operation to be performed on that malignant
+or that radical in the course of the evening, and would relate to us
+exultingly the next day all the incidents of the power of arms, and
+vindictively (for him) dwell on the barbed points and double edge of the
+beautiful episcopalian repartee with which it was terminated.</p>
+
+<p>11. Very seriously, in all such public duties, Mr. Harrison was a person
+of rarest quality and worth; absolutely disinterested in his zeal,
+unwearied in exertion, always ready, never tiresome, never absurd;
+bringing practical sense, kindly discretion, and a most wholesome
+element of good-humored, but incorruptible honesty, into everything his
+hand found to do. Everybody respected, and the best men sincerely
+regarded him, and I think those who knew most of the world were always
+the first to acknowledge his fine<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> faculty of doing exactly the right
+thing to exactly the right point&mdash;and so pleasantly. In private life, he
+was to me an object of quite special admiration, in the quantity of
+pleasure he could take in little things; and he very materially modified
+many of my gravest conclusions, as to the advantages or mischiefs of
+modern suburban life. To myself scarcely any dwelling-place and duty in
+this world would have appeared (until, perhaps, I had tried them) less
+eligible for a man of sensitive and fanciful mind than the New Road,
+Camberwell Green, and the monotonous office work in Bridge Street. And
+to a certain extent, I am still of the same mind as to these matters,
+and do altogether, and without doubt or hesitation, repudiate the
+existence of New Road and Camberwell Green in general, no less than the
+condemnation of intelligent persons to a routine of clerk's work broken
+only by a three weeks' holiday in the decline of the year. On less
+lively, fanciful, and amiable persons than my old friend, the New Road
+and the daily desk do verily exercise a degrading and much to be
+regretted influence. But Mr. Harrison brought the freshness of pastoral
+simplicity into the most faded corners of the Green, lightened with his
+cheerful heart the most leaden hours of the office, and gathered during
+his three weeks' holiday in the neighborhood, suppose, of Guildford,
+Gravesend, Broadstairs, or Rustington, more vital recreation and
+speculative philosophy than another man would have got on the grand
+tour.</p>
+
+<p>12. On the other hand, I, who had nothing to do all day but what I
+liked, and could wander at will among all the best beauties of the
+globe&mdash;nor that without sufficient power to see and to feel them, was
+habitually a discontented person, and frequently a weary one; and the
+reproachful thought which always rose in my mind when in that
+unconquerable listlessness of surfeit from excitement I found myself
+unable to win even a momentary pleasure from the fairest scene, was
+always: "If but Mr. Harrison were here instead of me!"</p>
+
+<p>13. Many and many a time I planned very seriously the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> beguiling of him
+over the water. But there was always something to be done in a
+hurry&mdash;something to be worked out&mdash;something to be seen, as I thought,
+only in my own quiet way. I believe if I had but had the sense to take
+my old friend with me, he would have shown me ever so much more than I
+found out by myself. But it was not to be; and year after year I went to
+grumble and mope at Venice, or Lago Maggiore; and Mr. Harrison to enjoy
+himself from morning to night at Broadstairs or Box Hill. Let me not
+speak with disdain of either. No blue languor of tideless wave is worth
+the spray and sparkle of a South-Eastern English beach, and no one will
+ever rightly enjoy the pines of the Wengern Alp who despises the boxes
+of Box Hill.</p>
+
+<p>Nay, I remember me of a little rapture of George Richmond himself on
+those fair slopes of sunny sward, ending in a vision of Tobit and his
+dog&mdash;no less&mdash;led up there by the helpful angel. (I have always
+wondered, by the way, whether that blessed dog minded what the angel
+said to him.)</p>
+
+<p>14. But Mr. Harrison was independent of these mere ethereal visions, and
+surrounded himself only with a halo of sublunary beatitude. Welcome
+always he, as on his side frankly coming to be well, with the farmer,
+the squire, the rector, the&mdash;I had like to have said, dissenting
+minister, but I think Mr. Harrison usually evaded villages for summer
+domicile which were in any wise open to suspicion of Dissent in the
+air,&mdash;but with hunting rector, and the High Church curate, and the
+rector's daughters, and the curate's mother&mdash;and the landlord of the Red
+Lion, and the hostler of the Red Lion stables, and the tapster of the
+Pig and Whistle, and all the pigs in the backyard, and all the whistlers
+in the street&mdash;whether for want of thought or for gayety of it, and all
+the geese on the common, ducks in the horse-pond, and daws in the
+steeple, Mr. Harrison was known and beloved by every bird and body of
+them before half his holiday was over, and the rest of it was mere
+exuberance of festivity about him, and applauding coronation of his head
+and heart. Above<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> all, he delighted in the ways of animals and children.
+He wrote a birthday ode&mdash;or at least a tumble-out-of-the-nest-day
+ode&mdash;to our pet rook, Grip, which encouraged that bird in taking such
+liberties with the cook, and in addressing so many impertinences to the
+other servants, that he became the mere plague, or as the French would
+express it, the "Black-beast," of the kitchen at Denmark Hill for the
+rest of his life. There was almost always a diary kept, usually, I
+think, in rhyme, of those summer hours of indolence; and when at last it
+was recognized, in due and reverent way, at the Crown Life Office, that
+indeed the time had drawn near when its constant and faithful servant
+should be allowed to rest, it was perhaps not the least of my friend's
+praiseworthy and gentle gifts to be truly capable of rest; withdrawing
+himself into the memories of his useful and benevolent life, and making
+it truly a holiday in its honored evening. The idea then occurred to him
+(and it was now my turn to press with hearty sympathy the sometimes
+intermitted task) of writing these Reminiscences: valuable&mdash;valuable to
+whom, and for what, I begin to wonder.</p>
+
+<p>15. For indeed these memories are of people who are passed away like the
+snow in harvest; and now, with the sharp-sickle reapers of full shocks
+of the fattening wheat of metaphysics, and fair novelists Ruth-like in
+the fields of barley, or more mischievously coming through the
+rye,&mdash;what will the public, so vigorously sustained by these, care to
+hear of the lovely writers of old days, quaint creatures that they
+were?&mdash;Merry Miss Mitford, actually living in the country, actually
+walking in it, loving it, and finding history enough in the life of the
+butcher's boy, and romance enough in the story of the miller's daughter,
+to occupy all her mind with, innocent of troubles concerning the Turkish
+question; steady-going old Barham, confessing nobody but the Jackdaw of
+Rheims, and fearless alike of Ritualism, Darwinism, or disestablishment;
+iridescent clearness of Thomas Hood&mdash;the wildest, deepest infinity of
+marvelously jestful men; manly and rational Sydney, inevitable,
+infallible, inoffen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>sively wise of wit;<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>&mdash;they are gone their way, and
+ours is far diverse; and they and all the less-known, yet pleasantly and
+brightly endowed spirits of that time, are suddenly as unintelligible to
+us as the Etruscans&mdash;not a feeling they had that we can share in; and
+these pictures of them will be to us valuable only as the sculpture
+under the niches far in the shade there of the old parish church, dimly
+vital images of inconceivable creatures whom we shall never see the like
+of more.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span></p>
+<h2>ART.</h2>
+
+<h2>I.</h2>
+
+<h3>HISTORY AND CRITICISM.</h3>
+
+
+
+<h3>LORD LINDSAY'S "CHRISTIAN ART."</h3>
+
+<p class="center">(<i>Quarterly Review, June 1847.</i>)</p>
+
+<h3>EASTLAKE'S "HISTORY OF OIL PAINTING."</h3>
+
+   <p class="center">(<i>Quarterly Review, March 1848.</i>)</p>
+
+   <h3>SAMUEL PROUT.</h3>
+
+   <p class="center">(<i>Art Journal, March 1849.</i>)</p>
+
+   <h3>SIR JOSHUA AND HOLBEIN.</h3>
+
+   <p class="center">(<i>Cornhill Magazine, March 1860.</i>)</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="THE_HISTORY_OF_CHRISTIAN_ART4" id="THE_HISTORY_OF_CHRISTIAN_ART4"></a>"THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ART."<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></h2>
+
+<h3>BY LORD LINDSAY.</h3>
+
+
+<p>16. There is, perhaps, no phenomenon connected with the history of the
+first half of the nineteenth century, which will become a subject of
+more curious investigation in after ages, than the coincident
+development of the Critical faculty, and extinction of the Arts of
+Design. Our mechanical energies, vast though they be, are not singular
+nor characteristic; such, and so great, have before been manifested&mdash;and
+it may perhaps be recorded of us with wonder rather than respect, that
+we pierced mountains and excavated valleys, only to emulate the activity
+of the gnat and the swiftness of the swallow. Our discoveries in
+science, however accelerated or comprehensive, are but the necessary
+development of the more wonderful reachings into vacancy of past
+centuries; and they who struck the piles of the bridge of Chaos will
+arrest the eyes of Futurity rather than we builders of its towers and
+gates&mdash;theirs the authority of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> Light, ours but the ordering of courses
+to the Sun and Moon.</p>
+
+<p>17. But the Negative character of the age is distinctive. There has not
+before appeared a race like that of civilized Europe at this day,
+thoughtfully unproductive of all
+art&mdash;ambitious&mdash;industrious&mdash;investigative&mdash;reflective, and incapable.
+Disdained by the savage, or scattered by the soldier, dishonored by the
+voluptuary, or forbidden by the fanatic, the arts have not, till now,
+been extinguished by analysis and paralyzed by protection. Our
+lecturers, learned in history, exhibit the descents of excellence from
+school to school, and clear from doubt the pedigrees of powers which
+they cannot re-establish, and of virtues no more to be revived: the
+scholar is early acquainted with every department of the Impossible, and
+expresses in proper terms his sense of the deficiencies of Titian and
+the errors of Michael Angelo: the metaphysician weaves from field to
+field his analogies of gossamer, which shake and glitter fairly in the
+sun, but must be torn asunder by the first plow that passes: geometry
+measures out, by line and rule, the light which is to illustrate
+heroism, and the shadow which should veil distress; and anatomy counts
+muscles, and systematizes motion, in the wrestling of Genius with its
+angel. Nor is ingenuity wanting&mdash;nor patience; apprehension was never
+more ready, nor execution more exact&mdash;yet nothing is of us, or in us,
+accomplished;&mdash;the treasures of our wealth and will are spent in
+vain&mdash;our cares are as clouds without water&mdash;our creations fruitless and
+perishable; the succeeding Age will trample "sopra lor vanita che par
+persona," and point wonderingly back to the strange colorless tessera in
+the mosaic of human mind.</p>
+
+<p>18. No previous example can be shown, in the career of nations not
+altogether nomad or barbarous, of so total an absence of invention,&mdash;of
+any material representation of the mind's inward yearning and desire,
+seen, as soon as shaped, to be, though imperfect, in its essence good,
+and worthy to be rested in with contentment, and consisting
+self-approval&mdash;the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> Sabbath of contemplation which confesses and
+confirms the majesty of a style. All but ourselves have had this in
+measure; the Imagination has stirred herself in proportion to the
+requirements, capacity, and energy of each race: reckless or pensive,
+soaring or frivolous, still she has had life and influence; sometimes
+aiming at Heaven with brick for stone and slime for mortar&mdash;anon bound
+down to painting of porcelain, and carving of ivory, but always with an
+inward consciousness of power which might indeed be palsied or
+imprisoned, but not in operation vain. Altars have been rent,
+many&mdash;ashes poured out,&mdash;hands withered&mdash;but we alone have worshiped,
+and received no answer&mdash;the pieces left in order upon the wood, and our
+names writ in the water that runs roundabout the trench.</p>
+
+<p>19. It is easier to conceive than to enumerate the many circumstances
+which are herein against us, necessarily, and exclusive of all that
+wisdom might avoid, or resolution vanquish. First, the weight of mere
+numbers, among whom ease of communication rather renders opposition of
+judgment fatal, than agreement probable; looking from England to Attica,
+or from Germany to Tuscany, we may remember to what good purpose it was
+said that the magnetism of iron was found not in bars, but in needles.
+Together with this adversity of number comes the likelihood of many
+among the more available intellects being held back and belated in the
+crowd, or else prematurely outwearied; for it now needs both curious
+fortune and vigorous effort to give to any, even the greatest, such
+early positions of eminence and audience as may feed their force with
+advantage; so that men spend their strength in opening circles, and
+crying for place, and only come to speech of us with broken voices and
+shortened time. Then follows the diminution of importance in peculiar
+places and public edifices, as they engage national affection or vanity;
+no single city can now take such queenly lead as that the pride of the
+whole body of the people shall be involved in adorning her; the
+buildings of London or Munich are not charged with the fullness of the
+national heart as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> were the domes of Pisa and Florence:&mdash;their credit or
+shame is metropolitan, not acropolitan; central at the best, not
+dominant; and this is one of the chief modes in which the cessation of
+superstition, so far as it has taken place, has been of evil consequence
+to art, that the observance of local sanctities being abolished,
+meanness and mistake are anywhere allowed of, and the thoughts and
+wealth which were devoted and expended to good purpose in one place, are
+now distracted and scattered to utter unavailableness.</p>
+
+<p>20. In proportion to the increasing spirituality of religion, the
+conception of worthiness in material offering ceases, and with it the
+sense of beauty in the evidence of votive labor; machine-work is
+substituted for handwork, as if the value of ornament consisted in the
+mere multiplication of agreeable forms, instead of in the evidence of
+human care and thought and love about the separate stones;
+and&mdash;machine-work once tolerated&mdash;the eye itself soon loses its sense of
+this very evidence, and no more perceives the difference between the
+blind accuracy of the engine, and the bright, strange play of the living
+stroke&mdash;a difference as great as between the form of a stone pillar and
+a springing fountain. And on this blindness follow all errors and
+abuses&mdash;hollowness and slightness of framework, speciousness of surface
+ornament, concealed structure, imitated materials, and types of form
+borrowed from things noble for things base; and all these abuses must be
+resisted with the more caution, and less success, because in many ways
+they are signs or consequences of improvement, and are associated both
+with purer forms of religious feeling and with more general diffusion of
+refinements and comforts; and especially because we are critically aware
+of all our deficiencies, too cognizant of all that is greatest to pass
+willingly and humbly through the stages that rise to it, and oppressed
+in every honest effort by the bitter sense of inferiority. In every
+previous development the power has been in advance of the consciousness,
+the resources more abundant than the knowledge&mdash;the energy irresistible,
+the discipline imperfect. The light that led was narrow<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> and
+dim&mdash;streakings of dawn&mdash;but it fell with kindly gentleness on eyes
+newly awakened out of sleep. But we are now aroused suddenly in the
+light of an intolerable day&mdash;our limbs fail under the sunstroke&mdash;we are
+walled in by the great buildings of elder times, and their fierce
+reverberation falls upon us without pause, in our feverish and
+oppressive consciousness of captivity; we are laid bedridden at the
+Beautiful Gate, and all our hope must rest in acceptance of the "such as
+I have," of the passers by.</p>
+
+<p>21. The frequent and firm, yet modest expression of this hope, gives
+peculiar value to Lord Lindsay's book on Christian Art; for it is seldom
+that a grasp of antiquity so comprehensive, and a regard for it so
+affectionate, have consisted with aught but gloomy foreboding with
+respect to our own times. As a contribution to the History of Art, his
+work is unquestionably the most valuable which has yet appeared in
+England. His research has been unwearied; he has availed himself of the
+best results of German investigation&mdash;his own acuteness of discernment
+in cases of approximating or derivative style is considerable&mdash;and he
+has set before the English reader an outline of the relations of the
+primitive schools of Sacred art which we think so thoroughly verified in
+all its more important ramifications, that, with whatever richness of
+detail the labor of succeeding writers may illustrate them, the leading
+lines of Lord Lindsay's chart will always henceforth be followed. The
+feeling which pervades the whole book is chastened, serious, and full of
+reverence for the strength ordained out of the lips of infant
+Art&mdash;accepting on its own terms its simplest teaching, sympathizing with
+all kindness in its unreasoning faith; the writer evidently looking back
+with most joy and thankfulness to hours passed in gazing upon the faded
+and faint touches of feeble hands, and listening through the stillness
+of uninvaded cloisters for fall of voices now almost spent; yet he is
+never contracted into the bigot, nor inflamed into the enthusiast; he
+never loses his memory of the outside world, never quits nor compromises
+his severe and reflective Protestantism, never gives<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> ground of offense
+by despite or forgetfulness of any order of merit or period of effort.
+And the tone of his address to our present schools is therefore neither
+scornful nor peremptory; his hope, consisting with full apprehension of
+all that we have lost, is based on a strict and stern estimate of our
+power, position, and resource, compelling the assent even of the least
+sanguine to his expectancy of the revelation of a new world of Spiritual
+Beauty, of which whosoever</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"will dedicate his talents, as the bondsman of love, to his Redeemer's
+glory and the good of mankind, may become the priest and interpreter, by
+adopting in the first instance, and re-issuing with that outward
+investiture which the assiduous study of all that is beautiful, either
+in Grecian sculpture, or the later but less spiritual schools of
+painting, has enabled him to supply, such of its bright ideas as he
+finds imprisoned in the early and imperfect efforts of art&mdash;and
+secondly, by exploring further on his own account in the untrodden
+realms of feeling that lie before him, and calling into palpable
+existence visions as bright, as pure, and as immortal as those that have
+already, in the golden days of Raphael and Perugino, obeyed their
+creative mandate, Live!" (Vol. iii., p. 422).<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>22. But while we thus defer to the discrimination, respect the feeling,
+and join in the hope of the author, we earnestly deprecate the frequent
+assertion, as we entirely deny the accuracy or propriety, of the
+metaphysical analogies, in accordance with which his work has unhappily
+been arranged. Though these had been as carefully, as they are crudely,
+considered, it had still been no light error of judgment to thrust them
+with dogmatism so abrupt into the forefront of a work whose purpose is
+assuredly as much to win to the truth as to demonstrate it. The writer
+has apparently forgotten that of the men to whom he must primarily look
+for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> the working out of his anticipations, the most part are of limited
+knowledge and inveterate habit, men dexterous in practice, idle in
+thought; many of them compelled by ill-ordered patronage into directions
+of exertion at variance with their own best impulses, and regarding
+their art only as a means of life; all of them conscious of practical
+difficulties which the critic is too apt to under-estimate, and probably
+remembering disappointments of early effort rude enough to chill the
+most earnest heart. The shallow amateurship of the circle of their
+patrons early disgusts them with theories; they shrink back to the hard
+teaching of their own industry, and would rather read the book which
+facilitated their methods than the one that rationalized their aims.
+Noble exceptions there are, and more than might be deemed; but the labor
+spent in contest with executive difficulties renders even these better
+men unapt receivers of a system which looks with little respect on such
+achievement, and shrewd discerners of the parts of such system which
+have been feebly rooted, or fancifully reared. Their attention should
+have been attracted both by clearness and kindness of promise; their
+impatience prevented by close reasoning and severe proof of every
+statement which might seem transcendental. Altogether void of such
+consideration or care, Lord Lindsay never even so much as states the
+meaning or purpose of his appeal, but, clasping his hands desperately
+over his head, disappears on the instant in an abyss of curious and
+unsupported assertions of the philosophy of human nature: reappearing
+only, like a breathless diver, in the third page, to deprecate the
+surprise of the reader whom he has never addressed, at a conviction
+which he has never stated; and again vanishing ere we can well look him
+in the face, among the frankincensed clouds of Christian mythology:
+filling the greater part of his first volume with a <i>r&eacute;sum&eacute;</i> of its
+symbols and traditions, yet never vouchsafing the slightest hint of the
+objects for which they are assembled, or the amount of credence with
+which he would have them regarded; and so proceeds to the historical
+portion of the book,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> leaving the whole theory which is its key to be
+painfully gathered from scattered passages, and in great part from the
+mere form of enumeration adopted in the preliminary chart of the
+schools; and giving as yet account only of that period to which the mere
+artist looks with least interest&mdash;while the work, even when completed,
+will be nothing more than a single pinnacle of the historical edifice
+whose ground-plan is laid in the preceding essay, "Progression by
+Antagonism":&mdash;a plan, by the author's confession, "too extensive for his
+own, or any single hand to execute," yet without the understanding of
+whose main relations it is impossible to receive the intended teaching
+of the completed portion.</p>
+
+<p>23. It is generally easier to plan what is beyond the reach of others
+than to execute what is within our own; and it had been well if the
+range of this introductory essay had been something less extensive, and
+its reasoning more careful. Its search after truth is honest and
+impetuous, and its results would have appeared as interesting as they
+are indeed valuable, had they but been arranged with ordinary
+perspicuity, and represented in simple terms. But the writer's evil
+genius pursues him; the demand for exertion of thought is remorseless,
+and continuous throughout, and the statements of theoretical principle
+as short, scattered, and obscure, as they are bold. We question whether
+many readers may not be utterly appalled by the aspect of an "Analysis
+of Human Nature"&mdash;the first task proposed to them by our intellectual
+Eurystheus&mdash;to be accomplished in the space of six semi-pages, followed
+in the seventh by the "Development of the Individual Man," and applied
+in the eighth to a "General Classification of Individuals": and we
+infinitely marvel that our author should have thought it unnecessary to
+support or explain a division of the mental attributes on which the
+treatment of his entire subject afterwards depends, and whose terms are
+repeated in every following page to the very dazzling of eye and
+deadening of ear (a division, we regret to say, as illogical as it is
+purposeless), otherwise than by a laconic reference to the assumptions
+of Phrenology.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"The Individual Man, or Man considered by himself as an unit in
+creation, is compounded of three distinct primary elements.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>1. Sense, or the animal frame, with its passions or affections;</p>
+
+<p>2. Mind or Intellect;&mdash;of which the distinguishing
+faculties&mdash;rarely, if ever, equally balanced, and by their
+respective predominance determinative of his whole character,
+conduct, and views of life&mdash;are,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>i. Imagination, the discerner of Beauty,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>ii. Reason, the discerner of Truth,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>the former animating and informing the world of Sense or Matter,
+the latter finding her proper home in the world of abstract or
+immaterial existences &mdash;the former receiving the impress of things
+Objectively, or <i>ab externo</i>, the latter impressing its own ideas
+on them Subjectively, or <i>ab interno</i>&mdash;the former a feminine or
+passive, the latter a masculine or active principle; and</p>
+
+<p>iii. Spirit&mdash;the Moral or Immortal principle, ruling through the
+Will, and breathed into Man by the Breath of God."&mdash;"Progression
+by Antagonism," pp. 2, 3.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>24. On what authority does the writer assume that the moral is alone the
+<i>Immortal</i> principle&mdash;or the only part of the human nature bestowed by
+the breath of God? Are imagination, then, and reason perishable? Is the
+Body itself? Are not all alike immortal; and when distinction is to be
+made among them, is not the first great division between their active
+and passive immortality, between the supported body and supporting
+spirit; that spirit itself afterwards rather conveniently to be
+considered as either exercising intellectual function, or receiving
+moral influence, and, both in power and passiveness, deriving its energy
+and sensibility alike from the sustaining breath of God&mdash;than actually<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>
+divided into intellectual and moral parts? For if the distinction
+between us and the brute be the test of the nature of the living soul by
+that breath conferred, it is assuredly to be found as much in the
+imagination as in the moral principle. There is but one of the moral
+sentiments enumerated by Lord Lindsay, the sign of which is absent in
+the animal creation:&mdash;the enumeration is a bald one, but let it serve
+the turn&mdash;"Self-esteem and love of Approbation," eminent in horse and
+dog; "Firmness," not wanting either to ant or elephant; "Veneration,"
+distinct as far as the superiority of man can by brutal intellect be
+comprehended; "Hope," developed as far as its objects can be made
+visible; and "Benevolence," or Love, the highest of all, the most
+assured of all&mdash;together with all the modifications of opposite feeling,
+rage, jealousy, habitual malice, even love of mischief and comprehension
+of jest:&mdash;the one only moral sentiment wanting being that of
+responsibility to an Invisible being, or conscientiousness. But where,
+among brutes, shall we find the slightest trace of the Imaginative
+faculty, or of that discernment of beauty which our author most
+inaccurately confounds with it, or of the discipline of memory, grasping
+this or that circumstance at will, or of the still nobler foresight of,
+and respect towards, things future, except only instinctive and
+compelled?</p>
+
+<p>25. The fact is, that it is not in intellect added to the bodily sense,
+nor in moral sentiment superadded to the intellect, that the essential
+difference between brute and man consists: but in the elevation of all
+three to that point at which each becomes capable of communion with the
+Deity, and worthy therefore of eternal life;&mdash;the body more universal as
+an instrument&mdash;more exquisite in its sense&mdash;this last character carried
+out in the eye and ear to the perception of Beauty, in form, sound, and
+color&mdash;and herein distinctively raised above the brutal sense;
+intellect, as we have said, peculiarly separating and vast; the moral
+sentiments like in essence, but boundlessly expanded, as attached to an
+infinite object, and laboring in an infinite field: each part mortal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> in
+its shortcoming, immortal in the accomplishment of its perfection and
+purpose; the opposition which we at first broadly expressed as between
+body and spirit, being more strictly between the natural and spiritual
+condition of the entire creature&mdash;body natural, sown in death, body
+spiritual, raised in incorruption: Intellect natural, leading to
+skepticism; intellect spiritual, expanding into faith: Passion natural,
+suffered from things spiritual; passion spiritual, centered on things
+unseen: and the strife or antagonism which is throughout the subject of
+Lord Lindsay's proof, is not, as he has stated it, between the moral,
+intellectual, and sensual elements, but between the upward and downward
+tendencies of all three&mdash;between the spirit of Man which goeth upward,
+and the spirit of the Beast which goeth downward.</p>
+
+<p>26. We should not have been thus strict in our examination of these
+preliminary statements, if the question had been one of terms merely, or
+if the inaccuracy of thought had been confined to the Essay on
+Antagonism. If upon receiving a writer's terms of argument in the
+sense&mdash;however unusual or mistaken&mdash;which he chooses they should bear,
+we may without further error follow his course of thought, it is as
+unkind as unprofitable to lose the use of his result in quarrel with its
+algebraic expression; and if the reader will understand by Lord
+Lindsay's general term "Spirit" the susceptibility of right moral
+emotion, and the entire subjection of the Will to Reason; and receive
+his term "Sense" as not including the perception of Beauty either in
+sight or sound, but expressive of animal sensation only, he may follow
+without embarrassment to its close, his magnificently comprehensive
+statement of the forms of probation which the heart and faculties of man
+have undergone from the beginning of time. But it is far otherwise when
+the theory is to be applied, in all its pseudo-organization, to the
+separate departments of a particular art, and analogies the most subtle
+and speculative traced between the mental character and artistical
+choice or attainment of different races of men. Such analogies are
+always treacherous, for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> amount of expression of individual mind
+which Art can convey is dependent on so many collateral circumstances,
+that it even militates against the truth of any particular system of
+interpretation that it should seem at first generally applicable, or its
+results consistent. The passages in which such interpretation has been
+attempted in the work before us, are too graceful to be regretted, nor
+is their brilliant suggestiveness otherwise than pleasing and profitable
+too, so long as it is received on its own grounds merely, and affects
+not with its uncertainty the very matter of its foundation. But all
+oscillation is communicable, and Lord Lindsay is much to be blamed for
+leaving it entirely to the reader to distinguish between the
+determination of his research and the activity of his fancy&mdash;between the
+authority of his interpretation and the aptness of his metaphor. He who
+would assert the true meaning of a symbolical art, in an age of strict
+inquiry and tardy imagination, ought rather to surrender something of
+the fullness which his own faith perceives, than expose the fabric of
+his vision, too finely woven, to the hard handling of the materialist;
+and we sincerely regret that discredit is likely to accrue to portions
+of our author's well-grounded statement of real significances, once of
+all men understood, because these are rashly blended with his own
+accidental perceptions of disputable analogy. He perpetually associates
+the present imaginative influence of Art with its ancient hieroglyphical
+teaching, and mingles fancies fit only for the framework of a sonnet,
+with the deciphered evidence which is to establish a serious point of
+history; and this the more frequently and grossly, in the endeavor to
+force every branch of his subject into illustration of the false
+division of the mental attributes which we have pointed out.</p>
+
+<p>27. His theory is first clearly stated in the following passage:&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"Man is, in the strictest sense of the word, a progressive being, and
+with many periods of inaction and retrogression,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> has still held, upon
+the whole, a steady course towards the great end of his existence, the
+re-union and re-harmonizing of the three elements of his being,
+dislocated by the Fall, in the service of his God. Each of these three
+elements, Sense, Intellect, and Spirit, has had its distinct development
+at three distant intervals, and in the personality of the three great
+branches of the human family. The race of Ham, giants in prowess if not
+in stature, cleared the earth of primeval forests and monsters, built
+cities, established vast empires, invented the mechanical arts, and gave
+the fullest expansion to the animal energies. After them, the Greeks,
+the elder line of Japhet, developed the intellectual faculties,
+Imagination and Reason, more especially the former, always the earlier
+to bud and blossom; poetry and fiction, history, philosophy, and
+science, alike look back to Greece as their birthplace; on the one hand
+they put a soul into Sense, peopling the world with their gay
+mythology&mdash;on the other they bequeathed to us, in Plato and Aristotle,
+the mighty patriarchs of human wisdom, the Darius and the Alexander of
+the two grand armies of thinking men whose antagonism has ever since
+divided the battlefield of the human intellect:&mdash;While, lastly, the race
+of Shem, the Jews, and the nations of Christendom, their <i>locum
+tenentes</i> as the Spiritual Israel, have, by God's blessing, been
+elevated in Spirit to as near and intimate communion with Deity as is
+possible in this stage of being. Now the peculiar interest and dignity
+of Art consists in her exact correspondence in her three departments
+with these three periods of development, and in the illustration she
+thus affords&mdash;more closely and markedly even than literature&mdash;to the
+all-important truth that men stand or fall according as they look up to
+the Ideal or not. For example, the Architecture of Egypt, her pyramids
+and temples, cumbrous and inelegant, but imposing from their vastness
+and their gloom, express the ideal of Sense or Matter&mdash;elevated and
+purified indeed, and nearly approaching the Intellectual, but Material
+still; we think of them as of natural scenery, in association with caves
+or mountains, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> vast periods of time; their voice is as the voice of
+the sea, or as that of 'many peoples,' shouting in unison:&mdash;But the
+Sculpture of Greece is the voice of Intellect and Thought, communing
+with itself in solitude, feeding on beauty and yearning after
+truth:&mdash;While the Painting of Christendom&mdash;(and we must remember that
+the glories of Christianity, in the full extent of the term, are yet to
+come)&mdash;is that of an immortal Spirit, conversing with its God. And as if
+to mark more forcibly the fact of continuous progress towards
+perfection, it is observable that although each of the three arts
+peculiarly reflects and characterizes one of the three epochs, each art
+of later growth has been preceded in its rise, progress, and decline, by
+an antecedent correspondent development of its elder sister or
+sisters&mdash;Sculpture, in Greece, by that of Architecture&mdash;Painting, in
+Europe, by that of Architecture and Sculpture. If Sculpture and Painting
+stand by the side of Architecture in Egypt, if Painting by that of
+Architecture and Sculpture in Greece, it is as younger sisters, girlish
+and unformed. In Europe alone are the three found linked together, in
+equal stature and perfection."&mdash;Vol. i, pp. xii.&mdash;xiv.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>28. The reader must, we think, at once perceive the bold fallacy of this
+forced analogy&mdash;the comparison of the architecture of one nation with
+the sculpture of another, and the painting of a third, and the
+assumption as a proof of difference in moral character, of changes
+necessarily wrought, always in the same order, by the advance of mere
+mechanical experience. Architecture must precede sculpture, not because
+sense precedes intellect, but because men must build houses before they
+adorn chambers, and raise shrines before they inaugurate idols; and
+sculpture must precede painting, because men must learn forms in the
+solid before they can project them on a flat surface, and must learn to
+conceive designs in light and shade before they can conceive them in
+color, and must learn to treat subjects under positive color and in
+narrow groups, before they can treat them under<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> atmospheric effect and
+in receding masses, and all these are mere necessities of practice, and
+have no more connection with any divisions of the human mind than the
+equally paramount necessities that men must gather stones before they
+build walls, or grind corn before they bake bread. And that each
+following nation should take up either the same art at an advanced
+stage, or an art altogether more difficult, is nothing but the necessary
+consequence of its subsequent elevation and civilization. Whatever
+nation had succeeded Egypt in power and knowledge, after having had
+communication with her, must necessarily have taken up art at the point
+where Egypt left it&mdash;in its turn delivering the gathered globe of
+heavenly snow to the youthful energy of the nation next at hand, with an
+exhausted "&agrave; vous le d&eacute;!" In order to arrive at any useful or true
+estimate of the respective rank of each people in the scale of mind, the
+architecture of each must be compared with the architecture of the
+other&mdash;sculpture with sculpture&mdash;line with line; and to have done this
+broadly and with a surface glance, would have set our author's theory on
+firmer foundation, to outward aspect, than it now rests upon. Had he
+compared the accumulation of the pyramid with the proportion of the
+peristyle, and then with the aspiration of the spire; had he set the
+colossal horror of the Sphinx beside the Phidian Minerva, and this
+beside the Piet&agrave; of M. Angelo; had he led us from beneath the iridescent
+capitals of Denderah, by the contested line of Apelles, to the hues and
+the heaven of Perugino or Bellini, we might have been tempted to
+assoilzie from all staying of question or stroke of partisan the
+invulnerable aspect of his ghostly theory; but, if, with even partial
+regard to some of the circumstances which physically limited the
+attainments of each race, we follow their individual career, we shall
+find the points of superiority less salient and the connection between
+heart and hand more embarrassed.</p>
+
+<p>29. Yet let us not be misunderstood:&mdash;the great gulf between Christian
+and Pagan art we cannot bridge&mdash;nor do we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> wish to weaken one single
+sentence wherein its breadth or depth is asserted by our author. The
+separation is not gradual, but instant and final&mdash;the difference not of
+degree, but of condition; it is the difference between the dead vapors
+rising from a stagnant pool, and the same vapors touched by a torch. But
+we would brace the weakness which Lord Lindsay has admitted in his own
+assertion of this great inflaming instant by confusing its fire with the
+mere phosphorescence of the marsh, and explaining as a successive
+development of the several human faculties, what was indeed the bearing
+of them all at once, over a threshold strewed with the fragments of
+their idols, into the temple of the One God.</p>
+
+<p>We shall therefore, as fully as our space admits, examine the
+application of our author's theory to Architecture, Sculpture, and
+Painting, successively, setting before the reader some of the more
+interesting passages which respect each art, while we at the same time
+mark with what degree of caution their conclusions are, in our judgment,
+to be received.</p>
+
+<p>30. Accepting Lord Lindsay's first reference to Egypt, let us glance at
+a few of the physical accidents which influenced its types of
+architecture. The first of these is evidently the capability of carriage
+of large blocks of stone over perfectly level land. It was possible to
+roll to their destination along that uninterrupted plain, blocks which
+could neither by the Greek have been shipped in seaworthy vessels, nor
+carried over mountain-passes, nor raised except by extraordinary effort
+to the height of the rock-built fortress or seaward promontory. A small
+undulation of surface, or embarrassment of road, makes large difference
+in the portability of masses, and of consequence, in the breadth of the
+possible intercolumniation, the solidity of the column, and the whole
+scale of the building. Again, in a hill-country, architecture can be
+important only by position, in a level country only by bulk. Under the
+overwhelming mass of mountain-form it is vain to attempt the expression
+of majesty by size of edifice&mdash;the humblest architecture may become
+important by availing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> itself of the power of nature, but the mightiest
+must be crushed in emulating it: the watch-towers of Amalfi are more
+majestic than the Superga of Piedmont; St. Peter's would look like a toy
+if built beneath the Alpine cliffs, which yet vouchsafe some
+communication of their own solemnity to the smallest chalet that
+glitters among their glades of pine. On the other hand, a small building
+is in a level country lost, and the impressiveness of bulk
+proportionably increased; hence the instinct of nations has always led
+them to the loftiest efforts where the masses of their labor might be
+seen looming at incalculable distance above the open line of the
+horizon&mdash;hence rose her four square mountains above the flat of Memphis,
+while the Greek pierced the recesses of Phigaleia with ranges of
+columns, or crowned the sea-cliffs of Sunium with a single pediment,
+bright, but not colossal.</p>
+
+<p>31. The derivation of the Greek types of form from the forest-hut is too
+direct to escape observation; but sufficient attention has not been paid
+to the similar petrifaction, by other nations, of the rude forms and
+materials adopted in the haste of early settlement, or consecrated by
+the purity of rural life. The whole system of Swiss and German Gothic
+has thus been most characteristically affected by the structure of the
+intersecting timbers at the angles of the chalet. This was in some cases
+directly and without variation imitated in stone, as in the piers of the
+old bridge at Aarburg; and the practice obtained&mdash;partially in the
+German after-Gothic&mdash;universally, or nearly so, in Switzerland&mdash;of
+causing moldings which met at an angle to appear to interpenetrate each
+other, both being truncated immediately beyond the point of
+intersection. The painfulness of this ill-judged adaptation was
+conquered by association&mdash;the eye became familiarized to uncouth forms
+of tracery&mdash;and a stiffness and meagerness, as of cast-iron, resulted in
+the moldings of much of the ecclesiastical, and all the domestic Gothic
+of central Europe; the moldings of casements intersecting so as to form
+a small hollow square at the angles, and the practice being further
+carried out into all modes of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> decoration&mdash;pinnacles interpenetrating
+crockets, as in a peculiarly bold design of archway at Besan&ccedil;on. The
+influence at Venice has been less immediate and more fortunate; it is
+with peculiar grace that the majestic form of the ducal palace reminds
+us of the years of fear and endurance when the exiles of the Prima
+Venetia settled like home-less birds on the sea-sand, and that its
+quadrangular range of marble wall and painted chamber, raised upon
+multiplied columns of confused arcade,<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> presents but the exalted image
+of the first pile-supported hut that rose above the rippling of the
+lagoons.</p>
+
+<p>32. In the chapter on the "Influence of Habit and Religion," of Mr.
+Hope's Historical Essay,<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> the reader will find further instances of
+the same feeling, and, bearing immediately on our present purpose, a
+clear account of the derivation of the Egyptian temple from the
+excavated cavern; but the point to which in all these cases we would
+direct especial attention, is, that the first perception of the great
+laws of architectural <i>proportion</i> is dependent for its acuteness less
+on the &aelig;sthetic instinct of each nation than on the mechanical
+conditions of stability and natural limitations of size in the primary
+type, whether hut, ch&acirc;let, or tent.</p>
+
+<p>As by the constant reminiscence of the natural proportions of his first
+forest-dwelling, the Greek would be restrained from all inordinate
+exaggeration of size&mdash;the Egyptian was from the first left without hint
+of any system of proportion, whether constructive, or of visible parts.
+The cavern&mdash;its level roof supported by amorphous piers&mdash;might be
+extended indefinitely into the interior of the hills, and its outer
+fa&ccedil;ade continued almost without term along their flanks&mdash;the solid mass
+of cliff above forming one gigantic entablature, poised upon props
+instead of columns. Hence the predisposition to attempt in the built
+temple the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> expression of infinite extent, and to heap the ponderous
+architrave above the proportionless pier.</p>
+
+<p>33. The less direct influences of external nature in the two countries
+were still more opposed. The sense of beauty, which among the Greek
+peninsulas was fostered by beating of sea and rush of river, by waving
+of forest and passing of cloud, by undulation of hill and poise of
+precipice, lay dormant beneath the shadowless sky and on the objectless
+plain of the Egyptians; no singing winds nor shaking leaves nor gliding
+shadows gave life to the line of their barren mountains&mdash;no Goddess of
+Beauty rose from the pacing of their silent and foamless Nile. One
+continual perception of stability, or changeless revolution, weighed
+upon their hearts&mdash;their life depended on no casual alternation of cold
+and heat&mdash;of drought and shower; their gift-Gods were the risen River
+and the eternal Sun, and the types of these were forever consecrated in
+the lotus decoration of the temple and the wedge of the enduring
+Pyramid. Add to these influences, purely physical, those dependent on
+the superstitions and political constitution; of the overflowing
+multitude of "populous No"; on their condition of prolonged peace&mdash;their
+simple habits of life&mdash;their respect for the dead&mdash;their separation by
+incommunicable privilege and inherited occupation&mdash;and it will be
+evident to the reader that Lord Lindsay's broad assertion of the
+expression of "the Ideal of Sense or Matter" by their universal style,
+must be received with severe modification, and is indeed thus far only
+true, that the mass of Life supported upon that fruitful plain could,
+when swayed by a despotic ruler in any given direction, accomplish by
+mere weight and number what to other nations had been impossible, and
+bestow a pre-eminence, owed to mere bulk and evidence of labor, upon
+public works which among the Greek republics could be rendered admirable
+only by the intelligence of their design.</p>
+
+<p>34. Let us, for the present omitting consideration of the debasement of
+the Greek types which took place when their cycle of achievement had
+been fulfilled, pass to the germination<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> of Christian architecture, out
+of one of the least important elements of those fallen forms&mdash;one which,
+less than the least of all seeds, has risen into the fair branching
+stature under whose shadow we still dwell.</p>
+
+<p>The principal characteristics of the new architecture, as exhibited in
+the Lombard cathedral, are well sketched by Lord Lindsay:&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"The three most prominent features, the eastern aspect of the sanctuary,
+the cruciform plan, and the soaring octagonal cupola, are borrowed from
+Byzantium&mdash;the latter in an improved form&mdash;the cross with a
+difference&mdash;the nave, or arm opposite the sanctuary, being lengthened so
+as to resemble the supposed shape of the actual instrument of suffering,
+and form what is now distinctively called the Latin Cross. The crypt and
+absis, or tribune, are retained from the Romish basilica, but the absis
+is generally pierced with windows, and the crypt is much loftier and
+more spacious, assuming almost the appearance of a subterranean church.
+The columns of the nave, no longer isolated, are clustered so as to form
+compound piers, massive and heavy&mdash;their capitals either a rude
+imitation of the Corinthian, or, especially in the earlier structures,
+sculptured with grotesque imagery. Triforia, or galleries for women,
+frequently line the nave and transepts. The roof is of stone, and
+vaulted. The narthex, or portico, for excluded penitents, common alike
+to the Greek and Roman churches, and in them continued along the whole
+fa&ccedil;ade of entrance, is dispensed with altogether in the oldest Lombard
+ones, and when afterwards resumed, in the eleventh century, was
+restricted to what we should now call Porches, over each door,
+consisting generally of little more than a canopy open at the sides, and
+supported by slender pillars, resting on sculptured monsters. Three
+doors admit from the western front; these are generally covered with
+sculpture, which frequently extends in belts across the fa&ccedil;ade, and even
+along the sides of the building. Above the central door is usually seen,
+in the later Lombard churches, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> S. Catherine's-wheel window. The roof
+slants at the sides, and ends in front sometimes in a single pediment,
+sometimes in three gables answering to three doors; while, in Lombardy
+at least, hundreds of slender pillars, of every form and device&mdash;those
+immediately adjacent to each other frequently interlaced in the true
+lover's knot, and all supporting round or trefoliate arches&mdash;run along,
+in continuous galleries, under the eaves, as if for the purpose of
+supporting the roof&mdash;run up the pediment in front, are continued along
+the side-walls and round the eastern absis, and finally engirdle the
+cupola. Sometimes the western front is absolutely covered with these
+galleries, rising tier above tier. Though introduced merely for
+ornament, and therefore on a vicious principle, these fairy-like
+colonnades win very much on one's affections. I may add to these general
+features the occasional and rare one, seen to peculiar advantage in the
+cathedral of Cremona, of numerous slender towers, rising, like minarets,
+in every direction, in front and behind, and giving the east end,
+specially, a marked resemblance to the mosques of the Mahometans.</p>
+
+<p>"The Baptistery and the Campanile, or bell-tower, are in theory
+invariable adjuncts to the Lombard cathedral, although detached from it.
+The Lombards seem to have built them with peculiar zest, and to have had
+a keen eye for the picturesque in grouping them with the churches they
+belong to.</p>
+
+<p>"I need scarcely add that the round arch is exclusively employed in pure
+Lombard architecture.</p>
+
+<p>"To translate this new style into its symbolical language is a
+pleasurable task. The three doors and three gable ends signify the
+Trinity, the Catherine-wheel window (if I mistake not) the Unity, as
+concentrated in Christ, the Light of the Church, from whose Greek
+monogram its shape was probably adopted. The monsters that support the
+pillars of the porch stand there as talismans to frighten away evil
+spirits. The crypt (as in older buildings) signifies the moral death of
+man, the cross, the atonement, the cupola heaven;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> and these three,
+taken in conjunction with the lengthened nave, express, reconcile, and
+give their due and balanced prominence to the leading ideas of the
+Militant and Triumphant Church, respectively embodied in the
+architecture of Rome and Byzantium. Add to this, the symbolism of the
+Baptistery, and the Christian pilgrimage, from the Font to the Door of
+Heaven, is complete,"&mdash;Vol. ii., p. 8-11.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>35. We have by-and-bye an equally comprehensive sketch of the essential
+characters of the Gothic cathedral; but this we need not quote, as it
+probably contains little that would be new to the reader. It is
+succeeded by the following interpretation of the spirit of the two
+styles:&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"Comparing, apart from enthusiasm, the two styles of Lombard and Pointed
+Architecture, they will strike you, I think, as the expression,
+respectively, of that alternate repose and activity which characterize
+the Christian life, exhibited in perfect harmony in Christ alone, who,
+on earth, spent His night in prayer to God, His day in doing good to
+man&mdash;in heaven, as we know by His own testimony, 'worketh hitherto,'
+conjointly with the Father&mdash;forever, at the same time, reposing on the
+infinity of His wisdom and of His power. Each, then, of these styles has
+its peculiar significance, each is perfect in its way. The Lombard
+Architecture, with its horizontal lines, its circular arches and
+expanding cupola, soothes and calms one; the Gothic, with its pointed
+arches, aspiring vaults and intricate tracery, rouses and excites&mdash;and
+why? Because the one symbolizes an infinity of Rest, the other of
+Action, in the adoration and service of God. And this consideration will
+enable us to advance a step farther:&mdash;The aim of the one style is
+definite, of the other indefinite; we look up to the dome of heaven and
+calmly acquiesce in the abstract idea of infinity; but we only realize
+the impossibility of conceiving it by the flight of imagination from
+star to star, from firmament to firmament. Even so Lombard Architecture
+attained perfection, expressed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> its idea, accomplished its purpose&mdash;but
+Gothic never; the Ideal is unapproachable."&mdash;Vol. ii., p. 23.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>36. This idea occurs not only in this passage:&mdash;it is carried out
+through the following chapters;&mdash;at page 38, the pointed arch associated
+with the cupola is spoken of as a "fop interrupting the meditations of a
+philosopher"; at page 65, the "earlier contemplative style of the
+Lombards" is spoken of; at page 114, Giottesque art is "the expression
+of that Activity of the Imagination which produced Gothic Architecture";
+and, throughout, the analogy is prettily expressed, and ably supported;
+yet it is one of those against which we must warn the reader: it is
+altogether superficial, and extends not to the minds of those whose
+works it accidentally, and we think disputably, characterizes. The
+transition from Romanesque (we prefer using the generic term) to Gothic
+is natural and straightforward, in many points traceable to mechanical
+and local necessities (of which one, the dangerous weight of snow on
+flat roofs, has been candidly acknowledged by our author), and directed
+by the tendency, common to humanity in all ages, to push every
+newly-discovered means of delight to its most fantastic extreme, to
+exhibit every newly-felt power in its most admirable achievement, and to
+load with intrinsic decoration forms whose essential varieties have been
+exhausted. The arch, carelessly struck out by the Etruscan, forced by
+mechanical expediencies on the unwilling, uninventive Roman, remained
+unfelt by either. The noble form of the apparent Vault of Heaven&mdash;the
+line which every star follows in its journeying, extricated by the
+Christian architect from the fosse, the aqueduct, and the sudarium&mdash;grew
+into long succession of proportioned colonnade, and swelled into the
+white domes that glitter above the plain of Pisa, and fretted channels
+of Venice, like foam globes at rest.</p>
+
+<p>37. But the spirit that was in these Aphrodites of the earth was not
+then, nor in them, to be restrained. Colonnade rose over colonnade; the
+pediment of the western front<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> was lifted into a detached and scenic
+wall; story above story sprang the multiplied arches of the Campanile,
+and the eastern pyramidal fire-type, lifted from its foundation, was
+placed upon the summit. With the superimposed arcades of the principal
+front arose the necessity, instantly felt by their subtle architects, of
+a new proportion in the column; the lower wall inclosure, necessarily
+for the purposes of Christian worship continuous, and needing no
+peristyle, rendered the lower columns a mere facial decoration, whose
+proportions were evidently no more to be regulated by the laws hitherto
+observed in detached colonnades. The column expanded into the shaft, or
+into the huge pilaster rising unbanded from tier to tier; shaft and
+pilaster were associated in ordered groups, and the ideas of singleness
+and limited elevation once attached to them, swept away for ever; the
+stilted and variously centered arch existed already: the pure ogive
+followed&mdash;where first exhibited we stay not to inquire;&mdash;finally, and
+chief of all, the great mechanical discovery of the resistance of
+lateral pressure by the weight of the superimposed flanking pinnacle.
+Daring concentrations of pressure upon narrow piers were the immediate
+consequence, and the recognition of the buttress as a feature in itself
+agreeable and susceptible of decoration. The glorious art of painting on
+glass added its temptations; the darkness of northern climes both
+rendering the typical character of Light more deeply felt than in Italy,
+and necessitating its admission in larger masses; the Italian, even at
+the period of his most exquisite art in glass, retaining the small
+Lombard window, whose expediency will hardly be doubted by anyone who
+has experienced the transition from the scorching reverberation of the
+white-hot marble front, to the cool depth of shade within, and whose
+beauty will not be soon forgotten by those who have seen the narrow
+lights of the Pisan duomo announce by their redder burning, not like
+transparent casements, but like characters of fire searing the western
+wall, the decline of day upon Capraja.</p>
+
+<p>38. Here, then, arose one great distinction between<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> Northern and
+Transalpine Gothic, based, be it still observed, on mere necessities of
+climate. While the architect of Santa Maria Novella admitted to the
+frescoes of Ghirlandajo scarcely more of purple lancet light than had
+been shed by the morning sun through the veined alabasters of San
+Miniato; and looked to the rich blue of the quinquipartite vault above,
+as to the mosaic of the older concha, for conspicuous aid in the color
+decoration of the whole; the northern builder burst through the walls of
+his apse, poured over the eastern altar one unbroken blaze, and lifting
+his shafts like pines, and his walls like precipices, ministered to
+their miraculous stability by an infinite phalanx of sloped buttress and
+glittering pinnacle. The spire was the natural consummation. Internally,
+the sublimity of space in the cupola had been superseded by another kind
+of infinity in the prolongation of the nave; externally, the spherical
+surface had been proved, by the futility of Arabian efforts, incapable
+of decoration; its majesty depended on its simplicity, and its
+simplicity and leading forms were alike discordant with the rich
+rigidity of the body of the building. The campanile became, therefore,
+principal and central; its pyramidal termination was surrounded at the
+base by a group of pinnacles, and the spire itself, banded, or pierced
+into a&euml;rial tracery, crowned with its last enthusiastic effort the
+flamelike ascent of the perfect pile.</p>
+
+<p>39. The process of change was thus consistent throughout, though at
+intervals accelerated by the sudden discovery of resource, or invention
+of design; nor, had the steps been less traceable, do we think the
+suggestiveness of Repose, in the earlier style, or of Imaginative
+Activity in the latter, definite or trustworthy. We much question
+whether the Duomo of Verona, with its advanced guard of haughty
+gryphons&mdash;the mailed peers of Charlemagne frowning from its vaulted
+gate,&mdash;that vault itself ribbed with variegated marbles, and peopled by
+a crowd of monsters&mdash;-the Evangelical types not the least stern or
+strange; its stringcourses replaced by flat cut friezes, combats between
+gryphons and chain-clad paladins,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> stooping behind their triangular
+shields and fetching sweeping blows with two-handled swords; or that of
+Lucca&mdash;its fantastic columns clasped by writhing snakes and winged
+dragons, their marble scales spotted with inlaid serpentine, every
+available space alive with troops of dwarfish riders, with spur on heel
+and hawk in hood, sounding huge trumpets of chase, like those of the
+Swiss Urus-horn, and cheering herds of gaping dogs upon harts and hares,
+boars and wolves, every stone signed with its grisly beast&mdash;be one whit
+more soothing to the contemplative, or less exciting to the imaginative
+faculties, than the successive arch? and visionary shaft, and dreamy
+vault, and crisped foliage, and colorless stone, of our own fair abbeys,
+checkered with sunshine through the depth of ancient branches, or seen
+far off, like clouds in the valley, risen out of the pause of its river.</p>
+
+<p>40. And with respect to the more fitful and fantastic expression of the
+"Italian Gothic," our author is again to be blamed for his loose
+assumption, from the least reflecting of preceding writers, of this
+general term, as if the pointed buildings of Italy could in any wise be
+arranged in one class, or criticised in general terms. It is true that
+so far as the church interiors are concerned, the system is nearly
+universal, and always bad; its characteristic features being arches of
+enormous span, and banded foliage capitals divided into three fillets,
+rude in design, unsuggestive of any structural connection with the
+column, and looking consequently as if they might be slipped up or down,
+and had been only fastened in their places for the temporary purposes of
+a festa. But the exteriors of Italian pointed buildings display
+variations of principle and transitions of type quite as bold as either
+the advance from the Romanesque to the earliest of their forms, or the
+recoil from their latest to the cinque-cento.</p>
+
+<p>41. The first and grandest style resulted merely from the application of
+the pointed arch to the frequent Romanesque window, the large
+semicircular arch divided by three small ones. Pointing both the
+superior and inferior arches, and adding to the grace of the larger one
+by striking another<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> arch above it with a more removed center, and
+placing the voussoirs at an acute angle to the curve, we have the truly
+noble form of domestic Gothic, which&mdash;more or less enriched by moldings
+and adorned by penetration, more or less open of the space between the
+including and inferior arches&mdash;was immediately adopted in almost all the
+proudest palaces of North Italy&mdash;in the Brolettos of Como, Bergamo,
+Modena, and Siena&mdash;-in the palace of the Scaligers at Verona&mdash;of the
+Gambacorti at Pisa&mdash;of Paolo Guinigi at Lucca&mdash;besides inferior
+buildings innumerable:&mdash;nor is there any form of civil Gothic except the
+Venetian, which can be for a moment compared with it in simplicity or
+power. The latest is that most vicious and barbarous style of which the
+richest types are the lateral porches and upper pinnacles of the
+Cathedral of Como, and the whole of the Certosa of Pavia:&mdash;characterized
+by the imitative sculpture of large buildings on a small scale by way of
+pinnacles and niches; the substitution of candelabra for columns; and
+the covering of the surfaces with sculpture, often of classical subject,
+in high relief and daring perspective, and finished with delicacy which
+rather would demand preservation in a cabinet, and exhibition under a
+lens, than admit of exposure to the weather and removal from the eye,
+and which, therefore, architecturally considered, is worse than
+valueless, telling merely as unseemly roughness and rustication. But
+between these two extremes are varieties nearly countless&mdash;some of them
+both strange and bold, owing to the brilliant color and firm texture of
+the accessible materials, and the desire of the builders to crowd the
+greatest expression of value into the smallest space.</p>
+
+<p>42. Thus it is in the promontories of serpentine which meet with their
+polished and gloomy green the sweep of the Gulf of Genoa, that we find
+the first cause of the peculiar spirit of the Tuscan and Ligurian
+Gothic&mdash;carried out in the Florentine duomo to the highest pitch of
+colored finish&mdash;adorned in the upper story of the Campanile by a
+transformation, peculiarly rich and exquisite, of the narrowly-pierced<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>
+heading of window already described, into a veil of tracery&mdash;and aided
+throughout by an accomplished precision of design in its moldings which
+we believe to be unique. In St. Petronio of Bologna, another and a
+barbarous type occurs; the hollow niche of Northern Gothic wrought out
+with diamond-shaped penetrations inclosed in squares; at Bergamo
+another, remarkable for the same square penetrations of its rich and
+daring foliation;&mdash;while at Monza and Carrara the square is adopted as
+the leading form of decoration on the west fronts, and a grotesque
+expression results&mdash;barbarous still;&mdash;which, however, in the latter
+duomo is associated with the arcade of slender niches&mdash;the translation
+of the Romanesque arcade into pointed work, which forms the second
+perfect order of Italian Gothic, entirely ecclesiastical, and well
+developed in the churches of Santa Caterina and Santa Maria della Spina
+at Pisa. The Veronese Gothic, distinguished by the extreme purity and
+severity of its ruling lines, owing to the distance of the centers of
+circles from which its cusps are struck, forms another, and yet a more
+noble school&mdash;and passes through the richer decoration of Padua and
+Vicenza to the full magnificence of the Venetian&mdash;distinguished by the
+introduction of the ogee curve without pruriency or effeminacy, and by
+the breadth and decision of moldings as severely determined in all
+examples of the style as those of any one of the Greek orders.</p>
+
+<p>43. All these groups are separated by distinctions clear and bold&mdash;and
+many of them by that broadest of all distinctions which lies between
+disorganization and consistency&mdash;accumulation and adaptation, experiment
+and design;&mdash;yet to all one or two principles are common, which again
+divide the whole series from that of the Transalpine Gothic&mdash;and whose
+importance Lord Lindsay too lightly passes over in the general
+description, couched in somewhat ungraceful terms, "the vertical
+principle snubbed, as it were, by the horizontal." We have already
+alluded to the great school of color which arose in the immediate
+neighborhood of the Genoa serpentine. The accessibility of marble
+throughout North<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> Italy similarly modified the aim of all design, by the
+admission of undecorated surfaces. A blank space of freestone wall is
+always uninteresting, and sometimes offensive; there is no suggestion of
+preciousness in its dull color, and the stains and rents of time upon it
+are dark, coarse, and gloomy. But a marble surface receives in its age
+hues of continually increasing glow and grandeur; its stains are never
+foul nor dim; its undecomposing surface preserves a soft, fruit-like
+polish forever, slowly flushed by the maturing suns of centuries. Hence,
+while in the Northern Gothic the effort of the architect was always so
+to diffuse his ornament as to prevent the eye from permanently resting
+on the blank material, the Italian fearlessly left fallow large fields
+of uncarved surface, and concentrated the labor of the chisel on
+detached portions, in which the eye, being rather directed to them by
+their isolation than attracted by their salience, required perfect
+finish and pure design rather than force of shade or breadth of parts;
+and further, the intensity of Italian sunshine articulated by perfect
+gradations, and defined by sharp shadows at the edge, such inner anatomy
+and minuteness of outline as would have been utterly vain and valueless
+under the gloom of a northern sky; while again the fineness of material
+both admitted of, and allured to, the precision of execution which the
+climate was calculated to exhibit.</p>
+
+<p>44. All these influences working together, and with them that of
+classical example and tradition, induced a delicacy of expression, a
+slightness of salience, a carefulness of touch, and refinement of
+invention, in all, even the rudest, Italian decorations, utterly
+unrecognized in those of Northern Gothic: which, however picturesquely
+adapted to their place and purpose, depend for most of their effect upon
+bold undercutting, accomplish little beyond graceful embarrassment of
+the eye, and cannot for an instant be separately regarded as works of
+accomplished art. Even the later and more imitative examples profess
+little more than picturesque vigor or ingenious intricacy. The oak
+leaves and acorns of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> the Beauvais moldings are superbly wreathed, but
+rigidly repeated in a constant pattern; the stems are without character,
+and the acorns huge, straight, blunt, and unsightly. Round the southern
+door of the Florentine duomo runs a border of fig-leaves, each leaf
+modulated as if dew had just dried from off it&mdash;yet each alike, so as to
+secure the ordered symmetry of classical enrichment. But the Gothic
+fullness of thought is not therefore left without expression; at the
+edge of each leaf is an animal, first a cicala, then a lizard, then a
+bird, moth, serpent, snail&mdash;all different, and each wrought to the very
+life&mdash;panting&mdash;plumy&mdash;writhing&mdash;glittering&mdash;full of breath and power.
+This harmony of classical restraint with exhaustless fancy, and of
+architectural propriety with imitative finish, is found throughout all
+the fine periods of the Italian Gothic, opposed to the wildness without
+invention, and exuberance without completion, of the North.</p>
+
+<p>45. One other distinction we must notice, in the treatment of the Niche
+and its accessories. In Northern Gothic the niche frequently consists
+only of a bracket and canopy&mdash;the latter attached to the wall,
+independent of columnar support, pierced into openwork profusely rich,
+and often prolonged upwards into a crocketed pinnacle of indefinite
+height. But in the niche of pure Italian Gothic the classic principle of
+columnar support is never lost sight of. Even when its canopy is
+actually supported by the wall behind, it is apparently supported by two
+columns in front, perfectly formed with bases and capitals:&mdash;(the
+support of the Northern niche&mdash;if it have any&mdash;commonly takes the form
+of a buttress):&mdash;when it appears as a detached pinnacle, it is supported
+on four columns, the canopy trefoliated with very obtuse cusps, richly
+charged with foliage in the foliating space, but undecorated at the cusp
+points, and terminating above in a smooth pyramid, void of all ornament,
+and never very acute. This form, modified only by various grouping, is
+that of the noble sepulchral monuments of Verona, Lucca, Pisa, and
+Bologna; on a small scale it is at Venice associated with the cupola,
+in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> St. Mark's, as well as in Santa Fosca, and other minor churches. At
+Pisa, in the Spina chapel it occurs in its most exquisite form, the
+columns there being chased with checker patterns of great elegance. The
+windows of the Florence cathedral are all placed under a flat canopy of
+the same form, the columns being elongated, twisted, and enriched with
+mosaic patterns. The reader must at once perceive how vast is the
+importance of the difference in system with respect to this member; the
+whole of the rich, cavernous chiaroscuro of Northern Gothic being
+dependent on the accumulation of its niches.</p>
+
+<p>46. In passing to the examination of our Author's theory as tested by
+the progress of Sculpture, we are still struck by his utter want of
+attention to physical advantages or difficulties. He seems to have
+forgotten from the first, that the mountains of Syene are not the rocks
+of Paros. Neither the social habits nor intellectual powers of the Greek
+had so much share in inducing his advance in Sculpture beyond the
+Egyptian, as the difference between marble and syenite, porphyry or
+alabaster. Marble not only gave the power, it actually introduced the
+<i>thought</i> of representation or realization of form, as opposed to the
+mere suggestive abstraction: its translucency, tenderness of surface,
+and equality of tint tempting by utmost reward to the finish which of
+all substances it alone admits:&mdash;even ivory receiving not so delicately,
+as alabaster endures not so firmly, the lightest, latest touches of the
+completing chisel. The finer feeling of the hand cannot be put upon a
+hard rock like syenite&mdash;the blow must be firm and fearless&mdash;the
+traceless, tremulous difference between common and immortal sculpture
+cannot be set upon it&mdash;it cannot receive the enchanted strokes which,
+like Aaron's incense, separate the Living and the Dead. Were it
+otherwise, were finish possible, the variegated and lustrous surface
+would not exhibit it to the eye. The imagination itself is blunted by
+the resistance of the material, and by the necessity of absolute
+predetermination of all it would achieve. Retraction of all thought into
+determined and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> simple forms, such as might be fearlessly wrought,
+necessarily remained the characteristic of the school. The size of the
+edifice induced by other causes above stated, further limited the
+efforts of the sculptor. No colossal figure can be minutely finished;
+nor can it easily be conceived except under an imperfect form. It is a
+representation of Impossibility, and every effort at completion adds to
+the monstrous sense of Impossibility. Space would altogether fail us
+were we even to name one-half of the circumstances which influence the
+treatment of light and shade to be seen at vast distances upon surfaces
+of variegated or dusky color; or of the necessities by which, in masses
+of huge proportion, the mere laws of gravity, and the difficulty of
+clearing the substance out of vast hollows neither to be reached nor
+entered, bind the realization of absolute form. Yet all these Lord
+Lindsay ought rigidly to have examined, before venturing to determine
+anything respecting the mental relations of the Greek and Egyptian. But
+the fact of his overlooking these inevitablenesses of material is
+intimately connected with the worst flaw of his theory&mdash;his idea of a
+Perfection resultant from a balance of elements; a perfection which all
+experience has shown to be neither desirable nor possible.</p>
+
+<p>47. His account of Niccola Pisano, the founder of the first great school
+of middle age sculpture, is thus introduced:&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"Niccola's peculiar praise is this,&mdash;that, in practice at least, if not
+in theory, he first established the principle that the study of nature,
+corrected by the ideal of the antique, and animated by the spirit of
+Christianity, personal and social, can alone lead to excellence in
+art:&mdash;each of the three elements of human nature&mdash;Matter, Mind, and
+Spirit&mdash;being thus brought into union and co-operation in the service of
+God, in due relative harmony and subordination. I cannot over-estimate
+the importance of this principle; it was on this that, consciously or
+unconsciously, Niccola himself worked&mdash;it has been by following it that
+Donatello and Ghiberti,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> Leonardo, Raphael, and Michael Angelo have
+risen to glory. The Sienese school and the Florentine, minds
+contemplative and dramatic, are alike beholden to it for whatever
+success has attended their efforts. Like a treble-stranded rope, it
+drags after it the triumphal car of Christian Art. But if either of the
+strands be broken, if either of the three elements be pursued
+disjointedly from the other two, the result is, in each respective case,
+grossness, pedantry, or weakness:&mdash;the exclusive imitation of Nature
+produces a Caravaggio, a Rubens, a Rembrandt&mdash;that of the Antique, a
+Pellegrino di Tibaldo and a David; and though there be a native chastity
+and taste in religion, which restrains those who worship it too
+abstractedly from Intellect and Sense, from running into such extremes,
+it cannot at least supply that mechanical apparatus which will enable
+them to soar:&mdash;such devotees must be content to gaze up into heaven,
+like angels cropt of their wings."&mdash;Vol. ii., p. 102-3.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>48. This is mere Bolognese eclecticism in other terms, and those terms
+incorrect. We are amazed to find a writer usually thoughtful, if not
+accurate, thus indolently adopting the worn-out falsities of our weakest
+writers on Taste. Does he&mdash;can he for an instant suppose that the
+ruffian Caravaggio, distinguished only by his preference of candlelight
+and black shadows for the illustration and re-enforcement of villainy,
+painted nature&mdash;mere nature&mdash;exclusive nature, more painfully or
+heartily than John Bellini or Raphael? Does he not see that whatever men
+imitate must be nature of some kind, material nature or spiritual,
+lovely or foul, brutal or human, but nature still? Does he himself see
+in mere, external, copyable nature, no more than Caravaggio saw, or in
+the Antique no more than has been comprehended by David? The fact is,
+that all artists are primarily divided into the two great groups of
+Imitators and Suggesters&mdash;their falling into one or other being
+dependent partly on disposition, and partly on the matter they have to
+subdue&mdash;(thus Perugino imitates<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> line by line with penciled gold, the
+hair which Nino Pisano can only suggest by a gilded marble mass, both
+having the will of representation alike). And each of these classes is
+again divided into the faithful and unfaithful imitators and suggesters;
+and that is a broad question of blind eye and hard heart, or seeing eye
+and serious heart, always co-existent; and then the faithful imitators
+and suggesters&mdash;artists proper, are appointed, each with his peculiar
+gift and affection, over the several orders and classes of things
+natural, to be by them illumined and set forth.</p>
+
+<p>49. And that is God's doing and distributing; and none is rashly to be
+thought inferior to another, as if by his own fault; nor any of them
+stimulated to emulation, and changing places with others, although their
+allotted tasks be of different dignities, and their granted instruments
+of different keenness; for in none of them can there be a perfection or
+balance of all human attributes;&mdash;the great colorist becomes gradually
+insensible to the refinements of form which he at first intentionally
+omitted; the master of line is inevitably dead to many of the delights
+of color; the study of the true or ideal human form is inconsistent with
+the love of its most spiritual expressions. To one it is intrusted to
+record the historical realities of his age; in him the perception of
+character is subtle, and that of abstract beauty in measure diminished;
+to another, removed to the desert, or inclosed in the cloister, is
+given, not the noting of things transient, but the revealing of things
+eternal. Ghirlandajo and Titian painted men, but could not angels;
+Duccio and Angelico painted Saints, but could not senators. One is
+ordered to copy material form lovingly and slowly&mdash;his the fine finger
+and patient will: to another are sent visions and dreams upon the
+bed&mdash;his the hand fearful and swift, and impulse of passion irregular
+and wild. We may have occasion further to insist upon this great
+principle of the incommunicableness and singleness of all the highest
+powers; but we assert it here especially, in opposition to the idea,
+already so fatal to art, that either the aim of the antique may take
+place together<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> with the purposes, or its traditions become elevatory of
+the power, of Christian art; or that the glories of Giotto and the
+Sienese are in any wise traceable through Niccola Pisano to the
+venerable relics of the Campo Santo.</p>
+
+<p>50. Lord Lindsay's statement, as far as it regards Niccola himself, is
+true.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"His improvement in Sculpture is attributable, in the first instance, to
+the study of an ancient sarcophagus, brought from Greece by the ships of
+Pisa in the eleventh century, and which, after having stood beside the
+door of the Duomo for many centuries as the tomb of the Countess
+Beatrice, mother of the celebrated Matilda, has been recently removed to
+the Campo Santo. The front is sculptured in bas-relief, in two
+compartments, the one representing Hippolytus rejecting the suit of
+Ph&aelig;dra, the other his departure for the chase:&mdash;such at least is the
+most plausible interpretation. The sculpture, if not super-excellent, is
+substantially good, and the benefit derived from it by Niccola is
+perceptible on the slightest examination of his works. Other remains of
+antiquity are preserved at Pisa, which he may have also studied, but
+this was the classic well from which he drew those waters which became
+wine when poured into the hallowing chalice of Christianity. I need
+scarcely add that the mere presence of such models would have availed
+little, had not nature endowed him with the quick eye and the intuitive
+apprehension of genius, together with a purity of taste which taught him
+how to select, how to modify and how to reinspire the germs of
+excellence thus presented to him."&mdash;Vol. ii., pp. 104, 105.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>51. But whatever characters peculiarly classical were impressed upon
+Niccola by this study, died out gradually among his scholars; and in
+Orcagna the Byzantine manner finally triumphed, leading the way to the
+purely Christian sculpture of the school of Fiesole, in its turn swept
+away by the returning wave of classicalism. The sculpture of Orcagna,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>
+Giotto, and Mino da Fiesole, would have been what it was, if Niccola had
+been buried in his sarcophagus; and this is sufficiently proved by
+Giotto's remaining entirely uninfluenced by the educated excellence of
+Andrea Pisano, while he gradually bent the Pisan down to his own
+uncompromising simplicity. If, as Lord Lindsay asserts, "Giotto had
+learned from the works of Niccola the grand principle of Christian art,"
+the sculptures of the Campanile of Florence would not now have stood
+forth in contrasted awfulness of simplicity, beside those of the south
+door of the Baptistery.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>52. "Andrea's merit was indeed very great; his works, compared with
+those of Giovanni and Niccola Pisano, exhibit a progress in design,
+grace, composition and mechanical execution, at first sight
+unaccountable&mdash;a chasm yawns between them, deep and broad, over which
+the younger artist seems to have leapt at a bound,&mdash;the stream that sank
+into the earth at Pisa emerges a river at Florence. The solution of the
+mystery lies in the peculiar plasticity of Andrea's genius, and the
+ascendency acquired over it by Giotto, although a younger man, from the
+first moment they came into contact. Giotto had learnt from the works of
+Niccola the grand principle of Christian art, imperfectly apprehended by
+Giovanni and his other pupils, and by following up which he had in the
+natural course of things improved upon his prototype. He now repaid to
+Sculpture, in the person of Andrea, the sum of improvement in which he
+stood her debtor in that of Niccola:&mdash;so far, that is to say, as the
+treasury of Andrea's mind was capable of taking it in, for it would be
+an error to suppose that Andrea profited by Giotto in the same
+independent manner or degree that Giotto profited by Niccola. Andrea's
+was not a mind of strong individuality; he became completely Giottesque
+in thought and style, and as Giotto and he continued intimate friends
+through life, the impression never wore off:&mdash;most fortunate, indeed,
+that it was so, for the welfare of Sculpture in general, and for that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>
+of the buildings in decorating which the friends worked in concert.</p>
+
+<p>"Happily, Andrea's most important work, the bronze door of the
+Baptistery, still exists, and with every prospect of preservation. It is
+adorned with bas-reliefs from the history of S. John, with allegorical
+figures of virtues and heads of prophets, all most beautiful,&mdash;the
+historical compositions distinguished by simplicity and purity of
+feeling and design, the allegorical virtues perhaps still more
+expressive, and full of poetry in their symbols and attitudes; the whole
+series is executed with a delicacy of workmanship till then unknown in
+bronze, a precision yet softness of touch resembling that of a skillful
+performer on the pianoforte. Andrea was occupied upon it for nine years,
+from 1330 to 1339, and when finished, fixed in its place, and exposed to
+view, the public enthusiasm exceeded all bounds; the Signoria, with
+unexampled condescension, visited it in state, accompanied by the
+ambassadors of Naples and Sicily, and bestowed on the fortunate artist
+the honor and privilege of citizenship, seldom accorded to foreigners
+unless of lofty rank or exalted merit. The door remained in its original
+position&mdash;facing the Cathedral&mdash;till superseded in that post of honor by
+the 'Gate of Paradise,' cast by Ghiberti. It was then transferred to the
+Southern entrance of the Baptistery, facing the Misericordia."&mdash;Vol.
+ii., pp. 125-128.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>53. A few pages farther on, the question of <i>Giotto's</i> claim to the
+authorship of the designs for this door is discussed at length, and, to
+the annihilation of the honor here attributed to <i>Andrea</i>, determined
+affirmatively, partly on the testimony of Vasari, partly on internal
+evidence&mdash;these designs being asserted by our author to be "thoroughly
+Giottesque." But, not to dwell on Lord Lindsay's inconsistency, in the
+ultimate decision his discrimination seems to us utterly at fault.
+Giotto has, we conceive, suffered quite enough in the abduction of the
+work in the Campo Santo, which was worthy of him, without being made
+answerable for these designs of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> Andrea. That he gave a rough draft of
+many of them, is conceivable; but if even he did this, Andrea has added
+cadenzas of drapery, and other scholarly commonplace, as a bad singer
+puts ornament into an air. It was not of such teaching that came the
+"Jabal" of Giotto. Sitting at his tent door, he withdraws its rude
+drapery with one hand: three sheep only are feeding before him, the
+watchdog sitting beside them; but he looks forth like a Destiny,
+beholding the ruined cities of the earth become places, like the valley
+of Achor, for herds to lie down in.</p>
+
+<p>54. We have not space to follow our author through his very interesting
+investigation of the comparatively unknown schools of Teutonic
+sculpture. With one beautiful anecdote, breathing the whole spirit of
+the time&mdash;the mingling of deep piety with the modest, manly pride of
+art&mdash;our readers must be indulged:&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"The Florentine Ghiberti gives a most interesting account of a sculptor
+of Cologne in the employment of Charles of Anjou, King of Naples, whose
+skill he parallels with that of the statuaries of ancient Greece; his
+heads, he says, and his design of the naked, were 'maravigliosamente
+bene,' his style full of grace, his sole defect the somewhat curtailed
+stature of his figures. He was no less excellent in minuter works as a
+goldsmith, and in that capacity had worked for his patron a 'tavola
+d'oro,' a tablet or screen (apparently) of gold, with his utmost care
+and skill; it was a work of exceeding beauty&mdash;but in some political
+exigency his patron wanted money, and it was broken up before his eyes.
+Seeing his labor vain and the pride of his heart rebuked, he threw
+himself on the ground, and uplifting his eyes and hands to heaven,
+prayed in contrition, 'Lord God Almighty, Governor and disposer of
+heaven and earth! Thou hast opened mine eyes that I follow from
+henceforth none other than Thee&mdash;Have mercy upon me!'&mdash;He forthwith gave
+all he had to the poor for the love of God, and went up into a mountain
+where there was a great hermitage, and dwelt<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> there the rest of his days
+in penitence and sanctity, surviving down to the days of Pope Martin,
+who reigned from 1281 to 1284. 'Certain youths,' adds Ghiberti, 'who
+sought to be skilled in statuary, told me how he was versed both in
+painting and sculpture, and how he had painted in the Romitorio where he
+lived; he was an excellent draughtsman and very courteous. When the
+youths who wished to improve visited him, he received them with much
+humility, giving them learned instructions, showing them various
+proportions, and drawing for them many examples, for he was most
+accomplished in his art. And thus,' he concludes, 'with great humility,
+he ended his days in that hermitage.'"&mdash;Vol. iii., pp. 257-259.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>55. We could have wished that Lord Lindsay had further insisted on what
+will be found to be a characteristic of all the truly Christian or
+spiritual, as opposed to classical, schools of sculpture&mdash;the scenic or
+painter-like management of effect. The marble is not cut into the actual
+form of the thing imaged, but oftener into a perspective suggestion of
+it&mdash;the bas-reliefs sometimes almost entirely under cut, and sharpedged,
+so as to come clear off a dark ground of shadow; even heads the size of
+life being in this way rather shadowed out than carved out, as the
+Madonna of Benedetto de Majano in Santa Maria Novella, one of the cheeks
+being advanced half an inch out of its proper place&mdash;and often the most
+audacious violations of proportion admitted, as in the limbs of Michael
+Angelo's sitting Madonna in the Uffizii; all artifices, also, of deep
+and sharp cutting being allowed, to gain the shadowy and spectral
+expressions about the brow and lip which the mere actualities of form
+could not have conveyed;&mdash;the sculptor never following a material model,
+but feeling after the most momentary and subtle aspects of the
+countenance&mdash;striking these out sometimes suddenly, by rude chiseling,
+and stopping the instant they are attained&mdash;never risking the loss of
+thought by the finishing of flesh surface. The heads of the Medici
+sacristy we believe to have been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> thus left unfinished, as having
+already the utmost expression which the marble could receive, and
+incapable of anything but loss from further touches. So with Mino da
+Fiesole and Jacopo della Quercia, the workmanship is often hard,
+sketchy, and angular, having its full effect only at a little distance;
+but at that distance the statue becomes ineffably alive, even to
+startling, bearing an aspect of change and uncertainty, as if it were
+about to vanish, and withal having a light, and sweetness, and incense
+of passion upon it that silences the looker-on, half in delight, half in
+expectation. This daring stroke&mdash;this transfiguring tenderness&mdash;may be
+shown to characterize all truly Christian sculpture, as compared with
+the antique, or the pseudo-classical of subsequent periods. We agree
+with Lord Lindsay in thinking the Psyche of Naples the nearest approach
+to the Christian ideal of all ancient efforts; but even in this the
+approximation is more accidental than real&mdash;a fair type of feature,
+further exalted by the mode in which the imagination supplies the lost
+upper folds of the hair. The fountain of life and emotion remains
+sealed; nor was the opening of that fountain due to any study of the far
+less pure examples accessible by the Pisan sculptors. The sound of its
+waters had been heard long before in the aisles of the Lombard; nor was
+it by Ghiberti, still less by Donatello, that the bed of that Jordan was
+dug deepest, but by Michael Angelo (the last heir of the Byzantine
+traditions descending through Orcagna), opening thenceforward through
+thickets darker and more dark, and with waves ever more soundless and
+slow, into the Dead Sea wherein its waters have been stayed.</p>
+
+<p>56. It is time for us to pass to the subject which occupies the largest
+portion of the work&mdash;-the History</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"of Painting, as developed contemporaneously with her sister, Sculpture,
+and (like her) under the shadow of the Gothic Architecture, by Giotto
+and his successors throughout Italy, by Mino, Duccio, and their scholars
+at Siena, by Orcagna and Fra Angelico da Fiesole at Florence, and by the
+obscure but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> interesting primitive school of Bologna, during the
+fourteenth and the early years of the fifteenth century. The period is
+one, comparatively speaking, of repose and tranquillity,&mdash;the storm
+sleeps and the winds are still, the currents set in one direction, and
+we may sail from isle to isle over a sunny sea, dallying with the time,
+secure of a cloudless sky and of the greetings of innocence and love
+wheresoever the breeze may waft us. There is in truth a holy purity, an
+innocent na&iuml;vet&eacute;, a childlike grace and simplicity, a freshness, a
+fearlessness, an utter freedom from affectation, a yearning after all
+things truthful, lovely and of good report, in the productions of this
+early time, which invest them with a charm peculiar in its kind, and
+which few even of the most perfect works of the maturer era can boast
+of,&mdash;and hence the risk and danger of becoming too passionately attached
+to them, of losing the power of discrimination, of admiring and
+imitating their defects as well as their beauties, of running into
+affectation in seeking after simplicity and into exaggeration in our
+efforts to be in earnest,&mdash;in a word, of forgetting that in art as in
+human nature, it is the balance, harmony, and co-equal development of
+Sense, Intellect, and Spirit, which constitute perfection."&mdash;Vol. ii.,
+pp. 161-163.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>57. To the thousand islands, or how many soever they may be, we shall
+allow ourselves to be wafted with all willingness, but not in Lord
+Lindsay's three-masted vessel, with its balancing topmasts of Sense,
+Intellect, and Spirit. We are utterly tired of the triplicity; and we
+are mistaken if its application here be not as inconsistent as it is
+arbitrary. Turning back to the introduction, which we have quoted, the
+reader will find that while Architecture is there taken for the exponent
+of Sense, Painting is chosen as the peculiar expression of Spirit. "The
+painting of Christendom is that of an immortal spirit conversing with
+its God." But in a note to the first chapter of the second volume, he
+will be surprised to find painting become a "twin of intellect," and
+architecture<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> suddenly advanced from a type of sense to a type of
+spirit:&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"Sculpture and Painting, twins of Intellect, rejoice and breathe freest
+in the pure ether of Architecture, or Spirit, like Castor or Pollux
+under the breezy heaven of their father Jupiter."&mdash;Vol. ii., p. 14.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>58. Prepared by this passage to consider painting either as spiritual or
+intellectual, his patience may pardonably give way on finding in the
+sixth letter&mdash;(what he might, however, have conjectured from the heading
+of the third period in the chart of the schools)&mdash;that the peculiar
+prerogative of painting&mdash;color, is to be considered as a <i>sensual</i>
+element, and the exponent of sense, in accordance with a new analogy,
+here for the first time proposed, between spirit, intellect, and sense,
+and expression, form, and color. Lord Lindsay is peculiarly unfortunate
+in his adoptions from previous writers. He has taken this division of
+art from Fuseli and Reynolds, without perceiving that in those writers
+it is one of convenience merely, and, even so considered, is as
+injudicious as illogical. In what does expression consist but in form
+and color? It is one of the ends which these accomplish, and may be
+itself an attribute of both. Color may be expressive or inexpressive,
+like music; form expressive or inexpressive, like words; but expression
+by itself cannot exist; so that to divide painting into color, form, and
+expression, is precisely as rational as to divide music into notes,
+words, and expression. Color may be pensive, severe, exciting,
+appalling, gay, glowing, or sensual; in all these modes it is
+expressive: form may be tender or abrupt, mean or majestic, attractive
+or overwhelming, discomfortable or delightsome; in all these modes, and
+many more, it is expressive; and if Lord Lindsay's analogy be in anywise
+applicable to either form or color, we should have color sensual
+(Correggio), color intellectual (Tintoret), color spiritual
+(Angelico)&mdash;form sensual (French sculpture), form intellectual<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>
+(Phidias), form spiritual (Michael Angelo). Above all, our author should
+have been careful how he attached the epithet "sensual" to the element
+of color&mdash;not only on account of the glaring inconsistency with his own
+previous assertion of the spirituality of painting&mdash;(since it is
+certainly not merely by being flat instead of solid, representative
+instead of actual, that painting is&mdash;if it be&mdash;more spiritual than
+sculpture); but also, because this idea of sensuality in color has had
+much share in rendering abortive the efforts of the modern German
+religious painters, inducing their abandonment of its consecrating,
+kindling, purifying power.</p>
+
+<p>59. Lord Lindsay says, in a passage which we shall presently quote, that
+the most sensual as well as the most religious painters have always
+loved the brightest colors. Not so; no painters ever were more sensual
+than the modern French, who are alike insensible to, and incapable of
+color&mdash;depending altogether on morbid gradation, waxy smoothness of
+surface, and lusciousness of line, the real elements of sensuality
+wherever it eminently exists. So far from good color being sensual, it
+saves, glorifies, and guards from all evil: it is with Titian, as with
+all great masters of flesh-painting, the redeeming and protecting
+element; and with the religious painters, it is a baptism with fire, an
+under-song of holy Litanies. Is it in sensuality that the fair flush
+opens upon the cheek of Francia's chanting angel,<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> until we think it
+comes, and fades, and returns, as his voice and his harping are louder
+or lower&mdash;or that the silver light rises upon wave after wave of his
+lifted hair; or that the burning of the blood is seen on the unclouded
+brows of the three angels of the Campo Santo, and of folded fire within
+their wings; or that the hollow blue of the highest heaven mantles the
+Madonna with its depth, and falls around her like raiment, as she sits
+beneath the throne of the Sistine Judgment? Is it in sensuality that the
+visible world about us is girded with an eternal iris?&mdash;is there
+pollution in the rose and the gentian more than in the rocks that are
+trusted to their robing?&mdash;is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> the sea-blue a stain upon its water, or
+the scarlet spring of day upon the mountains less holy than their snow?
+As well call the sun itself, or the firmament, sensual, as the color
+which flows from the one, and fills the other.</p>
+
+<p>60. We deprecate this rash assumption, however, with more regard to the
+forthcoming portion of the history, in which we fear it may seriously
+diminish the value of the author's account of the school of Venice, than
+to the part at present executed. This is written in a spirit rather
+sympathetic than critical, and rightly illustrates the feeling of early
+art, even where it mistakes, or leaves unanalyzed, the technical modes
+of its expression. It will be better, perhaps, that we confine our
+attention to the accounts of the three men who may be considered as
+sufficient representatives not only of the art of their time, but of all
+subsequent; Giotto, the first of the great line of dramatists,
+terminating in Raffaelle; Orcagna, the head of that branch of the
+contemplative school which leans towards sadness or terror, terminating
+in Michael Angelo; and Angelico, the head of the contemplatives
+concerned with the heavenly ideal, around whom may be grouped first
+Duccio, and the Sienese, who preceded him, and afterwards Pinturiccio,
+Perugino, and Leonardo da Vinci.</p>
+
+<p>61. The fourth letter opens in the fields of Vespignano. The
+circumstances of the finding of Giotto by Cimabue are well known.
+Vasari's anecdote of the fly painted upon the nose of one of Cimabue's
+figures might, we think, have been spared, or at least not instanced as
+proof of study from nature "nobly rewarded." Giotto certainly never
+either attempted or accomplished any small imitation of this kind; the
+story has all the look of one of the common inventions of the ignorant
+for the ignorant; nor, if true, would Cimabue's careless mistake of a
+black spot in the shape of a fly for one of the living annoyances of
+which there might probably be some dozen or more upon his panel at any
+moment, have been a matter of much credit to his young pupil. The first
+point of any real interest is Lord Lindsay's confirmation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> of F&ouml;rster's
+attribution of the Campo Santo Life of Job, till lately esteemed
+Giotto's, to Francesco da Volterra. F&ouml;rster's evidence appears
+incontrovertible; yet there is curious internal evidence, we think, in
+favor of the designs being Giotto's, if not the execution. The landscape
+is especially Giottesque, the trees being all boldly massed first with
+dark brown, within which the leaves are painted separately in light:
+this very archaic treatment had been much softened and modified by the
+Giotteschi before the date assigned to these frescoes by F&ouml;rster. But,
+what is more singular, the figure of Eliphaz, or the foremost of the
+three friends, occurs in a tempera picture of Giotto's in the Academy of
+Florence, the Ascension, among the apostles on the left; while the face
+of another of the three friends is again repeated in the "Christ
+disputing with the Doctors" of the small tempera series, also in the
+Academy; the figure of Satan shows much analogy to that of the Envy of
+the Arena chapel; and many other portions of the design are evidently
+either sketches of this very subject by Giotto himself, or dexterous
+compilations from his works by a loving pupil. Lord Lindsay has not done
+justice to the upper division&mdash;the Satan before God: it is one of the
+very finest thoughts ever realized by the Giotteschi. The serenity of
+power in the principal figure is very noble; no expression of wrath, or
+even of scorn, in the look which commands the evil spirit. The position
+of the latter, and countenance, are less grotesque and more demoniacal
+than is usual in paintings of the time; the triple wings expanded&mdash;the
+arms crossed over the breast, and holding each other above the elbow,
+the claws fixing in the flesh; a serpent buries its head in a cleft in
+the bosom, and the right hoof is lifted, as if to stamp.</p>
+
+<p>62. We should have been glad if Lord Lindsay had given us some clearer
+idea of the internal evidence on which he founds his determination of
+the order or date of the works of Giotto. When no trustworthy records
+exist, we conceive this task to be of singular difficulty, owing to the
+differences of execution universally existing between the large and
+small<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> works of the painter. The portrait of Dante in the chapel of the
+Podest&aacute; is proved by Dante's exile, in 1302, to have been painted before
+Giotto was six and twenty; yet we remember no head in any of his works
+which can be compared with it for carefulness of finish and truth of
+drawing; the crudeness of the material vanquished by dexterous hatching;
+the color not only pure, but deep&mdash;a rare virtue with Giotto; the eye
+soft and thoughtful, the brow nobly modeled. In the fresco of the Death
+of the Baptist, in Santa Croce, which we agree with Lord Lindsay in
+attributing to the same early period, the face of the musician is drawn
+with great refinement, and considerable power of rounding
+surfaces&mdash;(though in the drapery may be remarked a very singular piece
+of archaic treatment: it is warm white, with yellow stripes; the dress
+itself falls in deep folds, but the striped pattern does not follow the
+foldings&mdash;it is drawn across, as if with a straight ruler).</p>
+
+<p>63. But passing from these frescoes, which are nearly the size of life,
+to those of the Arena chapel at Padua, erected in 1303, decorated in
+1306, which are much smaller, we find the execution proportionably less
+dexterous. Of this famous chapel Lord Lindsay says&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"nowhere (save in the Duomo of Orvieto) is the legendary history of the
+Virgin told with such minuteness.</p>
+
+<p>"The heart must indeed be cold to the charms of youthful art that can
+enter this little sanctuary without a glow of delight. From the roof,
+with its sky of ultramarine, powdered with stars and interspersed with
+medallions containing the heads of our Saviour, the Virgin and the
+Apostles, to the mock paneling of the nave, below the windows, the whole
+is completely covered with frescoes, in excellent preservation, and all
+more or less painted by Giotto's own hand, except six in the tribune,
+which however have apparently been executed from his cartoons....</p>
+
+<p>"These frescoes form a most important document in the history of
+Giotto's mind, exhibiting all his peculiar merits,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> although in a state
+as yet of immature development. They are full of fancy and invention;
+the composition is almost always admirable, although sometimes too
+studiously symmetrical; the figures are few and characteristic, each
+speaking for itself, the impersonation of a distinct idea, and most
+dramatically grouped and contrasted; the attitudes are appropriate,
+easy, and natural; the action and gesticulation singularly vivid; the
+expression is excellent, except when impassioned grief induces
+caricature:&mdash;devoted to the study of Nature as he is, Giotto had not yet
+learnt that it is suppressed feeling which affects one most. The head of
+our Saviour is beautiful throughout&mdash;that of the Virgin not so good&mdash;she
+is modest, but not very graceful or celestial:&mdash;it was long before he
+succeeded in his Virgins&mdash;they are much too matronly: among the
+accessory figures, graceful female forms occasionally appear,
+foreshadowing those of his later works at Florence and Naples, yet they
+are always clumsy about the waist and bust, and most of them are
+under-jawed, which certainly detracts from the sweetness of the female
+countenance. His delineation of the naked is excellent, as compared with
+the works of his predecessors, but far unequal to what he attained in
+his later years,&mdash;the drapery, on the contrary, is noble, majestic, and
+statuesque; the coloring is still pale and weak,&mdash;it was long ere he
+improved in this point; the landscape displays little or no amendment
+upon the Byzantine; the architecture, that of the fourteenth century, is
+to the figures that people it in the proportion of dolls' houses to the
+children that play with them,&mdash;an absurdity long unthinkingly acquiesced
+in, from its occurrence in the classic bas-reliefs from which it had
+been traditionally derived;&mdash;and, finally, the lineal perspective is
+very fair, and in three of the compositions an excellent effect is
+produced by the introduction of the same background with varied
+<i>dramatis person&aelig;</i>, reminding one of Retszch's illustrations of Faust.
+The animals too are always excellent, full of spirit and
+character."&mdash;Vol. ii., pp. 183-199.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>64. This last characteristic is especially to be noticed. It is a
+touching proof of the influence of early years. Giotto was only ten
+years old when he was taken from following the sheep. For the rest, as
+we have above stated, the manipulation of these frescoes is just as far
+inferior to that of the Podest&agrave; chapel as their dimensions are less; and
+we think it will be found generally that the smaller the work the more
+rude is Giotto's hand. In this respect he seems to differ from all other
+masters.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"It is not difficult, gazing on these silent but eloquent walls, to
+repeople them with the group once, as we know-five hundred years
+ago&mdash;assembled within them,&mdash;Giotto intent upon his work, his wife Ciuta
+admiring his progress, and Dante, with abstracted eye, alternately
+conversing with his friend and watching the gambols of the children
+playing on the grass before the door. It is generally affirmed that
+Dante, during this visit, inspired Giotto with his taste for allegory,
+and that the Virtues and Vices of the Arena were the first fruits of
+their intercourse; it is possible, certainly, but I doubt it,&mdash;allegory
+was the universal language of the time, as we have seen in the history
+of the Pisan school."&mdash;Vol. ii., pp. 199, 200.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>It ought to have been further mentioned, that the representation of the
+Virtues and Vices under these Giottesque figures continued long
+afterwards. We find them copied, for instance, on the capitals of the
+Ducal Palace at Venice, with an amusing variation on the "Stultitia,"
+who has neither Indian dress nor club, as with Giotto, but is to the
+Venetians sufficiently distinguished by riding a horse.</p>
+
+<p>65. The notice of the frescoes at Assisi consists of little more than an
+enumeration of the subjects, accompanied by agreeable translations of
+the traditions respecting St. Francis, embodied by St. Buonaventura. Nor
+have we space to follow the author through his examination of Giotto's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>
+works at Naples and Avignon. The following account of the erection of
+the Campanile of Florence is too interesting to be omitted:&mdash;-</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"Giotto was chosen to erect it, on the ground avowedly of the
+universality of his talents, with the appointment of Capomaestro, or
+chief architect of the Cathedral and its dependencies, a yearly salary
+of one hundred gold florins, and the privilege of citizenship, and under
+the special understanding that he was not to quit Florence. His designs
+being approved of, the republic passed a decree in the spring of 1334,
+that 'the Campanile should be built so as to exceed in magnificence,
+height and excellence of workmanship whatever in that kind had been
+achieved of old by the Greeks and Romans in the time of their utmost
+power and greatness&mdash;"della loro pi&ugrave; florida potenza."' The first stone
+was laid accordingly, with great pomp, on the 18th of July following,
+and the work prosecuted with such vigor and with such costliness and
+utter disregard of expense, that a citizen of Verona, looking on,
+exclaimed that the republic was taxing her strength too far,&mdash;that the
+united resources of two great monarchs would be insufficient to complete
+it; a <i>criticism which the Signoria resented by confining him for two
+months in prison</i>, and afterwards conducting him through the public
+treasury, to teach him that the Florentines could build their whole city
+of marble, and not one poor steeple only, were they so inclined.</p>
+
+<p>"Giotto made a model of his proposed structure, on which every stone was
+marked, and the successive courses painted red and white, according to
+his design, so as to match with the Cathedral and Baptistery; this model
+was of course adhered to strictly during the short remnant of his life,
+and the work was completed in strict conformity to it after his death,
+with the exception of the spire, which, the taste having changed, was
+never added. He had intended it to be one hundred <i>braccia</i>, or one
+hundred and fifty feet high."&mdash;Vol. ii., pp. 247-249.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The deficiency of the spire Lord Lindsay does not regret:&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"Let the reader stand before the Campanile, and ask himself whether,
+with Michael Scott at his elbow, or Aladdin's lamp in his hand, he would
+supply the deficiency? I think not."&mdash;p. 38.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>We have more faith in Giotto than our author&mdash;and we will reply to his
+question by two others&mdash;whether, looking down upon Florence from the
+hill of San Miniato, his eye rested oftener and more affectionately on
+the Campanile of Giotto, or on the simple tower and spire of Santa Maria
+Novella?&mdash;and whether, in the backgrounds of Perugino, he would
+willingly substitute for the church spires invariably introduced,
+flat-topped campaniles like the unfinished tower of Florence?</p>
+
+<p>66. Giotto sculptured with his own hand two of the bas-reliefs of this
+campanile, and probably might have executed them all. But the purposes
+of his life had been accomplished; he died at Florence on the 8th of
+January, 1337. The concluding notice of his character and achievement is
+highly valuable.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>67. "Painting indeed stands indebted to Giotto beyond any of her
+children. His history is a most instructive one. Endowed with the
+liveliest fancy, and with that facility which so often betrays genius,
+and achieving in youth a reputation which the age of Methuselah could
+not have added to, he had yet the discernment to perceive how much still
+remained to be done, and the resolution to bind himself (as it were) to
+Nature's chariot wheel, confident that she would erelong emancipate and
+own him as her son. Calm and unimpassioned, he seems to have commenced
+his career with a deliberate survey of the difficulties he had to
+encounter and of his resources for the conflict, and then to have worked
+upon a system steadily and perseveringly, prophetically sure of victory.
+His life was indeed one continued triumph,&mdash;and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> no conqueror ever
+mounted to the Capitol with a step more equal and sedate. We find him,
+at first, slowly and cautiously endeavoring to infuse new life into the
+traditional compositions, by substituting the heads, attitudes, and
+drapery of the actual world for the spectral forms and conventional
+types of the mosaics and the Byzantine painters,&mdash;idealizing them when
+the personages represented were of higher mark and dignity, but in none
+ever outstepping truth. Advancing in his career, we find year by year
+the fruits of continuous unwearied study in a consistent and equable
+contemporary improvement in all the various minuter though most
+important departments of his art, in his design, his drapery, his
+coloring, in the dignity and expression of his men and in the grace of
+his women&mdash;asperities softened down, little graces unexpectedly born and
+playing about his path, as if to make amends for the deformity of his
+actual offspring&mdash;touches, daily more numerous, of that nature which
+makes the world akin&mdash;and ever and always a keen yet cheerful sympathy
+with life, a playful humor mingling with his graver lessons, which
+affects us the more as coming from one who, knowing himself an object
+personally of disgust and ridicule, could yet satirize with a smile.</p>
+
+<p>"Finally, throughout his works, we are conscious of an earnest, a lofty,
+a religious aim and purpose, as of one who felt himself a pioneer of
+civilization in a newly-discovered world, the Adam of a new Eden freshly
+planted in the earth's wilderness, a mouthpiece of God and a preacher of
+righteousness to mankind.&mdash;And here we must establish a distinction very
+necessary to be recognized before we can duly appreciate the relative
+merits of the elder painters in this, the most important point in which
+we can view their character. Giotto's genius, however universal, was
+still (as I have repeatedly observed) Dramatic rather than
+Contemplative,&mdash;a tendency in which his scholars and successors almost
+to a man resembled him. Now, just as in actual life&mdash;where, with a few
+rare exceptions, all men rank under two great categories according as
+Imagination or Reason predominates<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> in their intellectual character&mdash;two
+individuals may be equally impressed with the truths of Christianity and
+yet differ essentially in its outward manifestation, the one dwelling in
+action, the other in contemplation, the one in strife, the other in
+peace, the one (so to speak) in hate, the other in love, the one
+struggling with devils, the other communing with angels, yet each
+serving as a channel of God's mercies to man, each (we may believe)
+offering Him service equally acceptable in His sight&mdash;even so shall we
+find it in art and with artists; few in whom the Dramatic power
+predominates will be found to excel in the expression of religious
+emotions of the more abstract and enthusiastic cast, even although men
+of indisputably pure and holy character themselves; and <i>vice vers&acirc;</i>,
+few of the more Contemplative but will feel bewildered and at fault, if
+they descend from their starry region of light into the grosser
+atmosphere that girdles in this world of action. The works of artists
+are their minds' mirror; they cannot express what they do not feel; each
+class dwells apart and seeks its ideal in a distinct sphere of
+emotion,&mdash;their object is different, and their success proportioned to
+the exclusiveness with which they pursue that object. A few indeed there
+have been in all ages, monarchs of the mind and types of our Saviour,
+who have lived a twofold existence of action and contemplation in art,
+in song, in politics, and in daily life; of these have been Abraham,
+Moses, David, and Cyrus in the elder world&mdash;Alfred, Charlemagne, Dante,
+and perhaps Shakespeare, in the new,&mdash;and in art, Niccola Pisano,
+Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo. But Giotto, however great as the
+patriarch of his peculiar tribe, was not of these few, and we ought not
+therefore to misapprehend him, or be disappointed at finding his
+Madonnas (for instance) less exquisitely spiritual than the Sienese, or
+those of Fra Angelico and some later painters, who seem to have dipped
+their pencils in the rainbow that circles the throne of God,&mdash;they are
+pure and modest, but that is all; on the other hand, where his
+Contemplative rivals lack utterance, he speaks most feelingly to the
+heart in his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> own peculiar language of Dramatic composition&mdash;he glances
+over creation with the eye of love, all the charities of life follow in
+his steps, and his thoughts are as the breath of the morning. A man of
+the world, living in it and loving it, yet with a heart that it could
+not spoil nor wean from its allegiance to God&mdash;'non meno buon Cristiano
+che eccellente pittore,' as Vasari emphatically describes him&mdash;his
+religion breathes of the free air of heaven rather than the cloister,
+neither enthusiastic nor superstitious, but practical, manly and
+healthy&mdash;and this, although the picturesque biographer of S.
+Francis!"&mdash;Vol. ii., pp. 260-264.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>68. This is all as admirably felt as expressed, and to those acquainted
+with and accustomed to love the works of the painter, it leaves nothing
+to be asked for; but we must again remind Lord Lindsay, that he has
+throughout left the <i>artistical</i> orbit of Giotto undefined, and the
+offense of his manner unremoved, as far as regards the uninitiated
+spectator. We question whether from all that he has written, the
+untraveled reader could form any distinct idea of the painter's peculiar
+merits or methods, or that the estimate, if formed, might not afterwards
+expose him to severe disappointment. It ought especially to have been
+stated, that the Giottesque system of chiaroscuro is one of pure, quiet,
+pervading daylight. No <i>cast</i> shadows ever occur, and this remains a
+marked characteristic of all the works of the Giotteschi. Of course, all
+subtleties of reflected light or raised color are unthought of. Shade is
+only given as far as it is necessary to the articulation of simple
+forms, nor even then is it rightly adapted to the color of the light;
+the folds of the draperies are well drawn, but the entire rounding of
+them always missed&mdash;the general forms appearing flat, and terminated by
+equal and severe outlines, while the masses of ungradated color often
+seem to divide the figure into fragments. Thus, the Madonna in the small
+tempera series of the Academy of Florence, is usually divided exactly in
+half by the dark mass of her blue robe, falling in a vertical line.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> In
+consequence of this defect, the grace of Giotto's composition can hardly
+be felt until it is put into outline. The colors themselves are of good
+quality, never glaring, always gladdening, the reds inclining to orange
+more than purple, yellow frequent, the prevalent tone of the color
+groups warm; the sky always blue, the whole effect somewhat resembling
+that of the Northern painted glass of the same century&mdash;and chastened in
+the same manner by noble neutral tints or greens; yet all somewhat
+unconsidered and unsystematic, painful discords not unfrequent. The
+material and ornaments of dress are never particularized, no imitations
+of texture or jewelry, yet shot stuffs of two colors frequent. The
+drawing often powerful, though of course uninformed; the mastery of
+mental expression by bodily motion, and of bodily motion, past and
+future, by a single gesture, altogether unrivaled even by Raffaelle;&mdash;it
+is obtained chiefly by throwing the emphasis always on the right line,
+admitting straight lines of great severity, and never dividing the main
+drift of the drapery by inferior folds; neither are accidents allowed to
+interfere&mdash;the garments fall heavily and in marked angles&mdash;nor are they
+affected by the wind, except under circumstances of very rapid motion.
+The ideal of the face is often solemn&mdash;seldom beautiful; occasionally
+ludicrous failures occur: in the smallest designs the face is very often
+a dead letter, or worse: and in all, Giotto's handling is generally to
+be distinguished from that of any of his followers by its bluntness. In
+the school work we find sweeter types of feature, greater finish,
+stricter care, more delicate outline, fewer errors, but on the whole
+less life.</p>
+
+<p>69. Finally, and on this we would especially insist, Giotto's genius is
+not to be considered as struggling with difficulty and repressed by
+ignorance, but as appointed, for the good of men, to come into the world
+exactly at the time when its rapidity of invention was not likely to be
+hampered by demands for imitative dexterity or neatness of finish; and
+when, owing to the very ignorance which has been unwisely regretted, the
+simplicity of his thoughts might be uttered with a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> childlike and
+innocent sweetness, never to be recovered in times of prouder knowledge.
+The dramatic power of his works, rightly understood, could receive no
+addition from artificial arrangement of shade, or scientific exhibition
+of anatomy, and we have reason to be deeply grateful when afterwards
+"inland far" with Buonaroti and Titian, that we can look back to the
+Giotteschi&mdash;to see those children</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">"Sport upon the shore</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>We believe Giotto himself felt this&mdash;unquestionably he could have
+carried many of his works much farther in finish, had he so willed it;
+but he chose rather to multiply motives than to complete details. Thus
+we recur to our great principle of Separate gift. The man who spends his
+life in toning colors must leave the treasures of his invention
+untold&mdash;let each have his perfect work; and while we thank Bellini and
+Leonardo for their deeply wrought dyes, and life-labored utterance of
+passionate thought; let us remember also what cause, but for the
+remorseless destruction of myriads of his works, we should have had to
+thank Giotto, in that, abandoning all proud effort, he chose rather to
+make the stones of Italy cry out with one voice of pauseless praise, and
+to fill with perpetual remembrance of the Saints he loved, and perpetual
+honor of the God he worshiped, palace chamber and convent cloister,
+lifted tower and lengthened wall, from the utmost blue of the plain of
+Padua to the Southern wildernesses of the hermit-haunted Apennine.</p>
+
+<p>70. From the head of the Dramatic branch of Art, we turn to the first of
+the great Contemplative Triad, associated, as it most singularly happens
+in name as well as in heart; Orcagna&mdash;Arcagnuolo; Fra Giovanni&mdash;detto
+Angelico; and Michael Angelo:&mdash;the first two names being bestowed by
+contemporary admiration.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"Orcagna was born apparently about the middle of the (14th) century, and
+was christened Andrea, by which name,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> with the addition of that of his
+father, Cione, he always designated himself; that, however, of Orcagna,
+a corruption of Arcagnuolo, or 'The Archangel,' was given him by his
+contemporaries, and by this he has become known to posterity.</p>
+
+<p>"The earliest works of Orcagna will be found in that sanctuary of
+Semi-Byzantine art, the Campo Santo of Pisa. He there painted three of
+the four 'Novissima,' Death, Judgment, Hell, and Paradise&mdash;the two
+former entirely himself, the third with the assistance of his brother
+Bernardo, who is said to have colored it after his designs. The first of
+the series, a most singular performance, had for centuries been
+popularly known as the 'Trionfo della Morte.' It is divided by an
+immense rock into two irregular portions. In that to the right, Death,
+personified as a female phantom, batwinged, claw-footed, her robe of
+linked mail [?] and her long hair streaming on the wind, swings back her
+scythe in order to cut down a company of the rich ones of the earth,
+Castruccio Castracani and his gay companions, seated under an
+orange-grove, and listening to the music of a troubadour and a female
+minstrel; little genii or Cupids, with reversed torches, float in the
+air above them; one young gallant caresses his hawk, a lady her
+lapdog,&mdash;Castruccio alone looks abstractedly away, as if his thoughts
+were elsewhere. But all are alike heedless and unconscious, though the
+sand is run out, the scythe falling and their doom sealed. Meanwhile the
+lame and the halt, the withered and the blind, to whom the heavens are
+brass and life a burthen, cry on Death with impassioned gestures, to
+release them from their misery,&mdash;but in vain; she sweeps past, and will
+not hear them. Between these two groups lie a heap of corpses, mown down
+already in her flight&mdash;kings, queens, bishops, cardinals, young men and
+maidens, secular and ecclesiastical&mdash;ensigned by their crowns, coronets,
+necklaces, miters and helmets&mdash;huddled together in hideous confusion;
+some are dead, others dying,&mdash;angels and devils draw the souls out of
+their mouths; that of a nun (in whose hand a purse, firmly clenched,
+betokens<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> her besetting sin) shrinks back aghast at the unlooked-for
+sight of the demon who receives it&mdash;an idea either inherited or adopted
+from Andrea Tafi. The whole upper half of the fresco, on this side, is
+filled with angels and devils carrying souls to heaven or to hell;
+sometimes a struggle takes place, and a soul is rescued from a demon who
+has unwarrantably appropriated it; the angels are very graceful, and
+their intercourse with their spiritual charge is full of tenderness and
+endearment; on the other hand, the wicked are hurried off by the devils
+and thrown headlong into the mouths of hell, represented as the crater
+of a volcano, belching out flames nearly in the center of the
+composition. These devils exhibit every variety of horror in form and
+feature."&mdash;Vol. iii., pp. 130-134.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>71. We wish our author had been more specific in his account of this
+wonderful fresco. The portrait of Castruccio ought to have been
+signalized as a severe disappointment to the admirers of the heroic
+Lucchese: the face is flat, lifeless, and sensual, though fine in
+feature. The group of mendicants occupying the center are especially
+interesting, as being among the first existing examples of hard study
+from the model: all are evidently portraits&mdash;and the effect of deformity
+on the lines of the countenance rendered with appalling truth; the
+retractile muscles of the mouth wrinkled and fixed&mdash;the jaws
+projecting&mdash;the eyes hungry and glaring&mdash;the eyebrows grisly and stiff,
+the painter having drawn each hair separately: the two stroppiati with
+stumps instead of arms are especially characteristic, as the observer
+may at once determine by comparing them with the descendants of the
+originals, of whom he will at any time find two, or more, waiting to
+accompany his return across the meadow in front of the Duomo: the old
+woman also, nearest of the group, with gray disheveled hair and gray
+coat, with a brown girdle and gourd flask, is magnificent, and the
+archetype of all modern conceptions of witch. But the crowning stroke of
+feeling is dependent on a circumstance seldom observed. As Castruccio<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>
+and his companions are seated under the shade of an orange grove, so the
+mendicants are surrounded by a thicket of <i>teasels</i>, and a branch of
+ragged thorn is twisted like a crown about their sickly temples and
+weedy hair.</p>
+
+<p>72. We do not altogether agree with our author in thinking that the
+devils exhibit every variety of horror; we rather fear that the
+spectator might at first be reminded by them of what is commonly known
+as the Dragon pattern of Wedgwood ware. There is invention in them
+however&mdash;and energy; the eyes are always terrible, though simply
+drawn&mdash;a black ball set forward, and two-thirds surrounded by a narrow
+crescent of white, under a shaggy brow; the mouths are frequently
+magnificent; that of a demon accompanying a thrust of a spear with a
+growl, on the right of the picture, is interesting as an example of the
+development of the canine teeth noticed by Sir Charles Bell ("Essay on
+Expression," p. 138)&mdash;its capacity of laceration is unlimited: another,
+snarling like a tiger at an angel who has pulled a soul out of his
+claws, is equally well conceived; we know nothing like its ferocity
+except Rembrandt's sketches of wounded wild beasts. The angels we think
+generally disappointing; they are for the most part diminutive in size,
+and the crossing of the extremities of the two wings that cover the
+feet, gives them a coleopterous, cockchafer look, which is not a little
+undignified; the colors of their plumes are somewhat coarse and
+dark&mdash;one is covered with silky hair, instead of feathers. The souls
+they contend for are indeed of sweet expression; but exceedingly earthly
+in contour, the painter being unable to deal with the nude form. On the
+whole, he seems to have reserved his highest powers for the fresco which
+follows next in order, the scene of Resurrection and Judgment.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"It is, in the main, the traditional Byzantine composition, even more
+rigidly symmetrical than usual, singularly contrasting in this respect
+with the rush and movement of the preceding compartment. Our Saviour and
+the Virgin, seated side by side, each on a rainbow and within a vesica
+piscis, appear<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> in the sky&mdash;Our Saviour uttering the words of
+malediction with uplifted arm, showing the wound in his side, and nearly
+in the attitude of Michael Angelo, but in wrath, not in fury&mdash;the Virgin
+timidly drawing back and gazing down in pity and sorrow. I never saw
+this co-equal juxtaposition in any other representation of the Last
+Judgment."&mdash;Vol. iii., p. 136.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>73. The positions of our Saviour and of the Virgin are not strictly
+co-equal; the glory in which the Madonna is seated is both lower and
+less; but the equality is more complete in the painting of the same
+subject in Santa M. Novella. We believe Lord Lindsay is correct in
+thinking Orcagna the only artist who has dared it. We question whether
+even wrath be intended in the countenance of the principal figure; on
+the contrary, we think it likely to disappoint at first, and appear
+lifeless in its exceeding tranquillity; the brow is indeed slightly
+knit, but the eyes have no local direction. They comprehend all
+things&mdash;are set upon all spirits alike, as in that <i>word-fresco</i> of our
+own, not unworthy to be set side by side with this, the Vision of the
+Trembling Man in the House of the Interpreter. The action is as majestic
+as the countenance&mdash;the right hand seems raised rather to show its wound
+(as the left points at the same instant to the wound in the side), than
+in condemnation, though its gesture has been adopted as one of
+threatening&mdash;first (and very nobly) by Benozzo Gozzoli, in the figure of
+the Angel departing, looking towards Sodom&mdash;and afterwards, with
+unfortunate exaggeration, by Michael Angelo. Orcagna's Madonna we think
+a failure, but his strength has been more happily displayed in the
+Apostolic circle. The head of St. John is peculiarly beautiful. The
+other Apostles look forward or down as in judgment&mdash;some in indignation,
+some in pity, some serene&mdash;but the eyes of St. John are fixed upon the
+Judge Himself with the stability of love&mdash;intercession and sorrow
+struggling for utterance with awe&mdash;and through both is seen a tremor of
+submissive astonishment, that the lips which had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> once forbidden his to
+call down fire from heaven should now themselves burn with irrevocable
+condemnation.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>74. "One feeling for the most part pervades this side of the
+composition,&mdash;there is far more variety in the other; agony is depicted
+with fearful intensity and in every degree and character; some clasp
+their hands, some hide their faces, some look up in despair, but none
+towards Christ; others seem to have grown idiots with horror:&mdash;a few
+gaze, as if fascinated, into the gulf of fire towards which the whole
+mass of misery are being urged by the ministers of doom&mdash;the flames bite
+them, the devils fish for and catch them with long grappling-hooks:&mdash;in
+sad contrast to the group on the opposite side, a queen, condemned
+herself but self-forgetful, vainly struggles to rescue her daughter from
+a demon who has caught her by the gown and is dragging her backwards
+into the abyss&mdash;her sister, wringing her hands, looks on in agony&mdash;it is
+a fearful scene.</p>
+
+<p>"A vast rib or arch in the walls of pandemonium admits one into the
+contiguous gulf of Hell, forming the third fresco, or rather a
+continuation of the second&mdash;in which Satan sits in the midst, in
+gigantic terror, cased in armor and crunching sinners&mdash;of whom Judas,
+especially, is eaten and ejected, re-eaten and re-ejected again and
+again forever. The punishments of the wicked are portrayed in circles
+numberless around him. But in everything save horror this compartment is
+inferior to the preceding, and it has been much injured and
+repainted."&mdash;Vol. iii., p. 138.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>75. We might have been spared all notice of this last compartment.
+Throughout Italy, owing, it may be supposed, to the interested desire of
+the clergy to impress upon the populace as forcibly as possible the
+verity of purgatorial horrors, nearly every representation of the
+Inferno has been repainted, and vulgar butchery substituted for the
+expressions of punishment which were too chaste for monkish purposes.
+The infernos of Giotto at Padua, and of Orcagna at Florence,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> have thus
+been destroyed; but in neither case have they been replaced by anything
+so merely disgusting as these restorations by Solazzino in the Campo
+Santo. Not a line of Orcagna's remains, except in one row of figures
+halfway up the wall, where his firm black drawing is still
+distinguishable: throughout the rest of the fresco, hillocks of pink
+flesh have been substituted for his severe forms&mdash;and for his agonized
+features, puppets' heads with roaring mouths and staring eyes, the whole
+as coarse and sickening, and quite as weak, as any scrabble on the
+lowest booths of a London Fair.</p>
+
+<p>76. Lord Lindsay's comparison of these frescoes of Orcagna with the
+great work in the Sistine, is, as a specimen of his writing, too good
+not to be quoted.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"While Michael Angelo's leading idea seems to be the self-concentration
+and utter absorption of all feeling into the one predominant thought,
+<i>Am I, individually, safe?</i> resolving itself into two emotions only,
+doubt and despair&mdash;all diversities of character, all kindred sympathies
+annihilated under their pressure&mdash;those emotions uttering themselves,
+not through the face but the form, by bodily contortion, rendering the
+whole composition, with all its overwhelming merits, a mighty
+hubbub&mdash;Orcagna's on the contrary embraces the whole world of passions
+that make up the economy of man, and these not confused or crushed into
+each other, but expanded and enhanced in quality and intensity
+commensurably with the 'change' attendant upon the
+resurrection&mdash;variously expressed indeed, and in reference to the
+diversities of individual character, which will be nowise compromised by
+that change, yet from their very intensity suppressed and subdued,
+stilling the body and informing only the soul's index, the countenance.
+All therefore is calm; the saved have acquiesced in all things, they can
+mourn no more&mdash;the damned are to them as if they had never been;&mdash;among
+the lost, grief is too deep, too settled for caricature, and while every
+feeling of the spectator, every key of the soul's organ, is played upon
+by turns, tenderness and pity<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> form the under-song throughout and
+ultimately prevail; the curse is uttered in sorrow rather than wrath,
+and from the pitying Virgin and the weeping archangel above, to the
+mother endeavoring to rescue her daughter below, and the young secular
+led to paradise under the approving smile of S. Michael, all resolves
+itself into sympathy and love.&mdash;Michael Angelo's conception may be more
+efficacious for teaching by terror&mdash;it was his object, I believe, as the
+heir of Savonarola and the representative of the Protestant spirit
+within the bosom of Catholicism; but Orcagna's is in better taste, truer
+to human nature, sublimer in philosophy, and (if I mistake not) more
+scriptural."&mdash;Vol. iii., pp. 139-141.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>77. We think it somewhat strange that the object of teaching by terror
+should be attributed to M. Angelo more than to Orcagna, seeing that the
+former, with his usual dignity, has refused all representation of
+infernal punishment&mdash;except in the figure dragged down with the hand
+over the face, the serpent biting the thigh, and in the fiends of the
+extreme angle; while Orcagna, whose intention may be conjectured even
+from Solazzino's restoration, exhausted himself in detailing Dante's
+distribution of torture, and brings into successive prominence every
+expedient of pain; the prong, the spit, the rack, the chain, venomous
+fang and rending beak, harrowing point and dividing edge, biting fiend
+and calcining fire. The objects of the two great painters were indeed
+opposed, but not in this respect. Orcagna's, like that of every great
+painter of his day, was to write upon the wall, as in a book, the
+greatest possible number of those religious facts or doctrines which the
+Church desired should be known to the people. This he did in the
+simplest and most straightforward way, regardless of artistical
+reputation, and desiring only to be read and understood. But Michael
+Angelo's object was from the beginning that of an artist. He addresses
+not the sympathies of his day, but the understanding of all time, and he
+treats the subject in the mode best adapted to bring every one of his
+own powers into full play. As<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> might have been expected, while the
+self-forgetfulness of Orcagna has given, on the one hand, an awfulness
+to his work, and verity, which are wanting in the studied composition of
+the Sistine, on the other it has admitted a puerility commensurate with
+the narrowness of the religion he had to teach.</p>
+
+<p>78. Greater differences still result from the opposed powers and
+idiosyncrasies of the two men. Orcagna was unable to draw the nude&mdash;on
+this inability followed a coldness to the value of flowing lines, and to
+the power of unity in composition&mdash;neither could he indicate motion or
+buoyancy in flying or floating figures, nor express violence of action
+in the limbs&mdash;he cannot even show the difference between pulling and
+pushing in the muscles of the arm. In M. Angelo these conditions were
+directly reversed. Intense sensibility to the majesty of writhing,
+flowing, and connected lines, was in him associated with a power,
+unequaled except by Angelico, of suggesting a&euml;rial motion&mdash;motion
+deliberate or disturbed, inherent or impressed, impotent or
+inspired&mdash;gathering into glory, or gravitating to death. Orcagna was
+therefore compelled to range his figures symmetrically in ordered lines,
+while Michael Angelo bound them into chains, or hurled them into heaps,
+or scattered them before him as the wind does leaves. Orcagna trusted
+for all his expression to the countenance, or to rudely explained
+gesture aided by grand fall of draperies, though in all these points he
+was still immeasurably inferior to his colossal rival. As for his
+"embracing the whole world of passions which make up the economy of
+man," he had no such power of delineation&mdash;nor, we believe, of
+conception. The expressions on the inferno side are all of them
+varieties of grief and fear, differing merely in degree, not in
+character or operation: there is something dramatic in the raised hand
+of a man wearing a green bonnet with a white plume&mdash;but the only really
+far-carried effort in the group is the head of a Dominican monk (just
+above the queen in green), who, in the midst of the close crowd,
+struggling, shuddering, and howling on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> every side, is fixed in quiet,
+total despair, insensible to all things, and seemingly poised in
+existence and sensation upon that one point in his past life when his
+steps first took hold on hell; this head, which is opposed to a face
+distorted by horror beside it, is, we repeat, the only highly wrought
+piece of expression in the group.</p>
+
+<p>79. What Michael Angelo could do by expression of countenance alone, let
+the Piet&agrave; of Genoa tell, or the Lorenzo, or the parallel to this very
+head of Orcagna's, the face of the man borne down in the Last Judgment
+with the hand clenched over one of the eyes. Neither in that fresco is
+he wanting in dramatic episode; the adaptation of the Niobe on the
+spectator's left hand is far finer than Orcagna's condemned queen and
+princess; the groups rising below, side by side, supporting each other,
+are full of tenderness, and reciprocal devotion; the contest in the
+center for the body which a demon drags down by the hair is another kind
+of quarrel from that of Orcagna between a feathered angel and bristly
+fiend for a diminutive soul&mdash;reminding us, as it forcibly did at first,
+of a vociferous difference in opinion between a cat and a cockatoo. But
+Buonaroti knew that it was useless to concentrate interest in the
+countenances, in a picture of enormous size, ill lighted; and he
+preferred giving full play to the powers of line-grouping, for which he
+could have found no nobler field. Let us not by unwise comparison mingle
+with our admiration of these two sublime works any sense of weakness in
+the na&iuml;vet&eacute; of the one, or of coldness in the science of the other. Each
+painter has his own sufficient dominion, and he who complains of the
+want of knowledge in Orcagna, or of the display of it in Michael Angelo,
+has probably brought little to his judgment of either.</p>
+
+<p>80. One passage more we must quote, well worthy of remark in these days
+of hollowness and haste, though we question the truth of the particular
+fact stated in the second volume respecting the shrine of Or San
+Michele. Cement is now visible enough in all the joints, but whether
+from recent repairs we cannot say:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"There is indeed another, a technical merit, due to Orcagna, which I
+would have mentioned earlier, did it not partake so strongly of a moral
+virtue. Whatever he undertook to do, he did well&mdash;by which I mean,
+better than anybody else. His Loggia, in its general structure and its
+provisions against injury from wet and decay, is a model of strength no
+less than symmetry and elegance; the junction of the marbles in the
+tabernacle of Or San Michele, and the exquisite manual workmanship of
+the bas-reliefs, have been the theme of praise for five centuries; his
+colors in the Campo Santo have maintained a freshness unrivaled by those
+of any of his successors there;&mdash;nay, even had his mosaics been
+preserved at Orvieto, I am confident the <i>commettitura</i> would be found
+more compact and polished than any previous to the sixteenth century.
+The secret of all this was that he made himself thoroughly an adept in
+the mechanism of the respective arts, and therefore his works have
+stood. Genius is too apt to think herself independent of form and
+matter&mdash;never was there such a mistake; she cannot slight either without
+hamstringing herself. But the rule is of universal application; without
+this thorough mastery of their respective tools, this determination
+honestly to make the best use of them, the divine, the soldier, the
+statesman, the philosopher, the poet&mdash;however genuine their enthusiasm,
+however lofty their genius&mdash;are mere empirics, pretenders to crowns they
+will not run for, children not men&mdash;sporters with Imagination, triflers
+with Reason, with the prospects of humanity, with Time, and with
+God."&mdash;Vol. iii., pp. 148, 149.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>A noble passage this, and most true, provided we distinguish always
+between mastery of tool together with thorough strength of workmanship,
+and mere neatness of outside polish or fitting of measurement, of which
+ancient masters are daringly scornful.</p>
+
+<p>81. None of Orcagna's pupils, except Francisco Traini, attained
+celebrity<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"nothing in fact is known of them except their names. Had their works,
+however inferior, been preserved, we might have had less difficulty in
+establishing the links between himself and his successor in the
+supremacy of the Semi-Byzantine school at Florence, the Beato Fra
+Angelico da Fiesole.... He was born at Vicchio, near Florence, it is
+said in 1387, and was baptized by the name of Guido. Of a gentle nature,
+averse to the turmoil of the world, and pious to enthusiasm, though as
+free from fanaticism as his youth was innocent of vice, he determined,
+at the age of twenty, though well provided for in a worldly point of
+view, to retire to the cloister; he professed himself accordingly a
+brother of the monastery of S. Domenico at Fiesole in 1407, assuming his
+monastic name from the Apostle of love, S. John. He acquired from his
+residence there the distinguishing surname 'da Fiesole;' and a calmer
+retreat for one weary of earth and desirous of commerce with heaven
+would in vain be sought for;&mdash;the purity of the atmosphere, the
+freshness of the morning breeze, the starry clearness and delicious
+fragrance of the nights, the loveliness of the valley at one's feet,
+lengthening out, like a life of happiness, between the Apennine and the
+sea&mdash;with the intermingling sounds that ascend perpetually from below,
+softened by distance into music, and by an agreeable compromise at once
+giving a zest to solitude and cheating it of its loneliness&mdash;rendering
+Fiesole a spot which angels might alight upon by mistake in quest of
+paradise, a spot where it would be at once sweet to live and sweet to
+die."&mdash;Vol. iii., pp. 151-153.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>82. Our readers must recollect that the convent where Fra Giovanni first
+resided is not that whose belfry tower and cypress grove crown the "top
+of F&eacute;sole." The Dominican convent is situated at the bottom of the slope
+of olives, distinguished only by its narrow and low spire; a cypress
+avenue recedes from it towards Florence&mdash;a stony path, leading to the
+ancient Badia of Fiesole, descends in front of the three-arched loggia
+which protects the entrance to the church.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> No extended prospect is open
+to it; though over the low wall, and through the sharp, thickset olive
+leaves, may be seen one silver gleam of the Arno, and, at evening, the
+peaks of the Carrara mountains, purple against the twilight, dark and
+calm, while the fire-flies glance beneath, silent and intermittent, like
+stars upon the rippling of mute, soft sea.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"It is by no means an easy task to adjust the chronology of Fra
+Angelico's works; he has affixed no dates to them, and consequently,
+when external evidence is wanting, we are thrown upon internal, which in
+his case is unusually fallacious. It is satisfactory therefore to
+possess a fixed date in 1433, the year in which he painted the great
+tabernacle for the Company of Flax-merchants, now removed to the gallery
+of the Uffizii. It represents the Virgin and child, with attendant
+Saints, on a gold ground&mdash;very dignified and noble, although the Madonna
+has not attained the exquisite spirituality of his later efforts. Round
+this tabernacle as a nucleus, may be classed a number of paintings, all
+of similar excellence&mdash;admirable that is to say, but not of his very
+best, and in which, if I mistake not, the type of the Virgin bears
+throughout a strong family resemblance."&mdash;Vol. iii., pp. 160, 161.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>83. If the painter ever increased in power after this period (he was
+then forty-three), we have been unable to systematize the improvement.
+We much doubt whether, in his modes of execution, advance were possible.
+Men whose merit lies in record of natural facts, increase in knowledge;
+and men whose merit is in dexterity of hand increase in facility; but we
+much doubt whether the faculty of design, or force of feeling, increase
+after the age of twenty-five. By Fra Angelico, who drew always in fear
+and trembling, dexterous execution had been from the first repudiated;
+he neither needed nor sought technical knowledge of the form, and the
+inspiration, to which his power was owing, was not less glowing in youth
+than in age. The inferiority traceable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> (we grant) in this Madonna
+results not from its early date, but from Fra Angelico's incapability,
+always visible, of drawing the head of life size. He is, in this
+respect, the exact reverse of Giotto; he was essentially a miniature
+painter, and never attained the mastery of muscular play in the features
+necessary in a full-sized drawing. His habit, almost constant, of
+surrounding the iris of the eye by a sharp black line, is, in small
+figures, perfectly successful, giving a transparency and tenderness not
+otherwise expressible. But on a larger scale it gives a stony stare to
+the eyeball, which not all the tenderness of the brow and mouth can
+conquer or redeem.</p>
+
+<p>84. Further, in this particular instance, the ear has by accident been
+set too far back&mdash;(Fra Angelico, drawing only from feeling, was liable
+to gross errors of this kind,&mdash;often, however, more beautiful than other
+men's truths)&mdash;and the hair removed in consequence too far off the brow;
+in other respects the face is very noble&mdash;still more so that of the
+Christ. The child <i>stands</i> upon the Virgin's knees,<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> one hand raised
+in the usual attitude of benediction, the other holding a globe. The
+face looks straightforward, quiet, Jupiter-like, and very sublime, owing
+to the smallness of the features in proportion to the head, the eyes
+being placed at about three-sevenths of the whole height, leaving
+four-sevenths for the brow, and themselves only in length about
+one-sixth of the breadth of the face, half closed, giving a peculiar
+appearance of repose. The hair is short, golden, symmetrically curled,
+statuesque in its contour; the mouth tender and full of life: the red
+cross of the glory about the head of an intense ruby enamel, almost fire
+color; the dress brown, with golden girdle. In all the treatment Fra
+Angelico maintains his assertion of the authority of abstract
+imagination, which, depriving his subject of all material or actual
+being, contemplates it as retaining qualities eternal only&mdash;adorned by
+incorporeal splendor. The eyes of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> beholder are supernaturally
+unsealed: and to this miraculous vision whatever is of the earth
+vanishes, and all things are seen endowed with an harmonious glory&mdash;the
+garments falling with strange, visionary grace, glowing with indefinite
+gold&mdash;the walls of the chamber dazzling as of a heavenly city&mdash;the
+mortal forms themselves impressed with divine changelessness&mdash;no
+domesticity&mdash;no jest&mdash;no anxiety&mdash;no expectation&mdash;no variety of action
+or of thought. Love, all fulfilling, and various modes of power, are
+alone expressed; the Virgin never shows the complacency or petty
+watchfulness of maternity; she sits serene, supporting the child whom
+she ever looks upon, as a stranger among strangers; "Behold the handmaid
+of the Lord" forever written upon her brow.</p>
+
+<p>85. An approach to an exception in treatment is found in the
+Annunciation of the upper corridor of St. Mark's, most unkindly treated
+by our author:&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"Probably the earliest of the series&mdash;full of faults, but imbued with
+the sweetest feeling; there is a look of na&iuml;ve curiosity, mingling with
+the modest and meek humility of the Virgin, which almost provokes a
+smile."&mdash;iii., 176.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>Many a Sabbath evening of bright summer have we passed in that lonely
+corridor&mdash;but not to the finding of faults, nor the provoking of smiles.
+The angel is perhaps something less majestic than is usual with the
+painter; but the Virgin is only the more to be worshiped, because here,
+for once, set before us in the verity of life. No gorgeous robe is upon
+her; no lifted throne set for her; the golden border gleams faintly on
+the dark blue dress; the seat is drawn into the shadow of a lowly
+loggia. The face is of no strange, far-sought loveliness; the features
+might even be thought hard, and they are worn with watching, and severe,
+though innocent. She stoops forward with her arms folded on her bosom:
+no casting down of eye nor shrinking of the frame in fear; she is too
+earnest, too self-forgetful for either:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> wonder and inquiry are there,
+but chastened and free from doubt; meekness, yet mingled with a patient
+majesty; peace, yet sorrowfully sealed, as if the promise of the Angel
+were already underwritten by the prophecy of Simeon. They who pass and
+repass in the twilight of that solemn corridor, need not the adjuration
+inscribed beneath:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">"Virginis intactae cum veneris ante figuram</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">Praetereundo cave ne sileatur Ave."<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>We in general allow the inferiority of Angelico's fresco to his tempera
+works; yet even that which of all these latter we think the most
+radiant, the Annunciation on the reliquary of Santa Maria Novella,
+would, we believe, if repeatedly compared with this of St. Mark's, in
+the end have the disadvantage. The eminent value of the tempera
+paintings results partly from their delicacy of line, and partly from
+the purity of color and force of decoration of which the material is
+capable.</p>
+
+<p>86. The passage, to which we have before alluded, respecting Fra
+Angelico's color in general, is one of the most curious and fanciful in
+the work:&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"His coloring, on the other hand, is far more beautiful, although of
+questionable brilliancy. This will be found invariably the case in minds
+constituted like his. Spirit and Sense act on each other with livelier
+reciprocity the closer their approximation, the less intervention there
+is of Intellect. Hence the most religious and the most sensual painters
+have always loved the brightest colors&mdash;Spiritual Expression and a
+clearly defined (however inaccurate) outline forming the distinction of
+the former class; Animal Expression and a confused and uncertain outline
+(reflecting that lax morality which confounds the limits of light and
+darkness, right and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> wrong) of the latter. On the other hand, the more
+that Intellect, or the spirit of Form, intervenes in its severe
+precision, the less pure, the paler grow the colors, the nearer they
+tend to the hue of marble, of the bas-relief. We thus find the purest
+and brightest colors only in Fra Angelico's pictures, with a general
+predominance of blue, which we have observed to prevail more or less in
+so many of the Semi-Byzantine painters, and which, fanciful as it may
+appear, I cannot but attribute, independently of mere tradition, to an
+inherent, instinctive sympathy between their mental constitution and the
+color in question; as that of red, or of blood, may be observed to
+prevail among painters in whom Sense or Nature predominates over
+Spirit&mdash;for in this, as in all things else, the moral and the material
+world respond to each other as closely as shadow and substance. But, in
+Painting as in Morals, perfection implies the due intervention of
+Intellect between Spirit and Sense&mdash;of Form between Expression and
+Coloring&mdash;as a power at once controlling and controlled&mdash;and therefore,
+although acknowledging its fascination, I cannot unreservedly praise the
+Coloring of Fra Angelico."&mdash;Vol. iii., pp. 193, 194.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>87. There is much ingenuity, and some truth, here, but the reader, as in
+other of Lord Lindsay's speculations, must receive his conclusions with
+qualification. It is the natural character of strong effects of color,
+as of high light, to confuse outlines; and it is a necessity in all fine
+harmonies of color that many tints should merge imperceptibly into their
+following or succeeding ones:&mdash;we believe Lord Lindsay himself would
+hardly wish to mark the hues of the rainbow into divided zones, or to
+show its edge, as of an iron arch, against the sky, in order that it
+might no longer reflect (a reflection of which we profess ourselves up
+to this moment altogether unconscious) "that lax morality which
+confounds the limits of right and wrong." Again, there is a character of
+energy in all warm colors, as of repose in cold, which necessarily
+causes the former to be preferred by painters of savage subject&mdash;that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>
+is to say, commonly by the coarsest and most degraded;&mdash;but when
+sensuality is free from ferocity, it leans to blue more than to red (as
+especially in the flesh tints of Guido), and when intellect prevails
+over this sensuality, its first step is invariably to put more red into
+every color, and so "rubor est virtutis color." We hardly think Lord
+Lindsay would willingly include Luca Giordano among his spiritual
+painters, though that artist's servant was materially enriched by
+washing the ultramarine from the brushes with which he painted the
+Ricardi palace; nor would he, we believe, degrade Ghirlandajo to
+fellowship with the herd of the sensual, though in the fresco of the
+vision of Zacharias there are seventeen different reds in large masses,
+and not a shade of blue. The fact is, there is no color of the spectrum,
+as there is no note of music, whose key and prevalence may not be made
+pure in expression, and elevating in influence, by a great and good
+painter, or degraded to unhallowed purpose by a base one.</p>
+
+<p>88. We are sorry that our author "cannot unreservedly praise the
+coloring of Angelico;" but he is again curbed by his unhappy system of
+balanced perfectibility, and must quarrel with the gentle monk because
+he finds not in him the flames of Giorgione, nor the tempering of
+Titian, nor the melody of Cagliari. This curb of perfection we took
+between our teeth from the first, and we will give up our hearts to
+Angelico without drawback or reservation. His color is, in its sphere
+and to its purpose, as perfect as human work may be: wrought to radiance
+beyond that of the ruby and opal, its inartificialness prevents it from
+arresting the attention it is intended only to direct; were it composed
+with more science it would become vulgar from the loss of its
+unconsciousness; if richer, it must have parted with its purity, if
+deeper, with its joyfulness, if more subdued, with its sincerity.
+Passages are, indeed, sometimes unsuccessful; but it is to be judged in
+its rapture, and forgiven in its fall: he who works by law and system
+may be blamed when he sinks below the line above which he proposes no
+elevation, but to him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> whose eyes are on a mark far off, and whose
+efforts are impulsive, and to the utmost of his strength, we may not
+unkindly count the slips of his sometime descent into the valley of
+humiliation.</p>
+
+<p>89. The concluding notice of Angelico is true and interesting, though
+rendered obscure by useless recurrence to the favorite theory.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"Such are the surviving works of a painter, who has recently been as
+unduly extolled as he had for three centuries past been unduly
+depreciated,&mdash;depreciated, through the amalgamation during those
+centuries of the principle of which he was the representative with
+baser, or at least less precious matter&mdash;extolled, through the
+recurrence to that principle, in its pure, unsophisticated essence, in
+the present &mdash;in a word, to the simple Imaginative Christianity of the
+middle ages, as opposed to the complex Reasoning Christianity of recent
+times. Creeds therefore are at issue, and no exclusive partisan, neither
+Catholic nor Protestant in the absolute sense of the terms, can fairly
+appreciate Fra Angelico. Nevertheless, to those who regard society as
+progressive through the gradual development of the component elements of
+human nature, and who believe that Providence has accommodated the mind
+of man, individually, to the perception of half-truths only, in order to
+create that antagonism from which Truth is generated in the abstract,
+and by which the progression is effected, his rank and position in art
+are clear and definite. All that Spirit could achieve by herself,
+anterior to that struggle with Intellect and Sense which she must in all
+cases pass through in order to work out her destiny, was accomplished by
+him. Last and most gifted of a long and imaginative race&mdash;the heir of
+their experience, with collateral advantages which they possessed
+not&mdash;and flourishing at the moment when the transition was actually
+taking place from the youth to the early manhood of Europe; he gave
+full, unreserved, and enthusiastic expression to that Love and Hope
+which had winged the Faith<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> of Christendom in her flight towards heaven
+for fourteen centuries,&mdash;to those yearnings of the Heart and the
+Imagination which ever precede, in Universal as well as Individual
+development, the severer and more chastened intelligence of
+Reason."&mdash;Vol. iii., pp. 188-190.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>90. We must again repeat that if our author wishes to be truly
+serviceable to the schools of England, he must express himself in terms
+requiring less laborious translation. Clearing the above statement of
+its mysticism and metaphor, it amounts only to this,&mdash;that Fra Angelico
+was a man of (humanly speaking) <i>perfect</i> piety&mdash;humility, charity, and
+faith&mdash;that he never employed his art but as a means of expressing his
+love to God and man, and with the view, single, simple, and
+straightforward, of glory to the Creator, and good to the Creature.
+Every quality or subject of art by which these ends were not to be
+attained, or to be attained secondarily only, he rejected; from all
+study of art, as such, he withdrew; whatever might merely please the
+eye, or interest the intellect, he despised, and refused; he used his
+colors and lines, as David his harp, after a kingly fashion, for
+purposes of praise and not of science. To this grace and gift of
+holiness were added, those of a fervent imagination, vivid invention,
+keen sense of loveliness in lines and colors, unwearied energy, and to
+all these gifts the crowning one of quietness of life and mind, while
+yet his convent-cell was at first within view, and afterwards in the
+center, of a city which had lead of all the world in Intellect, and in
+whose streets he might see daily and hourly the noblest setting of manly
+features. It would perhaps be well to wait until we find another man
+thus actuated, thus endowed, and thus circumstanced, before we speak of
+"unduly extolling" the works of Fra Angelico.</p>
+
+<p>91. His artistical attainments, as might be conjectured, are nothing
+more than the development, through practice, of his natural powers in
+accordance with his sacred instincts. His power of expression by bodily
+gesture is greater even<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> than Giotto's, wherever he could feel or
+comprehend the passion to be expressed; but so inherent in him was his
+holy tranquillity of mind, that he could not by any exertion, even for a
+moment, conceive either agitation, doubt, or fear&mdash;and all the actions
+proceeding from such passions, or, <i>&agrave; fortiori</i>, from any yet more
+criminal, are absurdly and powerlessly portrayed by him; while
+contrariwise, every gesture, consistent with emotion pure and saintly,
+is rendered with an intensity of truth to which there is no existing
+parallel; the expression being carried out into every bend of the hand,
+every undulation of the arm, shoulder, and neck, every fold of the dress
+and every wave of the hair. His drawing of movement is subject to the
+same influence; vulgar or vicious motion he cannot represent; his
+running, falling, or struggling figures are drawn with childish
+incapability; but give him for his scene the pavement of heaven, or
+pastures of Paradise, and for his subject the "inoffensive pace" of
+glorified souls, or the spiritual speed of Angels, and Michael Angelo
+alone can contend with him in majesty,&mdash;in grace and musical
+continuousness of motion, no one. The inspiration was in some degree
+caught by his pupil Benozzo, but thenceforward forever lost. The angels
+of Perugino appear to be let down by cords and moved by wires; that of
+Titian, in the sacrifice of Isaac, kicks like an awkward swimmer;
+Raphael's Moses and Elias of the Transfiguration are cramped at the
+knees; and the flight of Domenichino's angels is a sprawl paralyzed. The
+authority of Tintoret over movement is, on the other hand, too
+unlimited; the descent of his angels is the swoop of a whirlwind or the
+fall of a thunderbolt; his mortal impulses are oftener impetuous than
+pathetic, and majestic more than melodious.</p>
+
+<p>92. But it is difficult by words to convey to the reader unacquainted
+with Angelico's works, any idea of the thoughtful variety of his
+rendering of movement&mdash;Earnest haste of girded faith in the Flight into
+Egypt, the haste of obedience, not of fear; and unweariedness, but
+through spiritual support, and not in human strength&mdash;Swift obedience of
+passive<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> earth to the call of its Creator, in the Resurrection of
+Lazarus&mdash;March of meditative gladness in the following of the Apostles
+down the Mount of Olives&mdash;Rush of adoration breaking through the chains
+and shadows of death, in the Spirits in Prison. Pacing of mighty angels
+above the Firmament, poised on their upright wings, half opened, broad,
+bright, quiet, like eastern clouds before the sun is up;&mdash;or going
+forth, with timbrels and with dances, of souls more than conquerors,
+beside the shore of the last great Red Sea, the sea of glass mingled
+with fire, hand knit with hand, and voice with voice, the joyful winds
+of heaven following the measure of their motion, and the flowers of the
+new earth looking on, like stars pausing in their courses.</p>
+
+<p>93. And yet all this is but the lowest part and narrowest reach of
+Angelico's conceptions. Joy and gentleness, patience and power, he could
+indicate by gesture&mdash;but Devotion could be told by the countenance only.
+There seems to have been always a stern limit by which the thoughts of
+other men were stayed; the religion that was painted even by Perugino,
+Francia, and Bellini, was finite in its spirit&mdash;the religion of earthly
+beings, checked, not indeed by the corruption, but by the veil and the
+sorrow of clay. But with Fra Angelico the glory of the countenance
+reaches to actual transfiguration; eyes that see no more darkly,
+incapable of all tears, foreheads flaming, like Belshazzar's marble
+wall, with the writing of the Father's name upon them, lips tremulous
+with love, and crimson with the light of the coals of the altar&mdash;and all
+this loveliness, thus enthusiastic and ineffable, yet sealed with the
+stability which the coming and going of ages as countless as sea-sand
+cannot dim nor weary, and bathed by an ever flowing river of holy
+thought, with God for its source, God for its shore, and God for its
+ocean.</p>
+
+<p>94. We speak in no inconsiderate enthusiasm. We feel assured that to any
+person of just feeling who devotes sufficient time to the examination of
+these works, all terms of description must seem derogatory. Where such
+ends as these have been reached, it ill becomes us to speak of minor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>
+deficiencies as either to be blamed or regretted: it cannot be
+determined how far even what we deprecate may be accessory to our
+delight, nor by what intricate involution what we deplore may be
+connected with what we love. Every good that nature herself bestows, or
+accomplishes, is given with a counterpoise, or gained at a sacrifice;
+nor is it to be expected of Man that he should win the hardest battles
+and tread the narrowest paths, without the betrayal of a weakness, or
+the acknowledgment of an error.</p>
+
+<p>95. With this final warning against our author's hesitating approbation
+of what is greatest and best, we must close our specific examination of
+the mode in which his design has been worked out. We have done enough to
+set the reader upon his guard against whatever appears slight or
+inconsiderate in his theory or statements, and with the more severity,
+because this was alone wanting to render the book one of the most
+valuable gifts which Art has ever received. Of the translations from the
+lives of the saints we have hardly spoken; they are gracefully rendered,
+and all of them highly interesting&mdash;but we could wish to see these, and
+the enumerations of fresco subjects<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> with which the other volumes are
+in great part occupied, published separately for the convenience of
+travelers in Italy. They are something out of place in a work like that
+before us. For the rest, we might have more interested the reader, and
+gratified ourselves, by setting before him some of the many passages of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>
+tender feeling and earnest eloquence with which the volumes are
+replete&mdash;but we felt it necessary rather to anticipate the hesitation
+with which they were liable to be received, and set limits to the halo
+of fancy by which their light is obscured&mdash;though enlarged. One or two
+paragraphs, however, of the closing chapter must be given before we
+part:&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>96. "What a scene of beauty, what a flower-garden of art&mdash;how bright and
+how varied&mdash;must Italy have presented at the commencement of the
+sixteenth century, at the death of Raphael! The sacrileges we lament
+took place for the most part after that period; hundreds of frescoes,
+not merely of Giotto and those other elders of Christian Art, but of
+Gentile da Fabriano, Pietro della Francesca, Perugino and their
+compeers, were still existing, charming the eye, elevating the mind, and
+warming the heart. Now alas! few comparatively and fading are the relics
+of those great and good men. While Dante's voice rings as clear as ever,
+communing with us as friend with friend, theirs is dying gradually away,
+fainter and fainter, like the farewell of a spirit. Flaking off the
+walls, uncared for and neglected save in a few rare instances, scarce
+one of their frescoes will survive the century, and the labors of the
+next may not improbably be directed to the recovery and restoration of
+such as may still slumber beneath the whitewash and the daubs with which
+the Bronzinos and Zuccheros 'et id genus omne' have unconsciously sealed
+them up for posterity&mdash;their best title to our gratitude.&mdash;But why not
+begin at once? at all events in the instances numberless, where merely
+whitewash interposes between us and them.</p>
+
+<p>"It is easy to reply&mdash;what need of this? They&mdash;the artists&mdash;have Moses
+and the prophets, the frescoes of Raphael and Michael Angelo&mdash;let them
+study them. Doubtless,&mdash;but we still reply, and with no impiety&mdash;they
+will not repent, they will not forsake their idols and their evil
+ways&mdash;they will not abandon Sense for Spirit, oils for fresco&mdash;unless
+these great ones of the past, these Sleepers of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> Ephesus, arise from the
+dead.... It is not by studying art in its perfection&mdash;by worshiping
+Raphael and Michael Angelo exclusively of all other excellence&mdash;that we
+can expect to rival them, but by re-ascending to the fountain-head&mdash;by
+planting ourselves as acorns in the ground those oaks are rooted in, and
+growing up to their level&mdash;in a word, by studying Duccio and Giotto that
+we may paint like Taddeo di Bartolo and Masaccio, Taddeo di Bartolo and
+Masaccio that we may paint like Perugino and Luca Signorelli, Perugino
+and Luca Signorelli that we may paint like Raphael and Michael Angelo.
+And why despair of this, or even of shaming the Vatican? For with genius
+and God's blessing nothing is impossible.</p>
+
+<p>"I would not be a blind partisan, but, with all their faults, the old
+masters I plead for knew how to touch the heart. It may be difficult at
+first to believe this; like children, they are shy with us&mdash;like
+strangers, they bear an uncouth mien and aspect&mdash;like ghosts from the
+other world, they have an awkward habit of shocking our
+conventionalities with home truths. But with the dead as with the living
+all depends on the frankness with which we greet them, the sincerity
+with which we credit their kindly qualities; sympathy is the key to
+truth&mdash;we must love, in order to appreciate."&mdash;iii., p. 418.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>97. These are beautiful sentences; yet this let the young painter of
+these days remember always, that whomsoever he may love, or from
+whomsoever learn, he can now no more go back to those hours of infancy
+and be born again.<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> About<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> the faith, the questioning and the
+teaching of childhood there is a joy and grace, which we may often envy,
+but can no more assume:&mdash;the voice and the gesture must not be imitated
+when the innocence is lost. Incapability and ignorance in the act of
+being struggled against and cast away are often endowed with a peculiar
+charm&mdash;but both are only contemptible when they are pretended. Whatever
+we have now to do, we may be sure, first, that its strength and life
+must be drawn from the real nature with us and about us always, and
+secondly, that, if worth doing, it will be something altogether
+different from what has ever been done before. The visions of the
+cloister must depart with its superstitious peace&mdash;the quick,
+apprehensive symbolism of early Faith must yield to the abstract
+teaching of disciplined Reason. Whatever else we may deem of the
+Progress of Nations, one character of that progress is determined and
+discernible. As in the encroaching of the land upon the sea, the
+strength of the sandy bastions is raised out of the sifted ruin of
+ancient inland hills&mdash;for every tongue of level land that stretches into
+the deep, the fall of Alps has been heard among the clouds, and as the
+fields of industry enlarge, the intercourse with Heaven is shortened.
+Let it not be doubted that as this change is inevitable, so it is
+expedient, though the form of teaching adopted and of duty prescribed be
+less mythic and contemplative, more active and unassisted: for the light
+of Transfiguration on the Mountain is substituted the Fire of Coals upon
+the Shore, and on the charge to hear the Shepherd, follows that to feed
+the Sheep. Doubtful we may be for a time, and apparently deserted; but
+if, as we wait, we still look forward with steadfast will and humble
+heart, so that our Hope for the Future may be fed, not dulled or
+diverted by our Love for the Past, we shall not long be left without a
+Guide:&mdash;the way will be opened, the Precursor appointed&mdash;the Hour will
+come, and the Man.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="EASTLAKES_HISTORY_OF_OIL-PAINTING13" id="EASTLAKES_HISTORY_OF_OIL-PAINTING13"></a>EASTLAKE'S HISTORY OF OIL-PAINTING.<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>98. The stranger in Florence who for the first time passes through the
+iron gate which opens from the Green Cloister of Santa Maria Novella
+into the Spezieria, can hardly fail of being surprised, and that perhaps
+painfully, by the suddenness of the transition from the silence and
+gloom of the monastic inclosure, its pavement rough with epitaphs, and
+its walls retaining, still legible, though crumbling and mildewed, their
+imaged records of Scripture History, to the activity of a traffic not
+less frivolous than flourishing, concerned almost exclusively with the
+appliances of bodily adornment or luxury. Yet perhaps, on a moment's
+reflection, the rose-leaves scattered on the floor, and the air filled
+with odor of myrtle and myrrh, aloes and cassia, may arouse associations
+of a different and more elevated character; the preparation of these
+precious perfumes may seem not altogether unfitting the hands of a
+religious brotherhood&mdash;or if this should not be conceded, at all events
+it must be matter of rejoicing to observe the evidence of intelligence
+and energy interrupting the apathy and languor of the cloister; nor will
+the institution be regarded with other than respect, as well as
+gratitude, when it is remembered that, as to the convent library we owe<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>
+the preservation of ancient literature, to the convent laboratory we owe
+the duration of medi&aelig;val art.</p>
+
+<p>99. It is at first with surprise not altogether dissimilar, that we find
+a painter of refined feeling and deep thoughtfulness, after manifesting
+in his works the most sincere affection for what is highest in the reach
+of his art, devoting himself for years (there is proof of this in the
+work before us) to the study of the mechanical preparation of its
+appliances, and whatever documentary evidence exists respecting their
+ancient use. But it is with a revulsion of feeling more entire, that we
+perceive the value of the results obtained&mdash;the accuracy of the varied
+knowledge by which their sequence has been established&mdash;and above all,
+their immediate bearing upon the practice and promise of the schools of
+our own day.</p>
+
+<p>Opposite errors, we know not which the least pardonable, but both
+certainly productive of great harm, have from time to time possessed the
+masters of modern art. It has been held by some that the great early
+painters owed the larger measure of their power to secrets of material
+and method, and that the discovery of a lost vehicle or forgotten
+process might at any time accomplish the regeneration of a fallen
+school. By others it has been asserted that all questions respecting
+materials or manipulation are idle and impertinent; that the methods of
+the older masters were either of no peculiar value, or are still in our
+power; that a great painter is independent of all but the simplest
+mechanical aids, and demonstrates his greatness by scorn of system and
+carelessness of means.</p>
+
+<p>100. It is evident that so long as incapability could shield itself
+under the first of these creeds, or presumption vindicate itself by the
+second; so long as the feeble painter could lay his faults on his
+palette and his panel; and the self-conceited painter, from the assumed
+identity of materials proceed to infer equality of power&mdash;(for we
+believe that in most instances those who deny the evil of our present
+methods will deny also the weakness of our present works)&mdash;little good<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>
+could be expected from the teaching of the abstract principles of the
+art; and less, if possible, from the example of any mechanical
+qualities, however admirable, whose means might be supposed
+irrecoverable on the one hand, or indeterminate on the other, or of any
+excellence conceived to have been either summoned by an incantation, or
+struck out by an accident. And of late, among our leading masters, the
+loss has not been merely of the system of the ancients, but of all
+system whatsoever: the greater number paint as if the virtue of oil
+pigment were its opacity, or as if its power depended on its polish; of
+the rest, no two agree in use or choice of materials; not many are
+consistent even in their own practice; and the most zealous and earnest,
+therefore the most discontented, reaching impatiently and desperately
+after better things, purchase the momentary satisfaction of their
+feelings by the sacrifice of security of surface and durability of hue.
+The walls of our galleries are for the most part divided between
+pictures whose dead coating of consistent paint, laid on with a heavy
+hand and a cold heart, secures for them the stability of dullness and
+the safety of mediocrity; and pictures whose reckless and experimental
+brilliancy, unequal in its result as lawless in its means, is as
+evanescent as the dust of an insect's wing, and presents in its chief
+perfections so many subjects of future regret.</p>
+
+<p>101. But if these evils now continue, it can only be through rashness
+which no example can warn, or through apathy which no hope can
+stimulate, for Mr. Eastlake has alike withdrawn license from
+experimentalism and apology from indolence. He has done away with all
+legends of forgotten secrets; he has shown that the masters of the great
+Flemish and early Venetian schools possessed no means, followed no
+methods, but such as we may still obtain and pursue; but he has shown
+also, among all these masters, the most admirable care in the
+preparation of materials and the most simple consistency in their use;
+he has shown that their excellence was reached, and could only have been
+reached, by stern and exact science, condescending to the observance,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>
+care, and conquest of the most minute physical particulars and
+hindrances; that the greatest of them never despised an aid nor avoided
+a difficulty. The loss of imaginative liberty sometimes involved in a
+too scrupulous attention to methods of execution is trivial compared to
+the evils resulting from a careless or inefficient practice. The modes
+in which, with every great painter, realization falls short of
+conception are necessarily so many and so grievous, that he can ill
+afford to undergo the additional discouragement caused by uncertain
+methods and bad materials. Not only so, but even the choice of subjects,
+the amount of completion attempted, nay, even the modes of conception
+and measure of truth are in no small degree involved in the great
+question of materials. On the habitual use of a light or dark ground may
+depend the painter's preference of a broad and faithful, or partial and
+scenic chiaroscuro; correspondent with the facility or fatality of
+alterations, may be the exercise of indolent fancy, or disciplined
+invention; and to the complexities of a system requiring time, patience,
+and succession of process, may be owing the conversion of the ready
+draughtsman into the resolute painter. Farther than this, who shall say
+how unconquerable a barrier to all self-denying effort may exist in the
+consciousness that the best that is accomplished can last but a few
+years, and that the painter's travail must perish with his life?</p>
+
+<p>102. It cannot have been without strong sense of this, the true dignity
+and relation of his subject, that Mr. Eastlake has gone through a toil
+far more irksome, far less selfish than any he could have undergone in
+the practice of his art. The value which we attach to the volume
+depends, however, rather on its preceptive than its antiquarian
+character. As objects of historical inquiry merely, we cannot conceive
+any questions less interesting than those relating to mechanical
+operations generally, nor any honors less worthy of prolonged dispute
+than those which are grounded merely on the invention or amelioration of
+processes and pigments. The subject can only become historically
+interesting when the means ascertained<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> to have been employed at any
+period are considered in their operation upon or procession from the
+artistical aim of such period, the character of its chosen subjects, and
+the effects proposed in their treatment upon the national mind. Mr.
+Eastlake has as yet refused himself the indulgence of such speculation;
+his book is no more than its modest title expresses. For ourselves,
+however, without venturing in the slightest degree to anticipate the
+expression of his ulterior views&mdash;though we believe that we can trace
+their extent and direction in a few suggestive sentences, as pregnant as
+they are unobtrusive&mdash;we must yet, in giving a rapid sketch of the facts
+established, assume the privilege of directing the reader to one or two
+of their most obvious consequences, and, like honest 'prentices, not
+suffer the abstracted retirement of our master in the back parlor to
+diminish the just recommendation of his wares to the passers-by.</p>
+
+<p>103. Eminently deficient in works representative of the earliest and
+purest tendencies of art, our National Gallery nevertheless affords a
+characteristic and sufficient series of examples of the practice of the
+various schools of painting, after oil had been finally substituted for
+the less manageable glutinous vehicles which, under the general name of
+tempera, were principally employed in the production of easel pictures
+up to the middle of the fifteenth century. If the reader were to make
+the circuit of this collection for the purpose of determining which
+picture represented with least disputable fidelity the first intention
+of its painter, and united in its modes of execution the highest reach
+of achievement with the strongest assurance of durability, we believe
+that&mdash;after hesitating long over hypothetical degrees of blackened
+shadow and yellowed light, of lost outline and buried detail, of chilled
+luster, dimmed transparency, altered color, and weakened force&mdash;he would
+finally pause before a small picture on panel, representing two quaintly
+dressed figures in a dimly lighted room&mdash;dependent for its interest
+little on expression, and less on treatment&mdash;but eminently remarkable
+for reality of substance, vacuity of space, and vigor of quiet color;
+nor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> less for an elaborate finish, united with energetic freshness,
+which seem to show that time has been much concerned in its production,
+and has had no power over its fate.</p>
+
+<p>104. We do not say that the total force of the material is exhibited in
+this picture, or even that it in any degree possesses the lusciousness
+and fullness which are among the chief charms of oil-painting; but that
+upon the whole it would be selected as uniting imperishable firmness
+with exquisite delicacy; as approaching more unaffectedly and more
+closely than any other work to the simple truths of natural color and
+space; and as exhibiting, even in its quaint and minute treatment,
+conquest over many of the difficulties which the boldest practice of art
+involves.</p>
+
+<p>This picture, bearing the inscription "Johannes Van Eyck (fuit?) hic,
+1434," is probably the portrait, certainly the work, of one of those
+brothers to whose ingenuity the first invention of the art of
+oil-painting has been long ascribed. The volume before us is occupied
+chiefly in determining the real extent of the improvements they
+introduced, in examining the processes they employed, and in tracing the
+modifications of those processes adopted by later Flemings, especially
+Rubens, Rembrandt, and Vandyck. Incidental notices of the Italian system
+occur, so far as, in its earlier stages, it corresponded with that of
+the north; but the consideration of its separate character is reserved
+for a following volume, and though we shall expect with interest this
+concluding portion of the treatise, we believe that, in the present
+condition of the English school, the choice of the methods of Van Eyck,
+Bellini, or Rubens, is as much as we could modestly ask or prudently
+desire.</p>
+
+<p>105. It would have been strange indeed if a technical perfection like
+that of the picture above described (equally characteristic of all the
+works of those brothers), had been at once reached by the first
+inventors of the art. So far was this from being the case, and so
+distinct is the evidence of the practice of oil-painting in antecedent
+periods, that of late years the discoveries of the Van Eycks have not
+unfrequently<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> been treated as entirely fabulous; and Raspe, in
+particular, rests their claims to gratitude on the contingent
+introduction of amber-varnish and poppy-oil:&mdash;"Such <i>perhaps</i>," he says,
+"might have been the misrepresented discovery of the Van Eycks." That
+tradition, however, for which the great painters of Italy, and their
+sufficiently vain historian, had so much respect as never to put forward
+any claim in opposition to it, is not to be clouded by incautious
+suspicion. Mr. Eastlake has approached it with more reverence, stripped
+it of its exaggeration, and shown the foundations for it in the fact
+that the Van Eycks, though they did not create the art, yet were the
+first to enable it for its function; that having found it in servile
+office and with dormant power&mdash;laid like the dead Adonis on his
+lettuce-bed&mdash;they gave it vitality and dominion. And fortunate it is for
+those who look for another such reanimation, that the method of the Van
+Eycks was not altogether their own discovery. Had it been so, that
+method might still have remained a subject of conjecture; but after
+being put in possession of the principles commonly acknowledged before
+their time, it is comparatively easy to trace the direction of their
+inquiry and the nature of their improvements.</p>
+
+<p>106. With respect to remote periods of antiquity, we believe that the
+use of a hydrofuge oil-varnish for the protection of works in tempera,
+the only fact insisted upon by Mr. Eastlake, is also the only one which
+the labor of innumerable ingenious writers has established: nor up to
+the beginning of the twelfth century is there proof of any practice of
+painting except in tempera, encaustic (wax applied by the aid of heat),
+and fresco. Subsequent to that period, notices of works executed in
+solid color mixed with oil are frequent, but all that can be proved
+respecting earlier times is a gradually increasing acquaintance with the
+different kinds of oil and the modes of their adaptation to artistical
+uses.</p>
+
+<p>Several drying oils are mentioned by the writers of the first three
+centuries of the Christian era&mdash;walnut by Pliny and Galen, walnut,
+poppy, and castor-oil (afterwards used<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> by the painters of the twelfth
+century as a varnish) by Dioscorides&mdash;yet these notices occur only with
+reference to medicinal or culinary purposes. But at length a drying oil
+is mentioned in connection with works of art by Aetius, a medical writer
+of the fifth century. His words are:&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"Walnut oil is prepared like that of almonds, either by pounding or
+pressing the nuts, or by throwing them, after they have been bruised,
+into boiling water. The (medicinal) uses are the same: but it has a use
+besides these, being employed by gilders or encaustic painters; for it
+dries, and preserves gildings and encaustic paintings for a long time."</p>
+
+<p>"It is therefore clear," says Mr. Eastlake, "that an oil varnish,
+composed either of inspissated nut oil, or of nut oil combined with a
+dissolved resin, was employed on gilt surfaces and pictures, with a view
+to preserve them, at least as early as the fifth century. It may be
+added that a writer who could then state, as if from his own experience,
+that such varnishes had the effect of preserving works 'for a long
+time,' can hardly be understood to speak of a new invention."&mdash;P. 22.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>Linseed-oil is also mentioned by Aetius, though still for medicinal uses
+only; but a varnish, composed of linseed-oil mixed with a variety of
+resins, is described in a manuscript at Lucca, belonging probably to the
+eighth century:&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"The age of Charlemagne was an era in the arts; and the addition of
+linseed-oil to the materials of the varnisher and decorator may on the
+above evidence be assigned to it. From this time, and during many ages,
+the linseed-oil varnish, though composed of simpler materials (such as
+sandarac and mastic resin boiled in the oil), alone appears in the
+recipes hitherto brought to light."&mdash;<i>Ib.</i>, p. 24.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>107. The modes of bleaching and thickening oil in the sun, as well as
+the siccative power of metallic oxides, were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> known to the classical
+writers, and evidence exists of the careful study of Galen, Dioscorides,
+and others by the painters of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: the
+loss (recorded by Vasari) of Antonio Veneziano to the arts, "per che
+studio in Dioscoride le cose dell'erbe," is a remarkable instance of its
+less fortunate results. Still, the immixture of solid color with the
+oil, which had been commonly used as a varnish for tempera paintings and
+gilt surfaces, was hitherto unsuggested; and no distinct notice seems to
+occur of the first occasion of this important step, though in the
+twelfth century, as above stated, the process is described as frequent
+both in Italy and England. Mr. Eastlake's instances have been selected,
+for the most part, from four treatises, two of which, though in an
+imperfect form, have long been known to the public; the third,
+translated by Mrs. Merrifield, is in course of publication; the fourth,
+"Tractatus de Coloribus illuminatorum," is of less importance.</p>
+
+<p>Respecting the dates of the first two, those of Eraclius and Theophilus,
+some difference of opinion exists between Mr. Eastlake and their
+respective editors. The former MS. was published by Raspe,<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> who
+inclines to the opinion of its having been written soon after the time
+of St. Isidore of Seville, probably therefore in the eighth century, but
+insists only on its being prior to the thirteenth. That of Theophilus,
+published first by M. Charles de l'Escalopier, and lately from a more
+perfect MS. by Mr. Hendrie, is ascribed by its English editor (who
+places Eraclius in the tenth) to the early half of the eleventh century.
+Mr. Hendrie maintains his opinion with much analytical ingenuity, and we
+are disposed to think that Mr. Eastlake attaches too much importance to
+the absence of reference to oil-painting in the Mapp&aelig; Clavicula (a MS.
+of the twelfth century), in placing Theophilus a century and a half
+later on that ground alone. The question is one of some importance in an
+antiquarian point of view, but the general reader will perhaps be
+satisfied with the conclusion that in MSS. which cannot possibly be
+later than the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> close of the twelfth century, references to oil-painting
+are clear and frequent.</p>
+
+<p>108. Nothing is known of the personality of either Eraclius or
+Theophilus, but what may be collected from their works; amounting, in
+the first case, to the facts of the author's "language being barbarous,
+his credulity exceptionable, and his knowledge superficial," together
+with his written description as "vir sapientissimus;" while all that is
+positively known of Theophilus is that he was a monk, and that
+Theophilus was not his real name. The character, however, of which the
+assumed name is truly expressive, deserves from us no unrespectful
+attention; we shall best possess our readers of it by laying before them
+one or two passages from the preface. We shall make some use of Mr.
+Hendrie's translation; it is evidently the work of a tasteful man, and
+in most cases renders the feeling of the original faithfully; but the
+Latin, monkish though it be, deserved a more accurate following, and
+many of Mr. Hendrie's deviations bear traces of unsound scholarship. An
+awkward instance occurs in the first paragraph:&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"Theophilus, humilis presbyter, servus servorum Dei, indignus nomine et
+professione monachi, omnibus mentis desidiam animique vagationem utili
+manuum occupatione, et delectabili novitatum meditatione declinare et
+calcare volentibus, retributionem c&oelig;lestis pr&aelig;mii!"</p>
+
+<p>"I, Theophilus, an humble priest, servant of the servants of God,
+unworthy of the name and profession of a monk, to all wishing to
+overcome and avoid sloth of the mind or wandering of the soul, by useful
+manual occupation and the delightful contemplation of novelties, send a
+recompense of heavenly price."&mdash;<i>Theophilus</i>, p. 1.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p><i>Pr&oelig;mium</i> is not "price," nor is the verb understood before
+<i>retributionem</i> "send." Mr. Hendrie seems even less familiar with
+Scriptural than with monkish language, or in this and several other
+cases he would have recognized the adoption<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> of apostolic formul&aelig;. The
+whole paragraph is such a greeting and prayer as stands at the head of
+the sacred epistles:&mdash;"Theophilus, to all who desire to overcome
+wandering of the soul, etc., etc. (wishes) recompense of heavenly
+reward." Thus also the dedication of the Byzantine manuscript, lately
+translated by M. Didron, commences "A tous les peintres, et &agrave; tous ceux
+qui, aimant l'instruction, &eacute;tudieront ce livre, salut dans le Seigneur."
+So, presently afterwards, in the sentence, "divina dignatio qu&aelig; dat
+omnibus affluenter et non improperat" (translated, "divine <i>authority</i>
+which affluently and not precipitately gives to all"), though Mr.
+Hendrie might have perhaps been excused for not perceiving the
+transitive sense of <i>dignatio</i> after <i>indignus</i> in the previous text,
+which indeed, even when felt, is sufficiently difficult to render in
+English; and might not have been aware that the word <i>impropero</i>
+frequently bears the sense of <i>opprobo</i>; he ought still to have
+recognized the Scriptural "who giveth to all men liberally and
+<i>upbraideth</i> not." "Qui," in the first page, translated "wherefore,"
+mystifies a whole sentence; "ut mereretur," rendered with a schoolboy's
+carelessness "as he merited," reverses the meaning of another;
+"jactantia," in the following page, is less harmfully but not less
+singularly translated "jealousy." We have been obliged to alter several
+expressions in the following passages, in order to bring them near
+enough to the original for our immediate purpose:</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"Which knowledge, when he has obtained, let no one magnify himself in
+his own eyes, as if it had been received from himself, and not from
+elsewhere; but let him rejoice humbly in the Lord, from whom and by whom
+are all things, and without whom is nothing; nor let him wrap his gifts
+in the folds of envy, nor hide them in the closet of an avaricious
+heart; but all pride of heart being repelled, let him with a cheerful
+mind give with simplicity to all who ask of him, and let him fear the
+judgment of the Gospel upon that merchant, who, failing to return to his
+lord a talent with accumulated<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> interest, deprived of all reward,
+merited the censure from the mouth of his judge of 'wicked servant.'</p>
+
+<p>"Fearing to incur which sentence, I, a man unworthy and almost without
+name, offer gratuitously to all desirous with humility to learn, that
+which the divine condescension, which giveth to all men liberally and
+upbraideth not, gratuitously conceded to me: and I admonish them that in
+me they acknowledge the goodness, and admire the generosity of God; and
+I would persuade them to believe that if they also add their labor, the
+same gifts are within their reach.</p>
+
+<p>"Wherefore, gentle son, whom God has rendered perfectly happy in this
+respect, that those things are offered to thee gratis, which many,
+plowing the sea waves with the greatest danger to life, consumed by the
+hardship of hunger and cold, or subjected to the weary servitude of
+teachers, and altogether worn out by the desire of learning, yet acquire
+with intolerable labor, covet with greedy looks this '<span class="smcap">BOOK OF VARIOUS
+ARTS</span>,' read it through with a tenacious memory, embrace it with an
+ardent love.</p>
+
+<p>"Should you carefully peruse this, you will there find out whatever
+Greece possesses in kinds and mixtures of various colors; whatever
+Tuscany knows of in mosaic-work, or in variety of enamel; whatever
+Arabia shows forth in work of fusion, ductility, or chasing; whatever
+Italy ornaments with gold, in diversity of vases and sculpture of gems
+or ivory; whatever France loves in a costly variety of windows; whatever
+industrious Germany approves in work of gold, silver, copper, and iron,
+of woods and of stones.</p>
+
+<p>"When you shall have re-read this often, and have committed it to your
+tenacious memory, you shall thus recompense me for this care of
+instruction, that as often as you shall have successfully made use of my
+work, you pray for me for the pity of Omnipotent God, who knows that I
+have written these things, which are here arranged, neither through love
+of human approbation, nor through desire of temporal reward, nor have I
+stolen anything precious or rare through envious jealousy, nor have I
+kept back anything reserved<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> served for myself alone; but in
+augmentation of the honor and glory of His name, I have consulted the
+progress and hastened to aid the necessities of many men."&mdash;<i>Ib.</i> pp.
+xlvii.-li.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>109. There is perhaps something in the naive seriousness with which
+these matters of empiricism, to us of so small importance, are regarded
+by the good monk, which may at first tempt the reader to a smile. It is,
+however, to be kept in mind that some such mode of introduction was
+customary in all works of this order and period. The Byzantine MS.,
+already alluded to, is prefaced still more singularly: "Que celui qui
+veut apprendre la science de la peinture commence &agrave; s'y pr&eacute;parer
+d'avance quelque temps en dessinant sans relache ... puis qu'il adresse
+&agrave; Jesus Christ la pri&egrave;re et oraison suivante," etc.:&mdash;the prayer being
+followed by a homily respecting envy, much resembling that of
+Theophilus. And we may rest assured that until we have again begun to
+teach and to learn in this spirit, art will no more recover its true
+power or place than springs which flow from no heavenward hills can rise
+to useful level in the wells of the plain. The tenderness, tranquillity,
+and resoluteness which we feel in such men's words and thoughts found a
+correspondent expression even in the movements of the hand; precious
+qualities resulted from them even in the most mechanical of their works,
+such as no reward can evoke, no academy teach, nor any other merits
+replace. What force can be summoned by authority, or fostered by
+patronage, which could for an instant equal in intensity the labor of
+this humble love, exerting itself for its own pleasure, looking upon its
+own works by the light of thankfulness, and finishing all, offering all,
+with the irrespective profusion of flowers opened by the wayside, where
+the dust may cover them, and the foot crush them?</p>
+
+<p>110. Not a few passages conceived in the highest spirit of self-denying
+piety would, of themselves, have warranted our sincere thanks to Mr.
+Hendrie for his publication of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> manuscript. The practical value of
+its contents is however very variable; most of the processes described
+have been either improved or superseded, and many of the recipes are
+quite as illustrative of the writer's credulity in reception, as
+generosity in communication. The references to the "land of Havilah" for
+gold, and to "Mount Calybe" for iron, are characteristic of monkish
+geographical science; the recipe for the making of Spanish gold is
+interesting, as affording us a clew to the meaning of the medi&aelig;val
+traditions respecting the basilisk. Pliny says nothing about the
+hatching of this chimera from cocks' eggs, and ascribes the power of
+killing at sight to a different animal, the catoblepas, whose head,
+fortunately, was so heavy that it could not be held up. Probably the
+word "basiliscus" in Theophilus would have been better translated
+"cockatrice."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"There is also a gold called Spanish gold, which is composed from red
+copper, powder of basilisk, and human blood, and acid. The Gentiles,
+whose skillfulness in this art is commendable, make basilisks in this
+manner. They have, underground, a house walled with stones everywhere,
+above and below, with two very small windows, so narrow that scarcely
+any light can appear through them; in this house they place two old
+cocks of twelve or fifteen years, and they give them plenty of food.
+When these have become fat, through the heat of their good condition,
+they agree together and lay eggs. Which being laid, the cocks are taken
+out and toads are placed in, which may hatch the eggs, and to which
+bread is given for food. The eggs being hatched, chickens issue out,
+like hens' chickens, to which after seven days grow the tails of
+serpents, and immediately, if there were not a stone pavement to the
+house, they would enter the earth. Guarding against which, their masters
+have round brass vessels of large size, perforated all over, the mouths
+of which are narrow, in which they place these chickens, and close the
+mouths with copper coverings and inter them underground, and they are
+nourished with the fine earth entering<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> through the holes for six
+months. After this they uncover them and apply a copious fire, until the
+animals' insides are completely burnt. Which done, when they have become
+cold, they are taken out and carefully ground, adding to them a third
+part of the blood of a red man, which blood has been dried and ground.
+These two compositions are tempered with sharp acid in a clean vessel;
+they then take very thin sheets of the purest red copper, and anoint
+this composition over them on both sides, and place them in the fire.
+And when they have become glowing, they take them out and quench and
+wash them in the same confection; and they do this for a long time,
+until this composition eats through the copper, and it takes the color
+of gold. This gold is proper for all work."&mdash;<i>Ib.</i> p. 267.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>Our readers will find in Mr. Hendrie's interesting note the explanation
+of the symbolical language of this recipe; though we cannot agree with
+him in supposing Theophilus to have so understood it. We have no doubt
+the monk wrote what he had heard in good faith, and with no equivocal
+meaning; and we are even ourselves much disposed to regret and resist
+the transformation of toads into nitrates of potash, and of basilisks
+into sulphates of copper.</p>
+
+<p>111. But whatever may be the value of the recipes of Theophilus, couched
+in the symbolical language of the alchemist, his evidence is as clear as
+it is conclusive, as far as regards the general processes adopted in his
+own time. The treatise of Peter de St. Audemar, contained in a volume
+transcribed by Jehan le Begue in 1431, bears internal evidence of being
+nearly coeval with that of Theophilus. And in addition to these MSS.,
+Mr. Eastlake has examined the records of Ely and Westminster, which are
+full of references to decorative operations. From these sources it is
+not only demonstrated that oil-painting, at least in the broadest sense
+(striking colors mixed with oil on surfaces of wood or stone), was
+perfectly common both in Italy and England in the 12th, 13th, and 14th
+centuries, but every step of the process is determinable.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> Stone
+surfaces were primed with white lead mixed with linseed oil, applied in
+successive coats, and carefully smoothed when dry. Wood was planed
+smooth (or, for delicate work, covered with leather of horse-skin or
+parchment), then coated with a mixture of white lead, wax, and
+pulverized tile, on which the oil and lead priming was laid. In the
+successive application of the coats of this priming, the painter is
+warned by Eraclius of the danger of letting the superimposed coat be
+more oily than that beneath, the shriveling of the surface being a
+necessary consequence.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"The observation respecting the cause, or one of the causes, of a
+wrinkled and shriveled surface, is not unimportant. Oil, or an oil
+varnish, used in abundance with the colors over a perfectly dry
+preparation, will produce this appearance: the employment of an oil
+varnish is even supposed to be detected by it.... As regards the effect
+itself, the best painters have not been careful to avoid it. Parts of
+Titian's St. Sebastian (now in the Gallery of the Vatican) are
+shriveled; the Giorgione in the Louvre is so; the drapery of the figure
+of Christ in the Duke of Wellington's Correggio exhibits the same
+appearance; a Madonna and Child by Reynolds, at Petworth, is in a
+similar state, as are also parts of some pictures by Greuze. It is the
+reverse of a cracked surface, and is unquestionably the less evil of the
+two."&mdash;"Eastlake," pp. 36-38.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>112. On the white surface thus prepared, the colors, ground finely with
+linseed oil, were applied, according to the advice of Theophilus, in not
+less than three successive coats, and finally protected with amber or
+sandarac varnish: each coat of color being carefully dried by the aid of
+heat or in the sun before a second was applied, and the entire work
+before varnishing. The practice of carefully drying each coat was
+continued in the best periods of art, but the necessity of exposure to
+the sun intimated by Theophilus appears to have arisen only from his
+careless preparation of the linseed oil,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> and ignorance of a proper
+drying medium. Consequent on this necessity is the restriction in
+Theophilus, St. Audemar, and in the British Museum MS., of oil-painting
+to wooden surfaces, because movable panels could be dried in the sun;
+while, for walls, the colors are to be mixed with water, wine, gum, or
+the usual tempera vehicles, egg and fig-tree juice; white lead and
+verdigris, themselves dryers, being the only pigments which could be
+mixed with oil for walls. But the MS. of Eraclius and the records of our
+English cathedrals imply no such absolute restriction. They mention the
+employment of oil for the painting or varnishing of columns and interior
+walls, and in quantity very remarkable. Among the entries relating to
+St. Stephen's chapel, occur&mdash;"For 19 flagons of painter's oil, at 3<i>s.</i>
+4<i>d.</i> the flagon, 43<i>s.</i> 4<i>d.</i>" (It might be as well, in the next
+edition, to correct the copyist's reverse of the position of the X and
+L, lest it should be thought that the principles of the science of
+arithmetic have been progressive, as well as those of art.) And
+presently afterwards, in May of the same year, "to John de Hennay, for
+<i>seventy</i> flagons and a half of painter's oil for the painting of the
+same chapel, at 20<i>d.</i> the flagon, 117<i>s.</i> 6<i>d.</i>" The expression
+"painter's oil" seems to imply more careful preparation than that
+directed by Theophilus, probably purification from its mucilage in the
+sun; but artificial heat was certainly employed to assist the drying,
+and after reading of flagons supplied by the score, we can hardly be
+surprised at finding charcoal furnished by the cartload&mdash;see an entry
+relating to the Painted Chamber. In one MS. of Eraclius, however, a
+distinct description of a drying oil in the modern sense, occurs, white
+lead and lime being added, and the oil thickened by exposure to the sun,
+as was the universal practice in Italy.</p>
+
+<p>113. Such was the system of oil-painting known before the time of Van
+Eyck; but it remains a question in what kind of works and with what
+degree of refinement this system had been applied. The passages in
+Eraclius refer only to ornamental work, imitations of marble, etc.; and
+although, in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> records of Ely cathedral, the words "pro ymaginibus
+super columnas depingendis" may perhaps be understood as referring to
+paintings of figures, the applications of oil, which are distinctly
+determinable from these and other English documents, are merely
+decorative; and "the large supplies of it which appear in the
+Westminster and Ely records indicate the coarseness of the operations
+for which it was required." Theophilus, indeed, mentions tints for
+faces&mdash;<i>mixturas vultuum</i>; but it is to be remarked that Theophilus
+painted with a liquid oil, the drying of which in the sun he expressly
+says "in <i>ymaginibus</i> et aliis picturis diuturnum et t&aelig;diosum nimis
+est." The oil generally employed was thickened to the consistence of a
+varnish. Cennini recommends that it be kept in the sun until reduced one
+half; and in the Paris copy of Eraclius we are told that "the longer the
+oil remains in the sun the better it will be." Such a vehicle entirely
+precluded delicacy of execution.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"Paintings entirely executed with the thickened vehicle, at a time when
+art was in the very lowest state, and when its votaries were ill
+qualified to contend with unnecessary difficulties, must have been of
+the commonest description. Armorial bearings, patterns, and similar
+works of mechanical decoration, were perhaps as much as could be
+attempted.</p>
+
+<p>"Notwithstanding the general reference to flesh-painting, 'e cos&igrave; fa
+dello incarnare,' in Cennini's directions, there are no certain examples
+of pictures of the fourteenth century, in which the flesh is executed in
+oil colors. This leads us to inquire what were the ordinary applications
+of oil-painting in Italy at that time. It appears that the method, when
+adopted at all, was considered to belong to the complemental and merely
+decorative parts of a picture. It was employed in portions of the work
+only, on draperies, and over gilding and foils. Cennini describes such
+operations as follows. 'Gild the surface to be occupied by the drapery;
+draw on it what ornaments or patterns you please; glaze the unornamented
+intervals with verdigris ground in oil, shading some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> folds twice. Then,
+when this is dry, glaze the same color over the whole drapery, both
+ornaments and plain portions.'</p>
+
+<p>"These operations, together with the gilt field round the figures, the
+stucco decorations, and the carved framework, tabernacle, or <i>ornamento</i>
+itself of the picture, were completed first; the faces and hands, which
+in Italian pictures of the fourteenth century were always in tempera,
+were added afterwards, or at all events after the draperies and
+background were finished. Cennini teaches the practice of all but the
+carving. In later times the work was divided, and the decorator or
+gilder was sometimes a more important person than the painter. Thus some
+works of an inferior Florentine artist were ornamented with stuccoes,
+carving, and gilding, by the celebrated Donatello, who, in his youth,
+practiced this art in connection with sculpture. Vasari observed the
+following inscription under a picture:&mdash;'Simone Cini, a Florentine,
+wrought the carved work; Gabriello Saracini executed the gilding; and
+Spinello di Luca, of Arezzo, painted the picture, in the year
+1385.'"&mdash;<i>Ib.</i> pp. 71, 72, and 80.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>114. We may pause to consider for a moment what effect upon the mental
+habits of these earlier schools might result from this separate and
+previous completion of minor details. It is to be remembered that the
+painter's object in the backgrounds of works of this period
+(universally, or nearly so, of religious subject) was not the deceptive
+representation of a natural scene, but the adornment and setting forth
+of the central figures with precious work&mdash;the conversion of the
+picture, as far as might be, into a gem, flushed with color and alive
+with light. The processes necessary for this purpose were altogether
+mechanical; and those of stamping and burnishing the gold, and of
+enameling, were necessarily performed before any delicate tempera-work
+could be executed. Absolute decision of design was therefore necessary
+throughout; hard linear separations were unavoidable between the
+oil-color and the tempera, or between each and the gold or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> enamel.
+General harmony of effect, a&euml;rial perspective, or deceptive chiaroscuro,
+became totally impossible; and the dignity of the picture depended
+exclusively on the lines of its design, the purity of its ornaments, and
+the beauty of expression which could be attained in those portions (the
+faces and hands) which, set off and framed by this splendor of
+decoration, became the cynosure of eyes. The painter's entire energy was
+given to these portions; and we can hardly imagine any discipline more
+calculated to insure a grand and thoughtful school of art than the
+necessity of discriminated character and varied expression imposed by
+this peculiarly separate and prominent treatment of the features. The
+exquisite drawing of the hand also, at least in outline, remained for
+this reason even to late periods one of the crowning excellences of the
+religious schools. It might be worthy the consideration of our present
+painters whether some disadvantage may not result from the exactly
+opposite treatment now frequently adopted, the finishing of the head
+before the addition of its accessories. A flimsy and indolent background
+is almost a necessary consequence, and probably also a false
+flesh-color, irrecoverable by any after-opposition.</p>
+
+<p>115. The reader is in possession of most of the conclusions relating to
+the practice of oil-painting up to about the year 1406.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"Its inconveniences were such that tempera was not unreasonably
+preferred to it for works that required careful design, precision, and
+completeness. Hence the Van Eycks seem to have made it their first
+object to overcome the stigma that attached to oil-painting, as a
+process fit only for ordinary purposes and mechanical decorations. With
+an ambition partly explained by the previous coarse applications of the
+method, they sought to raise wonder by surpassing the finish of tempera
+with the very material that had long been considered intractable. Mere
+finish was, however, the least of the excellences of these reformers.
+The step was short<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> which sufficed to remove the self-imposed
+difficulties of the art; but that effort would probably not have been so
+successful as it was, in overcoming long-established prejudices, had it
+not been accompanied by some of the best qualities which oil-painting,
+as a means of imitating nature, can command."&mdash;<i>Ib.</i> p. 88.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>116. It has been a question to which of the two brothers, Hubert or
+John, the honor of the invention is to be attributed. Van Mander gives
+the date of the birth of Hubert 1366; and his interesting epitaph in the
+cathedral of St. Bavon, at Ghent, determines that of his death:&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"Take warning from me, ye who walk over me. I was as you are, but am now
+buried dead beneath you. Thus it appears that neither art nor medicine
+availed me. Art, honor, wisdom, power, affluence, are spared not when
+death comes. I was called Hubert Van Eyck; I am now food for worms.
+Formerly known and highly honored in painting; this all was shortly
+after turned to nothing. It was in the year of the Lord one thousand
+four hundred and twenty-six, on the eighteenth day of September, that I
+rendered up my soul to God, in sufferings. Pray God for me, ye who love
+art, that I may attain to His sight. Flee sin; turn to the best
+[objects]: for you must follow me at last."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>John Van Eyck appears by sufficient evidence to have been born between
+1390 and 1395; and, as the improved oil-painting was certainly
+introduced about 1410, the probability is greater that the system had
+been discovered by the elder brother than by the youth of 15. What the
+improvement actually was is a far more important question. Vasari's
+account, in the Life of Antonello da Messina, is the first piece of
+evidence here examined (p. 205); and it is examined at once with more
+respect and more advantage than the half-negligent, half-embarrassed
+wording of the passage might appear either to deserve or to promise.
+Vasari states that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> "<i>Giovanni</i> of Bruges," having finished a
+tempera-picture on panel, and varnished it as usual, placed it in the
+sun to dry&mdash;that the heat opened the joinings&mdash;and that the artist,
+provoked at the destruction of his work&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"began to devise means for preparing a kind of varnish which should dry
+in the shade, so as to avoid placing his pictures in the sun. Having
+made experiments with many things, both pure and mixed together, he at
+last found that linseed-oil and nut-oil, among the many which he had
+tested, were more drying than all the rest. These, therefore, boiled
+with <i>other mixtures of his</i>, made him the varnish which he, nay, which
+all the painters of the world, had long desired. Continuing his
+experiments with many other things, he saw that the immixture of the
+colors with these kinds of oils gave them a very firm consistence,
+which, when dry, was proof against wet; and, moreover, that the vehicle
+lit up the colors so powerfully, that it gave a gloss of itself without
+varnish; and that which appeared to him still more admirable was, that
+it allowed of blending [the colors] infinitely better than tempera.
+Giovanni, rejoicing in this invention, and being a person of
+discernment, began many works."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>117. The reader must observe that this account is based upon and
+clumsily accommodated to the idea, prevalent in Vasari's time throughout
+Italy, that Van Eyck not merely improved, but first introduced, the art
+of oil-painting, and that no mixture of color with linseed or nut oil
+had taken place before his time. We are only informed of the new and
+important part of the invention, under the pointedly specific and
+peculiarly Vasarian expression&mdash;"altre sue misture." But the real value
+of the passage is dependent on the one fact of which it puts us in
+possession, and with respect to which there is every reason to believe
+it trustworthy, that it was in search of a <i>Varnish</i> which would dry in
+the shade that Van Eyck discovered the new vehicle. The next point to be
+determined is the nature of the Varnish ordinarily em<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>ployed, and spoken
+of by Cennini and many other writers under the familiar title of Vernice
+liquida. The derivation of the word Vernix bears materially on the
+question, and will not be devoid of interest for the general reader, who
+may perhaps be surprised at finding himself carried by Mr. Eastlake's
+daring philology into regions poetical and planetary:&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"Eustathius, a writer of the twelfth century, in his commentary on
+Homer, states that the Greeks of his day called amber (&#7969;&#955;&#949;&#954;&#964;&#961;&#959;&#957;) Veronice (&#946;&#949;&#961;&#959;&#957;&#7985;&#954;&#951;). Salmasius, quoting from a
+Greek medical MS. of the same period, writes it Verenice (&#946;&#949;&#961;&#949;&#957;&#7985;&#954;&#951;). In the Lucca MS. (8th century) the word Veronica more than
+once occurs among the ingredients of varnishes, and it is remarkable
+that in the copies of the same recipes in the <i>Mapp&aelig; Clavicula</i> (12th
+century) the word is spelt, in the genitive, Verenicis and Vernicis.
+This is probably the earliest instance of the use of the Latinized word
+nearly in its modern form; the original nominative Vernice being
+afterwards changed to Vernix.</p>
+
+<p>"Veronice or Verenice, as a designation for amber, must have been common
+at an earlier period than the date of the Lucca MS., since it there
+occurs as a term in ordinary use. It is scarcely necessary to remark
+that the letter &#946; was sounded v by the medi&aelig;val Greeks,
+as it is by their present descendants. Even during the classic ages of
+Greece &#946; represented &#966; in certain dialects. The
+name Berenice or Beronice, borne by more than one daughter of the
+Ptolemies, would be more correctly written Pherenice or Pheronice. The
+literal coincidence of this name and its modifications with the Vernice
+of the middle ages, might almost warrant the supposition that amber,
+which by the best ancient authorities was considered a mineral, may, at
+an early period, have been distinguished by the name of a constellation,
+the constellation of Berenice's (golden) hair."&mdash;<i>Eastlake</i>, p. 230.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>118. We are grieved to interrupt our reader's voyage among the
+constellations; but the next page crystallizes us<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> again like ants in
+amber, or worse, in gum-sandarach. It appears, from conclusive and
+abundant evidence, that the greater cheapness of sandarach, and its
+easier solubility in oil rendered it the usual substitute for amber, and
+that the word Vernice, when it occurs alone, is the common synonym for
+dry sandarach resin. This, dissolved by heat in linseed oil, three parts
+oil to one of resin, was the Vernice liquida of the Italians, sold in
+Cennini's time ready prepared, and the customary varnish of tempera
+pictures. Concrete turpentine ("oyle of fir-tree," "Pece Greca,"
+"Pegola"), previously prepared over a slow fire until it ceased to
+swell, was added to assist the liquefaction of the sandarach, first in
+Venice, where the material could easily be procured, and afterwards in
+Florence. The varnish so prepared, especially when it was long boiled to
+render it more drying, was of a dark color, materially affecting the
+tints over which it was passed.<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"It is not impossible that the lighter style of coloring introduced by
+Giotto may have been intended by him to counteract the effects of this
+varnish, the appearance of which in the Greek pictures he could not fail
+to observe. Another peculiarity in the works of the painters of the time
+referred to, particularly those of the Florentine and Sienese schools,
+is the greenish tone of their coloring in the flesh; produced by the
+mode in which they often prepared their works, viz. by a green
+under-painting. The appearance was neutralized by the red sandarac
+varnish, and pictures executed in the manner described must have looked
+better before it was removed."&mdash;<i>Ib.</i> p. 252.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>Farther on, this remark is thus followed out:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"The paleness or freshness of the tempera may have been sometimes
+calculated for this brown glazing (for such it was in effect), and when
+this was the case, the picture was, strictly speaking, unfinished
+without its varnish. It is, therefore, quite conceivable that a painter,
+averse to mere mechanical operations, would, in his final process, still
+have an eye to the harmony of his work, and, seeing that the tint of his
+varnish was more or less adapted to display the hues over which it was
+spread, would vary that tint, so as to heighten the effect of the
+picture. The practice of tingeing varnishes was not even new, as the
+example given by Cardanus proves. The next step to this would be to
+treat the tempera picture still more as a preparation, and to calculate
+still further on the varnish, by modifying and adapting its color to a
+greater extent. A work so completed must have nearly approached the
+appearance of an oil picture. This was perhaps the moment when the new
+method opened itself to the mind of Hubert Van Eyck.... The next change
+necessarily consisted in using opaque as well as transparent colors; the
+former being applied over the light, the latter over the darker,
+portions of the picture; while the work in tempera was now reduced to a
+light chiaroscuro preparation.... It was now that the hue of the
+original varnish became an objection; for, as a medium, it required to
+be itself colorless."&mdash;<i>Ib.</i> pp. 271-273.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>119. Our author has perhaps somewhat embarrassed this part of the
+argument, by giving too much importance to the conjectural adaptation of
+the tints of the tempera picture to the brown varnish, and too little to
+the bold transition from transparent to opaque color on the lights. Up
+to this time, we must remember, the entire drawing of the flesh had been
+in tempera; the varnish, however richly tinted, however delicately
+adjusted to the tints beneath, was still broadly applied over the whole
+surface, the design being seen through the transparent glaze. But the
+mixture of opaque color at once implies that portions of the design
+itself were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> executed with the varnish for a vehicle, and therefore that
+the varnish had been entirely changed both in color and consistence. If,
+as above stated, the improvement in the varnish had been made only after
+it had been mixed with opaque color, it does not appear why the idea of
+so mixing it should have presented itself to Van Eyck more than to any
+other painter of the day, and Vasari's story of the split panel becomes
+nugatory. But we apprehend, from a previous passage (<a href='#Page_258'><b>p. 258</b></a>),
+that Mr. Eastlake would not have us so interpret him. We rather suppose
+that we are expressing his real opinion in stating our own, that Van
+Eyck, seeking for a varnish which would dry in the shade, first
+perfected the methods of dissolving amber or copal in oil, then sought
+for and added a good dryer, and thus obtained a varnish which, having
+been subjected to no long process of boiling, was nearly colorless; that
+in using this new varnish over tempera works he might cautiously and
+gradually mix it with the opaque color, whose purity he now found
+unaffected, by the transparent vehicle; and, finally, as the thickness
+of the varnish in its less perfect state was an obstacle to precision of
+execution, increase the proportion of its oil to the amber, or add a
+diluent, as occasion required.</p>
+
+<p>120. Such, at all events, in the sum, whatever might be the order or
+occasion of discovery, were Van Eyck's improvements in the vehicle of
+color, and to these, applied by singular ingenuity and affection to the
+imitation of nature, with a fidelity hitherto unattempted, Mr. Eastlake
+attributes the influence which his works obtained over his
+contemporaries:&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"If we ask in what the chief novelty of his practice consisted, we shall
+at once recognize it in an amount of general excellence before unknown.
+At all times, from Van Eyck's day to the present, whenever nature has
+been surprisingly well imitated in pictures, the first and last question
+with the ignorant has been&mdash;What materials did the artist use? The
+superior mechanical secret is always supposed to be in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> hands of the
+greatest genius; and an early example of sudden perfection in art, like
+the fame of the heroes of antiquity, was likely to monopolize and
+represent the claims of many."&mdash;<i>Ib.</i> p. 266.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>This is all true; that Van Eyck saw nature more truly than his
+predecessors is certain; but it is disputable whether this rendering of
+nature recommended his works to the imitation of the Italians. On the
+contrary, Mr. Eastlake himself observes in another place (p. 220), that
+the character of delicate imitation common to the Flemish pictures
+militated <i>against</i> the acceptance of their method:&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"The specimens of Van Eyck, Hugo van der Goes, Memling, and others,
+which the Florentines had seen, may have appeared, in the eyes of some
+severe judges (for example, those who daily studied the frescoes of
+Masaccio), to indicate a certain connection between oil painting and
+minuteness, if not always of size, yet of style. The method, by its very
+finish and the possible completeness of its gradations, must have seemed
+well calculated to exhibit numerous objects on a small scale. That this
+was really the impression produced, at a later period, on one who
+represented the highest style of design, has been lately proved by means
+of an interesting document, in which the opinions of Michael Angelo on
+the character of Flemish pictures are recorded by a contemporary
+artist."<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>121. It was not, we apprehend, the resemblance to nature, but the
+abstract power of color, which inflamed with admiration and jealousy the
+artists of Italy; it was not the delicate touch nor the precise verity
+of Van Eyck, but the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> "vivacita de' colori" (says Vasari) which at the
+first glance induced Antonello da Messina to "put aside every other
+avocation and thought, and at once set out for Flanders," assiduously to
+cultivate the friendship of <i>Giovanni</i>, presenting to him many drawings
+and other things, until <i>Giovanni</i>, finding himself already old, was
+content that Antonello should see the method of his coloring in oil, nor
+then to quit Flanders until he had "thoroughly learned that <i>process</i>."
+It was this <i>process</i>, separate, mysterious, and admirable, whose
+communication the Venetian, Domenico, thought the most acceptable
+kindness which could repay his hospitality; and whose solitary
+possession Castagno thought cheaply purchased by the guilt of the
+betrayer and murderer; it was in this process, the deduction of watchful
+intelligence, not by fortuitous discovery, that the first impulse was
+given to European art. Many a plank had yawned in the sun before Van
+Eyck's; but he alone saw through the rent, as through an opening portal,
+the lofty perspective of triumph widening its rapid wedge;&mdash;many a spot
+of opaque color had clouded the transparent amber of earlier times; but
+the little cloud that rose over Van Eyck's horizon was "like unto a
+man's hand."</p>
+
+<p>What this process was, and how far it differed from preceding practice,
+has hardly, perhaps, been pronounced by Mr. Eastlake with sufficient
+distinctness. One or two conclusions which he has not marked are, we
+think, deducible from his evidence, In one point, and that not an
+unimportant one, we believe that many careful students of coloring will
+be disposed to differ with him: our own intermediate opinion we will
+therefore venture to state, though with all diffidence.</p>
+
+<p>122. We must not, however, pass entirely without notice the two chapters
+on the preparation of oils, and on the oleo-resinous vehicles, though to
+the general reader the recipes contained in them are of little interest;
+and in the absence of all expression of opinion on the part of Mr.
+Eastlake as to their comparative excellence, even to the artist, their
+immediate utility appears somewhat doubtful. One circumstance,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> however,
+is remarkable in all, the care taken by the great painters, without
+exception, to avoid the yellowing of their oil. Perfect and stable
+clearness is the ultimate aim of all the processes described (many of
+them troublesome and tedious in the extreme): and the effect of the
+altered oil is of course most dreaded on pale and cold colors. Thus
+Philippe Nunez tells us how to purify linseed oil "for white and blues;"
+and Pacheco, "el de linaza no me quele mal: aunque ai quien diga que no
+a de ver el Azul ni el Blanco este Azeite."<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> De Mayerne recommends
+poppy oil "for painting white, blue, and similar colors, so that they
+shall not yellow;" and in another place, "for air-tints and
+blue;"&mdash;while the inclination to green is noticed as an imperfection in
+hempseed oil: so Vasari&mdash;speaking of linseed-oil in contemporary
+practice&mdash;"bench&egrave; il noce e meglio, perch&egrave; ingialla meno." The Italians
+generally mixed an essential oil with their delicate tints, including
+flesh tints (p. 431). Extraordinary methods were used by the Flemish
+painters to protect their blues; they were sometimes painted with size,
+and varnished; sometimes strewed in powder on fresh white-lead (p. 456). Leonardo gives a careful recipe for preventing the change of color
+in nut oil, supposing it to be owing to neglect in removing the skin of
+the nut. His words, given at (p. 321), are incorrectly translated: "una
+certa bucciolina," is not a husk or rind&mdash;but "a thin skin," meaning the
+white membranous covering of the nut itself, of which it is almost
+impossible to detach all the inner lamin&aelig;. This, "che tiene della natura
+del mallo," Leonardo supposes to give the expressed oil its property of
+forming a <i>skin</i> at the surface.</p>
+
+<p>123. We think these passages interesting, because they are entirely
+opposed to the modern ideas of the desirableness of yellow lights and
+green blues, which have been introduced chiefly by the study of altered
+pictures. The anxiety of Rubens, expressed in various letters, quoted at
+p. 516, lest any of his whites should have become yellow, and his
+request that his pictures might be exposed to the sun to remedy the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>
+defect, if it occurred, are conclusive on this subject, as far as
+regards the feeling of the Flemish painters: we shall presently see that
+the <i>coolness</i> of their light was an essential part of their scheme of
+color.</p>
+
+<p>The testing of the various processes given in these two chapters must be
+a matter of time: many of them have been superseded by recent
+discoveries. Copal varnish is in modern practice no inefficient
+substitute for amber, and we believe that most artists will agree with
+us in thinking that the vehicles now in use are sufficient for all
+purposes, if used rightly. We shall, therefore, proceed in the first
+place to give a rapid sketch of the entire process of the Flemish school
+as it is stated by Mr. Eastlake in the 11th chapter, and then examine
+the several steps of it one by one, with the view at once of marking
+what seems disputable, and of deducing from what is certain some
+considerations respecting the consequences of its adoption in subsequent
+art.</p>
+
+<p>124. The ground was with all the early masters pure <i>white</i>, plaster of
+Paris, or washed chalk with size; a preparation which has been employed
+without change from remote antiquity&mdash;witness the Egyptian mummy-cases.
+Such a ground, becoming brittle with age, is evidently unsafe on canvas,
+unless exceedingly thin; and even on panel is liable to crack and detach
+itself, unless it be carefully guarded against damp. The precautions of
+Van Eyck against this danger, as well as against the warping of his
+panel, are remarkable instances of his regard to points apparently
+trivial:&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"In large altar-pieces, necessarily composed of many pieces, it may be
+often remarked that each separate plank has become slightly convex in
+front: this is particularly observable in the picture of the
+Transfiguration by Raphael. The heat of candles on altars is supposed to
+have been the cause of this not uncommon defect; but heat, if
+considerable, would rather produce the contrary appearance. It would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>
+seem that the layer of paint, with its substratum, slightly operates to
+prevent the wood from contracting or becoming concave on that side; it
+might therefore be concluded that a similar protection at the back, by
+equalizing the conditions, would tend to keep the wood flat. The oak
+panel on which the picture by Van Eyck in the National Gallery is
+painted is protected at the back by a composition of gesso, size, and
+tow, over which a coat of black oil-paint was passed. This, whether
+added when the picture was executed or subsequently, has tended to
+preserve the wood (which is not at all worm-eaten), and perhaps to
+prevent its warping."&mdash;<i>Ib.</i> pp. 373, 374.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>On the white ground, scraped, when it was perfectly dry, till it was "as
+white as milk and as smooth as ivory" (Cennini), the outline of the
+picture was drawn, and its light and shade expressed, usually with the
+pen, with all possible care; and over this outline a coating of size was
+applied in order to render the gesso ground <i>non</i>-absorbent. The
+establishment of this fact is of the greatest importance, for the whole
+question of the true function and use of the gesso ground hangs upon it.
+That use has been supposed by all previous writers on the technical
+processes of painting to be, by absorbing the oil, to remove in some
+degree the cause of yellowness in the colors. Had this been so, the
+ground itself would have lost its brilliancy, and it would have followed
+that a dark ground, equally absorbent, would have answered the purpose
+as well. But the evidence adduced by Mr. Eastlake on this subject is
+conclusive:&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"Pictures are sometimes transferred from panel to cloth. The front being
+secured by smooth paper or linen, the picture is laid on its face, and
+the wood is gradually planed and scraped away. At last the ground
+appears; first, the 'gesso grosso,' then, next the painted surface, the
+'gesso sottile.' On scraping this it is found that it is whitest
+immediately next the colors; for on the inner side it may sometimes
+have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> received slight stains from the wood, if the latter was not first
+sized. When a picture which happens to be much cracked has been oiled or
+varnished, the fluid will sometimes penetrate through the cracks into
+the ground, which in such parts had become accessible. In that case the
+white ground is stained in lines only, corresponding in their direction
+with the cracks of the picture. This last circumstance also proves that
+the ground was not sufficiently hard in itself to prevent the absorption
+of oil. Accordingly, it required to be rendered non-absorbent by a
+coating of size; and this was passed <i>over</i> the outline, before the
+oil-priming was applied."&mdash;<i>Ib.</i> pp. 383, 384.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>The perfect whiteness of the ground being thus secured, a transparent
+warm oil-priming, in early practice flesh-colored, was usually passed
+over the entire picture. This custom, says Mr. Eastlake, appears to have
+been "a remnant of the old habit of covering tempera pictures with a
+warm varnish, and was sometimes omitted." When used it was permitted to
+dry thoroughly, and over it the shadows were painted in with a rich
+transparent brown, mixed with a somewhat thick oleo-resinous vehicle;
+the lighter colors were then added with a thinner vehicle, taking care
+not to disturb the transparency of the shadows by the unnecessary
+mixture of opaque pigments, and leaving the ground bearing bright
+<i>through the thin lights</i>. (?) As the art advanced, the lights were more
+and more loaded, and afterwards glazed, the shadows being still left in
+untouched transparency. This is the method of Rubens. The later Italian
+colorists appear to have laid opaque local color without fear even into
+the shadows, and to have recovered transparency by ultimate glazing.</p>
+
+<p>125. Such are the principal heads of the method of the early Flemish
+masters, as stated by Mr. Eastlake. We have marked as questionable the
+influence of the ground in supporting the lights: our reasons for doing
+so we will give, after we have stated what we suppose to be the
+advantages or dis<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>advantages of the process in its earlier stages,
+guiding ourselves as far as possible by the passages in which any
+expression occurs of Mr. Eastlake's opinion.</p>
+
+<p>The reader cannot but see that the <i>eminent</i> character of the whole
+system is its predeterminateness. From first to last its success
+depended on the decision and clearness of each successive step. The
+drawing and light and shade were secured without any interference of
+color; but when over these the oil-priming was once laid, the design
+could neither be altered nor, if lost, recovered; a color laid too
+opaquely in the shadow destroyed the inner organization of the picture,
+and remained an irremediable blemish; and it was necessary, in laying
+color even on the lights, to follow the guidance of the drawing beneath
+with a caution and precision which rendered anything like freedom of
+handling, in the modern sense, totally impossible. Every quality which
+depends on rapidity, accident, or audacity was interdicted; no
+affectation of ease was suffered to disturb the humility of patient
+exertion. Let our readers consider in what temper such a work must be
+undertaken and carried through&mdash;a work in which error was irremediable,
+change impossible&mdash;which demanded the drudgery of a student, while it
+involved the deliberation of a master&mdash;in which the patience of a
+mechanic was to be united with the foresight of a magician&mdash;in which no
+license could be indulged either to fitfulness of temper or felicity of
+invention&mdash;in which haste was forbidden, yet languor fatal, and
+consistency of conception no less incumbent than continuity of toil. Let
+them reflect what kind of men must have been called up and trained by
+work such as this, and then compare the tones of mind which are likely
+to be produced by our present practice,&mdash;a practice in which alteration
+is admitted to any extent in any stage&mdash;in which neither foundation is
+laid nor end foreseen&mdash;in which all is dared and nothing resolved,
+everything periled, nothing provided for&mdash;in which men play the
+sycophant in the courts of their humors, and hunt wisps in the marshes
+of their wits&mdash;a practice which invokes accident, evades law,
+discredits<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> application, despises system, and sets forth with chief
+exultation, contingent beauty, and extempore invention.</p>
+
+<p>126. But it is not only the fixed nature of the successive steps which
+influenced the character of these early painters. A peculiar <i>direction</i>
+was given to their efforts by the close attention to drawing which, as
+Mr. Eastlake has especially noticed, was involved in the preparation of
+the design on the white ground. That design was secured with a care and
+finish which in many instances might seem altogether supererogatory.<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a>
+The preparation by John Bellini in the Florentine gallery is completed
+with exhaustless diligence into even the portions farthest removed from
+the light, where the thick brown of the shadows must necessarily have
+afterwards concealed the greater part of the work. It was the discipline
+undergone in producing this preparation which fixed the character of the
+school. The most important part of the picture was executed not with the
+brush, but with the point, and the refinements attainable by this
+instrument dictated the treatment of their subject. Hence the transition
+to etching and engraving, and the intense love of minute detail,
+accompanied by an imaginative communication of dignity and power to the
+smallest forms, in Albert D&uuml;rer and others. But this attention to
+minuti&aelig; was not the only result; the disposition of light and shade was
+also affected by the method. Shade was not to be had at small cost; its
+masses could not be dashed on in impetuous generalization, fields for
+the future recovery of light. They were measured out and wrought to
+their depths only by expenditure of toil and time; and, as future
+grounds for color, they were necessarily restricted to the <i>natural</i>
+shadow of every object, white being left for high lights of whatever
+hue. In consequence, the character of pervading daylight, almost
+inevitably produced in the preparation, was afterwards assumed as a
+stand<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>ard in the painting. Effectism, accidental shadows, all obvious
+and vulgar artistical treatment, were excluded, or introduced only as
+the lights became more loaded, and were consequently imposed with more
+facility on the dark ground. Where shade was required in large mass, it
+was obtained by introducing an object of locally dark color. The Italian
+masters who followed Van Eyck's system were in the constant habit of
+relieving their principal figures by the darkness of some object,
+foliage, throne, or drapery, introduced behind the head, the open sky
+being left visible on each side. A green drapery is thus used with great
+quaintness by John Bellini in the noble picture of the Brera Gallery; a
+black screen, with marbled veins, behind the portraits of himself and
+his brother in the Louvre; a crimson velvet curtain behind the Madonna,
+in Francia's best picture at Bologna. Where the subject was sacred, and
+the painter great, this system of pervading light produced pictures of a
+peculiar and tranquil majesty; where the mind of the painter was
+irregularly or frivolously imaginative, its temptations to accumulative
+detail were too great to be resisted&mdash;the spectator was by the German
+masters overwhelmed with the copious inconsistency of a dream, or
+compelled to traverse the picture from corner to corner like a museum of
+curiosities.</p>
+
+<p>127. The chalk or pen preparation being completed, and the oil-priming
+laid, we have seen that the shadows were laid in with a transparent
+<i>brown</i> in considerable body. The question next arises&mdash;What influence
+is this part of the process likely to have had upon the <i>coloring</i> of
+the school? It is to be remembered that the practice was continued to
+the latest times, and that when the thin light had been long abandoned,
+and a loaded body of color had taken its place, the brown transparent
+shadow was still retained, and is retained often to this day, when
+asphaltum is used as its base, at the risk of the destruction of the
+picture. The utter loss of many of Reynolds' noblest works has been
+caused by the lavish use of this pigment. What the pigment actually was
+in older times is left by Mr. Eastlake undecided:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"A rich brown, which, whether an earth or mineral alone, or a substance
+of the kind enriched by the addition of a transparent yellow or orange,
+is not an unimportant element of the glowing coloring which is
+remarkable in examples of the school. Such a color, by artificial
+combinations at least, is easily supplied; and it is repeated, that, in
+general, the materials now in use are quite as good as those which the
+Flemish masters had at their command."&mdash;<i>Ib.</i> p. 488.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>At p. 446 it is also asserted that the peculiar glow of the brown of
+Rubens is hardly to be accounted for by any accidental variety in the
+Cassel earths, but was obtained by the mixture of a transparent yellow.
+Evidence, however, exists of asphaltum having been used in Flemish
+pictures, and with safety, even though prepared in the modern manner:&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"It is not ground" (says De Mayerne), "but a drying oil is prepared with
+litharge, and the pulverized asphaltum mixed with this oil is placed in
+a glass vessel, suspended by a thread [in a water bath]. Thus exposed to
+the fire it melts like butter; when it begins to boil it is instantly
+removed. It is an excellent color for shadows, and may be glazed like
+lake; it lasts well."&mdash;<i>Ib.</i> p. 463.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>128. The great advantage of this primary laying in of the darks in brown
+was the obtaining an unity of shadow throughout the picture, which
+rendered variety of hue, where it occurred, an instantly accepted
+evidence of light. It mattered not how vigorous or how deep in tone the
+masses of local color might be, the eye could not confound them with
+true shadow; it everywhere distinguished the transparent browns as
+indicative of gloom, and became acutely sensible of the presence and
+preciousness of light wherever local tints rose out of their depths. But
+however superior this method may be to the arbitrary use of polychrome
+shadows, utterly unrelated to the lights, which has been admitted in
+modern works; and however beautiful or brilliant its results might<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> be
+in the hands of colorists as faithful as Van Eyck, or as inventive as
+Rubens; the principle on which it is based becomes dangerous whenever,
+in assuming that the ultimate hue of every shadow is brown, it
+presupposes a peculiar and conventional light. It is true, that so long
+as the early practice of finishing the under-drawing with the pen was
+continued, the gray of that preparation might perhaps diminish the force
+of the upper color, which became in that case little more than a glowing
+varnish&mdash;even thus sometimes verging on too monotonous warmth, as the
+reader may observe in the head of Dandolo, by John Bellini, in the
+National Gallery. But when, by later and more impetuous hands, the point
+tracing was dispensed with, and the picture boldly thrown in with the
+brown pigment, it became matter of great improbability that the force of
+such a prevalent tint could afterwards be softened or melted into a pure
+harmony; the painter's feeling for truth was blunted; brilliancy and
+richness became his object rather than sincerity or solemnity; with the
+palled sense of color departed the love of light, and the diffused
+sunshine of the early schools died away in the narrowed rays of
+Rembrandt. We think it a deficiency in the work before us that the
+extreme peril of such a principle, incautiously applied, has not been
+pointed out, and that the method of Rubens has been so highly extolled
+for its technical perfection, without the slightest notice of the gross
+mannerism into which its facile brilliancy too frequently betrayed the
+mighty master.</p>
+
+<p>129. Yet it remains a question how far, under certain limitations and
+for certain effects, this system of pure brown shadow may be
+successfully followed. It is not a little singular that it has already
+been revived in water-colors by a painter who, in his realization of
+light and splendor of hue, stands without a rival among living
+schools&mdash;Mr. Hunt; his neutral shadows being, we believe, first thrown
+in frankly with sepia, the color introduced upon the lights, and the
+central lights afterwards further raised by body color, and glazed. But
+in this process the sepia shadows are admitted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> only on objects whose
+local colors are warm or neutral; wherever the tint of the illumined
+portion is delicate or peculiar, a relative hue of shade is at once laid
+on the white paper; and the correspondence with the Flemish school is in
+the use of brown as the ultimate representative of deep gloom, and in
+the careful preservation of its transparency, not in the application of
+brown universally as the shade of all colors. We apprehend that this
+practice represents, in another medium, the very best mode of applying
+the Flemish system; and that when the result proposed is an effect of
+vivid color under bright cool sunshine, it would be impossible to adopt
+any more perfect means. But a system which in any stage prescribes the
+use of a certain pigment, implies the adoption of a constant aim, and
+becomes, in that degree, conventional. Suppose that the effect desired
+be neither of sunlight nor of bright color, but of grave color subdued
+by atmosphere, and we believe that the use of brown for an ultimate
+shadow would be highly inexpedient. With Van Eyck and with Rubens the
+aim was always consistent: clear daylight, diffused in the one case,
+concentrated in the other, was yet the hope, the necessity of both; and
+any process which admitted the slightest dimness, coldness, or opacity,
+would have been considered an error in their system by either. Alike, to
+Rubens, came subjects of tumult or tranquillity, of gayety or terror;
+the nether, earthly, and upper world were to him animated with the same
+feeling, lighted by the same sun; he dyed in the same lake of fire the
+warp of the wedding-garment or of the winding-sheet; swept into the same
+delirium the recklessness of the sensualist, and rapture of the
+anchorite; saw in tears only their glittering, and in torture only its
+flush. To such a painter, regarding every subject in the same temper,
+and all as mere motives for the display of the power of his art, the
+Flemish system, improved as it became in his hands, was alike sufficient
+and habitual. But among the greater colorists of Italy the aim was not
+always so simple nor the method so determinable. We find Tintoret
+passing like a fire-fly from light to darkness in one oscillation,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>
+ranging from the fullest prism of solar color to the coldest grays of
+twilight, and from the silver tingeing of a morning cloud to the lava
+fire of a volcano: one moment shutting himself into obscure chambers of
+imagery, the next plunged into the revolutionless day of heaven, and
+piercing space, deeper than the mind can follow or the eye fathom; we
+find him by turns appalling, pensive, splendid, profound, profuse; and
+throughout sacrificing every minor quality to the power of his prevalent
+mood. By such an artist it might, perhaps, be presumed that a different
+system of color would be adopted in almost every picture, and that if a
+chiaroscuro ground were independently laid, it would be in a neutral
+gray, susceptible afterwards of harmony with any tone he might determine
+upon, and not in the vivid brown which necessitated brilliancy of
+subsequent effect. We believe, accordingly, that while some of the
+pieces of this master's richer color, such as the Adam and Eve in the
+Gallery of Venice, and we suspect also the miracle of St. Mark, may be
+executed on the pure Flemish system, the greater number of his large
+compositions will be found based on a gray shadow; and that this gray
+shadow was independently laid we have more direct proof in the assertion
+of Boschini, who received his information from the younger Palma:
+"Quando haveva stabilita questa importante distribuzione, <i>abboggiava il
+quadro tutto di chiaroscuro</i>;" and we have, therefore, no doubt that
+Tintoret's well-known reply to the question, "What were the most
+beautiful colors?" "<i>Il nero, e il bianco</i>," is to be received in a
+perfectly literal sense, beyond and above its evident reference to
+abstract principle. Its main and most valuable meaning was, of course,
+that the design and light and shade of a picture were of greater
+importance than its color; (and this Tintoret felt so thoroughly that
+there is not one of his works which would seriously lose in power if it
+were translated into chiaroscuro); but it implied also that Tintoret's
+idea of a shadowed preparation was in gray, and not in brown.</p>
+
+<p>130. But there is a farther and more essential ground of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> difference in
+system of shadow between the Flemish and Italian colorists. It is a
+well-known optical fact that the color of shadow is complemental to that
+of light: and that therefore, in general terms, warm light has cool
+shadow, and cool light hot shadow. The noblest masters of the northern
+and southern schools respectively adopted these contrary keys; and while
+the Flemings raised their lights in frosty white and pearly grays out of
+a glowing shadow, the Italians opposed the deep and burning rays of
+their golden heaven to masses of solemn gray and majestic blue. Either,
+therefore, their preparation must have been different, or they were
+able, when they chose, to conquer the warmth of the ground by
+superimposed color. We believe, accordingly, that Correggio will be
+found&mdash;as stated in the notes of Reynolds quoted at p. 495&mdash;to have
+habitually grounded with black, white, and ultramarine, then glazing
+with golden transparent colors; while Titian used the most vigorous
+browns, and conquered them with cool color in mass above. The remarkable
+sketch of Leonardo in the Uffizii of Florence is commenced in
+brown&mdash;over the brown is laid an olive green, on which the highest
+lights are struck with white.</p>
+
+<p>Now it is well known to even the merely decorative painter that no color
+can be brilliant which is laid over one of a corresponding key, and that
+the best ground for any given opaque color will be a comparatively
+subdued tint of the complemental one; of green under red, of violet
+under yellow, and of <i>orange</i> or <i>brown</i> therefore under <i>blue</i>. We
+apprehend accordingly that the real value of the brown ground with
+Titian was far greater than even with Rubens; it was to support and give
+preciousness to cool color above, while it remained itself untouched as
+the representative of warm reflexes and extreme depth of transparent
+gloom. We believe this employment of the brown ground to be the only
+means of uniting majesty of hue with profundity of shade. But its value
+to the Fleming is connected with the management of the lights, which we
+have next to consider. As we here venture for the first time to disagree
+in some measure<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> with Mr. Eastlake, let us be sure that we state his
+opinion fairly. He says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"The light warm tint which Van Mander assumes to have been generally
+used in the oil-priming was sometimes omitted, as unfinished pictures
+prove. Under such circumstances, the picture may have been executed at
+once on the sized outline. In the works of Lucas van Leyden, and
+sometimes in those of Albert D&uuml;rer, the thin yet brilliant lights
+exhibit a still brighter ground underneath (p. 389).... It thus
+appears that the method proposed by the inventors of oil-painting, of
+preserving light within the colors, involved a certain order of
+processes. The principal conditions were: first, that the outline should
+be completed on the panel before the painting, properly so called, was
+begun. The object, in thus defining the forms, was to avoid alterations
+and repaintings, which might ultimately render the ground useless
+without supplying its place. Another condition was to avoid loading <i>the
+opaque</i> colors. <i>This limitation was not essential with regard to the
+transparent colors, as such could hardly exclude the bright ground</i>
+(p. 398).... The system of coloring adopted by the Van Eycks may have
+been influenced by the practice of glass-painting. They appear, in their
+first efforts at least, to have considered the white panel as
+representing light behind a colored and transparent medium, and aimed at
+giving brilliancy to their tints by allowing the white ground to shine
+through them. If those painters and their followers erred, it was in
+sometimes too literally carrying out this principle. <i>Their lights are
+always transparent</i> (mere white excepted) and their shadows sometimes
+want depth. This is in accordance with the effect of glass-staining, in
+which transparency may cease with darkness, but never with light. The
+superior method of Rubens consisted in preserving transparency chiefly
+in his darks, and in contrasting their lucid depth with solid lights
+(p. 408).... Among the technical improvements on the older process may
+be especially mentioned the preservation of transparency in the darker<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>
+masses, the lights being loaded as required. The system of exhibiting
+the bright ground through the shadows still involved an adherence to the
+original method of defining the composition at first; and the solid
+painting of the lights opened the door to that freedom of execution
+which the works of the early masters wanted." (p. 490.)</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>131. We think we cannot have erred in concluding from these scattered
+passages that Mr. Eastlake supposes the brilliancy of the high lights of
+the earlier schools to be attributable to the under-power of the white
+ground. This we admit, so far as that ground gave value to the
+transparent flesh-colored or brown preparation above it; but we doubt
+the transparency of the highest lights, and the power of any white
+ground to add brilliancy to opaque colors. We have ourselves never seen
+an instance of a <i>painted brilliant</i> light that was not loaded to the
+exclusion of the ground. Secondary lights indeed are often perfectly
+transparent, a warm hatching over the under-white; the highest light
+itself may be so&mdash;but then it is the white ground itself subdued by
+transparent <i>darker</i> color, not supporting a light color. In the Van
+Eyck in the National Gallery all the brilliant lights are loaded; mere
+white, Mr. Eastlake himself admits, was always so; and we believe that
+the flesh-color and carnations are painted with color as <i>opaque</i> as the
+white head-dress, but fail of brilliancy from not being <i>loaded enough</i>;
+the white ground beneath being utterly unable to add to the power of
+such tints, while its effect on more subdued tones depended in great
+measure on its receiving a transparent coat of warm color first. This
+<i>may</i> have been sometimes omitted, as stated at p. 389; when it was
+so, we believe that an utter loss of brilliancy must have resulted; but
+when it was used, the highest lights must have been raised from it by
+opaque color as distinctly by Van Eyck as by Rubens. Rubens' Judgment of
+Paris is quoted at [p. 388] as an example of the best use of the
+bright gesso ground:&mdash;and how in that picture, how in all Rubens' best
+pictures, is it used? Over the ground is thrown<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> a transparent glowing
+brown tint, varied and deepened in the shadow; boldly over that brown
+glaze, and into it, are struck and painted the opaque gray middle tints,
+already concealing the ground totally; and above these are loaded the
+high lights like gems&mdash;note the sparkling strokes on the peacock's
+plumes. We believe that Van Eyck's high lights were either, in
+proportion to the scale of picture and breadth of handling, as loaded as
+these, or, in the degree of their thinness, less brilliant. Was then his
+system the same as Rubens'? Not so; but it differed more in the
+management of middle tints than in the lights: the main difference was,
+we believe, between the careful preparation of the gradations of drawing
+in the one, and the daring assumption of massy light in the other. There
+are theorists who would assert that their system was the same&mdash;but they
+forget the primal work, with the point underneath, and all that it
+implied of transparency above. Van Eyck secured his drawing in dark,
+then threw a pale transparent middle tint over the whole, and recovered
+his <i>highest</i> lights; all was <i>transparent</i> except these. Rubens threw a
+dark middle tint over the whole at first, and then gave the <i>drawing</i>
+with opaque gray. All was <i>opaque</i> except the shadows. No slight
+difference this, when we reflect on the contrarieties of practice
+ultimately connected with the opposing principles; above all on the
+eminent one that, as all Van Eyck's color, except the high lights, must
+have been equivalent to a glaze, while the great body of <i>color</i> in
+Rubens was solid (ultimately glazed occasionally, but not necessarily),
+it was possible for Van Eyck to mix his tints to the local hues
+required, with far less danger of heaviness in effect than would have
+been incurred in the solid painting of Rubens. This is especially
+noticed by Mr. Eastlake, with whom we are delighted again to concur:&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>"The practice of using compound tints has not been approved by
+colorists; the method, as introduced by the early masters, was adapted
+to certain conditions, but, like many of their processes, was afterwards
+misapplied. Vasari in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>forms us that Lorenzo di Credi, whose exaggerated
+nicety in technical details almost equaled that of Gerard Dow, was in
+the habit of mixing about thirty tints before he began to work. The
+opposite extreme is perhaps no less objectionable. Much may depend on
+the skillful use of the ground. The purest color in an opaque state and
+superficially light only, is less brilliant than the foulest mixture
+through which light shines. Hence, as long as the white ground was
+visible within the tints, the habit of matching colors from nature (no
+matter by what complication of hues, provided the ingredients were not
+chemically injurious to each other) was likely to combine the truth of
+negative hues with clearness."&mdash;<i>Ib.</i> p. 400.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>132. These passages open to us a series of questions far too intricate
+to be even cursorily treated within our limits. It is to be held in mind
+that one and the same quality of color or kind of brilliancy is not
+always the best; the phases and phenomena of color are innumerable in
+reality, and even the modes of imitating them become expedient or
+otherwise, according to the aim and scale of the picture. It is no
+question of mere authority whether the mixture of tints to a compound
+one, or their juxtaposition in a state of purity, be the better
+practice. There is not the slightest doubt that, the ground being the
+same, a stippled tint is more brilliant and rich than a mixed one; nor
+is there doubt on the other hand that in some subjects such a tint is
+impossible, and in others vulgar. We have above alluded to the power of
+Mr. Hunt in water-color. The fruit-pieces of that artist are dependent
+for their splendor chiefly on the juxtaposition of pure color for
+compound tints, and we may safely affirm that the method is for such
+purpose as exemplary as its results are admirable. Yet would you desire
+to see the same means adopted in the execution of the fruit in Rubens'
+Peace and War? Or again, would the lusciousness of tint obtained by
+Rubens himself, adopting the same means on a grander scale in his
+painting of flesh, have been conducive to the ends or grateful to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>
+feelings of the Bellinis or Albert D&uuml;rer? Each method is admirable as
+applied by its master; and Hemling and Van Eyck are as much to be
+followed in the mingling of color, as Rubens and Rembrandt in its
+decomposition. If an award is absolutely to be made of superiority to
+either system, we apprehend that the palm of mechanical skill must be
+rendered to the latter, and higher dignity of moral purpose confessed in
+the former; in proportion to the nobleness of the subject and the
+thoughtfulness of its treatment, simplicity of color will be found more
+desirable. Nor is the far higher perfection of drawing attained by the
+earlier method to be forgotten. Gradations which are expressed by
+delicate execution of the <i>darks</i>, and then aided by a few strokes of
+recovered light, must always be more subtle and true than those which
+are struck violently forth with opaque color; and it is to be remembered
+that the handling of the brush, with the early Italian masters,
+approached in its refinement to drawing with the point&mdash;the more
+definitely, because the work was executed, as we have just seen, with
+little change or play of local color. And&mdash;whatever discredit the looser
+and bolder practice of later masters may have thrown on the hatched and
+penciled execution of earlier periods&mdash;we maintain that this method,
+necessary in fresco, and followed habitually in the first oil pictures,
+has produced the noblest renderings of human expression in the whole
+range of the examples of art: the best works of Raphael, all the
+glorious portraiture of Ghirlandajo and Masaccio, all the mightiest
+achievements of religious zeal in Francia, Perugino, Bellini, and such
+others. Take as an example in fresco Masaccio's hasty sketch of himself
+now in the Uffizii; and in oil, the two heads of monks by Perugino in
+the Academy of Florence; and we shall search in vain for any work in
+portraiture, executed in opaque colors, which could contend with them in
+depth of expression or in fullness of <i>recorded</i> life&mdash;not mere
+imitative vitality, but chronicled action. And we have no hesitation in
+asserting that where the object of the painter is expression, and the
+picture is of a size admitting careful<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> execution, the transparent
+system, developed as it is found in Bellini or Perugino, will attain the
+most profound and serene color, while it will never betray into
+looseness or audacity. But if in the mind of the painter invention
+prevail over veneration,&mdash;if his eye be creative rather than
+penetrative, and his hand more powerful than patient&mdash;let him not be
+confined to a system where light, once lost, is as irrecoverable as
+time, and where all success depends on husbandry of resource. Do not
+measure out to him his sunshine in inches of gesso; let him have the
+power of striking it even out of darkness and the deep.</p>
+
+<p>133. If human life were endless, or human spirit could fit its compass
+to its will, it is possible a perfection might be reached which should
+unite the majesty of invention with the meekness of love. We might
+conceive that the thought, arrested by the readiest means, and at first
+represented by the boldest symbols, might afterwards be set forth with
+solemn and studied expression, and that the power might know no
+weariness in clothing which had known no restraint in creating. But
+dilation and contraction are for molluscs, not for men; we are not
+ringed into flexibility like worms, nor gifted with opposite sight and
+mutable color like chameleons. The mind which molds and summons cannot
+at will transmute itself into that which clings and contemplates; nor is
+it given to us at once to have the potter's power over the lump, the
+fire's upon the clay, and the gilder's upon the porcelain. Even the
+temper in which we behold these various displays of mind must be
+different; and it admits of more than doubt whether, if the bold work of
+rapid thought were afterwards in all its forms completed with
+microscopic care, the result would be other than painful. In the shadow
+at the foot of Tintoret's picture of the Temptation, lies a broken
+rock-bowlder.<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a> The dark ground has been first laid in, of color
+nearly uniform; and over it a few, not more than fifteen or twenty,
+strokes of the brush, loaded with a light gray, have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> quarried the solid
+block of stone out of the vacancy. Probably ten minutes are the utmost
+time which those strokes have occupied, though the rock is some four
+feet square. It may safely be affirmed that no other method, however
+laborious, could have reached the truth of form which results from the
+very freedom with which the conception has been expressed; but it is a
+truth of the simplest kind&mdash;the definition of a stone, rather than the
+painting of one&mdash;and the lights are in some degree dead and cold&mdash;the
+natural consequence of striking a mixed opaque pigment over a dark
+ground. It would now be possible to treat this skeleton of a stone,
+which could only have been knit together by Tintoret's rough temper,
+with the care of a Fleming; to leave its fiercely-stricken lights
+emanating from a golden ground, to gradate with the pen its ponderous
+shadows, and in its completion, to dwell with endless and intricate
+precision upon fibers of moss, bells of heath, blades of grass, and
+films of lichen. Love like Van Eyck's would separate the fibers as if
+they were stems of forest, twine the ribbed grass into fanciful
+articulation, shadow forth capes and islands in the variegated film, and
+hang the purple bells in counted chiming. A year might pass away, and
+the work yet be incomplete; yet would the purpose of the great picture
+have been better answered when all had been achieved? or if so, is it to
+be wished that a year of the life of Tintoret (could such a thing be
+conceived possible) had been so devoted?</p>
+
+<p>134. We have put in as broad and extravagant a view as possible the
+difference of object in the two systems of loaded and transparent light;
+but it is to be remembered that both are in a certain degree compatible,
+and that whatever exclusive arguments may be adduced in favor of the
+loaded system apply only to the ultimate stages of the work. The
+question is not whether the white ground be expedient in the
+commencement&mdash;but how far it must of necessity be preserved to the
+close? There cannot be the slightest doubt that, whatever the object,
+whatever the power of the painter, the white ground, as intensely bright
+and perfect as it can<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> be obtained, should be the base of his
+operations; that it should be preserved as long as possible, shown
+wherever it is possible, and sacrificed only upon good cause. There are
+indeed many objects which do not admit of imitation unless the hand have
+power of superimposing and modeling the light; but there are others
+which are equally unsusceptible of every rendering except that of
+transparent color over the pure ground.</p>
+
+<p>It appears from the evidence now produced that there are at least three
+distinct systems traceable in the works of good colorists, each having
+its own merit and its peculiar application. First, the white ground,
+with careful chiaroscuro preparation, transparent color in the middle
+tints, and opaque high lights only (Van Eyck). Secondly, white ground,
+transparent brown preparation, and solid painting of lights above
+(Rubens). Thirdly, white ground, brown preparation, and solid painting
+both of lights and shadows above (Titian); on which last method,
+indisputably the noblest, we have not insisted, as it has not yet been
+examined by Mr. Eastlake. But in all these methods the white ground was
+indispensable. It mattered not what transparent color were put over it:
+red, frequently, we believe, by Titian, before the brown shadows&mdash;yellow
+sometimes by Rubens:&mdash;whatever warm tone might be chosen for the key of
+the composition, and for the support of its grays, depended for its own
+value upon the white gesso beneath; nor can any system of color be
+ultimately successful which excludes it. Noble arrangement, choice, and
+relation of color, will indeed redeem and recommend the falsest system:
+our own Reynolds, and recently Turner, furnish magnificent examples of
+the power attainable by colorists of high caliber, after the light
+ground is lost&mdash;(we cannot agree with Mr. Eastlake in thinking the
+practice of painting first in white and black, with cool reds only,
+"equivalent to its preservation"):&mdash;but in the works of both, diminished
+splendor and sacrificed durability attest and punish the neglect of the
+best resources of their art.</p>
+
+<p>135. We have stated, though briefly, the major part of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> the data which
+recent research has furnished respecting the early colorists; enough,
+certainly, to remove all theoretical obstacles to the attainment of a
+perfection equal to theirs. A few carefully conducted experiments, with
+the efficient aids of modern chemistry, would probably put us in
+possession of an amber varnish, if indeed this be necessary, at least
+not inferior to that which they employed; the rest of their materials
+are already in our hands, soliciting only such care in their preparation
+as it ought, we think, to be no irksome duty to bestow. Yet we are not
+sanguine of the immediate result. Mr. Eastlake has done his duty
+excellently; but it is hardly to be expected that, after being long in
+possession of means which we could apply to no profit, the knowledge
+that the greatest men possessed no better, should at once urge to
+emulation and gift with strength. We believe that some consciousness of
+their true position already existed in the minds of many living artists;
+example had at least been given by two of our Academicians, Mr. Mulready
+and Mr. Etty, of a splendor based on the Flemish system, and consistent,
+certainly, in the first case, with a high degree of permanence; while
+the main direction of artistic and public sympathy to works of a
+character altogether opposed to theirs, showed fatally how far more
+perceptible and appreciable to our present instincts is the mechanism of
+handling than the melody of hue. Indeed we firmly believe, that of all
+powers of enjoyment or of judgment, that which is concerned with
+nobility of color is least communicable: it is also perhaps the most
+rare. The achievements of the draughtsman are met by the curiosity of
+all mankind; the appeals of the dramatist answered by their sympathy;
+the creatures of imagination acknowledged by their fear; but the voice
+of the colorist has but the adder's listening, charm he never so wisely.
+Men vie with each other, untaught, in pursuit of smoothness and
+smallness&mdash;of Carlo Dolci and Van Huysum; their domestic hearts may
+range them in faithful armies round the throne of Raphael; meditation
+and labor may raise them to the level of the great mountain pedestal of
+Buonarotti&mdash;"vestito gia<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> de' raggi del pianeta, che mena dritto altrui
+per ogni calle;" but neither time nor teaching will bestow the sense,
+when it is not innate, of that wherein consists the power of Titian and
+the great Venetians. There is proof of this in the various degrees of
+cost and care devoted to the preservation of their works. The glass, the
+curtain, and the cabinet guard the preciousness of what is petty, guide
+curiosity to what is popular, invoke worship to what is mighty;&mdash;Raphael
+has his palace&mdash;Michael his dome&mdash;respect protects and crowds traverse
+the sacristy and the saloon; but the frescoes of Titian fade in the
+solitudes of Padua, and the gesso falls crumbled from the flapping
+canvas, as the sea-winds shake the Scuola di San Rocco.</p>
+
+<p>136. But if, on the one hand, mere abstract excellence of color be thus
+coldly regarded, it is equally certain that no work ever attains
+enduring celebrity which is eminently deficient in this great respect.
+Color cannot be indifferent; it is either beautiful and auxiliary to the
+purposes of the picture, or false, froward, and opposite to them. Even
+in the painting of Nature herself, this law is palpable; chiefly
+glorious when color is a predominant element in her working, she is in
+the next degree most impressive when it is withdrawn altogether: and
+forms and scenes become sublime in the neutral twilight, which were
+indifferent in the colors of noon. Much more is this the case in the
+feebleness of imitation; all color is bad which is less than beautiful;
+all is gross and intrusive which is not attractive; it repels where it
+cannot inthrall, and destroys what it cannot assist. It is besides the
+painter's peculiar craft; he who cannot color is no painter. It is not
+painting to grind earths with oil and lay them smoothly on a surface. He
+only is a painter who can melodize and harmonize <i>hue</i>&mdash;if he fail in
+this, he is no member of the brotherhood. Let him etch, or draw, or
+carve: better the unerring graver than the unfaithful pencil&mdash;better the
+true sling and stone than the brightness of the unproved armor. And let
+not even those who deal in the deeper magic, and feel in themselves the
+loftier power, presume<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> upon that power&mdash;nor believe in the reality of
+any success unless that which has been deserved by deliberate, resolute,
+successive operation. We would neither deny nor disguise the influences
+of sensibility or of imagination, upon this, as upon every other
+admirable quality of art;&mdash;we know that there is that in the very stroke
+and fall of the pencil in a master's hand, which creates color with an
+unconscious enchantment&mdash;we know that there is a brilliancy which
+springs from the joy of the painter's heart&mdash;a gloom which sympathizes
+with its seriousness&mdash;a power correlative with its will; but these are
+all vain unless they be ruled by a seemly caution&mdash;a manly
+moderation&mdash;an indivertible foresight. This we think the one great
+conclusion to be received from the work we have been examining, that all
+power is vain&mdash;all invention vain&mdash;all enthusiasm vain&mdash;all devotion
+even, and fidelity vain, unless these are guided by such severe and
+exact law as we see take place in the development of every great natural
+glory; and, even in the full glow of their bright and burning operation,
+sealed by the cold, majestic, deep-graven impress of the signet on the
+right hand of Time.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>SAMUEL PROUT.<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a></h2>
+
+<p>137. The first pages in the histories of artists, worthy the name, are
+generally alike; records of boyish resistance to every scheme, parental
+or tutorial, at variance with the ruling desire and bent of the opening
+mind. It is so rare an accident that the love of drawing should be
+noticed and fostered in the child, that we are hardly entitled to form
+any conclusions respecting the probable result of an indulgent
+foresight; it is enough to admire the strength of will which usually
+accompanies every noble intellectual gift, and to believe that, in early
+life, direct resistance is better than inefficient guidance. Samuel
+Prout&mdash;with how many rich and picturesque imaginations is the name now
+associated!&mdash;was born at Plymouth, September 17th, 1783, and intended by
+his father for his own profession; but although the delicate health of
+the child might have appeared likely to induce a languid acquiescence in
+his parent's wish, the love of drawing occupied every leisure hour, and
+at last trespassed upon every other occupation. Reproofs were
+affectionately repeated, and every effort made to dissuade the boy from
+what was considered an "idle amusement,"
+but it was soon discovered that opposition was unavailing, and the
+attachment too strong to be checked. It might perhaps have been
+otherwise, but for some rays of encouragement received from the
+observant kindness of his first schoolmaster. To watch the direction of
+the little hand when it wandered from its task, to draw the culprit to
+him with a smile instead of a reproof, to set him on the high stool
+beside his desk, and stimulate him, by the loan of his own pen, to a
+more patient and elaborate study of the child's usual subject, his
+favorite cat, was a modification of preceptorial care as easy as it was
+wise; but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> it perhaps had more influence on the mind and after-life of
+the boy than all the rest of his education together.</p>
+
+<p>138. Such happy though rare interludes in school-hours, and occasional
+attempts at home, usually from the carts and horses which stopped at a
+public-house opposite, began the studentship of the young artist before
+he had quitted his pinafore. An unhappy accident which happened about
+the same time, and which farther enfeebled his health, rendered it still
+less advisable to interfere with his beloved occupation. We have heard
+the painter express, with a melancholy smile, the distinct recollection
+remaining with him to this day, of a burning autumn morning, on which he
+had sallied forth alone, himself some four autumns old, armed with a
+hooked stick, to gather nuts. Unrestrainable alike with pencil or crook,
+he was found by a farmer, towards the close of the day, lying moaning
+under a hedge, prostrated by a sunstroke, and was brought home
+insensible. From that day forward he was subject to attacks of violent
+pain in the head, recurring at short intervals; and until thirty years
+after marriage not a week passed without one or two days of absolute
+confinement to his room or to his bed. "Up to this hour," we may perhaps
+be permitted to use his own touching words, "I have to endure a great
+fight of afflictions; can I therefore be sufficiently thankful for the
+merciful gift of a buoyant spirit?"</p>
+
+<p>139. That buoyancy of spirit&mdash;one of the brightest and most marked
+elements of his character&mdash;never failed to sustain him between the
+recurrences even of his most acute suffering; and the pursuit of his
+most beloved Art became every year more determined and independent. The
+first beginnings in landscape study were made in happy truant
+excursions, now fondly remembered, with the painter Haydon, then also a
+youth. This companionship was probably rather cemented by the energy
+than the delicacy of Haydon's sympathies. The two boys were directly
+opposed in their habits of application and modes of study. Prout
+unremitting in diligence, patient in observation, devoted in copying
+what he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> loved in nature, never working except with his model before
+him; Haydon restless, ambitious, and fiery; exceedingly imaginative,
+never captivated with simple truth, nor using his pencil on the spot,
+but trusting always to his powers of memory. The fates of the two youths
+were inevitably fixed by their opposite characters. The humble student
+became the originator of a new School of Art, and one of the most
+popular painters of his age. The self-trust of the wanderer in the
+wilderness of his fancy betrayed him into the extravagances, and
+deserted him in the suffering, with which his name must remain sadly,
+but not unjustly, associated.</p>
+
+<p>140. There was, however, little in the sketches made by Prout at this
+period to indicate the presence of dormant power. Common prints, at a
+period when engraving was in the lowest state of decline, were the only
+guides which the youth could obtain; and his style, in endeavoring to
+copy these, became cramped and mannered; but the unremitting sketching
+from nature saved him. Whole days, from dawn till night, were devoted to
+the study of the peculiar objects of his early interest, the ivy-mantled
+bridges, mossy water-mills, and rock-built cottages, which characterize
+the valley scenery of Devon. In spite of every disadvantage, the strong
+love of truth, and the instinctive perception of the chief points of
+shade and characters of form on which his favorite effects mainly
+depended, enabled him not only to obtain an accumulated store of
+memoranda, afterwards valuable, but to publish several elementary works
+which obtained extensive and deserved circulation, and to which many
+artists, now high in reputation, have kindly and frankly confessed their
+early obligations.</p>
+
+<p>141. At that period the art of water-color drawing was little understood
+at Plymouth, and practiced only by Payne, then an engineer in the
+citadel. Though mannered in the extreme, his works obtained reputation;
+for the best drawings of the period were feeble both in color and
+execution, with commonplace light and shadow, a dark foreground being a
+<i>rule absolute</i>, as may be seen in several of Turner's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> first
+productions. But Turner was destined to annihilate such rules, breaking
+through and scattering them with an expansive force commensurate with
+the rigidity of former restraint. It happened "fortunately," as it is
+said,&mdash;naturally and deservedly, as it <i>should</i> be said,&mdash;that Prout was
+at this period removed from the narrow sphere of his first efforts to
+one in which he could share in, and take advantage of, every progressive
+movement.</p>
+
+<p>142. The most respectable of the Plymouth amateurs was the Rev. Dr.
+Bidlake, who was ever kind in his encouragement of the young painter,
+and with whom many delightful excursions were made. At his house, Mr.
+Britton, the antiquarian, happening to see some of the cottages
+sketches, and being pleased with them, proposed that Prout should
+accompany him into Cornwall, in order to aid him in collecting materials
+for his "Beauties of England and Wales." This was the painter's first
+recognized artistical employment, as well as the occasion of a
+friendship ever gratefully and fondly remembered. On Mr. Britton's
+return to London, after sending to him a portfolio of drawings, which
+were almost the first to create a sensation with lovers of Art, Mr.
+Prout received so many offers of encouragement, if he would consent to
+reside in London, as to induce him to take this important step&mdash;the
+first towards being established as an artist.</p>
+
+<p>143. The immediate effect of this change of position was what might
+easily have been foretold, upon a mind naturally sensitive, diffident,
+and enthusiastic. It was a heavy discouragement. The youth felt that he
+had much to eradicate and more to learn, and hardly knew at first how to
+avail himself of the advantages presented by the study of the works of
+Turner, Girtin, Cousins, and others. But he had resolution and ambition
+as well as modesty; he knew that</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">"The noblest honors of the mind</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">On rigid terms descend."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>He had every inducement to begin the race, in the clearer guidance and
+nobler ends which the very works that had dis<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>heartened him afforded and
+pointed out; and the first firm and certain step was made. His range of
+subject was as yet undetermined, and was likely at one time to have been
+very different from that in which he has since obtained pre-eminence so
+confessed. Among the picturesque material of his native place, the forms
+of its shipping had not been neglected, though there was probably less
+in the order of Plymouth dockyard to catch the eye of the boy, always
+determined in its preference of purely picturesque arrangements, than
+might have been afforded by the meanest fishing hamlet. But a strong and
+lasting impression was made upon him by the wreck of the "Dutton" East
+Indiaman on the rocks under the citadel; the crew were saved by the
+personal courage and devotion of Sir Edward Pellew, afterwards Lord
+Exmouth. The wreck held together for many hours under the cliff, rolling
+to and fro as the surges struck her. Haydon and Prout sat on the crags
+together and watched her vanish fragment by fragment into the gnashing
+foam. Both were equally awe-struck at the time; both, on the morrow,
+resolved to paint their first pictures; both failed; but Haydon, always
+incapable of acknowledging and remaining loyal to the majesty of what he
+had seen, lost himself in vulgar thunder and lightning. Prout struggled
+to some resemblance of the actual scene, and the effect upon his mind
+was never effaced.</p>
+
+<p>144. At the time of his first residence in London, he painted more
+marines than anything else. But other work was in store for him. About
+the year 1818, his health, which as we have seen had never been
+vigorous, showed signs of increasing weakness, and a short trial of
+continental air was recommended. The route by Havre to Rouen was chosen,
+and Prout found himself, for the first time, in the grotesque labyrinths
+of the Norman streets. There are few minds so apathetic as to receive no
+impulse of new delight from their first acquaintance with continental
+scenery and architecture; and Rouen was, of all the cities of France,
+the richest in those objects with which the painter's mind had the
+profound<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>est sympathy. It was other then than it is now; revolutionary
+fury had indeed spent itself upon many of its noblest monuments, but the
+interference of modern restoration or improvement was unknown. Better
+the unloosed rage of the fiend than the scrabble of self-complacent
+idiocy. The fa&ccedil;ade of the cathedral was as yet unencumbered by the
+blocks of new stonework, never to be carved, by which it is now defaced;
+the Church of St. Nicholas existed, (the last fragments of the niches of
+its gateway were seen by the writer dashed upon the pavement in 1840 to
+make room for the new "Hotel St. Nicholas"); the Gothic turret had not
+vanished from the angle of the Place de la Pucelle, the Palais de
+Justice remained in its gray antiquity, and the Norman houses still
+lifted their fantastic ridges of gable along the busy quay (now fronted
+by as formal a range of hotels and offices as that of the West Cliff of
+Brighton). All was at unity with itself, and the city lay under its
+guarding hills, one labyrinth of delight, its gray and fretted towers,
+misty in their magnificence of height, letting the sky like blue enamel
+through the foiled spaces of their crowns of open work; the walls and
+gates of its countless churches wardered by saintly groups of solemn
+statuary, clasped about by wandering stems of sculptured leafage, and
+crowned by fretted niche and fairy pediment&mdash;meshed like gossamer with
+inextricable tracery: many a quaint monument of past times standing to
+tell its far-off tale in the place from which it has since perished&mdash;in
+the midst of the throng and murmur of those shadowy streets&mdash;all grim
+with jutting props of ebon woodwork, lightened only here and there by a
+sunbeam glancing down from the scaly backs, and points, and pyramids of
+the Norman roofs, or carried out of its narrow range by the gay progress
+of some snowy cap or scarlet camisole. The painter's vocation was fixed
+from that hour. The first effect upon his mind was irrepressible
+enthusiasm, with a strong feeling of a new-born attachment to Art, in a
+new world of exceeding interest. Previous impressions were presently
+obliterated, and the old embankments of fancy gave way to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> the force of
+overwhelming anticipations, forming another and a wider channel for its
+future course.</p>
+
+<p>145. From this time excursions were continually made to the continent,
+and every corner of France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy
+ransacked for its fragments of carved stone. The enthusiasm of the
+painter was greater than his ambition, and the strict limitation of his
+aim to the rendering of architectural character permitted him to adopt a
+simple and consistent method of execution, from which he has rarely
+departed. It was adapted in the first instance to the necessities of the
+moldering and mystic character of Northern Gothic; and though
+impressions received afterwards in Italy, more especially at Venice,
+have retained as strong a hold upon the painter's mind as those of his
+earlier excursions, his methods of drawing have always been influenced
+by the predilections first awakened. How far his love of the
+picturesque, already alluded to, was reconcilable with an entire
+appreciation of the highest characters of Italian architecture we do not
+pause to inquire; but this we may assert, without hesitation, that the
+picturesque <i>elements</i> of that architecture were unknown until he
+developed them, and that since Gentile Bellini, no one had regarded the
+palaces of Venice with so affectionate an understanding of the purpose
+and expression of their wealth of detail. In this respect the City of
+the Sea has been, and remains, peculiarly his own. There is, probably,
+no single piazza nor sea-paved street from St. Georgio in Aliga to the
+Arsenal, of which Prout has not in order drawn every fragment of
+pictorial material. Probably not a pillar in Venice but occurs in some
+one of his innumerable studies; while the peculiarly beautiful and
+varied arrangements under which he has treated the angle formed by St.
+Mark's Church with the Doge's palace, have not only made every
+successful drawing of those buildings by any other hand look like
+plagiarism, but have added (and what is this but indeed to paint the
+lily!) another charm to the spot itself.</p>
+
+<p>146. This exquisite dexterity of arrangement has always<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> been one of his
+leading characteristics as an artist. Notwithstanding the deserved
+popularity of his works, his greatness in composition remains altogether
+unappreciated. Many modern works exhibit greater pretense at
+arrangement, and a more palpable system; masses of well-concentrated
+light or points of sudden and dextrous color are expedients in the works
+of our second-rate artists as attractive as they are commonplace. But
+the moving and natural crowd, the decomposing composition, the frank and
+unforced, but marvelously intricate grouping, the breadth of
+inartificial and unexaggerated shadow, these are merits of an order only
+the more elevated because unobtrusive. Nor is his system of color less
+admirable. It is a quality from which the character of his subjects
+naturally withdraws much of his attention, and of which sometimes that
+character precludes any high attainment; but, nevertheless, the truest
+and happiest association of hues in sun and shade to be found in modern
+water-color art,<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a> (excepting only the studies of Hunt and De Wint)
+will be found in portions of Prout's more important works.</p>
+
+<p>147. Of his <i>peculiar</i> powers we need hardly speak; it would be
+difficult to conceive the circle of their influence widened. There is
+not a landscape of recent times in which the treatment of the
+architectural features has not been affected, however unconsciously, by
+principles which were first developed by Prout. Of those principles the
+most original was his familiarization of the sentiment, while he
+elevated the subject, of the picturesque. That character had been
+sought, before his time, either in solitude or in rusticity; it was
+supposed to belong only to the savageness of the desert or the
+simplicity of the hamlet; it lurked beneath the brows of rocks and the
+eaves of cottages; to seek it in a city would have been deemed an
+extravagance, to raise it to the height of a cathedral, an heresy. Prout
+did both, and both simultaneously; he found and proved in the busy
+shadows and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> sculptured gables of the Continental street sources of
+picturesque delight as rich and as interesting as those which had been
+sought amidst the darkness of thickets and the eminence of rocks; and he
+contrasted with the familiar circumstances of urban life, the majesty
+and the a&euml;rial elevation of the most noble architecture, expressing its
+details in more splendid accumulation, and with a more patient love than
+ever had been reached or manifested before his time by any artist who
+introduced such subjects as members of a general composition. He thus
+became the interpreter of a great period of the world's history, of that
+in which age and neglect had cast the interest of ruin over the noblest
+ecclesiastical structures of Europe, and in which there had been born at
+their feet a generation other in its feelings and thoughts than that to
+which they owed their existence, a generation which understood not their
+meaning, and regarded not their beauty, and which yet had a character of
+its own, full of vigor, animation, and originality, which rendered the
+grotesque association of the circumstances of its ordinary and active
+life with the solemn memorialism of the elder building, one which rather
+pleased by the strangeness than pained by the violence of its contrast.</p>
+
+<p>148. That generation is passing away, and another dynasty is putting
+forth its character and its laws. Care and observance, more mischievous
+in their misdirection than indifference or scorn, have in many places
+given the medi&aelig;val relics the aspect and associations of a kind of
+cabinet preservation, instead of that air of majestic independence, or
+patient and stern endurance, with which they frowned down the insult of
+the regardless crowd. Nominal restoration has done tenfold worse, and
+has hopelessly destroyed what time, and storm, and anarchy, and impiety
+had spared. The picturesque material of a lower kind is fast
+departing&mdash;and forever. There is not, so far as we know, one city scene
+in central Europe which has not suffered from some jarring point of
+modernization. The railroad and the iron wheel have done their work, and
+the characters of Venice, Flor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>ence, and Rouen are yielding day by day
+to a lifeless extension of those of Paris and Birmingham. A few lusters
+more, and the modernization will be complete: the arch&aelig;ologist may still
+find work among the wrecks of beauty, and here and there a solitary
+fragment of the old cities may exist by toleration, or rise strangely
+before the workmen who dig the new foundations, left like some isolated
+and tottering rock in the midst of sweeping sea. But the life of the
+middle ages is dying from their embers, and the warm mingling of the
+past and present will soon be forever dissolved. The works of Prout, and
+of those who have followed in his footsteps, will become memorials the
+most precious of the things that have been; to their technical value,
+however great, will be added the far higher interest of faithful and
+fond records of a strange and unreturning era of history. May he long be
+spared to us, and enabled to continue the noble series, conscious of a
+purpose and function worthy of being followed with all the zeal of even
+his most ardent and affectionate mind. A time will come when that zeal
+will be understood, and his works will be cherished with a melancholy
+gratitude when the pillars of Venice shall lie moldering in the salt
+shallows of her sea, and the stones of the goodly towers of Rouen have
+become ballast for the barges of the Seine.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>SIR JOSHUA AND HOLBEIN.<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a></h2>
+
+<p>149. Long ago discarded from our National Gallery, with the contempt
+logically due to national or English pictures,&mdash;lost to sight and memory
+for many a year in the Ogygian seclusions of Marlborough House&mdash;there
+have reappeared at last, in more honorable exile at Kensington, two
+great pictures by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Two, with others; but these alone
+worth many an entanglement among the cross-roads of the West, to see for
+half an hour by spring sunshine:&mdash;the <i>Holy Family</i>, and the <i>Graces</i>,
+side by side now in the principal room. Great, as ever was work wrought
+by man. In placid strength, and subtlest science, unsurpassed;&mdash;in sweet
+felicity, incomparable.</p>
+
+<p>150. If you truly want to know what good work of painter's hand is,
+study those two pictures from side to side, and miss no inch of them
+(you will hardly, eventually, be inclined to miss one): in some respects
+there is no execution like it; none so open in the magic. For the work
+of other great men is hidden in its wonderfulness&mdash;you cannot see how it
+was done. But in Sir Joshua's there is no mystery: it is all amazement.
+No question but that the touch was so laid; only that it <i>could</i> have
+been so laid, is a marvel forever. So also there is no painting so
+majestic in sweetness. He is lily-sceptered: his power blossoms, but
+burdens not. All other men of equal dignity paint more slowly; all
+others of equal force paint less lightly. Tintoret lays his line like a
+king marking the boundaries of conquered lands; but Sir Joshua leaves it
+as a summer wind its trace on a lake; he could have painted on a silken
+veil, where it fell free, and not bent it.</p>
+
+<p>151. Such at least is his touch when it is life that he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> paints: for
+things lifeless he has a severer hand. If you examine that picture of
+the <i>Graces</i> you will find it reverses all the ordinary ideas of
+expedient treatment. By other men flesh is firmly painted, but
+accessories lightly. Sir Joshua paints accessories firmly,<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> flesh
+lightly;&mdash;nay, flesh not at all, but spirit. The wreath of flowers he
+feels to be material; and gleam by gleam strikes fearlessly the silver
+and violet leaves out of the darkness. But the three maidens are less
+substantial than rose petals. No flushed nor frosted tissue that ever
+faded in night wind is so tender as they; no hue may reach, no line
+measure, what is in them so gracious and so fair. Let the hand move
+softly&mdash;itself as a spirit; for this is Life, of which it touches the
+imagery.</p>
+
+<p>152. "And yet&mdash;&mdash;" Yes: you do well to pause. There is a "yet" to be
+thought of. I did not bring you to these pictures to see wonderful work
+merely, or womanly beauty merely. I brought you chiefly to look at that
+Madonna, believing that you might remember other Madonnas, unlike her;
+and might think it desirable to consider wherein the difference
+lay:&mdash;other Madonnas not by Sir Joshua, who painted Madonnas but seldom.
+Who perhaps, if truth must be told, painted them never: for surely this
+dearest pet of an English girl, with the little curl of lovely hair
+under her ear, is <i>not</i> one.</p>
+
+<p>153. Why did not Sir Joshua&mdash;or could not&mdash;or would not Sir
+Joshua&mdash;paint Madonnas? neither he, nor his great rival-friend
+Gainsborough? Both of them painters of women, such as since Giorgione
+and Correggio had not been; both painters of men, such as had not been
+since Titian. How is it that these English friends can so brightly paint
+that particular order of humanity which we call "gentlemen and ladies,"
+but neither heroes, nor saints, nor angels? Can it be because they were
+both country-bred boys, and for ever<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> after strangely sensitive to
+courtliness? Why, Giotto also was a country-bred boy. Allegri's native
+Correggio, Titian's Cadore, were but hill villages; yet these men
+painted, not the court, nor the drawing-room, but the Earth: and not a
+little of Heaven besides: while our good Sir Joshua never trusts himself
+outside the park palings. He could not even have drawn the strawberry
+girl, unless she had got through a gap in them&mdash;or rather, I think, she
+must have been let in at the porter's lodge, for her strawberries are in
+a pottle, ready for the ladies at the Hall. Giorgione would have set
+them, wild and fragrant, among their leaves, in her hand. Between his
+fairness, and Sir Joshua's May-fairness, there is a strange, impassable
+limit&mdash;as of the white reef that in Pacific isles encircles their inner
+lakelets, and shuts them from the surf and sound of sea. Clear and calm
+they rest, reflecting fringed shadows of the palm-trees, and the passing
+of fretted clouds across their own sweet circle of blue sky. But beyond,
+and round and round their coral bar, lies the blue of sea and heaven
+together&mdash;blue of eternal deep.</p>
+
+<p>154. You will find it a pregnant question, if you follow it forth, and
+leading to many others, not trivial, Why it is, that in Sir Joshua's
+girl, or Gainsborough's, we always think first of the Ladyhood; but in
+Giotto's, of the Womanhood? Why, in Sir Joshua's hero, or Vandyck's, it
+is always the Prince or the Sir whom we see first; but in Titian's, the
+man.</p>
+
+<p>Not that Titian's gentlemen are less finished than Sir Joshua's; but
+their gentlemanliness<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a> is not the principal thing about them; their
+manhood absorbs, conquers, wears it as a despised thing. Nor&mdash;and this
+is another stern ground of separation&mdash;will Titian make a gentleman of
+everyone he paints. He will make him so if he is so, not otherwise; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>
+this not merely in general servitude to truth, but because in his
+sympathy with deeper humanity, the courtier is not more interesting to
+him than anyone else. "You have learned to dance and fence; you can
+speak with clearness, and think with precision; your hands are small,
+your senses acute, and your features well-shaped. Yes: I see all this in
+you, and will do it justice. You shall stand as none but a well-bred man
+could stand; and your fingers shall fall on the sword-hilt as no fingers
+could but those that knew the grasp of it. But for the rest, this grisly
+fisherman, with rusty cheek and rope-frayed hand, is a man as well as
+you, and might possibly make several of you, if souls were divisible.
+His bronze color is quite as interesting to me, Titian, as your
+paleness, and his hoary spray of stormy hair takes the light as well as
+your waving curls. Him also I will paint, with such picturesqueness as
+he may have; yet not putting the picturesqueness first in him, as in you
+I have not put the gentlemanliness first. In him I see a strong human
+creature, contending with all hardship: in you also a human creature,
+uncontending, and possibly not strong. Contention or strength, weakness
+or picturesqueness, and all other such accidents in either, shall have
+due place. But the immortality and miracle of you&mdash;this clay that burns,
+this color that changes&mdash;are in truth the awful things in both: these
+shall be first painted&mdash;and last."</p>
+
+<p>155. With which question respecting treatment of character we have to
+connect also this further one: How is it that the attempts of so great
+painters as Reynolds and Gainsborough are, beyond portraiture, limited
+almost like children's? No domestic drama&mdash;no history&mdash;no noble natural
+scenes, far less any religious subject:&mdash;only market carts; girls with
+pigs; woodmen going home to supper; watering-places; gray cart-horses in
+fields, and such like. Reynolds, indeed, once or twice touched higher
+themes,&mdash;"among the chords his fingers laid," and recoiled: wisely; for,
+strange to say, his very sensibility deserts him when he leaves his
+courtly quiet. The horror of the subjects he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> chose (Cardinal Beaufort
+and Ugolino) showed inherent apathy: had he felt deeply, he would not
+have sought for this strongest possible excitement of feeling,&mdash;would
+not willingly have dwelt on the worst conditions of despair&mdash;the despair
+of the ignoble. His religious subjects are conceived even with less care
+than these. Beautiful as it is, this Holy Family by which we stand has
+neither dignity nor sacredness, other than those which attach to every
+group of gentle mother and ruddy babe; while his Faiths, Charities, or
+other well-ordered and emblem-fitted virtues are even less lovely than
+his ordinary portraits of women.</p>
+
+<p>It was a faultful temper, which, having so mighty a power of realization
+at command, never became so much interested in any fact of human history
+as to spend one touch of heartfelt skill upon it;&mdash;which, yielding
+momentarily to indolent imagination, ended, at best, in a Puck, or a
+Thais; a Mercury as Thief, or a Cupid as Linkboy. How wide the interval
+between this gently trivial humor, guided by the wave of a feather, or
+arrested by the enchantment of a smile,&mdash;and the habitual dwelling of
+the thoughts of the great Greeks and Florentines among the beings and
+the interests of the eternal world!</p>
+
+<p>156. In some degree it may indeed be true that the modesty and sense of
+the English painters are the causes of their simple practice. All that
+they did, they did well, and attempted nothing over which conquest was
+doubtful. They knew they could paint men and women: it did not follow
+that they could paint angels. Their own gifts never appeared to them so
+great as to call for serious question as to the use to be made of them.
+"They could mix colors and catch likeness&mdash;yes; but were they therefore
+able to teach religion, or reform the world? To support themselves
+honorably, pass the hours of life happily, please their friends, and
+leave no enemies, was not this all that duty could require, or prudence
+recommend? Their own art was, it seemed, difficult enough to employ all
+their genius: was it reasonable to hope also to be poets or theologians?
+Such men had, indeed,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> existed; but the age of miracles and prophets was
+long past; nor, because they could seize the trick of an expression, or
+the turn of a head, had they any right to think themselves able to
+conceive heroes with Homer, or gods with Michael Angelo."</p>
+
+<p>157. Such was, in the main, their feeling: wise, modest, unenvious, and
+unambitious. Meaner men, their contemporaries or successors, raved of
+high art with incoherent passion; arrogated to themselves an equality
+with the masters of elder time, and declaimed against the degenerate
+tastes of a public which acknowledged not the return of the Heraclid&aelig;.
+But the two great&mdash;the two only painters of their age&mdash;happy in a
+reputation founded as deeply in the heart as in the judgment of mankind,
+demanded no higher function than that of soothing the domestic
+affections; and achieved for themselves at last an immortality not the
+less noble, because in their lifetime they had concerned themselves less
+to claim it than to bestow.</p>
+
+<p>158. Yet, while we acknowledge the discretion and simple-heartedness of
+these men, honoring them for both: and the more when we compare their
+tranquil powers with the hot egotism and hollow ambition of their
+inferiors: we have to remember, on the other hand, that the measure they
+thus set to their aims was, if a just, yet a narrow one; that amiable
+discretion is not the highest virtue; nor to please the frivolous, the
+best success. There is probably some strange weakness in the painter,
+and some fatal error in the age, when in thinking over the examples of
+their greatest work, for some type of culminating loveliness or
+veracity, we remember no expression either of religion or heroism, and
+instead of reverently naming a Madonna di San Sisto, can only whisper,
+modestly, "Mrs. Pelham feeding chickens."</p>
+
+<p>159. The nature of the fault, so far as it exists in the painters
+themselves, may perhaps best be discerned by comparing them with a man
+who went not far beyond them in his general range of effort, but who did
+all his work in a wholly different temper&mdash;Hans Holbein.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The first great difference between them is of course in completeness of
+execution. Sir Joshua's and Gainsborough's work, at its best, is only
+magnificent sketching; giving indeed, in places, a perfection of result
+unattainable by other methods, and possessing always a charm of grace
+and power exclusively its own; yet, in its slightness addressing itself,
+purposefully, to the casual glance, and common thought&mdash;eager to arrest
+the passer-by, but careless to detain him; or detaining him, if at all,
+by an unexplained enchantment, not by continuance of teaching, or
+development of idea. But the work of Holbein is true and thorough;
+accomplished, in the highest as the most literal sense, with a calm
+entireness of unaffected resolution, which sacrifices nothing, forgets
+nothing, and fears nothing.</p>
+
+<p>160. In the portrait of the Hausmann George Gyzen,<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> every accessory
+is perfect with a fine perfection: the carnations in the glass vase by
+his side&mdash;the ball of gold, chased with blue enamel, suspended on the
+wall&mdash;the books&mdash;the steelyard&mdash;the papers on the table, the seal-ring,
+with its quartered bearings,&mdash;all intensely there, and there in beauty
+of which no one could have dreamed that even flowers or gold were
+capable, far less parchment or steel. But every change of shade is felt,
+every rich and rubied line of petal followed; every subdued gleam in the
+soft blue of the enamel and bending of the gold touched with a hand
+whose patience of regard creates rather than paints. The jewel itself
+was not so precious as the rays of enduring light which form it, and
+flash from it, beneath that errorless hand. The man himself, what he
+was&mdash;not more; but to all conceivable proof of sight&mdash;in all aspect of
+life or thought&mdash;not less. He sits alone in his accustomed room, his
+common work laid out before him; he is conscious of no presence, assumes
+no dignity, bears no sudden or superficial look of care or interest,
+lives only as he lived&mdash;but forever.</p>
+
+<p>161. The time occupied in painting this portrait was probably twenty
+times greater than Sir Joshua ever spent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> on a single picture, however
+large. The result is, to the general spectator, less attractive. In some
+qualities of force and grace it is absolutely inferior. But it is
+inexhaustible. Every detail of it wins, retains, rewards the attention
+with a continually increasing sense of wonderfulness. It is also wholly
+true. So far as it reaches, it contains the absolute facts of color,
+form, and character, rendered with an unaccusable faithfulness. There is
+no question respecting things which it is best worth while to know, or
+things which it is unnecessary to state, or which might be overlooked
+with advantage. What of this man and his house were visible to Holbein,
+are visible to us: we may despise if we will; deny or doubt, we shall
+not; if we care to know anything concerning them, great or small, so
+much as may by the eye be known is forever knowable, reliable,
+indisputable.</p>
+
+<p>162. Respecting the advantage, or the contrary, of so great earnestness
+in drawing a portrait of an uncelebrated person, we raise at present no
+debate: I only wish the reader to note this quality of earnestness, as
+entirely separating Holbein from Sir Joshua,&mdash;raising him into another
+sphere of intellect. For here is no question of mere difference in style
+or in power, none of minuteness or largeness. It is a question of
+Entireness. Holbein is <i>complete</i> in intellect: what he sees, he sees
+with his whole soul: what he paints, he paints with his whole might. Sir
+Joshua sees partially, slightly, tenderly&mdash;catches the flying lights of
+things, the momentary glooms: paints also partially, tenderly, never
+with half his strength; content with uncertain visions, insecure
+delights; the truth not precious nor significant to him, only pleasing;
+falsehood also pleasurable, even useful on occasion&mdash;must, however, be
+discreetly touched, just enough to make all men noble, all women lovely:
+"we do not need this flattery often, most of those we know being such;
+and it is a pleasant world, and with diligence&mdash;for nothing can be done
+without diligence&mdash;every day till four" (says Sir Joshua)&mdash;"a painter's
+is a happy life."</p>
+
+<p>Yes: and the Isis; with her swans, and shadows of Wind<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>sor Forest, is a
+sweet stream, touching her shores softly. The Rhine at Basle is of
+another temper, stern and deep, as strong, however bright its face:
+winding far through the solemn plain, beneath the slopes of Jura, tufted
+and steep: sweeping away into its regardless calm of current the waves
+of that little brook of St. Jakob, that bathe the Swiss Thermopyl&aelig;;<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a>
+the low village nestling beneath a little bank of sloping fields&mdash;its
+spire seen white against the deep blue shadows of the Jura pines.</p>
+
+<p>163. Gazing on that scene day by day, Holbein went his own way, with the
+earnestness and silent swell of the strong river&mdash;not unconscious of the
+awe, nor of the sanctities of his life. The snows of the eternal Alps
+giving forth their strength to it; the blood of the St. Jakob brook
+poured into it as it passes by&mdash;not in vain. He also could feel his
+strength coming from white snows far off in heaven. He also bore upon
+him the purple stain of the earth sorrow. A grave man, knowing what
+steps of men keep truest time to the chanting of Death. Having grave
+friends also;&mdash;the same singing heard far off, it seems to me, or,
+perhaps, even low in the room, by that family of Sir Thomas More; or
+mingling with the hum of bees in the meadows outside the towered wall of
+Basle; or making the words of the book more tunable, which meditative
+Erasmus looks upon. Nay, that same soft Death-music is on the lips even
+of Holbein's Madonna. Who, among many, is the Virgin you had best
+compare with the one before whose image we have stood so long.</p>
+
+<p>Holbein's is at Dresden, companioned by the Madonna di San Sisto; but
+both are visible enough to you here, for, by a strange coincidence, they
+are (at least so far as I know) the only two great pictures in the world
+which have been faultlessly engraved.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>164. The received tradition respecting the Holbein Madonna is beautiful;
+and I believe the interpretation to be true. A father and mother have
+prayed to her for the life of their sick child. She appears to them, her
+own Christ in her arms. She puts down her Christ beside them&mdash;takes
+their child into her arms instead. It lies down upon her bosom, and
+stretches its hand to its father and mother, saying farewell.</p>
+
+<p>This interpretation of the picture has been doubted, as nearly all the
+most precious truths of pictures have been doubted, and forgotten. But
+even supposing it erroneous, the design is not less characteristic of
+Holbein. For that there are signs of suffering on the features of the
+child in the arms of the Virgin, is beyond question; and if this child
+be intended for the Christ, it would not be doubtful to my mind, that,
+of the two&mdash;Raphael and Holbein&mdash;the latter had given the truest aspect
+and deepest reading of the early life of the Redeemer. Raphael sought to
+express His power only; but Holbein His labor and sorrow.</p>
+
+<p>165. There are two other pictures which you should remember together
+with this (attributed, indeed, but with no semblance of probability, to
+the elder Holbein, none of whose work, preserved at Basle, or elsewhere,
+approaches in the slightest degree to their power), the St. Barbara and
+St. Elizabeth.<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a> I do not know among the pictures of the great sacred
+schools any at once so powerful, so simple, so pathetically expressive
+of the need of the heart that conceived them. Not ascetic, nor quaint,
+nor feverishly or fondly passionate, nor wrapt in withdrawn solemnities
+of thought. Only entirely true&mdash;entirely pure. No depth of glowing
+heaven beyond them&mdash;but the clear sharp sweetness of the northern air:
+no splendor of rich color, striving to adorn them with better brightness
+than of the day: a gray glory, as of moonlight without mist, dwelling on
+face and fold of dress;&mdash;all faultless-fair. Creatures they are, humble
+by nature,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> not by self-condemnation; merciful by habit, not by tearful
+impulse; lofty without consciousness; gentle without weakness; wholly in
+this present world, doing its work calmly; beautiful with all that
+holiest life can reach&mdash;yet already freed from all that holiest death
+can cast away.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2>ART.</h2>
+
+<h2>II.</h2>
+
+<h3>PRE-RAPHAELITISM.</h3>
+
+<h3>ITS PRINCIPLES, AND TURNER.</h3>
+
+<p class="center">(<i>Pamphlet</i>, 1851.)</p>
+
+<h3>ITS THREE COLORS.</h3>
+
+<p class="center">(<i>Nineteenth Century, Nov.-Dec. 1878.</i>)<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE"></a>PREFACE.</h2>
+
+
+<blockquote><p><i>Eight years ago, in the close of the first volume of "Modern Painters,"
+I ventured to give the following advice to the young artists of
+England:&mdash;</i></p>
+
+<p><i>"They should go to nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her
+laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to
+penetrate her meaning; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and
+scorning nothing." Advice which, whether bad or good, involved infinite
+labor and humiliation in the following it, and was therefore, for the
+most part, rejected.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>It has, however, at last been carried out, to the very letter, by a
+group of men who, for their reward, have been assailed with the most
+scurrilous abuse which I ever recollect seeing issue from the public
+press. I have, therefore, thought it due to them to contradict the
+directly false statements which have been made respecting their works;
+and to point out the kind of merit which, however deficient in some
+respects, those works possess beyond the possibility of dispute.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Denmark Hill, August, 1851.</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span></p>
+</blockquote>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="PRE-RAPHAELITISM28" id="PRE-RAPHAELITISM28"></a>PRE-RAPHAELITISM.<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>166. It may be proved, with much certainty, that God intends no man to
+live in this world without working: but it seems to me no less evident
+that He intends every man to be happy in his work. It is written, "in
+the sweat of thy brow," but it was never written, "in the breaking of
+thine heart," thou shalt eat bread: and I find that, as on the one hand,
+infinite misery is caused by idle people, who both fail in doing what
+was appointed for them to do, and set in motion various springs of
+mischief in matters in which they should have had no concern, so on the
+other hand, no small misery is caused by overworked and unhappy people,
+in the dark views which they necessarily take up themselves, and force
+upon others, of work itself. Were it not so, I believe the fact of their
+being unhappy is in itself a violation of divine law, and a sign of some
+kind of folly or sin in their way of life. Now in order that people may
+be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit
+for it: They must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense of
+success in it&mdash;not a doubtful sense, such as needs some testimony of
+other people for its confirmation, but a sure sense, or rather
+knowledge, that so much work has been done well, and fruitfully done,
+whatever the world may say or think about it. So that in order that a
+man may be happy, it is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> necessary that he should not only be capable of
+his work, but a good judge of his work.</p>
+
+<p>167. The first thing then that he has to do, if unhappily his parents or
+masters have not done it for him, is to find out what he is fit for. In
+which inquiry a man may be safely guided by his likings, if he be not
+also guided by his pride. People usually reason in some such fashion as
+this: "I don't seem quite fit for a head-manager in the firm of &mdash;&mdash; &amp;
+Co., therefore, in all probability, I am fit to be Chancellor of the
+Exchequer." Whereas, they ought rather to reason thus: "I don't seem
+quite fit to be head-manager in the firm of &mdash;&mdash; &amp; Co., but I dare say I
+might do something in a small green-grocery business; I used to be a
+good judge of pease;" that is to say, always trying lower instead of
+trying higher, until they find bottom: once well set on the ground, a
+man may build up by degrees, safely, instead of disturbing everyone in
+his neighborhood by perpetual catastrophes. But this kind of humility is
+rendered especially difficult in these days, by the contumely thrown on
+men in humble employments. The very removal of the massy bars which once
+separated one class of society from another, has rendered it tenfold
+more shameful in foolish people's, <i>i.e.</i>, in most people's eyes, to
+remain in the lower grades of it, than ever it was before. When a man
+born of an artisan was looked upon as an entirely different species of
+animal from a man born of a noble, it made him no more uncomfortable or
+ashamed to remain that different species of animal, than it makes a
+horse ashamed to remain a horse, and not to become a giraffe. But now
+that a man may make money, and rise in the world, and associate himself,
+unreproached, with people once far above him, not only is the natural
+discontentedness of humanity developed to an unheard-of extent, whatever
+a man's position, but it becomes a veritable shame to him to remain in
+the state he was born in, and everybody thinks it his <i>duty</i> to try to
+be a "gentleman." Persons who have any influence in the management of
+public institutions for charitable education know how common this
+feeling has become.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> Hardly a day passes but they receive letters from
+mothers who want all their six or eight sons to go to college, and make
+the grand tour in the long vacation, and who think there is something
+wrong in the foundations of society because this is not possible. Out of
+every ten letters of this kind, nine will allege, as the reason of the
+writers' importunity, their desire to keep their families in such and
+such a "station of life."<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a> There is no real desire for the safety,
+the discipline, or the moral good of the children, only a panic horror
+of the inexpressibly pitiable calamity of their living a ledge or two
+lower on the molehill of the world&mdash;a calamity to be averted at any cost
+whatever, of struggle, anxiety, and shortening of life itself. I do not
+believe that any greater good could be achieved for the country, than
+the change in public feeling on this head, which might be brought about
+by a few benevolent men, undeniably in the class of "gentlemen," who
+would, on principle, enter into some of our commonest trades, and make
+them honorable; showing that it was possible for a man to retain his
+dignity, and remain, in the best sense, a gentleman, though part of his
+time was every day occupied in manual labor, or even in serving
+customers over a counter. I do not in the least see why courtesy, and
+gravity, and sympathy with the feelings of others, and courage, and
+truth, and piety, and what else goes to make up a gentleman's character,
+should not be found behind a counter as well as elsewhere, if they were
+demanded, or even hoped for, there.</p>
+
+<p>168. Let us suppose, then, that the man's way of life, and manner of
+work have been discreetly chosen; then the next thing to be required is,
+that he do not overwork himself therein. I am not going to say anything
+here about the various errors in our systems of society and commerce,
+which appear (I am not sure if they ever do more than appear) to force
+us to overwork ourselves merely that we may live; nor about the still
+more fruitful cause of unhealthy toil&mdash;the incapability, in many men, of
+being content with the little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> that is indeed necessary to their
+happiness. I have only a word or two to say about one special cause of
+overwork&mdash;the ambitious desire of doing great or clever things, and the
+hope of accomplishing them by immense efforts: hope as vain as it is
+pernicious; not only making men overwork themselves, but rendering all
+the work they do unwholesome to them. I say it is a vain hope, and let
+the reader be assured of this (it is a truth all-important to the best
+interests of humanity). <i>No great intellectual thing was ever done by
+great effort</i>; a great thing can only be done by a great man, and he
+does it <i>without</i> effort. Nothing is, at present, less understood by us
+than this&mdash;nothing is more necessary to be understood. Let me try to say
+it as clearly, and explain it as fully as I may.</p>
+
+<p>169. I have said no great <i>intellectual</i> thing: for I do not mean the
+assertion to extend to things moral. On the contrary, it seems to me
+that just because we are intended, as long as we live, to be in a state
+of intense moral effort, we are <i>not</i> intended to be in intense physical
+or intellectual effort. Our full energies are to be given to the soul's
+work&mdash;to the great fight with the Dragon&mdash;the taking the kingdom of
+heaven by force. But the body's work and head's work are to be done
+quietly, and comparatively without effort. Neither limbs nor brain are
+ever to be strained to their utmost; that is not the way in which the
+greatest quantity of work is to be got out of them: they are never to be
+worked furiously, but with tranquillity and constancy. We are to follow
+the plow from sunrise to sunset, but not to pull in race-boats at the
+twilight: we shall get no fruit of that kind of work, only disease of
+the heart.</p>
+
+<p>170. How many pangs would be spared to thousands, if this great truth
+and law were but once sincerely, humbly understood&mdash;that if a great
+thing can be done at all, it can be done easily; that, when it is needed
+to be done, there is perhaps only one man in the world who can do it;
+but <i>he</i> can do it without any trouble&mdash;without more trouble, that is,
+than it costs small people to do small things; nay, perhaps, with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> less.
+And yet what truth lies more openly on the surface of all human
+phenomena? Is not the evidence of Ease on the very front of all the
+greatest works in existence? Do they not say plainly to us, not, "there
+has been a great <i>effort</i> here," but, "there has been a great <i>power</i>
+here"? It is not the weariness of mortality, but the strength of
+divinity, which we have to recognize in all mighty things; and that is
+just what we now <i>never</i> recognize, but think that we are to do great
+things, by help of iron bars and perspiration:&mdash;alas! we shall do
+nothing that way but lose some pounds of our own weight.</p>
+
+<p>171. Yet let me not be misunderstood, nor this great truth be supposed
+anywise resolvable into the favorite dogma of young men, that they need
+not work if they have genius. The fact is that a man of genius is always
+far more ready to work than other people, and gets so much more good
+from the work that he does, and is often so little conscious of the
+inherent divinity in himself, that he is very apt to ascribe all his
+capacity to his work, and to tell those who ask how he came to be what
+he is: "If I <i>am</i> anything, which I much doubt, I made myself so merely
+by labor." This was Newton's way of talking, and I suppose it would be
+the general tone of men whose genius had been devoted to the physical
+sciences. Genius in the Arts must commonly be more self-conscious, but
+in whatever field, it will always be distinguished by its perpetual,
+steady, well-directed, happy, and faithful labor in accumulating and
+disciplining its powers, as well as by its gigantic, incommunicable
+facility in exercising them. Therefore, literally, it is no man's
+business whether he has genius or not: work he must, whatever he is, but
+quietly and steadily; and the natural and unforced results of such work
+will be always the things that God meant him to do, and will be his
+best. No agonies nor heart-rendings will enable him to do any better. If
+he be a great man, they will be great things; if a small man, small
+things; but always, if thus peacefully done, good and right; always, if
+restlessly and ambitiously done, false, hollow, and despicable.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>172. Then the third thing needed was, I said, that a man should be a
+good judge of his work; and this chiefly that he may not be dependent
+upon popular opinion for the manner of doing it, but also that he may
+have the just encouragement of the sense of progress, and an honest
+consciousness of victory; how else can he become</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">"That awful independent on to-morrow,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">Whose yesterdays look backwards with a smile "?</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>I am persuaded that the real nourishment and help of such a feeling as
+this is nearly unknown to half the workmen of the present day. For
+whatever appearance of self-complacency there may be in their outward
+bearing, it is visible enough, by their feverish jealousy of each other,
+how little confidence they have in the sterling value of their several
+doings. Conceit may puff a man up, but never prop him up; and there is
+too visible distress and hopelessness in men's aspects to admit of the
+supposition that they have any stable support of faith in themselves.</p>
+
+<p>173. I have stated these principles generally, because there is no
+branch of labor to which they do not apply: but there is one in which
+our ignorance or forgetfulness of them has caused an incalculable amount
+of suffering; and I would endeavor now to reconsider them with special
+reference to it&mdash;the branch of the Arts.</p>
+
+<p>In general, the men who are employed in the Arts have freely chosen
+their profession, and suppose themselves to have special faculty for it;
+yet, as a body, they are not happy men. For which this seems to me the
+reason&mdash;that they are expected, and themselves expect, to make their
+bread <i>by being clever</i>&mdash;not by steady or quiet work; and are therefore,
+for the most part, trying to be clever, and so living in an utterly
+false state of mind and action.</p>
+
+<p>174. This is the case, to the same extent, in no other profession or
+employment. A lawyer may indeed suspect that, unless he has more wit
+than those around him, he is not likely to advance in his profession;
+but he will not be always<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> thinking how he is to display his wit. He
+will generally understand, early in his career, that wit must be left to
+take care of itself, and that it is hard knowledge of law and vigorous
+examination and collation of the facts of every case intrusted to him,
+which his clients will mainly demand: this it is which he is to be paid
+for; and this is healthy and measurable labor, payable by the hour. If
+he happen to have keen natural perception and quick wit, these will come
+into play in their due time and place, but he will not think of them as
+his chief power; and if he have them not, he may still hope that
+industry and conscientiousness may enable him to rise in his profession
+without them. Again in the case of clergymen: that they are sorely
+tempted to display their eloquence or wit, none who know their own
+hearts will deny, but then they <i>know</i> this to <i>be</i> a temptation: they
+never would suppose that cleverness was all that was to be expected from
+them, or would sit down deliberately to write a clever sermon: even the
+dullest or vainest of them would throw some veil over their vanity, and
+pretend to some profitableness of purpose in what they did. They would
+not openly ask of their hearers&mdash;Did you think my sermon ingenious, or
+my language poetical? They would early understand that they were not
+paid for being ingenious, nor called to be so, but to preach truth; that
+if they happened to possess wit, eloquence, or originality, these would
+appear and be of service in due time, but were not to be continually
+sought after or exhibited; and if it should happen that they had them
+not, they might still be serviceable pastors without them.</p>
+
+<p>175. Not so with the unhappy artist. No one expects any honest or useful
+work of him; but everyone expects him to be ingenious. Originality,
+dexterity, invention, imagination, everything is asked of him except
+what alone is to be had for asking&mdash;honesty and sound work, and the due
+discharge of his function as a painter. What function? asks the reader
+in some surprise. He may well ask; for I suppose few painters have any
+idea what their function is, or even that they have any at all.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>176. And yet surely it is not so difficult to discover. The faculties,
+which when a man finds in himself, he resolves to be a painter, are, I
+suppose, intenseness of observation and facility of imitation. The man
+is created an observer and an imitator; and his function is to convey
+knowledge to his fellow-men, of such things as cannot be taught
+otherwise than ocularly. For a long time this function remained a
+religious one: it was to impress upon the popular mind the reality of
+the objects of faith, and the truth of the histories of Scripture, by
+giving visible form to both. That function has now passed away, and none
+has as yet taken its place. The painter has no profession, no purpose.
+He is an idler on the earth, chasing the shadows of his own fancies.</p>
+
+<p>177. But he was never meant to be this. The sudden and universal
+Naturalism, or inclination to copy ordinary natural objects, which
+manifested itself among the painters of Europe, at the moment when the
+invention of printing superseded their legendary labors, was no false
+instinct. It was misunderstood and misapplied, but it came at the right
+time, and has maintained itself through all kinds of abuse; presenting,
+in the recent schools of landscape, perhaps only the first fruits of its
+power. That instinct was urging every painter in Europe at the same
+moment to his true duty&mdash;<i>the faithful representation of all objects of
+historical interest, or of natural beauty existent at the period</i>;
+representation such as might at once aid the advance of the sciences,
+and keep faithful record of every monument of past ages which was likely
+to be swept away in the approaching eras of revolutionary change.</p>
+
+<p>178. The instinct came, as I said, exactly at the right moment; and let
+the reader consider what amount and kind of general knowledge might by
+this time have been possessed by the nations of Europe, had their
+painters understood and obeyed it. Suppose that, after disciplining
+themselves so as to be able to draw, with unerring precision, each the
+particular kind of subject in which he most delighted, they had
+separated into two great armies of historians and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> naturalists;&mdash;that
+the first had painted with absolute faithfulness every edifice, every
+city, every battlefield, every scene of the slightest historical
+interest, precisely and completely rendering their aspect at the time;
+and that their companions, according to their several powers, had
+painted with like fidelity the plants and animals, the natural scenery,
+and the atmospheric phenomena of every country on the earth&mdash;suppose
+that a faithful and complete record were now in our museums of every
+building destroyed by war, or time, or innovation, during these last 200
+years&mdash;suppose that each recess of every mountain chain of Europe had
+been penetrated, and its rocks drawn with such accuracy that the
+geologist's diagram was no longer necessary&mdash;suppose that every tree of
+the forest had been drawn in its noblest aspect, every beast of the
+field in its savage life&mdash;that all these gatherings were already in our
+national galleries, and that the painters of the present day were
+laboring, happily and earnestly, to multiply them, and put such means of
+knowledge more and more within reach of the common people&mdash;would not
+that be a more honorable life for them, than gaining precarious bread by
+"bright effects"? They think not, perhaps. They think it easy, and
+therefore contemptible, to be truthful; they have been taught so all
+their lives. But it is not so, whoever taught it them. It is most
+difficult, and worthy of the greatest men's greatest effort, to render,
+as it should be rendered, the simplest of the natural features of the
+earth; but also be it remembered, no man is confined to the simplest;
+each may look out work for himself where he chooses, and it will be
+strange if he cannot find something hard enough for him. The excuse is,
+however, one of the lips only; for every painter knows, that when he
+draws back from the attempt to render nature as she is, it is oftener in
+cowardice than in disdain.</p>
+
+<p>179. I must leave the reader to pursue this subject for himself; I have
+not space to suggest to him the tenth part of the advantages which would
+follow, both to the painter from such an understanding of his mission,
+and to the whole people,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> in the results of his labor. Consider how the
+man himself would be elevated; how content he would become, how earnest,
+how full of all accurate and noble knowledge, how free from
+envy&mdash;knowing creation to be infinite, feeling at once the value of what
+he did, and yet the nothingness. Consider the advantage to the people:
+the immeasurably larger interest given to art itself; the easy,
+pleasurable, and perfect knowledge conveyed by it, in every subject; the
+far greater number of men who might be healthily and profitably occupied
+with it as a means of livelihood; the useful direction of myriads of
+inferior talents now left fading away in misery. Conceive all this, and
+then look around at our exhibitions, and behold the "cattle pieces," and
+"sea pieces," and "fruit pieces," and "family pieces"; the eternal brown
+cows in ditches, and white sails in squalls, and sliced lemons in
+saucers, and foolish faces in simpers;&mdash;and try to feel what we are, and
+what we might have been.</p>
+
+<p>180. Take a single instance in one branch of arch&aelig;ology. Let those who
+are interested in the history of Religion consider what a treasure we
+should now have possessed, if, instead of painting pots, and vegetables,
+and drunken peasantry, the most accurate painters of the seventeenth and
+eighteenth centuries had been set to copy, line for line, the religious
+and domestic sculpture on the German, Flemish, and French cathedrals and
+castles; and if every building destroyed in the French or in any other
+subsequent revolution, had thus been drawn in all its parts with the
+same precision with which Gerard Dow or Mieris paint bas-reliefs of
+Cupids. Consider, even now, what incalculable treasure is still left in
+ancient bas-reliefs, full of every kind of legendary interest, of subtle
+expression, of priceless evidence as to the character, feelings, habits,
+histories, of past generations, in neglected and shattered churches and
+domestic buildings, rapidly disappearing over the whole of
+Europe&mdash;treasure which, once lost, the labor of all men living cannot
+bring back again; and then look at the myriads of men, with skill
+enough, if they had but the commonest schooling, to record all this
+faith<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>fully, who are making their bread by drawing dances of naked women
+from academy models, or idealities of chivalry fitted out with Wardour
+Street armor, or eternal scenes from Gil Blas, Don Quixote, and the
+Vicar of Wakefield, or mountain sceneries with young idiots of Londoners
+wearing Highland bonnets and brandishing rifles in the foregrounds. Do
+but think of these things in the breadth of their inexpressible
+imbecility, and then go and stand before that broken bas-relief in the
+southern gate of Lincoln Cathedral, and see if there is no fiber of the
+heart in you that will break too.</p>
+
+<p>181. But is there to be no place left, it will be indignantly asked, for
+imagination and invention, for poetical power, or love of ideal beauty?
+Yes, the highest, the noblest place&mdash;that which these only can attain
+when they are all used in the cause, and with the aid of truth. Wherever
+imagination and sentiment are, they will either show themselves without
+forcing, or, if capable of artificial development, the kind of training
+which such a school of art would give them would be the best they could
+receive. The infinite absurdity and failure of our present training
+consists mainly in this, that we do not rank imagination and invention
+high enough, and suppose that they <i>can</i> be taught. Throughout every
+sentence that I ever have written, the reader will find the same rank
+attributed to these powers&mdash;the rank of a purely divine gift, not to be
+attained, increased, or in anywise modified by teaching, only in various
+ways capable of being concealed or quenched. Understand this thoroughly;
+know once for all, that a poet on canvas is exactly the same species of
+creature as a poet in song, and nearly every error in our methods of
+teaching will be done away with. For who among us now thinks of bringing
+men up to be poets?&mdash;of producing poets by any kind of general recipe or
+method of cultivation? Suppose even that we see in a youth that which we
+hope may, in its development, become a power of this kind, should we
+instantly, supposing that we wanted to make a poet of him, and nothing
+else, forbid him all quiet, steady, rational labor? Should we force him
+to perpetual spinning of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> new crudities out of his boyish brain, and set
+before him, as the only objects of his study, the laws of versification
+which criticism has supposed itself to discover in the works of previous
+writers? Whatever gifts the boy had, would much be likely to come of
+them so treated? unless, indeed, they were so great as to break through
+all such snares of falsehood and vanity, and build their own foundation
+in spite of us; whereas if, as in cases numbering millions against
+units, the natural gifts were too weak to do this, could anything come
+of such training but utter inanity and spuriousness of the whole man?
+But if we had sense, should we not rather restrain and bridle the first
+flame of invention in early youth, heaping material on it as one would
+on the first sparks and tongues of a fire which we desired to feed into
+greatness? Should we not educate the whole intellect into general
+strength, and all the affections into warmth and honesty, and look to
+heaven for the rest? This, I say, we should have sense enough to do, in
+order to produce a poet in words: but, it being required to produce a
+poet on canvas, what is our way of setting to work? We begin, in all
+probability, by telling the youth of fifteen or sixteen, that Nature is
+full of faults, and that he is to improve her; but that Raphael is
+perfection, and that the more he copies Raphael the better; that after
+much copying of Raphael, he is to try what he can do himself in a
+Raphaelesque, but yet original manner: that is to say, he is to try to
+do something very clever, all out of his own head, but yet this clever
+something is to be properly subjected to Raphaelesque rules, is to have
+a principal light occupying one-seventh of its space, and a principal
+shadow occupying one-third of the same; that no two people's heads in
+the picture are to be turned the same way, and that all the personages
+represented are to possess ideal beauty of the highest order, which
+ideal beauty consists partly in a Greek outline of nose, partly in
+proportions expressible in decimal fractions between the lips and chin;
+but mostly in that degree of improvement which the youth of sixteen is
+to bestow upon God's work in general. This I say is the kind of teaching
+which through various<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> channels, Royal Academy lecturings, press
+criticisms, public enthusiasm, and not least by solid weight of gold, we
+give to our young men. And we wonder we have no painters!</p>
+
+<p>182. But we do worse than this. Within the last few years some sense of
+the real tendency of such teaching has appeared in some of our younger
+painters. It only <i>could</i> appear in the younger ones, our older men
+having become familiarized with the false system, or else having passed
+through it and forgotten it, not well knowing the degree of harm they
+had sustained. This sense appeared, among our
+youths,&mdash;increased,&mdash;matured into resolute action. Necessarily, to exist
+at all, it needed the support both of strong instincts and of
+considerable self-confidence, otherwise it must at once have been borne
+down by the weight of general authority and received canon law. Strong
+instincts are apt to make men strange and rude; self-confidence, however
+well founded, to give much of what they do or say the appearance of
+impertinence. Look at the self-confidence of Wordsworth, stiffening
+every other sentence of his prefaces into defiance; there is no more of
+it than was needed to enable him to do his work, yet it is not a little
+ungraceful here and there. Suppose this stubbornness and self-trust in a
+youth, laboring in an art of which the executive part is confessedly to
+be best learnt from masters, and we shall hardly wonder that much of his
+work has a certain awkwardness and stiffness in it, or that he should be
+regarded with disfavor by many, even the most temperate, of the judges
+trained in the system he was breaking through, and with utter contempt
+and reprobation by the envious and the dull. Consider, further, that the
+particular system to be overthrown was, in the present case, one of
+which the main characteristic was the pursuit of beauty at the expense
+of manliness and truth; and it will seem likely <i>&agrave; priori</i>, that the men
+intended successfully to resist the influence of such a system should be
+endowed with little natural sense of beauty, and thus rendered dead to
+the temptation it presented. Summing up these con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>ditions, there is
+surely little cause for surprise that pictures painted, in a temper of
+resistance, by exceedingly young men, of stubborn instincts and positive
+self-trust, and with little natural perception of beauty, should not be
+calculated, at the first glance, to win us from works enriched by
+plagiarism, polished by convention, invested with all the attractiveness
+of artificial grace, and recommended to our respect by established
+authority.</p>
+
+<p>183. We should, however, on the other hand, have anticipated, that in
+proportion to the strength of character required for the effort, and to
+the absence of distracting sentiments, whether respect for precedent, or
+affection for ideal beauty, would be the energy exhibited in the pursuit
+of the special objects which the youths proposed to themselves, and
+their success in attaining them.</p>
+
+<p>All this has actually been the case, but in a degree which it would have
+been impossible to anticipate. That two youths, of the respective ages
+of eighteen and twenty, should have conceived for themselves a totally
+independent and sincere method of study, and enthusiastically persevered
+in it against every kind of dissuasion and opposition, is strange
+enough; that in the third or fourth year of their efforts they should
+have produced works in many parts not inferior to the best of Albert
+D&uuml;rer, this is perhaps not less strange. But the loudness and
+universality of the howl which the common critics of the press have
+raised against them, the utter absence of all generous help or
+encouragement from those who can both measure their toil and appreciate
+their success, and the shrill, shallow laughter of those who can do
+neither the one nor the other&mdash;these are strangest of all&mdash;unimaginable
+unless they had been experienced.</p>
+
+<p>184. And as if these were not enough, private malice is at work against
+them, in its own small, slimy way. The very day after I had written my
+second letter to the "Times" in the defense of the Pre-Raphaelites,<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a>
+I received an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> anonymous letter respecting one of them, from some person
+apparently hardly capable of spelling, and about as vile a specimen of
+petty malignity as ever blotted paper. I think it well that the public
+should know this, and so get some insight into the sources of the spirit
+which is at work against these men: how first roused it is difficult to
+say, for one would hardly have thought that mere eccentricity in young
+artists could have excited an hostility so determined and so cruel;
+hostility which hesitated at no assertion, however impudent. That of the
+"absence of perspective" was one of the most curious pieces of the hue
+and cry which began with the "Times," and died away in feeble maundering
+in the Art Union; I contradicted it in the "Times"&mdash;I here contradict it
+directly for the second time. There was not a single error in
+perspective in three out of the four pictures in question. But if
+otherwise, would it have been anything remarkable in them? I doubt if,
+with the exception of the pictures of David Roberts, there were one
+architectural drawing in perspective on the walls of the Academy; I
+never met but with two men in my life who knew enough of perspective to
+draw a Gothic arch in a retiring plane, so that its lateral dimensions
+and curvatures might be calculated to scale from the drawing. Our
+architects certainly do not, and it was but the other day that, talking
+to one of the most distinguished among them, the author of several most
+valuable works, I found he actually did not know how to draw a circle in
+perspective. And in this state of general science our writers for the
+press take it upon them to tell us, that the forest-trees in Mr. Hunt's
+<i>Sylvia</i>, and the bunches of lilies in Mr. Collins's <i>Convent Thoughts</i>,
+are out of perspective.<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>185. It might not, I think, in such circumstances, have been ungraceful
+or unwise in the Academicians themselves to have defended their young
+pupils, at least by the contradiction of statements directly false
+respecting them,<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a> and the direction of the mind and sight of the
+public to such real merit as they possess. If Sir Charles Eastlake,
+Mulready, Edwin and Charles Landseer, Cope, and Dyce would each of them
+simply state their own private opinion respecting their paintings, sign
+it, and publish it, I believe the act would be of more service to
+English art than anything the Academy has done since it was founded. But
+as I cannot hope for this, I can only ask the public to give their
+pictures careful examination, and to look at them at once with the
+indulgence and the respect which I have endeavored to show they deserve.</p>
+
+<p>Yet let me not be misunderstood. I have adduced them only as examples of
+the kind of study which I would desire to see substituted for that of
+our modern schools, and of singular success in certain characters,
+finish of detail, and brilliancy of color. What faculties, higher than
+imitative, may be in these men, I do not yet venture to say; but I do
+say, that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> if they exist, such faculties will manifest themselves in due
+time all the more forcibly because they have received training so
+severe.</p>
+
+<p>186. For it is always to be remembered that no one mind is like another,
+either in its powers or perceptions; and while the main principles of
+training must be the same for all, the result in each will be as various
+as the kinds of truth which each will apprehend; therefore, also, the
+modes of effort, even in men whose inner principles and final aims are
+exactly the same. Suppose, for instance, two men, equally honest,
+equally industrious, equally impressed with a humble desire to render
+some part of what they saw in nature faithfully; and, otherwise, trained
+in convictions such as I have above endeavored to induce. But one of
+them is quiet in temperament, has a feeble memory, no invention, and
+excessively keen sight. The other is impatient in temperament, has a
+memory which nothing escapes, an invention which never rests, and is
+comparatively near-sighted.</p>
+
+<p>187. Set them both free in the same field in a mountain valley. One sees
+everything, small and large, with almost the same clearness; mountains
+and grasshoppers alike; the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> leaves on the branches, the veins in the
+pebbles, the bubbles in the stream; but he can remember nothing, and
+invent nothing. Patiently he sets himself to his mighty task; abandoning
+at once all thoughts of seizing transient effects, or giving general
+impressions of that which his eyes present to him in microscopical
+dissection, he chooses some small portion out of the infinite scene, and
+calculates with courage the number of weeks which must elapse before he
+can do justice to the intensity of his perceptions, or the fullness of
+matter in his subject.</p>
+
+<p>188. Meantime, the other has been watching the change of the clouds, and
+the march of the light along the mountain sides; he beholds the entire
+scene in broad, soft masses of true gradation, and the very feebleness
+of his sight is in some sort an advantage to him, in making him more
+sensible of the a&euml;rial mystery of distance, and hiding from him the
+multitudes of circumstances which it would have been impossible for him
+to represent. But there is not one change in the casting of the jagged
+shadows along the hollows of the hills, but it is fixed on his mind
+forever; not a flake of spray has broken from the sea of cloud about
+their bases, but he has watched it as it melts away, and could recall it
+to its lost place in heaven by the slightest effort of his thoughts. Not
+only so, but thousands and thousands of such images, of older scenes,
+remain congregated in his mind, each mingling in new associations with
+those now visibly passing before him, and these again confused with
+other images of his own ceaseless, sleepless imagination, flashing by in
+sudden troops. Fancy how his paper will be covered with stray symbols
+and blots, and undecipherable shorthand:&mdash;as for his sitting down to
+"draw from Nature," there was not one of the things which he wished to
+represent, that stayed for so much as five seconds together: but none of
+them escaped for all that: they are sealed up in that strange storehouse
+of his; he may take one of them out perhaps, this day twenty years, and
+paint it in his dark room, far away. Now, observe, you may tell both of
+these men, when they are young, that they are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> to be honest, that they
+have an important function, and that they are not to care what Raphael
+did. This you may wholesomely impress on them both. But fancy the
+exquisite absurdity of expecting either of them to possess any of the
+qualities of the other.</p>
+
+<p>189. I have supposed the feebleness of sight in the last, and of
+invention in the first painter, that the contrast between them might be
+more striking; but, with very slight modification, both the characters
+are real. Grant to the first considerable inventive power, with
+exquisite sense of color; and give to the second, in addition to all his
+other faculties, the eye of an eagle; and the first is John Everett
+Millais, the second Joseph Mallard William Turner.</p>
+
+<p>They are among the few men who have defied all false teaching, and have
+therefore, in great measure, done justice to the gifts with which they
+were intrusted. They stand at opposite poles, marking culminating points
+of art in both directions; between them, or in various relations to
+them, we may class five or six more living artists who, in like manner,
+have done justice to their powers. I trust that I may be pardoned for
+naming them, in order that the reader may know how the strong innate
+genius in each has been invariably accompanied with the same humility,
+earnestness, and industry in study.</p>
+
+<p>190. It is hardly necessary to point out the earnestness or humility in
+the works of William Hunt; but it may be so to suggest the high value
+they possess as records of English rural life, and <i>still</i> life. Who is
+there who for a moment could contend with him in the unaffected, yet
+humorous truth with which he has painted our peasant children? Who is
+there who does not sympathize with him in the simple love with which he
+dwells on the brightness and bloom of our summer fruit and flowers? And
+yet there is something to be regretted concerning him: why should he be
+allowed continually to paint the same bunches of hot-house grapes, and
+supply to the Water Color Society a succession of pine-apples with the
+regularity of a Covent Garden fruiterer?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> He has of late discovered that
+primrose banks are lovely, but there are other things grow wild besides
+primroses: what undreamt-of loveliness might he not bring back to us, if
+he would lose himself for a summer in Highland foregrounds; if he would
+paint the heather as it grows, and the foxglove and the harebell as they
+nestle in the clefts of the rocks, and the mosses and bright lichens of
+the rocks themselves. And then, cross to the Jura, and bring back a
+piece of Jura pasture in spring; with the gentians in their earliest
+blue, and a soldanelle beside the fading snow! And return again, and
+paint a gray wall of alpine crag, with budding roses crowning it like a
+wreath of rubies. That is what he was meant to do in this world; not to
+paint bouquets in china vases.</p>
+
+<p>191. I have in various other places expressed my sincere respect for the
+works of Samuel Prout: his shortness of sight has necessarily prevented
+their possessing delicacy of finish or fullness of minor detail; but I
+think that those of no other living artist furnish an example so
+striking of innate and special instinct, sent to do a particular work at
+the exact and only period when it was possible. At the instant when
+peace had been established all over Europe, but when neither national
+character nor national architecture had as yet been seriously changed by
+promiscuous intercourse or modern "improvement"; when, however, nearly
+every ancient and beautiful building had been long left in a state of
+comparative neglect, so that its aspect of partial ruinousness, and of
+separation from recent active life, gave to every edifice a peculiar
+interest&mdash;half sorrowful, half sublime;&mdash;at that moment Prout was
+trained among the rough rocks and simple cottages of Cornwall, until his
+eye was accustomed to follow with delight the rents and breaks, and
+irregularities which, to another man, would have been offensive; and
+then, gifted with infinite readiness in composition, but also with
+infinite affection for the kind of subjects he had to portray, he was
+sent to preserve, in an almost innumerable series of drawings, <i>every
+one made on the spot</i>, the aspect borne, at the beginning of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> the
+nineteenth century, by cities which, in a few years more, re-kindled
+wars, or unexpected prosperities, were to ravage, or renovate, into
+nothingness.<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a></p>
+
+<p>192. It seems strange to pass from Prout to John Lewis; but there is
+this fellowship between them, that both seem to have been intended to
+appreciate the characters of foreign countries more than of their own,
+nay, to have been born in England chiefly that the excitement of
+strangeness might enhance to them the interest of the scenes they had to
+represent. I believe John Lewis to have done more entire justice to all
+his powers (and they are magnificent ones), than any other man amongst
+us. His mission was evidently to portray the comparatively animal life
+of the southern and eastern families of mankind. For this he was
+prepared in a somewhat singular way&mdash;by being led to study, and endowed
+with altogether peculiar apprehension of, the most sublime characters of
+animals themselves. Rubens, Rembrandt, Snyders, Tintoret, and Titian,
+have all, in various ways, drawn wild beasts magnificently; but they
+have in some sort humanized or demonized them, making them either
+ravenous fiends, or educated beasts, that would draw cars, and had
+respect for hermits. The sullen isolation of the brutal nature; the
+dignity and quietness of the mighty limbs; the shaggy mountainous power,
+mingled with grace as of a flowing stream; the stealthy restraint of
+strength and wrath in every soundless motion of the gigantic frame; all
+this seems never to have been seen, much less drawn, until Lewis drew
+and himself engraved a series of animal subjects, now many years ago.
+Since then, he has devoted himself to the portraiture of those European
+and Asiatic races, among whom the refinements of civilization exist
+without its laws or its energies, and in whom the fierceness, indolence,
+and subtlety of animal nature are associated with brilliant imagination
+and strong affections. To this task he has brought not only intense
+perception of the kind of character, but powers of artistical
+composition like those of the great Venetians, dis<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>playing, at the same
+time, a refinement of drawing almost miraculous, and appreciable only,
+as the minuti&aelig; of nature itself are appreciable, by the help of the
+microscope. The value, therefore, of his works, as records of the aspect
+of the scenery and inhabitants of the south of Spain and of the East, in
+the earlier part of the nineteenth century, is quite above all estimate.</p>
+
+<p>193. I hardly know how to speak of Mulready: in delicacy and completion
+of drawing, and splendor of color, he takes place beside John Lewis and
+the Pre-Raphaelites; but he has, throughout his career, displayed no
+definiteness in choice of subject. He must be named among the painters
+who have studied with industry, and have made themselves great by doing
+so; but, having obtained a consummate method of execution, he has thrown
+it away on subjects either altogether uninteresting, or above his
+powers, or unfit for pictorial representation. "The Cherry Woman,"
+exhibited in 1850, may be named as an example of the first kind; the
+"Burchell and Sophia" of the second (the character of Sir William
+Thornhill being utterly missed); the "Seven Ages" of the third; for this
+subject cannot be painted. In the written passage, the thoughts are
+progressive and connected; in the picture they must be co-existent, and
+yet separate; nor can all the characters of the ages be rendered in
+painting at all. One may represent the soldier at the cannon's mouth,
+but one cannot paint the "bubble reputation" which he seeks. Mulready,
+therefore, while he has always produced exquisite pieces of painting,
+has failed in doing anything which can be of true or extensive use. He
+has, indeed, understood how to discipline his genius, but never how to
+direct it.</p>
+
+<p>194. Edwin Landseer is the last painter but one whom I shall name: I
+need not point out to anyone acquainted with his earlier works, the
+labor, or watchfulness of nature which they involve, nor need I do more
+than allude to the peculiar faculties of his mind. It will at once be
+granted that the highest merits of his pictures are throughout found in
+those<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> parts of them which are least like what had before been
+accomplished; and that it was not by the study of Raphael that he
+attained his eminent success, but by a healthy love of Scotch terriers.</p>
+
+<p>None of these painters, however, it will be answered, afford examples of
+the rise of the highest imaginative power out of close study of matters
+of fact. Be it remembered, however, that the imaginative power, in its
+magnificence, is not to be found every day. Lewis has it in no mean
+degree, but we cannot hope to find it at its highest more than once in
+an age. We <i>have</i> had it once, and must be content.</p>
+
+<p>195. Towards the close of the last century, among the various drawings
+executed, according to the quiet manner of the time, in grayish blue,
+with brown foregrounds, some began to be noticed as exhibiting rather
+more than ordinary diligence and delicacy, signed W. Turner.<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a> There
+was nothing, however, in them at all indicative of genius, or even of
+more than ordinary talent, unless in some of the subjects a large
+perception of space, and excessive clearness and decision in the
+arrangement of masses. Gradually and cautiously the blues became mingled
+with delicate green, and then with gold; the browns in the foreground
+became first more positive, and then were slightly mingled with other
+local colors; while the touch, which had at first been heavy and broken,
+like that of the ordinary drawing masters of the time, grew more and
+more refined and expressive, until it lost itself in a method of
+execution often too delicate for the eye to follow, rendering, with a
+precision before unexampled, both the texture and the form of every
+object. The style may be considered as perfectly formed about the year
+1800, and it remained unchanged for twenty years.</p>
+
+<p>During that period the painter had attempted, and with more or less
+success had rendered, every order of landscape subject, but always on
+the same principle, subduing the colors of nature into a harmony of
+which the keynotes are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> grayish green and brown; pure blues, and
+delicate golden yellows being admitted in small quantity as the lowest
+and highest limits of shade and light: and bright local colors in
+extremely small quantity in figures or other minor accessories.</p>
+
+<p>196. Pictures executed on such a system are not, properly speaking,
+works in <i>color</i> at all; they are studies of light and shade, in which
+both the shade and the distance are rendered in the general hue which
+best expresses their attributes of coolness and transparency; and the
+lights and the foreground are executed in that which best expresses
+their warmth and solidity. This advantage may just as well be taken as
+not, in studies of light and shadow to be executed with the hand; but
+the use of two, three, or four colors, always in the same relations and
+places, does not in the least constitute the work a study of color, any
+more than the brown engravings of the Liber Studiorum; nor would the
+idea of color be in general more present to the artist's mind when he
+was at work on one of these drawings, than when he was using pure brown
+in the mezzotint engraving. But the idea of space, warmth, and freshness
+being not successfully expressible in a single tint, and perfectly
+expressible by the admission of three or four, he allows himself this
+advantage when it is possible, without in the least embarrassing himself
+with the actual color of the objects to be represented. A stone in the
+foreground might in nature have been cold gray, but it will be drawn
+nevertheless of a rich brown, because it is in the foreground; a hill in
+the distance might in nature be purple with heath, or golden with furze;
+but it will be drawn, nevertheless, of a cool gray, because it is in the
+distance.</p>
+
+<p>197. This at least was the general theory,&mdash;carried out with great
+severity in many, both of the drawings and pictures executed by him
+during the period: in others more or less modified by the cautious
+introduction of color, as the painter felt his liberty increasing; for
+the system was evidently never considered as final, or as anything more
+than a means of progress: the conventional, easily manageable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> color,
+was visibly adopted, only that his mind might be at perfect liberty to
+address itself to the acquirement of the first and most necessary
+knowledge in all art&mdash;that of form. But as form, in landscape, implies
+vast bulk and space, the use of the tints which enabled him best to
+express them, was actually auxiliary to the mere drawing; and,
+therefore, not only permissible, but even necessary, while more
+brilliant or varied tints were never indulged in, except when they might
+be introduced without the slightest danger of diverting his mind for an
+instant from his principal object. And, therefore, it will be generally
+found in the works of this period, that exactly in proportion to the
+importance and general toil of the composition, is the severity of the
+tint; and that the play of color begins to show itself first in slight
+and small drawings, where he felt that he could easily secure all that
+he wanted in form.</p>
+
+<p>198. Thus the "Crossing the Brook," and such other elaborate and large
+compositions, are actually painted in nothing but gray, brown, and blue,
+with a point or two of severe local color in the figures; but in the
+minor drawings, tender passages of complicated color occur not
+unfrequently in easy places; and even before the year 1800 he begins to
+introduce it with evident joyfulness and longing in his rude and simple
+studies, just as a child, if it could be supposed to govern itself by a
+fully developed intellect, would cautiously, but with infinite pleasure,
+add now and then a tiny dish of fruit or other dangerous luxury to the
+simple order of its daily fare. Thus, in the foregrounds of his most
+severe drawings, we not unfrequently find him indulging in the luxury of
+a peacock; and it is impossible to express the joyfulness with which he
+seems to design its graceful form, and deepen with soft penciling the
+bloom of its blue, after he has worked through the stern detail of his
+almost colorless drawing. A rainbow is another of his most frequently
+permitted indulgences; and we find him very early allowing the edges of
+his evening clouds to be touched with soft rose-color or gold; while,
+whenever the hues of nature in anywise<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> fall into his system, and can be
+caught without a dangerous departure from it, he instantly throws his
+whole soul into the faithful rendering of them. Thus the usual brown
+tones of his foreground become warmed into sudden vigor, and are varied
+and enhanced with indescribable delight, when he finds himself by the
+shore of a moorland stream, where they truly express the stain of its
+golden rocks, and the darkness of its clear, Cairngorm-like pools, and
+the usual serenity of his a&euml;rial blue is enriched into the softness and
+depth of the sapphire, when it can deepen the distant slumber of some
+Highland lake, or temper the gloomy shadows of the evening upon its
+hills.</p>
+
+<p>199. The system of his color being thus simplified, he could address all
+the strength of his mind to the accumulation of facts of form; his
+choice of subject, and his methods of treatment, are therefore as
+various as his color is simple; and it is not a little difficult to give
+the reader who is unacquainted with his works, an idea either of their
+infinitude of aims, on the one hand, or of the kind of feeling which
+pervades them all, on the other. No subject was too low or too high for
+him; we find him one day hard at work on a cock and hen, with their
+family of chickens in a farm-yard; and bringing all the refinement of
+his execution into play to express the texture of the plumage; next day
+he is drawing the Dragon of Colchis. One hour he is much interested in a
+gust of wind blowing away an old woman's cap; the next, he is painting
+the fifth plague of Egypt. Every landscape painter before him had
+acquired distinction by confining his efforts to one class of subject.
+Hobbima painted oaks; Ruysdael, waterfalls and copses; Cuyp, river or
+meadow scenes in quiet afternoons; Salvator and Poussin, such kind of
+mountain scenery as people could conceive, who lived in towns in the
+seventeenth century. But I am well persuaded that if all the works of
+Turner, up to the year 1820, were divided into classes (as he has
+himself divided them in the Liber Studiorum), no preponderance could be
+assigned to one class over another. There is architecture, including a
+large num<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>ber of formal "gentlemen's seats," I suppose drawings
+commissioned by the owners; then lowland pastoral scenery of every kind,
+including nearly all farming operations&mdash;-plowing, harrowing, hedging
+and ditching, felling trees, sheep-washing, and I know not what else;
+then all kinds of town life&mdash;courtyards of inns, starting of mail
+coaches, interiors of shops, house-buildings, fairs, elections, etc.;
+then all kinds of inner domestic life&mdash;interiors of rooms, studies of
+costumes, of still life, and heraldry, including multitudes of
+symbolical vignettes; then marine scenery of every kind, full of local
+incident; every kind of boat and method of fishing for particular fish,
+being specifically drawn, round the whole coast of England&mdash;pilchard
+fishing at St. Ives, whiting fishing at Margate, herring at Loch Fyne;
+and all kinds of shipping, including studies of every separate part of
+the vessels, and many marine battle pieces, two in particular of
+Trafalgar, both of high importance&mdash;one of the Victory after the battle,
+now in Greenwich Hospital; another of the death of Nelson, in his own
+gallery; then all kinds of mountain scenery, some idealized into
+compositions, others of definite localities; together with classical
+compositions, Romes, and Carthages, and such others, by the myriad, with
+mythological, historical, or allegorical figures&mdash;nymphs, monsters, and
+specters; heroes and divinities.<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a></p>
+
+<p>200. What general feeling, it may be asked incredulously, can possibly
+pervade all this? This, the greatest of all feelings&mdash;an utter
+forgetfulness of self. Throughout the whole period with which we are at
+present concerned, Turner appears as a man of sympathy absolutely
+infinite&mdash;a sympathy so all-embracing, that I know nothing but that of
+Shakspeare comparable with it. A soldier's wife resting by the roadside
+is not beneath it;<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a> Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, watching the dead
+bodies of her sons, not above it. Nothing can possibly be so mean as
+that it will not interest his whole mind,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> and carry away his whole
+heart; nothing so great or solemn but that he can raise himself into
+harmony with it; and it is impossible to prophesy of him at any moment,
+whether, the next, he will be in laughter or in tears.</p>
+
+<p>201. This is the root of the man's greatness; and it follows as a matter
+of course that this sympathy must give him a subtle power of expression,
+even of the characters of mere material things, such as no other painter
+ever possessed. The man who can best feel the difference between
+rudeness and tenderness in humanity, perceives also more difference
+between the branches of an oak and a willow than anyone else would; and,
+therefore, necessarily the most striking character of the drawings
+themselves is the speciality of whatever they represent&mdash;the thorough
+stiffness of what is stiff, and grace of what is graceful, and vastness
+of what is vast; but through and beyond all this, the condition of the
+mind of the painter himself is easily enough discoverable by comparison
+of a large number of the drawings. It is singularly serene and peaceful:
+in itself quite passionless, though entering with ease into the external
+passion which it contemplates. By the effort of its will it sympathizes
+with tumult or distress, even in their extremes, but there is no tumult,
+no sorrow in itself, only a chastened and exquisitely peaceful
+cheerfulness, deeply meditative; touched, without loss of its own
+perfect balance, by sadness on the one side, and stooping to playfulness
+upon the other. I shall never cease to regret the destruction, by fire,
+now several years ago, of a drawing which always seemed to me to be the
+perfect image of the painter's mind at this period,&mdash;the drawing of
+Brignal Church near Rokeby, of which a feeble idea may still be gathered
+from the engraving (in the Yorkshire series). The spectator stands on
+the "Brignal banks," looking down into the glen at twilight; the sky is
+still full of soft rays, though the sun is gone, and the Greta glances
+brightly in the valley, singing its even-song; two white clouds,
+following each other, move without wind through the hollows of the
+ravine, and others lie couched on the far away moorlands; every leaf of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>
+the woods is still in the delicate air; a boy's kite, incapable of
+rising, has become entangled in their branches, he is climbing to
+recover it; and just behind it in the picture, almost indicated by it,
+the lowly church is seen in its secluded field between the rocks and the
+stream; and around, it the low churchyard wall, and a few white stones
+which mark the resting places of those who can climb the rocks no more,
+nor hear the river sing as it passes.</p>
+
+<p>There are many other existing drawings which indicate the same character
+of mind, though I think none so touching or so beautiful: yet they are
+not, as I said above, more numerous than those which express his
+sympathy with sublimer or more active scenes; but they are almost always
+marked by a tenderness of execution, and have a look of being beloved in
+every part of them, which shows them to be the truest expression of his
+own feelings.</p>
+
+<p>202. One other characteristic of his mind at this period remains to be
+noticed&mdash;its reverence for talent in others. Not the reverence which
+acts upon the practices of men as if they were the laws of nature, but
+that which is ready to appreciate the power, and receive the assistance,
+of every mind which has been previously employed in the same direction,
+so far as its teaching seems to be consistent with the great text-book
+of nature itself. Turner thus studied almost every preceding landscape
+painter, chiefly Claude, Poussin, Vandevelde, Loutherbourg, and Wilson.
+It was probably by the Sir George Beaumonts and other feeble
+conventionalists of the period, that he was persuaded to devote his
+attention to the works of these men; and his having done so will be
+thought, a few scores of years hence, evidence of perhaps the greatest
+modesty ever shown by a man of original power. Modesty at once admirable
+and unfortunate, for the study of the works of Vandevelde and Claude was
+productive of unmixed mischief to him: he spoiled many of his marine
+pictures, as for instance Lord Ellesmere's, by imitation of the former;
+and from the latter learned a false ideal, which, confirmed by the
+notions of Greek art prevalent in London in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> the beginning of this
+century, has manifested itself in many vulgarities in his composition
+pictures, vulgarities which may perhaps be best expressed by the general
+term "Twickenham Classicism," as consisting principally in conceptions
+of ancient or of rural life such as have influenced the erection of most
+of our suburban villas. From Nicole Poussin and Loutherbourg he seems to
+have derived advantage; perhaps also from Wilson; and much in his
+subsequent travels from far higher men, especially Tintoret and Paul
+Veronese. I have myself heard him speaking with singular delight of the
+putting in of the beech leaves in the upper right-hand corner of
+Titian's Peter Martyr. I cannot in any of his works trace the slightest
+influence of Salvator; and I am not surprised at it, for though Salvator
+was a man of far higher powers than either Vandevelde or Claude, he was
+a willful and gross caricaturist. Turner would condescend to be helped
+by feeble men, but could not be corrupted by false men. Besides, he had
+never himself seen classical life, and Claude was represented to him as
+competent authority for it. But he <i>had</i> seen mountains and torrents,
+and knew therefore that Salvator could not paint them.</p>
+
+<p>203. One of the most characteristic drawings of this period fortunately
+bears a date, 1818, and brings us within two years of another dated
+drawing, no less characteristic of what I shall henceforward call
+Turner's Second period. It is in the possession of Mr. Hawkesworth
+Fawkes of Farnley, one of Turner's earliest and truest friends; and
+bears the inscription, unusually conspicuous, heaving itself up and down
+over the eminences of the foreground&mdash;"<span class="smcap">Passage of Mont Cenis. J. M. W.
+Turner</span>, January 15th, 1820."</p>
+
+<p>The scene is on the summit of the pass close to the hospice, or what
+seems to have been a hospice at that time,&mdash;I do not remember any such
+at present,&mdash;a small square built house, built as if partly for a
+fortress, with a detached flight of stone steps in front of it, and a
+kind of drawbridge to the door. This building, about 400 or 500 yards
+off, is seen in a dim, ashy gray against the light, which by help of a
+violent blast<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> of mountain wind has broken through the depth of clouds
+which hang upon the crags. There is no sky, properly so called, nothing
+but this roof of drifting cloud; but neither is there any weight of
+darkness&mdash;the high air is too thin for it,&mdash;all savage, howling, and
+luminous with cold, the massy bases of the granite hills jutting out
+here and there grimly through the snow wreaths. There is a
+desolate-looking refuge on the left, with its number 16, marked on it in
+long ghastly figures, and the wind is drifting the snow off the roof and
+through its window in a frantic whirl; the near ground is all wan with
+half-thawed, half-trampled snow; a diligence in front, whose horses,
+unable to face the wind, have turned right round with fright, its
+passengers struggling to escape, jammed in the window; a little farther
+on is another carriage off the road, some figures pushing at its wheels,
+and its driver at the horses' heads, pulling and lashing with all his
+strength, his lifted arm stretched out against the light of the
+distance, though too far off for the whip to be seen.</p>
+
+<p>204. Now I am perfectly certain that anyone thoroughly accustomed to the
+earlier works of the painter, and shown this picture for the first time,
+would be struck by two altogether new characters in it.</p>
+
+<p>The first, a seeming enjoyment of the excitement of the scene, totally
+different from the contemplative philosophy with which it would formerly
+have been regarded. Every incident of motion and of energy is seized
+upon with indescribable delight, and every line of the composition
+animated with a force and fury which are now no longer the mere
+expression of a contemplated external truth, but have origin in some
+inherent feeling in the painter's mind.</p>
+
+<p>The second, that although the subject is one in itself almost incapable
+of color, and although, in order to increase the wildness of the
+impression, all brilliant local color has been refused even where it
+might easily have been introduced, as in the figures; yet in the low
+minor key which has been chosen, the melodies of <i>color</i> have been
+elaborated<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> to the utmost possible pitch, so as to become a leading,
+instead of a subordinate, element in the composition; the subdued warm
+hues of the granite promontories, the dull stone color of the walls of
+the buildings, clearly opposed, even in shade, to the gray of the snow
+wreaths heaped against them, and the faint greens and ghastly blues of
+the glacier ice, being all expressed with delicacies of transition
+utterly unexampled in any previous drawings.</p>
+
+<p>205. These, accordingly, are the chief characteristics of the works of
+Turner's second period, as distinguished from the first,&mdash;a new energy
+inherent in the mind of the painter, diminishing the repose and exalting
+the force and fire of his conceptions, and the presence of Color, as at
+least an essential, and often a principal, element of design.</p>
+
+<p>Not that it is impossible, or even unusual, to find drawings of serene
+subject, and perfectly quiet feeling, among the compositions of this
+period; but the repose is in them, just as the energy and tumult were in
+the earlier period, an external quality, which the painter images by an
+effort of the will: it is no longer a character inherent in himself. The
+"Ulleswater," in the England series, is one of those which are in most
+perfect peace; in the "Cowes," the silence is only broken by the dash of
+the boat's oars, and in the "Alnwick" by a stag drinking; but in at
+least nine drawings out of ten, either sky, water, or figures are in
+rapid motion, and the grandest drawings are almost always those which
+have even violent action in one or other, or in all; <i>e.g.</i> high force
+of Tees, Coventry, Llanthony, Salisbury, Llanberis, and such others.</p>
+
+<p>206. The color is, however, a more absolute distinction; and we must
+return to Mr. Fawkes's collection in order to see how the change in it
+was effected. That such a change would take place at one time or other
+was of course to be securely anticipated, the conventional system of the
+first period being, as above stated, merely a means of study. But the
+immediate cause was the journey of the year 1820. As might be guessed
+from the legend on the drawing above described,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> "Passage of Mont Cenis,
+January 15th, 1820," that drawing represents what happened on the day in
+question to the painter himself. He passed the Alps then in the winter
+of 1820; and either in the previous or subsequent summer, but on the
+same journey, he made a series of sketches on the Rhine, in body color,
+now in Mr. Fawkes's collection. Every one of those sketches is the
+almost instantaneous record of an <i>effect</i> of color or atmosphere, taken
+strictly from nature, the drawing and the details of every subject being
+comparatively subordinate, and the color nearly as principal as the
+light and shade had been before,&mdash;certainly the leading feature, though
+the light and shade are always exquisitely harmonized with it. And
+naturally, as the color becomes the leading object, those times of day
+are chosen in which it is most lovely; and whereas before, at least five
+out of six of Turner's drawings represented ordinary daylight, we now
+find his attention directed constantly to the evening: and, for the
+first time, we have those rosy lights upon the hills, those gorgeous
+falls of sun through flaming heavens, those solemn twilights, with the
+blue moon rising as the western sky grows dim, which have ever since
+been the themes of his mightiest thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>207. I have no doubt, that the <i>immediate</i> reason of this change was the
+impression made upon him by the colors of the continental skies. When he
+first traveled on the Continent (1800), he was comparatively a young
+student; not yet able to draw form as he wanted, he was forced to give
+all his thoughts and strength to this primary object. But now he was
+free to receive other impressions; the time was come for perfecting his
+art, and the first sunset which he saw on the Rhine taught him that all
+previous landscape art was vain and valueless, that in comparison with
+natural color, the things that had been called paintings were mere ink
+and charcoal, and that all precedent and all authority must be cast away
+at once, and trodden underfoot. He cast them away: the memories of
+Vandevelde and Claude were at once weeded out of the great mind they had
+encumbered;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> they and all the rubbish of the schools together with them;
+the waves of the Rhine swept them away forever: and a new dawn rose over
+the rocks of the Siebengebirge.</p>
+
+<p>208. There was another motive at work, which rendered the change still
+more complete. His fellow artists were already conscious enough of his
+superior power in drawing, and their best hope was that he might not be
+able to color. They had begun to express this hope loudly enough for it
+to reach his ears. The engraver of one of his most important marine
+pictures told me, not long ago, that one day about the period in
+question, Turner came into his room to examine the progress of the
+plate, not having seen his own picture for several months. It was one of
+his dark early pictures, but in the foreground was a little piece of
+luxury, a pearly fish wrought into hues like those of an opal. He stood
+before the picture for some moments; then laughed, and pointed joyously
+to the fish:&mdash;"They say that Turner can't color!" and turned away.</p>
+
+<p>209. Under the force of these various impulses the change was total.
+<i>Every subject thenceforward was primarily conceived in color</i>; and no
+engraving ever gave the slightest idea of any drawing of this period.</p>
+
+<p>The artists who had any perception of the truth were in despair; the
+Beaumontites, classicalists, and "owl species" in general, in as much
+indignation as their dullness was capable of. They had deliberately
+closed their eyes to all nature, and had gone on inquiring, "Where do
+you put your brown 'tree'?" A vast revelation was made to them at once,
+enough to have dazzled anyone; but to <i>them</i>, light unendurable as
+incomprehensible. They "did to the moon complain," in one vociferous,
+unanimous, continuous "Tu whoo." Shrieking rose from all dark places at
+the same instant, just the same kind of shrieking that is now raised
+against the Pre-Raphaelites. Those glorious old Arabian Nights, how true
+they are! Mocking and whispering, and abuse loud and low by turns, from
+all the black stones beside the road, when one living soul is toiling up
+the hill to get the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> golden water. Mocking and whispering, that he may
+look back, and become a black stone like themselves.</p>
+
+<p>210. Turner looked not back, but he went on in such a temper as a strong
+man must be in, when he is forced to walk with his fingers in his ears.
+He retired into himself; he could look no longer for help, or counsel,
+or sympathy from anyone; and the spirit of defiance in which he was
+forced to labor led him sometimes into violences, from which the
+slightest expression of sympathy would have saved him. The new energy
+that was upon him, and the utter isolation into which he was driven,
+were both alike dangerous, and many drawings of the time show the evil
+effects of both; some of them being hasty, wild, or experimental, and
+others little more than magnificent expressions of defiance of public
+opinion.</p>
+
+<p>But all have this noble virtue&mdash;they are in everything his own: there
+are no more reminiscences of dead masters, no more trials of skill in
+the manner of Claude or Poussin; every faculty of his soul is fixed upon
+nature only, as he saw her, or as he remembered her.</p>
+
+<p>211. I have spoken above of his gigantic memory: it is especially
+necessary to notice this, in order that we may understand the kind of
+grasp which a man of real imagination takes of all things that are once
+brought within his reach&mdash;grasp thenceforth not to be relaxed forever.</p>
+
+<p>On looking over any catalogues of his works, or of particular series of
+them, we shall notice the recurrence of the same subject two, three, or
+even many times. In any other artist this would be nothing remarkable.
+Probably, most modern landscape painters multiply a favorite subject
+twenty, thirty, or sixty fold, putting the shadows and the clouds in
+different places, and "inventing," as they are pleased to call it, a new
+"effect" every time. But if we examine the successions of Turner's
+subjects, we shall find them either the records of a succession of
+impressions actually received by him at some favorite locality, or else
+repetitions of one impression received in early youth, and again and
+again realized as his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> increasing powers enabled him to do better
+justice to it. In either case we shall find them records of <i>seen
+facts</i>; <i>never</i> compositions in his room to fill up a favorite outline.</p>
+
+<p>212. For instance, every traveler&mdash;at least, every traveler of thirty
+years' standing&mdash;must love Calais, the place where he first felt himself
+in a strange world. Turner evidently loved it excessively. I have never
+catalogued his studies of Calais, but I remember, at this moment, five:
+there is first the "Pas de Calais," a very large oil painting, which is
+what he saw in broad daylight as he crossed over, when he got near the
+French side. It is a careful study of French fishing-boats running for
+the shore before the wind, with the picturesque old city in the
+distance. Then there is the "Calais Harbor" in the Liber Studiorum: that
+is what he saw just as he was going into the harbor&mdash;a heavy brig
+warping out, and very likely to get in his way or run against the pier,
+and bad weather coming on. Then there is the "Calais Pier," a large
+painting, engraved some years ago by Mr. Lupton:<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a> that is what he saw
+when he had landed, and ran back directly to the pier to see what had
+become of the brig. The weather had got still worse, the fishwomen were
+being blown about in a distressful manner on the pier head, and some
+more fishing-boats were running in with all speed. Then there is the
+"Fortrouge," Calais: that is what he saw after he had been home to
+Dessein's, and dined, and went out again in the evening to walk on the
+sands, the tide being down. He had never seen such a waste of sands
+before, and it made an impression on him. The shrimp girls were all
+scattered over them too, and moved about in white spots on the wild
+shore; and the storm had lulled a little, and there was a sunset&mdash;such a
+sunset!&mdash;and the bars of Fortrouge seen against it, skeleton-wise. He
+did not paint that directly; thought over it&mdash;painted it a long while
+afterwards.</p>
+
+<p>213. Then there is the vignette in the illustrations to Scott. That is
+what he saw as he was going home, meditatively; and the revolving
+lighthouse came blazing out upon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> him suddenly, and disturbed him. He
+did not like that so much; made a vignette of it, however, when he was
+asked to do a bit of Calais, twenty or thirty years afterwards, having
+already done all the rest.</p>
+
+<p>Turner never told me all this, but anyone may see it if he will compare
+the pictures. They might, possibly, not be impressions of a single day,
+but of two days or three; though, in all human probability, they were
+seen just as I have stated them;<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a> but they <i>are</i> records of
+successive impressions, as plainly written as ever traveler's diary. All
+of them pure veracities. Therefore immortal.</p>
+
+<p>214. I could multiply these series almost indefinitely from the rest of
+his works. What is curious, some of them have a kind of private mark
+running through all the subjects. Thus, I know three drawings of
+Scarborough, and all of them have a starfish in the foreground: I do not
+remember any others of his marine subjects which have a starfish.</p>
+
+<p>The other kind of repetition&mdash;the recurrence to one early
+impression&mdash;is, however, still more remarkable. In the collection of F.
+H. Bale, Esq., there is a small drawing of Llanthony Abbey. It is in his
+boyish manner, its date probably about 1795; evidently a sketch from
+nature, finished at home. It had been a showery day; the hills were
+partially concealed by the rain, and gleams of sunshine breaking out at
+intervals. A man was fishing in the mountain stream. The young Turner
+sought a place of some shelter under the bushes; made his sketch; took
+great pains when he got home to imitate the rain, as he best could;
+added his child's luxury of a rainbow; put in the very bush under which
+he had taken shelter, and the fisherman, a somewhat ill-jointed and
+long-legged fisherman, in the courtly short breeches which were the
+fashion of the time.</p>
+
+<p>215. Some thirty years afterwards, with all his powers in their
+strongest training, and after the total change in his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> feelings and
+principles, which I have endeavored to describe, he undertook the series
+of "England and Wales," and in that series introduced the subject of
+Llanthony Abbey. And behold, he went back to his boy's sketch and boy's
+thought. He kept the very bushes in their places, but brought the
+fisherman to the other side of the river, and put him, in somewhat less
+courtly dress, under their shelter, instead of himself. And then he set
+all his gained strength and new knowledge at work on the well-remembered
+shower of rain, that had fallen thirty years before, to do it better.
+The resultant drawing<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a> is one of the very noblest of his second
+period.</p>
+
+<p>216. Another of the drawings of the England series, Ulleswater, is the
+repetition of one in Mr. Fawkes's collection, which, by the method of
+its execution, I should conjecture to have been executed about the year
+1808 or 1810: at all events, it is a very quiet drawing of the first
+period. The lake is quite calm; the western hills in gray shadow, the
+eastern massed in light. Helvellyn rising like a mist between them, all
+being mirrored in the calm water. Some thin and slightly evanescent cows
+are standing in the shallow water in front; a boat floats motionless
+about a hundred yards from the shore; the foreground is of broken rocks,
+with some lovely pieces of copse on the right and left.</p>
+
+<p>This was evidently Turner's record of a quiet evening by the shore of
+Ulleswater, but it was a feeble one. He could not at that time render
+the sunset colors: he went back to it, therefore, in the England series,
+and painted it again with his new power. The same hills are there, the
+same shadows, the same cows,&mdash;they had stood in his mind, on the same
+spot, for twenty years,&mdash;the same boat, the same rocks, only the copse
+is cut away&mdash;it interfered with the masses of his color. Some figures
+are introduced bathing; and what was gray, and feeble gold in the first
+drawing, becomes purple and burning rose-color in the last.</p>
+
+<p>217. But perhaps one of the most curious examples is in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> the series of
+subjects from Winchelsea. That in the Liber Studiorum, "Winchelsea,
+Sussex," bears date 1812, and its figures consist of a soldier speaking
+to a woman, who is resting on the bank beside the road. There is another
+small subject, with Winchelsea in the distance, of which the engraving
+bears date 1817. It has <i>two</i> women with bundles, and <i>two</i> soldiers
+toiling along the embankment in the plain, and a baggage wagon in the
+distance. Neither of these seems to have satisfied him, and at last he
+did another for the England series, of which the engraving bears date
+1830. There is now a regiment on the march; the baggage wagon is there,
+having got no farther on in the thirteen years, but one of the women is
+tired, and has fainted on the bank; another is supporting her against
+her bundle, and giving her drink; a third sympathetic woman is added,
+and the two soldiers have stopped, and one is drinking from his
+canteen.<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a></p>
+
+<p>218. Nor is it merely of entire scenes, or of particular incidents that
+Turner's memory is thus tenacious. The slightest passages of color or
+arrangement that have pleased him&mdash;the fork of a bough, the casting of a
+shadow, the fracture of a stone&mdash;will be taken up again and again, and
+strangely worked into new relations with other thoughts. There is a
+single sketch from nature in one of the portfolios at Farnley, of a
+common wood-walk on the estate, which has furnished passages to no fewer
+than three of the most elaborate compositions in the Liber Studiorum.</p>
+
+<p>219. I am thus tedious in dwelling on Turner's powers of memory, because
+I wish it to be thoroughly seen how all his greatness, all his infinite
+luxuriance of invention, depends on his taking possession of everything
+that he sees,&mdash;on his grasping all, and losing hold of nothing,&mdash;on his
+forgetting himself, and forgetting nothing else. I wish it to be
+understood how every great man paints what he sees or did see, his
+greatness being indeed little else than his intense sense of fact. And
+thus Pre-Raphaelitism and Raphaelitism, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> Turnerism, are all one and
+the same, so far as education can influence them. They are different in
+their choice, different in their faculties, but all the same in this,
+that Raphael himself, so far as he was great, and all who preceded or
+followed him who ever were great, became so by painting the truths
+around them as they appeared to each man's own mind, not as he had been
+taught to see them, except by the God who made both him and them.</p>
+
+<p>220. There is, however, one more characteristic of Turner's second
+period, on which I have still to dwell, especially with reference to
+what has been above advanced respecting the fallacy of overtoil; namely,
+the magnificent ease with which all is done when it is <i>successfully</i>
+done. For there are one or two drawings of this time which are <i>not</i>
+done easily. Turner had in these set himself to do a fine thing to
+exhibit his powers; in the common phrase, to excel himself; so sure as
+he does this, the work is a failure. The worst drawings that have ever
+come from his hands are some of this second period, on which he has
+spent much time and laborious thought; drawings filled with incident
+from one side to the other, with skies stippled into morbid blue, and
+warm lights set against them in violent contrast; one of Bamborough
+Castle, a large water-color, may be named as an example. But the truly
+noble works are those in which, without effort, he has expressed his
+thoughts as they came, and forgotten himself; and in these the
+outpouring of invention is not less miraculous than the swiftness and
+obedience of the mighty hand that expresses it. Anyone who examines the
+drawings may see the evidence of this facility, in the strange freshness
+and sharpness of every touch of color; but when the multitude of
+delicate touches, with which all the a&euml;rial tones are worked, is taken
+into consideration, it would still appear impossible that the drawing
+could have been completed with <i>ease</i>, unless we had direct evidence on
+the matter: fortunately, it is not wanting. There is a drawing in Mr.
+Fawkes's collection of a man-of-war taking in stores: it is of the usual
+size of those of the England series, about sixteen inches by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> eleven: it
+does not appear one of the most highly finished, but it is still farther
+removed from slightness. The hull of a first-rate occupies nearly
+one-half of the picture on the right, her bows towards the spectator,
+seen in sharp perspective from stem to stern, with all her port-holes,
+guns, anchors, and lower rigging elaborately detailed; there are two
+other ships of the line in the middle distance, drawn with equal
+precision; a noble breezy sea dancing against their broad bows, full of
+delicate drawing in its waves; a store-ship beneath the hull of the
+larger vessel, and several other boats, and a complicated cloudy sky. It
+might appear no small exertion of mind to draw the detail of all this
+shipping down to the smallest ropes, from memory, in the drawing-room of
+a mansion in the middle of Yorkshire, even if considerable time had been
+given for the effort. But Mr. Fawkes sat beside the painter from the
+first stroke to the last. Turner took a piece of blank paper one morning
+after breakfast, outlined his ships, finished the drawing in three
+hours, and went out to shoot.</p>
+
+<p>221. Let this single fact be quietly meditated upon by our ordinary
+painters, and they will see the truth of what was above asserted,&mdash;that
+if a great thing can be done at all, it can be done easily; and let them
+not torment themselves with twisting of compositions this way and that,
+and repeating, and experimenting, and scene-shifting. If a man can
+compose at all, he can compose at once, or rather he must compose in
+spite of himself. And this is the reason of that silence which I have
+kept in most of my works, on the subject of Composition. Many critics,
+especially the architects, have found fault with me for not "teaching
+people how to arrange masses;" for not "attributing sufficient
+importance to composition." Alas! I attribute far more importance to it
+than they do;&mdash;so much importance, that I should just as soon think of
+sitting down to teach a man how to write a Divina Commedia, or King
+Lear, as how to "compose," in the true sense, a single building or
+picture. The marvelous stupidity of this age of lecturers is, that they
+do not see that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> what they call, "principles of composition," are mere
+principles of common sense in everything, as well as in pictures and
+buildings;&mdash;A picture is to have a principal light? Yes; and so a dinner
+is to have a principal dish, and an oration a principal point, and an
+air of music a principal note, and every man a principal object. A
+picture is to have harmony of relation among its parts? Yes; and so is a
+speech well uttered, and an action well ordered, and a company well
+chosen, and a ragout well mixed. Composition! As if a man were not
+composing every moment of his life, well or ill, and would not do it
+instinctively in his picture as well as elsewhere, if he could.
+Composition of this lower or common kind is of exactly the same
+importance in a picture that it is in anything else,&mdash;no more. It is
+well that a man should say what he has to say in good order and
+sequence, but the main thing is to say it truly. And yet we go on
+preaching to our pupils as if to have a principal light was everything,
+and so cover our academy walls with Shacabac feasts, wherein the courses
+are indeed well ordered, but the dishes empty.</p>
+
+<p>222. It is not, however, only in invention that men overwork themselves,
+but in execution also; and here I have a word to say to the
+Pre-Raphaelites specially. They are working too hard. There is evidence
+in failing portions of their pictures, showing that they have wrought so
+long upon them that their very sight has failed for weariness, and that
+the hand refused any more to obey the heart. And, besides this, there
+are certain qualities of drawing which they miss from over-carefulness.
+For, let them be assured, there is a great truth lurking in that common
+desire of men to see things done in what they call a "masterly," or
+"bold," or "broad," manner: a truth oppressed and abused, like almost
+every other in this world, but an eternal one nevertheless; and whatever
+mischief may have followed from men's looking for nothing else but this
+facility of execution, and supposing that a picture was assuredly all
+right if only it were done with broad dashes of the brush, still the
+truth remains<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> the same:&mdash;that because it is not intended that men shall
+torment or weary themselves with any earthly labor, it is appointed that
+the noblest results should only be attainable by a certain ease and
+decision of manipulation. I only wish people understood this much of
+sculpture, as well as of painting, and could see that the finely
+finished statue is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a far more
+vulgar work than that which shows rough signs of the right hand laid to
+the workman's hammer: but at all events, in painting it is felt by all
+men, and justly felt. The freedom of the lines of nature can only be
+represented by a similar freedom in the hand that follows them; there
+are curves in the flow of the hair, and in the form of the features, and
+in the muscular outline of the body, which can in no wise be caught but
+by a sympathetic freedom in the stroke of the pencil. I do not care what
+example is taken; be it the most subtle and careful work of Leonardo
+himself, there will be found a play and power and ease in the outlines,
+which no <i>slow</i> effort could ever imitate. And if the Pre-Raphaelites do
+not understand how this kind of power, in its highest perfection, may be
+united with the most severe rendering of all other orders of truth, and
+especially of those with which they themselves have most sympathy, let
+them look at the drawings of John Lewis.</p>
+
+<p>223. These then are the principal lessons which we have to learn from
+Turner, in his second or central period of labor. There is one more,
+however, to be received; and that is a warning; for towards the close of
+it, what with doing small conventional vignettes for publishers, making
+showy drawings from sketches taken by other people of places he had
+never seen, and touching up the bad engravings from his works submitted
+to him almost every day,&mdash;engravings utterly destitute of animation, and
+which had to be raised into a specious brilliancy by scratching them
+over with white, spotty lights, he gradually got inured to many
+conventionalities, and even falsities; and, having trusted for ten or
+twelve years almost entirely to his memory and invention, living, I
+believe, mostly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> in London, and receiving a new sensation only from the
+burning of the Houses of Parliament, he painted many pictures between
+1830 and 1840 altogether unworthy of him. But he was not thus to close
+his career.</p>
+
+<p>224. In the summer either of 1840 or 1841, he undertook another journey
+into Switzerland. It was then at least forty years since he had first
+seen the Alps; (the source of the Arveron, in Mr. Fawkes's collection,
+which could not have been painted till he had seen the thing itself,
+bears date 1800,) and the direction of his journey in 1840 marks his
+fond memory of that earliest one; for, if we look over the Swiss studies
+and drawings executed in his first period, we shall be struck by his
+fondness for the pass of the St. Gothard; the most elaborate drawing in
+the Farnley collection is one of the Lake of Lucerne from Fluelen; and,
+counting the Liber Studiorum subjects, there are, to my knowledge, six
+compositions taken at the same period from the pass of St. Gothard, and,
+probably, several others are in existence. The valleys of Sallenche and
+Chamouni, and Lake of Geneva, are the only other Swiss scenes which seem
+to have made very profound impressions on him.</p>
+
+<p>He returned in 1841 to Lucerne; walked up Mont Pilate on foot, crossed
+the St. Gothard, and returned by Lausanne and Geneva. He made a large
+number of colored sketches on this journey, and realized several of them
+on his return. The drawings thus produced are different from all that
+had preceded them, and are the first which belong definitely to what I
+shall henceforward call his Third period.</p>
+
+<p>The perfect repose of his youth had returned to his mind, while the
+faculties of imagination and execution appeared in renewed strength; all
+conventionality being done away by the force of the impression which he
+had received from the Alps, after his long separation from them. The
+drawings are marked by a peculiar largeness and simplicity of thought:
+most of them by deep serenity, passing into melancholy; all by a
+richness of color, such as he had never before conceived.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> They, and the
+works done in following years, bear the same relation to those of the
+rest of his life that the colors of sunset do to those of the day; and
+will be recognized, in a few years more, as the noblest landscapes ever
+yet conceived by human intellect.</p>
+
+<p>225. Such has been the career of the greatest painter of this century.
+Many a century may pass away before there rises such another; but what
+greatness any among us may be capable of, will, at least, be best
+attained by following in his path;&mdash;by beginning in all quietness and
+hopefulness to use whatever powers we may possess to represent the
+things around us as we see and feel them; trusting to the close of life
+to give the perfect crown to the course of its labors, and knowing
+assuredly that the determination of the degree in which watchfulness is
+to be exalted into invention, rests with a higher will than our own.
+And, if not greatness, at least a certain good, is thus to be achieved;
+for though I have above spoken of the mission of the more humble artist,
+as if it were merely to be subservient to that of the antiquarian or the
+man of science, there is an ulterior aspect, in which it is not
+subservient, but superior. Every arch&aelig;ologist, every natural
+philosopher, knows that there is a peculiar rigidity of mind brought on
+by long devotion to logical and analytical inquiries. Weak men, giving
+themselves to such studies, are utterly hardened by them, and become
+incapable of understanding anything nobler, or even of feeling the value
+of the results to which they lead. But even the best men are in a sort
+injured by them, and pay a definite price, as in most other matters, for
+definite advantages. They gain a peculiar strength, but lose in
+tenderness, elasticity, and impressibility. The man who has gone, hammer
+in hand, over the surface of a romantic country, feels no longer, in the
+mountain ranges he has so laboriously explored, the sublimity or mystery
+with which they were veiled when he first beheld them, and with which
+they are adorned in the mind of the passing traveler. In his more
+informed conception, they arrange themselves like a dissected model:
+where<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> another man would be awe-struck by the magnificence of the
+precipice, he sees nothing but the emergence of a fossiliferous rock,
+familiarized already to his imagination as extending in a shallow
+stratum, over a perhaps uninteresting district; where the unlearned
+spectator would be touched with strong emotion by the aspect of the
+snowy summits which rise in the distance, he sees only the culminating
+points of a metamorphic formation, with an uncomfortable web of fanlike
+fissures radiating, in his imagination, though their centers.<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a> That
+in the grasp he has obtained of the inner relations of all these things
+to the universe, and to man, that in the views which have been opened to
+him of natural energies such as no human mind would have ventured to
+conceive, and of past states of being, each in some new way bearing
+witness to the unity of purpose and everlastingly consistent providence
+of the Maker of all things, he has received reward well worthy the
+sacrifice, I would not for an instant deny; but the sense of the loss is
+not less painful to him if his mind be rightly constituted; and it would
+be with infinite gratitude that he would regard the man, who, retaining
+in his delineation of natural scenery a fidelity to the facts of science
+so rigid as to make his work at once acceptable and credible to the most
+sternly critical intellect, should yet invest its features again with
+the sweet veil of their daily aspect; should make them dazzling with the
+splendor of wandering light, and involve them in the unsearchableness of
+stormy obscurity; should<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> restore to the divided anatomy its visible
+vitality of operation, clothe the naked crags with soft forests, enrich
+the mountain ruins with bright pastures, and lead the thoughts from the
+monotonous recurrence of the phenomena of the physical world, to the
+sweet interests and sorrows of human life and death.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_THREE_COLORS_OF_PRE-RAPHAELITISM42" id="THE_THREE_COLORS_OF_PRE-RAPHAELITISM42"></a>THE THREE COLORS OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM.<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a></h2>
+
+<h2>I.</h2>
+
+
+<p>226. I was lately staying in a country house, in which, opposite each
+other at the sides of the drawing-room window, were two pictures,
+belonging to what in the nineteenth century must be called old times,
+namely Rossetti's "Annunciation," and Millais' "Blind Girl"; while, at
+the corner of the chimney-piece in the same room, there was a little
+drawing of a Marriage-dance, by Edward Burne Jones. And in my bedroom,
+at one side of my bed, there was a photograph of the tomb of Ilaria di
+Caretto at Lucca, and on the other, an engraving, in long since
+superannuated manner, from Raphael's "Transfiguration." Also over the
+looking-glass in my bedroom, there was this large illuminated text,
+fairly well written, but with more vermilion in it than was needful;
+"Lord, teach us to pray."</p>
+
+<p>And for many reasons I would fain endeavor to tell my Oxford pupils some
+facts which seem to me worth memory about these six works of art; which,
+if they will reflect upon, being, in the present state of my health, the
+best I can do for them in the way of autumn lecturing, it will be kind
+to me. And as I cannot speak what I would say, and believe my pupils are
+more likely to read it if printed in the <i>Nineteenth Century</i> than in a
+separate pamphlet, I have asked, and obtained of the editor, space in
+columns which ought, nevertheless, I think, usually to be occupied with
+sterner subjects, as the Fates are now driving the nineteenth century on
+its missionary path.</p>
+
+<p>227. The first picture I named, Rossetti's "Annunciation," was, I
+believe, among the earliest that drew some pub<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>lic attention to the
+so-called "Pre-Raphaelite" school. The one opposite to it,&mdash;Millais'
+"Blind Girl," is among those chiefly characteristic of that school in
+its determined manner. And the third, though small and unimportant, is
+no less characteristic, in its essential qualities, of the mind of the
+greatest master whom that school has yet produced.</p>
+
+<p>I believe most readers will start at the application of the term
+"master," to any English painter. For the hope of the nineteenth century
+is more and more distinctly every day, to teach all men how to live
+without mastership either in art or morals (primarily, of course,
+substituting for the words of Christ, "Ye say well, for so I am,"&mdash;the
+probable emendation, "Ye say ill, for so I am not"); and to limit the
+idea of magistracy altogether, no less than the functions of the
+magistrate, to the suppression of disturbance in the manufacturing
+districts.</p>
+
+<p>Nor would I myself use the word "Master" in any but the most qualified
+sense, of any "modern painter"; scarcely even of Turner, and not at all,
+except for convenience and as a matter of courtesy, of any workman of
+the Pre-Raphaelite school, as yet. In such courtesy, only, let the
+masterless reader permit it me.</p>
+
+<p>228. I must endeavor first to give, as well as I can by description,
+some general notion of the subjects and treatment of the three pictures.</p>
+
+<p>Rossetti's "Annunciation" differs from every previous conception of the
+scene known to me, in representing the angel as waking the Virgin from
+sleep to give her his message. The Messenger himself also differs from
+angels as they are commonly represented, in not depending, for
+recognition of his supernatural character, on the insertion of bird's
+wings at his shoulders. If we are to know him for an angel at all, it
+must be by his face, which is that simply of youthful, but grave,
+manhood. He is neither transparent in body, luminous in presence, nor
+auriferous in apparel;&mdash;wears a plain, long, white robe,&mdash;casts a
+natural and undiminished shadow,&mdash;and, although there are flames beneath
+his feet,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> which upbear him, so that he does not touch the earth, these
+are unseen by the Virgin.</p>
+
+<p>She herself is an English, not a Jewish girl, of about sixteen or
+seventeen, of such pale and thoughtful beauty as Rossetti could best
+imagine for her; concerning which effort, and its degree of success, we
+will inquire farther presently.</p>
+
+<p>She has risen half up, not <i>started</i> up, in being awakened; and is not
+looking at the angel, but only thinking, it seems, with eyes cast down,
+as if supposing herself in a strange dream. The morning light fills the
+room, and shows at the foot of her little pallet-bed, her embroidery
+work, left off the evening before,&mdash;an upright lily.</p>
+
+<p>Upright, and very accurately upright, as also the edges of the piece of
+cloth in its frame,&mdash;as also the gliding form of the angel,&mdash;as also, in
+severe foreshortening, that of the Virgin herself. It has been studied,
+so far as it has been studied at all, from a very thin model; and the
+disturbed coverlid is thrown into confused angular folds, which admit no
+suggestion whatever of ordinary girlish grace. So that, to any spectator
+little inclined towards the praise of barren "uprightnesse," and
+accustomed on the contrary to expect radiance in archangels, and grace
+in Madonnas, the first effect of the design must be extremely
+displeasing, and the first is perhaps, with most art-amateurs of modern
+days, likely to be the last.</p>
+
+<p>229. The background of the second picture (Millais' "Blind Girl"), is an
+open English common, skirted by the tidy houses of a well-to-do village
+in the cockney rural districts. I have no doubt the scene is a real one
+within some twenty miles from London, and painted mostly on the spot.
+The houses are entirely uninteresting, but decent, trim, as human
+dwellings should be, and on the whole inoffensive&mdash;not "cottages," mind
+you, in any sense, but respectable brick-walled and slated
+constructions, old-fashioned in the sense of "old" at, suppose, Bromley
+or Sevenoaks, and with a pretty little church belonging to them, its
+window traceries freshly whitewashed by order of the careful warden.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The common is a fairly spacious bit of ragged pasture, with a couple of
+donkeys feeding on it, and a cow or two, and at the side of the public
+road passing over it, the blind girl has sat down to rest awhile. She is
+a simple beggar, not a poetical or vicious one;&mdash;being peripatetic with
+musical instrument, she will, I suppose, come under the general term of
+tramp; a girl of eighteen or twenty, extremely plain-featured, but
+healthy, and just now resting, as any one of us would rest, not because
+she is much tired, but because the sun has but this moment come out
+after a shower, and the smell of the grass is pleasant.</p>
+
+<p>The shower has been heavy, and is so still in the distance, where an
+intensely bright double rainbow is relieved against the departing
+thunder-cloud. The freshly wet grass is all radiant through and through
+with the new sunshine; full noon at its purest, the very donkeys bathed
+in the rain-dew, and prismatic with it under their rough breasts as they
+graze; the weeds at the girl's side as bright as a Byzantine enamel, and
+inlaid with blue veronica; her upturned face all aglow with the light
+that seeks its way through her wet eyelashes (wet only with the rain).
+Very quiet she is,&mdash;so quiet that a radiant butterfly has settled on her
+shoulder, and basks there in the warm sun. Against her knee, on which
+her poor instrument of musical beggary rests (harmonium), leans another
+child, half her age&mdash;her guide;&mdash;indifferent, this one, either to sun or
+rain, only a little tired of waiting. No more than a half profile of her
+face is seen; and that is quite expressionless, and not the least
+pretty.</p>
+
+<p>230. Both of these pictures are oil-paintings. The third, Mr. Burne
+Jones's "Bridal," is a small water-color drawing, scarcely more than a
+sketch; but full and deep in such color as it admits. Any careful
+readers of my recent lectures at Oxford know that I entirely ignore the
+difference of material between oil and water as diluents of color, when
+I am examining any grave art question: nor shall I hereafter, throughout
+this paper, take notice of it. Nor do I think it needful to ask the
+pardon of any of the three artists for confining<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> the reader's attention
+at present to comparatively minor and elementary examples of their
+works. If I can succeed in explaining the principles involved in them,
+their application by the reader will be easily extended to the enjoyment
+of better examples.</p>
+
+<p>This drawing of Mr. Jones's, however, is far less representative of his
+scale of power than either of the two pieces already described, which
+have both cost their artists much care and time; while this little
+water-color has been perhaps done in the course of a summer afternoon.
+It is only about seven inches by nine: the figures of the average size
+of Angelico's on any altar predella; and the heads, of those on an
+average Corinthian or Syracusan coin. The bride and bridegroom sit on a
+slightly raised throne at the side of the picture, the bride nearest us;
+her head seen in profile, a little bowed. Before them, the three
+bridesmaids and their groomsmen dance in circle, holding each other's
+hands, bare-footed, and dressed in long dark blue robes. Their figures
+are scarcely detached from the dark background, which is a willful
+mingling of shadow and light, as the artist chose to put them,
+representing, as far as I remember, nothing in particular. The deep tone
+of the picture leaves several of the faces in obscurity, and none are
+drawn with much care, not even the bride's; but with enough to show that
+her features are at least as beautiful as those of an ordinary Greek
+goddess, while the depth of the distant background throws out her pale
+head in an almost lunar, yet unexaggerated, light; and the white and
+blue flowers of her narrow coronal, though <i>merely</i> white and blue,
+shine, one knows not how, like gems. Her bridegroom stoops forward a
+little to look at her, so that we see his front face, and can see also
+that he loves her.</p>
+
+<p>231. Such being the respective effort and design of the three pictures,
+although I put by, for the moment, any question of their mechanical
+skill or manner, it must yet, I believe, be felt by the reader that, as
+works of young men, they contained, and even nailed to the Academy
+gates, a kind of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> Lutheran challenge to the then accepted teachers in
+all European schools of Art: perhaps a little too shrill and petulant in
+the tone of it, but yet curiously resolute and steady in its triple
+Fraternity, as of William of Burglen with his Melchthal and Stauffacher,
+in the Grutli meadow, not wholly to be scorned by even the knightliest
+powers of the Past.</p>
+
+<p>We have indeed, since these pictures were first exhibited, become
+accustomed to many forms both of pleasing and revolting innovation: but
+consider, in those early times, how the pious persons who had always
+been accustomed to see their Madonnas dressed in scrupulously folded and
+exquisitely falling robes of blue, with edges embroidered in gold,&mdash;to
+find them also, sitting under arcades of exquisitest architecture by
+Bernini,&mdash;and reverently to observe them receive the angel's message
+with their hands folded on their breasts in the most graceful positions,
+and the missals they had been previously studying laid open on their
+knees, (see my own outline from Angelico of the "Ancilla Domini," the
+first plate of the fifth volume of <i>Modern Painters</i>);&mdash;consider, I
+repeat, the shock to the feelings of all these delicately minded
+persons, on being asked to conceive a Virgin waking from her sleep on a
+pallet bed, in a plain room, startled by sudden words and ghostly
+presence which she does not comprehend, and casting in her mind what
+manner of Salutation this should be.</p>
+
+<p>232. Again, consider, with respect to the second picture, how the
+learned possessors of works of established reputation by the ancient
+masters, classically catalogued as "landscapes with figures"; and who
+held it for eternal, artistic law that such pictures should either
+consist of a rock, with a Spanish chestnut growing out of the side of
+it, and three banditti in helmets and big feathers on the top, or else
+of a Corinthian temple, built beside an arm of the sea, with the Queen
+of Sheba beneath, preparing for embarkation to visit Solomon,&mdash;the whole
+properly toned down with amber varnish;&mdash;imagine the first
+consternation, and final wrath, of these <i>cognoscenti</i>, at being asked
+to contemplate, deliberately, and to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> the last rent of her ragged gown,
+and for principal object in a finished picture, a vagrant who ought at
+once to have been sent to the workhouse; and some really green grass and
+blue flowers, as they actually may any day be seen on an English
+common-side.</p>
+
+<p>And finally, let us imagine, if imagination fail us not, the far more
+wide and weighty indignation of the public, accustomed always to see its
+paintings of marriages elaborated in Christian propriety and splendor;
+with a bishop officiating, assisted by a dean and an archdeacon; the
+modesty of the bride expressed by a veil of the most expensive
+Valenciennes, and the robes of the bridesmaids designed by the
+perfectest of Parisian artists, and looped up with stuffed robins or
+other such tender rarities;&mdash;think with what sense of hitherto
+unheard-of impropriety, the British public must have received a picture
+of a marriage, in which the bride was only crowned with flowers,&mdash;at
+which the bridesmaids danced barefoot,&mdash;and in which nothing was known,
+or even conjecturable, respecting the bridegroom, but his love!</p>
+
+<p>233. Such being the manifestly opponent and agonistic temper of these
+three pictures (and admitting, which I will crave the reader to do for
+the nonce, their real worth and power to be considerable), it surely
+becomes a matter of no little interest to see what spirit it is that
+they have in common, which, recognized as revolutionary in the minds of
+the young artists themselves, caused them, with more or less of
+firmness, to constitute themselves into a society, partly monastic,
+partly predicatory, called "Pre-Raphaelite": and also recognized as
+such, with indignation, by the public, caused the youthfully didactic
+society to be regarded with various degrees of contempt, passing into
+anger (as of offended personal dignity), and embittered farther, among
+certain classes of persons, even into a kind of instinctive abhorrence.</p>
+
+<p>234. I believe the reader will discover, on reflection, that there is
+really only one quite common and sympathetic impulse shown in these
+three works, otherwise so distinct in aim and execution. And this
+fraternal link he will, if careful in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> reflection, discover to be an
+effort to represent, so far as in these youths lay either the choice or
+the power, things as they are, or were, or may be, instead of, according
+to the practice of their instructors and the wishes of their public,
+things as they are <i>not</i>, never were, and never can be: this effort
+being founded deeply on a conviction that it is at first better, and
+finally more pleasing, for human minds to contemplate things as they
+are, than as they are not.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, Mr. Rossetti, in this and subsequent works of the kind, thought it
+better for himself and his public to make some effort towards a real
+notion of what actually did happen in the carpenter's cottage at
+Nazareth, giving rise to the subsequent traditions delivered in the
+Gospels, than merely to produce a variety in the pattern of Virgin,
+pattern of Virgin's gown, and pattern of Virgin's house, which had been
+set by the jewelers of the fifteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>Similarly, Mr. Millais, in this and other works of the kind, thought it
+desirable rather to paint such grass and foliage as he saw in Kent,
+Surrey, and other solidly accessible English counties, than to imitate
+even the most Elysian fields enameled by Claude, or the gloomiest
+branches of Hades forest rent by Salvator: and yet more, to manifest his
+own strong personal feeling that the humanity, no less than the herbage,
+near us and around, was that which it was the painter's duty first to
+portray; and that, if Wordsworth were indeed right in feeling that the
+meanest flower that blows can give,&mdash;much more, for any kindly heart it
+should be true that the meanest tramp that walks can give&mdash;"thoughts
+that do often lie too deep for tears."</p>
+
+<p>235. And if at first&mdash;or even always to careless sight&mdash;the third of
+these pictures seem opposite to the two others in the very point of
+choice, between what is and what is not; insomuch that while <i>they</i> with
+all their strength avouch realities, <i>this</i> with simplest confession
+dwells upon a dream,&mdash;yet in this very separation from them it sums
+their power and seals their brotherhood; reaching beyond them to the
+more perfect truth of things, not only that once were,&mdash;not only<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> that
+now are,&mdash;but which are the same yesterday, to-day, and forever;&mdash;the
+love by whose ordaining the world itself, and all that dwell therein,
+live, and move, and have their being; by which the Morning stars rejoice
+in their courses&mdash;in which the virgins of deathless Israel rejoice in
+the dance&mdash;and in whose constancy the Giver of light to stars, and love
+to men, Himself is glad in the creatures of His hand,&mdash;day by new day
+proclaiming to His Church of all the ages, "As the bridegroom rejoiceth
+over the bride, so shall thy Lord rejoice over thee."</p>
+
+<p>Such, the reader will find, if he cares to learn it, is indeed the
+purport and effort of these three designs&mdash;so far as, by youthful hands
+and in a time of trouble and rebuke, such effort could be brought to
+good end. Of their visible weaknesses, with the best justice I may,&mdash;of
+their veritable merits with the best insight I may, and of the farther
+history of the school which these masters founded, I hope to be
+permitted to speak more under the branches that do not "remember their
+green felicity"; adding a corollary or two respecting the other pieces
+of art above named<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a> as having taken part in the tenor of my country
+hours of idleness.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_THREE_COLORS_OF_PRE-RAPHAELITISM" id="THE_THREE_COLORS_OF_PRE-RAPHAELITISM"></a>THE THREE COLORS OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM.</h2>
+
+<h2>II.</h2>
+
+
+<p>236. The feeling which, in the foregoing notes on the pictures that
+entertained my vacation, I endeavored to illustrate as dominant over
+early Pre-Raphaelite work, is very far from being new in the world.
+Demonstrations in support of fact against fancy have been periodical
+motives of earthquake and heartquake, under the two rigidly incumbent
+burdens of drifted tradition, which, throughout the history of humanity,
+during phases of languid thought, cover the vaults of searching fire
+that must at last try every man's work, what it is.</p>
+
+<p>But the movement under present question derived unusual force, and in
+some directions a morbid and mischievous force, from the vulgarly
+called<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a> "scientific" modes of investigation which had destroyed in
+the minds of the public it appealed to, all possibility, or even
+conception, of reverence for anything, past, present, or future,
+invisible to the eyes of a mob, and inexpressible by popular
+vociferation. It was indeed, and had long been, too true, as the wisest
+of us felt, that the mystery of the domain between things that are
+universally visible, and are only occasionally so to some persons,&mdash;no
+less than the myths or words in which those who had entered that kingdom
+related what they had seen, had become, the one uninviting, and the
+other useless, to men dealing with the immediate business of our day; so
+that the his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>torian of the last of European kings might most reasonably
+mourn that "the Berlin Galleries, which are made up, like other
+galleries, of goat-footed Pan, Europa's Bull, Romulus's She-wolf, and
+the Correggiosity of Correggio, 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 of 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."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>237. But we must surely, in fairness to modernism, remember that
+although no portraits of great Frederick, of a trustworthy character,
+may be found at Berlin, portraits of the English squire, be he great or
+small, may usually be seen at his country house. And Edinburgh, as I
+lately saw,&mdash;if she boasts of no Venetian perfectness of art in the
+portraiture of her Bruce or James, her Douglas or Knox, at Holyrood, has
+at least a charming portrait of a Scottish beauty in the Attic
+Institution, whose majesty, together with that of the more extensive
+glass roofs of the railway station, and the tall chimney of the
+gasworks, inflates the Caledonian mind, contemplative around the spot
+where the last of its minstrels appears to be awaiting eternal
+extinction under his special extinguisher;&mdash;and pronouncing of all its
+works and ways that they are very good.</p>
+
+<p>And are there not also sufficiently resembling portraits of all the
+mouthpieces of constituents in British Parliament&mdash;as their vocal powers
+advance them into that worshipful society&mdash;presented to the people, with
+due felicitation on the new pipe it has got to its organ, in the
+<i>Illustrated</i> or other graphic <i>News</i>? Surely, therefore, it cannot be
+portraiture of merely human greatness of mind that we are anyway short
+of; but another manner of greatness altogether? And may we not regret
+that as great Frederick is dead, so also great Pan is dead, and only the
+goat-footed Pan, or rather the goat's feet of him without the Pan, left
+for portraiture?</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>238. I chanced to walk, to-day, 9th of November, through<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> the gallery of
+the Liverpool Museum, in which the good zeal and sense of Mr. Gatty have
+already, in beautiful order, arranged the Egyptian antiquities, but have
+not yet prevailed far enough to group, in like manner, the scattered
+Byzantine and Italian ivories above. Out of which collection, every way
+valuable, two primarily important pieces, it seems to me, may be
+recommended for accurate juxtaposition, bringing then for us into
+briefest compass an extensive story of the Arts of Mankind.</p>
+
+<p>The first is an image of St. John the Baptist, carved in the eleventh
+century; being then conceived by the image-maker as decently covered by
+his raiment of camel's hair; bearing a gentle aspect, because the herald
+of a gentle Lord; and pointing to his quite legibly written message
+concerning the Lamb which is that gentle Lord's heraldic symbol.</p>
+
+<p>The other carving is also of St. John the Baptist, Italian work of the
+sixteenth century. He is represented thereby as bearing no aspect, for
+he is without his head;&mdash;wearing no camel's hair, for he is without his
+raiment;&mdash;and indicative of no message, for he has none to bring.</p>
+
+<p>239. Now if these two carvings are ever put in due relative position,
+they will constitute a precise and permanent art-lecture to the
+museum-visitants of Liverpool-burg; exhibiting to them instantly, and in
+sum, the conditions of the change in the aims of art which, beginning in
+the thirteenth century under Niccolo Pisano, consummated itself three
+hundred years afterwards in Raphael and his scholars. Niccolo, first
+among Italians, thought mainly in carving the Crucifixion, not how heavy
+Christ's head was when He bowed it;&mdash;but how heavy His body was when
+people came to take it down. And the apotheosis of flesh, or, in modern
+scientific terms, the molecular development of flesh, went steadily on,
+until at last, as we see in the instance before us, it became really of
+small consequence to the artists of the Renaissance Incarnadine, whether
+a man had his head on or not, so only that his legs were handsome: and
+the decapitation, whether of St. John or St. Cecilia; the massacre of
+any quantity of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> Innocents; the flaying, whether of Marsyas or St.
+Bartholomew, and the deaths, it might be of Laocoon by his vipers, it
+might be of Adonis by his pig, or it might be of Christ by His people,
+became, one and all, simply subjects for analysis of muscular
+mortification; and the vast body of artists accurately, therefore,
+little more than a chirurgically useless sect of medical students.</p>
+
+<p>Of course there were many reactionary tendencies among the men who had
+been trained in the pure Tuscan schools, which partly concealed, or
+adorned, the materialism of their advance; and Raphael himself, after
+profoundly studying the arabesques of Pompeii and of the palace of the
+C&aelig;sars, beguiled the tedium, and illustrated the spirituality of the
+converse of Moses and Elias with Christ concerning His decease which He
+should accomplish at Jerusalem, by placing them, above the Mount of
+Transfiguration, in the attitudes of two humming-birds on the top of a
+honeysuckle.</p>
+
+<p>240. But the best of these ornamental arrangements were insufficient to
+sustain the vivacity, while they conclusively undermined the sincerity,
+of the Christian faith, and "the real consequences of the acceptance of
+this kind (Roman Bath and Sarcophagus kind)" of religious idealism were
+instant and manifold.<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 25%;' />
+
+<p>So far as it was received and trusted in by thoughtful persons, it only
+served to chill all the conceptions of sacred history which they might
+otherwise have obtained. Whatever they could have fancied for themselves
+about the wild, strange, infinitely stern, infinitely tender, infinitely
+varied veracities of the life of Christ, was blotted out by the vapid
+fineries of Raphael: the rough Galilean pilot, the orderly custom
+receiver, and all the questioning wonder and fire of uneducated
+apostleship, were obscured under an antique<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> mask of philosophical faces
+and long robes. The feeble, subtle, suffering, ceaseless energy and
+humiliation of St. Paul were confused with an idea of a meditative
+Hercules leaning on a sweeping sword; and the mighty presences of Moses
+and Elias were softened by introductions of delicate grace, adopted from
+dancing nymphs and rising Auroras.</p>
+
+<p>Now no vigorously minded religious person could possibly receive
+pleasure or help from such art as this; and the necessary result was the
+instant rejection of it by the healthy religion of the world. Raphael
+ministered, with applause, to the impious luxury of the Vatican, but was
+trampled underfoot at once by every believing and advancing Christian of
+his own and subsequent times; and thenceforward pure Christianity and
+"high art" took separate roads, and fared on, as best they might,
+independently of each other.</p>
+
+<p>But although Calvin, and Knox, and Luther, and their flocks, with all
+the hardest-headed and truest-hearted faithful left in Christendom, thus
+spurned away the spurious art, and all art with it (not without harm to
+themselves, such as a man must needs sustain in cutting off a decayed
+limb), certain conditions of weaker Christianity suffered the false
+system to retain influence over them; and to this day the clear and
+tasteless poison of the art of Raphael infects with sleep of infidelity
+the hearts of millions of Christians. It is the first cause of all that
+pre-eminent <i>dullness</i> which characterizes what Protestants call sacred
+art; a dullness not merely baneful in making religion distasteful to the
+young, but in sickening, as we have seen, all vital belief of religion
+in the old. A dim sense of impossibility attaches itself always to the
+graceful emptiness of the representation; we feel instinctively that the
+painted Christ and painted apostle are not beings that ever did or could
+exist; and this fatal sense of fair fabulousness, and well-composed
+impossibility, steals gradually from the picture into the history, until
+we find ourselves reading St. Mark or St. Luke with the same admiring,
+but uninterested, incredulity, with which we contemplate Raphael.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>241. Without claiming,&mdash;nay, so far as my knowledge can reach, utterly
+disclaiming&mdash;any personal influence over, or any originality of
+suggestion to, the men who founded our presently realistic schools, I
+may yet be permitted to point out the sympathy which I had as an
+outstanding spectator with their effort; and the more or less active
+fellowship with it, which, unrecognized, I had held from the beginning.
+The passage I have just quoted (with many others enforcing similar
+truths) is in the third volume of <i>Modern Painters</i>; but if the reader
+can refer to the close of the preface to the second edition<a name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a> of the
+first, he will find this very principle of realism asserted for the
+groundwork of all I had to teach in that volume. The lesson so far
+pleased the public of that day, that ever since, they have refused to
+listen to any corollaries or conclusions from it, assuring me, year by
+year, continually, that the older I grew, the less I knew, and the worse
+I wrote. Nevertheless, that first volume of <i>Modern Painters</i> did by no
+means contain all that even then I knew; and in the third, nominally
+treating of "Many Things," will be found the full expression of what I
+knew best; namely, that all "things," many or few, which we ought to
+paint, must be first distinguished boldly from the nothings which we
+ought not; and that a faithful realist, before he could question whether
+his art was representing anything truly, had first to ask whether it
+meant seriously to represent anything at all!</p>
+
+<p>242. And such definition has in these days become more needful than ever
+before, in this solid, or spectral&mdash;which-ever the reader pleases to
+consider it&mdash;world of ours. For some of us, who have no perception but
+of solidity, are agreed to consider all that is not solid, or weighably
+liquid, nothing. And others of us, who have also perception of the
+spectral, are sometimes too much inclined to call what is no more than
+solid, or weighably liquid, nothing. But the general reader may be at
+least assured that it is not at all possible<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> for the student to enter
+into useful discussion concerning the qualities of art which takes on
+itself to represent things as they are, unless he include in its
+subjects the spectral, no less than the substantial, reality; and
+understand what difference must be between the powers of veritable
+representation, for the men whose models are of ponderable flesh, as for
+instance, the "Sculptor's model," lately under debate in Liverpool,&mdash;and
+the men whose models pause perhaps only for an instant&mdash;painted on the
+immeasurable air,&mdash;forms which they themselves can but discern darkly,
+and remember uncertainly, saying: "A vision passed before me, but I
+could not discern the form thereof."</p>
+
+<p>243. And the most curious, yet the most common, deficiency in the modern
+contemplative mind, is its inability to comprehend that these phenomena
+of true imagination are yet no less real, and often more vivid than
+phenomena of matter. We continually hear artists blamed or praised for
+having painted this or that (either of material or spectral kind),
+without the slightest implied inquiry whether they <i>saw</i> this, or that.
+Whereas the quite primal difference between the first and second order
+of artists, is that the first is indeed painting what he has seen; and
+the second only what he would like to see! But as the one that can paint
+what he would like, has therefore the power, if he chooses, of painting
+more or less what also his public likes, he has a chance of being
+received with sympathetic applause, on all hands, while the first, it
+may be, meets only reproach for not having painted something more
+agreeable. Thus Mr. Millais, going out at Tunbridge or Sevenoaks, sees a
+blind vagrant led by an ugly child; and paints that highly objectionable
+group, as they appeared to him. But your pliably minded painter gives
+you a beautiful young lady guiding a sightless Belisarius (see the gift
+by one of our most tasteful modistes to our National Gallery), and the
+gratified public never troubles itself to ask whether these ethereal
+mendicants were ever indeed apparent in this world, or any other. Much
+more, if, in deeper vistas of his imagination, some presently<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> graphic
+Zechariah paint&mdash;(let us say) four carpenters, the public will most
+likely declare that he ought to have painted persons in a higher class
+of life, without ever inquiring whether the Lord had shown him four
+carpenters or not. And the worst of the business is that the public
+impatience, in such sort, is not wholly unreasonable. For truly, a
+painter who has eyes can, for the most part, see what he "likes" with
+them; and is, by divine law, answerable for his liking. And, even at
+this late hour of the day, it is still conceivable that such of them as
+would <i>verily</i> prefer to see, suppose, instead of a tramp with a
+harmonium, Orpheus with his lute, or Arion on his dolphin, pleased
+Proteus rising beside him from the sea,&mdash;might, standing on the
+"pleasant lea" of Margate or Brighton, have sight of those personages.</p>
+
+<p>Orpheus with his lute,&mdash;Jubal with his harp and horn,&mdash;Harmonia, bride
+of the warrior seed-sower,&mdash;Musica herself, lady of all timely thought
+and sweetly ordered things,&mdash;Cantatrice and Incantatrice to all but the
+museless adder; these the Amphion of F&eacute;sole saw, as he shaped the marble
+of his tower; these, Memmi of Siena, fair-figured on the shadows of his
+vault;&mdash;but for us, here is the only manifestation granted to our best
+practical painter&mdash;a vagrant with harmonium&mdash;and yonder blackbirds and
+iridescent jackasses, to be harmonized thereby.</p>
+
+<p>244. Our best <i>painter</i> (among the living) I say;&mdash;no question has ever
+been of that. Since Van Eyck and D&uuml;rer there has nothing been seen so
+well done in laying of clear oil-color within definite line. And what he
+might have painted for us, if <i>we</i> had only known what we would have of
+him! Heaven only knows. But we none of us knew,&mdash;nor he neither; and on
+the whole the perfectest of his works, and the representative picture of
+that generation&mdash;was no Annunciate Maria bowing herself; but only a
+Newsless Mariana stretching herself: which is indeed the best symbol of
+the mud-moated Nineteenth century; in <i>its</i> Grange, Stable&mdash;Sty, or
+whatever name of dwelling may best befit the things it calls Houses and
+Cities: imprisoned therein by the unas<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>sailablest of walls, and blackest
+of ditches&mdash;by the pride of Babel, and the filthiness of Aholah and
+Aholibamah; and their worse younger sister;&mdash;craving for any manner of
+News from any world&mdash;and getting none trustworthy even of its own.</p>
+
+<p>245. I said that in this second paper I would try to give some brief
+history of the rise, and the issue, of that Pre-Raphaelite school: but,
+as I look over two of the essays<a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a> that were printed with mine in that
+last number of the <i>Nineteenth Century</i>&mdash;the first&mdash;in laud of the
+Science which accepts for practical spirits, inside of men, only Avarice
+and Indolence; and the other,&mdash;in laud of the Science which "rejects the
+Worker" outside of Men, I am less and less confident in offering to the
+readers of the <i>Nineteenth Century</i> any History relating to such
+despised things as unavaricious industry,&mdash;or incorporeal vision. I will
+be as brief as I can.</p>
+
+<p>246. The central branch of the school, represented by the central
+picture above described:&mdash;"The Blind Girl"&mdash;was essentially and vitally
+an uneducated one. It was headed, in literary power, by Wordsworth; but
+the first pure example of its mind and manner of Art, as opposed to the
+erudite and <i>artificial</i> schools, will be found, so far as I know, in
+Moli&egrave;re's song: <i>j'aime mieux ma mie</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Its mental power consisted in discerning what was lovely in present
+nature, and in pure moral emotion concerning it.</p>
+
+<p>Its physical power, in an intense veracity of direct realization to the
+eye.</p>
+
+<p>So far as Mr. Millais saw what was beautiful in vagrants, or commons, or
+crows, or donkeys, or the straw under children's feet in the Ark (Noah's
+or anybody else's does not matter),&mdash;in the Huguenot and his mistress,
+or the ivy behind them,&mdash;in the face of Ophelia, or in the flowers
+floating over it as it sank;&mdash;much more, so far as he saw what
+in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>stantly comprehensible nobleness of passion might be in the binding
+of a handkerchief,&mdash;in the utterance of two words, "Trust me" or the
+like: he prevailed, and rightly prevailed, over all prejudice and
+opposition; to that extent he will in what he has done, or may yet do,
+take, as a standard-bearer, an honorable place among the reformers of
+our day.</p>
+
+<p>So far as he could not see what was beautiful, but what was essentially
+and forever common (in that God had not cleansed it), and so far as he
+did not see truly what he thought he saw; (as for instance, in this
+picture, under immediate consideration, when he paints the spark of
+light in a crow's eye a hundred yards off, as if he were only painting a
+miniature of a crow close by,)&mdash;he failed of his purpose and hope; but
+how far I have neither the power nor the disposition to consider.</p>
+
+<p>247. The school represented by Mr. Rossetti's picture and adopted for
+his own by Mr. Holman Hunt, professed, necessarily, to be a learned one;
+and to represent things which had happened long ago, in a manner
+credible to any moderns who were interested in them. The value to us of
+such a school necessarily depends on the things it chooses to represent,
+out of the infinite history of mankind. For instance, David, of the
+first Republican Academe, was a true master of this school; and,
+painting the Horatii receiving their swords, foretold the triumph of
+that Republican Power. G&eacute;r&ocirc;me, of the latest Republican Academe, paints
+the dying Polichinelle, and the <i>morituri</i> gladiators: foretelling, in
+like manner, the shame and virtual ruin of modern Republicanism. What
+our own painters have done for us in this kind has been too unworthy of
+their real powers, for Mr. Rossetti threw more than half his strength
+into literature, and, in that precise measure, left himself unequal to
+his appointed task in painting; while Mr. Hunt, not knowing the
+necessity of masters any more than the rest of our painters, and
+attaching too great importance to the externals of the life of Christ,
+separated himself for long years from all discipline by the recognized
+laws of his art; and fell into errors which wofully<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> shortened his hand
+and discredited his cause&mdash;into which again I hold it no part of my duty
+to enter. But such works as either of these painters have done, without
+antagonism or ostentation, and in their own true instincts; as all
+Rossetti's drawing from the life of Christ, more especially that of the
+Madonna gathering the bitter herbs for the Passover when He was twelve
+years old; and that of the Magdalen leaving her companions to come to
+Him; these, together with all the mythic scenes which he painted from
+the <i>Vita Nuova</i> and <i>Paradiso</i> of Dante, are of quite imperishable
+power and value: as also many of the poems to which he gave up part of
+his painter's strength. Of Holman Hunt's "Light of the World," and
+"Awakening Conscience," I have publicly spoken and written, now for many
+years, as standard in their kind: the study of sunset on the Egean,
+lately placed by me in the schools of Oxford, is not less authoritative
+in landscape, so far as its aim extends.</p>
+
+<p>248. But the School represented by the third painting, "The Bridal," is
+that into which the greatest masters of <i>all</i> ages are gathered, and in
+which they are walled round as in Elysian fields, unapproachable but by
+the reverent and loving souls, in some sort already among the Dead.</p>
+
+<p>They interpret to those of us who can read them, so far as they already
+see and know, the things that are forever. "Charity never faileth; but
+whether there be prophecies, they shall fail&mdash;tongues, they shall
+cease&mdash;knowledge, it shall vanish."</p>
+
+<p>And the one message they bear to us is the commandment of the Eternal
+Charity. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with <i>all</i> thine heart, and
+thy neighbor as thyself." As thyself&mdash;no more, even the dearest of
+neighbors.</p>
+
+<p>"Therefore let every man see that he love his wife even as himself."</p>
+
+<p>No more&mdash;else she has become an idol, not a fellow-servant; a creature
+between us and our Master.</p>
+
+<p>And they teach us that what higher creatures exist between Him and us,
+we are also bound to know, and to love<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> in their place and state, as
+they ascend and descend on the stairs of their watch and ward.</p>
+
+<p>The principal masters of this faithful religious school in painting,
+known to me, are Giotto, Angelico, Sandro Botticelli, Filippo Lippi,
+Luini, and Carpaccio; but for a central illustration of their mind, I
+take that piece of work by the sculptor of Quercia,<a name="FNanchor_48_48" id="FNanchor_48_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48_48" class="fnanchor">[48]</a> of which some
+shadow of representation, true to an available degree, is within reach
+of my reader.</p>
+
+<p>249. This sculpture is central in every respect; being the last
+Florentine work in which the proper form of the Etruscan tomb is
+preserved, and the first in which all right Christian sentiment
+respecting death is embodied. It is perfectly severe in classical
+tradition, and perfectly frank in concession to the passions of existing
+life. It submits to all the laws of the past, and expresses all the
+hopes of the future.</p>
+
+<p>Now every work of the great Christian schools expresses primarily,
+conquest over death; conquest not grievous, but absolute and serene;
+rising with the greatest of them, into rapture.</p>
+
+<p>But this, as a <i>central</i> work, has all the peace of the Christian
+Eternity, but only in part its gladness. Young children wreathe round
+the tomb a garland of abundant flowers, but she herself, Ilaria, yet
+sleeps; the time is not yet come for her to be awakened out of sleep.</p>
+
+<p>Her image is a simple portrait of her&mdash;how much less beautiful than she
+was in life, we cannot know&mdash;but as beautiful as marble can be.</p>
+
+<p>And through and in the marble we may see that the damsel is not dead,
+but sleepeth: yet as visibly a sleep that shall<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> know no ending until
+the last day break, and the last shadow flee away; until then, she
+"shall not return." Her hands are laid on her breast&mdash;not praying&mdash;she
+has no need to pray now. She wears her dress of every day, clasped at
+her throat, girdled at her waist, the hem of it drooping over her feet.
+No disturbance of its folds by pain of sickness, no binding, no
+shrouding of her sweet form, in death more than in life. As a soft, low
+wave of summer sea, her breast rises; no more: the rippled gathering of
+its close mantle droops to the belt, then sweeps to her feet, straight
+as drifting snow. And at her feet her dog lies watching her; the mystery
+of his mortal life joined, by love, to her immortal one.</p>
+
+<p>Few know, and fewer love, the tomb and its place,&mdash;not shrine, for it
+stands bare by the cathedral wall: only, by chance, a cross is cut deep
+into one of the foundation stones behind her head. But no goddess statue
+of the Greek cities, no nun's image among the cloisters of Apennine, no
+fancied light of angel in the homes of heaven, has more divine rank
+among the thoughts of men.</p>
+
+<p>250. In so much as the reader can see of it, and learn, either by print
+or cast, or beside it; (and he would do well to stay longer in that
+transept than in the Tribune at Florence,) he may receive from it,
+unerring canon of what is evermore Lovely and Right in the dealing of
+the Art of Man with his fate, and his passions. Evermore <i>lovely</i>, and
+<i>right</i>. These two virtues of visible things go always hand in hand: but
+the workman is bound to assure himself of his Rightness first; then the
+loveliness will come.</p>
+
+<p>And primarily, from this sculpture, you are to learn what a "Master" is.
+Here was one man at least, who knew his business, once upon a time!
+Unaccusably;&mdash;none of your fool's heads or clown's hearts can find a
+fault here! "Dog-fancier,<a name="FNanchor_49_49" id="FNanchor_49_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a> cobbler, tailor, or churl, look
+here"&mdash;says Master Jacopo&mdash;"look! I know what a brute is, better than
+you, I know what a silken tassel is&mdash;what a leathern belt is&mdash;Also,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>
+what a woman is; and also&mdash;what a Law of God is, if you care to know."
+This it is, to be a Master.</p>
+
+<p>Then secondly&mdash;you are to note that with all the certain rightness of
+its material fact, this sculpture still is the Sculpture of a Dream.
+Ilaria is dressed as she was in life. But she never lay so on her
+pillow! nor so, in her grave. Those straight folds, straightly laid as a
+snowdrift, are impossible; known by the Master to be so&mdash;chiseled with a
+hand as steady as an iron beam, and as true as a ray of light&mdash;in
+defiance of your law of Gravity to the Earth. <i>That</i> law prevailed on
+her shroud, and prevails on her dust: but not on herself, nor on the
+Vision of her.</p>
+
+<p>Then thirdly, and lastly. You are to learn that the doing of a piece of
+Art such as this is <i>possible</i> to the hand of Man just in the measure of
+his obedience to the laws which are indeed over his heart, and not over
+his dust: primarily, as I have said, to that great one, "Thou shalt
+<i>Love</i> the Lord thy God." Which command is straight and clear; and all
+men may obey it if they will,&mdash;so only that they be early taught to know
+Him.</p>
+
+<p>And that is precisely the piece of exact Science which is not taught at
+present in our Board Schools&mdash;so that although my friend, with whom I
+was staying, was not himself, in the modern sense, ill-educated; neither
+did he conceive me to be so,&mdash;he yet thought it good for himself and me
+to have that Inscription, "Lord, teach us to Pray," illuminated on the
+house wall&mdash;if perchance either he or I could yet learn what John (when
+he still had his head) taught <i>his</i> Disciples.</p>
+
+<p>251. But alas, for us only at last, among the people of all ages and in
+all climes, the lesson has become too difficult; and the Father of all,
+in every age, in every clime adored, is Rejected of science, as an
+Outside Worker, in Cockneydom of the nineteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>Rejected of Science: well; but not yet, not yet&mdash;by the men who can do,
+as well as know. And though I have neither strength nor time, nor at
+present the mind to go into any review of the work done by the Third and
+chief School<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> of our younger painters, headed by Burne Jones;<a name="FNanchor_50_50" id="FNanchor_50_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a> and
+though I know its faults, palpable enough, like those of Turner, to the
+poorest sight; and though I am discouraged in all its discouragements, I
+still hold in fullness to the hope of it in which I wrote the close of
+the third lecture I ever gave in Oxford&mdash;of which I will ask the reader
+here in conclusion to weigh the words, set down in the days of my best
+strength, so far as I know; and with the uttermost care given to that
+inaugural Oxford work, to "speak only that which I did know."</p>
+
+<p>252. "Think of it, and you will find that so far from art being immoral,
+little else <i>except</i> art is moral;&mdash;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' or
+'Destroyers.'</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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,'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>"And perfect the day shall be, when it is of all men understood that the
+beauty of Holiness must be in labor as well as in rest. Nay! more, if it
+may be, in labor; 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 labor 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&mdash;For Ever."<a name="FNanchor_51_51" id="FNanchor_51_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="ART" id="ART"></a>ART.</h2>
+
+<h2>III.</h2>
+
+<h3>ARCHITECTURE.</h3>
+
+
+<h3>THE OPENING OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE.</h3>
+
+<p class="center">(<i>Pamphlet, 1854.</i>)</p>
+
+<h3>THE STUDY OF ARCHITECTURE IN OUR SCHOOLS.</h3>
+
+<p class="center">(<i>R.I.B.A. Transactions, 1865.</i>)<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="THE_OPENING_OF_THE_CRYSTAL_PALACE52" id="THE_OPENING_OF_THE_CRYSTAL_PALACE52"></a>THE OPENING OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE.<a name="FNanchor_52_52" id="FNanchor_52_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>253. I read the account in the <i>Times</i> newspaper of the opening of the
+Crystal Palace at Sydenham as I ascended the hill between Vevay and
+Chatel St. Denis, and the thoughts which it called up haunted me all day
+long as my road wound among the grassy slopes of the Simmenthal. There
+was a strange contrast between the image of that mighty palace, raised
+so high above the hills on which it is built as to make them seem little
+else than a basement for its glittering stateliness, and those lowland
+huts, half hidden beneath their coverts of forest, and scattered like
+gray stones along the masses of far-away mountain. Here man contending
+with the power of Nature for his existence; there commanding them for
+his recreation; here a feeble folk nested among the rocks with the wild
+goat and the coney, and retaining the same quiet thoughts from
+generation to generation; there a great multitude triumphing in the
+splendor of immeasurable habitation, and haughty with hope of endless
+progress and irresistible power.</p>
+
+<p>254. It is indeed impossible to limit, in imagination, the beneficent
+results which may follow from the undertaking thus happily begun.<a name="FNanchor_53_53" id="FNanchor_53_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53_53" class="fnanchor">[53]</a>
+For the first time in the history of the world, a national museum is
+formed in which a whole nation is interested; formed on a scale which
+permits the exhibition of monuments of art in unbroken symmetry, and of
+the productions of nature in unthwarted growth,&mdash;formed under the
+auspices of science which can hardly err, and of wealth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> which can
+hardly be exhausted; and placed in the close neighborhood of a
+metropolis overflowing with a population weary of labor, yet thirsting
+for knowledge, where contemplation may be consistent with rest, and
+instruction with enjoyment. It is impossible, I repeat, to estimate the
+influence of such an institution on the minds of the working-classes.
+How many hours once wasted may now be profitably dedicated to pursuits
+in which interest was first awakened by some accidental display in the
+Norwood palace; how many constitutions, almost broken, may be restored
+by the healthy temptation into the country air; how many intellects,
+once dormant, may be roused into activity within the crystal walls, and
+how these noble results may go on multiplying and increasing and bearing
+fruit seventy times seven-fold, as the nation pursues its career,&mdash;are
+questions as full of hope as incapable of calculation. But with all
+these grounds for hope there are others for despondency, giving rise to
+a group of melancholy thoughts, of which I can neither repress the
+importunity nor forbear the expression.</p>
+
+<p>255. For three hundred years, the art of architecture has been the
+subject of the most curious investigation; its principles have been
+discussed with all earnestness and acuteness; its models in all
+countries and of all ages have been examined with scrupulous care, and
+imitated with unsparing expenditure. And of all this refinement of
+inquiry,&mdash;this lofty search after the ideal,&mdash;this subtlety of
+investigation and sumptuousness of practice,&mdash;the great result, the
+admirable and long-expected conclusion is, that in the center of the
+19th century, we suppose ourselves to have invented a new style of
+architecture, when we have magnified a conservatory!</p>
+
+<p>256. In Mr. Laing's speech, at the opening of the palace, he declares
+that "<i>an entirely novel order of architecture</i>, producing, by means of
+unrivaled mechanical ingenuity, the most marvelous and beautiful
+effects, sprang into existence to provide a building."<a name="FNanchor_54_54" id="FNanchor_54_54"></a><a href="#Footnote_54_54" class="fnanchor">[54]</a> In these
+words, the speaker is not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> merely giving utterance to his own feelings.
+He is expressing the popular view of the facts, nor that a view merely
+popular, but one which has been encouraged by nearly all the professors
+of art of our time.</p>
+
+<p>It is to this, then, that our Doric and Palladian pride is at last
+reduced! We have vaunted the divinity of the Greek ideal&mdash;we have plumed
+ourselves on the purity of our Italian taste&mdash;we have cast our whole
+souls into the proportions of pillars and the relations of orders&mdash;and
+behold the end! Our taste, thus exalted and disciplined, is dazzled by
+the luster of a few rows of panes of glass; and the first principles of
+architectural sublimity, so far sought, are found all the while to have
+consisted merely in sparkling and in space.</p>
+
+<p>Let it not be thought that I would depreciate (were it possible to
+depreciate) the mechanical ingenuity which has been displayed in the
+erection of the Crystal Palace, or that I underrate the effect which its
+vastness may continue to produce on the popular imagination. But
+mechanical ingenuity is <i>not</i> the essence either of painting or
+architecture, and largeness of dimension does not necessarily involve
+nobleness of design. There is assuredly as much ingenuity required to
+build a screw frigate, or a tubular bridge, as a hall of glass;&mdash;all
+these are works characteristic of the age; and all, in their several
+ways, deserve our highest admiration, but not admiration of the kind
+that is rendered to poetry or to art. We may cover the German Ocean with
+frigates, and bridge the Bristol Channel with iron, and roof the county
+of Middlesex with crystal, and yet not possess one Milton, or Michael
+Angelo.</p>
+
+<p>257. Well, it may be replied, we need our bridges, and have pleasure in
+our palaces; but we do not want Miltons, nor Michael Angelos.</p>
+
+<p>Truly, it seems so; for, in the year in which the first Crystal Palace
+was built, there died among us a man whose name, in after-ages, will
+stand with those of the great of all time. Dying, he bequeathed to the
+nation the whole mass of his most cherished works; and for these three
+years, while<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> we have been building this colossal receptacle for casts
+and copies of the art of other nations, these works of our own greatest
+painter have been left to decay in a dark room near Cavendish Square,
+under the custody of an aged servant.</p>
+
+<p>This is quite natural. But it is also memorable.</p>
+
+<p>258. There is another interesting fact connected with the history of the
+Crystal Palace as it bears on that of the art of Europe, namely, that in
+the year 1851, when all that glittering roof was built, in order to
+exhibit the paltry arts of our fashionable luxury&mdash;the carved bedsteads
+of Vienna, and glued toys of Switzerland, and gay jewelry of France&mdash;in
+that very year, I say, the greatest pictures of the Venetian masters
+were rotting at Venice in the rain, for want of roof to cover them, with
+holes made by cannon shot through their canvas.</p>
+
+<p>There is another fact, however, more curious than either of these, which
+will hereafter be connected with the history of the palace now in
+building; namely, that at the very period when Europe is congratulated
+on the invention of a new style of architecture, because fourteen acres
+of ground have been covered with glass, the greatest examples in
+existence of true and noble Christian architecture are being resolutely
+destroyed, and destroyed by the effects of the very interest which was
+beginning to be excited by them.</p>
+
+<p>259. Under the firm and wise government of the third Napoleon, France
+has entered on a new epoch of prosperity, one of the signs of which is a
+zealous care for the preservation of her noble public buildings. Under
+the influence of this healthy impulse, repairs of the most extensive
+kind are at this moment proceeding, on the cathedrals of Rheims, Amiens,
+Rouen, Chartres, and Paris; (probably also in many other instances
+unknown to me). These repairs were, in many cases, necessary up to a
+certain point; and they have been executed by architects as skillful and
+learned as at present exist,&mdash;executed with noble disregard of expense,
+and sincere desire on the part of their superintendents that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> they
+should be completed in a manner honorable to the country.</p>
+
+<p>260. They are, nevertheless, more fatal to the monuments they are
+intended to preserve, than fire, war, or revolution. For they are
+undertaken, in the plurality of instances, under an impression, which
+the efforts of all true antiquaries have as yet been unable to remove,
+that it is impossible to reproduce the mutilated sculpture of past ages
+in its original beauty.</p>
+
+<p>"Reproduire avec une exactitude mathematique," are the words used, by
+one of the most intelligent writers on this subject,<a name="FNanchor_55_55" id="FNanchor_55_55"></a><a href="#Footnote_55_55" class="fnanchor">[55]</a> of the proposed
+regeneration of the statue of Ste. Modeste, on the north porch of the
+Cathedral of Chartres.</p>
+
+<p>Now it is not the question at present whether thirteenth century
+sculpture be of value, or not. Its value is assumed by the authorities
+who have devoted sums so large to its so-called restoration, and may
+therefore be assumed in my argument. The worst state of the sculptures
+whose restoration is demanded may be fairly represented by that of the
+celebrated group of the Fates, among the Elgin Marbles in the British
+Museum. With what favor would the guardians of those marbles, or any
+other persons interested in Greek art, receive a proposal from a living
+sculptor to "reproduce with mathematical exactitude" the group of the
+Fates, in a perfect form, and to destroy the original? For with exactly
+such favor, those who are interested in Gothic art should receive
+proposals to reproduce the sculpture of Chartres or Rouen.</p>
+
+<p>261. In like manner, the state of the architecture which it is proposed
+to restore may, at its worst, be fairly represented to the British
+public by that of the best preserved portions of Melrose Abbey. With
+what encouragement would those among us who are sincerely interested in
+history, or in art, receive a proposal to pull down Melrose Abbey, and
+"reproduce it mathematically"? There can be no doubt of the answer
+which, in the instances supposed, it would be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> proper to return. "By all
+means, if you can, reproduce mathematically, elsewhere, the group of the
+Fates, and the Abbey of Melrose. But leave unharmed the original
+fragment, and the existing ruin."<a name="FNanchor_56_56" id="FNanchor_56_56"></a><a href="#Footnote_56_56" class="fnanchor">[56]</a> And an answer of the same tenor
+ought to be given to every proposal to restore a Gothic sculpture or
+building. Carve or raise a model of it in some other part of the city;
+but touch not the actual edifice, except only so far as may be necessary
+to sustain, to protect it. I said above that repairs were in many
+instances necessary. These necessary operations consist in substituting
+new stones for decayed ones, where they are absolutely essential to the
+stability of the fabric; in propping, with wood or metal, the portions
+likely to give way; in binding or cementing into their places the
+sculptures which are ready to detach themselves; and in general care to
+remove luxuriant weeds and obstructions of the channels for the
+discharge of the rain. But no modern or imitative sculpture ought
+<i>ever</i>, under any circumstances, to be mingled with the ancient work.</p>
+
+<p>262. Unfortunately, repairs thus conscientiously executed are always
+unsightly, and meet with little approbation from the general public; so
+that a strong temptation is necessarily felt by the superintendents of
+public works to execute the required repairs in a manner which, though
+indeed fatal to the monument, may be, in appearance, seemly. But a far
+more cruel temptation is held out to the architect. He who should
+propose to a municipal body to build in the form of a new church, to be
+erected in some other part of their city, models of such portions of
+their cathedral as were falling into decay, would be looked upon as
+merely asking for employment, and his offer would be rejected with
+disdain. But let an architect declare that the existing fabric stands in
+need of repairs, and offer to restore it to its original beauty, and he
+is instantly regarded as a lover of his country, and has a chance of
+obtaining a commission which will furnish him with a large and ready
+income, and enormous patronage, for twenty or thirty years to come.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>263. I have great respect for human nature. But I would rather leave it
+to others than myself to pronounce how far such a temptation is always
+likely to be resisted, and how far, when repairs are once permitted to
+be undertaken, a fabric is likely to be spared from mere interest in its
+beauty, when its destruction, under the name of restoration, has become
+permanently remunerative to a large body of workmen.</p>
+
+<p>Let us assume, however, that the architect is always
+conscientious&mdash;always willing, the moment he has done what is strictly
+necessary for the safety and decorous aspect of the building, to abandon
+his income, and declare his farther services unnecessary. Let us
+presume, also, that every one of the two or three hundred workmen who
+must be employed under him is equally conscientious, and, during the
+course of years of labor, will never destroy in carelessness what it may
+be inconvenient to save, or in cunning what it is difficult to imitate.
+Will all this probity of purpose preserve the hand from error, and the
+heart from weariness? Will it give dexterity to the awkward&mdash;sagacity to
+the dull&mdash;and at once invest two or three hundred imperfectly educated
+men with the feeling, intention, and information of the freemasons of
+the thirteenth century? Grant that it can do all this, and that the new
+building is both equal to the old in beauty, and precisely correspondent
+to it in detail. Is it, therefore, altogether <i>worth</i> the old building?
+Is the stone carved to-day in their masons' yards altogether the same in
+value to the hearts of the French people as that which the eyes of St.
+Louis saw lifted to its place? Would a loving daughter, in mere desire
+for gaudy dress, ask a jeweler for a bright fac-simile of the worn cross
+which her mother bequeathed to her on her deathbed?&mdash;would a thoughtful
+nation, in mere fondness for splendor of streets, ask its architects to
+provide for it fac-similes of the temples which for centuries had given
+joy to its saints, comfort to its mourners, and strength to its
+chivalry?</p>
+
+<p>264. But it may be replied, that all this is already admitted by the
+antiquaries of France and England; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> that it is impossible that works
+so important should now be undertaken with due consideration and
+faithful superintendence.</p>
+
+<p>I answer, that the men who justly feel these truths are rarely those who
+have much influence in public affairs. It is the poor abb&eacute;, whose little
+garden is sheltered by the mighty buttresses from the north wind, who
+knows the worth of the cathedral. It is the bustling mayor and the
+prosperous architect who determine its fate.</p>
+
+<p>I answer farther, by the statement of a simple fact. I have given many
+years, in many cities, to the study of Gothic architecture; and of all
+that I know, or knew, the entrance to the north transept of Rouen
+Cathedral was, on the whole, the most beautiful&mdash;beautiful, not only as
+an elaborate and faultless work of the finest time of Gothic art, but
+yet more beautiful in the partial, though not dangerous, decay which had
+touched its pinnacles with pensive coloring, and softened its severer
+lines with unexpected change and delicate fracture, like sweet breaks in
+a distant music. The upper part of it has been already restored to the
+white accuracies of novelty; the lower pinnacles, which flanked its
+approach, far more exquisite in their partial ruin than the loveliest
+remains of our English abbeys, have been entirely destroyed, and rebuilt
+in rough blocks, now in process of sculpture. This restoration, so far
+as it has gone, has been executed by peculiarly skillful workmen; it is
+an unusually favorable example of restoration, especially in the care
+which has been taken to preserve intact the exquisite, and hitherto
+almost uninjured sculptures which fill the quatrefoils of the tracery
+above the arch. But I happened myself to have made, five years ago,
+detailed drawings of the buttress decorations on the right and left of
+this tracery, which are part of the work that has been completely
+restored. And I found the restorations as inaccurate as they were
+unnecessary.</p>
+
+<p>265. If this is the case in a most favorable instance, in that of a
+well-known monument, highly esteemed by every antiquary in France, what,
+during the progress of the now<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> almost universal repair, is likely to
+become of architecture which is unwatched and despised?</p>
+
+<p>Despised! and more than despised&mdash;even hated! It is a sad truth, that
+there is something in the solemn aspect of ancient architecture which,
+in rebuking frivolity and chastening gayety, has become at this time
+literally <i>repulsive</i> to a large majority of the population of Europe.
+Examine the direction which is taken by all the influences of fortune
+and of fancy, wherever they concern themselves with art, and it will be
+found that the real, earnest effort of the upper classes of European
+society is to make every place in the world as much like the Champs
+Elys&eacute;es of Paris as possible. Wherever the influence of that educated
+society is felt, the old buildings are relentlessly destroyed; vast
+hotels, like barracks, and rows of high, square-windowed
+dwelling-houses, thrust themselves forward to conceal the hated
+antiquities of the great cities of France and Italy. Gay promenades,
+with fountains and statues, prolong themselves along the quays once
+dedicated to commerce; ball-rooms and theaters rise upon the dust of
+desecrated chapels, and thrust into darkness the humility of domestic
+life. And when the formal street, in all its pride of perfumery and
+confectionery, has successfully consumed its way through wrecks of
+historical monuments, and consummated its symmetry in the ruin of all
+that once prompted a reflection, or pleaded for regard, the whitened
+city is praised for its splendor, and the exulting inhabitants for their
+patriotism&mdash;patriotism which consists in insulting their fathers with
+forgetfulness, and surrounding their children with temptation.</p>
+
+<p>266. I am far from intending my words to involve any disrespectful
+allusion to the very noble improvements in the city of Paris itself,
+lately carried out under the encouragement of the Emperor. Paris, in its
+own peculiar character of bright magnificence, had nothing to fear, and
+everything to gain, from the gorgeous prolongation of the Rue Rivoli.
+But I speak of the general influence of the rich travelers and
+proprietors of Europe on the cities which they pretend<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> to admire, or
+endeavor to improve. I speak of the changes wrought during my own
+lifetime on the cities of Venice, Florence, Geneva, Lucerne, and chief
+of all on Rouen, a city altogether inestimable for its retention of
+medi&aelig;val character in the infinitely varied streets in which one half of
+the existing and inhabited houses date from the 15th or early 16th
+century, and the only town left in France in which the effect of old
+French domestic architecture can yet be seen in its collective groups.
+But when I was there, this last spring, I heard that these noble old
+Norman houses are all, as speedily as may be, to be stripped of the dark
+slates which protected their timbers, and deliberately whitewashed over
+all their sculptures and ornaments, in order to bring the interior of
+the town into some conformity with the "handsome fronts" of the hotels
+and offices on the quay.</p>
+
+<p>Hotels and offices, and "handsome fronts" in general&mdash;they can be built
+in America or Australia&mdash;built at any moment, and in any height of
+splendor. But who shall give us back, when once destroyed, the
+habitations of the French chivalry and bourgeoisie in the days of the
+Field of the Cloth of Gold?</p>
+
+<p>267. It is strange that no one seems to think of this! What do men
+travel for, in this Europe of ours? Is it only to gamble with French
+dies&mdash;to drink coffee out of French porcelain&mdash;to dance to the beat of
+German drums, and sleep in the soft air of Italy? Are the ball-room, the
+billiard-room, and the Boulevard, the only attractions that win us into
+wandering, or tempt us to repose? And when the time is come, as come it
+will, and that shortly, when the parsimony&mdash;or lassitude&mdash;which, for the
+most part, are the only protectors of the remnants of elder time, shall
+be scattered by the advance of civilization&mdash;when all the monuments,
+preserved only because it was too costly to destroy them, shall have
+been crushed by the energies of the new world, will the proud nations of
+the twentieth century, looking round on the plains of Europe,
+disencumbered of their memorial marbles,&mdash;will those nations indeed
+stand up with no other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> feeling than one of triumph, freed from the
+paralysis of precedent and the entanglement of memory, to thank us, the
+fathers of progress, that no saddening shadows can any more trouble the
+enjoyments of the future,&mdash;no moments of reflection retard its
+activities; and that the new-born population of a world without a record
+and without a ruin may, in the fullness of ephemeral felicity, dispose
+itself to eat, and to drink, and to die?</p>
+
+<p>268. Is this verily the end at which we aim, and will the mission of the
+age have been then only accomplished, when the last castle has fallen
+from our rocks, the last cloisters faded from our valleys, the last
+streets, in which the dead have dwelt, been effaced from our cities, and
+regenerated society is left in luxurious possession of towns composed
+only of bright saloons, overlooking gay parterres? If this indeed be our
+end, yet why must it be so laboriously accomplished? Are there no new
+countries on the earth, as yet uncrowned by thorns of cathedral spires,
+untenanted by the consciousness of a past? Must this little Europe&mdash;this
+corner of our globe, gilded with the blood of old battles, and gray with
+the temples of old pieties&mdash;this narrow piece of the world's pavement,
+worn down by so many pilgrims' feet, be utterly swept and garnished for
+the masque of the Future? Is America not wide enough for the
+elasticities of our humanity? Asia not rich enough for its pride? or
+among the quiet meadowlands and solitary hills of the old land, is there
+not yet room enough for the spreadings of power, or the indulgences of
+magnificence, without founding all glory upon ruin, and prefacing all
+progress with obliteration?</p>
+
+<p>269. We must answer these questions speedily, or we answer them in vain.
+The peculiar character of the evil which is being wrought by this age is
+its utter irreparableness. Its newly formed schools of art, its
+extending galleries, and well-ordered museums will assuredly bear some
+fruit in time, and give once more to the popular mind the power to
+discern what is great, and the disposition to protect what is precious.
+But it will be too late. We shall wander<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> through our palaces of
+crystal, gazing sadly on copies of pictures torn by cannon-shot, and on
+casts of sculpture dashed to pieces long ago. We shall gradually learn
+to distinguish originality and sincerity from the decrepitudes of
+imitation and palsies of repetition; but it will be only in hopelessness
+to recognize the truth, that architecture and painting can be "restored"
+when the dead can be raised,&mdash;and not till then.</p>
+
+<p>270. Something might yet be done, if it were but possible thoroughly to
+awaken and alarm the men whose studies of arch&aelig;ology have enabled them
+to form an accurate judgment of the importance of the crisis. But it is
+one of the strange characters of the human mind, necessary indeed to its
+peace, but infinitely destructive of its power, that we never thoroughly
+feel the evils which are not actually set before our eyes. If, suddenly,
+in the midst of the enjoyments of the palate and lightnesses of heart of
+a London dinner-party, the walls of the chamber were parted, and through
+their gap, the nearest human beings who were famishing, and in misery,
+were borne into the midst of the company&mdash;feasting and fancy-free&mdash;if,
+pale with sickness, horrible in destitution, broken by despair, body by
+body, they were laid upon the soft carpet, one beside the chair of every
+guest, would only the crumbs of the dainties be cast to them&mdash;would only
+a passing glance, a passing thought be vouchsafed to them? Yet the
+actual facts, the real relations of each Dives and Lazarus, are not
+altered by the intervention of the house wall between the table and the
+sick-bed&mdash;by the few feet of ground (how few!) which are indeed all that
+separate the merriment from the misery.</p>
+
+<p>271. It is the same in the matters of which I have hitherto been
+speaking. If every one of us, who knows what food for the human heart
+there is in the great works of elder time, could indeed see with his own
+eyes their progressive ruin; if every earnest antiquarian, happy in his
+well-ordered library, and in the sense of having been useful in
+preserving an old stone or two out of his parish church, and an old coin
+or two<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> out of a furrow in the next plowed field, could indeed behold,
+each morning as he awaked, the mightiest works of departed nations
+moldering to the ground in disregarded heaps; if he could always have in
+clear phantasm before his eyes the ignorant monk trampling on the
+manuscript, the village mason striking down the monument, the court
+painter daubing the despised and priceless masterpiece into freshness of
+fatuity, he would not always smile so complacently in the thoughts of
+the little learnings and petty preservations of his own immediate
+sphere. And if every man, who has the interest of Art and of History at
+heart, would at once devote himself earnestly&mdash;not to enrich his own
+collection&mdash;not even to enlighten his own neighbors or investigate his
+own parish-territory&mdash;but to far-sighted and <i>fore</i>-sighted endeavor in
+the great field of Europe, there is yet time to do much. An association
+might be formed, thoroughly organized so as to maintain active watchers
+and agents in every town of importance, who, in the first place, should
+furnish the society with a <i>perfect</i> account of every monument of
+interest in its neighborhood, and then with a yearly or half-yearly
+report of the state of such monuments, and of the changes proposed to be
+made upon them; the society then furnishing funds, either to buy,
+freehold, such buildings or other works of untransferable art as at any
+time might be offered for sale, or to assist their proprietors, whether
+private individuals or public bodies, in the maintenance of such
+guardianship as was really necessary for their safety; and exerting
+itself, with all the influence which such an association would rapidly
+command, to prevent unwise restoration and unnecessary destruction.</p>
+
+<p>272. Such a society would of course be rewarded only by the
+consciousness of its usefulness. Its funds would have to be supplied, in
+pure self-denial, by its members, who would be required, so far as they
+assisted it, to give up the pleasure of purchasing prints or pictures
+for their own walls, that they might save pictures which in their
+lifetime they might never behold; they would have to forego the
+enlargement<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> of their own estates, that they might buy, for a European
+property, ground on which their feet might never tread. But is it absurd
+to believe that men are capable of doing this? Is the love of art
+altogether a selfish principle in the heart? and are its emotions
+altogether incompatible with the exertions of self-denial or enjoyments
+of generosity?</p>
+
+<p>273. I make this appeal at the risk of incurring only contempt for my
+Utopianism. But I should forever reproach myself if I were prevented
+from making it by such a risk; and I pray those who may be disposed in
+any wise to favor it to remember that it must be answered at once or
+never. The next five years determine what is to be saved&mdash;what
+destroyed. The restorations have actually begun like cancers on every
+important piece of Gothic architecture in Christendom; the question is
+only how much can yet be saved. All projects, all pursuits, having
+reference to art, are at this moment of less importance than those which
+are simply protective. There is time enough for everything else. Time
+enough for teaching&mdash;time enough for criticising&mdash;time enough for
+inventing. But time little enough for saving. Hereafter we can create,
+but it is now only that we can preserve. By the exertion of great
+national powers, and under the guidance of enlightened monarchs, we may
+raise magnificent temples and gorgeous cities; we may furnish labor for
+the idle, and interest for the ignorant. But the power neither of
+emperors, nor queens, nor kingdoms, can ever print again upon the sands
+of time the effaced footsteps of departed generations, or gather
+together from the dust the stones which had been stamped with the spirit
+of our ancestors.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE STUDY OF ARCHITECTURE IN OUR SCHOOLS.<a name="FNanchor_57_57" id="FNanchor_57_57"></a><a href="#Footnote_57_57" class="fnanchor">[57]</a></h2>
+
+<p>274. I suppose there is no man who, permitted to address, for the first
+time, the Institute of British Architects, would not feel himself
+abashed and restrained, doubtful of his claim to be heard by them, even
+if he attempted only to describe what had come under his personal
+observation, much more if on the occasion he thought it would be
+expected of him to touch upon any of the general principles of the art
+of architecture before its principal English masters.</p>
+
+<p>But if any more than another should feel thus abashed, it is certainly
+one who has first to ask their pardon for the petulance of boyish
+expressions of partial thought; for ungraceful advocacy of principles
+which needed no support from him, and discourteous blame of work of
+which he had never felt the difficulty.</p>
+
+<p>275. Yet, when I ask this pardon, gentlemen&mdash;and I do it sincerely and
+in shame&mdash;it is not as desiring to retract anything in the general tenor
+and scope of what I have hitherto tried to say. Permit me the pain, and
+the apparent impertinence, of speaking for a moment of my own past work;
+for it is necessary that what I am about to submit to you to-night
+should be spoken in no disadvantageous connection with that; and yet
+understood as spoken, in no discordance of purpose with that. Indeed
+there is much in old work of mine which I could wish to put out of mind.
+Reasonings, per<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span>haps not in themselves false, but founded on
+insufficient data and imperfect experience&mdash;eager preferences, and
+dislikes, dependent on chance circumstances of association, and
+limitations of sphere of labor: but, while I would fain now, if I could,
+modify the applications, and chasten the extravagance of my writings,
+let me also say of them that they were the expression of a delight in
+the art of architecture which was too intense to be vitally deceived,
+and of an inquiry too honest and eager to be without some useful result;
+and I only wish I had now time, and strength and power of mind, to carry
+on, more worthily, the main endeavor of my early work. That main
+endeavor has been throughout to set forth the life of the individual
+human spirit as modifying the application of the formal laws of
+architecture, no less than of all other arts; and to show that the power
+and advance of this art, even in conditions of formal nobleness, were
+dependent on its just association with sculpture as a means of
+expressing the beauty of natural forms: and I the more boldly ask your
+permission to insist somewhat on this main meaning of my past work,
+because there are many buildings now rising in the streets of London, as
+in other cities of England, which appear to be designed in accordance
+with this principle, and which are, I believe, more offensive to all who
+thoughtfully concur with me in accepting the principle of Naturalism
+than they are to the classical architect to whose modes of design they
+are visibly antagonistic. These buildings, in which the mere cast of a
+flower, or the realization of a vulgar face, carved without pleasure by
+a workman who is only endeavoring to attract attention by novelty, and
+then fastened on, or appearing to be fastened, as chance may dictate, to
+an arch, or a pillar, or a wall, hold such relation to nobly
+naturalistic architecture as common sign-painter's furniture landscapes
+do to painting, or commonest wax-work to Greek sculpture; and the
+feelings with which true naturalists regard such buildings of this class
+are, as nearly as might be, what a painter would experience, if, having
+contended earnestly against conventional schools, and having asserted
+that Greek<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> vase-painting and Egyptian wall-painting, and Medi&aelig;val
+glass-painting, though beautiful, all, in their place and way, were yet
+subordinate arts, and culminated only in perfectly naturalistic work
+such as Raphael's in fresco, and Titian's on canvas;&mdash;if, I say, a
+painter, fixed in such faith in an entire, intellectual and manly truth,
+and maintaining that an Egyptian profile of a head, however decoratively
+applicable, was only noble for such human truth as it contained, and was
+imperfect and ignoble beside a work of Titian's, were shown, by his
+antagonist, the colored daguerreotype of a human body in its nakedness,
+and told that it was art such as that which he really advocated, and to
+such art that his principles, if carried out, would finally lead.</p>
+
+<p>276. And because this question lies at the very root of the organization
+of the system of instruction for our youth, I venture boldly to express
+the surprise and regret with which I see our schools still agitated by
+assertions of the opposition of Naturalism to Invention, and to the
+higher conditions of art. Even in this very room I believe there has
+lately been question whether a sculptor should look at a real living
+creature of which he had to carve the image. I would answer in one
+sense,&mdash;no; that is to say, he ought to carve no living creature while
+he still needs to look at it. If we do not know what a human body is
+like, we certainly had better look, and look often, at it, before we
+carve it; but if we already know the human likeness so well that we can
+carve it by light of memory, we shall not need to ask whether we ought
+now to look at it or not; and what is true of man is true of all other
+creatures and organisms&mdash;of bird, and beast, and leaf. No assertion is
+more at variance with the laws of classical as well as of subsequent art
+than the common one that species should not be distinguished in great
+design. We might as well say that we ought to carve a man so as not to
+know him from an ape, as that we should carve a lily so as not to know
+it from a thistle. It is difficult for me to conceive how this can be
+asserted in the presence of any remains either of great Greek or Italian
+art. A Greek looked at a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> cockle-shell or a cuttlefish as carefully as
+he looked at an Olympic conqueror. The eagle of Elis, the lion of Velia,
+the horse of Syracuse, the bull of Thurii, the dolphin of Tarentum, the
+crab of Agrigentum, and the crawfish of Catana, are studied as closely,
+every one of them, as the Juno of Argos, or Apollo of Clazomen&aelig;.
+Idealism, so far from being contrary to special truth, is the very
+abstraction of speciality from everything else. It is the earnest
+statement of the characters which make man man, and cockle cockle, and
+flesh flesh, and fish fish. Feeble thinkers, indeed, always suppose that
+distinction of kind involves meanness of style; but the meanness is in
+the treatment, not in the distinction. There is a noble way of carving a
+man, and a mean one; and there is a noble way of carving a beetle, and a
+mean one; and a great sculptor carves his scarab&aelig;us grandly, as he
+carves his king, while a mean sculptor makes vermin of both. And it is a
+sorrowful truth, yet a sublime one, that this greatness of treatment
+cannot be taught by talking about it. No, nor even by enforced imitative
+practice of it. Men treat their subjects nobly only when they themselves
+become noble; not till then. And that elevation of their own nature is
+assuredly not to be effected by a course of drawing from models, however
+well chosen, or of listening to lectures, however well intended.</p>
+
+<p>Art, national or individual, is the result of a long course of previous
+life and training; a necessary result, if that life has been loyal, and
+an impossible one, if it has been base. Let a nation be healthful,
+happy, pure in its enjoyments, brave in its acts, and broad in its
+affections, and its art will spring round and within it as freely as the
+foam from a fountain; but let the spring of its life be impure, and its
+course polluted, and you will not get the bright spray by treatises on
+the mathematical structure of bubbles.</p>
+
+<p>277. And I am to-night the more restrained in addressing you, because,
+gentlemen&mdash;I tell you honestly&mdash;I am weary of all writing and speaking
+about art, and most of my own. No good is to be reached that way. The
+last fifty years<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> have, in every civilized country of Europe, produced
+more brilliant thought, and more subtle reasoning about art than the
+five thousand before them, and what has it all come to? Do not let it be
+thought that I am insensible to the high merits of much of our modern
+work. It cannot be for a moment supposed that in speaking of the
+inefficient expression of the doctrines which writers on art have tried
+to enforce, I was thinking of such Gothic as has been designed and built
+by Mr. Scott, Mr. Butterfield, Mr. Street, Mr. Waterhouse, Mr. Godwin,
+or my dead friend, Mr. Woodward. Their work has been original and
+independent. So far as it is good, it has been founded on principles
+learned not from books, but by study of the monuments of the great
+schools, developed by national grandeur, not by philosophical
+speculation. But I am entirely assured that those who have done best
+among us are the least satisfied with what they have done, and will
+admit a sorrowful concurrence in my belief that the spirit, or rather, I
+should say, the dispirit, of the age, is heavily against them; that all
+the ingenious writing or thinking which is so rife amongst us has failed
+to educate a public capable of taking true pleasure in any kind of art,
+and that the best designers never satisfy their own requirements of
+themselves, unless by vainly addressing another temper of mind, and
+providing for another manner of life, than ours. All lovely architecture
+was designed for cities in cloudless air; for cities in which piazzas
+and gardens opened in bright populousness and peace; cities built that
+men might live happily in them, and take delight daily in each other's
+presence and powers. But our cities, built in black air which, by its
+accumulated foulness, first renders all ornament invisible in distance,
+and then chokes its interstices with soot; cities which are mere crowded
+masses of store, and warehouse, and counter, and are therefore to the
+rest of the world what the larder and cellar are to a private house;
+cities in which the object of men is not life, but labor; and in which
+all chief magnitude of edifice is to inclose machinery; cities in which
+the streets are not the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> avenues for the passing and procession of a
+happy people, but the drains for the discharge of a tormented mob, in
+which the only object in reaching any spot is to be transferred to
+another; in which existence becomes mere transition, and every creature
+is only one atom in a drift of human dust, and current of interchanging
+particles, circulating here by tunnels underground, and there by tubes
+in the air; for a city, or cities, such as this no architecture is
+possible&mdash;nay, no desire of it is possible to their inhabitants.</p>
+
+<p>278. One of the most singular proofs of the vanity of all hope that
+conditions of art may be combined with the occupations of such a city,
+has been given lately in the design of the new iron bridge over the
+Thames at Blackfriars. Distinct attempt has been there made to obtain
+architectural effect on a grand scale. Nor was there anything in the
+nature of the work to prevent such an effort being successful. It is not
+edifices, being of iron, or of glass, or thrown into new forms, demanded
+by new purposes, which need hinder its being beautiful. But it is the
+absence of all desire of beauty, of all joy in fancy, and of all freedom
+in thought. If a Greek, or Egyptian, or Gothic architect had been
+required to design such a bridge, he would have looked instantly at the
+main conditions of its structure, and dwelt on them with the delight of
+imagination. He would have seen that the main thing to be done was to
+hold a horizontal group of iron rods steadily and straight over stone
+piers. Then he would have said to himself (or felt without saying), "It
+is this holding,&mdash;this grasp,&mdash;this securing tenor of a thing which
+might be shaken, so that it cannot be shaken, on which I have to
+insist." And he would have put some life into those iron tenons. As a
+Greek put human life into his pillars and produced the caryatid; and an
+Egyptian lotus life into his pillars and produced the lily capital: so
+here, either of them would have put some gigantic or some angelic life
+into those colossal sockets. He would perhaps have put vast winged
+statues of bronze, folding their wings, and grasping the iron rails with
+their hands; or monstrous eagles, or ser<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span>pents holding with claw or
+coil, or strong four-footed animals couchant, holding with the paw, or
+in fierce action, holding with teeth. Thousands of grotesque or of
+lovely thoughts would have risen before him, and the bronze forms,
+animal or human, would have signified, either in symbol or in legend,
+whatever might be gracefully told respecting the purposes of the work
+and the districts to which it conducted. Whereas, now, the entire
+invention of the designer seems to have exhausted itself in exaggerating
+to an enormous size a weak form of iron nut, and in conveying the
+information upon it, in large letters, that it belongs to the London,
+Chatham, and Dover Railway Company. I believe then, gentlemen, that if
+there were any life in the national mind in such respects, it would be
+shown in these its most energetic and costly works. But that there is no
+such life, nothing but a galvanic restlessness and covetousness, with
+which it is for the present vain to strive; and in the midst of which,
+tormented at once by its activities and its apathies, having their work
+continually thrust aside and dishonored, always seen to disadvantage,
+and overtopped by huge masses, discordant and destructive, even the best
+architects must be unable to do justice to their own powers.</p>
+
+<p>279. But, gentlemen, while thus the mechanisms of the age prevent even
+the wisest and best of its artists from producing entirely good work,
+may we not reflect with consternation what a marvelous ability the
+luxury of the age, and the very advantages of education, confer on the
+unwise and ignoble for the production of attractively and infectiously
+<i>bad</i> work? I do not think that this adverse influence, necessarily
+affecting all conditions of so-called civilization, has been ever enough
+considered. It is impossible to calculate the power of the false workman
+in an advanced period of national life, nor the temptation to all
+workmen, to <i>become</i> false.</p>
+
+<p>280. First, there is the irresistible appeal to vanity. There is hardly
+any temptation of the kind (there cannot be) while the arts are in
+progress. The best men must then always be ashamed of themselves; they
+never can be satis<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span>fied with their work absolutely, but only as it is
+progressive. Take, for instance, any archaic head intended to be
+beautiful; say, the Attic Athena, or the early Arethusa of Syracuse. In
+that, and in all archaic work of promise, there is much that is
+inefficient, much that to us appears ridiculous&mdash;but nothing sensual,
+nothing vain, nothing spurious or imitative. It is a child's work, a
+childish nation's work, but not a fool's work. You find in children the
+same tolerance of ugliness, the same eager and innocent delight in their
+own work for the moment, however feeble; but next day it is thrown
+aside, and something better is done. Now, in this careless play, a child
+or a childish nation differs inherently from a foolish educated person,
+or a nation advanced in pseudo-civilization. The educated person has
+seen all kinds of beautiful things, of which he would fain do the
+like&mdash;not to add to their number&mdash;but for his own vanity, that he also
+may be called an artist. Here is at once a singular and fatal
+difference. The childish nation sees nothing in its own past work to
+satisfy itself. It is pleased at having done this, but wants something
+better; it is struggling forward always to reach this better, this ideal
+conception. It wants more beauty to look at, it wants more subject to
+feel. It calls out to all its artists&mdash;stretching its hands to them as a
+little child does&mdash;"Oh, if you would but tell me another story,"&mdash;"Oh,
+if I might but have a doll with bluer eyes." That's the right temper to
+work in, and to get work done for you in. But the vain, aged,
+highly-educated nation is satiated with beautiful things&mdash;it has myriads
+more than it can look at; it has fallen into a habit of inattention; it
+passes weary and jaded through galleries which contain the best fruit of
+a thousand years of human travail; it gapes and shrugs over them, and
+pushes its way past them to the door.</p>
+
+<p>281. But there is one feeling that is always distinct; however jaded and
+languid we may be in all other pleasures, we are never languid in
+vanity, and we would still paint and carve for fame. What other motive
+have the nations of Europe to-day? If they wanted art for art's sake
+they would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> take care of what they have already got. But at this instant
+the two noblest pictures in Venice are lying rolled up in outhouses, and
+the noblest portrait of Titian in existence is hung forty feet from the
+ground. We have absolutely no motive but vanity and the love of
+money&mdash;no others, as nations, than these, whatever we may have as
+individuals. And as the thirst of vanity thus increases, so the
+temptation to it. There was no fame of artists in these archaic days.
+Every year, every hour, saw someone rise to surpass what had been done
+before. And there was always better work to be done, but never any
+credit to be got by it. The artist lived in an atmosphere of perpetual,
+wholesome, inevitable eclipse. Do as well as you choose to-day,&mdash;make
+the whole Borgo dance with delight, they would dance to a better man's
+pipe to-morrow. <i>Credette Cimabue nella pittura, tener lo campo, et ora
+ha Giotto il grido.</i> This was the fate, the necessary fate, even of the
+strongest. They could only hope to be remembered as links in an endless
+chain. For the weaker men it was no use even to put their name on their
+works. They did not. If they could not work for joy and for love, and
+take their part simply in the choir of human toil, they might throw up
+their tools. But now it is far otherwise&mdash;now, the best having been
+done&mdash;and for a couple of hundred years, the best of us being confessed
+to have come short of it, everybody thinks that he may be the great man
+once again, and this is certain, that whatever in art is done for
+display, is invariably wrong.</p>
+
+<p>282. But, secondly, consider the attractive power of false art,
+completed, as compared with imperfect art advancing to completion.
+Archaic work, so far as faultful, is repulsive, but advanced work is, in
+all its faults, attractive. The moment that art has reached the point at
+which it becomes sensitively and delicately imitative, it appeals to a
+new audience. From that instant it addresses the sensualist and the
+idler. Its deceptions, its successes, its subtleties, become interesting
+to every condition of folly, of frivolity, and of vice. And this new
+audience brings to bear upon the art in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> which its foolish and wicked
+interest has been unhappily awakened, the full power of its riches: the
+largest bribes of gold as well as of praise are offered to the artist
+who will betray his art, until at last, from the sculpture of Phidias
+and fresco of Luini, it sinks into the cabinet ivory and the picture
+kept under lock and key. Between these highest and lowest types, there
+is a vast mass of merely imitative and delicately sensual
+sculpture;&mdash;veiled nymphs&mdash;chained slaves&mdash;soft goddesses seen by
+roselight through suspended curtains&mdash;drawing room portraits and
+domesticities, and such like, in which the interest is either merely
+personal and selfish, or dramatic and sensational; in either case,
+destructive of the power of the public to sympathize with the aims of
+great architects.</p>
+
+<p>283. Gentlemen,&mdash;I am no Puritan, and have never praised or advocated
+puritanical art. The two pictures which I would last part with out of
+our National Gallery, if there were question of parting with any, would
+be Titian's Bacchus and Correggio's Venus. But the noble naturalism of
+these was the fruit of ages of previous courage, continence, and
+religion&mdash;it was the fullness of passion in the life of a Britomart. But
+the mid-age and old age of nations is not like the mid-age or old age of
+noble women. National decrepitude must be criminal. National death can
+only be by disease, and yet it is almost impossible, out of the history
+of the art of nations, to elicit the true conditions relating to its
+decline in any demonstrable manner. The history of Italian art is that
+of a struggle between superstition and naturalism on one side, between
+continence and sensuality on another. So far as naturalism prevailed
+over superstition, there is always progress; so far as sensuality over
+chastity, death. And the two contests are simultaneous. It is impossible
+to distinguish one victory from the other. Observe, however, I say
+victory over superstition, not over religion. Let me carefully define
+the difference. Superstition, in all times and among all nations, is the
+fear of a spirit whose passions are those of a man, whose acts are the
+acts of a man;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> who is present in some places, not in others; who makes
+some places holy and not others; who is kind to one person, unkind to
+another; who is pleased or angry according to the degree of attention
+you pay to him, or praise you refuse to him; who is hostile generally to
+human pleasure, but may be bribed by sacrifice of a part of that
+pleasure into permitting the rest. This, whatever form of faith it
+colors, is the essence of superstition. And religion is the belief in a
+Spirit whose mercies are over all His works&mdash;who is kind even to the
+unthankful and the evil; who is everywhere present, and therefore is in
+no place to be sought, and in no place to be evaded; to whom all
+creatures, times, and things are everlastingly holy, and who claims&mdash;not
+tithes of wealth, nor sevenths of days&mdash;but all the wealth that we have,
+and all the days that we live, and all the beings that we are, but who
+claims that totality because He delights only in the delight of His
+creatures; and because, therefore, the one duty that they owe to Him,
+and the only service they can render Him, is to be happy. A Spirit,
+therefore, whose eternal benevolence cannot be angered, cannot be
+appeased; whose laws are everlasting and inexorable, so that heaven and
+earth must indeed pass away if one jot of them failed: laws which attach
+to every wrong and error a measured, inevitable penalty; to every
+rightness and prudence, an assured reward; penalty, of which the
+remittance cannot be purchased; and reward, of which the promise cannot
+be broken.</p>
+
+<p>284. And thus, in the history of art, we ought continually to endeavor
+to distinguish (while, except in broadest lights, it is impossible to
+distinguish) the work of religion from that of superstition, and the
+work of reason from that of infidelity. Religion devotes the artist,
+hand and mind, to the service of the gods; superstition makes him the
+slave of ecclesiastical pride, or forbids his work altogether, in terror
+or disdain. Religion perfects the form of the divine statue,
+superstition distorts it into ghastly grotesque. Religion contemplates
+the gods as the lords of healing and life, surrounds them with glory of
+affectionate service, and festivity of pure<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> human beauty. Superstition
+contemplates its idols as lords of death, appeases them with blood, and
+vows itself to them in torture and solitude. Religion proselytes by
+love, superstition by war; religion teaches by example, superstition by
+persecution. Religion gave granite shrine to the Egyptian, golden temple
+to the Jew, sculptured corridor to the Greek, pillared aisle and
+frescoed wall to the Christian. Superstition made idols of the splendors
+by which Religion had spoken: reverenced pictures and stones, instead of
+truths; letters and laws, instead of acts, and forever, in various
+madness of fantastic desolation, kneels in the temple while it crucifies
+the Christ.</p>
+
+<p>285. On the other hand, to reason resisting superstition, we owe the
+entire compass of modern energies and sciences; the healthy laws of
+life, and the possibilities of future progress. But to infidelity
+resisting religion (or which is often enough the case, taking the mask
+of it), we owe sensuality, cruelty, and war, insolence and avarice,
+modern political economy, life by conservation of forces, and salvation
+by every man's looking after his own interest; and, generally,
+whatsoever of guilt, and folly, and death, there is abroad among us. And
+of the two, a thousand-fold rather let us retain some color of
+superstition, so that we may keep also some strength of religion, than
+comfort ourselves with color of reason for the desolation of
+godlessness. I would say to every youth who entered our schools&mdash;Be a
+Mahometan, a Diana-worshiper, a Fire-worshiper, Root-worshiper, if you
+will; but at least be so much a man as to know what worship means. I had
+rather, a million-fold rather, see you one of those "quibus h&aelig;c
+nascuntur in hortis numina," than one of those "quibus h&aelig;c <i>non</i>
+nascuntur in cordibus lumina"; and who are, by everlasting orphanage,
+divided from the Father of Spirits, who is also the Father of lights,
+from whom cometh every good and perfect gift.</p>
+
+<p>286. "So much of man," I say, feeling profoundly that all right exercise
+of any human gift, so descended from the Giver of good, depends on the
+primary formation of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> character of true manliness in the youth&mdash;that
+is to say, of a majestic, grave, and deliberate strength. How strange
+the words sound; how little does it seem possible to conceive of
+majesty, and gravity, and deliberation in the daily track of modern
+life. Yet, gentlemen, we need not hope that our work will be majestic if
+there is no majesty in ourselves. The word "manly" has come to mean
+practically, among us, a schoolboy's character, not a man's. We are, at
+our best, thoughtlessly impetuous, fond of adventure and excitement;
+curious in knowledge for its novelty, not for its system and results;
+faithful and affectionate to those among whom we are by chance cast, but
+gently and calmly insolent to strangers: we are stupidly conscientious,
+and instinctively brave, and always ready to cast away the lives we take
+no pains to make valuable, in causes of which we have never ascertained
+the justice. This is our highest type&mdash;notable peculiarly among nations
+for its gentleness, together with its courage; but in lower conditions
+it is especially liable to degradation by its love of jest and of vulgar
+sensation. It is against this fatal tendency to vile play that we have
+chiefly to contend. It is the spirit of Milton's Comus; bestial itself,
+but having power to arrest and paralyze all who come within its
+influence, even pure creatures sitting helpless, mocked by it on their
+marble thrones. It is incompatible, not only with all greatness of
+character, but with all true gladness of heart, and it develops itself
+in nations in proportion to their degradation, connected with a peculiar
+gloom and a singular tendency to play with death, which is a morbid
+reaction from the morbid excess.</p>
+
+<p>287. A book has lately been published on the Mythology of the Rhine,
+with illustrations by Gustave Dor&eacute;. The Rhine god is represented in the
+vignette title-page with a pipe in one hand and a pot of beer in the
+other. You cannot have a more complete type of the tendency which is
+chiefly to be dreaded in this age than in this conception, as opposed to
+any possibility of representation of a river-god, however playful, in
+the mind of a Greek painter. The example is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> the more notable because
+Gustave Dor&eacute;'s is not a common mind, and, if born in any other epoch, he
+would probably have done valuable (though never first rate) work; but by
+glancing (it will be impossible for you to do more than glance) at his
+illustrations of Balzac's "Contes Drolatiques," you will see further how
+this "drolatique," or semi-comic mask is, in the truth of it, the mask
+of a skull, and how the tendency to burlesque jest is both in France and
+England only an effervescence from the <i>cloaca maxima</i> of the putrid
+instincts which fasten themselves on national sin, and are in the midst
+of the luxury of European capitals, what Dante meant when he wrote "quel
+mi sveglio col puzzo," of the body of the Wealth-Siren; the mocking
+levity and mocking gloom being equally signs of the death of the soul;
+just as, contrariwise, a passionate seriousness and passionate
+joyfulness are signs of its full life in works such as those of
+Angelico, Luini, Ghiberti, or La Robbia.</p>
+
+<p>It is to recover this stern seriousness, this pure and thrilling joy,
+together with perpetual sense of spiritual presence, that all true
+education of youth must now be directed. This seriousness, this passion,
+this universal human religion, are the first principles, the true roots
+of all art, as they are of all doing, of all being. Get this <i>vis viva</i>
+first and all great work will follow. Lose it, and your schools of art
+will stand among other living schools as the frozen corpses stand by the
+winding stair of the St. Michael's Convent of Mont Cenis, holding their
+hands stretched out under their shrouds, as if beseeching the passer by
+to look upon the wasting of their death.</p>
+
+<p>288. And all the higher branches of technical teaching are vain without
+this; nay are in some sort vain altogether, for they are superseded by
+this. You may teach imitation, because the meanest man can imitate; but
+you can neither teach idealism nor composition, because only a great man
+can choose, conceive, or compose; and he does all these necessarily, and
+because of his nature. His greatness is in his choice of things, in his
+analysis of them, and his combining<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> powers involve the totality of his
+knowledge in life. His methods of observation and abstraction are
+essential habits of his thought, conditions of his being. If he looks at
+a human form he recognizes the signs of nobility in it, and loves
+them&mdash;hates whatever is diseased, frightful, sinful, or <i>designant</i> of
+decay. All ugliness, and abortion, and fading away; all signs of vice
+and foulness, he turns away from, as inherently diabolic and horrible;
+all signs of unconquered emotion he regrets, as weaknesses. He looks
+only for the calm purity of the human creature, in living conquests of
+its passions and of fate. That is idealism; but you cannot teach anyone
+else that preference. Take a man who likes to see and paint the
+gambler's rage; the hedge-ruffian's enjoyment; the debauched soldier's
+strife; the vicious woman's degradation;&mdash;take a man fed on the dusty
+picturesque of rags and guilt; talk to him of principles of beauty! make
+him draw what you will, how you will, he will leave the stain of himself
+on whatever he touches. You had better go lecture to a snail, and tell
+it to leave no slime behind it. Try to make a mean man compose; you will
+find nothing in his thoughts consecutive or proportioned&mdash;nothing
+consistent in his sight&mdash;nothing in his fancy. He cannot comprehend two
+things in relation at once&mdash;how much less twenty! How much less all!
+Everything is uppermost with him in its turn, and each as large as the
+rest; but Titian or Veronese compose as tranquilly as they would
+speak&mdash;inevitably. The thing comes to them so&mdash;they see it so&mdash;rightly,
+and in harmony: they will not talk to you of composition, hardly even
+understanding how lower people see things otherwise, but knowing that if
+they <i>do</i> see otherwise, there is for them the end there, talk as you
+will.</p>
+
+<p>289. I had intended, in conclusion, gentlemen, to incur such blame of
+presumption as might be involved in offering some hints for present
+practical methods in architectural schools, but here again I am checked,
+as I have been throughout, by a sense of the uselessness of all minor
+means, and helps, without the establishment of a true and broad
+edu<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span>cational system. My wish would be to see the profession of the
+architect united, not with that of the engineer, but of the sculptor. I
+think there should be a separate school and university course for
+engineers, in which the principal branches of study connected with that
+of practical building should be the physical and exact sciences, and
+honors should be taken in mathematics; but I think there should be
+another school and university course for the sculptor and architect, in
+which literature and philosophy should be the associated branches of
+study, and honors should be taken <i>in literis humanioribus</i>; and I think
+a young architect's examination for his degree (for mere pass), should
+be much stricter than that of youths intending to enter other
+professions. The quantity of scholarship necessary for the efficiency of
+a country clergyman is not great. So that he be modest and kindly, the
+main truths he has to teach may be learned better in his heart than in
+books, and taught in very simple English. The best physicians I have
+known spent very little time in their libraries; and though my lawyer
+sometimes chats with me over a Greek coin, I think he regards the time
+so spent in the light rather of concession to my idleness than as
+helpful to his professional labors.</p>
+
+<p>But there is no task undertaken by a true architect of which the
+honorable fulfillment will not require a range of knowledge and habitual
+feeling only attainable by advanced scholarship.</p>
+
+<p>290. Since, however, such expansion of system is, at present, beyond
+hope, the best we can do is to render the studies undertaken in our
+schools thoughtful, reverent, and refined, according to our power.
+Especially, it should be our aim to prevent the minds of the students
+from being distracted by models of an unworthy or mixed character. A
+museum is one thing&mdash;a school another; and I am persuaded that as the
+efficiency of a school of literature depends on the mastering a few good
+books, so the efficiency of a school of art will depend on the
+understanding a few good models. And so strongly do I feel this that I
+would, for my own part, at once<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> consent to sacrifice my personal
+predilections in art, and to vote for the exclusion of all Gothic or
+Medi&aelig;val models whatsoever, if by this sacrifice I could obtain also the
+exclusion of Byzantine, Indian, Renaissance-French, and other more or
+less attractive but barbarous work; and thus concentrate the mind of the
+student wholly upon the study of natural form, and upon its treatment by
+the sculptors and metal workers of Greece, Ionia, Sicily, and Magna
+Gr&aelig;cia, between 500 and 350 <span class="smcap">B.C.</span> But I should hope that exclusiveness
+need not be carried quite so far. I think Donatello, Mino of Fiesole,
+the Robbias, Ghiberti, Verrocchio, and Michael Angelo, should be
+adequately represented in our schools&mdash;together with the Greeks&mdash;and
+that a few carefully chosen examples of the floral sculpture of the
+North in the thirteenth century should be added, with especial view to
+display the treatment of naturalistic ornament in subtle connection with
+constructive requirements; and in the course of study pursued with
+reference to these models, as of admitted perfection, I should endeavor
+first to make the student thoroughly acquainted with the natural forms
+and characters of the objects he had to treat, and then to exercise him
+in the abstraction of these forms, and the suggestion of these
+characters, under due sculptural limitation. He should first be taught
+to draw largely and simply; then he should make quick and firm sketches
+of flowers, animals, drapery, and figures, from nature, in the simplest
+terms of line, and light and shade; always being taught to look at the
+organic, actions and masses, not at the textures or accidental effects
+of shade; meantime his sentiment respecting all these things should be
+cultivated by close and constant inquiry into their mythological
+significance and associated traditions; then, knowing the things and
+creatures thoroughly, and regarding them through an atmosphere of
+enchanted memory, he should be shown how the facts he has taken so long
+to learn are summed by a great sculptor in a few touches; how those
+touches are invariably arranged in musical and decorative relations; how
+every detail unnecessary for his purpose is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> refused; how those
+necessary for his purpose are insisted upon, or even exaggerated, or
+represented by singular artifice, when literal representation is
+impossible; and how all this is done under the instinct and passion of
+an inner commanding spirit which it is indeed impossible to imitate, but
+possible, perhaps, to share.</p>
+
+<p>291. Perhaps! Pardon me that I speak despondingly. For my own part, I
+feel the force of mechanism and the fury of avaricious commerce to be at
+present so irresistible, that I have seceded from the study not only of
+architecture, but nearly of all art; and have given myself, as I would
+in a besieged city, to seek the best modes of getting bread and water
+for its multitudes, there remaining no question, it seems, to me, of
+other than such grave business for the time. But there is, at least,
+this ground for courage, if not for hope: As the evil spirits of avarice
+and luxury are directly contrary to art, so, also, art is directly
+contrary to them; and according to its force, expulsive of them and
+medicinal against them; so that the establishment of such schools as I
+have ventured to describe&mdash;whatever their immediate success or ill
+success in the teaching of art&mdash;would yet be the directest method of
+resistance to those conditions of evil among which our youth are cast at
+the most critical period of their lives. We may not be able to produce
+architecture, but, at the least, we shall resist vice. I do not know if
+it has been observed that while Dante rightly connects architecture, as
+the most permanent expression of the pride of humanity, whether just or
+unjust, with the first cornice of Purgatory, he indicates its noble
+function by engraving upon it, in perfect sculpture, the stories which
+rebuke the errors and purify the purposes of noblest souls. In the
+fulfillment of such function, literally and practically, here among men,
+is the only real use of pride of noble architecture, and on its
+acceptance or surrender of that function it depends whether, in future,
+the cities of England melt into a ruin more confused and ghastly than
+ever storm wasted or wolf inhabited, or purge and exalt themselves into
+true habitations of men,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> whose walls shall be Safety, and whose gates
+shall be Praise.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Note.</span>&mdash;In the course of the discussion which followed this paper the
+meeting was addressed by Prof. Donaldson, who alluded to the
+architectural improvements in France under the Third Napoleon, by Mr.
+George Edmund Street, by Prof. Kerr, Mr. Digby Wyatt, and others. The
+President then proposed a vote of thanks to Mr. Ruskin, who, in
+acknowledging the high compliment paid him, said he would detain the
+meeting but a few minutes, but he felt he ought to make some attempt to
+explain what he had inefficiently stated in his paper; and there was
+hardly anything said in the discussion in which he did not concur: the
+supposed differences of opinion were either because he had ill-expressed
+himself, or because of things left unsaid. In the first place he was
+surprised to hear dissent from Professor Donaldson while he expressed
+his admiration of some of the changes which had been developed in modern
+architecture. There were two conditions of architecture adapted for
+different climates; one with narrow streets, calculated for shade;
+another for broad avenues beneath bright skies; but both conditions had
+their beautiful effects. He sympathized with the admirers of Italy, and
+he was delighted with Genoa. He had been delighted also by the view of
+the long vistas from the Tuileries. Mr. Street had showed that he had
+not sufficiently dwelt on the distinction between near and distant
+carving&mdash;between carving and sculpture. He (Mr. Ruskin) could allow of
+no distinction. Sculpture which was to be viewed at a height of 500 feet
+above the eye might be executed with a few touches of the chisel;
+opposed to that there was the exquisite finish which was the perfection
+of sculpture as displayed in the Greek statues, after a full knowledge
+of the whole nature of the object portrayed; both styles were admirable
+in their true application&mdash;both were "sculpture"&mdash;perfect according to
+their places and requirements. The attack of Professor Kerr he regarded
+as in play, and in that spirit he would reply to him that he was afraid
+a practical association with bricks and mortar would hardly produce the
+effects upon him which had been suggested, for having of late in his
+residence experienced the transition of large extents of ground into
+bricks and mortar, it had had no effect in changing his views; and when
+he said he was tired of writing upon art, it was not that he was ashamed
+of what he had written, but that he was tired of writing in vain, and of
+knocking his head, thick as it might be, against a wall. There was
+another point which he would answer very gravely. It was referred to by
+Mr. Digby Wyatt, and was the one point he had mainly at heart all
+through&mdash;viz., that religion and high morality<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> were at the root of all
+great art in all great times. The instances referred to by Mr. Digby
+Wyatt did not counteract that proposition. Modern and ancient forms of
+life might be different, nor could all men be judged by formal canons,
+but a true human heart was in the breast of every really great artist.
+He had the greatest detestation of anything approaching to cant in
+respect of art; but, after long investigation of the historical
+evidence, as well as of the metaphysical laws bearing on this question,
+he was absolutely certain that a high moral and religious training was
+the only way to get good fruits from our youth; make them good men
+first, and only so, if at all, they would become good artists. With
+regard to the points mooted respecting the practical and poetical uses
+of architecture, he thought they did not sufficiently define their
+terms; they spoke of poetry as rhyme. He thanked the President for his
+definition to-night, and he was sure he would concur with him that
+poetry meant as its derivation implied&mdash;"the <i>doing</i>." What was rightly
+done was done forever, and that which was only a crude work for the time
+was not poetry; poetry was only that which would recreate or remake the
+human soul. In that sense poetical architecture was separated from all
+utilitarian work. He had said long ago men could not decorate their
+shops and counters; they could decorate only where they lived in peace
+and rest&mdash;where they existed to be happy. There ornament would find use,
+and there their "doing" would be permanent. In other cases they wasted
+their money if they attempted to make utilitarian work ornamental. He
+might be wrong in that principle, but he had always asserted it, and had
+seen no reason in recent works for any modification of it. He thanked
+the meeting sincerely for the honor they had conferred upon him by their
+invitation to address them that evening, and for the indulgence with
+which they had heard him.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>ART.</h2>
+
+<h2>IV.</h2>
+
+<h3>INAUGURAL ADDRESS.</h3>
+
+
+
+<h3>CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL OF ART.</h3>
+
+<p class="center">(<i>Pamphlet, 1858.</i>)</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="INAUGURAL_ADDRESS58" id="INAUGURAL_ADDRESS58"></a>INAUGURAL ADDRESS<a name="FNanchor_58_58" id="FNanchor_58_58"></a><a href="#Footnote_58_58" class="fnanchor">[58]</a></h2>
+
+<h3>DELIVERED AT THE</h3>
+
+<h3>CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL OF ART,</h3>
+
+<h4>OCTOBER 29TH, 1858.</h4>
+
+
+<p>1. I suppose the persons interested in establishing a School of Art for
+workmen may in the main be divided into two classes, namely, first,
+those who chiefly desire to make the men themselves happier, wiser, and
+better; and secondly, those who desire to enable them to produce better
+and more valuable work. These two objects may, of course, be kept both
+in view at the same time; nevertheless, there is a wide difference in
+the spirit with which we shall approach our task, according to the
+motive of these two which weighs most with us&mdash;a difference great enough
+to divide, as I have said, the promoters of any such scheme into two
+distinct classes; one philanthropic in the gist of its aim, and the
+other commercial in the gist of its aim; one desiring the workman to be
+better informed chiefly for his own sake, and the other chiefly that he
+may be enabled to produce for us commodi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span>ties precious in themselves,
+and which shall successfully compete with those of other countries.</p>
+
+<p>2. And this separation in motives must lead also to a distinction in the
+machinery of the work. The philanthropists address themselves, not to
+the artisan merely, but to the laborer in general, desiring in any
+possible way to refine the habits or increase the happiness of our whole
+working population, by giving them new recreations or new thoughts: and
+the principles of Art-Education adopted in a school which has this wide
+but somewhat indeterminate aim, are, or should be, very different from
+those adopted in a school meant for the special instruction of the
+artisan in his own business. I do not think this distinction is yet
+firmly enough fixed in our minds, or calculated upon in our plans of
+operation. We have hitherto acted, it seems to me, under a vague
+impression that the arts of drawing and painting might be, up to a
+certain point, taught in a general way to everyone, and would do
+everyone equal good; and that each class of operatives might afterwards
+bring this general knowledge into use in their own trade, according to
+its requirements. Now, that is not so. A wood-carver needs for his
+business to learn drawing in quite a different way from a china-painter,
+and a jeweler from a worker in iron. They must be led to study quite
+different characters in the natural forms they introduce in their
+various manufacture. It is no use to teach an iron-worker to observe the
+down on a peach, and of none to teach laws of atmospheric effect to a
+carver in wood. So far as their business is concerned, their brains
+would be vainly occupied by such things, and they would be prevented
+from pursuing, with enough distinctness or intensity, the qualities of
+Art which can alone be expressed in the materials with which they each
+have to do.</p>
+
+<p>3. Now, I believe it to be wholly impossible to teach special
+application of Art principles to various trades in a single school. That
+special application can be only learned rightly by the experience of
+years in the particular work required. The power of each material, and
+the difficulties connected<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> with its treatment are not so much to be
+taught as to be felt; it is only by repeated touch and continued trial
+beside the forge or the furnace, that the goldsmith can find out how to
+govern his gold, or the glass-worker his crystal; and it is only by
+watching and assisting the actual practice of a master in the business,
+that the apprentice can learn the efficient secrets of manipulation, or
+perceive the true limits of the involved conditions of design. It seems
+to me, therefore, that all idea of reference to definite businesses
+should be abandoned in such schools as that just established: we can
+have neither the materials, the conveniences, nor the empirical skill in
+the master, necessary to make such teaching useful. All specific
+Art-teaching must be given in schools established by each trade for
+itself: and when our operatives are a little more enlightened on these
+matters, there will be found, as I have already stated in my lectures on
+the political economy of Art,<a name="FNanchor_59_59" id="FNanchor_59_59"></a><a href="#Footnote_59_59" class="fnanchor">[59]</a> absolute necessity for the
+establishment of guilds of trades in an active and practical form, for
+the purposes of ascertaining the principles of Art proper to their
+business, and instructing their apprentices in them, as well as making
+experiments on materials, and on newly-invented methods of procedure;
+besides many other functions which I cannot now enter into account of.
+All this for the present, and in a school such as this, I repeat, we
+cannot hope for: we shall obtain no satisfactory result, unless we give
+up such hope, and set ourselves to teaching the operative, however
+employed&mdash;be he farmer's laborer, or manufacturer's; be he mechanic,
+artificer, shopman, sailor, or plowman&mdash;teaching, I say, as far as we
+can, one and the same thing to all; namely, Sight.</p>
+
+<p>4. Not a slight thing to teach, this: perhaps, on the whole, the most
+important thing to be taught in the whole range of teaching. To be
+taught to read&mdash;what is the use of that, if you know not whether what
+you read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speak&mdash;but what
+is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to
+think<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span>&mdash;nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing
+to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at
+once, and both true. There is a vague acknowledgment of this in the way
+people are continually expressing their longing for light, until all the
+common language of our prayers and hymns has sunk into little more than
+one monotonous metaphor, dimly twisted into alternate languages,&mdash;asking
+first in Latin to be illuminated; and then in English to be enlightened;
+and then in Latin again to be delivered out of obscurity; and then in
+English to be delivered out of darkness; and then for beams, and rays,
+and suns, and stars, and lamps, until sometimes one wishes that, at
+least for religious purposes, there were no such words as light or
+darkness in existence. Still, the main instinct which makes people
+endure this perpetuity of repetition is a true one; only the main thing
+they want and ought to ask for is, not light, but Sight. It doesn't
+matter how much light you have if you don't know how to use it. It may
+very possibly put out your eyes, instead of helping them. Besides, we
+want, in this world of ours, very often to be able to see in the
+dark&mdash;that's the great gift of all;&mdash;but at any rate to see no matter by
+what light, so only we can see things as they are. On my word, we should
+soon make it a different world, if we could get but a little&mdash;ever so
+little&mdash;of the dervish's ointment in the Arabian Nights, not to show us
+the treasures of the earth, but the facts of it.</p>
+
+<p>5. However, whether these things be generally true or not, at all events
+it is certain that our immediate business, in such a school as this,
+will prosper more by attending to eyes than to hands; we shall always do
+most good by simply endeavoring to enable the student to see natural
+objects clearly and truly. We ought not even to try too strenuously to
+give him the power of representing them. That power may be acquired,
+more or less, by exercises which are no wise conducive to accuracy of
+sight: and, <i>vice vers&acirc;</i>, accuracy of sight may be gained by exercises
+which in no wise conduce to ease of representation. For instance, it
+very much as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span>sists the power of drawing to spend many hours in the
+practice of washing in flat tints; but all this manual practice does not
+in the least increase the student's power of determining what the tint
+of a given object actually is. He would be more advanced in the
+knowledge of the facts by a single hour of well-directed and
+well-<i>corrected</i> effort, rubbing out and putting in again, lightening,
+and darkening, and scratching, and blotching, in patient endeavors to
+obtain concordance with fact, issuing perhaps, after all, in total
+destruction or unpresentability of the drawing; but also in acute
+perception of the things he has been attempting to copy in it. Of
+course, there is always a vast temptation, felt both by the master and
+student, to struggle towards visible results, and obtain something
+beautiful, creditable, or salable, in way of actual drawing: but the
+more I see of schools, the more reason I see to look with doubt upon
+those which produce too many showy and complete works by pupils. A showy
+work will always be found, on stern examination of it, to have been done
+by some conventional rule;&mdash;some servile compliance with directions
+which the student does not see the reason for; and representation of
+truths which he has not himself perceived: the execution of such
+drawings will be found monotonous and lifeless; their light and shade
+specious and formal, but false. A drawing which the pupil has learned
+much in doing, is nearly always full of blunders and mishaps, and it is
+highly necessary for the formation of a truly public or universal school
+of Art, that the masters should not try to conceal or anticipate such
+blunders, but only seek to employ the pupil's time so as to get the most
+precious results for his understanding and his heart, not for his hand.</p>
+
+<p>6. For, observe, the best that you can do in the production of drawing,
+or of draughtsmanship, must always be nothing in itself, unless the
+whole life be given to it. An amateur's drawing, or a workman's
+drawing&mdash;anybody's drawing but an artist's, is always valueless in
+itself. It may be, as you have just heard Mr. Redgrave tell you, most
+precious as a memorial, or as a gift, or as a means of noting useful
+facts; but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> as <i>Art</i>, an amateur's drawing is always wholly worthless;
+and it ought to be one of our great objects to make the pupil understand
+and feel that, and prevent his trying to make his valueless work look,
+in some superficial, hypocritical, eye-catching, penny-catching way,
+like work that is really good.</p>
+
+<p>7. If, therefore, we have to do with pupils belonging to the higher
+ranks of life, our main duty will be to make them good judges of Art,
+rather than artists; for though I had a month to speak to you, instead
+of an hour, time would fail me if I tried to trace the various ways in
+which we suffer, nationally, for want of powers of enlightened judgment
+of Art in our upper and middle classes. Not that this judgment can ever
+be obtained without discipline of the hand: no man ever was a thorough
+judge of painting who could not draw; but the drawing should only be
+thought of as a means of fixing his attention upon the subtleties of the
+Art put before him, or of enabling him to record such natural facts as
+are necessary for comparison with it. I should also attach the greatest
+importance to severe limitation of choice in the examples submitted to
+him. To study one good master till you understand him will teach you
+more than a superficial acquaintance with a thousand: power of criticism
+does not consist in knowing the names or the manner of many painters,
+but in discerning the excellence of a few.</p>
+
+<p>If, on the contrary, our teaching is addressed more definitely to the
+operative, we need not endeavor to render his powers of criticism very
+acute. About many forms of existing Art, the less he knows the better.
+His sensibilities are to be cultivated with respect to nature chiefly;
+and his imagination, if possible, to be developed, even though somewhat
+to the disadvantage of his judgment. It is better that his work should
+be bold, than faultless: and better that it should be delightful, than
+discreet.</p>
+
+<p>8. And this leads me to the second, or commercial, question; namely, how
+to get from the workman, after we have trained him, the best and most
+precious work, so as to enable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> ourselves to compete with foreign
+countries, or develop new branches of commerce in our own.</p>
+
+<p>Many of us, perhaps, are under the impression that plenty of schooling
+will do this; that plenty of lecturing will do it; that sending abroad
+for patterns will do it; or that patience, time, and money, and good
+will may do it. And, alas, none of these things, nor all of them put
+together, will do it. If you want really good work, such as will be
+acknowledged by all the world, there is but one way of getting it, and
+that is a difficult one. You may offer any premium you choose for
+it&mdash;but you will find it can't be done for premiums. You may send for
+patterns to the antipodes&mdash;but you will find it can't be done upon
+patterns. You may lecture on the principles of Art to every school in
+the kingdom&mdash;and you will find it can't be done upon principles. You may
+wait patiently for the progress of the age&mdash;and you will find your Art
+is unprogressive. Or you may set yourselves impatiently to urge it by
+the inventions of the age&mdash;and you will find your chariot of Art
+entirely immovable either by screw or paddle. There's no way of getting
+good Art, I repeat, but one&mdash;at once the simplest and most
+difficult&mdash;namely, to enjoy it. Examine the history of nations, and you
+will find this great fact clear and unmistakable on the front of
+it&mdash;that good Art has only been produced by nations who rejoiced in it;
+fed themselves with it, as if it were bread; basked in it, as if it were
+sunshine; shouted at the sight of it; danced with the delight of it;
+quarreled for it; fought for it; starved for it; did, in fact, precisely
+the opposite with it of what we want to do with it&mdash;they made it to
+keep, and we to sell.</p>
+
+<p>9. And truly this is a serious difficulty for us as a commercial nation.
+The very primary motive with which we set about the business, makes the
+business impossible. The first and absolute condition of the thing's
+ever becoming salable is, that we shall make it without wanting to sell
+it; nay, rather with a determination not to sell it at any price, if
+once we get hold of it. Try to make your Art popular, cheap&mdash;a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> fair
+article for your foreign market; and the foreign market will always show
+something better. But make it only to please yourselves, and even be
+resolved that you won't let anybody else have any; and forthwith you
+will find everybody else wants it. And observe, the insuperable
+difficulty is this making it to please ourselves, while we are incapable
+of pleasure. Take, for instance, the simplest example, which we can all
+understand, in the art of dress. We have made a great fuss about the
+patterns of silk lately; wanting to vie with Lyons, and make a Paris of
+London. Well, we may try forever: so long as we don't really enjoy silk
+patterns, we shall never get any. And we don't enjoy them. Of course,
+all ladies like their dresses to sit well, and be becoming; but of real
+enjoyment of the beauty of the silk, for the silk's own sake, I find
+none; for the test of that enjoyment is, that they would like it also to
+sit well, and look well, on somebody else. The pleasure of being well
+dressed, or even of seeing well-dressed people&mdash;for I will suppose in my
+fair hearers that degree of unselfishness&mdash;be that pleasure great or
+small, is quite a different thing from delight in the beauty and play of
+the silken folds and colors themselves, for their own gorgeousness or
+grace.</p>
+
+<p>10. I have just had a remarkable proof of the total want of this feeling
+in the modern mind. I was staying part of this summer in Turin, for the
+purpose of studying one of the Paul Veroneses there&mdash;the presentation of
+the Queen of Sheba to Solomon. Well, one of the most notable characters
+in this picture is the splendor of its silken dresses: and, in
+particular, there was a piece of white brocade, with designs upon it in
+gold, which it was one of my chief objects in stopping at Turin to copy.
+You may, perhaps, be surprised at this; but I must just note in passing,
+that I share this weakness of enjoying dress patterns with all good
+students and all good painters. It doesn't matter what school they
+belong to,&mdash;Fra Angelico, Perugino, John Bellini, Giorgione, Titian,
+Tintoret, Veronese, Leonardo da Vinci&mdash;no matter how they differ in
+other respects, all of them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> like dress patterns; and what is more, the
+nobler the painter is, the surer he is to do his patterns well.</p>
+
+<p>11. I stayed then, as I say, to make a study of this white brocade. It
+generally happens in public galleries that the best pictures are the
+worst placed; and this Veronese is not only hung at considerable height
+above the eye, but over a door, through which, however, as all the
+visitors to the gallery must pass, they cannot easily overlook the
+picture, though they would find great difficulty in examining it. Beside
+this door, I had a stage erected for my work, which being of some height
+and rather in a corner, enabled me to observe, without being observed
+myself, the impression made by the picture on the various visitors. It
+seemed to me that if ever a work of Art caught popular attention, this
+ought to do so. It was of very large size; of brilliant color, and of
+agreeable subject. There are about twenty figures in it, the principal
+ones being life size: that of Solomon, though in the shade, is by far
+the most perfect conception of the young king in his pride of wisdom and
+beauty which I know in the range of Italian art; the queen is one of the
+loveliest of Veronese's female figures; all the accessories are full of
+grace and imagination; and the finish of the whole so perfect that one
+day I was upwards of two hours vainly trying to render, with perfect
+accuracy, the curves of two leaves of the brocaded silk. The English
+travelers used to walk through the room in considerable numbers; and
+were invariably directed to the picture by their laquais de place, if
+they missed seeing it themselves. And to this painting&mdash;in which it took
+me six weeks to examine rightly two figures&mdash;I found that on an average,
+the English traveler who was doing Italy conscientiously, and seeing
+everything as he thought he ought, gave about half or three-quarters of
+a minute; but the flying or fashionable traveler, who came to do as much
+as he could in a given time, never gave more than a single glance, most
+of such people turning aside instantly to a bad landscape hung on the
+right, containing a vigorously painted white wall, and an opaque green
+moat. What especially impressed me, how<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span>ever, was that none of the
+ladies ever stopped to look at the dresses in the Veronese. Certainly
+they were far more beautiful than any in the shops in the great square,
+yet no one ever noticed them. Sometimes when any nice, sharp-looking,
+bright-eyed girl came into the room, I used to watch her all the way,
+thinking&mdash;"Come, at least <i>you'll</i> see what the Queen of Sheba has got
+on." But no&mdash;on she would come carelessly, with a little toss of the
+head, apparently signifying "nothing in <i>this</i> room worth looking
+at&mdash;except myself," and so trip through the door, and away.</p>
+
+<p>12. The fact is, we don't care for pictures: in very deed we don't. The
+Academy exhibition is a thing to talk of and to amuse vacant hours;
+those who are rich amongst us buy a painting or two, for mixed reasons,
+sometimes to fill the corner of a passage&mdash;sometimes to help the
+drawing-room talk before dinner&mdash;sometimes because the painter is
+fashionable&mdash;occasionally because he is poor&mdash;not unfrequently that we
+may have a collection of specimens of painting, as we have specimens of
+minerals or butterflies&mdash;and in the best and rarest case of all, because
+we have really, as we call it, taken a fancy to the picture; meaning the
+same sort of fancy which one would take to a pretty arm-chair or a
+newly-shaped decanter. But as for real love of the picture, and joy of
+it when we have got it, I do not believe it is felt by one in a
+thousand.</p>
+
+<p>13. I am afraid this apathy of ours will not be easily conquered; but
+even supposing it should, and that we should begin to enjoy pictures
+properly, and that the supply of good ones increased as in that case it
+<i>would</i> increase&mdash;then comes another question. Perhaps some of my
+hearers this evening may occasionally have heard it stated of me that I
+am rather apt to contradict myself. I hope I am exceedingly apt to do
+so. I never met with a question yet, of any importance, which did not
+need, for the right solution of it, at least one positive and one
+negative answer, like an equation of the second degree. Mostly, matters
+of any consequence are three-sided, or four-sided, or polygonal; and the
+trotting<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> round a polygon is severe work for people any way stiff in
+their opinions. For myself, I am never satisfied that I have handled a
+subject properly till I have contradicted myself at least three times:
+but once must do for this evening. I have just said that there is no
+chance of our getting good Art unless we delight in it: next I say, and
+just as positively, that there is no chance of our getting good Art
+unless we resist our delight in it. We must love it first, and restrain
+our love for it afterwards.</p>
+
+<p>14. This sounds strange; and yet I assure you it is true. In fact,
+whenever anything does not sound strange, you may generally doubt its
+being true; for all truth is wonderful. But take an instance in physical
+matters, of the same kind of contradiction. Suppose you were explaining
+to a young student in astronomy how the earth was kept steady in its
+orbit; you would have to state to him&mdash;would you not?&mdash;that the earth
+always had a tendency to fall to the sun; and that also it always had a
+tendency to fly away from the sun. These are two precisely contrary
+statements for him to digest at his leisure, before he can understand
+how the earth moves. Now, in like manner, when Art is set in its true
+and serviceable course, it moves under the luminous attraction of
+pleasure on the one side, and with a stout moral purpose of going about
+some useful business on the other. If the artist works without delight,
+he passes away into space, and perishes of cold: if he works only for
+delight, he falls into the sun, and extinguishes himself in ashes. On
+the whole, this last is the fate, I do not say the most to be feared,
+but which Art has generally hitherto suffered, and which the great
+nations of the earth have suffered with it.</p>
+
+<p>15. For, while most distinctly you may perceive in past history that Art
+has never been produced, except by nations who took pleasure in it, just
+as assuredly, and even more plainly, you may perceive that Art has
+always destroyed the power and life of those who pursued it for pleasure
+only. Surely this fact must have struck you as you glanced at the career
+of the great nations of the earth: surely it must have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> occurred to you
+as a point for serious questioning, how far, even in our days, we were
+wise in promoting the advancement of pleasures which appeared as yet
+only to have corrupted the souls and numbed the strength of those who
+attained to them. I have been complaining of England that she despises
+the Arts; but I might, with still more appearance of justice, complain
+that she does not rather dread them than despise. For, what has been the
+source of the ruin of nations since the world began? Has it been plague,
+or famine, earthquake-shock or volcano-flame? None of these ever
+prevailed against a great people, so as to make their name pass from the
+earth. In every period and place of national decline, you will find
+other causes than these at work to bring it about, namely, luxury,
+effeminacy, love of pleasure, fineness in Art, ingenuity in enjoyment.
+What is the main lesson which, as far as we seek any in our classical
+reading, we gather for our youth from ancient history? Surely this&mdash;that
+simplicity of life, of language, and of manners gives strength to a
+nation; and that luxuriousness of life, subtlety of language, and
+smoothness of manners bring weakness and destruction on a nation. While
+men possess little and desire less, they remain brave and noble: while
+they are scornful of all the arts of luxury, and are in the sight of
+other nations as barbarians, their swords are irresistible and their
+sway illimitable: but let them become sensitive to the refinements of
+taste, and quick in the capacities of pleasure, and that instant the
+fingers that had grasped the iron rod, fail from the golden scepter. You
+cannot charge me with any exaggeration in this matter; it is impossible
+to state the truth too strongly, or as too universal. Forever you will
+see the rude and simple nation at once more virtuous and more victorious
+than one practiced in the arts. Watch how the Lydian is overthrown by
+the Persian; the Persian by the Athenian; the Athenian by the Spartan;
+then the whole of polished Greece by the rougher Roman; the Roman, in
+his turn refined, only to be crushed by the Goth: and at the turning
+point of the middle ages, the liberty of Europe first asserted,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> the
+virtues of Christianity best practiced, and its doctrines best attested,
+by a handful of mountain shepherds, without art, without literature,
+almost without a language, yet remaining unconquered in the midst of the
+Teutonic chivalry, and uncorrupted amidst the hierarchies of Rome.<a name="FNanchor_60_60" id="FNanchor_60_60"></a><a href="#Footnote_60_60" class="fnanchor">[60]</a></p>
+
+<p>16. I was strangely struck by this great fact during the course of a
+journey last summer among the northern vales of Switzerland. My mind had
+been turned to the subject of the ultimate effects of Art on national
+mind before I left England, and I went straight to the chief fields of
+Swiss history: first to the center of her feudal power, Hapsburg, the
+hawk's nest from which the Swiss Rodolph rose to found the Austrian
+empire; and then to the heart of her republicanism, that little glen of
+Morgarten, where first in the history of Europe the shepherd's staff
+prevailed over the soldier's spear. And it was somewhat depressing to me
+to find, as day by day I found more certainly, that this people which
+first asserted the liberties of Europe, and first conceived the idea of
+equitable laws, was in all the&mdash;shall I call them the slighter, or the
+higher?&mdash;sensibilities of the human mind, utterly deficient; and not
+only had remained from its earliest ages till now, without poetry,
+without Art, and without music, except a mere modulated cry; but as far
+as I could judge from the rude efforts of their early monuments, would
+have been, at the time of their greatest national probity and power,
+incapable of producing good poetry or Art under any circumstances of
+education.</p>
+
+<p>17. I say, this was a sad thing for me to find. And then, to mend the
+matter, I went straight over into Italy, and came<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> at once upon a
+curious instance of the patronage of Art, of the character that usually
+inclines most to such patronage, and of the consequences thereof.</p>
+
+<p>From Morgarten and Grutli, I intended to have crossed to the Vaudois
+Valleys, to examine the shepherd character there; but on the way I had
+to pass through Turin, where unexpectedly I found the Paul Veroneses,
+one of which, as I told you just now, stayed me at once for six weeks.
+Naturally enough, one asked how these beautiful Veroneses came there:
+and found they had been commissioned by Cardinal Maurice of Savoy.
+Worthy Cardinal, I thought: that's what Cardinals were made for.
+However, going a little farther in the gallery, one comes upon four very
+graceful pictures by Albani&mdash;these also commissioned by the Cardinal,
+and commissioned with special directions, according to the Cardinal's
+fancy. Four pictures, to be illustrative of the four elements.</p>
+
+<p>18. One of the most curious things in the mind of the people of that
+century is their delight in these four elements, and in the four
+seasons. They had hardly any other idea of decorating a room, or of
+choosing a subject for a picture, than by some renewed reference to fire
+and water, or summer and winter; nor were ever tired of hearing that
+summer came after spring, and that air was not earth, until these
+interesting pieces of information got finally and poetically expressed
+in that well-known piece of elegant English conversation about the
+weather, Thomson's "Seasons." So the Cardinal, not appearing to have any
+better idea than the popular one, orders the four elements; but thinking
+that the elements pure would be slightly dull, he orders them, in one
+way or another, to be mixed up with Cupids; to have, in his own words,
+"una copiosa quantita di Amorini." Albani supplied the Cardinal
+accordingly with Cupids in clusters: they hang in the sky like bunches
+of cherries; and leap out of the sea like flying fish; grow out of the
+earth in fairy rings; and explode out of the fire like squibs. No work
+whatsoever is done in any of the four elements, but by the Cardinal's
+Cupids. They<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> are plowing the earth with their arrows; fishing in the
+sea with their bowstrings; driving the clouds with their breath; and
+fanning the fire with their wings. A few beautiful nymphs are assisting
+them here and there in pearl-fishing, flower-gathering, and other such
+branches of graceful industry; the moral of the whole being, that the
+sea was made for its pearls, the earth for its flowers, and all the
+world for pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>19. Well, the Cardinal, this great encourager of the arts, having these
+industrial and social theories, carried them out in practice, as you may
+perhaps remember, by obtaining a dispensation from the Pope to marry his
+own niece, and building a villa for her on one of the slopes of the
+pretty hills which rise to the east of the city. The villa which he
+built is now one of the principal objects of interest to the traveler as
+an example of Italian domestic architecture: to me, during my stay in
+the city, it was much more than an object of interest; for its deserted
+gardens were by much the pleasantest place I could find for walking or
+thinking in, in the hot summer afternoons.</p>
+
+<p>I say thinking, for these gardens often gave me a good deal to think
+about. They are, as I told you, on the slope of the hill above the city,
+to the east; commanding, therefore, the view over it and beyond it,
+westward&mdash;a view which, perhaps, of all those that can be obtained north
+of the Apennines, gives the most comprehensive idea of the nature of
+Italy, considered as one great country. If you glance at the map, you
+will observe that Turin is placed in the center of the crescent which
+the Alps form round the basin of Piedmont; it is within ten miles of the
+foot of the mountains at the nearest point; and from that point the
+chain extends half round the city in one unbroken Moorish crescent,
+forming three-fourths of a circle from the Col de Tende to the St.
+Gothard; that is to say, just two hundred miles of Alps, as the bird
+flies. I don't speak rhetorically or carelessly; I speak as I ought to
+speak here&mdash;with mathematical precision. Take the scale on your map;
+measure fifty miles of it accurately; try that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> measure from the Col de
+Tende to the St. Gothard, and you will find that four cords of fifty
+miles will not quite reach to the two extremities of the curve.</p>
+
+<p>20. You see, then, from this spot, the plain of Piedmont, on the north
+and south, literally as far as the eye can reach; so that the plain
+terminates as the sea does, with a level blue line, only tufted with
+woods instead of waves, and crowded with towers of cities instead of
+ships. Then in the luminous air beyond and behind this blue
+horizon-line, stand, as it were, the shadows of mountains, they
+themselves dark, for the southern slopes of the Alps of the Lago
+Maggiore and Bellinzona are all without snow; but the light of the
+unseen snowfields, lying level behind the visible peaks, is sent up with
+strange reflection upon the clouds; an everlasting light of calm Aurora
+in the north. Then, higher and higher around the approaching darkness of
+the plain, rise the central chains, not as on the Switzer's side, a
+recognizable group and following of successive and separate hills, but a
+wilderness of jagged peaks, cast in passionate and fierce profusion
+along the circumference of heaven; precipice behind precipice, and gulf
+beyond gulf, filled with the flaming of the sunset, and forming mighty
+channels for the flowings of the clouds, which roll up against them out
+of the vast Italian plain, forced together by the narrowing crescent,
+and breaking up at last against the Alpine wall in towers of spectral
+spray; or sweeping up its ravines with long moans of complaining
+thunder. Out from between the cloudy pillars, as they pass, emerge
+forever the great battlements of the memorable and perpetual hills:
+Viso, with her shepherd-witnesses to ancient faith; Rocca-Melone, the
+highest place of Alpine pilgrimage;<a name="FNanchor_61_61" id="FNanchor_61_61"></a><a href="#Footnote_61_61" class="fnanchor">[61]</a> Iseran, who shed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> her burial
+sheets of snow about the march of Hannibal; Cenis, who shone with her
+glacier light on the descent of Charlemagne; Paradiso, who watched with
+her opposite crest the stoop of the French eagle to Marengo; and
+underneath all these, lying in her soft languor, this tender Italy,
+lapped in dews of sleep, or more than sleep&mdash;one knows not if it is
+trance, from which morning shall yet roll the blinding mists away, or if
+the fair shadows of her quietude are indeed the shades of purple death.
+And, lifted a little above this solemn plain, and looking beyond it to
+its snowy ramparts, vainly guardian, stands this palace dedicate to
+pleasure, the whole legend of Italy's past history written before it by
+the finger of God, written as with an iron pen upon the rock forever, on
+all those fronting walls of reproachful Alp; blazoned in gold of
+lightning upon the clouds that still open and close their unsealed
+scrolls in heaven; painted in purple and scarlet upon the mighty missal
+pages of sunset after sunset, spread vainly before a nation's eyes for a
+nation's prayer. So stands this palace of pleasure; desolate as it
+deserves&mdash;desolate in smooth corridor and glittering chamber&mdash;desolate
+in pleached walk and planted bower&mdash;desolate in that worst and bitterest
+abandonment which leaves no light of memory. No ruins are here of walls
+rent by war, and falling above their defenders into mounds of graves: no
+remnants are here of chapel-altar, or temple porch, left shattered or
+silent by the power of some purer worship: no vestiges are here of
+sacred hearth and sweet homestead, left lonely through vicissitudes of
+fate, and heaven-sent sorrow. Nothing is here but the vain apparelings
+of pride sunk into dishonor, and vain appanages of delight now no more
+delightsome. The hill-waters, that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> once flowed and plashed in the
+garden fountains, now trickle sadly through the weeds that encumber
+their basins, with a sound as of tears: the creeping, insidious,
+neglected flowers weave their burning nets about the white marble of the
+balustrades, and rend them slowly, block from block, and stone from
+stone: the thin, sweet-scented leaves tremble along the old masonry
+joints as if with palsy at every breeze; and the dark lichens, golden
+and gray, make the footfall silent in the path's center.</p>
+
+<p>And day by day as I walked there, the same sentence seemed whispered by
+every shaking leaf, and every dying echo, of garden and chamber. "Thus
+end all the arts of life, only in death; and thus issue all the gifts of
+man, only in his dishonor, when they are pursued or possessed in the
+service of pleasure only."</p>
+
+<p>21. This then is the great enigma of Art History,&mdash;you must not follow
+Art without pleasure, nor must you follow it for the sake of pleasure.
+And the solution of that enigma is simply this fact; that wherever Art
+has been followed <i>only</i> for the sake of luxury or delight, it has
+contributed, and largely contributed, to bring about the destruction of
+the nation practicing it: but wherever Art has been used <i>also</i> to teach
+any truth, or supposed truth&mdash;religious, moral, or natural&mdash;there it has
+elevated the nation practicing it, and itself with the nation.</p>
+
+<p>22. Thus the Art of Greece rose, and did service to the people, so long
+as it was to them the earnest interpreter of a religion they believed
+in: the Arts of northern sculpture and architecture rose, as
+interpreters of Christian legend and doctrine: the Art of painting in
+Italy, not only as religious, but also mainly as expressive of truths of
+moral philosophy, and powerful in pure human portraiture. The only great
+painters in our schools of painting in England have either been of
+portrait&mdash;Reynolds and Gainsborough; of the philosophy of social
+life&mdash;Hogarth; or of the facts of nature in landscape&mdash;Wilson and
+Turner. In all these cases, if I had time, I could show you that the
+success of the painter de<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span>pended on his desire to convey a truth, rather
+than to produce a merely beautiful picture; that is to say, to get a
+likeness of a man, or of a place; to get some moral principle rightly
+stated, or some historical character rightly described, rather than
+merely to give pleasure to the eyes. Compare the feeling with which a
+Moorish architect decorated an arch of the Alhambra, with that of
+Hogarth painting the "Marriage &agrave; la Mode," or of Wilkie painting the
+"Chelsea Pensioners," and you will at once feel the difference between
+Art pursued for pleasure only, and for the sake of some useful principle
+or impression.</p>
+
+<p>23. But what you might not so easily discern is, that even when painting
+does appear to have been pursued for pleasure only, if ever you find it
+rise to any noble level, you will also find that a stern search after
+truth has been at the root of its nobleness. You may fancy, perhaps,
+that Titian, Veronese, and Tintoret were painters for the sake of
+pleasure only: but in reality they were the only painters who ever
+sought entirely to master, and who did entirely master, the truths of
+light and shade as associated with color, in the noblest of all physical
+created things, the human form. They were the only men who ever painted
+the human body; all other painters of the great schools are mere
+anatomical draughtsmen compared to them; rather makers of maps of the
+body, than painters of it. The Venetians alone, by a toil almost
+super-human, succeeded at last in obtaining a power almost super-human;
+and were able finally to paint the highest visible work of God with
+unexaggerated structure, undegraded color, and unaffected gesture. It
+seems little to say this; but I assure you it is much to have <i>done</i>
+this&mdash;so much, that no other men but the Venetians ever did it: none of
+them ever painted the human body without in some degree caricaturing the
+anatomy, forcing the action, or degrading the hue.</p>
+
+<p>24. Now, therefore, the sum of all is, that you who wish to encourage
+Art in England have to do two things with it: you must delight in it, in
+the first place; and you must get it to serve some serious work, in the
+second place. I don't<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> mean by serious, necessarily moral: all that I
+mean by serious is in some way or other useful, not merely selfish,
+careless, or indolent. I had, indeed, intended before closing my
+address, to have traced out a few of the directions in which, as it
+seems to me, Art may be seriously and practically serviceable to us in
+the career of civilization. I had hoped to show you how many of the
+great phenomena of nature still remained unrecorded by it, for <i>us</i> to
+record; how many of the historical monuments of Europe were perishing
+without memorial, for the want of but a little honest, simple,
+laborious, loving draughtsmanship; how many of the most impressive
+historical events of the day failed of teaching us half of what they
+were meant to teach, for want of painters to represent them faithfully,
+instead of fancifully, and with historical truth for their aim, instead
+of national self-glorification. I had hoped to show you how many of the
+best impulses of the heart were lost in frivolity or sensuality, for
+want of purer beauty to contemplate, and of noble thoughts to associate
+with the fervor of hallowed human passion; how, finally, a great part of
+the vital power of our religious faith was lost in us, for want of such
+art as would realize in some rational, probable, believable way, those
+events of sacred history which, as they visibly and intelligibly
+occurred, may also be visibly and intelligibly represented. But all this
+I dare not do yet. I felt, as I thought over these things, that the time
+was not yet come for their declaration: the time will come for it, and I
+believe soon; but as yet, the man would only lay himself open to the
+charge of vanity, of imagination, and of idle fondness of hope, who
+should venture to trace in words the course of the higher blessings
+which the Arts may have yet in store for mankind. As yet there is no
+need to do so: all that we have to plead for is an earnest and
+straightforward exertion in those courses of study which are opened to
+us day by day, believing only that they are to be followed gravely and
+for grave purposes, as by men, and not by children. I appeal, finally,
+to all those who are to become the pupils of these schools, to keep
+clear of the notion of following Art as dilet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span>tantism: it ought to
+delight you, as your reading delights you&mdash;but you never think of your
+reading as dilettantism. It ought to delight you as your studies of
+physical science delight you&mdash;but you don't call physical science
+dilettantism. If you are determined only to think of Art as a play or a
+pleasure, give it up at once: you will do no good to yourselves, and you
+will degrade the pursuit in the sight of others. Better, infinitely
+better, that you should never enter a picture gallery, than that you
+should enter only to saunter and to smile: better, infinitely better,
+that you should never handle a pencil at all, than handle it only for
+the sake of complacency in your small dexterity: better, infinitely
+better, that you should be wholly uninterested in pictures, and
+uninformed respecting them, than that you should just know enough to
+detect blemishes in great works,&mdash;to give a color of reasonableness to
+presumption, and an appearance of acuteness to misunderstanding. Above
+all, I would plead for this so far as the teaching of these schools may
+be addressed to the junior Members of the University. Men employed in
+any kind of manual labor, by which they must live, are not likely to
+take up the notion that they can learn any other art for amusement only;
+but amateurs are: and it is of the highest importance, nay, it is just
+the one thing of all importance, to show them what drawing really means;
+and not so much to teach them to produce a good work themselves, as to
+know it when they see it done by others. Good work, in the stern sense
+of the word, as I before said, no mere amateur can do; and good work, in
+any sense, that is to say, profitable work for himself or for anyone
+else, he can only do by being made in the beginning to see what is
+possible for him, and what not;&mdash;what is accessible, and what not; and
+by having the majesty and sternness of the everlasting laws of fact set
+before him in their infinitude. It is no matter for appalling him: the
+man is great already who is made well capable of being appalled; nor do
+we even wisely hope, nor truly understand, till we are humiliated by our
+hope, and awe-struck by our understanding. Nay, I will go farther than
+this, and say boldly, that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> what you have mainly to teach the young men
+here is, not so much what they can do, as what they cannot;&mdash;to make
+them see how much there is in nature which cannot be imitated, and how
+much in man which cannot be emulated. He only can be truly said to be
+educated in Art to whom all his work is only a feeble sign of glories
+which he cannot convey, and a feeble means of measuring, with
+ever-enlarging admiration, the great and untraversable gulf which God
+has set between the great and the common intelligences of mankind: and
+all the triumphs of Art which man can commonly achieve are only truly
+crowned by pure delight in natural scenes themselves, and by the sacred
+and self-forgetful veneration which can be nobly abashed, and
+tremblingly exalted, in the presence of a human spirit greater than his
+own.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>ART.</h2>
+
+<h2>V.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE CESTUS OF AGLAIA.</h3>
+
+
+<p class="center">(<i>Art Journal, January-July 1865; January, February, and April 1866.</i>)</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="THE_CESTUS_OF_AGLAIA" id="THE_CESTUS_OF_AGLAIA"></a>THE CESTUS OF AGLAIA.</h2>
+
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">"&#928;&#959;&#953;&#954;&#7985;&#955;&#959;&#957; &#8033; &#7953;&#957;&#953; &#960;&#7937;&#957;&#964;&#945; &#964;&#949;&#964;&#949;&#8017;&#967;&#945;&#964;&#945;&#953;&#959;&#8017;&#948;&#7953; &#963;&#949; &#966;&#951;&#956;&#7985;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">&#913;&#960;&#961;&#951;&#954;&#964;&#8001;&#957; &#947;&#949; &#957;&#7953;&#949;&#963;&#952;&#945;&#953; &#959;&#965; &#964;&#953; &#966;&#961;&#949;&#963;&#7985; &#956;&#949;&#957;&#959;&#953;&#957;&#7937;&#987;"</span><br />
+
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">(<span class="smcap">Hom.</span> <i>Il.</i> xiv. 220-21.)</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<h4>PREFATORY.<a name="FNanchor_62_62" id="FNanchor_62_62"></a><a href="#Footnote_62_62" class="fnanchor">[62]</a></h4>
+
+<p>25. Not many months ago, a friend, whose familiarity with both living
+and past schools of Art rendered his opinion of great authority, said
+casually to me in the course of talk, "I believe we have now as able
+painters as ever lived; but they never paint as good pictures as were
+once painted." That was the substance of his saying; I forget the exact
+words, but their tenor surprised me, and I have thought much of them
+since. Without pressing the statement too far, or examining it with an
+unintended strictness, this I believe to be at all events true, that we
+have men among us, now in Europe, who might have been noble painters,
+and are not; men whose doings are altogether as wonderful in skill, as
+inexhaustible in fancy, as the work of the really great painters; and
+yet these doings of theirs are not great. Shall I write the commonplace
+that rings in sequence in my ear, and draws on my hand&mdash;"are not Great,
+for they are not (in the broad human and ethical sense) Good"? I write
+it, and ask forgiveness for the truism, with its implied
+uncharitableness of blame; for this trite thing is ill understood and
+little thought upon by any of us, and the implied blame is divided among
+us all; only let me at once partly modify it, and partly define.</p>
+
+<p>26. In one sense, modern Art has more goodness in it than ever Art had
+before. Its kindly spirit, its quick sympathy with pure domestic and
+social feeling, the occasional serious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span>ness of its instructive purpose,
+and its honest effort to grasp the reality of conceived scenes, are all
+eminently "good," as compared with the insane picturesqueness and
+conventional piety of many among the old masters. Such domestic
+painting, for instance, as Richter's in Germany, Edward Frere's in
+France, and Hook's in England, together with such historical and ideal
+work as&mdash;&mdash;perhaps the reader would be offended with me were I to set
+down the several names that occur to me here, so I will set down one
+only, and say&mdash;as that of Paul de la Roche; such work, I repeat, as
+these men have done, or are doing, is entirely good in its influence on
+the public mind; and may, in thankful exultation, be compared with the
+renderings of besotted, vicious, and vulgar human life perpetrated by
+Dutch painters, or with the deathful formalism and fallacy of what was
+once called "Historical Art." Also, this gentleness and veracity of
+theirs, being in part communicable, are gradually learned, though in a
+somewhat servile manner, yet not without a sincere sympathy, by many
+inferior painters, so that our exhibitions and currently popular books
+are full of very lovely and pathetic ideas, expressed with a care, and
+appealing to an interest, quite unknown in past times. I will take two
+instances of merely average power, as more illustrative of what I mean
+than any more singular and distinguished work could be. Last year, in
+the British Institution, there were two pictures by the same painter,
+one of a domestic, the other of a sacred subject. I will say nothing of
+the way in which they were painted; it may have been bad, or good, or
+neither: it is not to my point. I wish to direct attention only to the
+conception of them. One, "Cradled in his Calling," was of a fisherman
+and his wife, and helpful grown-up son, and helpless new-born little
+one; the two men carrying the young child up from the shore, rocking it
+between them in the wet net for a hammock, the mother looking on
+joyously, and the baby laughing. The thought was pretty and good, and
+one might go on dreaming over it long&mdash;not unprofitably. But the second
+picture was more interesting. I describe it only in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> the circumstances
+of the invented scene&mdash;sunset after the crucifixion. The bodies have
+been taken away, and the crosses are left lying on the broken earth; a
+group of children have strayed up the hill, and stopped beside them in
+such shadowy awe as is possible to childhood, and they have picked up
+one or two of the drawn nails to feel how sharp they are. Meantime a
+girl with her little brother&mdash;goat-herds both&mdash;have been watering their
+flock at Kidron, and are driving it home. The girl, strong in grace and
+honor of youth, carrying her pitcher of water on her erect head, has
+gone on past the place steadily, minding her flock; but her little
+curly-headed brother, with cheeks of burning Eastern brown, has lingered
+behind to look, and is feeling the point of one of the nails, held in
+another child's hand. A lovely little kid of the goats has stayed behind
+to keep him company, and is amusing itself by jumping backwards and
+forwards over an arm of the cross. The sister looks back, and, wondering
+what he can have stopped in that dreadful place for, waves her hand for
+the little boy to come away.</p>
+
+<p>I have no hesitation in saying that, as compared with the ancient and
+stereotyped conceptions of the "Taking down from the Cross," there is a
+living feeling in that picture which is of great price. It may perhaps
+be weak, nay, even superficial, or untenable&mdash;that will depend on the
+other conditions of character out of which it springs&mdash;but, so far as it
+reaches, it is pure and good; and we may gain more by looking
+thoughtfully at such a picture than at any even of the least formal
+types of the work of older schools. It would be unfair to compare it
+with first-rate, or even approximately first-rate designs; but even
+accepting such unjust terms, put it beside Rembrandt's ghastly white
+sheet, laid over the two poles at the Cross-foot, and see which has most
+good in it for you of any communicable kind.</p>
+
+<p>27. I trust, then, that I fully admit whatever may, on due deliberation,
+be alleged in favor of modern Art. Nay, I have heretofore asserted more
+for some modern Art than others were disposed to admit, nor do I
+withdraw one word from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> such assertion. But when all has been said and
+granted that may be, there remains this painful fact to be dealt
+with,&mdash;the consciousness, namely, both in living artists themselves and
+in us their admirers, that something, and that not a little, is wrong
+with us; that they, relentlessly examined, could not say they thoroughly
+knew how to paint, and that we, relentlessly examined, could not say we
+thoroughly know how to judge. The best of our painters will look a
+little to us, the beholders, for confirmation of his having done well.
+We, appealed to, look to each other to see what we ought to say. If we
+venture to find fault, however submissively, the artist will probably
+feel a little uncomfortable: he will by no means venture to meet us with
+a serenely crushing "Sir, it cannot be better done," in the manner of
+Albert D&uuml;rer. And yet, if it could not be better done, he, of all men,
+should know that best, nor fear to say so; it is good for himself, and
+for us, that he should assert that, if he knows that. The last time my
+dear old friend William Hunt came to see me, I took down one of his
+early drawings for him to see (three blue plums and one amber one, and
+two nuts). So he looked at it, happily, for a minute or two and then
+said, "Well, it's very nice, isn't it? I did not think I could have done
+so well." The saying was entirely right, exquisitely modest and true;
+only I fear he would not have had the courage to maintain that his
+drawing was good, if anybody had been there to say otherwise. Still,
+having done well, he knew it; and what is more no man ever does do well
+without knowing it: he may not know <i>how</i> well, nor be conscious of the
+best of his own qualities; nor measure, or care to measure, the relation
+of his power to that of other men, but he will know that what he has
+done is, in an intended, accomplished, and ascertainable degree, good.
+Every able and honest workman, as he wins a right to rest, so he wins a
+right to approval,&mdash;his own if no one's beside; nay, his only true rest
+<i>is</i> in the calm consciousness that the thing has been honorably
+done&mdash;&#963;&#965;&#957;&#949;&#7985;&#948;&#951;&#963;&#953;&#987; &#959;&#964;&#953; &#954;&#945;&#955;&#8001;&#957;. I do not use the Greek words in
+pedantry, I want them for future service and interpretation; no English
+words, nor any of any other language,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> would do as well. For I mean to
+try to show, and believe I <i>can</i> show, that a simple and sure conviction
+of our having done rightly is not only an attainable, but a necessary
+seal and sign of our having so done; and that the doing well or rightly,
+and ill or wrongly, are both conditions of the whole being of each
+person, coming of a nature in him which affects all things that he may
+do, from the least to the greatest, according to the noble old phrase
+for the conquering rightness, of "integrity," "wholeness," or
+"wholesomeness." So that when we do external things (that are our
+business) ill, it is a sign that internal, and, in fact, that all
+things, are ill with us; and when we do external things well, it is a
+sign that internal and all things are well with us. And I believe there
+are two principal adversities to this wholesomeness of work, and to all
+else that issues out of wholeness of inner character, with which we have
+in these days specially to contend. The first is the variety of Art
+round us, tempting us to thoughtless imitation; the second our own want
+of belief in the existence of a rule of right.</p>
+
+<p>28. I. I say the first is the variety of Art around us. No man can
+pursue his own track in peace, nor obtain consistent guidance, if
+doubtful of his track. All places are full of inconsistent example, all
+mouths of contradictory advice, all prospects of opposite temptations.
+The young artist sees myriads of things he would like to do, but cannot
+learn from their authors how they were done, nor choose decisively any
+method which he may follow with the accuracy and confidence necessary to
+success. He is not even sure if his thoughts are his own; for the whole
+atmosphere round him is full of floating suggestion: those which are his
+own he cannot keep pure, for he breathes a dust of decayed ideas, wreck
+of the souls of dead nations, driven by contrary winds. He may stiffen
+himself (and all the worse for him) into an iron self-will, but if the
+iron has any magnetism in it, he cannot pass a day without finding
+himself, at the end of it, instead of sharpened or tempered, covered
+with a ragged fringe of iron filings. If there be anything better than
+iron&mdash;living wood fiber&mdash;in him, he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span> cannot be allowed any natural
+growth, but gets hacked in every extremity, and bossed over with lumps
+of frozen clay;&mdash;grafts of incongruous blossom that will never set;
+while some even recognize no need of knife or clay (though both are good
+in a gardener's hand), but deck themselves out with incongruous
+glittering, like a Christmas-tree. Even were the style chosen true to
+his own nature, and persisted in, there is harm in the very eminence of
+the models set before him at the beginning of his career. If he feels
+their power, they make him restless and impatient, it may be despondent,
+it may be madly and fruitlessly ambitious. If he does not feel it, he is
+sure to be struck by what is weakest or slightest of their peculiar
+qualities; fancies that <i>this</i> is what they are praised for; tries to
+catch the trick of it; and whatever easy vice or mechanical habit the
+master may have been betrayed or warped into, the unhappy pupil watches
+and adopts, triumphant in its ease:&mdash;has not sense to steal the
+peacock's feather, but imitates its voice. Better for him, far better,
+never to have seen what had been accomplished by others, but to have
+gained gradually his own quiet way, or at least with his guide only a
+step in advance of him, and the lantern low on the difficult path.
+Better even, it has lately seemed, to be guideless and lightless;
+fortunate those who, by desolate effort, trying hither and thither, have
+groped their way to some independent power. So, from Cornish rock, from
+St. Giles's Lane, from Thames mudshore, you get your Prout, your Hunt,
+your Turner; not, indeed, any of them well able to spell English, nor
+taught so much of their own business as to lay a color safely; but yet
+at last, or first, doing somehow something, wholly ineffective on the
+national mind, yet real, and valued at last after they are dead, in
+money;&mdash;valued otherwise not even at so much as the space of dead brick
+wall it would cover; their work being left for years packed in parcels
+at the National Gallery, or hung conclusively out of sight under the
+shadowy iron vaults of Kensington. The men themselves, quite
+inarticulate, determine nothing of their Art, interpret nothing of their
+own minds; teach perhaps a trick<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> or two of their stage business in
+early life&mdash;as, for instance, that it is good where there is much black
+to break it with white, and where there is much white to break it with
+black, etc., etc.; in later life remain silent altogether, or speak only
+in despair (fretful or patient according to their character); one who
+might have been among the best of them,<a name="FNanchor_63_63" id="FNanchor_63_63"></a><a href="#Footnote_63_63" class="fnanchor">[63]</a> the last we heard of,
+finding refuge for an entirely honest heart from a world which declares
+honesty to be impossible, only in a madness nearly as sorrowful as its
+own;&mdash;the religious madness which makes a beautiful soul ludicrous and
+ineffectual; and so passes away, bequeathing for our inheritance from
+its true and strong life, a pretty song about a tiger, another about a
+bird-cage, two or three golden couplets, which no one will ever take the
+trouble to understand,&mdash;the spiritual portrait of the ghost of a
+flea,&mdash;and the critical opinion that "the unorganized blots of Rubens
+and Titian are not Art." Which opinion the public mind perhaps not
+boldly indorsing, is yet incapable of pronouncing adversely to it, that
+the said blots of Titian and Rubens <i>are</i> Art, perceiving for itself
+little good in them, and hanging <i>them</i> also well out of its way, at
+tops of walls (Titian's portrait of Charles V. at Munich, for example;
+Tintoret's Susannah, and Veronese's Magdalen, in the Louvre), that it
+may have room and readiness for what may be generally termed "railroad
+work," bearing on matters more immediately in hand; said public looking
+to the present pleasure of its fancy, and the portraiture of itself in
+official and otherwise imposing or entertaining circumstances, as the
+only "Right" cognizable by it.</p>
+
+<p>29. II. And this is a deeper source of evil, by far, than the former
+one, for though it is ill for us to strain towards a right for which we
+have never ripened it is worse for us to believe in no right at all.
+"Anything," we say, "that a clever man can do to amuse us is good; what
+does not amuse us we do not want. Taste is assuredly a frivolous,
+apparently a dangerous gift; vicious persons and vicious nations have
+it; we are a practical people, content to know what we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> like, wise in
+not liking it too much, and when tired of it, wise in getting something
+we like better. Painting is of course an agreeable ornamental Art,
+maintaining a number of persons respectably, deserving therefore
+encouragement, and getting it pecuniarily, to a hitherto unheard-of
+extent. What would you have more?" This is, I believe, very nearly our
+Art-creed. The fact being (very ascertainably by anyone who will take
+the trouble to examine the matter), that there is a cultivated Art among
+all great nations, inevitably necessary to them as the fulfillment of
+one part of their human nature. None but savage nations are without Art,
+and civilized nations who do their Art ill, do it because there is
+something deeply wrong at their hearts. They paint badly as a paralyzed
+man stammers, because his life is touched somewhere within; when the
+deeper life is full in a people, they speak clearly and rightly; paint
+clearly and rightly; think clearly and rightly. There is some reverse
+effect, but very little. Good pictures do not teach a nation; they are
+the signs of its having been taught. Good thoughts do not form a nation;
+it must be formed before it can think them. Let it once decay at the
+heart, and its good work and good thoughts will become subtle luxury and
+aimless sophism; and it and they will perish together.</p>
+
+<p>30. It is my purpose, therefore, in some subsequent papers, with such
+help as I may anywise receive, to try if there may not be determined
+some of the simplest laws which are indeed binding on Art practice and
+judgment. Beginning with elementary principle, and proceeding upwards as
+far as guiding laws are discernible, I hope to show, that if we do not
+yet know them, there are at least such laws to be known, and that it is
+of a deep and intimate importance to any people, especially to the
+English at this time, that their children should be sincerely taught
+whatever arts they learn, and in riper age become capable of a just
+choice and wise pleasure in the accomplished works of the artist. But I
+earnestly ask for help in this task. It is one which can only come to
+good issue by the consent and aid of many thinkers; and I would, with
+the per<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span>mission of the Editor of this Journal, invite debate on the
+subject of each paper, together with brief and clear statements of
+consent or objection, with name of consenter or objector; so that after
+courteous discussion had, and due correction of the original statement,
+we may get something at last set down, as harmoniously believed by such
+and such known artists. If nothing can thus be determined, at least the
+manner and variety of dissent will show whether it is owing to the
+nature of the subject, or to the impossibility, under present
+circumstances, that different persons should approach it from similar
+points of view; and the inquiry, whatever its immediate issue, cannot be
+ultimately fruitless.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><br /><br />THE CESTUS OF AGLAIA.<br /><br /></h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="Chapter_I64" id="Chapter_I64"></a><span class="smcap">Chapter</span> I.<a name="FNanchor_64_64" id="FNanchor_64_64"></a><a href="#Footnote_64_64" class="fnanchor">[64]</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>31. Our knowledge of human labor, if intimate enough, will, I think,
+mass it for the most part into two kinds&mdash;mining and molding; the labor
+that seeks for things, and the labor that shapes them. Of these the last
+should be always orderly, for we ought to have some conception of the
+whole of what we have to make before we try to make any part of it; but
+the labor of seeking must be often methodless, following the veins of
+the mine as they branch, or trying for them where they are broken. And
+the mine, which we would now open into the souls of men, as they govern
+the mysteries of their handicrafts, being rent into many dark and
+divided ways, it is not possible to map our work beforehand, or resolve
+on its directions. We will not attempt to bind ourselves to any
+methodical treatment of our subject, but will get at the truths of it
+here and there, as they seem extricable; only, though we cannot know to
+what depth we may have to dig, let us know clearly what we are digging
+for. We desire to find by what rule some Art is called good, and other
+Art bad: we desire to find the conditions of character in the artist
+which are essentially connected with the goodness of his work: we desire
+to find what are the methods of practice which form this character or
+corrupt it; and finally, how the formation or corruption of this
+character is connected with the general prosperity of nations.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>32. And all this we want to learn practically: not for mere pleasant
+speculation on things that have been; but for instant direction of those
+that are yet to be. My first object is to get at some fixed principles
+for the teaching of Art to our youth; and I am about to ask, of all who
+may be able to give me a serviceable answer, and with and for all who
+are anxious for such answer, what arts should be generally taught to the
+English boy and girl,&mdash;by what methods,&mdash;and to what ends? How well, or
+how imperfectly, our youth of the higher classes should be disciplined
+in the practice of music and painting?&mdash;how far, among the lower
+classes, exercise in certain mechanical arts might become a part of
+their school life?&mdash;how far, in the adult life of this nation, the Fine
+Arts may advisably supersede or regulate the mechanical Arts? Plain
+questions these, enough; clearly also important ones; and, as clearly,
+boundless ones&mdash;mountainous&mdash;infinite in contents&mdash;only to be mined into
+in a scrambling manner by poor inquirers, as their present tools and
+sight may serve.</p>
+
+<p>33. I have often been accused of dogmatism, and confess to the holding
+strong opinions on some matters; but I tell the reader in sincerity, and
+entreat him in sincerity to believe, that I do not think myself able to
+dictate anything positive respecting questions of this magnitude. The
+one thing I am sure of is, the need of some form of dictation; or, where
+that is as yet impossible, at least of consistent experiment, for the
+just solution of doubts which present themselves every day in more
+significant and more impatient temper of interrogation.</p>
+
+<p>Here is one, for instance, lying at the base of all the rest&mdash;namely,
+what may be the real dignity of mechanical Art itself? I cannot express
+the amazed awe, the crushed humility, with which I sometimes watch a
+locomotive take its breath at a railway station, and think what work
+there is in its bars and wheels, and what manner of men they must be who
+dig brown iron-stone out of the ground, and forge it into <span class="smcap">That</span>! What
+assemblage of accurate and mighty faculties in them; more than fleshly
+power over melting crag and coiling fire, fettered, and finessed at last
+into the precision of watchmak<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span>ing; Titanian hammer-strokes beating, out
+of lava, these glittering cylinders and timely-respondent valves, and
+fine ribbed rods, which touch each other as a serpent writhes, in
+noiseless gliding, and omnipotence of grasp; infinitely complex anatomy
+of active steel, compared with which the skeleton of a living creature
+would seem, to a careless observer, clumsy and vile&mdash;a mere morbid
+secretion and phosphatous prop of flesh! What would the men who thought
+out this&mdash;who beat it out, who touched it into its polished calm of
+power, who set it to its appointed task, and triumphantly saw it fulfill
+this task to the utmost of their will&mdash;feel or think about this weak
+hand of mine, timidly leading a little stain of water-color, which I
+cannot manage, into an imperfect shadow of something else&mdash;mere failure
+in every motion, and endless disappointment; what, I repeat, would these
+Iron-dominant Genii think of me? and what ought I to think of them?</p>
+
+<p>34. But as I reach this point of reverence, the unreasonable thing is
+sure to give a shriek as of a thousand unanimous vultures, which leaves
+me shuddering in real physical pain for some half minute following; and
+assures me, during slow recovery, that a people which can endure such
+fluting and piping among them is not likely soon to have its modest ear
+pleased by aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song. Perhaps I am then led
+on into meditation respecting the spiritual nature of the Tenth Muse,
+who invented this gracious instrument, and guides its modulation by
+stokers' fingers; meditation, also, as to the influence of her invention
+amidst the other parts of the Parnassian melody of English education.
+Then it cannot but occur to me to inquire how far this modern "pneuma,"
+Steam, may be connected with other pneumatic powers talked of in that
+old religious literature, of which we fight so fiercely to keep the
+letters bright, and the working valves, so to speak, in good order
+(while we let the steam of it all carefully off into the cold
+condenser), what connection, I say, this modern "spiritus," in its
+valve-directed inspiration, has with that more ancient spiritus, or warm
+breath, which people used to think they might be "born of." Whether, in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span>
+fine, there be any such thing as an entirely human Art, with spiritual
+motive power, and signal as of human voice, distinct inherently from
+this mechanical Art, with its mechanical motive force, and signal of
+vulture voice. For after all, this shrieking thing, whatever the fine
+make of it may be, can but pull or push, and do oxen's work in an
+impetuous manner. That proud king of Assyria, who lost his reason, and
+ate oxen's food, would he have much more cause for pride, if he had been
+allowed to spend his reason in doing oxen's work?</p>
+
+<p>35. These things, then, I would fain consult about, and plead with the
+reader for his patience in council, even while we begin with the
+simplest practical matters; for raveled briers of thought entangle our
+feet, even at our first step. We would teach a boy to draw. Well, what
+shall he draw?&mdash;Gods, or men, or beasts, or clouds, or leaves, or iron
+cylinders? Are there any gods to be drawn? any men or women worth
+drawing, or only worth caricaturing? What are the &aelig;sthetic laws
+respecting iron cylinders; and would Titian have liked them rusty, or
+fresh cleaned with oil and rag, to fill the place once lightened by St.
+George's armor? How can we begin the smallest practical business, unless
+we get first some whisper of answer to such questions? We may tell a boy
+to draw a straight line straight, and a crooked one crooked; but what
+else?</p>
+
+<p>And it renders the dilemma, or multilemma, more embarrassing, that
+whatever teaching is to be had from the founders and masters of art is
+quite unpractical. The first source from which we should naturally seek
+for guidance would, of course, be the sayings of great workmen; but a
+sorrowful perception presently dawns on us that the great workmen have
+nothing to say. They are silent, absolutely in proportion to their
+creative power. The contributions to our practical knowledge of the
+principles of Art, furnished by the true captains of its hosts, may, I
+think, be arithmetically summed by the <big>O</big> of
+Giotto: the inferior teachers become didactic in the degree of their
+inferiority; and those who can do nothing have always much to advise.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>36. This however, observe, is only true of advice direct. You never, I
+grieve to say, get from the great men a plain answer to a plain
+question; still less can you entangle them in any agreeable gossip, out
+of which something might unawares be picked up. But of enigmatical
+teaching, broken signs and sullen mutterings, of which you can
+understand nothing, and may make anything;&mdash;of confused discourse in the
+work itself, about the work, as in D&uuml;rer's Melancolia;&mdash;and of discourse
+not merely confused, but apparently unreasonable and ridiculous, about
+all manner of things <i>except</i> the work,&mdash;the great Egyptian and Greek
+artists give us much: from which, however, all that by utmost industry
+may be gathered, comes briefly to this,&mdash;that they have no conception of
+what modern men of science call the "Conservation of forces," but deduce
+all the force they feel in themselves, and hope for in others, from
+certain fountains or centers of perpetually supplied strength, to which
+they give various names: as, for instance, these seven following, more
+specially:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>1. The Spirit of Light, moral and physical, by name the
+"Physician-Destroyer," bearing arrows in his hand, and a lyre;
+pre-eminently the destroyer of human pride, and the guide of human
+harmony. Physically, Lord of the Sun; and a mountain Spirit,
+because the sun seems first to rise and set upon hills.</p>
+
+<p>2. The Spirit of helpful Darkness&mdash;of shade and rest. Night the
+Restorer.</p>
+
+<p>3. The Spirit of Wisdom in <i>Conduct</i>, bearing, in sign of conquest
+over troublous and disturbing evil, the skin of the wild goat, and
+the head of the slain Spirit of physical storm. In her hand, a
+weaver's shuttle, or a spear.</p>
+
+<p>4. The Spirit of Wisdom in <i>Arrangement</i>; called the Lord or Father
+of Truth: throned on a four-square cubit, with a measuring-rod in
+his hand, or a potter's wheel.</p>
+
+<p>5. The Spirit of Wisdom in <i>Adaptation</i>; or of serviceable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span> labor:
+the Master of human effort in its glow; and Lord of useful fire,
+moral and physical.</p>
+
+<p>6. The Spirit, first of young or nascent grace, and then of
+fulfilled beauty: the wife of the Lord of Labor. I have taken the
+two lines in which Homer describes her girdle, for the motto of
+these essays: partly in memory of these outcast fancies of the
+great masters: and partly for the sake of a meaning which we shall
+find as we go on.</p>
+
+<p>7. The Spirit of pure human life and gladness. Master of wholesome
+vital passion; and physically, Lord of the Vine.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>37. From these ludicrous notions of motive force, inconsistent as they
+are with modern physiology and organic chemistry, we may, nevertheless,
+hereafter gather, in the details of their various expressions, something
+useful to us. But I grieve to say that when our provoking teachers
+descend from dreams about the doings of Gods to assertions respecting
+the deeds of Men, little beyond the blankest discouragement is to be had
+from them. Thus, they represent the ingenuity, and deceptive or
+imitative Arts of men, under the type of a Master who builds labyrinths,
+and makes images of living creatures, for evil purposes, or for none;
+and pleases himself and the people with idle jointing of toys, and
+filling of them with quicksilver motion; and brings his child to
+foolish, remediless catastrophe, in fancying his father's work as good,
+and strong, and fit to bear sunlight, as if it had been God's work. So,
+again, they represent the foresight and kindly zeal of men by a most
+rueful figure of one chained down to a rock by the brute force and bias
+and methodical hammer-stroke of the merely practical Arts, and by the
+merciless Necessities or Fates of present time; and so having his very
+heart torn piece by piece out of him by a vulturous hunger and sorrow,
+respecting things he cannot reach, nor prevent, nor achieve. So, again,
+they describe the sentiment and pure soul-power of Man, as moving the
+very rocks and trees, and giving them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span> life, by its sympathy with them;
+but losing its own best-beloved thing by mere venomous accident: and
+afterwards going down to hell for it, in vain; being impatient and
+unwise, though full of gentleness; and, in the issue, after as vainly
+trying to teach this gentleness to others, and to guide them out of
+their lower passions to sunlight of true healing Life, it drives the
+sensual heart of them, and the gods that govern it, into mere and pure
+frenzy of resolved rage, and gets torn to pieces by them, and ended;
+only the nightingale staying by its grave to sing. All which appearing
+to be anything rather than helpful or encouraging instruction for
+beginners, we shall, for the present, I think, do well to desire these
+enigmatical teachers to put up their pipes and be gone; and betaking
+ourselves in the humblest manner to intelligible business, at least set
+down some definite matter for decision, to be made a first
+stepping-stone at the shore of this brook of despond and difficulty.</p>
+
+<p>38. Most masters agree (and I believe they are right) that the first
+thing to be taught to any pupil, is how to draw an outline of such
+things as can be outlined.</p>
+
+<p>Now, there are two kinds of outline&mdash;the soft and hard. One must be
+executed with a soft instrument, as a piece of chalk or lead; and the
+other with some instrument producing for ultimate result a firm line of
+equal darkness; as a pen with ink, or the engraving tool on wood or
+metal.</p>
+
+<p>And these two kinds of outline have both of them their particular
+objects and uses, as well as their proper scale of size in work. Thus
+Raphael will sketch a miniature head with his pen, but always takes
+chalk if he draws of the size of life. So also Holbein, and generally
+the other strong masters.</p>
+
+<p>But the black outline seems to be peculiarly that which we ought to
+begin to reason upon, because it is simple and open-hearted, and does
+not endeavor to escape into mist. A pencil line may be obscurely and
+undemonstrably wrong; false in a cowardly manner, and without
+confession: but the ink line, if it goes wrong at all, goes wrong with a
+will, and may be convicted at our leisure, and put to such shame as its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span>
+black complexion is capable of. May we, therefore, begin with the hard
+line? It will lead us far, if we can come to conclusions about it.</p>
+
+<p>39. Presuming, then, that our schoolboys are such as Coleridge would
+have them&mdash;<i>i.e.</i> that they are</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 5.5em;">"Innocent, steady, and wise,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">And delight in the things of earth, water, and skies,"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>and, above all, in a moral state in which they may be trusted with
+ink&mdash;we put a pen into their hands (shall it be steel?) and a piece of
+smooth white paper, and something before them to draw. But what? "Nay,"
+the reader answers, "you had surely better give them pencil first, for
+that may be rubbed out." Perhaps so; but I am not sure that the power of
+rubbing out is an advantage; at all events, we shall best discover what
+the pencil outline ought to be, by investigating the power of the black
+one, and the kind of things we can draw with it.</p>
+
+<p>40. Suppose, for instance, my first scholar has a turn for entomology,
+and asks me to draw for him a wasp's leg, or its sting; having first
+humanely provided me with a model by pulling one off or out. My pen must
+clearly be fine at the point, and my execution none of the boldest, if I
+comply with his request. If I decline, and he thereupon challenges me at
+least to draw the wasp's body, with its pretty bands of black
+crinoline&mdash;behold us involved instantly in the profound question of
+local color! Am I to tell him he is not to draw outlines of bands or
+spots? How, then, shall he know a wasp's body from a bee's? I escape,
+for the present, by telling him the story of D&aelig;dalus and the honeycomb;
+set him to draw a pattern of hexagons, and lay the question of black
+bands up in my mind.</p>
+
+<p>41. The next boy, we may suppose, is a conchologist, and asks me to draw
+a white snail-shell for him! Veiling my consternation at the idea of
+having to give a lesson on the perspective of geometrical spirals, with
+an "austere regard of control" I pass on to the next student:&mdash;Who,
+bringing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span> after him, with acclamation, all the rest of the form,
+requires of me contemptuously, to "draw a horse."</p>
+
+<p>And I retreat in final discomfiture; for not only I cannot myself
+execute, but I have never seen, an outline, quite simply and rightly
+done, either of a shell or a pony; nay, not so much as of a pony's nose.
+At a girls' school we might perhaps take refuge in rosebuds: but these
+boys, with their impatient battle-cry, "my kingdom for a horse," what is
+to be done for them?</p>
+
+<p>42. Well, this is what I should like to be able to do for them. To show
+them an enlarged black outline, nobly done, of the two sides of a coin
+of Tarentum, with that fiery rider kneeling, careless, on his horse's
+neck, and reclined on his surging dolphin, with the curled sea lapping
+round them; and then to convince my boys that no one (unless it were
+Taras's father himself, with the middle prong of his trident) could draw
+a horse like that, without learning;&mdash;that for poor mortals like us
+there must be sorrowful preparatory stages; and, having convinced them
+of this, set them to draw (if I had a good copy to give them) a horse's
+hoof, or his rib, or a vertebra of his thunder-clothed neck, or any
+other constructive piece of him.</p>
+
+<p>43. Meanwhile, all this being far out of present reach, I am fain to
+shrink back into my snail-shell, both for shelter and calm of peace; and
+ask of artists in general how the said shell, or any other simple object
+involving varied contour, <i>should</i> be outlined in ink?&mdash;how thick the
+lines should be, and how varied? My own idea of an elementary outline is
+that it should be unvaried; distinctly visible; not thickened towards
+the shaded sides of the object; not express any exaggerations of a&euml;rial
+perspective, nor fade at the further side of a cup as if it were the
+further side of a crater of a volcano; and therefore, in objects of
+ordinary size, show no gradation at all, unless where the real outline
+disappears, as in soft contours and folds. Nay, I think it may even be a
+question whether we ought not to resolve that the line should never
+gradate itself at all, but terminate quite bluntly! Albert D&uuml;rer's
+"Cannon" furnishes a very peculiar and curious example of this entirely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span>
+equal line, even to the extreme distance; being in that respect opposed
+to nearly all his other work, which is wrought mostly by tapering lines;
+and his work in general, and Holbein's, which appear to me entirely
+typical of rightness in use of the graver and pen, are to be considered
+carefully in their relation to Rembrandt's loose etching, as in the
+"Spotted Shell."</p>
+
+<p>44. But I do not want to press my own opinions now, even when I have
+been able to form them distinctly. I want to get at some unanimous
+expression of opinion and method; and would propose, therefore, in all
+modesty, this question for discussion, by such artists as will favor me
+with answer,<a name="FNanchor_65_65" id="FNanchor_65_65"></a><a href="#Footnote_65_65" class="fnanchor">[65]</a> giving their names:&mdash;<i>How ought the pen to be used to
+outline a form of varied contour; and ought outline to be entirely pure,
+or, even in its most elementary types, to pass into some suggestion of
+shade in the inner masses?</i> For there are no examples whatever of pure
+outlines by the great masters. They are always touched or modified by
+inner lines, more or less suggestive of solid form, and they are lost or
+accentuated in certain places, not so much in conformity with any
+explicable law, as in expression of the master's future purpose, or of
+what he wishes immediately to note in the character of the object. Most
+of them are irregular memoranda, not systematic elementary work: of
+those which are systematized, the greater part are carried far beyond
+the initiative stage; and Holbein's are nearly all washed with color:
+the exact degree in which he depends upon the softening and extending
+his touch of ink by subsequent solution of it, being indeterminable,
+though exquisitely successful. His stupendous drawings in the British
+Museum (I can justly use no other term than "stupendous," of their
+consummately decisive power) furnish finer instances of this treatment
+than any at Basle; but it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span> would be very difficult to reduce them to a
+definable law. Venetian outlines are rare, except preparations on
+canvas, often shaded before coloring;&mdash;while Raphael's, if not shaded,
+are quite loose, and useless as examples to a beginner: so that we are
+left wholly without guide as to the preparatory steps on which we should
+decisively insist; and I am myself haunted by the notion that the
+students were forced to shade firmly from the very beginning, in all the
+greatest schools; only we never can get hold of any beginnings, or any
+weak work of those schools: whatever is bad in them comes of decadence,
+not infancy.</p>
+
+<p>45. I purpose in the next essay<a name="FNanchor_66_66" id="FNanchor_66_66"></a><a href="#Footnote_66_66" class="fnanchor">[66]</a> to enter upon quite another part of
+the inquiry, so as to leave time for the reception of communications
+bearing upon the present paper: and, according to their importance, I
+shall ask leave still to defer our return to the subject until I have
+had time to reflect upon them, and to collect for public service the
+concurrent opinions they may contain.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="trans-note">
+  <p class="center">Transcriber's note:</p>
+
+<p class="center">Chapter II is missing in the original.</p>
+      </div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Chapter III.</span><a name="FNanchor_67_67" id="FNanchor_67_67"></a><a href="#Footnote_67_67" class="fnanchor">[67]</a></h3>
+
+<p class="center">
+"Dame Pacienc&euml; sitting there I fonde,<br />
+With fac&euml; pale, upon an hill of sonde."
+</p>
+
+
+<p>46. As I try to summon this vision of Chaucer's into definiteness, and
+as it fades before me, and reappears, like the image of Piccarda in the
+moon, there mingles with it another;&mdash;the image of an Italian child,
+lying, she also, upon a hill of sand, by Eridanus' side; a vision which
+has never quite left me since I saw it. A girl of ten or twelve, it
+might be; one of the children to whom there has never been any other
+lesson taught than that of patience:&mdash;patience of famine and thirst;
+patience of heat and cold; patience of fierce word and sullen blow;
+patience of changeless fate and giftless time. She was lying with her
+arms thrown back over her head, all languid and lax, on an earth-heap by
+the river side (the softness of the dust being the only softness she had
+ever known), in the southern suburb of Turin, one golden afternoon in
+August, years ago. She had been at play, after her fashion, with other
+patient children, and had thrown herself down to rest, full in the sun,
+like a lizard. The sand was mixed with the draggled locks of her black
+hair, and some of it sprinkled over her face and body, in an "ashes to
+ashes" kind of way; a few black rags about her loins, but her limbs
+nearly bare, and her little breasts, scarce dimpled
+yet,&mdash;white,&mdash;marble-like&mdash;but, as wasted marble, thin with the
+scorching and the rains of Time. So she lay, motionless; black and white
+by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> the shore in the sun; the yellow light flickering back upon her from
+the passing eddies of the river, and burning down on her from the west.
+So she lay, like a dead Niobid: it seemed as if the Sun-God, as he sank
+towards gray Viso (who stood pale in the southwest, and pyramidal as a
+tomb), had been wroth with Italy for numbering her children too
+carefully, and slain this little one. Black and white she lay, all
+breathless, in a sufficiently pictorial manner: the gardens of the Villa
+Regina gleamed beyond, graceful with laurel-grove and labyrinthine
+terrace; and folds of purple mountain were drawn afar, for curtains
+round her little dusty bed.</p>
+
+<p>47. Pictorial enough, I repeat; and yet I might not now have remembered
+her, so as to find her figure mingling, against my will, with other
+images, but for her manner of "revival." For one of her playmates coming
+near, cast some word at her which angered her; and she rose&mdash;"en ego,
+victa situ"&mdash;she rose with a single spring, like a snake; one hardly saw
+the motion; and with a shriek so shrill that I put my hands upon my
+ears; and so uttered herself, indignant and vengeful, with words of
+justice,&mdash;Alecto standing by, satisfied, teaching her acute, articulate
+syllables, and adding her own voice to carry them thrilling through the
+blue laurel shadows. And having spoken, she went her way, wearily: and I
+passed by on the other side, meditating, with such Levitical propriety
+as a respectable person should, on the asplike Passion, following the
+sorrowful Patience; and on the way in which the saying, "Dust shalt thou
+eat all thy days" has been confusedly fulfilled, first by much provision
+of human dust for the meat of what Keats calls "human serpentry;" and
+last, by gathering the Consumed and Consumer into dust together, for the
+meat of the death spirit, or serpent Apap. Neither could I, for long,
+get rid of the thought of this strange dust-manufacture under the
+mill-stones, as it were, of Death; and of the two colors of the grain,
+discriminate beneath, though indiscriminately cast into the hopper. For
+indeed some of it seems only to be made whiter for its patience, and
+becomes kneadable into spiced bread, where they sell in Babylonian
+shops<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span> "slaves, and souls of men;" but other some runs dark from under
+the mill-stones; a little sulphurous and nitrous foam being mingled in
+the conception of it; and is ominously stored up in magazines near
+river-embankments; patient enough&mdash;for the present.</p>
+
+<p>48. But it is provoking to me that the image of this child mingles
+itself now with Chaucer's; for I should like truly to know what Chaucer
+means by his sand-hill. Not but that this is just one of those
+enigmatical pieces of teaching which we have made up our minds not to be
+troubled with, since it may evidently mean just what we like. Sometimes
+I would fain have it to mean the ghostly sand of the horologe of the
+world: and I think that the pale figure is seated on the recording heap,
+which rises slowly, and ebbs in giddiness, and flows again, and rises,
+tottering; and still she sees, falling beside her, the never-ending
+stream of phantom sand. Sometimes I like to think that she is seated on
+the sand because she is herself the Spirit of Staying, and victor over
+all things that pass and change;&mdash;quicksand of the desert in moving
+pillar; quicksand of the sea in moving floor; roofless all, and
+unabiding, but she abiding;&mdash;to herself, her home. And sometimes I
+think, though I do not like to think (neither did Chaucer mean this, for
+he always meant the lovely thing first, not the low one), that she is
+seated on her sand-heap as the only treasure to be gained by human toil;
+and that the little ant-hill, where the best of us creep to and fro,
+bears to angelic eyes, in the patientest gathering of its galleries,
+only the aspect of a little heap of dust; while for the worst of us, the
+heap, still lower by the leveling of those winged surveyors, is high
+enough, nevertheless, to overhang, and at last to close in judgment, on
+the seventh day, over the journeyers to the fortunate Islands; while to
+their dying eyes, through the mirage, "the city sparkles like a grain of
+salt."</p>
+
+<p>49. But of course it does not in the least matter what it means. All
+that matters specially to us in Chaucer's vision, is that, next to
+Patience (as the reader will find by looking at the context in the
+"Assembly of Foules"), were "Be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span>heste" and "Art;"&mdash;Promise, that is, and
+Art: and that, although these visionary powers are here waiting only in
+one of the outer courts of Love, and the intended patience is here only
+the long-suffering of love; and the intended beheste, its promise; and
+the intended art, its cunning,&mdash;the same powers companion each other
+necessarily in the courts and antechamber of every triumphal home of
+man. I say triumphal home, for, indeed, triumphal <i>arches</i> which you
+pass under, are but foolish things, and may be nailed together any day,
+out of pasteboard and filched laurel; but triumphal <i>doors</i>, which you
+can enter in at, with living laurel crowning the Lares, are not so easy
+of access: and outside of them waits always this sad portress, Patience;
+that is to say, the submission to the eternal laws of Pain and Time, and
+acceptance of them as inevitable, smiling at the grief. So much pains
+you shall take&mdash;so much time you shall wait: that is the Law. Understand
+it, honor it; with peace of heart accept the pain, and attend the hours;
+and as the husbandman in his waiting, you shall see, first the blade,
+and then the ear, and then the laughing of the valleys. But refuse the
+Law, and seek to do your work in your own time, or by any serpentine way
+to evade the pain, and you shall have no harvest&mdash;nothing but apples of
+Sodom: dust shall be your meat, and dust in your throat&mdash;there is no
+singing in such harvest time.</p>
+
+<p>50. And this is true for all things, little and great. There is a time
+and a way in which they can be done: none shorter&mdash;none smoother. For
+all noble things, the time is long and the way rude. You may fret and
+fume as you will; for every start and struggle of impatience there shall
+be so much attendant failure; if impatience become a habit, nothing but
+failure: until on the path you have chosen for your better swiftness,
+rather than the honest flinty one, there shall follow you, fast at hand,
+instead of Beheste and Art for companions, those two wicked hags,</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">"With hoary locks all loose, and visage grim;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">Their feet unshod, their bodies wrapt in rags,</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">And both as swift on foot as chased stags;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">And yet the one her other legge had lame,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">Which with a staff all full of little snags</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">She did support, and Impotence her name:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">But th' other was Impatience, armed with raging flame."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Raging</i> flame," note; unserviceable;&mdash;flame of the black grain. But
+the fire which Patience carries in her hand is that truly stolen from
+Heaven, in the <i>pith</i> of the rod&mdash;fire of the slow match; persistent
+Fire like it also in her own body,&mdash;fire in the marrow; unquenchable
+incense of life: though it may seem to the bystanders that there is no
+breath in her, and she holds herself like a statue, as Hermione, "the
+statue lady," or Griselda, "the stone lady;" unless indeed one looks
+close for the glance <i>forward</i>, in the eyes, which distinguishes such
+pillars from the pillars, not of flesh, but of salt, whose eyes are set
+backwards.</p>
+
+<p>51. I cannot get to my work in this paper, somehow; the web of these old
+enigmas entangles me again and again. That rough syllable which begins
+the name of Griselda, "Gries," "the stone;" the roar of the long fall of
+the Toccia seems to mix with the sound of it, bringing thoughts of the
+great Alpine patience; mute snow wreathed by gray rock, till avalanche
+time comes&mdash;patience of mute tormented races till the time of the Gray
+league came; at last impatient. (Not that, hitherto, it has hewn its way
+to much: the Rhine-foam of the Via Mala seeming to have done its work
+better.) But it is a noble color that Grison Gray;&mdash;dawn color&mdash;graceful
+for a faded silk to ride in, and wonderful, in paper, for getting a glow
+upon, if you begin wisely, as you may some day perhaps see by those
+Turner sketches at Kensington, if ever anybody can see them.</p>
+
+<p>52. But we <i>will</i> get to work now; the work being to understand, if we
+may, what tender creatures are indeed riding with us, the British
+public, in faded silk, and handing our plates for us with tender little
+thumbs, and never wearing, or doing, anything else (not always having
+much to put on their own plates). The loveliest arts, the arts of
+noblest descent, have been long doing this for us, and are still, and we
+have no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> idea of their being Princesses, but keep them ill-entreated and
+enslaved: vociferous as we are against Black slavery, while we are
+gladly acceptant of Gray; and fain to keep Aglaia and her
+sisters&mdash;Urania and hers,&mdash;serving us in faded silk, and taken for
+kitchen-wenches. We are mad Sanchos, not mad Quixotes: our eyes enchant
+<i>Down</i>wards.</p>
+
+<p>53. For one instance only: has the reader ever reflected on the
+patience, and deliberate subtlety, and unostentatious will, involved in
+the ordinary process of steel engraving; that process of which engravers
+themselves now with doleful voices deplore the decline, and with
+sorrowful hearts expect the extinction, after their own days?</p>
+
+<p>By the way&mdash;my friends of the field of steel,&mdash;you need fear nothing of
+the kind. What there is of mechanical in your work; of habitual and
+thoughtless, of vulgar or servile&mdash;for that, indeed, the time has come;
+the sun will burn it up for you, very ruthlessly; but what there is of
+human liberty, and of sanguine life, in finger and fancy, is kindred of
+the sun, and quite inextinguishable by him. He is the very last of
+divinities who would wish to extinguish it. With his red right hand,
+though full of lightning coruscation, he will faithfully and tenderly
+clasp yours, warm blooded; you will see the vermilion in the
+flesh-shadows all the clearer; but your hand will not be withered. I
+tell you&mdash;(dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well)&mdash;a
+square inch of man's engraving is worth all the photographs that ever
+were dipped in acid (or left half-washed afterwards, which is saying
+much)&mdash;only it must be man's engraving; not machine's engraving. You
+have founded a school on patience and labor&mdash;only. That school must soon
+be extinct. You will have to found one on thought, which is Ph&oelig;nician
+in immortality and fears no fire. Believe me, photography can do against
+line engraving just what Madame Tussaud's wax-work can do against
+sculpture. That, and no more. You are too timid in this matter; you are
+like Isaac in that picture of Mr. Schnorr's in the last number of this
+Journal, and with Teutonically metaphysical precaution, shade your eyes
+from the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span> sun with your back to it. Take courage; turn your eyes to it
+in an aquiline manner; put more sunshine on your steel, and less burr;
+and leave the photographers to their Ph&oelig;bus of Magnesium wire.</p>
+
+<p>54. Not that I mean to speak disrespectfully of magnesium. I honor it to
+its utmost fiery particle (though I think the soul a fierier one); and I
+wish the said magnesium all comfort and triumph; nightly-lodging in
+lighthouses, and utter victory over coal gas. Could Titian but have
+known what the gnomes who built his dolomite crags above Cadore had
+mixed in the make of them,&mdash;and that one day&mdash;one night, I mean&mdash;his
+blue distances would still be seen pure blue, by light got out of his
+own mountains!</p>
+
+<p>Light out of limestone&mdash;color out of coal&mdash;and white wings out of hot
+water! It is a great age this of ours, for traction and extraction, if
+it only knew what to extract from itself, or where to drag itself to!</p>
+
+<p>55. But in the meantime I want the public to admire this patience of
+yours, while they have it, and to understand what it has cost to give
+them even this, which has to pass away. We will not take instance in
+figure engraving, of which the complex skill and textural gradation by
+dot and checker must be wholly incomprehensible to amateurs; but we will
+take a piece of average landscape engraving, such as is sent out of any
+good workshop&mdash;the master who puts his name at the bottom of the plate
+being of course responsible only for the general method, for the
+sufficient skill of subordinate hands, and for the few finishing touches
+if necessary. We will take, for example, the plate of Turner's "Mercury
+and Argus," engraved in this Journal.<a name="FNanchor_68_68" id="FNanchor_68_68"></a><a href="#Footnote_68_68" class="fnanchor">[68]</a></p>
+
+<p>56. I suppose most people, looking at such a plate, fancy it is produced
+by some simple mechanical artifice, which is to drawing only what
+printing is to writing. They conclude, at all events, that there is
+something complacent, sympathetic,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span> and helpful in the nature of steel;
+so that while a pen-and-ink sketch may always be considered an
+achievement proving cleverness in the sketcher, a sketch on steel comes
+out by mere favor of the indulgent metal: or perhaps they think the
+plate is woven like a piece of pattern silk, and the pattern is
+developed by pasteboard cards punched full of holes. Not so. Look close
+at that engraving&mdash;imagine it to be a drawing in pen and ink, and
+yourself required similarly to produce its parallel! True, the steel
+point has the one advantage of not blotting, but it has tenfold or
+twentyfold disadvantage, in that you cannot slur, nor efface, except in
+a very resolute and laborious way, nor play with it, nor even see what
+you are doing with it at the moment, far less the effect that is to be.
+You must <i>feel</i> what you are doing with it, and know precisely what you
+have got to do; how deep&mdash;how broad&mdash;how far apart&mdash;your lines must be,
+etc. and etc. (a couple of lines of etc.'s would not be enough to imply
+all you must know). But suppose the plate <i>were</i> only a pen drawing:
+take your pen&mdash;your finest&mdash;and just try to copy the leaves that
+entangle the nearest cow's head and the head itself; remembering always
+that the kind of work required here is mere child's play compared to
+that of fine figure engraving. Nevertheless, take a strong magnifying
+glass to this&mdash;count the dots and lines that gradate the nostrils and
+the edges of the facial bone; notice how the light is left on the top of
+the head by the stopping at its outline of the coarse touches which form
+the shadows under the leaves; examine it well, and then&mdash;I humbly ask of
+you&mdash;try to do a piece of it yourself! You clever sketcher&mdash;you young
+lady or gentleman of genius&mdash;you eye-glassed dilettante&mdash;you current
+writer of criticism royally plural,&mdash;I beseech you&mdash;do it yourself; do
+the merely etched outline yourself, if no more. Look you,&mdash;you hold your
+etching needle this way, as you would a pencil, nearly; and then,&mdash;you
+scratch with it! it is as easy as lying. Or if you think that too
+difficult, take an easier piece;&mdash;take either of the light sprays of
+foliage that rise against the fortress on the right, put your glass over
+them&mdash;look how their fine out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span>line is first drawn, leaf by leaf; then
+how the distant rock is put in between, with broken lines, mostly
+stopping before they touch the leaf outline, and&mdash;again, I pray you, do
+it yourself; if not on that scale, on a larger. Go on into the hollows
+of the distant rock&mdash;traverse its thickets&mdash;number its towers&mdash;count how
+many lines there are in a laurel bush&mdash;in an arch&mdash;in a casement: some
+hundred and fifty, or two hundred, deliberately drawn lines, you will
+find, in every square quarter of an inch;&mdash;say three thousand to the
+inch,&mdash;each with skillful intent put in its place! and then consider
+what the ordinary sketcher's work must appear to the men who have been
+trained to this!</p>
+
+<p>57. "But might not more have been done by three thousand lines to a
+square inch?" you will perhaps ask. Well, possibly. It may be with lines
+as with soldiers: three hundred, knowing their work thoroughly, may be
+stronger than three thousand less sure of their game. We shall have to
+press close home this question about numbers and purpose presently;&mdash;it
+is not the question now. Supposing certain results
+required,&mdash;atmospheric effects, surface textures, transparencies of
+shade, confusions of light,&mdash;more could <i>not</i> be done with less. There
+are engravings of this modern school, of which, with respect to their
+particular aim, it may be said, most truly, they "<i>cannot</i> be better
+done."</p>
+
+<p>58. Whether an engraving should aim at effects of atmosphere, may be
+disputable (just as also whether a sculptor should aim at effects of
+perspective); but I do not raise these points to-day. Admit the aim&mdash;let
+us note the patience; nor this in engraving only. I have taken an
+engraving for my instance, but I might have taken any form of Art. I
+call upon all good artists, painters, sculptors, metal-workers, to bear
+witness with me in what I now tell the public in their name,&mdash;that the
+same Fortitude, the same deliberation, the same perseverance in resolute
+act&mdash;is needed to do <i>anything</i> in Art that is worthy. And why is it,
+you workmen, that you are silent always concerning your toil; and mock
+at us in your hearts, within that shrine at Eleusis, to the gate of
+which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span> you have hewn your way through so deadly thickets of thorn; and
+leave us, foolish children, outside, in our conceited thinking either
+that we can enter it in play, or that we are grander for not entering?
+Far more earnestly is it to be asked, why do you <i>stoop</i> to us as you
+mock us? If your secrecy were a noble one,&mdash;if, in that incommunicant
+contempt, you wrought your own work with majesty, whether we would
+receive it or not, it were kindly, though ungraciously, done; but now
+you make yourselves our toys, and do our childish will in servile
+silence. If engraving were to come to an end this day, and no guided
+point should press metal more, do you think it would be in a blaze of
+glory that your art would expire?&mdash;that those plates in the annuals, and
+black proofs in broad shop windows, are of a nobly monumental
+character,&mdash;"chalybe perennius"? I am afraid your patience has been too
+much like yonder poor Italian child's; and over that genius of yours,
+low laid by the Matin shore, if it expired so, the lament for Archytas
+would have to be sung again;&mdash;"pulveris exigui&mdash;munera." Suppose you
+were to shake off the dust again! cleanse your wings, like the morning
+bees on that Matin promontory; rise, in noble <i>im</i>patience, for there is
+such a thing: the Impatience of the Fourth Cornice.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">"Cui buon voler, e giusto amor cavalca."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Shall we try, together, to think over the meaning of that Haste, when
+the May mornings come?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_IV69" id="CHAPTER_IV69"></a><span class="smcap">Chapter IV.</span><a name="FNanchor_69_69" id="FNanchor_69_69"></a><a href="#Footnote_69_69" class="fnanchor">[69]</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>59. It is a wild March day,&mdash;the 20th; and very probably due course of
+English Spring will bring as wild a May-day by the time this writing
+meets anyone's eyes; but at all events, as yet the days are rough, and
+as I look out of my fitfully lighted window into the garden, everything
+seems in a singular hurry. The dead leaves; and yonder two living ones,
+on the same stalk, tumbling over and over each other on the lawn, like a
+quaint mechanical toy; and the fallen sticks from the rooks' nests, and
+the twisted straws out of the stable-yard&mdash;all going one way, in the
+hastiest manner! The puffs of steam, moreover, which pass under the
+wooded hills where what used to be my sweetest field-walk ends now,
+prematurely, in an abyss of blue clay; and which signify, in their
+silvery expiring between the successive trunks of wintry trees, that
+some human beings, thereabouts, are in a hurry as well as the sticks and
+straws, and, having fastened themselves to the tail of a manageable
+breeze, are being blown down to Folkestone.</p>
+
+<p>60. In the general effect of these various passages and passengers, as
+seen from my quiet room, they look all very much alike. One begins
+seriously to question with one's self whether those passengers by the
+Folkestone train are in truth one whit more in a hurry than the dead
+leaves. The difference consists, of course, in the said passengers
+knowing where they are going to, and why; and having resolved to go
+there&mdash;which, indeed, as far as Folkestone, may, perhaps, properly
+distinguish them from the leaves: but will it distinguish them any
+farther? Do many of them know what they are going to Folkestone
+for?&mdash;what they are going anywhere for? and where, at last, by sum of
+all the days' journeys, of which this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> glittering transit is one, they
+are going for peace? For if they know not this, certainly they are no
+more making haste than the straws are. Perhaps swiftly going the wrong
+way; more likely going no way&mdash;any way, as the winds and their own
+wills, wilder than the winds, dictate; to find themselves at last at the
+end which would have come to them quickly enough without their seeking.</p>
+
+<p>61. And, indeed, this is a very preliminary question to all measurement
+of the rate of going, this "where to?" or, even before that, "are we
+going on at all?"&mdash;"getting on" (as the world says) on any road
+whatever? Most men's eyes are so fixed on the mere swirl of the wheel of
+their fortunes, and their souls so vexed at the reversed cadences of it
+when they come, that they forget to ask if the curve they have been
+carried through on its circumference was circular or cycloidal; whether
+they have been bound to the ups and downs of a mill-wheel or of a
+chariot-wheel.</p>
+
+<p>That phrase, of "getting on," so perpetually on our lips (as indeed it
+should be), do any of us take it to our hearts, and seriously ask where
+we can get on <i>to</i>? That instinct of hurry has surely good grounds. It
+is all very well for lazy and nervous people (like myself for instance)
+to retreat into tubs, and holes, and corners, anywhere out of the dust,
+and wonder within ourselves, "what all the fuss can be about?" The fussy
+people might have the best of it, if they know their end. Suppose they
+were to answer this March or May morning thus:&mdash;"Not bestir ourselves,
+indeed! and the spring sun up these four hours!&mdash;and this first of May,
+1865, never to come back again; and of Firsts of May in perspective,
+supposing ourselves to be 'nel mezzo del cammin,' perhaps some twenty or
+twenty-five to be, not without presumption, hoped for, and by no means
+calculated upon. Say, twenty of them, with their following groups of
+summer days; and though they may be long, one cannot make much more than
+sixteen hours apiece out of them, poor sleepy wretches that we are; for
+even if we get up at four, we must go to bed while the red yet stays
+from the sunset: and half the time we are awake, we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span> must be lying among
+haycocks, or playing at something, if we are wise; not to speak of
+eating, and previously earning whereof to eat, which takes time: and
+then, how much of us and of our day will be left for getting on? Shall
+we have a seventh, or even a tithe, of our twenty-four hours?&mdash;two hours
+and twenty-four minutes clear, a day, or, roughly, a thousand hours a
+year, and (violently presuming on fortune, as we said) twenty years of
+working life: twenty thousand hours to get on in, altogether? Many men
+would think it hard to be limited to an utmost twenty thousand pounds
+for their fortunes, but here is a sterner limitation; the Pactolus of
+time, sand, and gold together, would, with such a fortune, count us a
+pound an hour, through our real and serviceable life. If this time
+capital would reproduce itself! and for our twenty thousand hours we
+could get some rate of interest, if well spent? At all events, we will
+do something with them; not lie moping out of the way of the dust, as
+you do."</p>
+
+<p>62. A sufficient answer, indeed; yet, friends, if you would <i>make</i> a
+little less dust, perhaps we should all see our way better. But I am
+ready to take the road with you, if you mean it so seriously&mdash;only let
+us at least consider where we are now, at starting.</p>
+
+<p>Here, on a little spinning, askew-axised thing we call a
+planet&mdash;(impertinently enough, since we are far more planetary
+ourselves). A round, rusty, rough little metallic ball&mdash;very hard to
+live upon; most of it much too hot or too cold: a couple of narrow
+habitable belts about it, which, to wandering spirits, must look like
+the places where it has got damp, and green-moldy, with accompanying
+small activities of animal life in the midst of the lichen. Explosive
+gases, seemingly, inside it, and possibilities of very sudden
+dispersion.</p>
+
+<p>63. This is where we are; and roundabout us, there seem to be more of
+such balls, variously heated and chilled, ringed and mooned, moved and
+comforted; the whole giddy group of us forming an atom in a milky mist,
+itself another atom in a shoreless phosphorescent sea of such Volvoces
+and Medus&aelig;.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Whereupon, I presume, one would first ask, have we any chance of getting
+off this ball of ours, and getting on to one of those finer ones? Wise
+people say we have, and that it is very wicked to think otherwise. So we
+will think no otherwise; but, with their permission, think nothing about
+the matter now, since it is certain that the more we make of our little
+rusty world, such as it is, the more chance we have of being one day
+promoted into a merrier one.</p>
+
+<p>64. And even on this rusty and moldy Earth, there appear to be things
+which may be seen with pleasure, and things which might be done with
+advantage. The stones of it have strange shapes; the plants and the
+beasts of it strange ways. Its air is coinable into wonderful sounds;
+its light into manifold colors: the trees of it bring forth pippins, and
+the fields cheese (though both of these may be, in a finer sense, "to
+come"). There are bright eyes upon it which reflect the light of other
+eyes quite singularly; and foolish feelings to be cherished upon it; and
+gladdenings of dust by neighbor dust, not easily explained, but
+pleasant, and which take time to win. One would like to know something
+of all this, I suppose?&mdash;to divide one's score of thousand hours as
+shrewdly as might be. Ten minutes to every herb of the field is not
+much; yet we shall not know them all, so, before the time comes to be
+made grass of ourselves! Half an hour for every crystalline form of clay
+and flint, and we shall be near the need of shaping the gray flint stone
+that is to weigh upon our feet. And we would fain dance a measure or two
+before that cumber is laid upon them: there having been hitherto much
+piping to which we have not danced. And we must leave time for loving,
+if we are to take Marmontel's wise peasant's word for it, "<i>Il n'y a de
+bon que c'a!</i>" And if there should be fighting to do also? and weeping?
+and much burying? truly, we had better make haste.</p>
+
+<p>65. Which means, simply, that we must lose neither strength nor moment.
+Hurry is not haste; but economy is, and rightness is. Whatever is
+rightly done stays with us, to support another right beyond, or higher
+up: whatever is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span> wrongly done, vanishes; and by the blank, betrays what
+we would have built above. Wasting no word, no thought, no doing, we
+shall have speed enough; but then there is that farther question, what
+shall we do?&mdash;what we are fittest (worthiest, that is) to do, and what
+is best worth doing? Note that word "worthy," both of the man and the
+thing, for the two dignities go together. Is <i>it</i> worth the pains? Are
+we worth the task? The dignity of a man depends wholly upon this
+harmony. If his task is above him, he will be undignified in failure; if
+he is above it, he will be undignified in success. His own composure and
+nobleness must be according to the composure of his thought to his toil.</p>
+
+<p>66. As I was dreaming over this, my eyes fell by chance on a page of my
+favorite thirteenth century psalter, just where two dragons, one with
+red legs, and another with green,&mdash;one with a blue tail on a purple
+ground, and the other with a rosy tail on a golden ground, follow the
+verse "<i>Quis ascendet in montem Domini</i>," and begin the solemn "<i>Qui non
+accepit in vano animam suam</i>." Who hath not lift up his soul unto
+vanity, we have it; and &#949;&#955;&#945;&#946;&#949;&#957; &#949;&#960;&#7985; &#956;&#945;&#964;&#945;&#7985;&#969;, the Greeks (not that
+I know what that means accurately): broadly, they all mean, "who has not
+received nor given his soul in vain," this is the man who can make
+haste, even uphill, the only haste worth making; and it must be up the
+right hill, too: not that Corinthian Acropolis, of which, I suppose, the
+white specter stood eighteen hundred feet high, in Hades, for Sisyphus
+to roll his fantastic stone up&mdash;image, himself, forever of the greater
+part of our wise mortal work.</p>
+
+<p>67. Now all this time, whatever the reader may think, I have never for a
+moment lost sight of that original black line with which is our own
+special business. The patience, the speed, the dignity, we can give to
+that, the choice to be made of subject for it, are the matters I want to
+get at. You think, perhaps, that an engraver's function is one of no
+very high dignity;&mdash;does not involve a serious choice of work. Consider
+a little of it. Here is a steel point, and 'tis like Job's "iron
+pen"&mdash;and you are going to cut into steel with it, in a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span> most deliberate
+way, as into the rock forever. And this scratch or inscription of yours
+will be seen of a multitude of eyes. It is not like a single picture or
+a single wall painting; this multipliable work will pass through
+thousand thousand hands, strengthen and inform innumerable souls, if it
+be worthy; vivify the folly of thousands if unworthy. Remember, also, it
+will mix in the very closest manner in domestic life. This engraving
+will not be gossiped over and fluttered past at private views of
+academies; listlessly sauntered by in corners of great galleries. Ah,
+no! This will hang over parlor chimney-pieces&mdash;shed down its hourly
+influence on children's forenoon work. This will hang in little luminous
+corners by sick beds; mix with flickering dreams by candlelight, and
+catch the first rays from the window's "glimmering square." You had
+better put something good into it! I do not know a more solemn field of
+labor than that <i>champ d'acier</i>. From a pulpit, perhaps a man can only
+reach one or two people, for that time,&mdash;even your book, once carelessly
+read, probably goes into a bookcase catacomb, and is thought of no more.
+But this; taking the eye unawares again and again, and always again:
+persisting and inevitable! where will you look for a chance of saying
+something nobly, if it is not here?</p>
+
+<p>68. And the choice is peculiarly free; to you of all men most free. An
+artist, at first invention, cannot always choose what shall come into
+his mind, nor know what it will eventually turn into. But you, professed
+copyists, unless you have mistaken your profession, have the power of
+governing your own thoughts, and of following and interpreting the
+thoughts of others. Also, you see the work to be done put plainly before
+you; you can deliberately choose what seems to you best, out of myriads
+of examples of perfect Art. You can count the cost accurately; saying,
+"It will take me a year&mdash;two years&mdash;five&mdash;a fourth or fifth, probably,
+of my remaining life, to do this." Is the thing worth it? There is no
+excuse for choosing wrongly; no other men whatever have data so full,
+and position so firm, for forecast of their labor.</p>
+
+<p>69. I put my psalter aside (not, observe, vouching for its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span> red and
+green dragons:&mdash;men lifted up their souls to vanity sometimes in the
+thirteenth as in the nineteenth century), and I take up, instead, a book
+of English verses, published&mdash;there is no occasion to say when. It is
+full of costliest engravings&mdash;large, skillful, appallingly laborious;
+dotted into textures like the dust on a lily leaf,&mdash;smoothed through
+gradations like clouds,&mdash;graved to surfaces like mother-of-pearl; and by
+all this toil there is set forth for the delight of Englishwomen, a
+series of the basest dreams that ungoverned feminine imagination can
+coin in sickliest indolence,&mdash;ball-room amours, combats of curled
+knights, pilgrimages of disguised girl-pages, romantic pieties,
+charities in costume,&mdash;a mass of disguised sensualism and feverish
+vanity&mdash;impotent, pestilent, prurient, scented with a venomous elixir,
+and rouged with a deadly dust of outward good; and all this done, as
+such things only can be done, in a boundless ignorance of all natural
+veracity; the faces falsely drawn&mdash;the lights falsely cast&mdash;the forms
+effaced or distorted, and all common human wit and sense extinguished in
+the vicious scum of lying sensation.</p>
+
+<p>And this, I grieve to say, is only a characteristic type of a large mass
+of popular English work. This is what we spend our Teutonic lives in;
+engraving with an iron pen in the rock forever; this, the passion of the
+Teutonic woman (as opposed to Virgilia), just as foxhunting is the
+passion of the Teutonic man, as opposed to Valerius.</p>
+
+<p>70. And while we deliberately spend all our strength, and all our
+tenderness, all our skill, and all our money, in doing, relishing,
+buying, this absolute Wrongness, of which nothing can ever come but
+disease in heart and brain, remember that all the mighty works of the
+great painters of the world, full of life, truth, and blessing, remain
+to this present hour of the year 1865 unengraved! There literally exists
+no earnestly studied and fully accomplished engraving of any very great
+work, except Leonardo's Cena. No large Venetian picture has ever been
+thoroughly engraved. Of Titian's Peter Martyr, there is even no worthy
+memorial transcript but Le Febre's.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> The Cartoons have been multiplied
+in false readings; never in faithful ones till lately by photography. Of
+the Disputa and the Parnassus, what can the English public know? of the
+thoughtful Florentines and Milanese, of Ghirlandajo, and Luini, and
+their accompanying hosts&mdash;what do they yet so much as care to know?</p>
+
+<p>"The English public will not pay," you reply, "for engravings from the
+great masters. The English public will only pay for pictures of itself;
+of its races, its rifle-meetings, its rail stations, its
+parlor-passions, and kitchen interests; you must make your bread as you
+may, by holding the mirror to it."</p>
+
+<p>71. Friends, there have been hard fighting and heavy sleeping, this many
+a day, on the other side of the Atlantic, in the cause, as you suppose,
+of Freedom against slavery; and you are all, open-mouthed, expecting the
+glories of Black Emancipation. Perhaps a little White Emancipation on
+this side of the water might be still more desirable, and more easily
+and guiltlessly won.</p>
+
+<p>Do you know what slavery means? Suppose a gentleman taken by a Barbary
+corsair&mdash;set to field-work; chained and flogged to it from dawn to eve.
+Need he be a slave therefore? By no means; he is but a hardly-treated
+prisoner. There is some work which the Barbary corsair will not be able
+to make him do; such work as a Christian gentleman may not do, that he
+will not, though he die for it. Bound and scourged he may be, but he has
+heard of a Person's being bound and scourged before now, who was not
+therefore a slave. He is not a whit more slave for that. But suppose he
+take the pirate's pay, and stretch his back at piratical oars, for due
+salary, how then? Suppose for fitting price he betray his fellow
+prisoners, and take up the scourge instead of enduring it&mdash;become the
+smiter instead of the smitten, at the African's bidding&mdash;how then? Of
+all the sheepish notions in our English public "mind," I think the
+simplest is that slavery is neutralized when you are well paid for it!
+Whereas it is precisely that fact of its being paid for which makes it
+com<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span>plete. A man who has been sold by another, may be but half a slave
+or none; but the man who has sold himself! He is the accurately Finished
+Bondsman.</p>
+
+<p>72. And gravely I say that I know <i>no</i> captivity so sorrowful as that of
+an artist doing, consciously, bad work for pay. It is the serfdom of the
+finest gifts&mdash;of all that should lead and master men, offering itself to
+be spit upon, and that for a bribe. There is much serfdom, in Europe, of
+speakers and writers, but they only sell words; and their talk, even
+honestly uttered, might not have been worth much; it will not be thought
+of ten years hence; still less a hundred years hence. No one will buy
+our parliamentary speeches to keep in portfolios this time next century;
+and if people are weak enough now to pay for any special and flattering
+cadence of syllable, it is little matter. But <i>you</i>, with your painfully
+acquired power, your unwearied patience, your admirable and manifold
+gifts, your eloquence in black and white, which people will buy, if it
+is good (and has a broad margin), for fifty guineas a copy&mdash;in the year
+2000; to sell it all, &aacute;s Ananias his land, "yea, for so much," and hold
+yourselves at every fool's beck, with your ready points, polished and
+sharp, hasting to scratch what <i>he</i> wills! To bite permanent mischief in
+with acid; to spread an inked infection of evil all your days, and pass
+away at last from a life of the skillfulest industry&mdash;having done
+whatsoever your hand found (remuneratively) to do, with your might, and
+a great might, but with cause to thank God only for this&mdash;that the end
+of it all has at last come, and that "there is no device nor work in the
+Grave." One would get quit of <i>this</i> servitude, I think, though we
+reached the place of Rest a little sooner, and reached it fasting.</p>
+
+<p>73. My English fellow-workmen, you have the name of liberty often on
+your lips; get the fact of it oftener into your business! talk of it
+less, and try to understand it better. You have given students many
+copy-books of free-hand outlines&mdash;give them a few of free <i>heart</i>
+outlines.</p>
+
+<p>It appears, however, that you do not intend to help me with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span> any
+utterance respecting these same outlines.<a name="FNanchor_70_70" id="FNanchor_70_70"></a><a href="#Footnote_70_70" class="fnanchor">[70]</a> Be it so: I must make out
+what I can by myself. And under the influence of the Solstitial sign of
+June I will go backwards, or askance, to the practical part of the
+business, where I left it three months ago, and take up that question
+first, touching Liberty, and the relation of the loose swift line to the
+resolute slow one and of the etched line to the engraved one. It is a
+worthy question, for the open field afforded by illustrated works is
+tempting even to our best painters, and many an earnest hour and active
+fancy spend and speak themselves in the black line, vigorously enough,
+and dramatically, at all events: if wisely, may be considered. The
+French also are throwing great passion into their <i>eaux fortes</i>&mdash;working
+with a vivid haste and dark, brilliant freedom, which looked as if they
+etched with very energetic waters indeed&mdash;quite waters of life (it does
+not look so well, written in French). So we will take, with the reader's
+permission, for text next month, "Rembrandt, and strong waters."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="Chapter_V71" id="Chapter_V71"></a><span class="smcap">Chapter V.</span><a name="FNanchor_71_71" id="FNanchor_71_71"></a><a href="#Footnote_71_71" class="fnanchor">[71]</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>74. The work I have to do in this paper ought, rightly, to have been
+thrown into the form of an appendix to the last chapter; for it is no
+link of the cestus of Aglaia we have to examine, but one of the crests
+of canine passion in the cestus of Scylla. Nevertheless, the girdle of
+the Grace cannot be discerned in the full brightness of it, but by
+comparing it with the dark torment of that other; and (in what place or
+form matters little) the work has to be done.</p>
+
+<p>"Rembrandt Van Rhyn"&mdash;it is said, in the last edition of a very valuable
+work<a name="FNanchor_72_72" id="FNanchor_72_72"></a><a href="#Footnote_72_72" class="fnanchor">[72]</a> (for which, nevertheless, I could wish that greater lightness
+in the hand should be obtained by the publication of its information in
+one volume, and its criticism in another)&mdash;was "the most attractive and
+original of painters." It may be so; but there are attractions, and
+attractions. The sun attracts the planets&mdash;and a candle, night-moths;
+the one with perhaps somewhat of benefit to the planets;&mdash;but with what
+benefit the other to the moths, one would be glad to learn from those
+desert flies, of whom, one company having extinguished Mr. Kinglake's
+candle with their bodies, the remainder, "who had failed in obtaining
+this martyrdom, became suddenly serious, and clung despondingly to the
+canvas."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>75. Also, there are originalities, and originalities. To invent a new
+thing, which is also a precious thing; to be struck by a divinely-guided
+Rod, and become a sudden fountain of life to thirsty multitudes&mdash;this is
+enviable. But to be distinct of men in an original Sin; elect for the
+initial letter of a Lie; the first apparent spot of an unknown plague; a
+Root of bitterness, and the first-born worm of a company, studying an
+original De-Composition,&mdash;this is perhaps not so enviable. And if we
+think of it, most human originality is apt to be of that kind. Goodness
+is one, and immortal; it may be received and communicated&mdash;not
+originated: but Evil is various and recurrent, and may be misbegotten in
+endlessly surprising ways.</p>
+
+<p>76. But, that we may know better in what this originality consists, we
+find that our author, after expatiating on the vast area of the
+Pantheon, "illuminated solely by the small circular opening in the dome
+above," and on other similar conditions of luminous contraction, tells
+us that "to Rembrandt belongs the glory of having first embodied in Art,
+and perpetuated, these rare and beautiful effects of nature." Such
+effects are indeed rare in nature; but they are not rare, absolutely.
+The sky, with the sun in it, does not usually give the impression of
+being dimly lighted through a circular hole; but you may observe a very
+similar effect any day in your coal-cellar. The light is not
+Rembrandtesque on the current, or banks, of a river; but it is on those
+of a drain. Color is not Rembrandtesque, usually, in a clean house; but
+is presently obtainable of that quality in a dirty one. And without
+denying the pleasantness of the mode of progression which Mr. Hazlitt,
+perhaps too enthusiastically, describes as attainable in a background of
+Rembrandt's&mdash;"You stagger from one abyss of obscurity to another"&mdash;I
+cannot feel it an entirely glorious speciality to be distinguished, as
+Rembrandt was, from other great painters, chiefly by the liveliness of
+his darkness, and the dullness of his light. Glorious, or inglorious,
+the speciality itself is easily and accurately definable. It is the aim
+of the best painters to paint the noblest things they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span> can see by
+sunlight. It was the aim of Rembrandt to paint the foulest things he
+could see&mdash;by rushlight.</p>
+
+<p>77. By rushlight, observe: material and spiritual. As the sun for the
+outer world; so in the inner world of man, that which "&#949;&#961;&#949;&#965;&#957;&#7937; &#964;&#945;&#956;&#949;&#7985;&#945; &#954;&#959;&#953;&#955;&#7985;&#945;&#962;"<a name="FNanchor_73_73" id="FNanchor_73_73"></a><a href="#Footnote_73_73" class="fnanchor">[73]</a>&mdash;"the candle of God, searching the inmost parts."
+If that light within become but a more active kind of darkness;&mdash;if,
+abdicating the measuring reed of modesty for scepter, and ceasing to
+measure with it, we dip it in such unctuous and inflammable refuse as we
+can find, and make our soul's light into a <i>tallow</i> candle, and
+thenceforward take our guttering, sputtering, ill-smelling illumination
+about with us, holding it out in fetid fingers&mdash;encumbered with its
+lurid warmth of fungous wick, and drip of stalactitic grease&mdash;that we
+may see, when another man would have seen, or dreamed he saw, the flight
+of a divine Virgin&mdash;only the lamplight upon the hair of a costermonger's
+ass;&mdash;that, having to paint the good Samaritan, we may see only in
+distance the back of the good Samaritan, and in nearness the back of the
+good Samaritan's dog;&mdash;that having to paint the Annunciation to the
+Shepherds, we may turn the announcement of peace to men, into an
+announcement of mere panic to beasts; and, in an unsightly firework of
+unsightlier angels, see, as we see always, the feet instead of the head,
+and the shame instead of the honor;&mdash;and finally concentrate and rest
+the sum of our fame, as Titian on the Assumption of a spirit, so we on
+the dissection of a carcass,&mdash;perhaps by such fatuous fire, the less we
+walk, and by such phosphoric glow, the less we shine, the better it may
+be for us, and for all who would follow us.</p>
+
+<p>78. Do not think I deny the greatness of Rembrandt. In mere technical
+power (none of his eulogists know that power better than I, nor declare
+it in more distinct terms) he might, if he had been educated in a true
+school, have taken rank with the Venetians themselves. But that type of
+distinction between Titian's Assumption, and Rembrandt's Dissection,
+will represent for you with sufficient significance the manner of choice
+in all their work; only it should be associated with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span> another
+characteristic example of the same opposition (which I have dwelt upon
+elsewhere) between Veronese and Rembrandt, in their conception of
+domestic life. Rembrandt's picture, at Dresden, of himself, with his
+wife sitting on his knee, a roasted peacock on the table, and a glass of
+champagne in his hand, is the best work I know of all he has left; and
+it marks his speciality with entire decision. It is, of course, a dim
+candlelight; and the choice of the sensual passions as the things
+specially and forever to be described and immortalized out of his own
+private life and love, is exactly that "painting the foulest thing by
+rushlight" which I have stated to be the enduring purpose of his mind.
+And you will find this hold in all minor treatment; and that to the
+uttermost: for as by your broken rushlight you see little, and only
+corners and points of things, and those very corners and points ill and
+distortedly; so, although Rembrandt knows the human face and hand, and
+never fails in these, when they are ugly, and he chooses to take pains
+with them, he knows nothing else: the more pains he takes with even
+familiar animals, the worse they are (witness the horse in that plate of
+the Good Samaritan), and any attempts to finish the first scribbled
+energy of his imaginary lions and tigers, end always only in the loss of
+the fiendish power and rage which were all he could conceive in an
+animal.</p>
+
+<p>79. His landscape, and foreground vegetation, I mean afterwards to
+examine in comparison with D&uuml;rer's; but the real caliber and nature of
+the man are best to be understood by comparing the puny, ill-drawn,
+terrorless, helpless, beggarly skeleton in his "Youth Surprised by
+Death," with the figure behind the tree in D&uuml;rer's plate (though it is
+quite one of D&uuml;rer's feeblest) of the same subject. Absolutely ignorant
+of all natural phenomena and law; absolutely careless of all lovely
+living form, or growth, or structure; able only to render with some
+approach to veracity, what alone he had looked at with some approach to
+attention,&mdash;the pawnbroker's festering heaps of old clothes, and caps,
+and shoes&mdash;Rembrandt's execution is one grand evasion, and his temper
+the grim contempt<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span> of a strong and sullen animal in its defiled den, for
+the humanity with which it is at war, for the flowers which it tramples,
+and the light which it fears.</p>
+
+<p>80. Again, do not let it be thought that when I call his execution
+evasive, I ignore the difference between his touch, on brow or lip, and
+a common workman's; but the whole school of etching which he founded,
+(and of painting, so far as it differs from Venetian work) is inherently
+loose and experimental. Etching is the very refuge and mask of
+sentimental uncertainty, and of vigorous ignorance. If you know anything
+clearly, and have a firm hand, depend upon it, you will draw it clearly;
+you will not care to hide it among scratches and burrs. And herein is
+the first grand distinction between etching and engraving&mdash;that in the
+etching needle you have an almost irresistible temptation to a wanton
+speed. There is, however, no real necessity for such a distinction; an
+etched line may have been just as steadily drawn, and seriously meant,
+as an engraved one; and for the moment, waiving consideration of this
+distinction, and opposing Rembrandt's work, considered merely as work of
+the black line, to Holbein's and D&uuml;rer's, as work of the black line, I
+assert Rembrandt's to be inherently <i>evasive</i>. You cannot unite his
+manner with theirs; choice between them is sternly put to you, when
+first you touch the steel. Suppose, for instance, you have to engrave,
+or etch, or draw with pen and ink, a single head, and that the head is
+to be approximately half an inch in height more or less (there is a
+reason for assigning this condition respecting size, which we will
+examine in due time): you have it in your power to do it in one of two
+ways. You may lay down some twenty or thirty entirely firm and visible
+lines, of which every one shall be absolutely right, and do the utmost a
+line can do. By their curvature they shall render contour; by their
+thickness, shade; by their place and form, every truth of expression,
+and every condition of design. The head of the soldier drawing his
+sword, in D&uuml;rer's "Cannon," is about half an inch high, supposing the
+brow to be seen. The chin is drawn with three lines, the lower lip with
+two, the upper, in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span>cluding the shadow from the nose, with five. Three
+separate the cheek from the chin, giving the principal points of
+character. Six lines draw the cheek, and its incised traces of care;
+four are given to each of the eyes; one, with the outline, to the nose;
+three to the frown of the forehead. None of these touches could anywhere
+be altered&mdash;none removed, without instantly visible harm; and their
+result is a head as perfect in character as a portrait by Reynolds.</p>
+
+<p>81. You may either do this&mdash;which, if you can, it will generally be very
+advisable to do&mdash;or, on the other hand, you may cover the face with
+innumerable scratches, and let your hand play with wanton freedom, until
+the graceful scrabble concentrates itself into shade. You may
+soften&mdash;efface&mdash;retouch&mdash;rebite&mdash;dot, and hatch, and redefine. If you
+are a great master, you will soon get your character, and probably keep
+it (Rembrandt often gets it at first, nearly as securely as D&uuml;rer); but
+the design of it will be necessarily seen through loose work, and
+modified by accident (as you think) fortunate. The accidents which occur
+to a practiced hand are always at first pleasing&mdash;the details which can
+be hinted, however falsely, through the gathering mystery, are always
+seducing. You will find yourself gradually dwelling more and more on
+little meannesses of form and texture, and lusters of surface: on cracks
+of skin, and films of fur and plume. You will lose your way, and then
+see two ways, and then many ways, and try to walk a little distance on
+all of them in turn, and so, back again. You will find yourself thinking
+of colors, and vexed because you cannot imitate them; next, struggling
+to render distances by indecision, which you cannot by tone. Presently
+you will be contending with finished pictures; laboring at the etching,
+as if it were a painting. You will leave off, after a whole day's work
+(after many days' work if you choose to give them), still unsatisfied.
+For final result&mdash;if you are as great as Rembrandt&mdash;you will have most
+likely a heavy, black, cloudy stain, with less character in it than the
+first ten lines had. If you are not as great as Rembrandt, you will have
+a stain by no means cloudy; but sandy and broken,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span>&mdash;instead of a face,
+a speckled phantom of a face, patched, blotched, discomfited in every
+texture and form&mdash;ugly, assuredly; dull, probably; an unmanageable and
+manifold failure ill concealed by momentary, accidental, undelightful,
+ignoble success.</p>
+
+<p>Undelightful; note this especially, for it is the peculiar character of
+etching that it cannot render beauty. You may hatch and scratch your way
+to picturesqueness or to deformity&mdash;never to beauty. You can etch an old
+woman, or an ill-conditioned fellow. But you cannot etch a girl&mdash;nor,
+unless in his old age, or with very partial rendering of him, a
+gentleman.</p>
+
+<p>82. And thus, as farther belonging to, and partly causative of, their
+choice of means, there is always a tendency in etchers to fasten on
+unlovely objects; and the whole scheme of modern rapid work of this kind
+is connected with a peculiar gloom which results from the confinement of
+men, partially informed, and wholly untrained, in the midst of foul and
+vicious cities. A sensitive and imaginative youth, early driven to get
+his living by his art, has to lodge, we will say, somewhere in the
+by-streets of Paris, and is left there, tutorless, to his own devices.
+Suppose him also vicious or reckless, and there need be no talk of his
+work farther; he will certainly do nothing in a D&uuml;reresque manner. But
+suppose him self-denying, virtuous, full of gift and power&mdash;what are the
+elements of living study within his reach? All supreme beauty is
+confined to the higher salons. There are pretty faces in the streets,
+but no stateliness nor splendor of humanity; all pathos and grandeur is
+in suffering; no purity of nature is accessible, but only a terrible
+picturesqueness, mixed with ghastly, with ludicrous, with base
+concomitants. Huge walls and roofs, dark on the sunset sky, but
+plastered with advertisement bills, monstrous-figured, seen farther than
+ever Parthenon shaft, or spire of Sainte Chapelle. Interminable lines of
+massy streets, wearisome with repetition of commonest design, and
+degraded by their gilded shops, wide-fuming, flaunting, glittering, with
+apparatus of eating or of dress. Splen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span>dor of palace-flank and goodly
+quay, insulted by floating cumber of barge and bath, trivial, grotesque,
+indecent, as cleansing vessels in a royal reception room. Solemn avenues
+of blossomed trees, shading puppet-show and baby-play; glades of
+wild-wood, long withdrawn, purple with faded shadows of blood; sweet
+windings and reaches of river far among the brown vines and white
+orchards, checked here by the Ile Notre Dame, to receive their nightly
+sacrifice, and after playing with it among their eddies, to give it up
+again, in those quiet shapes that lie on the sloped slate tables of the
+square-built Temple of the Death-Sibyl, who presides here over spray of
+Seine, as yonder at Tiber over spray of Anio. Sibylline, indeed, in her
+secrecy, and her sealing of destinies, by the baptism of the quick
+water-drops which fall on each fading face, unrecognized, nameless in
+<i>this</i> Baptism forever. Wreathed thus throughout, that Paris town, with
+beauty, and with unseemly sin, unseemlier death, as a fiend-city with
+fair eyes; forever letting fall her silken raiment so far as that one
+may "behold her bosom and half her side." Under whose whispered
+teaching, and substitution of "Contes Drolatiques" for the tales of the
+wood fairy, her children of Imagination will do, what G&eacute;r&ocirc;me and Gustave
+Dor&eacute; are doing, and her whole world of lesser Art will sink into shadows
+of the street and of the boudoir-curtain, wherein the etching point may
+disport itself with freedom enough.<a name="FNanchor_74_74" id="FNanchor_74_74"></a><a href="#Footnote_74_74" class="fnanchor">[74]</a><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>83. Nor are we slack in our companionship in these courses. Our
+imagination is slower and clumsier than the French&mdash;rarer also, by far,
+in the average English mind. The only man of power equal to Dor&eacute;'s whom
+we have had lately among us, was William Blake, whose temper fortunately
+took another turn. But in the calamity and vulgarity of daily
+circumstance, in the horror of our streets, in the discordance of our
+thoughts, in the laborious looseness and ostentatious cleverness of our
+work, we are alike. And to French faults we add a stupidity of our own;
+for which, so far as I may in modesty take blame for anything, as
+resulting from my own teach<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span>ing, I am more answerable than most men.
+Having spoken earnestly against painting without thinking, I now find
+our exhibitions decorated with works of students who think without
+painting; and our books illustrated by scratched wood-cuts, representing
+very ordinary people, who are presumed to be interesting in the picture,
+because the text tells a story about them. Of this least lively form of
+modern sensational work, however, I shall have to speak on other
+grounds; meantime, I am concerned only with its manner; its incontinence
+of line and method, associated with the slightness of its real thought,
+and morbid acuteness of irregular sensation; un<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span>governed all, and one of
+the external and slight phases of that beautiful Liberty which we are
+proclaiming as essence of gospel to all the earth, and shall presently,
+I suppose, when we have had enough of it here, proclaim also to the
+stars, with invitation to them <i>out</i> of their courses.</p>
+
+<p>84. "But you asked us for 'free-heart' outlines, and told us not to be
+slaves, only thirty days ago."<a name="FNanchor_75_75" id="FNanchor_75_75"></a><a href="#Footnote_75_75" class="fnanchor">[75]</a></p>
+
+<p>Inconsistent that I am! so I did. But as there are attractions, and
+attractions; originalities, and originalities, there are liberties, and
+liberties. Yonder torrent, crystal-clear, and arrow-swift, with its
+spray leaping into the air like white troops of fawns, is free, I think.
+Lost, yonder, amidst bankless, boundless marsh&mdash;soaking in slow
+shallowness, as it will, hither and thither, listless, among the
+poisonous reeds and unresisting slime&mdash;it is free also. You may choose
+which liberty you will, and restraint of voiceful rock, or the dumb and
+edgeless shore of darkened sand. Of that evil liberty, which men are now
+glorifying,&mdash;and of its opposite continence&mdash;which is the clasp and
+&#967;&#961;&#965;&#963;&#7953;&#951; &#960;&#949;&#961;&#8001;&#957;&#953; of Aglaia's cestus&mdash;we will try to find out
+something in next chapter.<a name="FNanchor_76_76" id="FNanchor_76_76"></a><a href="#Footnote_76_76" class="fnanchor">[76]</a><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="trans-note">
+  <p class="center">Transcriber's note:</p>
+
+<p class="center">Chapter VI is missing in the original.</p>
+      </div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="Chapter_VII77" id="Chapter_VII77"></a><span class="smcap">Chapter VII.</span><a name="FNanchor_77_77" id="FNanchor_77_77"></a><a href="#Footnote_77_77" class="fnanchor">[77]</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>85. In recommencing this series of papers, I may perhaps take permission
+briefly to remind the reader of the special purpose which my desultory
+way of writing, (of so vast a subject I find it impossible to write
+otherwise than desultorily), may cause him sometimes to lose sight of;
+the ascertainment, namely, of some laws for present practice of Art in
+our schools, which may be admitted, if not with absolute, at least with
+a sufficient consent, by leading artists.</p>
+
+<p>There are indeed many principles on which different men must ever be at
+variance; others, respecting which it may be impossible to obtain any
+practical consent in certain phases of particular schools. But there are
+a few, which, I think, in all times of meritorious Art, the leading
+painters would admit; and others which, by discussion, might be arrived
+at, as, at all events, the best discoverable for the time.</p>
+
+<p>86. One of those which I suppose great workmen would always admit, is,
+that, whatever material we use, the virtues of that material are to be
+exhibited, and its defects frankly admitted; no effort being made to
+conquer those defects by such skill as may make the material resemble
+another. For instance, in the dispute so frequently revived by the
+public, touching the relative merits of oil color and water color; I do
+not think a great painter would ever consider it a merit in a water
+color to have the "force of oil." He would like it to have the peculiar
+delicacy, paleness, and transparency belonging specially to its own
+material. On the other hand, I think he would not like an oil painting
+to have the deadness or paleness of a water color. He would like it to
+have the deep<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span> shadows, and the rich glow, and crumbling and bossy
+touches which are alone attainable in oil color. And if he painted in
+fresco, he would neither aim at the transparency of water color, nor the
+richness of oil; but at luminous bloom of surface, and dignity of
+clearly visible form. I do not think that this principle would be
+disputed by artists of great power at any time, or in any country;
+though, if by mischance they had been compelled to work in one material,
+while desiring the qualities only attainable in another, they might
+strive, and meritoriously strive, for those better results, with what
+they had under their hand. The change of manner in William Hunt's work,
+in the later part of his life, was an example of this. As his art became
+more developed, he perceived in his subjects qualities which it was
+impossible to express in a transparent medium; and employed opaque white
+to draw with, when the finer forms of relieved light could not be
+otherwise followed. It was out of his power to do more than this, since
+in later life any attempt to learn the manipulation of oil color would
+have been unadvisable; and he obtained results of singular beauty;
+though their preciousness and completion would never, in a well-founded
+school of Art, have been trusted to the frail substance of water color.</p>
+
+<p>87. But although I do not suppose that the abstract principle of doing
+with each material what it is best fitted to do, would be, in terms,
+anywhere denied; the practical question is always, not what should be
+done with this, or that, if everything were in our power; but what can
+be, or ought to be, accomplished with the means at our disposal, and in
+the circumstances under which we must necessarily work. Thus, in the
+question immediately before us, of the proper use of the black line&mdash;it
+is easy to establish the proper virtue of Line work, as essentially
+"De-Lineation," the expressing by outline the true limits of forms,
+which distinguish and part them from other forms; just as the virtue of
+brush work is essentially breadth, softness, and blending of forms. And,
+in the abstract, the point ought not to be used where the aim is not
+that of definition, nor the brush to be used where the aim is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span> not that
+of breadth. Every painting in which the aim is primarily that of
+drawing, and every drawing in which the aim is primarily that of
+painting, must alike be in a measure erroneous. But it is one thing to
+determine what should be done with the black line, in a period of highly
+disciplined and widely practiced art, and quite another thing to say
+what should be done with it, at this present time, in England.
+Especially, the increasing interest and usefulness of our illustrated
+books render this an inquiry of very great social and educational
+importance. On the one side, the skill and felicity of the work spent
+upon them, and the advantage which young readers, if not those of all
+ages, <i>might</i> derive from having examples of good drawing put familiarly
+before their eyes, cannot be overrated; yet, on the other side, neither
+the admirable skill nor free felicity of the work can ultimately be held
+a counterpoise for the want&mdash;if there be a want&mdash;of sterling excellence:
+while, farther, this increased power of obtaining examples of art for
+private possession, at an almost nominal price, has two accompanying
+evils: it prevents the proper use of what we have, by dividing the
+attention, and continually leading us restlessly to demand new subjects
+of interest, while the old are as yet not half exhausted; and it
+prevents us&mdash;satisfied with the multiplication of minor art in our own
+possession&mdash;from looking for a better satisfaction in great public
+works.</p>
+
+<p>88. Observe, first, it prevents the proper use of what we have. I often
+endeavor, though with little success, to conceive what would have been
+the effect on my mind, when I was a boy, of having such a book given me
+as Watson's "Illustrated Robinson Crusoe."<a name="FNanchor_78_78" id="FNanchor_78_78"></a><a href="#Footnote_78_78" class="fnanchor">[78]</a> The edition I had was a
+small octavo one, in two volumes, printed at the <i>Chiswick Press</i> in
+1812. It has, in each volume, eight or ten very rude<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span> vignettes, about a
+couple of inches wide; cut in the simple, but legitimate, manner of
+Bewick, and, though wholly commonplace and devoid of beauty, yet, as far
+as they go, rightly done; and here and there sufficiently suggestive of
+plain facts. I am quite unable to say how far I wasted,&mdash;how far I spent
+to advantage,&mdash;the unaccountable hours during which I pored over these
+wood-cuts; receiving more real sensation of sympathetic terror from the
+drifting hair and fear-stricken face of Crusoe dashed against the rock,
+in the rude attempt at the representation of his escape from the wreck,
+than I can now from the highest art; though the rocks and water are
+alike cut only with a few twisted or curved lines, and there is not the
+slightest attempt at light and shade, or imitative resemblance. For one
+thing, I am quite sure that being forced to make all I could out of very
+little things, and to remain long contented with them, not only in great
+part formed the power of close analysis in my mind, and the habit of
+steady contemplation; but rendered the power of greater art over me,
+when I first saw it, as intense as that of magic; so that it appealed to
+me like a vision out of another world.</p>
+
+<p>89. On the other hand this long contentment with inferior work, and the
+consequent acute enjoyment of whatever was the least suggestive of truth
+in a higher degree, rendered me long careless of the highest virtues of
+execution, and retarded by many years the maturing and balancing of the
+general power of judgment. And I am now, as I said, quite unable to
+imagine what would have been the result upon me, of being enabled to
+study, instead of these coarse vignettes, such lovely and expressive
+work as that of Watson; suppose, for instance, the vignette at p. 87,
+which would have been sure to have caught my fancy, because of the dog,
+with its head on Crusoe's knee, looking up and trying to understand what
+is the matter with his master. It remains to be seen, and can only be
+known by experience, what will actually be the effect of these treasures
+on the minds of children that possess them. The result must be in some
+sort different from anything yet known; no such art was ever yet
+attainable by the youth of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span> any nation. Yet of this there can, as I have
+just said, be no reasonable doubt;&mdash;that it is not well to make the
+imagination indolent, or take its work out of its hands by supplying
+continual pictures of what might be sufficiently conceived without
+pictures.</p>
+
+<p>90. Take, for instance, the preceding vignette, in the same book,
+"Crusoe looking at the first shoots of barley." Nothing can be more
+natural or successful as a representation; but, after all, whatever the
+importance of the moment in Crusoe's history, the picture can show us
+nothing more than a man in a white shirt and dark pantaloons, in an
+attitude of surprise; and the imagination ought to be able to compass so
+much as this without help. And if so laborious aid be given, much more
+ought to be given. The virtue of Art, as of life, is that no line shall
+be in vain. Now the number of lines in this vignette, applied with full
+intention of thought in every touch, as they would have been by Holbein
+or D&uuml;rer, are quite enough to have produced,&mdash;not a merely deceptive
+dash of local color, with evanescent background,&mdash;but an entirely
+perfect piece of chiaroscuro, with its lights all truly limited and
+gradated, and with every form of leaf and rock in the background
+entirely right, complete,&mdash;and full not of mere suggestion, but of
+accurate information, exactly such as the fancy by itself cannot
+furnish. A work so treated by any man of power and sentiment such as the
+designer of this vignette possesses, would be an eternal thing; ten in
+the volume, for real enduring and educational power, were worth two
+hundred in imperfect development, and would have been a perpetual
+possession to the reader; whereas one certain result of the
+multiplication of these lovely but imperfect drawings, is to increase
+the feverish thirst for excitement, and to weaken the power of attention
+by endless diversion and division. This volume, beautiful as it is, will
+be forgotten; the strength in it is, in final outcome, spent for naught;
+and others, and still others, following it, will "come like shadows, so
+depart."</p>
+
+<p>91. There is, however, a quite different disadvantage, but no less
+grave, to be apprehended from this rich multiplication<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span> of private
+possession. The more we have of books, and cabinet pictures, and cabinet
+ornaments, and other such domestic objects of art, the less capable we
+shall become of understanding or enjoying the lofty character of work
+noble in scale, and intended for public service. The most practical and
+immediate distinction between the orders of "mean" and "high" Art, is
+that the first is private,&mdash;the second public; the first for the
+individual, the second for all. It may be that domestic Art is the only
+kind which is likely to flourish in a country of cold climate, and in
+the hands of a nation tempered as the English are; but it is necessary
+that we should at least understand the disadvantage under which we thus
+labor; and the duty of not allowing the untowardness of our
+circumstances, or the selfishness of our dispositions, to have
+unresisted and unchecked influence over the adopted style of our art.
+But this part of the subject requires to be examined at length, and I
+must therefore reserve it for the following paper.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="Chapter_VIII79" id="Chapter_VIII79"></a><span class="smcap">Chapter VIII.</span><a name="FNanchor_79_79" id="FNanchor_79_79"></a><a href="#Footnote_79_79" class="fnanchor">[79]</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>92. In pursuing the question put at the close of the last paper, it must
+be observed that there are essentially two conditions under which we
+have to examine the difference between the effects of public and private
+Art on national prosperity. The first in immediate influence is their
+Economical function, the second their Ethical. We have first to consider
+what class of persons they in each case support; and, secondly, what
+classes they teach or please.</p>
+
+<p>Looking over the list of the gift-books of this year, perhaps the first
+circumstance which would naturally strike us would be the number of
+persons living by this industry; and, in any consideration of the
+probable effects of a transference of the public attention to other
+kinds of work, we ought first to contemplate the result on the interests
+of the workman. The guinea spent on one of our ordinary illustrated
+gift-books is divided among&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">1. A number of second-rate or third-rate artists, producing</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">designs as fast as they can, and realizing them up to</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">the standard required by the public of that year. Men</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">of consummate power may sometimes put their hands</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">to the business; but exceptionally.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">2. Engravers, trained to mechanical imitation of this</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">second or third-rate work; of these engravers the inferior</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">classes are usually much overworked.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">3. Printers, paper-makers, ornamental binders, and other</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">craftsmen.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">4. Publishers and booksellers.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>93. Let us suppose the book can be remuneratively pro<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span>duced if there is
+a sale of five thousand copies. Then &pound;5000, contributed for it by the
+public, are divided among the different workers; it does not matter what
+actual rate of division we assume, for the mere object of comparison
+with other modes of employing the money; but let us say these &pound;5000 are
+divided among five hundred persons, giving on an average &pound;10 to each.
+And let us suppose these &pound;10 to be a fortnight's maintenance to each.
+Then, to maintain them through the year, twenty-five such books must be
+published; or to keep certainly within the mark of the probable cost of
+our autumnal gift-books, suppose &pound;100,000 are spent by the public, with
+resultant supply of 100,000 households with one illustrated book, of
+second or third-rate quality each (there being twenty different books
+thus supplied), and resultant maintenance of five hundred persons for
+the year, at severe work of a second or third-rate order, mostly
+mechanical.</p>
+
+<p>94. Now, if the mind of the nation, instead of private, be set on public
+work, there is of course no expense incurred for multiplication, or
+mechanical copying of any kind, or for retail dealing. The &pound;5000,
+instead of being given for five thousand <i>copies</i> of the work, and
+divided among five hundred persons, are given for one original work, and
+given to one person. This one person will of course employ assistants;
+but these will be chosen by himself, and will form a superior class of
+men, out of whom the future leading artists of the time will rise in
+succession. The broad difference will therefore be, that, in the one
+case, &pound;5000 are divided among five hundred persons of different classes,
+doing second-rate or wholly mechanical work; and in the other case, the
+same sum is divided among a few chosen persons of the best material of
+mind producible by the state at the given epoch. It may seem an unfair
+assumption that work for the public will be more honestly and earnestly
+done than that for private possession. But every motive that can touch
+either conscience or ambition is brought to bear upon the artist who is
+employed on a public service, and only a few such motives in other modes
+of occupation. The greater permanence, scale, dignity<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span> of office, and
+fuller display of Art in a National building, combine to call forth the
+energies of the artist; and if a man will not do his best under such
+circumstances, there is no "best" in him.</p>
+
+<p>95. It might also at first seem an unwarrantable assumption that fewer
+persons would be employed in the private than in the national work,
+since, at least in architecture, quite as many subordinate craftsmen are
+employed as in the production of a book. It is, however, necessary, for
+the purpose of clearly seeing the effect of the two forms of occupation,
+that we should oppose them where their contrast is most complete; and
+that we should compare, not merely bookbinding with bricklaying, but the
+presentation of Art in books, necessarily involving much subordinate
+employment, with its presentation in statues or wall-pictures, involving
+only the labor of the artist and of his immediate assistants. In the one
+case, then, I repeat, the sum set aside by the public for Art-purposes
+is divided among many persons, very indiscriminately chosen; in the
+other among few carefully chosen. But it does not, for that reason,
+support fewer persons. The few artists live on their larger incomes,<a name="FNanchor_80_80" id="FNanchor_80_80"></a><a href="#Footnote_80_80" class="fnanchor">[80]</a>
+by expenditure among various tradesmen, who in no wise produce Art, but
+the means of pleasant life; so that the real economical question is, not
+how many men shall we maintain, but at what work shall they be
+kept?&mdash;shall they every one be set to produce Art for us, in which case
+they must all live poorly, and produce bad Art; or out of the whole
+number shall ten be chosen who can and will produce noble Art; and shall
+the others be employed in providing the means of pleasant life for these
+chosen ten? Will you have, that is to say, four hundred and ninety
+tradesmen, butchers, carpet-weavers, carpenters, and the like, and ten
+fine artists, or will you, under the vain hope of finding, for each of
+them within your realm, "five hundred good as he,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span> have your full
+complement of bad draughtsmen, and retail distributors of their bad
+work?</p>
+
+<p>96. It will be seen in a moment that this is no question of economy
+merely; but, as all economical questions become, when set on their true
+foundation, a dilemma relating to modes of discipline and education. It
+is only one instance of the perpetually recurring offer to our
+choice&mdash;shall we have one man educated perfectly, and others trained
+only to serve him, or shall we have all educated equally ill?&mdash;Which,
+when the outcries of mere tyranny and pride-defiant on one side, and of
+mere envy and pride-concupiscent on the other, excited by the peril and
+promise of a changeful time, shall be a little abated, will be found to
+be, in brief terms, the one social question of the day.</p>
+
+<p>Without attempting an answer which would lead us far from the business
+in hand, I pass to the Ethical part of the inquiry; to examine, namely,
+the effect of this cheaply diffused Art on the public mind.</p>
+
+<p>97. The first great principle we have to hold by in dealing with the
+matter is, that the end of Art is <span class="smcap">NOT</span> to <i>amuse</i>; and that all Art which
+proposes amusement as its end, or which is sought for that end, must be
+of an inferior, and is probably of a harmful, class.</p>
+
+<p>The end of Art is as serious as that of all other beautiful things&mdash;of
+the blue sky and the green grass, and the clouds and the dew. They are
+either useless, or they are of much deeper function than giving
+amusement. Whatever delight we take in them, be it less or more, is not
+the delight we take in play, or receive from momentary surprise. It
+might be a matter of some metaphysical difficulty to define the two
+kinds of pleasure, but it is perfectly easy for any of us to feel that
+there <i>is</i> generic difference between the delight we have in seeing a
+comedy and in watching a sunrise. Not but that there is a kind of Divina
+Commedia,&mdash;a dramatic change and power,&mdash;in all beautiful things: the
+joy of surprise and incident mingles in music, painting, architecture,
+and natural beauty itself, in an ennobled and enduring manner, with the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span>
+perfectness of eternal hue and form. But whenever the desire of change
+becomes principal; whenever we care only for new tunes, and new
+pictures, and new scenes, all power of enjoying Nature or Art is so far
+perished from us: and a child's love of toys has taken its place. The
+continual advertisement of new music (as if novelty were its virtue)
+signifies, in the inner fact of it, that no one now cares for music. The
+continual desire for new exhibitions means that we do not care for
+pictures; the continual demand for new books means that nobody cares to
+read.</p>
+
+<p>98. Not that it would necessarily, and at all times, mean this; for in a
+living school of Art there will always be an exceeding thirst for, and
+eager watching of freshly-developed thought. But it specially and
+sternly means this, when the interest is merely in the novelty; and
+great work in our possession is forgotten, while mean work, because
+strange and of some personal interest, is annually made the subject of
+eager observation and discussion. As long as (for one of many instances
+of such neglect) two great pictures of Tintoret's lie rolled up in an
+outhouse at Venice, all the exhibitions and schools in Europe mean
+nothing but promotion of costly commerce. Through that, we might indeed
+arrive at better things; but there is no proof, in the eager talk of the
+public about Art, that we <i>are</i> arriving at them. Portraiture of the
+said public's many faces, and tickling of its twice as many eyes, by
+changeful phantasm, are all that the patron-multitudes of the present
+day in reality seek; and this may be supplied to them in multiplying
+excess forever, yet no steps made to the formation of a school of Art
+now, or to the understanding of any that have hitherto existed.</p>
+
+<p>99. It is the carrying of this annual Exhibition into the recesses of
+home which is especially to be dreaded in the multiplication of inferior
+Art for private possession. Public amusement or excitement may often be
+quite wholesomely sought, in gay spectacles, or enthusiastic festivals;
+but we must be careful to the uttermost how we allow the desire for any
+kind of excitement to mingle among the peaceful con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span>tinuities of home
+happiness. The one stern condition of that happiness is that our
+possessions should be no more than we can thoroughly use; and that to
+this use they should be practically and continually put. Calculate the
+hours which, during the possible duration of life, can, under the most
+favorable circumstances, be employed in reading, and the number of books
+which it is possible to read in that utmost space of time;&mdash;it will be
+soon seen what a limited library is all that we need, and how careful we
+ought to be in choosing its volumes. Similarly, the time which most
+people have at their command for any observation of Art is not more than
+would be required for the just understanding of the works of one great
+master. How are we to estimate the futility of wasting this fragment of
+time on works from which nothing can be learned? For the only real
+pleasure, and the richest of all amusements, to be derived from either
+reading or looking, are in the steady progress of the mind and heart,
+which day by day are more deeply satisfied, and yet more divinely
+athirst.</p>
+
+<p>100. As far as I know the homes of England of the present day, they show
+a grievous tendency to fall, in these important respects, into the two
+great classes of over-furnished and unfurnished:&mdash;of those in which the
+Greek marble in its niche, and the precious shelf-loads of the luxurious
+library, leave the inmates nevertheless dependent for all their true
+pastime on horse, gun, and croquet-ground;&mdash;and those in which Art,
+honored only by the presence of a couple of engravings from Landseer,
+and literature, represented by a few magazines and annuals arranged in a
+star on the drawing-room table, are felt to be entirely foreign to the
+daily business of life, and entirely unnecessary to its domestic
+pleasures.</p>
+
+<p>101. The introduction of furniture of Art into households of this latter
+class is now taking place rapidly; and, of course, by the usual system
+of the ingenious English practical mind, will take place under the
+general law of supply and demand; that is to say, that whatever a class
+of consumers, entirely unacquainted with the different qualities of the
+article they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span> are buying, choose to ask for, will be duly supplied to
+them by the trade. I observe that this beautiful system is gradually
+extending lower and lower in education; and that children, like grown-up
+persons, are more and more able to obtain their toys without any
+reference to what is useful or useless, or right or wrong; but on the
+great horseleech's law of "demand and supply." And, indeed, I write
+these papers, knowing well how effectless all speculations on abstract
+proprieties or possibilities must be in the present ravening state of
+national desire for excitement; but the tracing of moral or of
+mathematical law brings its own quiet reward; though it may be, for the
+time, impossible to apply either to use.</p>
+
+<p>The power of the new influences which have been brought to bear on the
+middle-class mind, with respect to Art, may be sufficiently seen in the
+great rise in the price of pictures which has taken place (principally
+during the last twenty years) owing to the interest occasioned by
+national exhibitions, coupled with facilities of carriage, stimulating
+the activity of dealers, and the collateral discovery by mercantile men
+that pictures are not a bad investment.</p>
+
+<p>102. The following copy of a document in my own possession will give us
+a sufficiently accurate standard of Art-price at the date of it:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="author">"London, June 11th, 1814.</p>
+
+<p>"Received of Mr. Cooke the sum of twenty-two pounds ten shillings
+for three drawings, viz., Lyme, Land's End, and Poole.</p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 2em;">"&pound;22, 10s.</span></p>
+
+<p class="author">
+"<span class="smcap">J. M. W. Turner.</span>"<br />
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>It would be a very pleasant surprise to me if any <i>one</i> of these three
+(southern coast) drawings, for which the artist received seven guineas
+each (the odd nine shillings being, I suppose, for the great resource of
+tale-tellers about Turner&mdash;"coach-hire") were now offered to me by any
+dealer for a hundred. The rise is somewhat greater in the instance of
+Turner than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span> of any other unpopular<a name="FNanchor_81_81" id="FNanchor_81_81"></a><a href="#Footnote_81_81" class="fnanchor">[81]</a> artist; but it is at least three
+hundred per cent. on all work by artists of established reputation,
+whether the public can themselves see anything in it, or not. A certain
+quantity of intelligent interest mixes, of course, with the mere fever
+of desire for novelty; and the excellent book illustrations, which are
+the special subjects of our inquiry, are peculiarly adapted to meet
+this; for there are at least twenty people who know a good engraving or
+wood-cut, for one who knows a good picture. The best book illustrations
+fall into three main classes: fine line engravings (always grave in
+purpose), typically represented by Goodall's illustrations to Rogers's
+poems;&mdash;fine wood-cuts, or etchings, grave in purpose, such as those by
+Dalziel, from Thomson and Gilbert;&mdash;and fine wood-cuts, or etchings, for
+purpose of caricature, such as Leech's and Tenniel's in <i>Punch</i>. Each of
+these have a possibly instructive power special to them, which we will
+endeavor severally to examine in the next chapter.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="Chapter_Ix82" id="Chapter_Ix82"></a><span class="smcap">Chapter ix.</span><a name="FNanchor_82_82" id="FNanchor_82_82"></a><a href="#Footnote_82_82" class="fnanchor">[82]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>103. I purpose in this chapter, as intimated in the last, to sketch
+briefly what I believe to be the real uses and powers of the three kinds
+of engraving, by black line; either for book illustration, or general
+public instruction by distribution of multiplied copies. After thus
+stating what seems to me the proper purpose of each kind of work, I may,
+perhaps, be able to trace some advisable limitations of its technical
+methods.</p>
+
+<p>I. And first, of pure line engraving.</p>
+
+<p>This is the only means by which entire refinement of intellectual
+representation can be given to the public. Photographs have an
+inimitable mechanical refinement, and their legal evidence is of great
+use if you know how to cross-examine them. They are popularly supposed
+to be "true," and, at the worst, they are so, in the sense in which an
+echo is true to a conversation of which it omits the most important
+syllables and reduplicates the rest. But this truth of mere transcript
+has nothing to do with Art properly so called; and will never supersede
+it. Delicate art of design, or of selected truth, can only be presented
+to the general public by true line engraving. It will be enough for my
+purpose to instance three books in which its power has been sincerely
+used. I am more in fields than libraries, and have never cared to look
+much into book illustrations; there are, therefore, of course, numbers
+of well-illustrated works of which I know nothing: but the three I
+should myself name as typical of good use of the method, are I. Rogers's
+Poems, II. the Leipsic edition of Heyne's Virgil (1800), and III. the
+great "Description de l'Egypte."</p>
+
+<p>104. The vignettes in the first named volumes (considering<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span> the Italy
+and Poems as one book) I believe to be as skillful and tender as any
+hand work, of the kind, ever done; they are also wholly free from
+affectation of overwrought fineness, on the one side, and from hasty or
+cheap expediencies on the other; and they were produced, under the
+direction and influence of a gentleman and a scholar. Multitudes of
+works, imitative of these, and far more attractive, have been produced
+since; but none of any sterling quality: the good books were (I was
+told) a loss to their publisher, and the money spent since in the same
+manner has been wholly thrown away. Yet these volumes are enough to show
+what lovely service line engraving might be put upon, if the general
+taste were advanced enough to desire it. Their vignettes from Stothard,
+however conventional, show in the grace and tenderness of their living
+subjects how types of innocent beauty, as pure as Angelico's, and far
+lovelier, might indeed be given from modern English life, to exalt the
+conception of youthful dignity and sweetness in every household. I know
+nothing among the phenomena of the present age more sorrowful than that
+the beauty of our youth should remain wholly unrepresented in Fine Art,
+because unfelt by ourselves; and that the only vestiges of a likeness to
+it should be in some of the more subtle passages of caricatures, popular
+(and justly popular) as much because they were the only attainable
+reflection of the prettiness, as because they were the only sympathizing
+records of the humors, of English girls and boys. Of our oil portraits
+of them, in which their beauty is always conceived as consisting in a
+fixed simper&mdash;feet not more than two inches long, and accessory grounds,
+pony, and groom&mdash;our sentence need not be "<i>guarda e passa</i>," but
+"<i>passa</i>" only. Yet one oil picture has been painted, and so far as I
+know, one only, representing the deeper loveliness of English youth&mdash;the
+portraits of the three children of the Dean of Christ Church, by the son
+of the great portrait painter, who has recorded whatever is tender and
+beautiful in the faces of the aged men of England, bequeathing, as it
+seems, the beauty of their children to the genius of his child.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>105. The second book which I named, Heyne's Virgil, shows, though
+unequally and insufficiently, what might be done by line engraving to
+give vital image of classical design, and symbol of classical thought.
+It is profoundly to be regretted that none of these old and
+well-illustrated classics can be put frankly into the hands of youth;
+while all books lately published for general service, pretending to
+classical illustration, are, in point of Art, absolutely dead and
+harmful rubbish. I cannot but think that the production of
+well-illustrated classics would at least leave free of money-scathe, and
+in great honor, any publisher who undertook it; and although schoolboys
+in general might not care for any such help, to one, here and there, it
+would make all the difference between loving his work and hating it. For
+myself, I am quite certain that a single vignette, like that of the
+fountain of Arethusa in Heyne, would have set me on an eager quest,
+which would have saved me years of sluggish and fruitless labor.</p>
+
+<p>106. It is the more strange, and the more to be regretted, that no such
+worthy applications of line engraving are now made, because, merely to
+gratify a fantastic pride, works are often undertaken in which, for want
+of well-educated draughtsmen, the mechanical skill of the engraver has
+been wholly wasted, and nothing produced useful, except for common
+reference. In the great work published by the Dilettanti Society, for
+instance, the engravers have been set to imitate, at endless cost of
+sickly fineness in dotted and hatched execution, drawings in which the
+light and shade is always forced and vulgar, if not utterly false.
+Constantly (as in the 37th plate of the first volume), waving hair casts
+a straight shadow, not only on the forehead, but even on the ripples of
+other curls emerging beneath it: while the publication of plate 41, as a
+representation of the most beautiful statue in the British Museum, may
+well arouse any artist's wonder what kind of "diletto" in antiquity it
+might be, from which the Society assumed its name.</p>
+
+<p>107. The third book above named as a typical example of right work in
+line, the "Description de l'Egypte," is one of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span> the greatest monuments
+of calm human industry, honestly and delicately applied, which exist in
+the world. The front of Rouen Cathedral, or the most richly-wrought
+illuminated missal, as pieces of resolute industry, are mere child's
+play compared to any group of the plates of natural history in this
+book. Of unemotional, but devotedly earnest and rigidly faithful labor,
+I know no other such example. The lithographs to Agassiz's "poissons
+fossiles" are good in their kind, but it is a far lower and easier kind,
+and the popularly visible result is in larger proportion to the skill;
+whereas none but workmen can know the magnificent devotion of
+unpretending and observant toil, involved in even a single figure of an
+insect or a starfish on these unapproachable plates. Apply such skill to
+the simple presentation of the natural history of every English county,
+and make the books portable in size, and I cannot conceive any other
+book-gift to our youth so precious.</p>
+
+<p>108. II. Wood-cutting and etching for serious purpose.</p>
+
+<p>The tendency of wood-cutting in England has been to imitate the fineness
+and manner of engraving. This is a false tendency; and so far as the
+productions obtained under its influence have been successful, they are
+to be considered only as an inferior kind of engraving, under the last
+head. But the real power of wood-cutting is, with little labor, to
+express in clear delineation the most impressive essential qualities of
+form and light and shade, in objects which owe their interest not to
+grace, but to power and character. It can never express beauty of the
+subtlest kind, and is not in any way available on a large scale; but
+used rightly, on its own ground, it is the <i>most purely intellectual</i> of
+all Art; sculpture, even of the highest order, being slightly sensual
+and imitative; while fine wood-cutting is entirely abstract, thoughtful,
+and passionate. The best wood-cuts that I know in the whole range of Art
+are those of D&uuml;rer's "Life of the Virgin;" after these come the other
+works of D&uuml;rer, slightly inferior from a more complex and wiry treatment
+of line. I have never seen any other work in wood deserving to be named
+with his; but the best<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span> vignettes of Bewick approach D&uuml;rer in execution
+of plumage, as nearly as a clown's work can approach a gentleman's.</p>
+
+<p>109. Some very brilliant execution on an inferior system&mdash;less false,
+however, than the modern English one&mdash;has been exhibited by the French;
+and if we accept its false conditions, nothing can surpass the
+cleverness of our own school of Dalziel, or even of the average
+wood-cutting in our daily journals, which however, as aforesaid, is only
+to be reckoned an inferior method of engraving. These meet the demand of
+the imperfectly-educated public in every kind; and it would be absurd to
+urge any change in the method, as long as the public remain in the same
+state of knowledge or temper. But, allowing for the time during which
+these illustrated papers have now been bringing whatever information and
+example of Art they could to the million, it seems likely that the said
+million will remain in the same stage of knowledge yet for some time.
+Perhaps the horse is an animal as antagonistic to Art in England, as he
+was in harmony with it in Greece; still, allowing for the general
+intelligence of the London bred lower classes, I was surprised by a
+paragraph in the <i>Pall Mall Gazette</i>, quoting the <i>Star</i> of November 6th
+of last year, in its report upon the use made of illustrated papers by
+the omnibus stablemen,&mdash;to the following effect:&mdash;</p>
+
+
+<p>"They are frequently employed in the omnibus yards from five o'clock in
+the morning till twelve at night, so that a fair day's work for a
+'horse-keeper' is about eighteen hours. For this enormous labor they
+receive a guinea per week, which for them means seven, not six, days;
+though they do contrive to make Sunday an 'off-day' now and then. The
+ignorance of aught in the world save ''orses and 'buses' which prevails
+amongst these stablemen is almost incredible. A veteran horse-keeper,
+who had passed his days in an omnibus-yard, was once overheard praising
+the 'Lus-trated London News with much enthusiasm, as the best periodical
+in London, 'leastways at the coffee-shop.' When pressed for the reason
+of his partiality, he confessed it was the 'pickshers' which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span> delighted
+him. He amused himself during his meal-times by 'counting the images!'"</p>
+
+
+<p>110. But for the classes among whom there is a real demand for
+educational art, it is highly singular that no systematic use has yet
+been made of wood-cutting on its own terms; and only here and there,
+even in the best books, is there an example of what might be done by it.
+The frontispieces to the two volumes of Mr. Birch's "Ancient Pottery and
+Porcelain," and such simpler cuts as that at p. 273 of the first volume,
+show what might be cheaply done for illustration of archaic classical
+work; two or three volumes of such cuts chosen from the best vases of
+European collections and illustrated by a short and trustworthy
+commentary, would be to any earnest schoolboy worth a whole library of
+common books. But his father can give him nothing of the kind&mdash;and if
+the father himself wish to study Greek Art, he must spend something like
+a hundred pounds to put himself in possession of any sufficiently
+illustrative books of reference. As to any use of such means for
+representing objects in the round, the plate of the head of Pallas
+facing p. 168 in the same volume sufficiently shows the hopelessness of
+setting the modern engraver to such service. Again, in a book like
+Smith's dictionary of geography, the wood-cuts of coins are at present
+useful only for comparison and reference. They are absolutely valueless
+as representations of the art of the coin.</p>
+
+<p>111. Now, supposing that an educated scholar and draughtsman had drawn
+each of these blocks, and that they had been cut with as much average
+skill as that employed in the wood-cuts of <i>Punch</i>, each of these
+vignettes of coins might have been an exquisite lesson, both of high Art
+treatment in the coin, and of beautiful black and white drawing in the
+representation; and this just as cheaply&mdash;nay, more cheaply&mdash;than the
+present common and useless drawing. The things necessary are indeed not
+small,&mdash;nothing less than well educated intellect and feeling in the
+draughtsmen; but intellect and feeling, as I have often said before now,
+are always<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span> to be had cheap if you go the right way about it&mdash;and they
+cannot otherwise be had for any price. There are quite brains enough,
+and there is quite sentiment enough, among the gentlemen of England to
+answer all the purposes of England: but if you so train your youths of
+the richer classes that they shall think it more gentlemanly to scrawl a
+figure on a bit of note paper, to be presently rolled up to light a
+cigar with, than to draw one nobly and rightly for the seeing of all
+men;&mdash;and if you practically show your youths, of all classes, that they
+will be held gentlemen, for babbling with a simper in Sunday pulpits; or
+grinning through, not a horse's, but a hound's, collar, in Saturday
+journals; or dirtily living on the public money in government
+non-offices:&mdash;but that they shall be held less than gentlemen for doing
+a man's work honestly with a man's right hand&mdash;you will of course find
+that intellect and feeling cannot be had when you want them. But if you
+like to train some of your best youth into scholarly artists,&mdash;men of
+the temper of Leonardo, of Holbein, of D&uuml;rer, or of Velasquez, instead
+of decomposing them into the early efflorescences and putrescences of
+idle clerks, sharp lawyers, soft curates, and rotten journalists,&mdash;you
+will find that you can always get a good line drawn when you need it,
+without paying large subscriptions to schools of Art.</p>
+
+<p>112. III. This relation of social character to the possible supply of
+good Art is still more direct when we include in our survey the mass of
+illustration coming under the general head of dramatic
+caricature&mdash;caricature, that is to say, involving right understanding of
+the true grotesque in human life; caricature of which the worth or
+harmfulness cannot be estimated, unless we can first somewhat answer the
+wide question, What is the meaning and worth of English laughter? I say,
+"of English laughter," because if you can well determine the value of
+that, you determine the value of the true laughter of all men&mdash;the
+English laugh being the purest and truest in the metal that can be
+minted. And indeed only Heaven can know what the country owes to it, on
+the lips of such men as Sydney Smith and Thomas Hood. For indeed the
+true wit<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span> of all countries, but especially English wit (because the
+openest), must always be essentially on the side of truth&mdash;for the
+nature of wit is one with truth. Sentiment may be false&mdash;reasoning
+false&mdash;reverence false&mdash;-love false,&mdash;everything false except wit; that
+<i>must</i> be true&mdash;and even if it is ever harmful, it is as divided against
+itself&mdash;a small truth undermining a mightier.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, the spirit of levity, and habit of mockery, are among
+the chief instruments of final ruin both to individual and nations. I
+believe no business will ever be rightly done by a laughing Parliament:
+and that the public perception of vice or of folly which only finds
+expression in caricature, neither reforms the one, nor instructs the
+other. No man is fit for much, we know, "who has not a good laugh in
+him"&mdash;but a sad wise valor is the only complexion for a leader; and if
+there was ever a time for laughing in this dark and hollow world, I do
+not think it is now. This is a wide subject, and I must follow it in
+another place; for our present purpose, all that needs to be noted is
+that, for the expression of true humor, few and imperfect lines are
+often sufficient, and that in this direction lies the only opening for
+the serviceable presentation of amateur work to public notice.</p>
+
+<p>113. I have said nothing of lithography, because, with the exception of
+Samuel Prout's sketches, no work of standard Art-value has ever been
+produced by it, nor can be: its opaque and gritty texture being wholly
+offensive to the eye of any well trained artist. Its use in connection
+with color is, of course, foreign to our present subject. Nor do I take
+any note of the various current patents for cheap modes of drawing,
+though they are sometimes to be thanked for rendering possible the
+publication of sketches like those of the pretty little "Voyage en
+Zigzag" ("how we spent the summer") published by Longmans&mdash;which are
+full of charming humor, character, and freshness of expression; and
+might have lost more by the reduction to the severe terms of
+wood-cutting than they do by the ragged interruptions of line which are
+an inevitable defect in nearly all these cheap processes. It will be
+enough,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[Pg 378]</a></span> therefore, for all serious purpose, that we confine ourselves
+to the study of the black line, as produced in steel and wood; and I
+will endeavor in the next paper<a name="FNanchor_83_83" id="FNanchor_83_83"></a><a href="#Footnote_83_83" class="fnanchor">[83]</a> to set down some of the technical
+laws belonging to each mode of its employment.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> This paper was written as a preface to a series of
+"Reminiscences" from the pen of the late Mr. W. H. Harrison, commenced
+in the <i>University Magazine</i> of May 1878. It was separately printed in
+that magazine in the preceding month, but owing to Mr. Ruskin's illness
+at the time, he was unable to see it through the press. A letter from
+Mr. Ruskin to Mr. Harrison, printed in "Arrows of the Chace," may be
+found of interest in connection with the opening statements of this
+paper.&mdash;[<span class="smcap">Ed.</span>]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> "Friendship's Offering" of 1835 included two poems, signed
+"J. R.," and entitled "Saltzburg" and "Fragments from a Metrical
+Journal; Andernacht and St. Goar."&mdash;[<span class="smcap">Ed.</span>]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> In the "Life and Times of Sydney Smith," by Stuart J. Reid
+(London, 1884, p. 374), appears a letter addressed to the author by Mr.
+Ruskin, to whom the book is dedicated:&mdash;
+</p><p class="author">
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">"<span class="smcap">Oxford</span>, <i>Nov. 15th, 1883</i>.</span><br />
+</p>
+<p>
+"<span class="smcap">My Dear Sir</span>,&mdash;I wanted to tell you what deep respect I had for Sydney
+Smith; but my time has been cut to pieces ever since your note reached
+me. He was the first in the literary circles of London to assert the
+value of 'Modern Painters,' and he has always seemed to me equally
+keen-sighted and generous in his estimate of literary efforts. His
+'Moral Philosophy' is the only book on the subject which I care that my
+pupils should read, and there is no man (whom I have not personally
+known) whose image is so vivid in my constant affection.&mdash;Ever your
+faithful servant,
+</p><p class="author">
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">"<span class="smcap">John Ruskin.</span>"&mdash;[<span class="smcap">Ed.</span>]</span><br />
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> This essay is a review of two books by Lord Lindsay, viz.,
+"Progression by Antagonism," published in 1846, and the "Sketches of the
+History of Christian Art," which appeared in the following year. It is,
+with the paper on Sir C. Eastlake's "History of Oil Painting," one of
+the very few anonymous writings of its author. "I never felt at ease"
+(says Mr. Ruskin, in speaking of anonymous criticism) "in my graduate
+incognito, and although I consented, some nine years ago, to review Lord
+Lindsay's 'Christian Art,' and Sir Charles Eastlake's 'Essay on Oil
+Painting,' in the <i>Quarterly</i>, I have ever since steadily refused to
+write even for that once respectable periodical" ("Academy Notes," No.
+II., 1856). For Mr. Ruskin's estimate of Lord Lindsay's work, see the
+"Eagle's Nest," &sect; 46, and "Val d'Arno," &sect; 264, where he speaks of him as
+his "first master in Italian art."&mdash;[<span class="smcap">Ed.</span>]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> With one exception (see <a href='#Page_25'><b>p. 25</b></a>) the quotations from Lord
+Lindsay are always from the "Christian Art."&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> The reader must remember that this arcade was originally
+quite open, the inner wall having been built after the fire, in 1574.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> "An Historical Essay on Architecture" by the late Thomas
+Hope. (Murray, 1835) chap, iv., pp. 23-31.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> At the feet of his Madonna, in the Gallery of Bologna.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> In many pictures of Angelico, the Infant Christ appears
+self-supported&mdash;the Virgin not touching the child.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> The upper inscription Lord Lindsay has misquoted&mdash;it runs
+thus:&mdash;
+</p><p><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">"Salve Mater Pietatis</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">Et Totius Trinitatis</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">Nobile Triclinium."</span><br />
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> We have been much surprised by the author's frequent
+reference to Lasinio's engravings of various frescoes, unaccompanied by
+any warning of their inaccuracy. No work of Lasinio's can be trusted for
+<i>anything</i> except the number and relative position of the figures. All
+masters are by him translated into one monotony of commonplace:&mdash;he
+dilutes eloquence, educates na&iuml;vet&eacute;, prompts ignorance, stultifies
+intelligence, and paralyzes power; takes the chill off horror, the edge
+off wit, and the bloom off beauty. In all artistical points he is
+utterly valueless, neither drawing nor expression being ever preserved
+by him. Giotto, Benozzo, or Ghirlandajo are all alike to him; and we
+hardly know whether he injures most when he robs or when he redresses.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> We do not perhaps enough estimate the assistance which was
+once given both to purpose and perception, by the feeling of wonder
+which with us is destroyed partly by the ceaseless calls upon it, partly
+by our habit of either discovering or anticipating a reason for
+everything. Of the simplicity and ready surprise of heart which
+supported the spirit of the older painters, an interesting example is
+seen in the diary of Albert D&uuml;rer, lately published in a work every way
+valuable, but especially so in the carefulness and richness of its
+illustrations, "Divers Works of Early Masters in Christian Decoration,"
+edited by John Weale, London, 2 vols. folio, 1846.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> A review of the following-books:&mdash;
+</p><p>
+1. "Materials for a History of Oil-Painting." By Charles Lock Eastlake,
+R.A., F.R.S., F.S.A., Secretary to the Royal Commission for promoting
+the Fine Arts in Connection with the Rebuilding of the Houses of
+Parliament, etc., etc. London, 1847.
+</p><p>
+2. "Theophili, qui et Rugerus, Presbyteri et Monachi, Libri III. de
+Diversis Artibus; seu Diversarum Artium Schedula. (An Essay upon Various
+Arts, in Three Books, by Theophilus, called also Rugerus, Priest and
+Monk, forming an Encyclop&aelig;dia of Christian Art of the Eleventh Century."
+Translated, with Notes, by Robert Hendrie.) London, 1847.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> "A Critical Essay on Oil-Painting," London, 1781.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> "The medi&aelig;val painters were so accustomed to this
+appearance in varnishes, and considered it so indispensable, that they
+even supplied the tint when it did not exist. Thus Cardanus observes
+that when white of eggs was used as a varnish, it was customary to tinge
+it with red lead."&mdash;<i>Eastlake</i>, p. 270.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> "Si je dis tant de mal de la peinture flamande, ce n'est
+pas qu'elle soit enti&egrave;rement mauvaise, mais elle veut <i>rendre avec
+perfection</i> tant de choses, dont une seule suffirait par son importance,
+qu'elle n'en fait aucune d'une mani&egrave;re satisfaisante." This opinion of
+M. Angelo's is preserved by Francisco de Ollanda, quoted by Comte
+Raczynski, "Les Arts en Portugal," Paris, 1846.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> "Arte de Pintura." Sevilla, 1649.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> The preparations of Hemling, at Bruges, we imagine to have
+been in water-color, and perhaps the picture was carried to some degree
+of completion in this material. Van Mander observes that Van Eyck's dead
+colorings "were cleaner and sharper than the finished works of other
+painters."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> [See <i>Stones of Venice</i>, vol. iii. Venetian Index, <i>s.</i>
+Rocco, Scuola di San, &sect; 20, <i>Temptation</i>.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed.</span> 1899.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> <i>Art Journal</i>, March 1849.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> We do not mean under this term to include the drawings of
+professed oil-painters, as of Stothard or Turner.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> <i>Cornhill Magazine</i>, March, 1860.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed</span>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> As showing gigantic power of hand, joined with utmost
+accuracy and rapidity, the folds of drapery under the breast of the
+Virgin are, perhaps, as marvelous a piece of work as could be found in
+any picture, of whatever time or master.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> The reader must observe that I use the word here in a
+limited sense, as meaning only the effect of careful education, good
+society, and refined habits of life, on average temper and character. Of
+deep and true gentlemanliness&mdash;based as it is on intense sensibility and
+sincerity, perfected by courage, and other qualities of race; as well as
+of that union of insensibility with cunning, which is the essence of
+vulgarity, I shall have to speak at length in another place.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> Museum of Berlin.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> Of 1,200 Swiss, who fought by that brookside, ten only
+returned. The battle checked the attack of the French, led by Louis XI.
+(then Dauphin) in 1444; and was the first of the great series of efforts
+and victories which were closed at Nancy by the death of Charles of
+Burgundy.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> Pinacothek of Munich.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> This essay was first published in 1851 as a separate
+pamphlet entitled "Pre-Raphaelitism," by the author of "Modern
+Painters." (8vo, pp. 68. London: Smith, Elder, &amp; Co.) It was afterwards
+reprinted in 1862, without alteration, except that the later issue bore
+the author's name, and omitted a dedication which in the first edition
+ran as follows:&mdash;"To Francis Hawkesworth Fawkes, Esq., of Farnley, These
+pages, Which owe their present form to advantages granted By his
+kindness, Are affectionately inscribed, By his obliged friend, John
+Ruskin."&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> Compare "Sesame and Lilies," &sect; 2.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> See "Arrows of the Chace," vol. i., which gives several
+letters there collected under the head of Pre-Raphaelitism.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed</span>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> It was not a little curious, that in the very number of
+the Art Union which repeated this direct falsehood about the
+Pre-Raphaelite rejection of "linear perspective" (by-the-bye, the next
+time J. B. takes upon him to speak of anyone connected with the
+Universities, he may as well first ascertain the difference between a
+Graduate and an Under-Graduate), the second plate given should have been
+of a picture of Bonington's&mdash;a professional landscape painter,
+observe&mdash;for the want of <i>a&euml;rial</i> perspective in which the Art Union
+itself was obliged to apologize, and in which, the artist has committed
+nearly as many blunders in <i>linear</i> perspective as there are lines in
+the picture.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> These false statements may be reduced to three principal
+heads, and directly contradicted in succession.
+</p><p>
+The first, the current fallacy of society as well as of the press, was,
+that the Pre-Raphaelites imitated the <i>errors</i> of early painters.
+</p><p>
+A falsehood of this kind could not have obtained credence anywhere but
+in England, few English people, comparatively, having ever seen a
+picture of early Italian Masters. If they had they would have known that
+the Pre-Raphaelite pictures are just as superior to the early Italian in
+skill of manipulation, power of drawing, and knowledge of effect, as
+inferior to them in grace of design; and that in a word, there is not a
+shadow of resemblance between the two styles. The Pre-Raphaelites
+imitate no pictures: they paint from nature only. But they have opposed
+themselves as a body, to that kind of teaching above described, which
+only began after Raphael's time: and they have opposed themselves as
+sternly to the entire feeling of the Renaissance schools; a feeling
+compounded of indolence, infidelity, sensuality, and shallow pride.
+Therefore they have called themselves Pre-Raphaelite. If they adhere to
+their principles, and paint nature as it is around them, with the help
+of modern science, with the earnestness of the men of the thirteenth and
+fourteenth centuries, they will, as I said, found a new and noble school
+in England. If their sympathies with the early artists lead them into
+medi&aelig;valism or Romanism, they will of course come to nothing. But I
+believe there is no danger of this, at least for the strongest among
+them. There may be some weak ones, whom the Tractarian heresies may
+touch; but if so, they will drop off like decayed branches from a strong
+stem. I hope all things from the school.
+</p><p>
+The second falsehood was, that the Pre-Raphaelites did not draw well.
+This was asserted, and could have been asserted only by persons who had
+never looked at the pictures.
+</p><p>
+The third falsehood was, that they had no system of light and shade. To
+which it may be simply replied that their system of light and shade is
+exactly the same as the Sun's; which is, I believe, likely to outlast
+that of the Renaissance, however brilliant.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a> See ante, pp. 148-157.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed</span>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a> He did not use his full signature, "J. M. W.," until about
+the year 1800.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">[35]</span></a> I shall give a <i>catalogue raisonn&eacute;e</i> of all this in the
+third volume of <i>Modern Painters</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">[36]</span></a> See <i>post</i>, &sect; 217.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">[37]</span></a> The plate was, however, never published.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">[38]</span></a> And the more probably because Turner was never fond of
+staying long at any place, and was least of all likely to make a pause
+of two or three days at the beginning of his journey.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">[39]</span></a> <i>Vide Modern Painters</i>, Part II. Sect. III. Chap. IV. &sect;
+13.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">[40]</span></a> See <i>ante</i>, &sect; 200.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">[41]</span></a> This state of mind appears to have been the only one which
+Wordsworth had been able to discern in men of science; and in disdain of
+which, he wrote that short-sighted passage in the Excursion, Book III,
+P. 165-190, which is, I think, the only one in the whole range of his
+works which his true friends would have desired to see blotted out. What
+else has been found fault with as feeble or superfluous, is not so in
+the intense distinctive relief which it gives to his character. But
+these lines are written in mere ignorance of the matter they treat; in
+mere want of sympathy with the men they describe: for, observe, though
+the passage is put into the mouth of the Solitary, it is fully
+confirmed, and even rendered more scornful, by the speech which
+follows.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">[42]</span></a> <i>Nineteenth Century</i>, <span class="smcap">Nov.-Dec.</span> 1878.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">[43]</span></a> May I in the meantime recommend any reader interested in
+these matters to obtain for himself such photographic representation as
+may be easily acquirable of the tomb of Ilaria? It is in the north
+transept of the Cathedral of Lucca; and is certainly the most beautiful
+work existing by the master who wrought it,&mdash;Jacopo della Quercia.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">[44]</span></a> "Vulgarly"; the use of the word "scientia," as if it
+differed from "knowledge," being a modern barbarism; enhanced usually by
+the assumption that the knowledge of the difference between acids and
+alkalies is a more respectable one than that of the difference between
+vice and virtue.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">[45]</span></a> <i>Modern Painters</i>, volume iii. I proceed in my old words,
+of which I cannot better the substance, though&mdash;with all deference to
+the taste of those who call that book my best&mdash;I could, the expression.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46_46"><span class="label">[46]</span></a> The <i>third</i> edition was published in 1846, while the
+Pre-Raphaelite School was still in swaddling clothes.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_47_47" id="Footnote_47_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_47_47"><span class="label">[47]</span></a> These essays were, "Recent Attacks on Political Economy,"
+by Robert Lowe, and "Virchow and Evolution," by Prof. Tyndall,&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_48_48" id="Footnote_48_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_48_48"><span class="label">[48]</span></a> James of Quercia: see the rank assigned to this master in
+<i>Ariadne Florentina</i>. The best photographs of the monument are, I
+believe, those published by the Arundel Society; of whom I would very
+earnestly request that if ever they quote <i>Modern Painters</i>, they would
+not interpolate its text with unmarked parentheses of modern information
+such as "emblem of conjugal fidelity." I must not be made to answer for
+either the rhythm or the contents of sentences thus manipulated.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_49_49" id="Footnote_49_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_49_49"><span class="label">[49]</span></a> I foolishly, in <i>Modern Painters</i>, used the generic word
+"hound" to make my sentence prettier. He is a flat-nosed bulldog.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_50_50" id="Footnote_50_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_50_50"><span class="label">[50]</span></a> It would be utterly vain to attempt any general account of
+the works of this painter, unless I were able also to give abstract of
+the subtlest mythologies of Greek worship and Christian romance.
+Besides, many of his best designs are pale pencil drawings like
+Florentine engravings, of which the delicacy is literally invisible, and
+the manner irksome, to a public trained among the black scrabblings of
+modern wood-cutter's and etcher's prints. I will only say that the
+single series of these pencil-drawings, from the story of Psyche, which
+I have been able to place in the schools of Oxford, together with the
+two colored beginnings from the stories of Jason and Alcestis, are, in
+my estimate, quite the most precious gift, not excepting even the Loire
+series of Turners, in the ratified acceptance of which my University has
+honored with some fixed memorial the aims of her first Art-Teacher.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_51_51" id="Footnote_51_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor_51_51"><span class="label">[51]</span></a> <i>Lectures on Art</i>, &sect;&sect; 95-6.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed</span>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52_52" id="Footnote_52_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor_52_52"><span class="label">[52]</span></a> pamphlet, the full title of which was "The Opening of the
+Crystal Palace Considered in some of its Relations to the Progress of
+Art," by John Ruskin, M.A. London: Smith, Elder, &amp; Co., 1854.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed</span>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_53_53" id="Footnote_53_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor_53_53"><span class="label">[53]</span></a> But see now <i>Aratra Pentelici</i>, &sect; 53.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed</span>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_54_54" id="Footnote_54_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor_54_54"><span class="label">[54]</span></a> See the <i>Times</i> of Monday, June 12th.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_55_55" id="Footnote_55_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor_55_55"><span class="label">[55]</span></a> M. l'Abb&eacute; Bulteau, Description de la Cath&eacute;dral de Chartres
+(8vo, Paris, Sagnier et Bray, 1850), p. 98, <i>note</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_56_56" id="Footnote_56_56"></a><a href="#FNanchor_56_56"><span class="label">[56]</span></a> See <i>Arrows of the Chace</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_57_57" id="Footnote_57_57"></a><a href="#FNanchor_57_57"><span class="label">[57]</span></a> This paper was read by Mr. Ruskin at the ordinary meeting
+of the Royal Institute of British Architects, May 15, 1865, and was
+afterwards published in the Sessional Papers of the Institute, 1864-5,
+Part III., No. 2, pp. 139-147. Its full title (as there appears) was "An
+Inquiry into some of the conditions at present affecting the Study of
+Architecture in our Schools."&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_58_58" id="Footnote_58_58"></a><a href="#FNanchor_58_58"><span class="label">[58]</span></a> This Address has been already printed in three
+forms,&mdash;(<i>a</i>) in a pamphlet printed at Cambridge "for the committee of
+the School of Art," by Naylor &amp; Co., <i>Chronicle</i> office, 1858; (<i>b</i>) in
+a second pamphlet, Cambridge, Deighton &amp; Bell; London, Bell &amp; Daldy,
+1858; and (<i>c</i>) a new edition, published for Mr. Ruskin by Mr. George
+Allen in 1879. The first of these pamphlets contains, in addition to the
+address, a full account of the "inaugural soir&eacute;e" at which it was read,
+and a report of speeches then made by Mr. Redgrave, R.A., and Mr. George
+Cruikshank; and both the first and second pamphlet also contain a few
+introductory words spoken, by Mr. Ruskin, before proceeding to deliver
+his address.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_59_59" id="Footnote_59_59"></a><a href="#FNanchor_59_59"><span class="label">[59]</span></a> See "A Joy For Ever," &sect; 113, and "Time and Tide," &sect;
+78.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_60_60" id="Footnote_60_60"></a><a href="#FNanchor_60_60"><span class="label">[60]</span></a> I ought perhaps to remind the reader that this statement
+refers to two different societies among the Alps; the Waldenses in the
+13th, and the people of the Forest Cantons in the 14th and following
+centuries. Protestants are perhaps apt sometimes to forget that the
+virtues of these mountaineers were shown in connection with vital forms
+of opposing religions; and that the patriots of Schwytz and Uri were as
+zealous Roman Catholics as they were good soldiers. We have to lay to
+their charge the death of Zuinglius as well as of Gessler.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_61_61" id="Footnote_61_61"></a><a href="#FNanchor_61_61"><span class="label">[61]</span></a> The summit of Rocca-Melone is the sharp peak seen from
+Turin on the right hand of the gorge of the Cenis, dominant over the low
+projecting pyramid of the hill called by De Saussure Montagne de
+Musinet. Rocca-Melone rises to a height of 11,000 feet above the sea,
+and its peak is a place of pilgrimage to this day, though it seems
+temporarily to have ceased to be so in the time of De Saussure, who thus
+speaks of it:
+</p><p>
+"Il y a eu pendant longtemps sur cette cime, une petite chapelle avec
+une image de Notre Dame qui &eacute;toit en grande v&eacute;n&eacute;ration dans le pays, et
+o&ugrave; un grand nombre de gens alloient au mois d'ao&ucirc;t en procession, de
+Suze et des environs; mais le sentier qui conduit &agrave; cette chapelle est
+si &eacute;troit et si scabreux qu'il n'y avoit presque pas d'ann&eacute;es qu'il n'y
+p&eacute;rit du monde; la fatigue et la raret&eacute; de l'air saisissoient ceux qui
+avoient plut&ocirc;t consult&eacute; leur d&eacute;votion que leurs forces; ils tomb&eacute;rent en
+d&eacute;falliance, et de l&agrave; dans le pr&eacute;cipice."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_62_62" id="Footnote_62_62"></a><a href="#FNanchor_62_62"><span class="label">[62]</span></a> <i>Art Journal</i>, New Series, vol. iv., pp. 5-6. January
+1865.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_63_63" id="Footnote_63_63"></a><a href="#FNanchor_63_63"><span class="label">[63]</span></a> See p. 353, &sect; 83, for a further mention of William
+Blake.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_64_64" id="Footnote_64_64"></a><a href="#FNanchor_64_64"><span class="label">[64]</span></a> <i>Art Journal</i>, vol. iv., pp. 33-5. February 1865. The first
+word being printed in plain capitals instead of with an ornamental
+initial letter generally used by the <i>Art Journal</i>, the following note
+was added by the author:&mdash;"I beg the Editor's and reader's pardon for an
+informality in the type; but I shrink from ornamental letters, and have
+begged for a legible capital instead."&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_65_65" id="Footnote_65_65"></a><a href="#FNanchor_65_65"><span class="label">[65]</span></a> I need not say that this inquiry can only be pursued by
+the help of those who will take it up good-humoredly and graciously:
+such help I will receive in the spirit in which it is given; entering
+into no controversy, but questioning further where there is doubt:
+gathering all I can into focus, and passing silently by what seems at
+last irreconcilable.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_66_66" id="Footnote_66_66"></a><a href="#FNanchor_66_66"><span class="label">[66]</span></a> This essay, Chapter II. in the <i>Art Journal</i>, is here
+omitted as having been already reprinted with only a few verbal
+alterations in <i>The Queen of the Air</i>, &sect;&sect; 135 to 142 inclusive, which
+see. The <i>Art Journal</i>, however, contained a final paragraph,
+introductory of Chapter III., which is omitted in <i>The Queen of the
+Air</i>, and was as follows:&mdash;"To the discernment of this law" (<i>i.e.</i>,
+that to which the arts are subject, see <i>Queen of the Air</i>, &sect; 142) "we
+will now address ourselves slowly, beginning with the consideration of
+little things, and of easily definable virtues. And since Patience is
+the pioneer of all the others, I shall endeavor in the next paper to
+show how that modest virtue has been either held of no account, or else
+set to vilest work in our modern Art-schools; and what harm has resulted
+from such disdain, or such employment of her."&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_67_67" id="Footnote_67_67"></a><a href="#FNanchor_67_67"><span class="label">[67]</span></a> A small portion of this chapter was read by Mr. Ruskin, at
+Oxford, in November 1884, as a by-lecture, during the delivery of the
+course on the "Pleasures of England."&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_68_68" id="Footnote_68_68"></a><a href="#FNanchor_68_68"><span class="label">[68]</span></a> The rest of this and the whole of the succeeding paragraph
+is also reprinted in <i>Ariadne Florentina</i>, &sect; 115, and para. i. of
+116.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed</span>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_69_69" id="Footnote_69_69"></a><a href="#FNanchor_69_69"><span class="label">[69]</span></a> <i>Art Journal</i>, vol. iv., pp. 129-30. May 1865.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed</span>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_70_70" id="Footnote_70_70"></a><a href="#FNanchor_70_70"><span class="label">[70]</span></a> I have received some interesting private letters, but
+cannot make use of them at present, because they enter into general
+discussion instead of answering the specific question I asked,
+respecting the power of the black line; and I must observe to
+correspondents that in future their letters should be addressed to the
+Editor of this Journal, not to me; as I do not wish to incur the
+responsibility of selection.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_71_71" id="Footnote_71_71"></a><a href="#FNanchor_71_71"><span class="label">[71]</span></a> <i>Art Journal</i>, vol. iv., pp. 177-8. June 1865.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_72_72" id="Footnote_72_72"></a><a href="#FNanchor_72_72"><span class="label">[72]</span></a> W&oacute;rnum's "Epochs of Painting." I have continual occasion
+to quarrel with my friend on these matters of critical question; but I
+have deep respect for his earnest and patient research, and we remain
+friends&mdash;on the condition that I am to learn much from him, and he
+(though it may be questionable whose fault that is) nothing from me.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_73_73" id="Footnote_73_73"></a><a href="#FNanchor_73_73"><span class="label">[73]</span></a> Prov. xx, 27.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_74_74" id="Footnote_74_74"></a><a href="#FNanchor_74_74"><span class="label">[74]</span></a> As I was preparing these sheets for press, I chanced on a
+passage in a novel of Champfleury's, in which one young student is
+encouraging another in his contest with these and other such evils;&mdash;the
+evils are in this passage accepted as necessities; the inevitable
+deadliness of the element is not seen, as it can hardly be except by
+those who live out of it. The encouragement, on such view, is good and
+right; the connection of the young etcher's power with his poverty is
+curiously illustrative of the statements in the text, and the whole
+passage, though long, is well worth such space as it will ask here, in
+our small print.
+</p>
+<blockquote><p>
+"Cependant," dit Thomas, "on a vu des peintres de talent qui &eacute;taient
+partis de Paris apr&egrave;s avoir expos&eacute; de bons tableaux et qui s'en
+revenaient classiquement ennuyeux. C'est done la faute de l'enseignement
+de l'Acad&eacute;mie."
+</p><p>
+"Bah!" dit G&eacute;rard, "rien n'arr&ecirc;te le d&eacute;veloppement d'un homme puisqu'il
+comprend l'art, pourquoi ne fait-il pas d'art?"
+</p><p>
+"Parce qu'il gagne &agrave; peu pr&egrave;s sa vie en faisant du commerce."
+</p><p>
+"On dirait que tu ne veux pas me comprendre, toi qui as justement pass&eacute;
+par l&agrave;. Comment faisais-tu quand tu &eacute;tais compositeur d'une imprimerie?"
+</p><p>
+"Le soir," dit Thomas, "et le matin en hiver, &agrave; partir de quatre heures,
+je faisais des &eacute;tudes &agrave; la lampe pendant deux heures, jusqu'au moment o&ugrave;
+j'allais &agrave; l'atelier."
+</p><p>
+"Et tu ne vivais pas de la peinture?"
+</p><p>
+"Je ne gagnais pas un sou."
+</p><p>
+"Bon!" dit G&eacute;rard; "tu vois bien que tu faisais du commerce en dehors de
+l'art et que cependant tu &eacute;tudiais. Quand tu es sorti de l'imprimerie
+comment as-tu v&eacute;cu?"
+</p><p>
+"Je faisais cinq ou six petites aquarelles par jour, que je vendais,
+sous les arcades de l'Institut, six sous pi&egrave;ce."
+</p><p>
+"Et tu en vivais; c'est encore du commerce. Tu vois done que ni
+l'imprimerie, ni les petits dessins, &agrave; cinq sous, ni la privation, ni la
+mis&egrave;re ne t'ont emp&ecirc;ch&eacute; d'arriver."
+</p><p>
+"Je ne suis pas arriv&eacute;."
+</p><p>
+"N'importe, tu arriveras certainement. . . . Si tu veux d'autres
+exemples qui prouvent que la mis&egrave;re et les autres pi&eacute;ges tendus sous nos
+pas ne doivent rien arr&ecirc;ter, tu te rappelles bien ce pauvre gar&ccedil;on dont
+vous admiriez les eaux-fortes, que vous mettiez aussi haut que
+Rembrandt, et qui aurait &eacute;t&eacute; lion, disiez-vous, s'il n'avait tant
+souffert de la faim. Qu'a-t-il fait le jour o&ugrave; il lui est tomb&eacute; un petit
+h&eacute;ritage du ciel?"
+</p><p>
+"Il est vrai," dit Thomas, embarrass&eacute;; "qu'il a perdu tout son
+sentiment."
+</p><p>
+"Ce n'etait pas cependant une de ces grosses fortunes qui tuent un
+homme, qui le rendent lourd, fier et insolent: il avait juste de quoi
+vivre, six cents francs de rentes, une fortune pour lui, qui vivait avec
+cinq francs par mois. Il a continu&eacute; &agrave; travailler; mais ses eaux-fortes
+n'&eacute;taient plus supportables; tandis qu'avant, il vivait avec un morceau
+de pain et des l&eacute;gumes; alors il avait du talent. Cela, Thomas, doit te
+prouver que ni les mauvais enseignements, ni les influences, ni la
+mis&egrave;re, ni la faim, ni la maladie, ne peuvent corrompre une nature bien
+dou&eacute;e. Elle souffre; mais trouve moi un grand artiste qui n'ait pas
+souffert. Il n'y a pas un seul homme de d&eacute;nie heureux depuis que
+l'humanit&eacute; existe."
+</p><p>
+"J'ai envie," dit Thomas, "de te faire cadeau d'une jolie cravate."
+</p><p>
+"Pourquoi?" dit G&eacute;rard.
+</p><p>
+"Parce que tu as bien parl&eacute;."</p></blockquote></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_75_75" id="Footnote_75_75"></a><a href="#FNanchor_75_75"><span class="label">[75]</span></a> See <i>ante</i>, p. 343, &sect; 73.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_76_76" id="Footnote_76_76"></a><a href="#FNanchor_76_76"><span class="label">[76]</span></a> Chapter VI., which is here omitted, having been already
+reprinted in <i>The Queen of the Air</i> (&sect;&sect; 142-159), together with the last
+paragraph (somewhat altered) of the present chapter. After the
+publication of Chapter VI. the essays were discontinued until January
+1866.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_77_77" id="Footnote_77_77"></a><a href="#FNanchor_77_77"><span class="label">[77]</span></a> <i>Art Journal</i>, vol. v., pp. 9, 10. January 1866.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_78_78" id="Footnote_78_78"></a><a href="#FNanchor_78_78"><span class="label">[78]</span></a> Routledge, 1864. The engraving is all by Dalziel. I do not
+ask the reader's pardon for speaking of myself, with reference to the
+point at issue. It is perhaps quite as modest to relate personal
+experience as to offer personal opinion; and the accurate statement of
+such experience is, in questions of this sort, the only contribution at
+present possible towards their solution.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_79_79" id="Footnote_79_79"></a><a href="#FNanchor_79_79"><span class="label">[79]</span></a> <i>Art Journal</i>, vol. v., pp. 33-4. February 1866,&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_80_80" id="Footnote_80_80"></a><a href="#FNanchor_80_80"><span class="label">[80]</span></a> It may be, they would not ask larger incomes in a time of
+highest national life; and that then the noble art would be far cheaper
+to the nation than the ignoble. But I speak of existing circumstances.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_81_81" id="Footnote_81_81"></a><a href="#FNanchor_81_81"><span class="label">[81]</span></a> I have never found more than two people (students
+excepted) in the room occupied by Turner's drawings at Kensington, and
+one of the two, if there <i>are</i> two, always looks as if he had got in by
+mistake.</p></div>
+
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_82_82" id="Footnote_82_82"></a><a href="#FNanchor_82_82"><span class="label">[82]</span></a> <i>Art Journal</i>, vol. v., pp. 97-8. April 1866.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed</span>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_83_83" id="Footnote_83_83"></a><a href="#FNanchor_83_83"><span class="label">[83]</span></a> The present paper was, however, the last.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Ed.</span></p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's On the Old Road  Vol. 1  (of 2), by John Ruskin
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+Project Gutenberg's On the Old Road  Vol. 1  (of 2), 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: On the Old Road  Vol. 1  (of 2)
+       A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature
+
+Author: John Ruskin
+
+Release Date: June 2, 2008 [EBook #25678]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON THE OLD ROAD  VOL. 1  (OF 2) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: RUSKIN'S MONUMENT
+FROM A PHOTOGRAPH]
+
+
+
+
+   THE COMPLETE WORKS
+   OF
+   JOHN RUSKIN
+
+
+   ON THE OLD ROAD
+   VOLUMES I-II
+
+
+   NATIONAL LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
+   NEW YORK        CHICAGO
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+ON THE OLD ROAD.
+
+_A COLLECTION OF MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS AND ARTICLES ON ART AND
+LITERATURE._
+
+VOL. I.
+
+
+PUBLISHED 1834-1885.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
+
+
+   INTRODUCTORY.                                                    PAGE
+
+   MY FIRST EDITOR. 1878                                               3
+
+
+   ART.
+
+   I. HISTORY AND CRITICISM.
+        LORD LINDSAY'S "CHRISTIAN ART." 1847                          17
+        EASTLAKE'S "HISTORY OF OIL PAINTING." 1848                    97
+        SAMUEL PROUT. 1849                                           148
+        SIR JOSHUA AND HOLBEIN. 1860                                 158
+
+   II. PRE-RAPHAELITISM.
+        ITS PRINCIPLES, AND TURNER. 1851                             171
+        ITS THREE COLORS. 1878                                       218
+
+   III. ARCHITECTURE.
+        THE OPENING OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 1854                      245
+        THE STUDY OF ARCHITECTURE IN OUR SCHOOLS. 1865               259
+
+   IV. INAUGURAL ADDRESS, CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL OF ART. 1858              279
+
+   V. THE CESTUS OF AGLAIA. 1865-66                                  305
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+   INTRODUCTORY: MY FIRST EDITOR.
+
+
+   ART.
+
+   I. HISTORY AND CRITICISM.
+
+   II. PRE-RAPHAELITISM.
+
+   III. ARCHITECTURE.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+   INTRODUCTORY.
+
+
+   MY FIRST EDITOR.
+
+   AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REMINISCENCE.
+
+   (_University Magazine, April 1878._)
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+MY FIRST EDITOR.[1]
+
+AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REMINISCENCE.
+
+
+   _1st February, 1878._
+
+1. In seven days more I shall be fifty-nine;--which (practically) is all
+the same as sixty; but, being asked by the wife of my dear old friend,
+W. H. Harrison, to say a few words of our old relations together, I find
+myself, in spite of all these years, a boy again,--partly in the mere
+thought of, and renewed sympathy with, the cheerful heart of my old
+literary master, and partly in instinctive terror lest, wherever he is
+in celestial circles, he should catch me writing bad grammar, or putting
+wrong stops, and should set the table turning, or the like. For he was
+inexorable in such matters, and many a sentence in "Modern Painters,"
+which I had thought quite beautifully turned out after a forenoon's work
+on it, had to be turned outside-in, after all, and cut into the smallest
+pieces and sewn up again, because he had found out there wasn't a
+nominative in it, or a genitive, or a conjunction, or something else
+indispensable to a sentence's decent existence and position in life. Not
+a book of mine, for good thirty years, but went, every word of it, under
+his careful eyes twice over--often also the last revises left to his
+tender mercy altogether on condition he wouldn't bother me any more.
+
+2. "For good thirty years": that is to say, from my first verse-writing
+in "Friendship's Offering" at fifteen, to my last orthodox and
+conservative compositions at forty-five.[2] But when I began to utter
+radical sentiments, and say things derogatory to the clergy, my old
+friend got quite restive--absolutely refused sometimes to pass even my
+most grammatical and punctuated paragraphs, if their contents savored of
+heresy or revolution; and at last I was obliged to print all my
+philanthropy and political economy on the sly.
+
+3. The heaven of the literary world through which Mr. Harrison moved in
+a widely cometary fashion, circling now round one luminary and now
+submitting to the attraction of another, not without a serenely
+erubescent luster of his own, differed _toto coelo_ from the celestial
+state of authorship by whose courses we have now the felicity of being
+dazzled and directed. Then, the publications of the months being very
+nearly concluded in the modest browns of _Blackwood_ and _Fraser_, and
+the majesty of the quarterlies being above the range of the properly
+so-called "public" mind, the simple family circle looked forward with
+chief complacency to their New Year's gift of the Annual--a delicately
+printed, lustrously bound, and elaborately illustrated small octavo
+volume, representing, after its manner, the poetical and artistic
+inspiration of the age. It is not a little wonderful to me, looking back
+to those pleasant years and their bestowings, to measure the difficultly
+imaginable distance between the periodical literature of that day and
+ours. In a few words, it may be summed by saying that the ancient Annual
+was written by meekly-minded persons, who felt that they knew nothing
+about anything, and did not want to know more. Faith in the usually
+accepted principles of propriety, and confidence in the Funds, the
+Queen, the English Church, the British Army and the perennial
+continuance of England, of her Annuals, and of the creation in general,
+were necessary then for the eligibility, and important elements in the
+success, of the winter-blowing author. Whereas I suppose that the
+popularity of our present candidates for praise, at the successive
+changes of the moon, may be considered as almost proportionate to their
+confidence in the abstract principles of dissolution, the immediate
+necessity of change, and the inconvenience, no less than the iniquity,
+of attributing any authority to the Church, the Queen, the Almighty, or
+anything else but the British Press. Such constitutional differences in
+the tone of the literary contents imply still greater contrasts in the
+lives of the editors of these several periodicals. It was enough for the
+editor of the "Friendship's Offering" if he could gather for his
+Christmas bouquet a little pastoral story, suppose, by Miss Mitford, a
+dramatic sketch by the Rev. George Croly, a few sonnets or impromptu
+stanzas to music by the gentlest lovers and maidens of his acquaintance,
+and a legend of the Apennines or romance of the Pyrenees by some
+adventurous traveler who had penetrated into the recesses of their
+mountains, and would modify the traditions of the country to introduce a
+plate by Clarkson Stanfield or J. D. Harding. Whereas nowadays the
+editor of a leading monthly is responsible to his readers for exhaustive
+views of the politics of Europe during the last fortnight; and would
+think himself distanced in the race with his lunarian rivals, if his
+numbers did not contain three distinct and entirely new theories of the
+system of the universe, and at least one hitherto unobserved piece of
+evidence of the nonentity of God.
+
+4. In one respect, however, the humilities of that departed time were
+loftier than the prides of to-day--that even the most retiring of its
+authors expected to be admired, not for what he had discovered, but for
+what he was. It did not matter in our dynasties of determined noblesse
+how many things an industrious blockhead knew, or how curious things a
+lucky booby had discovered. We claimed, and gave no honor but for real
+rank of human sense and wit; and although this manner of estimate led to
+many various collateral mischiefs--to much toleration of misconduct in
+persons who were amusing, and of uselessness in those of proved ability,
+there was yet the essential and constant good in it, that no one hoped
+to snap up for himself a reputation which his friend was on the point of
+achieving, and that even the meanest envy of merit was not embittered by
+a gambler's grudge at his neighbor's fortune.
+
+5. Into this incorruptible court of literature I was early brought,
+whether by good or evil hap, I know not; certainly by no very deliberate
+wisdom in my friends or myself. A certain capacity for rhythmic cadence
+(visible enough in all my later writings) and the cheerfulness of a much
+protected, but not foolishly indulged childhood, made me early a
+rhymester; and a shelf of the little cabinet by which I am now writing
+is loaded with poetical effusions which were the delight of my father
+and mother, and I have not yet the heart to burn. A worthy Scottish
+friend of my father's, Thomas Pringle, preceded Mr. Harrison in the
+editorship of "Friendship's Offering," and doubtfully, but with
+benignant sympathy, admitted the dazzling hope that one day rhymes of
+mine might be seen in real print, on those amiable and shining pages.
+
+6. My introduction by Mr. Pringle to the poet Rogers, on the ground of
+my admiration of the recently published "Italy," proved, as far as I
+remember, slightly disappointing to the poet, because it appeared on Mr.
+Pringle's unadvised cross-examination of me in the presence that I knew
+more of the vignettes than the verses; and also slightly discouraging to
+me because, this contretemps necessitating an immediate change of
+subject, I thenceforward understood none of the conversation, and when
+we came away was rebuked by Mr. Pringle for not attending to it. Had his
+grave authority been maintained over me, my literary bloom would
+probably have been early nipped; but he passed away into the African
+deserts; and the Favonian breezes of Mr. Harrison's praise revived my
+drooping ambition.
+
+7. I know not whether most in that ambition, or to please my father, I
+now began seriously to cultivate my skill in expression. I had always an
+instinct of possessing considerable word-power; and the series of essays
+written about this time for the _Architectural Magazine_, under the
+signature of Kata Phusin, contain sentences nearly as well put together
+as any I have done since. But without Mr. Harrison's ready praise, and
+severe punctuation, I should have either tired of my labor, or lost it;
+as it was, though I shall always think those early years might have been
+better spent, they had their reward. As soon as I had anything really to
+say, I was able sufficiently to say it; and under Mr. Harrison's
+cheerful auspices, and balmy consolations of my father under adverse
+criticism, the first volume of "Modern Painters" established itself in
+public opinion, and determined the tenor of my future life.
+
+8. Thus began a friendship, and in no unreal sense, even a family
+relationship, between Mr. Harrison, my father and mother, and me, in
+which there was no alloy whatsoever of distrust or displeasure on either
+side, but which remained faithful and loving, more and more conducive to
+every sort of happiness among us, to the day of my father's death.
+
+But the joyfulest days of it for _us_, and chiefly for me, cheered with
+concurrent sympathy from other friends--of whom only one now is
+left--were in the triumphal Olympiad of years which followed the
+publication of the second volume of "Modern Painters," when Turner
+himself had given to me his thanks, to my father and mother his true
+friendship, and came always for _their_ honor, to keep my birthday with
+them; the constant dinner party of the day remaining in its perfect
+chaplet from 1844 to 1850,--Turner, Mr. Thomas Richmond, Mr. George
+Richmond, Samuel Prout, and Mr. Harrison.
+
+9. Mr. Harrison, as my literary godfather, who had held me at the Font
+of the Muses, and was answerable to the company for my moral principles
+and my syntax, always made "the speech"; my father used most often to
+answer for me in few words, but with wet eyes: (there was a general
+understanding that any good or sorrow that might come to me in literary
+life were infinitely more his) and the two Mr. Richmonds held themselves
+responsible to him for my at least moderately decent orthodoxy in art,
+taking in that matter a tenderly inquisitorial function, and warning my
+father solemnly of two dangerous heresies in the bud, and of things
+really passing the possibilities of the indulgence of the Church, said
+against Claude or Michael Angelo. The death of Turner and other things,
+far more sad than death, clouded those early days, but the memory of
+them returned again after I had well won my second victory with the
+"Stones of Venice"; and the two Mr. Richmonds, and Mr. Harrison, and my
+father, were again happy on my birthday, and so to the end.
+
+10. In a far deeper sense than he himself knew, Mr. Harrison was all
+this time influencing my thoughts and opinions, by the entire
+consistency, contentment, and practical sense of his modest life. My
+father and he were both flawless types of the true London citizen of
+olden days: incorruptible, proud with sacred and simple pride, happy in
+their function and position; putting daily their total energy into the
+detail of their business duties, and finding daily a refined and perfect
+pleasure in the hearth-side poetry of domestic life. Both of them, in
+their hearts, as romantic as girls; both of them inflexible as soldier
+recruits in any matter of probity and honor, in business or out of it;
+both of them utterly hating radical newspapers, and devoted to the House
+of Lords; my father only, it seemed to me, slightly failing in his
+loyalty to the Worshipful the Mayor and Corporation of London. This
+disrespect for civic dignity was connected in my father with some little
+gnawing of discomfort--deep down in his heart--in his own position as a
+merchant, and with timidly indulged hope that his son might one day move
+in higher spheres; whereas Mr. Harrison was entirely placid and resigned
+to the will of Providence which had appointed him his desk in the Crown
+Life Office, never in his most romantic visions projected a marriage for
+any of his daughters with a British baronet or a German count, and
+pinned his little vanities prettily and openly on his breast, like a
+nosegay, when he went out to dinner. Most especially he shone at the
+Literary Fund, where he was Registrar and had proper official relations,
+therefore, always with the Chairman, Lord Mahon, or Lord Houghton, or
+the Bishop of Winchester, or some other magnificent person of that sort,
+with whom it was Mr. Harrison's supremest felicity to exchange a not
+unfrequent little joke--like a pinch of snuff--and to indicate for them
+the shoals to be avoided and the channels to be followed with flowing
+sail in the speech of the year; after which, if perchance there were any
+malignant in the company who took objection, suppose, to the claims of
+the author last relieved, to the charity of the Society, or to any claim
+founded on the production of a tale for _Blackwood's Magazine_, and of
+two sonnets for "Friendship's Offering"; or if perchance there were any
+festering sharp thorn in Mr. Harrison's side in the shape of some
+distinguished radical, Sir Charles Dilke, or Mr. Dickens, or anybody who
+had ever said anything against taxation, or the Post Office, or the
+Court of Chancery, or the Bench of Bishops,--then would Mr. Harrison, if
+he had full faith in his Chairman, cunningly arrange with him some
+delicate little extinctive operation to be performed on that malignant
+or that radical in the course of the evening, and would relate to us
+exultingly the next day all the incidents of the power of arms, and
+vindictively (for him) dwell on the barbed points and double edge of the
+beautiful episcopalian repartee with which it was terminated.
+
+11. Very seriously, in all such public duties, Mr. Harrison was a person
+of rarest quality and worth; absolutely disinterested in his zeal,
+unwearied in exertion, always ready, never tiresome, never absurd;
+bringing practical sense, kindly discretion, and a most wholesome
+element of good-humored, but incorruptible honesty, into everything his
+hand found to do. Everybody respected, and the best men sincerely
+regarded him, and I think those who knew most of the world were always
+the first to acknowledge his fine faculty of doing exactly the right
+thing to exactly the right point--and so pleasantly. In private life, he
+was to me an object of quite special admiration, in the quantity of
+pleasure he could take in little things; and he very materially modified
+many of my gravest conclusions, as to the advantages or mischiefs of
+modern suburban life. To myself scarcely any dwelling-place and duty in
+this world would have appeared (until, perhaps, I had tried them) less
+eligible for a man of sensitive and fanciful mind than the New Road,
+Camberwell Green, and the monotonous office work in Bridge Street. And
+to a certain extent, I am still of the same mind as to these matters,
+and do altogether, and without doubt or hesitation, repudiate the
+existence of New Road and Camberwell Green in general, no less than the
+condemnation of intelligent persons to a routine of clerk's work broken
+only by a three weeks' holiday in the decline of the year. On less
+lively, fanciful, and amiable persons than my old friend, the New Road
+and the daily desk do verily exercise a degrading and much to be
+regretted influence. But Mr. Harrison brought the freshness of pastoral
+simplicity into the most faded corners of the Green, lightened with his
+cheerful heart the most leaden hours of the office, and gathered during
+his three weeks' holiday in the neighborhood, suppose, of Guildford,
+Gravesend, Broadstairs, or Rustington, more vital recreation and
+speculative philosophy than another man would have got on the grand
+tour.
+
+12. On the other hand, I, who had nothing to do all day but what I
+liked, and could wander at will among all the best beauties of the
+globe--nor that without sufficient power to see and to feel them, was
+habitually a discontented person, and frequently a weary one; and the
+reproachful thought which always rose in my mind when in that
+unconquerable listlessness of surfeit from excitement I found myself
+unable to win even a momentary pleasure from the fairest scene, was
+always: "If but Mr. Harrison were here instead of me!"
+
+13. Many and many a time I planned very seriously the beguiling of him
+over the water. But there was always something to be done in a
+hurry--something to be worked out--something to be seen, as I thought,
+only in my own quiet way. I believe if I had but had the sense to take
+my old friend with me, he would have shown me ever so much more than I
+found out by myself. But it was not to be; and year after year I went to
+grumble and mope at Venice, or Lago Maggiore; and Mr. Harrison to enjoy
+himself from morning to night at Broadstairs or Box Hill. Let me not
+speak with disdain of either. No blue languor of tideless wave is worth
+the spray and sparkle of a South-Eastern English beach, and no one will
+ever rightly enjoy the pines of the Wengern Alp who despises the boxes
+of Box Hill.
+
+Nay, I remember me of a little rapture of George Richmond himself on
+those fair slopes of sunny sward, ending in a vision of Tobit and his
+dog--no less--led up there by the helpful angel. (I have always
+wondered, by the way, whether that blessed dog minded what the angel
+said to him.)
+
+14. But Mr. Harrison was independent of these mere ethereal visions, and
+surrounded himself only with a halo of sublunary beatitude. Welcome
+always he, as on his side frankly coming to be well, with the farmer,
+the squire, the rector, the--I had like to have said, dissenting
+minister, but I think Mr. Harrison usually evaded villages for summer
+domicile which were in any wise open to suspicion of Dissent in the
+air,--but with hunting rector, and the High Church curate, and the
+rector's daughters, and the curate's mother--and the landlord of the Red
+Lion, and the hostler of the Red Lion stables, and the tapster of the
+Pig and Whistle, and all the pigs in the backyard, and all the whistlers
+in the street--whether for want of thought or for gayety of it, and all
+the geese on the common, ducks in the horse-pond, and daws in the
+steeple, Mr. Harrison was known and beloved by every bird and body of
+them before half his holiday was over, and the rest of it was mere
+exuberance of festivity about him, and applauding coronation of his head
+and heart. Above all, he delighted in the ways of animals and children.
+He wrote a birthday ode--or at least a tumble-out-of-the-nest-day
+ode--to our pet rook, Grip, which encouraged that bird in taking such
+liberties with the cook, and in addressing so many impertinences to the
+other servants, that he became the mere plague, or as the French would
+express it, the "Black-beast," of the kitchen at Denmark Hill for the
+rest of his life. There was almost always a diary kept, usually, I
+think, in rhyme, of those summer hours of indolence; and when at last it
+was recognized, in due and reverent way, at the Crown Life Office, that
+indeed the time had drawn near when its constant and faithful servant
+should be allowed to rest, it was perhaps not the least of my friend's
+praiseworthy and gentle gifts to be truly capable of rest; withdrawing
+himself into the memories of his useful and benevolent life, and making
+it truly a holiday in its honored evening. The idea then occurred to him
+(and it was now my turn to press with hearty sympathy the sometimes
+intermitted task) of writing these Reminiscences: valuable--valuable to
+whom, and for what, I begin to wonder.
+
+15. For indeed these memories are of people who are passed away like the
+snow in harvest; and now, with the sharp-sickle reapers of full shocks
+of the fattening wheat of metaphysics, and fair novelists Ruth-like in
+the fields of barley, or more mischievously coming through the
+rye,--what will the public, so vigorously sustained by these, care to
+hear of the lovely writers of old days, quaint creatures that they
+were?--Merry Miss Mitford, actually living in the country, actually
+walking in it, loving it, and finding history enough in the life of the
+butcher's boy, and romance enough in the story of the miller's daughter,
+to occupy all her mind with, innocent of troubles concerning the Turkish
+question; steady-going old Barham, confessing nobody but the Jackdaw of
+Rheims, and fearless alike of Ritualism, Darwinism, or disestablishment;
+iridescent clearness of Thomas Hood--the wildest, deepest infinity of
+marvelously jestful men; manly and rational Sydney, inevitable,
+infallible, inoffensively wise of wit;[3]--they are gone their way, and
+ours is far diverse; and they and all the less-known, yet pleasantly and
+brightly endowed spirits of that time, are suddenly as unintelligible to
+us as the Etruscans--not a feeling they had that we can share in; and
+these pictures of them will be to us valuable only as the sculpture
+under the niches far in the shade there of the old parish church, dimly
+vital images of inconceivable creatures whom we shall never see the like
+of more.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] This paper was written as a preface to a series of "Reminiscences"
+from the pen of the late Mr. W. H. Harrison, commenced in the
+_University Magazine_ of May 1878. It was separately printed in that
+magazine in the preceding month, but owing to Mr. Ruskin's illness at
+the time, he was unable to see it through the press. A letter from Mr.
+Ruskin to Mr. Harrison, printed in "Arrows of the Chace," may be found
+of interest in connection with the opening statements of this
+paper.--[ED.]
+
+[2] "Friendship's Offering" of 1835 included two poems, signed "J. R.,"
+and entitled "Saltzburg" and "Fragments from a Metrical Journal;
+Andernacht and St. Goar."--[ED.]
+
+[3] In the "Life and Times of Sydney Smith," by Stuart J. Reid (London,
+1884, p. 374), appears a letter addressed to the author by Mr. Ruskin,
+to whom the book is dedicated:--
+
+                                 "OXFORD, _Nov. 15th, 1883_.
+
+"MY DEAR SIR,--I wanted to tell you what deep respect I had for Sydney
+Smith; but my time has been cut to pieces ever since your note reached
+me. He was the first in the literary circles of London to assert the
+value of 'Modern Painters,' and he has always seemed to me equally
+keen-sighted and generous in his estimate of literary efforts. His
+'Moral Philosophy' is the only book on the subject which I care that my
+pupils should read, and there is no man (whom I have not personally
+known) whose image is so vivid in my constant affection.--Ever your
+faithful servant,
+
+                                       "JOHN RUSKIN."--[ED.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+ART.
+
+I.
+
+HISTORY AND CRITICISM.
+
+
+   LORD LINDSAY'S "CHRISTIAN ART."
+
+   (_Quarterly Review, June 1847._)
+
+   EASTLAKE'S "HISTORY OF OIL PAINTING."
+
+   (_Quarterly Review, March 1848._)
+
+   SAMUEL PROUT.
+
+   (_Art Journal, March 1849._)
+
+   SIR JOSHUA AND HOLBEIN.
+
+   (_Cornhill Magazine, March 1860._)
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+"THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ART."[4]
+
+BY LORD LINDSAY.
+
+
+16. There is, perhaps, no phenomenon connected with the history of the
+first half of the nineteenth century, which will become a subject of
+more curious investigation in after ages, than the coincident
+development of the Critical faculty, and extinction of the Arts of
+Design. Our mechanical energies, vast though they be, are not singular
+nor characteristic; such, and so great, have before been manifested--and
+it may perhaps be recorded of us with wonder rather than respect, that
+we pierced mountains and excavated valleys, only to emulate the activity
+of the gnat and the swiftness of the swallow. Our discoveries in
+science, however accelerated or comprehensive, are but the necessary
+development of the more wonderful reachings into vacancy of past
+centuries; and they who struck the piles of the bridge of Chaos will
+arrest the eyes of Futurity rather than we builders of its towers and
+gates--theirs the authority of Light, ours but the ordering of courses
+to the Sun and Moon.
+
+17. But the Negative character of the age is distinctive.
+There has not before appeared a race like that of civilized
+Europe at this day, thoughtfully unproductive of all
+art--ambitious--industrious--investigative--reflective, and incapable.
+Disdained by the savage, or scattered by the soldier, dishonored by the
+voluptuary, or forbidden by the fanatic, the arts have not, till now,
+been extinguished by analysis and paralyzed by protection. Our
+lecturers, learned in history, exhibit the descents of excellence from
+school to school, and clear from doubt the pedigrees of powers which
+they cannot re-establish, and of virtues no more to be revived: the
+scholar is early acquainted with every department of the Impossible, and
+expresses in proper terms his sense of the deficiencies of Titian and
+the errors of Michael Angelo: the metaphysician weaves from field to
+field his analogies of gossamer, which shake and glitter fairly in the
+sun, but must be torn asunder by the first plow that passes: geometry
+measures out, by line and rule, the light which is to illustrate
+heroism, and the shadow which should veil distress; and anatomy counts
+muscles, and systematizes motion, in the wrestling of Genius with its
+angel. Nor is ingenuity wanting--nor patience; apprehension was never
+more ready, nor execution more exact--yet nothing is of us, or in us,
+accomplished;--the treasures of our wealth and will are spent in
+vain--our cares are as clouds without water--our creations fruitless and
+perishable; the succeeding Age will trample "sopra lor vanita che par
+persona," and point wonderingly back to the strange colorless tessera in
+the mosaic of human mind.
+
+18. No previous example can be shown, in the career of nations not
+altogether nomad or barbarous, of so total an absence of invention,--of
+any material representation of the mind's inward yearning and desire,
+seen, as soon as shaped, to be, though imperfect, in its essence good,
+and worthy to be rested in with contentment, and consisting
+self-approval--the Sabbath of contemplation which confesses and
+confirms the majesty of a style. All but ourselves have had this in
+measure; the Imagination has stirred herself in proportion to the
+requirements, capacity, and energy of each race: reckless or pensive,
+soaring or frivolous, still she has had life and influence; sometimes
+aiming at Heaven with brick for stone and slime for mortar--anon bound
+down to painting of porcelain, and carving of ivory, but always with an
+inward consciousness of power which might indeed be palsied or
+imprisoned, but not in operation vain. Altars have been rent,
+many--ashes poured out,--hands withered--but we alone have worshiped,
+and received no answer--the pieces left in order upon the wood, and our
+names writ in the water that runs roundabout the trench.
+
+19. It is easier to conceive than to enumerate the many circumstances
+which are herein against us, necessarily, and exclusive of all that
+wisdom might avoid, or resolution vanquish. First, the weight of mere
+numbers, among whom ease of communication rather renders opposition of
+judgment fatal, than agreement probable; looking from England to Attica,
+or from Germany to Tuscany, we may remember to what good purpose it was
+said that the magnetism of iron was found not in bars, but in needles.
+Together with this adversity of number comes the likelihood of many
+among the more available intellects being held back and belated in the
+crowd, or else prematurely outwearied; for it now needs both curious
+fortune and vigorous effort to give to any, even the greatest, such
+early positions of eminence and audience as may feed their force with
+advantage; so that men spend their strength in opening circles, and
+crying for place, and only come to speech of us with broken voices and
+shortened time. Then follows the diminution of importance in peculiar
+places and public edifices, as they engage national affection or vanity;
+no single city can now take such queenly lead as that the pride of the
+whole body of the people shall be involved in adorning her; the
+buildings of London or Munich are not charged with the fullness of the
+national heart as were the domes of Pisa and Florence:--their credit or
+shame is metropolitan, not acropolitan; central at the best, not
+dominant; and this is one of the chief modes in which the cessation of
+superstition, so far as it has taken place, has been of evil consequence
+to art, that the observance of local sanctities being abolished,
+meanness and mistake are anywhere allowed of, and the thoughts and
+wealth which were devoted and expended to good purpose in one place, are
+now distracted and scattered to utter unavailableness.
+
+20. In proportion to the increasing spirituality of religion, the
+conception of worthiness in material offering ceases, and with it the
+sense of beauty in the evidence of votive labor; machine-work is
+substituted for handwork, as if the value of ornament consisted in the
+mere multiplication of agreeable forms, instead of in the evidence of
+human care and thought and love about the separate stones;
+and--machine-work once tolerated--the eye itself soon loses its sense of
+this very evidence, and no more perceives the difference between the
+blind accuracy of the engine, and the bright, strange play of the living
+stroke--a difference as great as between the form of a stone pillar and
+a springing fountain. And on this blindness follow all errors and
+abuses--hollowness and slightness of framework, speciousness of surface
+ornament, concealed structure, imitated materials, and types of form
+borrowed from things noble for things base; and all these abuses must be
+resisted with the more caution, and less success, because in many ways
+they are signs or consequences of improvement, and are associated both
+with purer forms of religious feeling and with more general diffusion of
+refinements and comforts; and especially because we are critically aware
+of all our deficiencies, too cognizant of all that is greatest to pass
+willingly and humbly through the stages that rise to it, and oppressed
+in every honest effort by the bitter sense of inferiority. In every
+previous development the power has been in advance of the consciousness,
+the resources more abundant than the knowledge--the energy irresistible,
+the discipline imperfect. The light that led was narrow and
+dim--streakings of dawn--but it fell with kindly gentleness on eyes
+newly awakened out of sleep. But we are now aroused suddenly in the
+light of an intolerable day--our limbs fail under the sunstroke--we are
+walled in by the great buildings of elder times, and their fierce
+reverberation falls upon us without pause, in our feverish and
+oppressive consciousness of captivity; we are laid bedridden at the
+Beautiful Gate, and all our hope must rest in acceptance of the "such as
+I have," of the passers by.
+
+21. The frequent and firm, yet modest expression of this hope, gives
+peculiar value to Lord Lindsay's book on Christian Art; for it is seldom
+that a grasp of antiquity so comprehensive, and a regard for it so
+affectionate, have consisted with aught but gloomy foreboding with
+respect to our own times. As a contribution to the History of Art, his
+work is unquestionably the most valuable which has yet appeared in
+England. His research has been unwearied; he has availed himself of the
+best results of German investigation--his own acuteness of discernment
+in cases of approximating or derivative style is considerable--and he
+has set before the English reader an outline of the relations of the
+primitive schools of Sacred art which we think so thoroughly verified in
+all its more important ramifications, that, with whatever richness of
+detail the labor of succeeding writers may illustrate them, the leading
+lines of Lord Lindsay's chart will always henceforth be followed. The
+feeling which pervades the whole book is chastened, serious, and full of
+reverence for the strength ordained out of the lips of infant
+Art--accepting on its own terms its simplest teaching, sympathizing with
+all kindness in its unreasoning faith; the writer evidently looking back
+with most joy and thankfulness to hours passed in gazing upon the faded
+and faint touches of feeble hands, and listening through the stillness
+of uninvaded cloisters for fall of voices now almost spent; yet he is
+never contracted into the bigot, nor inflamed into the enthusiast; he
+never loses his memory of the outside world, never quits nor compromises
+his severe and reflective Protestantism, never gives ground of offense
+by despite or forgetfulness of any order of merit or period of effort.
+And the tone of his address to our present schools is therefore neither
+scornful nor peremptory; his hope, consisting with full apprehension of
+all that we have lost, is based on a strict and stern estimate of our
+power, position, and resource, compelling the assent even of the least
+sanguine to his expectancy of the revelation of a new world of Spiritual
+Beauty, of which whosoever
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"will dedicate his talents, as the bondsman of love, to his Redeemer's
+glory and the good of mankind, may become the priest and interpreter, by
+adopting in the first instance, and re-issuing with that outward
+investiture which the assiduous study of all that is beautiful, either
+in Grecian sculpture, or the later but less spiritual schools of
+painting, has enabled him to supply, such of its bright ideas as he
+finds imprisoned in the early and imperfect efforts of art--and
+secondly, by exploring further on his own account in the untrodden
+realms of feeling that lie before him, and calling into palpable
+existence visions as bright, as pure, and as immortal as those that have
+already, in the golden days of Raphael and Perugino, obeyed their
+creative mandate, Live!" (Vol. iii., p. 422).[5]
+
+       *       *       *
+
+22. But while we thus defer to the discrimination, respect the feeling,
+and join in the hope of the author, we earnestly deprecate the frequent
+assertion, as we entirely deny the accuracy or propriety, of the
+metaphysical analogies, in accordance with which his work has unhappily
+been arranged. Though these had been as carefully, as they are crudely,
+considered, it had still been no light error of judgment to thrust them
+with dogmatism so abrupt into the forefront of a work whose purpose is
+assuredly as much to win to the truth as to demonstrate it. The writer
+has apparently forgotten that of the men to whom he must primarily look
+for the working out of his anticipations, the most part are of limited
+knowledge and inveterate habit, men dexterous in practice, idle in
+thought; many of them compelled by ill-ordered patronage into directions
+of exertion at variance with their own best impulses, and regarding
+their art only as a means of life; all of them conscious of practical
+difficulties which the critic is too apt to under-estimate, and probably
+remembering disappointments of early effort rude enough to chill the
+most earnest heart. The shallow amateurship of the circle of their
+patrons early disgusts them with theories; they shrink back to the hard
+teaching of their own industry, and would rather read the book which
+facilitated their methods than the one that rationalized their aims.
+Noble exceptions there are, and more than might be deemed; but the labor
+spent in contest with executive difficulties renders even these better
+men unapt receivers of a system which looks with little respect on such
+achievement, and shrewd discerners of the parts of such system which
+have been feebly rooted, or fancifully reared. Their attention should
+have been attracted both by clearness and kindness of promise; their
+impatience prevented by close reasoning and severe proof of every
+statement which might seem transcendental. Altogether void of such
+consideration or care, Lord Lindsay never even so much as states the
+meaning or purpose of his appeal, but, clasping his hands desperately
+over his head, disappears on the instant in an abyss of curious and
+unsupported assertions of the philosophy of human nature: reappearing
+only, like a breathless diver, in the third page, to deprecate the
+surprise of the reader whom he has never addressed, at a conviction
+which he has never stated; and again vanishing ere we can well look him
+in the face, among the frankincensed clouds of Christian mythology:
+filling the greater part of his first volume with a _resume_ of its
+symbols and traditions, yet never vouchsafing the slightest hint of the
+objects for which they are assembled, or the amount of credence with
+which he would have them regarded; and so proceeds to the historical
+portion of the book, leaving the whole theory which is its key to be
+painfully gathered from scattered passages, and in great part from the
+mere form of enumeration adopted in the preliminary chart of the
+schools; and giving as yet account only of that period to which the mere
+artist looks with least interest--while the work, even when completed,
+will be nothing more than a single pinnacle of the historical edifice
+whose ground-plan is laid in the preceding essay, "Progression by
+Antagonism":--a plan, by the author's confession, "too extensive for his
+own, or any single hand to execute," yet without the understanding of
+whose main relations it is impossible to receive the intended teaching
+of the completed portion.
+
+23. It is generally easier to plan what is beyond the reach of others
+than to execute what is within our own; and it had been well if the
+range of this introductory essay had been something less extensive, and
+its reasoning more careful. Its search after truth is honest and
+impetuous, and its results would have appeared as interesting as they
+are indeed valuable, had they but been arranged with ordinary
+perspicuity, and represented in simple terms. But the writer's evil
+genius pursues him; the demand for exertion of thought is remorseless,
+and continuous throughout, and the statements of theoretical principle
+as short, scattered, and obscure, as they are bold. We question whether
+many readers may not be utterly appalled by the aspect of an "Analysis
+of Human Nature"--the first task proposed to them by our intellectual
+Eurystheus--to be accomplished in the space of six semi-pages, followed
+in the seventh by the "Development of the Individual Man," and applied
+in the eighth to a "General Classification of Individuals": and we
+infinitely marvel that our author should have thought it unnecessary to
+support or explain a division of the mental attributes on which the
+treatment of his entire subject afterwards depends, and whose terms are
+repeated in every following page to the very dazzling of eye and
+deadening of ear (a division, we regret to say, as illogical as it is
+purposeless), otherwise than by a laconic reference to the assumptions
+of Phrenology.
+
+"The Individual Man, or Man considered by himself as an unit in
+creation, is compounded of three distinct primary elements.
+
+     1. Sense, or the animal frame, with its passions or affections;
+
+     2. Mind or Intellect;--of which the distinguishing
+     faculties--rarely, if ever, equally balanced, and by their
+     respective predominance determinative of his whole character,
+     conduct, and views of life--are,
+
+     i. Imagination, the discerner of Beauty,--
+
+     ii. Reason, the discerner of Truth,--
+
+     the former animating and informing the world of Sense or Matter,
+     the latter finding her proper home in the world of abstract or
+     immaterial existences --the former receiving the impress of things
+     Objectively, or _ab externo_, the latter impressing its own ideas
+     on them Subjectively, or _ab interno_--the former a feminine or
+     passive, the latter a masculine or active principle; and
+
+     iii. Spirit--the Moral or Immortal principle, ruling through the
+     Will, and breathed into Man by the Breath of God."--"Progression
+     by Antagonism," pp. 2, 3.
+
+
+24. On what authority does the writer assume that the moral is alone the
+_Immortal_ principle--or the only part of the human nature bestowed by
+the breath of God? Are imagination, then, and reason perishable? Is the
+Body itself? Are not all alike immortal; and when distinction is to be
+made among them, is not the first great division between their active
+and passive immortality, between the supported body and supporting
+spirit; that spirit itself afterwards rather conveniently to be
+considered as either exercising intellectual function, or receiving
+moral influence, and, both in power and passiveness, deriving its energy
+and sensibility alike from the sustaining breath of God--than actually
+divided into intellectual and moral parts? For if the distinction
+between us and the brute be the test of the nature of the living soul by
+that breath conferred, it is assuredly to be found as much in the
+imagination as in the moral principle. There is but one of the moral
+sentiments enumerated by Lord Lindsay, the sign of which is absent in
+the animal creation:--the enumeration is a bald one, but let it serve
+the turn--"Self-esteem and love of Approbation," eminent in horse and
+dog; "Firmness," not wanting either to ant or elephant; "Veneration,"
+distinct as far as the superiority of man can by brutal intellect be
+comprehended; "Hope," developed as far as its objects can be made
+visible; and "Benevolence," or Love, the highest of all, the most
+assured of all--together with all the modifications of opposite feeling,
+rage, jealousy, habitual malice, even love of mischief and comprehension
+of jest:--the one only moral sentiment wanting being that of
+responsibility to an Invisible being, or conscientiousness. But where,
+among brutes, shall we find the slightest trace of the Imaginative
+faculty, or of that discernment of beauty which our author most
+inaccurately confounds with it, or of the discipline of memory, grasping
+this or that circumstance at will, or of the still nobler foresight of,
+and respect towards, things future, except only instinctive and
+compelled?
+
+25. The fact is, that it is not in intellect added to the bodily sense,
+nor in moral sentiment superadded to the intellect, that the essential
+difference between brute and man consists: but in the elevation of all
+three to that point at which each becomes capable of communion with the
+Deity, and worthy therefore of eternal life;--the body more universal as
+an instrument--more exquisite in its sense--this last character carried
+out in the eye and ear to the perception of Beauty, in form, sound, and
+color--and herein distinctively raised above the brutal sense;
+intellect, as we have said, peculiarly separating and vast; the moral
+sentiments like in essence, but boundlessly expanded, as attached to an
+infinite object, and laboring in an infinite field: each part mortal in
+its shortcoming, immortal in the accomplishment of its perfection and
+purpose; the opposition which we at first broadly expressed as between
+body and spirit, being more strictly between the natural and spiritual
+condition of the entire creature--body natural, sown in death, body
+spiritual, raised in incorruption: Intellect natural, leading to
+skepticism; intellect spiritual, expanding into faith: Passion natural,
+suffered from things spiritual; passion spiritual, centered on things
+unseen: and the strife or antagonism which is throughout the subject of
+Lord Lindsay's proof, is not, as he has stated it, between the moral,
+intellectual, and sensual elements, but between the upward and downward
+tendencies of all three--between the spirit of Man which goeth upward,
+and the spirit of the Beast which goeth downward.
+
+26. We should not have been thus strict in our examination of these
+preliminary statements, if the question had been one of terms merely, or
+if the inaccuracy of thought had been confined to the Essay on
+Antagonism. If upon receiving a writer's terms of argument in the
+sense--however unusual or mistaken--which he chooses they should bear,
+we may without further error follow his course of thought, it is as
+unkind as unprofitable to lose the use of his result in quarrel with its
+algebraic expression; and if the reader will understand by Lord
+Lindsay's general term "Spirit" the susceptibility of right moral
+emotion, and the entire subjection of the Will to Reason; and receive
+his term "Sense" as not including the perception of Beauty either in
+sight or sound, but expressive of animal sensation only, he may follow
+without embarrassment to its close, his magnificently comprehensive
+statement of the forms of probation which the heart and faculties of man
+have undergone from the beginning of time. But it is far otherwise when
+the theory is to be applied, in all its pseudo-organization, to the
+separate departments of a particular art, and analogies the most subtle
+and speculative traced between the mental character and artistical
+choice or attainment of different races of men. Such analogies are
+always treacherous, for the amount of expression of individual mind
+which Art can convey is dependent on so many collateral circumstances,
+that it even militates against the truth of any particular system of
+interpretation that it should seem at first generally applicable, or its
+results consistent. The passages in which such interpretation has been
+attempted in the work before us, are too graceful to be regretted, nor
+is their brilliant suggestiveness otherwise than pleasing and profitable
+too, so long as it is received on its own grounds merely, and affects
+not with its uncertainty the very matter of its foundation. But all
+oscillation is communicable, and Lord Lindsay is much to be blamed for
+leaving it entirely to the reader to distinguish between the
+determination of his research and the activity of his fancy--between the
+authority of his interpretation and the aptness of his metaphor. He who
+would assert the true meaning of a symbolical art, in an age of strict
+inquiry and tardy imagination, ought rather to surrender something of
+the fullness which his own faith perceives, than expose the fabric of
+his vision, too finely woven, to the hard handling of the materialist;
+and we sincerely regret that discredit is likely to accrue to portions
+of our author's well-grounded statement of real significances, once of
+all men understood, because these are rashly blended with his own
+accidental perceptions of disputable analogy. He perpetually associates
+the present imaginative influence of Art with its ancient hieroglyphical
+teaching, and mingles fancies fit only for the framework of a sonnet,
+with the deciphered evidence which is to establish a serious point of
+history; and this the more frequently and grossly, in the endeavor to
+force every branch of his subject into illustration of the false
+division of the mental attributes which we have pointed out.
+
+27. His theory is first clearly stated in the following passage:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Man is, in the strictest sense of the word, a progressive being, and
+with many periods of inaction and retrogression, has still held, upon
+the whole, a steady course towards the great end of his existence, the
+re-union and re-harmonizing of the three elements of his being,
+dislocated by the Fall, in the service of his God. Each of these three
+elements, Sense, Intellect, and Spirit, has had its distinct development
+at three distant intervals, and in the personality of the three great
+branches of the human family. The race of Ham, giants in prowess if not
+in stature, cleared the earth of primeval forests and monsters, built
+cities, established vast empires, invented the mechanical arts, and gave
+the fullest expansion to the animal energies. After them, the Greeks,
+the elder line of Japhet, developed the intellectual faculties,
+Imagination and Reason, more especially the former, always the earlier
+to bud and blossom; poetry and fiction, history, philosophy, and
+science, alike look back to Greece as their birthplace; on the one hand
+they put a soul into Sense, peopling the world with their gay
+mythology--on the other they bequeathed to us, in Plato and Aristotle,
+the mighty patriarchs of human wisdom, the Darius and the Alexander of
+the two grand armies of thinking men whose antagonism has ever since
+divided the battlefield of the human intellect:--While, lastly, the race
+of Shem, the Jews, and the nations of Christendom, their _locum
+tenentes_ as the Spiritual Israel, have, by God's blessing, been
+elevated in Spirit to as near and intimate communion with Deity as is
+possible in this stage of being. Now the peculiar interest and dignity
+of Art consists in her exact correspondence in her three departments
+with these three periods of development, and in the illustration she
+thus affords--more closely and markedly even than literature--to the
+all-important truth that men stand or fall according as they look up to
+the Ideal or not. For example, the Architecture of Egypt, her pyramids
+and temples, cumbrous and inelegant, but imposing from their vastness
+and their gloom, express the ideal of Sense or Matter--elevated and
+purified indeed, and nearly approaching the Intellectual, but Material
+still; we think of them as of natural scenery, in association with caves
+or mountains, or vast periods of time; their voice is as the voice of
+the sea, or as that of 'many peoples,' shouting in unison:--But the
+Sculpture of Greece is the voice of Intellect and Thought, communing
+with itself in solitude, feeding on beauty and yearning after
+truth:--While the Painting of Christendom--(and we must remember that
+the glories of Christianity, in the full extent of the term, are yet to
+come)--is that of an immortal Spirit, conversing with its God. And as if
+to mark more forcibly the fact of continuous progress towards
+perfection, it is observable that although each of the three arts
+peculiarly reflects and characterizes one of the three epochs, each art
+of later growth has been preceded in its rise, progress, and decline, by
+an antecedent correspondent development of its elder sister or
+sisters--Sculpture, in Greece, by that of Architecture--Painting, in
+Europe, by that of Architecture and Sculpture. If Sculpture and Painting
+stand by the side of Architecture in Egypt, if Painting by that of
+Architecture and Sculpture in Greece, it is as younger sisters, girlish
+and unformed. In Europe alone are the three found linked together, in
+equal stature and perfection."--Vol. i, pp. xii.--xiv.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+28. The reader must, we think, at once perceive the bold fallacy of this
+forced analogy--the comparison of the architecture of one nation with
+the sculpture of another, and the painting of a third, and the
+assumption as a proof of difference in moral character, of changes
+necessarily wrought, always in the same order, by the advance of mere
+mechanical experience. Architecture must precede sculpture, not because
+sense precedes intellect, but because men must build houses before they
+adorn chambers, and raise shrines before they inaugurate idols; and
+sculpture must precede painting, because men must learn forms in the
+solid before they can project them on a flat surface, and must learn to
+conceive designs in light and shade before they can conceive them in
+color, and must learn to treat subjects under positive color and in
+narrow groups, before they can treat them under atmospheric effect and
+in receding masses, and all these are mere necessities of practice, and
+have no more connection with any divisions of the human mind than the
+equally paramount necessities that men must gather stones before they
+build walls, or grind corn before they bake bread. And that each
+following nation should take up either the same art at an advanced
+stage, or an art altogether more difficult, is nothing but the necessary
+consequence of its subsequent elevation and civilization. Whatever
+nation had succeeded Egypt in power and knowledge, after having had
+communication with her, must necessarily have taken up art at the point
+where Egypt left it--in its turn delivering the gathered globe of
+heavenly snow to the youthful energy of the nation next at hand, with an
+exhausted "a vous le de!" In order to arrive at any useful or true
+estimate of the respective rank of each people in the scale of mind, the
+architecture of each must be compared with the architecture of the
+other--sculpture with sculpture--line with line; and to have done this
+broadly and with a surface glance, would have set our author's theory on
+firmer foundation, to outward aspect, than it now rests upon. Had he
+compared the accumulation of the pyramid with the proportion of the
+peristyle, and then with the aspiration of the spire; had he set the
+colossal horror of the Sphinx beside the Phidian Minerva, and this
+beside the Pieta of M. Angelo; had he led us from beneath the iridescent
+capitals of Denderah, by the contested line of Apelles, to the hues and
+the heaven of Perugino or Bellini, we might have been tempted to
+assoilzie from all staying of question or stroke of partisan the
+invulnerable aspect of his ghostly theory; but, if, with even partial
+regard to some of the circumstances which physically limited the
+attainments of each race, we follow their individual career, we shall
+find the points of superiority less salient and the connection between
+heart and hand more embarrassed.
+
+29. Yet let us not be misunderstood:--the great gulf between Christian
+and Pagan art we cannot bridge--nor do we wish to weaken one single
+sentence wherein its breadth or depth is asserted by our author. The
+separation is not gradual, but instant and final--the difference not of
+degree, but of condition; it is the difference between the dead vapors
+rising from a stagnant pool, and the same vapors touched by a torch. But
+we would brace the weakness which Lord Lindsay has admitted in his own
+assertion of this great inflaming instant by confusing its fire with the
+mere phosphorescence of the marsh, and explaining as a successive
+development of the several human faculties, what was indeed the bearing
+of them all at once, over a threshold strewed with the fragments of
+their idols, into the temple of the One God.
+
+We shall therefore, as fully as our space admits, examine the
+application of our author's theory to Architecture, Sculpture, and
+Painting, successively, setting before the reader some of the more
+interesting passages which respect each art, while we at the same time
+mark with what degree of caution their conclusions are, in our judgment,
+to be received.
+
+30. Accepting Lord Lindsay's first reference to Egypt, let us glance at
+a few of the physical accidents which influenced its types of
+architecture. The first of these is evidently the capability of carriage
+of large blocks of stone over perfectly level land. It was possible to
+roll to their destination along that uninterrupted plain, blocks which
+could neither by the Greek have been shipped in seaworthy vessels, nor
+carried over mountain-passes, nor raised except by extraordinary effort
+to the height of the rock-built fortress or seaward promontory. A small
+undulation of surface, or embarrassment of road, makes large difference
+in the portability of masses, and of consequence, in the breadth of the
+possible intercolumniation, the solidity of the column, and the whole
+scale of the building. Again, in a hill-country, architecture can be
+important only by position, in a level country only by bulk. Under the
+overwhelming mass of mountain-form it is vain to attempt the expression
+of majesty by size of edifice--the humblest architecture may become
+important by availing itself of the power of nature, but the mightiest
+must be crushed in emulating it: the watch-towers of Amalfi are more
+majestic than the Superga of Piedmont; St. Peter's would look like a toy
+if built beneath the Alpine cliffs, which yet vouchsafe some
+communication of their own solemnity to the smallest chalet that
+glitters among their glades of pine. On the other hand, a small building
+is in a level country lost, and the impressiveness of bulk
+proportionably increased; hence the instinct of nations has always led
+them to the loftiest efforts where the masses of their labor might be
+seen looming at incalculable distance above the open line of the
+horizon--hence rose her four square mountains above the flat of Memphis,
+while the Greek pierced the recesses of Phigaleia with ranges of
+columns, or crowned the sea-cliffs of Sunium with a single pediment,
+bright, but not colossal.
+
+31. The derivation of the Greek types of form from the forest-hut is too
+direct to escape observation; but sufficient attention has not been paid
+to the similar petrifaction, by other nations, of the rude forms and
+materials adopted in the haste of early settlement, or consecrated by
+the purity of rural life. The whole system of Swiss and German Gothic
+has thus been most characteristically affected by the structure of the
+intersecting timbers at the angles of the chalet. This was in some cases
+directly and without variation imitated in stone, as in the piers of the
+old bridge at Aarburg; and the practice obtained--partially in the
+German after-Gothic--universally, or nearly so, in Switzerland--of
+causing moldings which met at an angle to appear to interpenetrate each
+other, both being truncated immediately beyond the point of
+intersection. The painfulness of this ill-judged adaptation was
+conquered by association--the eye became familiarized to uncouth forms
+of tracery--and a stiffness and meagerness, as of cast-iron, resulted in
+the moldings of much of the ecclesiastical, and all the domestic Gothic
+of central Europe; the moldings of casements intersecting so as to form
+a small hollow square at the angles, and the practice being further
+carried out into all modes of decoration--pinnacles interpenetrating
+crockets, as in a peculiarly bold design of archway at Besancon. The
+influence at Venice has been less immediate and more fortunate; it is
+with peculiar grace that the majestic form of the ducal palace reminds
+us of the years of fear and endurance when the exiles of the Prima
+Venetia settled like home-less birds on the sea-sand, and that its
+quadrangular range of marble wall and painted chamber, raised upon
+multiplied columns of confused arcade,[6] presents but the exalted image
+of the first pile-supported hut that rose above the rippling of the
+lagoons.
+
+32. In the chapter on the "Influence of Habit and Religion," of Mr.
+Hope's Historical Essay,[7] the reader will find further instances of
+the same feeling, and, bearing immediately on our present purpose, a
+clear account of the derivation of the Egyptian temple from the
+excavated cavern; but the point to which in all these cases we would
+direct especial attention, is, that the first perception of the great
+laws of architectural _proportion_ is dependent for its acuteness less
+on the aesthetic instinct of each nation than on the mechanical
+conditions of stability and natural limitations of size in the primary
+type, whether hut, chalet, or tent.
+
+As by the constant reminiscence of the natural proportions of his first
+forest-dwelling, the Greek would be restrained from all inordinate
+exaggeration of size--the Egyptian was from the first left without hint
+of any system of proportion, whether constructive, or of visible parts.
+The cavern--its level roof supported by amorphous piers--might be
+extended indefinitely into the interior of the hills, and its outer
+facade continued almost without term along their flanks--the solid mass
+of cliff above forming one gigantic entablature, poised upon props
+instead of columns. Hence the predisposition to attempt in the built
+temple the expression of infinite extent, and to heap the ponderous
+architrave above the proportionless pier.
+
+33. The less direct influences of external nature in the two countries
+were still more opposed. The sense of beauty, which among the Greek
+peninsulas was fostered by beating of sea and rush of river, by waving
+of forest and passing of cloud, by undulation of hill and poise of
+precipice, lay dormant beneath the shadowless sky and on the objectless
+plain of the Egyptians; no singing winds nor shaking leaves nor gliding
+shadows gave life to the line of their barren mountains--no Goddess of
+Beauty rose from the pacing of their silent and foamless Nile. One
+continual perception of stability, or changeless revolution, weighed
+upon their hearts--their life depended on no casual alternation of cold
+and heat--of drought and shower; their gift-Gods were the risen River
+and the eternal Sun, and the types of these were forever consecrated in
+the lotus decoration of the temple and the wedge of the enduring
+Pyramid. Add to these influences, purely physical, those dependent on
+the superstitions and political constitution; of the overflowing
+multitude of "populous No"; on their condition of prolonged peace--their
+simple habits of life--their respect for the dead--their separation by
+incommunicable privilege and inherited occupation--and it will be
+evident to the reader that Lord Lindsay's broad assertion of the
+expression of "the Ideal of Sense or Matter" by their universal style,
+must be received with severe modification, and is indeed thus far only
+true, that the mass of Life supported upon that fruitful plain could,
+when swayed by a despotic ruler in any given direction, accomplish by
+mere weight and number what to other nations had been impossible, and
+bestow a pre-eminence, owed to mere bulk and evidence of labor, upon
+public works which among the Greek republics could be rendered admirable
+only by the intelligence of their design.
+
+34. Let us, for the present omitting consideration of the debasement of
+the Greek types which took place when their cycle of achievement had
+been fulfilled, pass to the germination of Christian architecture, out
+of one of the least important elements of those fallen forms--one which,
+less than the least of all seeds, has risen into the fair branching
+stature under whose shadow we still dwell.
+
+The principal characteristics of the new architecture, as exhibited in
+the Lombard cathedral, are well sketched by Lord Lindsay:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"The three most prominent features, the eastern aspect of the sanctuary,
+the cruciform plan, and the soaring octagonal cupola, are borrowed from
+Byzantium--the latter in an improved form--the cross with a
+difference--the nave, or arm opposite the sanctuary, being lengthened so
+as to resemble the supposed shape of the actual instrument of suffering,
+and form what is now distinctively called the Latin Cross. The crypt and
+absis, or tribune, are retained from the Romish basilica, but the absis
+is generally pierced with windows, and the crypt is much loftier and
+more spacious, assuming almost the appearance of a subterranean church.
+The columns of the nave, no longer isolated, are clustered so as to form
+compound piers, massive and heavy--their capitals either a rude
+imitation of the Corinthian, or, especially in the earlier structures,
+sculptured with grotesque imagery. Triforia, or galleries for women,
+frequently line the nave and transepts. The roof is of stone, and
+vaulted. The narthex, or portico, for excluded penitents, common alike
+to the Greek and Roman churches, and in them continued along the whole
+facade of entrance, is dispensed with altogether in the oldest Lombard
+ones, and when afterwards resumed, in the eleventh century, was
+restricted to what we should now call Porches, over each door,
+consisting generally of little more than a canopy open at the sides, and
+supported by slender pillars, resting on sculptured monsters. Three
+doors admit from the western front; these are generally covered with
+sculpture, which frequently extends in belts across the facade, and even
+along the sides of the building. Above the central door is usually seen,
+in the later Lombard churches, a S. Catherine's-wheel window. The roof
+slants at the sides, and ends in front sometimes in a single pediment,
+sometimes in three gables answering to three doors; while, in Lombardy
+at least, hundreds of slender pillars, of every form and device--those
+immediately adjacent to each other frequently interlaced in the true
+lover's knot, and all supporting round or trefoliate arches--run along,
+in continuous galleries, under the eaves, as if for the purpose of
+supporting the roof--run up the pediment in front, are continued along
+the side-walls and round the eastern absis, and finally engirdle the
+cupola. Sometimes the western front is absolutely covered with these
+galleries, rising tier above tier. Though introduced merely for
+ornament, and therefore on a vicious principle, these fairy-like
+colonnades win very much on one's affections. I may add to these general
+features the occasional and rare one, seen to peculiar advantage in the
+cathedral of Cremona, of numerous slender towers, rising, like minarets,
+in every direction, in front and behind, and giving the east end,
+specially, a marked resemblance to the mosques of the Mahometans.
+
+"The Baptistery and the Campanile, or bell-tower, are in theory
+invariable adjuncts to the Lombard cathedral, although detached from it.
+The Lombards seem to have built them with peculiar zest, and to have had
+a keen eye for the picturesque in grouping them with the churches they
+belong to.
+
+"I need scarcely add that the round arch is exclusively employed in pure
+Lombard architecture.
+
+"To translate this new style into its symbolical language is a
+pleasurable task. The three doors and three gable ends signify the
+Trinity, the Catherine-wheel window (if I mistake not) the Unity, as
+concentrated in Christ, the Light of the Church, from whose Greek
+monogram its shape was probably adopted. The monsters that support the
+pillars of the porch stand there as talismans to frighten away evil
+spirits. The crypt (as in older buildings) signifies the moral death of
+man, the cross, the atonement, the cupola heaven; and these three,
+taken in conjunction with the lengthened nave, express, reconcile, and
+give their due and balanced prominence to the leading ideas of the
+Militant and Triumphant Church, respectively embodied in the
+architecture of Rome and Byzantium. Add to this, the symbolism of the
+Baptistery, and the Christian pilgrimage, from the Font to the Door of
+Heaven, is complete,"--Vol. ii., p. 8-11.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+35. We have by-and-bye an equally comprehensive sketch of the essential
+characters of the Gothic cathedral; but this we need not quote, as it
+probably contains little that would be new to the reader. It is
+succeeded by the following interpretation of the spirit of the two
+styles:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Comparing, apart from enthusiasm, the two styles of Lombard and Pointed
+Architecture, they will strike you, I think, as the expression,
+respectively, of that alternate repose and activity which characterize
+the Christian life, exhibited in perfect harmony in Christ alone, who,
+on earth, spent His night in prayer to God, His day in doing good to
+man--in heaven, as we know by His own testimony, 'worketh hitherto,'
+conjointly with the Father--forever, at the same time, reposing on the
+infinity of His wisdom and of His power. Each, then, of these styles has
+its peculiar significance, each is perfect in its way. The Lombard
+Architecture, with its horizontal lines, its circular arches and
+expanding cupola, soothes and calms one; the Gothic, with its pointed
+arches, aspiring vaults and intricate tracery, rouses and excites--and
+why? Because the one symbolizes an infinity of Rest, the other of
+Action, in the adoration and service of God. And this consideration will
+enable us to advance a step farther:--The aim of the one style is
+definite, of the other indefinite; we look up to the dome of heaven and
+calmly acquiesce in the abstract idea of infinity; but we only realize
+the impossibility of conceiving it by the flight of imagination from
+star to star, from firmament to firmament. Even so Lombard Architecture
+attained perfection, expressed its idea, accomplished its purpose--but
+Gothic never; the Ideal is unapproachable."--Vol. ii., p. 23.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+36. This idea occurs not only in this passage:--it is carried out
+through the following chapters;--at page 38, the pointed arch associated
+with the cupola is spoken of as a "fop interrupting the meditations of a
+philosopher"; at page 65, the "earlier contemplative style of the
+Lombards" is spoken of; at page 114, Giottesque art is "the expression
+of that Activity of the Imagination which produced Gothic Architecture";
+and, throughout, the analogy is prettily expressed, and ably supported;
+yet it is one of those against which we must warn the reader: it is
+altogether superficial, and extends not to the minds of those whose
+works it accidentally, and we think disputably, characterizes. The
+transition from Romanesque (we prefer using the generic term) to Gothic
+is natural and straightforward, in many points traceable to mechanical
+and local necessities (of which one, the dangerous weight of snow on
+flat roofs, has been candidly acknowledged by our author), and directed
+by the tendency, common to humanity in all ages, to push every
+newly-discovered means of delight to its most fantastic extreme, to
+exhibit every newly-felt power in its most admirable achievement, and to
+load with intrinsic decoration forms whose essential varieties have been
+exhausted. The arch, carelessly struck out by the Etruscan, forced by
+mechanical expediencies on the unwilling, uninventive Roman, remained
+unfelt by either. The noble form of the apparent Vault of Heaven--the
+line which every star follows in its journeying, extricated by the
+Christian architect from the fosse, the aqueduct, and the sudarium--grew
+into long succession of proportioned colonnade, and swelled into the
+white domes that glitter above the plain of Pisa, and fretted channels
+of Venice, like foam globes at rest.
+
+37. But the spirit that was in these Aphrodites of the earth was not
+then, nor in them, to be restrained. Colonnade rose over colonnade; the
+pediment of the western front was lifted into a detached and scenic
+wall; story above story sprang the multiplied arches of the Campanile,
+and the eastern pyramidal fire-type, lifted from its foundation, was
+placed upon the summit. With the superimposed arcades of the principal
+front arose the necessity, instantly felt by their subtle architects, of
+a new proportion in the column; the lower wall inclosure, necessarily
+for the purposes of Christian worship continuous, and needing no
+peristyle, rendered the lower columns a mere facial decoration, whose
+proportions were evidently no more to be regulated by the laws hitherto
+observed in detached colonnades. The column expanded into the shaft, or
+into the huge pilaster rising unbanded from tier to tier; shaft and
+pilaster were associated in ordered groups, and the ideas of singleness
+and limited elevation once attached to them, swept away for ever; the
+stilted and variously centered arch existed already: the pure ogive
+followed--where first exhibited we stay not to inquire;--finally, and
+chief of all, the great mechanical discovery of the resistance of
+lateral pressure by the weight of the superimposed flanking pinnacle.
+Daring concentrations of pressure upon narrow piers were the immediate
+consequence, and the recognition of the buttress as a feature in itself
+agreeable and susceptible of decoration. The glorious art of painting on
+glass added its temptations; the darkness of northern climes both
+rendering the typical character of Light more deeply felt than in Italy,
+and necessitating its admission in larger masses; the Italian, even at
+the period of his most exquisite art in glass, retaining the small
+Lombard window, whose expediency will hardly be doubted by anyone who
+has experienced the transition from the scorching reverberation of the
+white-hot marble front, to the cool depth of shade within, and whose
+beauty will not be soon forgotten by those who have seen the narrow
+lights of the Pisan duomo announce by their redder burning, not like
+transparent casements, but like characters of fire searing the western
+wall, the decline of day upon Capraja.
+
+38. Here, then, arose one great distinction between Northern and
+Transalpine Gothic, based, be it still observed, on mere necessities of
+climate. While the architect of Santa Maria Novella admitted to the
+frescoes of Ghirlandajo scarcely more of purple lancet light than had
+been shed by the morning sun through the veined alabasters of San
+Miniato; and looked to the rich blue of the quinquipartite vault above,
+as to the mosaic of the older concha, for conspicuous aid in the color
+decoration of the whole; the northern builder burst through the walls of
+his apse, poured over the eastern altar one unbroken blaze, and lifting
+his shafts like pines, and his walls like precipices, ministered to
+their miraculous stability by an infinite phalanx of sloped buttress and
+glittering pinnacle. The spire was the natural consummation. Internally,
+the sublimity of space in the cupola had been superseded by another kind
+of infinity in the prolongation of the nave; externally, the spherical
+surface had been proved, by the futility of Arabian efforts, incapable
+of decoration; its majesty depended on its simplicity, and its
+simplicity and leading forms were alike discordant with the rich
+rigidity of the body of the building. The campanile became, therefore,
+principal and central; its pyramidal termination was surrounded at the
+base by a group of pinnacles, and the spire itself, banded, or pierced
+into aerial tracery, crowned with its last enthusiastic effort the
+flamelike ascent of the perfect pile.
+
+39. The process of change was thus consistent throughout, though at
+intervals accelerated by the sudden discovery of resource, or invention
+of design; nor, had the steps been less traceable, do we think the
+suggestiveness of Repose, in the earlier style, or of Imaginative
+Activity in the latter, definite or trustworthy. We much question
+whether the Duomo of Verona, with its advanced guard of haughty
+gryphons--the mailed peers of Charlemagne frowning from its vaulted
+gate,--that vault itself ribbed with variegated marbles, and peopled by
+a crowd of monsters---the Evangelical types not the least stern or
+strange; its stringcourses replaced by flat cut friezes, combats between
+gryphons and chain-clad paladins, stooping behind their triangular
+shields and fetching sweeping blows with two-handled swords; or that of
+Lucca--its fantastic columns clasped by writhing snakes and winged
+dragons, their marble scales spotted with inlaid serpentine, every
+available space alive with troops of dwarfish riders, with spur on heel
+and hawk in hood, sounding huge trumpets of chase, like those of the
+Swiss Urus-horn, and cheering herds of gaping dogs upon harts and hares,
+boars and wolves, every stone signed with its grisly beast--be one whit
+more soothing to the contemplative, or less exciting to the imaginative
+faculties, than the successive arch? and visionary shaft, and dreamy
+vault, and crisped foliage, and colorless stone, of our own fair abbeys,
+checkered with sunshine through the depth of ancient branches, or seen
+far off, like clouds in the valley, risen out of the pause of its river.
+
+40. And with respect to the more fitful and fantastic expression of the
+"Italian Gothic," our author is again to be blamed for his loose
+assumption, from the least reflecting of preceding writers, of this
+general term, as if the pointed buildings of Italy could in any wise be
+arranged in one class, or criticised in general terms. It is true that
+so far as the church interiors are concerned, the system is nearly
+universal, and always bad; its characteristic features being arches of
+enormous span, and banded foliage capitals divided into three fillets,
+rude in design, unsuggestive of any structural connection with the
+column, and looking consequently as if they might be slipped up or down,
+and had been only fastened in their places for the temporary purposes of
+a festa. But the exteriors of Italian pointed buildings display
+variations of principle and transitions of type quite as bold as either
+the advance from the Romanesque to the earliest of their forms, or the
+recoil from their latest to the cinque-cento.
+
+41. The first and grandest style resulted merely from the application of
+the pointed arch to the frequent Romanesque window, the large
+semicircular arch divided by three small ones. Pointing both the
+superior and inferior arches, and adding to the grace of the larger one
+by striking another arch above it with a more removed center, and
+placing the voussoirs at an acute angle to the curve, we have the truly
+noble form of domestic Gothic, which--more or less enriched by moldings
+and adorned by penetration, more or less open of the space between the
+including and inferior arches--was immediately adopted in almost all the
+proudest palaces of North Italy--in the Brolettos of Como, Bergamo,
+Modena, and Siena---in the palace of the Scaligers at Verona--of the
+Gambacorti at Pisa--of Paolo Guinigi at Lucca--besides inferior
+buildings innumerable:--nor is there any form of civil Gothic except the
+Venetian, which can be for a moment compared with it in simplicity or
+power. The latest is that most vicious and barbarous style of which the
+richest types are the lateral porches and upper pinnacles of the
+Cathedral of Como, and the whole of the Certosa of Pavia:--characterized
+by the imitative sculpture of large buildings on a small scale by way of
+pinnacles and niches; the substitution of candelabra for columns; and
+the covering of the surfaces with sculpture, often of classical subject,
+in high relief and daring perspective, and finished with delicacy which
+rather would demand preservation in a cabinet, and exhibition under a
+lens, than admit of exposure to the weather and removal from the eye,
+and which, therefore, architecturally considered, is worse than
+valueless, telling merely as unseemly roughness and rustication. But
+between these two extremes are varieties nearly countless--some of them
+both strange and bold, owing to the brilliant color and firm texture of
+the accessible materials, and the desire of the builders to crowd the
+greatest expression of value into the smallest space.
+
+42. Thus it is in the promontories of serpentine which meet with their
+polished and gloomy green the sweep of the Gulf of Genoa, that we find
+the first cause of the peculiar spirit of the Tuscan and Ligurian
+Gothic--carried out in the Florentine duomo to the highest pitch of
+colored finish--adorned in the upper story of the Campanile by a
+transformation, peculiarly rich and exquisite, of the narrowly-pierced
+heading of window already described, into a veil of tracery--and aided
+throughout by an accomplished precision of design in its moldings which
+we believe to be unique. In St. Petronio of Bologna, another and a
+barbarous type occurs; the hollow niche of Northern Gothic wrought out
+with diamond-shaped penetrations inclosed in squares; at Bergamo
+another, remarkable for the same square penetrations of its rich and
+daring foliation;--while at Monza and Carrara the square is adopted as
+the leading form of decoration on the west fronts, and a grotesque
+expression results--barbarous still;--which, however, in the latter
+duomo is associated with the arcade of slender niches--the translation
+of the Romanesque arcade into pointed work, which forms the second
+perfect order of Italian Gothic, entirely ecclesiastical, and well
+developed in the churches of Santa Caterina and Santa Maria della Spina
+at Pisa. The Veronese Gothic, distinguished by the extreme purity and
+severity of its ruling lines, owing to the distance of the centers of
+circles from which its cusps are struck, forms another, and yet a more
+noble school--and passes through the richer decoration of Padua and
+Vicenza to the full magnificence of the Venetian--distinguished by the
+introduction of the ogee curve without pruriency or effeminacy, and by
+the breadth and decision of moldings as severely determined in all
+examples of the style as those of any one of the Greek orders.
+
+43. All these groups are separated by distinctions clear and bold--and
+many of them by that broadest of all distinctions which lies between
+disorganization and consistency--accumulation and adaptation, experiment
+and design;--yet to all one or two principles are common, which again
+divide the whole series from that of the Transalpine Gothic--and whose
+importance Lord Lindsay too lightly passes over in the general
+description, couched in somewhat ungraceful terms, "the vertical
+principle snubbed, as it were, by the horizontal." We have already
+alluded to the great school of color which arose in the immediate
+neighborhood of the Genoa serpentine. The accessibility of marble
+throughout North Italy similarly modified the aim of all design, by the
+admission of undecorated surfaces. A blank space of freestone wall is
+always uninteresting, and sometimes offensive; there is no suggestion of
+preciousness in its dull color, and the stains and rents of time upon it
+are dark, coarse, and gloomy. But a marble surface receives in its age
+hues of continually increasing glow and grandeur; its stains are never
+foul nor dim; its undecomposing surface preserves a soft, fruit-like
+polish forever, slowly flushed by the maturing suns of centuries. Hence,
+while in the Northern Gothic the effort of the architect was always so
+to diffuse his ornament as to prevent the eye from permanently resting
+on the blank material, the Italian fearlessly left fallow large fields
+of uncarved surface, and concentrated the labor of the chisel on
+detached portions, in which the eye, being rather directed to them by
+their isolation than attracted by their salience, required perfect
+finish and pure design rather than force of shade or breadth of parts;
+and further, the intensity of Italian sunshine articulated by perfect
+gradations, and defined by sharp shadows at the edge, such inner anatomy
+and minuteness of outline as would have been utterly vain and valueless
+under the gloom of a northern sky; while again the fineness of material
+both admitted of, and allured to, the precision of execution which the
+climate was calculated to exhibit.
+
+44. All these influences working together, and with them that of
+classical example and tradition, induced a delicacy of expression, a
+slightness of salience, a carefulness of touch, and refinement of
+invention, in all, even the rudest, Italian decorations, utterly
+unrecognized in those of Northern Gothic: which, however picturesquely
+adapted to their place and purpose, depend for most of their effect upon
+bold undercutting, accomplish little beyond graceful embarrassment of
+the eye, and cannot for an instant be separately regarded as works of
+accomplished art. Even the later and more imitative examples profess
+little more than picturesque vigor or ingenious intricacy. The oak
+leaves and acorns of the Beauvais moldings are superbly wreathed, but
+rigidly repeated in a constant pattern; the stems are without character,
+and the acorns huge, straight, blunt, and unsightly. Round the southern
+door of the Florentine duomo runs a border of fig-leaves, each leaf
+modulated as if dew had just dried from off it--yet each alike, so as to
+secure the ordered symmetry of classical enrichment. But the Gothic
+fullness of thought is not therefore left without expression; at the
+edge of each leaf is an animal, first a cicala, then a lizard, then a
+bird, moth, serpent, snail--all different, and each wrought to the very
+life--panting--plumy--writhing--glittering--full of breath and power.
+This harmony of classical restraint with exhaustless fancy, and of
+architectural propriety with imitative finish, is found throughout all
+the fine periods of the Italian Gothic, opposed to the wildness without
+invention, and exuberance without completion, of the North.
+
+45. One other distinction we must notice, in the treatment of the Niche
+and its accessories. In Northern Gothic the niche frequently consists
+only of a bracket and canopy--the latter attached to the wall,
+independent of columnar support, pierced into openwork profusely rich,
+and often prolonged upwards into a crocketed pinnacle of indefinite
+height. But in the niche of pure Italian Gothic the classic principle of
+columnar support is never lost sight of. Even when its canopy is
+actually supported by the wall behind, it is apparently supported by two
+columns in front, perfectly formed with bases and capitals:--(the
+support of the Northern niche--if it have any--commonly takes the form
+of a buttress):--when it appears as a detached pinnacle, it is supported
+on four columns, the canopy trefoliated with very obtuse cusps, richly
+charged with foliage in the foliating space, but undecorated at the cusp
+points, and terminating above in a smooth pyramid, void of all ornament,
+and never very acute. This form, modified only by various grouping, is
+that of the noble sepulchral monuments of Verona, Lucca, Pisa, and
+Bologna; on a small scale it is at Venice associated with the cupola,
+in St. Mark's, as well as in Santa Fosca, and other minor churches. At
+Pisa, in the Spina chapel it occurs in its most exquisite form, the
+columns there being chased with checker patterns of great elegance. The
+windows of the Florence cathedral are all placed under a flat canopy of
+the same form, the columns being elongated, twisted, and enriched with
+mosaic patterns. The reader must at once perceive how vast is the
+importance of the difference in system with respect to this member; the
+whole of the rich, cavernous chiaroscuro of Northern Gothic being
+dependent on the accumulation of its niches.
+
+46. In passing to the examination of our Author's theory as tested by
+the progress of Sculpture, we are still struck by his utter want of
+attention to physical advantages or difficulties. He seems to have
+forgotten from the first, that the mountains of Syene are not the rocks
+of Paros. Neither the social habits nor intellectual powers of the Greek
+had so much share in inducing his advance in Sculpture beyond the
+Egyptian, as the difference between marble and syenite, porphyry or
+alabaster. Marble not only gave the power, it actually introduced the
+_thought_ of representation or realization of form, as opposed to the
+mere suggestive abstraction: its translucency, tenderness of surface,
+and equality of tint tempting by utmost reward to the finish which of
+all substances it alone admits:--even ivory receiving not so delicately,
+as alabaster endures not so firmly, the lightest, latest touches of the
+completing chisel. The finer feeling of the hand cannot be put upon a
+hard rock like syenite--the blow must be firm and fearless--the
+traceless, tremulous difference between common and immortal sculpture
+cannot be set upon it--it cannot receive the enchanted strokes which,
+like Aaron's incense, separate the Living and the Dead. Were it
+otherwise, were finish possible, the variegated and lustrous surface
+would not exhibit it to the eye. The imagination itself is blunted by
+the resistance of the material, and by the necessity of absolute
+predetermination of all it would achieve. Retraction of all thought into
+determined and simple forms, such as might be fearlessly wrought,
+necessarily remained the characteristic of the school. The size of the
+edifice induced by other causes above stated, further limited the
+efforts of the sculptor. No colossal figure can be minutely finished;
+nor can it easily be conceived except under an imperfect form. It is a
+representation of Impossibility, and every effort at completion adds to
+the monstrous sense of Impossibility. Space would altogether fail us
+were we even to name one-half of the circumstances which influence the
+treatment of light and shade to be seen at vast distances upon surfaces
+of variegated or dusky color; or of the necessities by which, in masses
+of huge proportion, the mere laws of gravity, and the difficulty of
+clearing the substance out of vast hollows neither to be reached nor
+entered, bind the realization of absolute form. Yet all these Lord
+Lindsay ought rigidly to have examined, before venturing to determine
+anything respecting the mental relations of the Greek and Egyptian. But
+the fact of his overlooking these inevitablenesses of material is
+intimately connected with the worst flaw of his theory--his idea of a
+Perfection resultant from a balance of elements; a perfection which all
+experience has shown to be neither desirable nor possible.
+
+47. His account of Niccola Pisano, the founder of the first great school
+of middle age sculpture, is thus introduced:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Niccola's peculiar praise is this,--that, in practice at least, if not
+in theory, he first established the principle that the study of nature,
+corrected by the ideal of the antique, and animated by the spirit of
+Christianity, personal and social, can alone lead to excellence in
+art:--each of the three elements of human nature--Matter, Mind, and
+Spirit--being thus brought into union and co-operation in the service of
+God, in due relative harmony and subordination. I cannot over-estimate
+the importance of this principle; it was on this that, consciously or
+unconsciously, Niccola himself worked--it has been by following it that
+Donatello and Ghiberti, Leonardo, Raphael, and Michael Angelo have
+risen to glory. The Sienese school and the Florentine, minds
+contemplative and dramatic, are alike beholden to it for whatever
+success has attended their efforts. Like a treble-stranded rope, it
+drags after it the triumphal car of Christian Art. But if either of the
+strands be broken, if either of the three elements be pursued
+disjointedly from the other two, the result is, in each respective case,
+grossness, pedantry, or weakness:--the exclusive imitation of Nature
+produces a Caravaggio, a Rubens, a Rembrandt--that of the Antique, a
+Pellegrino di Tibaldo and a David; and though there be a native chastity
+and taste in religion, which restrains those who worship it too
+abstractedly from Intellect and Sense, from running into such extremes,
+it cannot at least supply that mechanical apparatus which will enable
+them to soar:--such devotees must be content to gaze up into heaven,
+like angels cropt of their wings."--Vol. ii., p. 102-3.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+48. This is mere Bolognese eclecticism in other terms, and those terms
+incorrect. We are amazed to find a writer usually thoughtful, if not
+accurate, thus indolently adopting the worn-out falsities of our weakest
+writers on Taste. Does he--can he for an instant suppose that the
+ruffian Caravaggio, distinguished only by his preference of candlelight
+and black shadows for the illustration and re-enforcement of villainy,
+painted nature--mere nature--exclusive nature, more painfully or
+heartily than John Bellini or Raphael? Does he not see that whatever men
+imitate must be nature of some kind, material nature or spiritual,
+lovely or foul, brutal or human, but nature still? Does he himself see
+in mere, external, copyable nature, no more than Caravaggio saw, or in
+the Antique no more than has been comprehended by David? The fact is,
+that all artists are primarily divided into the two great groups of
+Imitators and Suggesters--their falling into one or other being
+dependent partly on disposition, and partly on the matter they have to
+subdue--(thus Perugino imitates line by line with penciled gold, the
+hair which Nino Pisano can only suggest by a gilded marble mass, both
+having the will of representation alike). And each of these classes is
+again divided into the faithful and unfaithful imitators and suggesters;
+and that is a broad question of blind eye and hard heart, or seeing eye
+and serious heart, always co-existent; and then the faithful imitators
+and suggesters--artists proper, are appointed, each with his peculiar
+gift and affection, over the several orders and classes of things
+natural, to be by them illumined and set forth.
+
+49. And that is God's doing and distributing; and none is rashly to be
+thought inferior to another, as if by his own fault; nor any of them
+stimulated to emulation, and changing places with others, although their
+allotted tasks be of different dignities, and their granted instruments
+of different keenness; for in none of them can there be a perfection or
+balance of all human attributes;--the great colorist becomes gradually
+insensible to the refinements of form which he at first intentionally
+omitted; the master of line is inevitably dead to many of the delights
+of color; the study of the true or ideal human form is inconsistent with
+the love of its most spiritual expressions. To one it is intrusted to
+record the historical realities of his age; in him the perception of
+character is subtle, and that of abstract beauty in measure diminished;
+to another, removed to the desert, or inclosed in the cloister, is
+given, not the noting of things transient, but the revealing of things
+eternal. Ghirlandajo and Titian painted men, but could not angels;
+Duccio and Angelico painted Saints, but could not senators. One is
+ordered to copy material form lovingly and slowly--his the fine finger
+and patient will: to another are sent visions and dreams upon the
+bed--his the hand fearful and swift, and impulse of passion irregular
+and wild. We may have occasion further to insist upon this great
+principle of the incommunicableness and singleness of all the highest
+powers; but we assert it here especially, in opposition to the idea,
+already so fatal to art, that either the aim of the antique may take
+place together with the purposes, or its traditions become elevatory of
+the power, of Christian art; or that the glories of Giotto and the
+Sienese are in any wise traceable through Niccola Pisano to the
+venerable relics of the Campo Santo.
+
+50. Lord Lindsay's statement, as far as it regards Niccola himself, is
+true.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"His improvement in Sculpture is attributable, in the first instance, to
+the study of an ancient sarcophagus, brought from Greece by the ships of
+Pisa in the eleventh century, and which, after having stood beside the
+door of the Duomo for many centuries as the tomb of the Countess
+Beatrice, mother of the celebrated Matilda, has been recently removed to
+the Campo Santo. The front is sculptured in bas-relief, in two
+compartments, the one representing Hippolytus rejecting the suit of
+Phaedra, the other his departure for the chase:--such at least is the
+most plausible interpretation. The sculpture, if not super-excellent, is
+substantially good, and the benefit derived from it by Niccola is
+perceptible on the slightest examination of his works. Other remains of
+antiquity are preserved at Pisa, which he may have also studied, but
+this was the classic well from which he drew those waters which became
+wine when poured into the hallowing chalice of Christianity. I need
+scarcely add that the mere presence of such models would have availed
+little, had not nature endowed him with the quick eye and the intuitive
+apprehension of genius, together with a purity of taste which taught him
+how to select, how to modify and how to reinspire the germs of
+excellence thus presented to him."--Vol. ii., pp. 104, 105.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+51. But whatever characters peculiarly classical were impressed upon
+Niccola by this study, died out gradually among his scholars; and in
+Orcagna the Byzantine manner finally triumphed, leading the way to the
+purely Christian sculpture of the school of Fiesole, in its turn swept
+away by the returning wave of classicalism. The sculpture of Orcagna,
+Giotto, and Mino da Fiesole, would have been what it was, if Niccola had
+been buried in his sarcophagus; and this is sufficiently proved by
+Giotto's remaining entirely uninfluenced by the educated excellence of
+Andrea Pisano, while he gradually bent the Pisan down to his own
+uncompromising simplicity. If, as Lord Lindsay asserts, "Giotto had
+learned from the works of Niccola the grand principle of Christian art,"
+the sculptures of the Campanile of Florence would not now have stood
+forth in contrasted awfulness of simplicity, beside those of the south
+door of the Baptistery.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+52. "Andrea's merit was indeed very great; his works, compared with
+those of Giovanni and Niccola Pisano, exhibit a progress in design,
+grace, composition and mechanical execution, at first sight
+unaccountable--a chasm yawns between them, deep and broad, over which
+the younger artist seems to have leapt at a bound,--the stream that sank
+into the earth at Pisa emerges a river at Florence. The solution of the
+mystery lies in the peculiar plasticity of Andrea's genius, and the
+ascendency acquired over it by Giotto, although a younger man, from the
+first moment they came into contact. Giotto had learnt from the works of
+Niccola the grand principle of Christian art, imperfectly apprehended by
+Giovanni and his other pupils, and by following up which he had in the
+natural course of things improved upon his prototype. He now repaid to
+Sculpture, in the person of Andrea, the sum of improvement in which he
+stood her debtor in that of Niccola:--so far, that is to say, as the
+treasury of Andrea's mind was capable of taking it in, for it would be
+an error to suppose that Andrea profited by Giotto in the same
+independent manner or degree that Giotto profited by Niccola. Andrea's
+was not a mind of strong individuality; he became completely Giottesque
+in thought and style, and as Giotto and he continued intimate friends
+through life, the impression never wore off:--most fortunate, indeed,
+that it was so, for the welfare of Sculpture in general, and for that
+of the buildings in decorating which the friends worked in concert.
+
+"Happily, Andrea's most important work, the bronze door of the
+Baptistery, still exists, and with every prospect of preservation. It is
+adorned with bas-reliefs from the history of S. John, with allegorical
+figures of virtues and heads of prophets, all most beautiful,--the
+historical compositions distinguished by simplicity and purity of
+feeling and design, the allegorical virtues perhaps still more
+expressive, and full of poetry in their symbols and attitudes; the whole
+series is executed with a delicacy of workmanship till then unknown in
+bronze, a precision yet softness of touch resembling that of a skillful
+performer on the pianoforte. Andrea was occupied upon it for nine years,
+from 1330 to 1339, and when finished, fixed in its place, and exposed to
+view, the public enthusiasm exceeded all bounds; the Signoria, with
+unexampled condescension, visited it in state, accompanied by the
+ambassadors of Naples and Sicily, and bestowed on the fortunate artist
+the honor and privilege of citizenship, seldom accorded to foreigners
+unless of lofty rank or exalted merit. The door remained in its original
+position--facing the Cathedral--till superseded in that post of honor by
+the 'Gate of Paradise,' cast by Ghiberti. It was then transferred to the
+Southern entrance of the Baptistery, facing the Misericordia."--Vol.
+ii., pp. 125-128.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+53. A few pages farther on, the question of _Giotto's_ claim to the
+authorship of the designs for this door is discussed at length, and, to
+the annihilation of the honor here attributed to _Andrea_, determined
+affirmatively, partly on the testimony of Vasari, partly on internal
+evidence--these designs being asserted by our author to be "thoroughly
+Giottesque." But, not to dwell on Lord Lindsay's inconsistency, in the
+ultimate decision his discrimination seems to us utterly at fault.
+Giotto has, we conceive, suffered quite enough in the abduction of the
+work in the Campo Santo, which was worthy of him, without being made
+answerable for these designs of Andrea. That he gave a rough draft of
+many of them, is conceivable; but if even he did this, Andrea has added
+cadenzas of drapery, and other scholarly commonplace, as a bad singer
+puts ornament into an air. It was not of such teaching that came the
+"Jabal" of Giotto. Sitting at his tent door, he withdraws its rude
+drapery with one hand: three sheep only are feeding before him, the
+watchdog sitting beside them; but he looks forth like a Destiny,
+beholding the ruined cities of the earth become places, like the valley
+of Achor, for herds to lie down in.
+
+54. We have not space to follow our author through his very interesting
+investigation of the comparatively unknown schools of Teutonic
+sculpture. With one beautiful anecdote, breathing the whole spirit of
+the time--the mingling of deep piety with the modest, manly pride of
+art--our readers must be indulged:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"The Florentine Ghiberti gives a most interesting account of a sculptor
+of Cologne in the employment of Charles of Anjou, King of Naples, whose
+skill he parallels with that of the statuaries of ancient Greece; his
+heads, he says, and his design of the naked, were 'maravigliosamente
+bene,' his style full of grace, his sole defect the somewhat curtailed
+stature of his figures. He was no less excellent in minuter works as a
+goldsmith, and in that capacity had worked for his patron a 'tavola
+d'oro,' a tablet or screen (apparently) of gold, with his utmost care
+and skill; it was a work of exceeding beauty--but in some political
+exigency his patron wanted money, and it was broken up before his eyes.
+Seeing his labor vain and the pride of his heart rebuked, he threw
+himself on the ground, and uplifting his eyes and hands to heaven,
+prayed in contrition, 'Lord God Almighty, Governor and disposer of
+heaven and earth! Thou hast opened mine eyes that I follow from
+henceforth none other than Thee--Have mercy upon me!'--He forthwith gave
+all he had to the poor for the love of God, and went up into a mountain
+where there was a great hermitage, and dwelt there the rest of his days
+in penitence and sanctity, surviving down to the days of Pope Martin,
+who reigned from 1281 to 1284. 'Certain youths,' adds Ghiberti, 'who
+sought to be skilled in statuary, told me how he was versed both in
+painting and sculpture, and how he had painted in the Romitorio where he
+lived; he was an excellent draughtsman and very courteous. When the
+youths who wished to improve visited him, he received them with much
+humility, giving them learned instructions, showing them various
+proportions, and drawing for them many examples, for he was most
+accomplished in his art. And thus,' he concludes, 'with great humility,
+he ended his days in that hermitage.'"--Vol. iii., pp. 257-259.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+55. We could have wished that Lord Lindsay had further insisted on what
+will be found to be a characteristic of all the truly Christian or
+spiritual, as opposed to classical, schools of sculpture--the scenic or
+painter-like management of effect. The marble is not cut into the actual
+form of the thing imaged, but oftener into a perspective suggestion of
+it--the bas-reliefs sometimes almost entirely under cut, and sharpedged,
+so as to come clear off a dark ground of shadow; even heads the size of
+life being in this way rather shadowed out than carved out, as the
+Madonna of Benedetto de Majano in Santa Maria Novella, one of the cheeks
+being advanced half an inch out of its proper place--and often the most
+audacious violations of proportion admitted, as in the limbs of Michael
+Angelo's sitting Madonna in the Uffizii; all artifices, also, of deep
+and sharp cutting being allowed, to gain the shadowy and spectral
+expressions about the brow and lip which the mere actualities of form
+could not have conveyed;--the sculptor never following a material model,
+but feeling after the most momentary and subtle aspects of the
+countenance--striking these out sometimes suddenly, by rude chiseling,
+and stopping the instant they are attained--never risking the loss of
+thought by the finishing of flesh surface. The heads of the Medici
+sacristy we believe to have been thus left unfinished, as having
+already the utmost expression which the marble could receive, and
+incapable of anything but loss from further touches. So with Mino da
+Fiesole and Jacopo della Quercia, the workmanship is often hard,
+sketchy, and angular, having its full effect only at a little distance;
+but at that distance the statue becomes ineffably alive, even to
+startling, bearing an aspect of change and uncertainty, as if it were
+about to vanish, and withal having a light, and sweetness, and incense
+of passion upon it that silences the looker-on, half in delight, half in
+expectation. This daring stroke--this transfiguring tenderness--may be
+shown to characterize all truly Christian sculpture, as compared with
+the antique, or the pseudo-classical of subsequent periods. We agree
+with Lord Lindsay in thinking the Psyche of Naples the nearest approach
+to the Christian ideal of all ancient efforts; but even in this the
+approximation is more accidental than real--a fair type of feature,
+further exalted by the mode in which the imagination supplies the lost
+upper folds of the hair. The fountain of life and emotion remains
+sealed; nor was the opening of that fountain due to any study of the far
+less pure examples accessible by the Pisan sculptors. The sound of its
+waters had been heard long before in the aisles of the Lombard; nor was
+it by Ghiberti, still less by Donatello, that the bed of that Jordan was
+dug deepest, but by Michael Angelo (the last heir of the Byzantine
+traditions descending through Orcagna), opening thenceforward through
+thickets darker and more dark, and with waves ever more soundless and
+slow, into the Dead Sea wherein its waters have been stayed.
+
+56. It is time for us to pass to the subject which occupies the largest
+portion of the work---the History
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"of Painting, as developed contemporaneously with her sister, Sculpture,
+and (like her) under the shadow of the Gothic Architecture, by Giotto
+and his successors throughout Italy, by Mino, Duccio, and their scholars
+at Siena, by Orcagna and Fra Angelico da Fiesole at Florence, and by the
+obscure but interesting primitive school of Bologna, during the
+fourteenth and the early years of the fifteenth century. The period is
+one, comparatively speaking, of repose and tranquillity,--the storm
+sleeps and the winds are still, the currents set in one direction, and
+we may sail from isle to isle over a sunny sea, dallying with the time,
+secure of a cloudless sky and of the greetings of innocence and love
+wheresoever the breeze may waft us. There is in truth a holy purity, an
+innocent naivete, a childlike grace and simplicity, a freshness, a
+fearlessness, an utter freedom from affectation, a yearning after all
+things truthful, lovely and of good report, in the productions of this
+early time, which invest them with a charm peculiar in its kind, and
+which few even of the most perfect works of the maturer era can boast
+of,--and hence the risk and danger of becoming too passionately attached
+to them, of losing the power of discrimination, of admiring and
+imitating their defects as well as their beauties, of running into
+affectation in seeking after simplicity and into exaggeration in our
+efforts to be in earnest,--in a word, of forgetting that in art as in
+human nature, it is the balance, harmony, and co-equal development of
+Sense, Intellect, and Spirit, which constitute perfection."--Vol. ii.,
+pp. 161-163.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+57. To the thousand islands, or how many soever they may be, we shall
+allow ourselves to be wafted with all willingness, but not in Lord
+Lindsay's three-masted vessel, with its balancing topmasts of Sense,
+Intellect, and Spirit. We are utterly tired of the triplicity; and we
+are mistaken if its application here be not as inconsistent as it is
+arbitrary. Turning back to the introduction, which we have quoted, the
+reader will find that while Architecture is there taken for the exponent
+of Sense, Painting is chosen as the peculiar expression of Spirit. "The
+painting of Christendom is that of an immortal spirit conversing with
+its God." But in a note to the first chapter of the second volume, he
+will be surprised to find painting become a "twin of intellect," and
+architecture suddenly advanced from a type of sense to a type of
+spirit:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Sculpture and Painting, twins of Intellect, rejoice and breathe freest
+in the pure ether of Architecture, or Spirit, like Castor or Pollux
+under the breezy heaven of their father Jupiter."--Vol. ii., p. 14.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+58. Prepared by this passage to consider painting either as spiritual or
+intellectual, his patience may pardonably give way on finding in the
+sixth letter--(what he might, however, have conjectured from the heading
+of the third period in the chart of the schools)--that the peculiar
+prerogative of painting--color, is to be considered as a _sensual_
+element, and the exponent of sense, in accordance with a new analogy,
+here for the first time proposed, between spirit, intellect, and sense,
+and expression, form, and color. Lord Lindsay is peculiarly unfortunate
+in his adoptions from previous writers. He has taken this division of
+art from Fuseli and Reynolds, without perceiving that in those writers
+it is one of convenience merely, and, even so considered, is as
+injudicious as illogical. In what does expression consist but in form
+and color? It is one of the ends which these accomplish, and may be
+itself an attribute of both. Color may be expressive or inexpressive,
+like music; form expressive or inexpressive, like words; but expression
+by itself cannot exist; so that to divide painting into color, form, and
+expression, is precisely as rational as to divide music into notes,
+words, and expression. Color may be pensive, severe, exciting,
+appalling, gay, glowing, or sensual; in all these modes it is
+expressive: form may be tender or abrupt, mean or majestic, attractive
+or overwhelming, discomfortable or delightsome; in all these modes, and
+many more, it is expressive; and if Lord Lindsay's analogy be in anywise
+applicable to either form or color, we should have color sensual
+(Correggio), color intellectual (Tintoret), color spiritual
+(Angelico)--form sensual (French sculpture), form intellectual
+(Phidias), form spiritual (Michael Angelo). Above all, our author should
+have been careful how he attached the epithet "sensual" to the element
+of color--not only on account of the glaring inconsistency with his own
+previous assertion of the spirituality of painting--(since it is
+certainly not merely by being flat instead of solid, representative
+instead of actual, that painting is--if it be--more spiritual than
+sculpture); but also, because this idea of sensuality in color has had
+much share in rendering abortive the efforts of the modern German
+religious painters, inducing their abandonment of its consecrating,
+kindling, purifying power.
+
+59. Lord Lindsay says, in a passage which we shall presently quote, that
+the most sensual as well as the most religious painters have always
+loved the brightest colors. Not so; no painters ever were more sensual
+than the modern French, who are alike insensible to, and incapable of
+color--depending altogether on morbid gradation, waxy smoothness of
+surface, and lusciousness of line, the real elements of sensuality
+wherever it eminently exists. So far from good color being sensual, it
+saves, glorifies, and guards from all evil: it is with Titian, as with
+all great masters of flesh-painting, the redeeming and protecting
+element; and with the religious painters, it is a baptism with fire, an
+under-song of holy Litanies. Is it in sensuality that the fair flush
+opens upon the cheek of Francia's chanting angel,[8] until we think it
+comes, and fades, and returns, as his voice and his harping are louder
+or lower--or that the silver light rises upon wave after wave of his
+lifted hair; or that the burning of the blood is seen on the unclouded
+brows of the three angels of the Campo Santo, and of folded fire within
+their wings; or that the hollow blue of the highest heaven mantles the
+Madonna with its depth, and falls around her like raiment, as she sits
+beneath the throne of the Sistine Judgment? Is it in sensuality that the
+visible world about us is girded with an eternal iris?--is there
+pollution in the rose and the gentian more than in the rocks that are
+trusted to their robing?--is the sea-blue a stain upon its water, or
+the scarlet spring of day upon the mountains less holy than their snow?
+As well call the sun itself, or the firmament, sensual, as the color
+which flows from the one, and fills the other.
+
+60. We deprecate this rash assumption, however, with more regard to the
+forthcoming portion of the history, in which we fear it may seriously
+diminish the value of the author's account of the school of Venice, than
+to the part at present executed. This is written in a spirit rather
+sympathetic than critical, and rightly illustrates the feeling of early
+art, even where it mistakes, or leaves unanalyzed, the technical modes
+of its expression. It will be better, perhaps, that we confine our
+attention to the accounts of the three men who may be considered as
+sufficient representatives not only of the art of their time, but of all
+subsequent; Giotto, the first of the great line of dramatists,
+terminating in Raffaelle; Orcagna, the head of that branch of the
+contemplative school which leans towards sadness or terror, terminating
+in Michael Angelo; and Angelico, the head of the contemplatives
+concerned with the heavenly ideal, around whom may be grouped first
+Duccio, and the Sienese, who preceded him, and afterwards Pinturiccio,
+Perugino, and Leonardo da Vinci.
+
+61. The fourth letter opens in the fields of Vespignano. The
+circumstances of the finding of Giotto by Cimabue are well known.
+Vasari's anecdote of the fly painted upon the nose of one of Cimabue's
+figures might, we think, have been spared, or at least not instanced as
+proof of study from nature "nobly rewarded." Giotto certainly never
+either attempted or accomplished any small imitation of this kind; the
+story has all the look of one of the common inventions of the ignorant
+for the ignorant; nor, if true, would Cimabue's careless mistake of a
+black spot in the shape of a fly for one of the living annoyances of
+which there might probably be some dozen or more upon his panel at any
+moment, have been a matter of much credit to his young pupil. The first
+point of any real interest is Lord Lindsay's confirmation of Foerster's
+attribution of the Campo Santo Life of Job, till lately esteemed
+Giotto's, to Francesco da Volterra. Foerster's evidence appears
+incontrovertible; yet there is curious internal evidence, we think, in
+favor of the designs being Giotto's, if not the execution. The landscape
+is especially Giottesque, the trees being all boldly massed first with
+dark brown, within which the leaves are painted separately in light:
+this very archaic treatment had been much softened and modified by the
+Giotteschi before the date assigned to these frescoes by Foerster. But,
+what is more singular, the figure of Eliphaz, or the foremost of the
+three friends, occurs in a tempera picture of Giotto's in the Academy of
+Florence, the Ascension, among the apostles on the left; while the face
+of another of the three friends is again repeated in the "Christ
+disputing with the Doctors" of the small tempera series, also in the
+Academy; the figure of Satan shows much analogy to that of the Envy of
+the Arena chapel; and many other portions of the design are evidently
+either sketches of this very subject by Giotto himself, or dexterous
+compilations from his works by a loving pupil. Lord Lindsay has not done
+justice to the upper division--the Satan before God: it is one of the
+very finest thoughts ever realized by the Giotteschi. The serenity of
+power in the principal figure is very noble; no expression of wrath, or
+even of scorn, in the look which commands the evil spirit. The position
+of the latter, and countenance, are less grotesque and more demoniacal
+than is usual in paintings of the time; the triple wings expanded--the
+arms crossed over the breast, and holding each other above the elbow,
+the claws fixing in the flesh; a serpent buries its head in a cleft in
+the bosom, and the right hoof is lifted, as if to stamp.
+
+62. We should have been glad if Lord Lindsay had given us some clearer
+idea of the internal evidence on which he founds his determination of
+the order or date of the works of Giotto. When no trustworthy records
+exist, we conceive this task to be of singular difficulty, owing to the
+differences of execution universally existing between the large and
+small works of the painter. The portrait of Dante in the chapel of the
+Podesta is proved by Dante's exile, in 1302, to have been painted before
+Giotto was six and twenty; yet we remember no head in any of his works
+which can be compared with it for carefulness of finish and truth of
+drawing; the crudeness of the material vanquished by dexterous hatching;
+the color not only pure, but deep--a rare virtue with Giotto; the eye
+soft and thoughtful, the brow nobly modeled. In the fresco of the Death
+of the Baptist, in Santa Croce, which we agree with Lord Lindsay in
+attributing to the same early period, the face of the musician is drawn
+with great refinement, and considerable power of rounding
+surfaces--(though in the drapery may be remarked a very singular piece
+of archaic treatment: it is warm white, with yellow stripes; the dress
+itself falls in deep folds, but the striped pattern does not follow the
+foldings--it is drawn across, as if with a straight ruler).
+
+63. But passing from these frescoes, which are nearly the size of life,
+to those of the Arena chapel at Padua, erected in 1303, decorated in
+1306, which are much smaller, we find the execution proportionably less
+dexterous. Of this famous chapel Lord Lindsay says--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"nowhere (save in the Duomo of Orvieto) is the legendary history of the
+Virgin told with such minuteness.
+
+"The heart must indeed be cold to the charms of youthful art that can
+enter this little sanctuary without a glow of delight. From the roof,
+with its sky of ultramarine, powdered with stars and interspersed with
+medallions containing the heads of our Saviour, the Virgin and the
+Apostles, to the mock paneling of the nave, below the windows, the whole
+is completely covered with frescoes, in excellent preservation, and all
+more or less painted by Giotto's own hand, except six in the tribune,
+which however have apparently been executed from his cartoons....
+
+"These frescoes form a most important document in the history of
+Giotto's mind, exhibiting all his peculiar merits, although in a state
+as yet of immature development. They are full of fancy and invention;
+the composition is almost always admirable, although sometimes too
+studiously symmetrical; the figures are few and characteristic, each
+speaking for itself, the impersonation of a distinct idea, and most
+dramatically grouped and contrasted; the attitudes are appropriate,
+easy, and natural; the action and gesticulation singularly vivid; the
+expression is excellent, except when impassioned grief induces
+caricature:--devoted to the study of Nature as he is, Giotto had not yet
+learnt that it is suppressed feeling which affects one most. The head of
+our Saviour is beautiful throughout--that of the Virgin not so good--she
+is modest, but not very graceful or celestial:--it was long before he
+succeeded in his Virgins--they are much too matronly: among the
+accessory figures, graceful female forms occasionally appear,
+foreshadowing those of his later works at Florence and Naples, yet they
+are always clumsy about the waist and bust, and most of them are
+under-jawed, which certainly detracts from the sweetness of the female
+countenance. His delineation of the naked is excellent, as compared with
+the works of his predecessors, but far unequal to what he attained in
+his later years,--the drapery, on the contrary, is noble, majestic, and
+statuesque; the coloring is still pale and weak,--it was long ere he
+improved in this point; the landscape displays little or no amendment
+upon the Byzantine; the architecture, that of the fourteenth century, is
+to the figures that people it in the proportion of dolls' houses to the
+children that play with them,--an absurdity long unthinkingly acquiesced
+in, from its occurrence in the classic bas-reliefs from which it had
+been traditionally derived;--and, finally, the lineal perspective is
+very fair, and in three of the compositions an excellent effect is
+produced by the introduction of the same background with varied
+_dramatis personae_, reminding one of Retszch's illustrations of Faust.
+The animals too are always excellent, full of spirit and
+character."--Vol. ii., pp. 183-199.
+
+64. This last characteristic is especially to be noticed. It is a
+touching proof of the influence of early years. Giotto was only ten
+years old when he was taken from following the sheep. For the rest, as
+we have above stated, the manipulation of these frescoes is just as far
+inferior to that of the Podesta chapel as their dimensions are less; and
+we think it will be found generally that the smaller the work the more
+rude is Giotto's hand. In this respect he seems to differ from all other
+masters.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"It is not difficult, gazing on these silent but eloquent walls, to
+repeople them with the group once, as we know-five hundred years
+ago--assembled within them,--Giotto intent upon his work, his wife Ciuta
+admiring his progress, and Dante, with abstracted eye, alternately
+conversing with his friend and watching the gambols of the children
+playing on the grass before the door. It is generally affirmed that
+Dante, during this visit, inspired Giotto with his taste for allegory,
+and that the Virtues and Vices of the Arena were the first fruits of
+their intercourse; it is possible, certainly, but I doubt it,--allegory
+was the universal language of the time, as we have seen in the history
+of the Pisan school."--Vol. ii., pp. 199, 200.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+It ought to have been further mentioned, that the representation of the
+Virtues and Vices under these Giottesque figures continued long
+afterwards. We find them copied, for instance, on the capitals of the
+Ducal Palace at Venice, with an amusing variation on the "Stultitia,"
+who has neither Indian dress nor club, as with Giotto, but is to the
+Venetians sufficiently distinguished by riding a horse.
+
+65. The notice of the frescoes at Assisi consists of little more than an
+enumeration of the subjects, accompanied by agreeable translations of
+the traditions respecting St. Francis, embodied by St. Buonaventura. Nor
+have we space to follow the author through his examination of Giotto's
+works at Naples and Avignon. The following account of the erection of
+the Campanile of Florence is too interesting to be omitted:---
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Giotto was chosen to erect it, on the ground avowedly of the
+universality of his talents, with the appointment of Capomaestro, or
+chief architect of the Cathedral and its dependencies, a yearly salary
+of one hundred gold florins, and the privilege of citizenship, and under
+the special understanding that he was not to quit Florence. His designs
+being approved of, the republic passed a decree in the spring of 1334,
+that 'the Campanile should be built so as to exceed in magnificence,
+height and excellence of workmanship whatever in that kind had been
+achieved of old by the Greeks and Romans in the time of their utmost
+power and greatness--"della loro piu florida potenza."' The first stone
+was laid accordingly, with great pomp, on the 18th of July following,
+and the work prosecuted with such vigor and with such costliness and
+utter disregard of expense, that a citizen of Verona, looking on,
+exclaimed that the republic was taxing her strength too far,--that the
+united resources of two great monarchs would be insufficient to complete
+it; a _criticism which the Signoria resented by confining him for two
+months in prison_, and afterwards conducting him through the public
+treasury, to teach him that the Florentines could build their whole city
+of marble, and not one poor steeple only, were they so inclined.
+
+"Giotto made a model of his proposed structure, on which every stone was
+marked, and the successive courses painted red and white, according to
+his design, so as to match with the Cathedral and Baptistery; this model
+was of course adhered to strictly during the short remnant of his life,
+and the work was completed in strict conformity to it after his death,
+with the exception of the spire, which, the taste having changed, was
+never added. He had intended it to be one hundred _braccia_, or one
+hundred and fifty feet high."--Vol. ii., pp. 247-249.
+
+The deficiency of the spire Lord Lindsay does not regret:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Let the reader stand before the Campanile, and ask himself whether,
+with Michael Scott at his elbow, or Aladdin's lamp in his hand, he would
+supply the deficiency? I think not."--p. 38.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+We have more faith in Giotto than our author--and we will reply to his
+question by two others--whether, looking down upon Florence from the
+hill of San Miniato, his eye rested oftener and more affectionately on
+the Campanile of Giotto, or on the simple tower and spire of Santa Maria
+Novella?--and whether, in the backgrounds of Perugino, he would
+willingly substitute for the church spires invariably introduced,
+flat-topped campaniles like the unfinished tower of Florence?
+
+66. Giotto sculptured with his own hand two of the bas-reliefs of this
+campanile, and probably might have executed them all. But the purposes
+of his life had been accomplished; he died at Florence on the 8th of
+January, 1337. The concluding notice of his character and achievement is
+highly valuable.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+67. "Painting indeed stands indebted to Giotto beyond any of her
+children. His history is a most instructive one. Endowed with the
+liveliest fancy, and with that facility which so often betrays genius,
+and achieving in youth a reputation which the age of Methuselah could
+not have added to, he had yet the discernment to perceive how much still
+remained to be done, and the resolution to bind himself (as it were) to
+Nature's chariot wheel, confident that she would erelong emancipate and
+own him as her son. Calm and unimpassioned, he seems to have commenced
+his career with a deliberate survey of the difficulties he had to
+encounter and of his resources for the conflict, and then to have worked
+upon a system steadily and perseveringly, prophetically sure of victory.
+His life was indeed one continued triumph,--and no conqueror ever
+mounted to the Capitol with a step more equal and sedate. We find him,
+at first, slowly and cautiously endeavoring to infuse new life into the
+traditional compositions, by substituting the heads, attitudes, and
+drapery of the actual world for the spectral forms and conventional
+types of the mosaics and the Byzantine painters,--idealizing them when
+the personages represented were of higher mark and dignity, but in none
+ever outstepping truth. Advancing in his career, we find year by year
+the fruits of continuous unwearied study in a consistent and equable
+contemporary improvement in all the various minuter though most
+important departments of his art, in his design, his drapery, his
+coloring, in the dignity and expression of his men and in the grace of
+his women--asperities softened down, little graces unexpectedly born and
+playing about his path, as if to make amends for the deformity of his
+actual offspring--touches, daily more numerous, of that nature which
+makes the world akin--and ever and always a keen yet cheerful sympathy
+with life, a playful humor mingling with his graver lessons, which
+affects us the more as coming from one who, knowing himself an object
+personally of disgust and ridicule, could yet satirize with a smile.
+
+"Finally, throughout his works, we are conscious of an earnest, a lofty,
+a religious aim and purpose, as of one who felt himself a pioneer of
+civilization in a newly-discovered world, the Adam of a new Eden freshly
+planted in the earth's wilderness, a mouthpiece of God and a preacher of
+righteousness to mankind.--And here we must establish a distinction very
+necessary to be recognized before we can duly appreciate the relative
+merits of the elder painters in this, the most important point in which
+we can view their character. Giotto's genius, however universal, was
+still (as I have repeatedly observed) Dramatic rather than
+Contemplative,--a tendency in which his scholars and successors almost
+to a man resembled him. Now, just as in actual life--where, with a few
+rare exceptions, all men rank under two great categories according as
+Imagination or Reason predominates in their intellectual character--two
+individuals may be equally impressed with the truths of Christianity and
+yet differ essentially in its outward manifestation, the one dwelling in
+action, the other in contemplation, the one in strife, the other in
+peace, the one (so to speak) in hate, the other in love, the one
+struggling with devils, the other communing with angels, yet each
+serving as a channel of God's mercies to man, each (we may believe)
+offering Him service equally acceptable in His sight--even so shall we
+find it in art and with artists; few in whom the Dramatic power
+predominates will be found to excel in the expression of religious
+emotions of the more abstract and enthusiastic cast, even although men
+of indisputably pure and holy character themselves; and _vice versa_,
+few of the more Contemplative but will feel bewildered and at fault, if
+they descend from their starry region of light into the grosser
+atmosphere that girdles in this world of action. The works of artists
+are their minds' mirror; they cannot express what they do not feel; each
+class dwells apart and seeks its ideal in a distinct sphere of
+emotion,--their object is different, and their success proportioned to
+the exclusiveness with which they pursue that object. A few indeed there
+have been in all ages, monarchs of the mind and types of our Saviour,
+who have lived a twofold existence of action and contemplation in art,
+in song, in politics, and in daily life; of these have been Abraham,
+Moses, David, and Cyrus in the elder world--Alfred, Charlemagne, Dante,
+and perhaps Shakespeare, in the new,--and in art, Niccola Pisano,
+Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo. But Giotto, however great as the
+patriarch of his peculiar tribe, was not of these few, and we ought not
+therefore to misapprehend him, or be disappointed at finding his
+Madonnas (for instance) less exquisitely spiritual than the Sienese, or
+those of Fra Angelico and some later painters, who seem to have dipped
+their pencils in the rainbow that circles the throne of God,--they are
+pure and modest, but that is all; on the other hand, where his
+Contemplative rivals lack utterance, he speaks most feelingly to the
+heart in his own peculiar language of Dramatic composition--he glances
+over creation with the eye of love, all the charities of life follow in
+his steps, and his thoughts are as the breath of the morning. A man of
+the world, living in it and loving it, yet with a heart that it could
+not spoil nor wean from its allegiance to God--'non meno buon Cristiano
+che eccellente pittore,' as Vasari emphatically describes him--his
+religion breathes of the free air of heaven rather than the cloister,
+neither enthusiastic nor superstitious, but practical, manly and
+healthy--and this, although the picturesque biographer of S.
+Francis!"--Vol. ii., pp. 260-264.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+68. This is all as admirably felt as expressed, and to those acquainted
+with and accustomed to love the works of the painter, it leaves nothing
+to be asked for; but we must again remind Lord Lindsay, that he has
+throughout left the _artistical_ orbit of Giotto undefined, and the
+offense of his manner unremoved, as far as regards the uninitiated
+spectator. We question whether from all that he has written, the
+untraveled reader could form any distinct idea of the painter's peculiar
+merits or methods, or that the estimate, if formed, might not afterwards
+expose him to severe disappointment. It ought especially to have been
+stated, that the Giottesque system of chiaroscuro is one of pure, quiet,
+pervading daylight. No _cast_ shadows ever occur, and this remains a
+marked characteristic of all the works of the Giotteschi. Of course, all
+subtleties of reflected light or raised color are unthought of. Shade is
+only given as far as it is necessary to the articulation of simple
+forms, nor even then is it rightly adapted to the color of the light;
+the folds of the draperies are well drawn, but the entire rounding of
+them always missed--the general forms appearing flat, and terminated by
+equal and severe outlines, while the masses of ungradated color often
+seem to divide the figure into fragments. Thus, the Madonna in the small
+tempera series of the Academy of Florence, is usually divided exactly in
+half by the dark mass of her blue robe, falling in a vertical line. In
+consequence of this defect, the grace of Giotto's composition can hardly
+be felt until it is put into outline. The colors themselves are of good
+quality, never glaring, always gladdening, the reds inclining to orange
+more than purple, yellow frequent, the prevalent tone of the color
+groups warm; the sky always blue, the whole effect somewhat resembling
+that of the Northern painted glass of the same century--and chastened in
+the same manner by noble neutral tints or greens; yet all somewhat
+unconsidered and unsystematic, painful discords not unfrequent. The
+material and ornaments of dress are never particularized, no imitations
+of texture or jewelry, yet shot stuffs of two colors frequent. The
+drawing often powerful, though of course uninformed; the mastery of
+mental expression by bodily motion, and of bodily motion, past and
+future, by a single gesture, altogether unrivaled even by Raffaelle;--it
+is obtained chiefly by throwing the emphasis always on the right line,
+admitting straight lines of great severity, and never dividing the main
+drift of the drapery by inferior folds; neither are accidents allowed to
+interfere--the garments fall heavily and in marked angles--nor are they
+affected by the wind, except under circumstances of very rapid motion.
+The ideal of the face is often solemn--seldom beautiful; occasionally
+ludicrous failures occur: in the smallest designs the face is very often
+a dead letter, or worse: and in all, Giotto's handling is generally to
+be distinguished from that of any of his followers by its bluntness. In
+the school work we find sweeter types of feature, greater finish,
+stricter care, more delicate outline, fewer errors, but on the whole
+less life.
+
+69. Finally, and on this we would especially insist, Giotto's genius is
+not to be considered as struggling with difficulty and repressed by
+ignorance, but as appointed, for the good of men, to come into the world
+exactly at the time when its rapidity of invention was not likely to be
+hampered by demands for imitative dexterity or neatness of finish; and
+when, owing to the very ignorance which has been unwisely regretted, the
+simplicity of his thoughts might be uttered with a childlike and
+innocent sweetness, never to be recovered in times of prouder knowledge.
+The dramatic power of his works, rightly understood, could receive no
+addition from artificial arrangement of shade, or scientific exhibition
+of anatomy, and we have reason to be deeply grateful when afterwards
+"inland far" with Buonaroti and Titian, that we can look back to the
+Giotteschi--to see those children
+
+       "Sport upon the shore
+   And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore."
+
+We believe Giotto himself felt this--unquestionably he could have
+carried many of his works much farther in finish, had he so willed it;
+but he chose rather to multiply motives than to complete details. Thus
+we recur to our great principle of Separate gift. The man who spends his
+life in toning colors must leave the treasures of his invention
+untold--let each have his perfect work; and while we thank Bellini and
+Leonardo for their deeply wrought dyes, and life-labored utterance of
+passionate thought; let us remember also what cause, but for the
+remorseless destruction of myriads of his works, we should have had to
+thank Giotto, in that, abandoning all proud effort, he chose rather to
+make the stones of Italy cry out with one voice of pauseless praise, and
+to fill with perpetual remembrance of the Saints he loved, and perpetual
+honor of the God he worshiped, palace chamber and convent cloister,
+lifted tower and lengthened wall, from the utmost blue of the plain of
+Padua to the Southern wildernesses of the hermit-haunted Apennine.
+
+70. From the head of the Dramatic branch of Art, we turn to the first of
+the great Contemplative Triad, associated, as it most singularly happens
+in name as well as in heart; Orcagna--Arcagnuolo; Fra Giovanni--detto
+Angelico; and Michael Angelo:--the first two names being bestowed by
+contemporary admiration.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Orcagna was born apparently about the middle of the (14th) century, and
+was christened Andrea, by which name, with the addition of that of his
+father, Cione, he always designated himself; that, however, of Orcagna,
+a corruption of Arcagnuolo, or 'The Archangel,' was given him by his
+contemporaries, and by this he has become known to posterity.
+
+"The earliest works of Orcagna will be found in that sanctuary of
+Semi-Byzantine art, the Campo Santo of Pisa. He there painted three of
+the four 'Novissima,' Death, Judgment, Hell, and Paradise--the two
+former entirely himself, the third with the assistance of his brother
+Bernardo, who is said to have colored it after his designs. The first of
+the series, a most singular performance, had for centuries been
+popularly known as the 'Trionfo della Morte.' It is divided by an
+immense rock into two irregular portions. In that to the right, Death,
+personified as a female phantom, batwinged, claw-footed, her robe of
+linked mail [?] and her long hair streaming on the wind, swings back her
+scythe in order to cut down a company of the rich ones of the earth,
+Castruccio Castracani and his gay companions, seated under an
+orange-grove, and listening to the music of a troubadour and a female
+minstrel; little genii or Cupids, with reversed torches, float in the
+air above them; one young gallant caresses his hawk, a lady her
+lapdog,--Castruccio alone looks abstractedly away, as if his thoughts
+were elsewhere. But all are alike heedless and unconscious, though the
+sand is run out, the scythe falling and their doom sealed. Meanwhile the
+lame and the halt, the withered and the blind, to whom the heavens are
+brass and life a burthen, cry on Death with impassioned gestures, to
+release them from their misery,--but in vain; she sweeps past, and will
+not hear them. Between these two groups lie a heap of corpses, mown down
+already in her flight--kings, queens, bishops, cardinals, young men and
+maidens, secular and ecclesiastical--ensigned by their crowns, coronets,
+necklaces, miters and helmets--huddled together in hideous confusion;
+some are dead, others dying,--angels and devils draw the souls out of
+their mouths; that of a nun (in whose hand a purse, firmly clenched,
+betokens her besetting sin) shrinks back aghast at the unlooked-for
+sight of the demon who receives it--an idea either inherited or adopted
+from Andrea Tafi. The whole upper half of the fresco, on this side, is
+filled with angels and devils carrying souls to heaven or to hell;
+sometimes a struggle takes place, and a soul is rescued from a demon who
+has unwarrantably appropriated it; the angels are very graceful, and
+their intercourse with their spiritual charge is full of tenderness and
+endearment; on the other hand, the wicked are hurried off by the devils
+and thrown headlong into the mouths of hell, represented as the crater
+of a volcano, belching out flames nearly in the center of the
+composition. These devils exhibit every variety of horror in form and
+feature."--Vol. iii., pp. 130-134.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+71. We wish our author had been more specific in his account of this
+wonderful fresco. The portrait of Castruccio ought to have been
+signalized as a severe disappointment to the admirers of the heroic
+Lucchese: the face is flat, lifeless, and sensual, though fine in
+feature. The group of mendicants occupying the center are especially
+interesting, as being among the first existing examples of hard study
+from the model: all are evidently portraits--and the effect of deformity
+on the lines of the countenance rendered with appalling truth; the
+retractile muscles of the mouth wrinkled and fixed--the jaws
+projecting--the eyes hungry and glaring--the eyebrows grisly and stiff,
+the painter having drawn each hair separately: the two stroppiati with
+stumps instead of arms are especially characteristic, as the observer
+may at once determine by comparing them with the descendants of the
+originals, of whom he will at any time find two, or more, waiting to
+accompany his return across the meadow in front of the Duomo: the old
+woman also, nearest of the group, with gray disheveled hair and gray
+coat, with a brown girdle and gourd flask, is magnificent, and the
+archetype of all modern conceptions of witch. But the crowning stroke of
+feeling is dependent on a circumstance seldom observed. As Castruccio
+and his companions are seated under the shade of an orange grove, so the
+mendicants are surrounded by a thicket of _teasels_, and a branch of
+ragged thorn is twisted like a crown about their sickly temples and
+weedy hair.
+
+72. We do not altogether agree with our author in thinking that the
+devils exhibit every variety of horror; we rather fear that the
+spectator might at first be reminded by them of what is commonly known
+as the Dragon pattern of Wedgwood ware. There is invention in them
+however--and energy; the eyes are always terrible, though simply
+drawn--a black ball set forward, and two-thirds surrounded by a narrow
+crescent of white, under a shaggy brow; the mouths are frequently
+magnificent; that of a demon accompanying a thrust of a spear with a
+growl, on the right of the picture, is interesting as an example of the
+development of the canine teeth noticed by Sir Charles Bell ("Essay on
+Expression," p. 138)--its capacity of laceration is unlimited: another,
+snarling like a tiger at an angel who has pulled a soul out of his
+claws, is equally well conceived; we know nothing like its ferocity
+except Rembrandt's sketches of wounded wild beasts. The angels we think
+generally disappointing; they are for the most part diminutive in size,
+and the crossing of the extremities of the two wings that cover the
+feet, gives them a coleopterous, cockchafer look, which is not a little
+undignified; the colors of their plumes are somewhat coarse and
+dark--one is covered with silky hair, instead of feathers. The souls
+they contend for are indeed of sweet expression; but exceedingly earthly
+in contour, the painter being unable to deal with the nude form. On the
+whole, he seems to have reserved his highest powers for the fresco which
+follows next in order, the scene of Resurrection and Judgment.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"It is, in the main, the traditional Byzantine composition, even more
+rigidly symmetrical than usual, singularly contrasting in this respect
+with the rush and movement of the preceding compartment. Our Saviour and
+the Virgin, seated side by side, each on a rainbow and within a vesica
+piscis, appear in the sky--Our Saviour uttering the words of
+malediction with uplifted arm, showing the wound in his side, and nearly
+in the attitude of Michael Angelo, but in wrath, not in fury--the Virgin
+timidly drawing back and gazing down in pity and sorrow. I never saw
+this co-equal juxtaposition in any other representation of the Last
+Judgment."--Vol. iii., p. 136.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+73. The positions of our Saviour and of the Virgin are not strictly
+co-equal; the glory in which the Madonna is seated is both lower and
+less; but the equality is more complete in the painting of the same
+subject in Santa M. Novella. We believe Lord Lindsay is correct in
+thinking Orcagna the only artist who has dared it. We question whether
+even wrath be intended in the countenance of the principal figure; on
+the contrary, we think it likely to disappoint at first, and appear
+lifeless in its exceeding tranquillity; the brow is indeed slightly
+knit, but the eyes have no local direction. They comprehend all
+things--are set upon all spirits alike, as in that _word-fresco_ of our
+own, not unworthy to be set side by side with this, the Vision of the
+Trembling Man in the House of the Interpreter. The action is as majestic
+as the countenance--the right hand seems raised rather to show its wound
+(as the left points at the same instant to the wound in the side), than
+in condemnation, though its gesture has been adopted as one of
+threatening--first (and very nobly) by Benozzo Gozzoli, in the figure of
+the Angel departing, looking towards Sodom--and afterwards, with
+unfortunate exaggeration, by Michael Angelo. Orcagna's Madonna we think
+a failure, but his strength has been more happily displayed in the
+Apostolic circle. The head of St. John is peculiarly beautiful. The
+other Apostles look forward or down as in judgment--some in indignation,
+some in pity, some serene--but the eyes of St. John are fixed upon the
+Judge Himself with the stability of love--intercession and sorrow
+struggling for utterance with awe--and through both is seen a tremor of
+submissive astonishment, that the lips which had once forbidden his to
+call down fire from heaven should now themselves burn with irrevocable
+condemnation.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+74. "One feeling for the most part pervades this side of the
+composition,--there is far more variety in the other; agony is depicted
+with fearful intensity and in every degree and character; some clasp
+their hands, some hide their faces, some look up in despair, but none
+towards Christ; others seem to have grown idiots with horror:--a few
+gaze, as if fascinated, into the gulf of fire towards which the whole
+mass of misery are being urged by the ministers of doom--the flames bite
+them, the devils fish for and catch them with long grappling-hooks:--in
+sad contrast to the group on the opposite side, a queen, condemned
+herself but self-forgetful, vainly struggles to rescue her daughter from
+a demon who has caught her by the gown and is dragging her backwards
+into the abyss--her sister, wringing her hands, looks on in agony--it is
+a fearful scene.
+
+"A vast rib or arch in the walls of pandemonium admits one into the
+contiguous gulf of Hell, forming the third fresco, or rather a
+continuation of the second--in which Satan sits in the midst, in
+gigantic terror, cased in armor and crunching sinners--of whom Judas,
+especially, is eaten and ejected, re-eaten and re-ejected again and
+again forever. The punishments of the wicked are portrayed in circles
+numberless around him. But in everything save horror this compartment is
+inferior to the preceding, and it has been much injured and
+repainted."--Vol. iii., p. 138.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+75. We might have been spared all notice of this last compartment.
+Throughout Italy, owing, it may be supposed, to the interested desire of
+the clergy to impress upon the populace as forcibly as possible the
+verity of purgatorial horrors, nearly every representation of the
+Inferno has been repainted, and vulgar butchery substituted for the
+expressions of punishment which were too chaste for monkish purposes.
+The infernos of Giotto at Padua, and of Orcagna at Florence, have thus
+been destroyed; but in neither case have they been replaced by anything
+so merely disgusting as these restorations by Solazzino in the Campo
+Santo. Not a line of Orcagna's remains, except in one row of figures
+halfway up the wall, where his firm black drawing is still
+distinguishable: throughout the rest of the fresco, hillocks of pink
+flesh have been substituted for his severe forms--and for his agonized
+features, puppets' heads with roaring mouths and staring eyes, the whole
+as coarse and sickening, and quite as weak, as any scrabble on the
+lowest booths of a London Fair.
+
+76. Lord Lindsay's comparison of these frescoes of Orcagna with the
+great work in the Sistine, is, as a specimen of his writing, too good
+not to be quoted.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"While Michael Angelo's leading idea seems to be the self-concentration
+and utter absorption of all feeling into the one predominant thought,
+_Am I, individually, safe?_ resolving itself into two emotions only,
+doubt and despair--all diversities of character, all kindred sympathies
+annihilated under their pressure--those emotions uttering themselves,
+not through the face but the form, by bodily contortion, rendering the
+whole composition, with all its overwhelming merits, a mighty
+hubbub--Orcagna's on the contrary embraces the whole world of passions
+that make up the economy of man, and these not confused or crushed
+into each other, but expanded and enhanced in quality and
+intensity commensurably with the 'change' attendant upon the
+resurrection--variously expressed indeed, and in reference to the
+diversities of individual character, which will be nowise compromised by
+that change, yet from their very intensity suppressed and subdued,
+stilling the body and informing only the soul's index, the countenance.
+All therefore is calm; the saved have acquiesced in all things, they can
+mourn no more--the damned are to them as if they had never been;--among
+the lost, grief is too deep, too settled for caricature, and while every
+feeling of the spectator, every key of the soul's organ, is played upon
+by turns, tenderness and pity form the under-song throughout and
+ultimately prevail; the curse is uttered in sorrow rather than wrath,
+and from the pitying Virgin and the weeping archangel above, to the
+mother endeavoring to rescue her daughter below, and the young secular
+led to paradise under the approving smile of S. Michael, all resolves
+itself into sympathy and love.--Michael Angelo's conception may be more
+efficacious for teaching by terror--it was his object, I believe, as the
+heir of Savonarola and the representative of the Protestant spirit
+within the bosom of Catholicism; but Orcagna's is in better taste, truer
+to human nature, sublimer in philosophy, and (if I mistake not) more
+scriptural."--Vol. iii., pp. 139-141.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+77. We think it somewhat strange that the object of teaching by terror
+should be attributed to M. Angelo more than to Orcagna, seeing that the
+former, with his usual dignity, has refused all representation of
+infernal punishment--except in the figure dragged down with the hand
+over the face, the serpent biting the thigh, and in the fiends of the
+extreme angle; while Orcagna, whose intention may be conjectured even
+from Solazzino's restoration, exhausted himself in detailing Dante's
+distribution of torture, and brings into successive prominence every
+expedient of pain; the prong, the spit, the rack, the chain, venomous
+fang and rending beak, harrowing point and dividing edge, biting fiend
+and calcining fire. The objects of the two great painters were indeed
+opposed, but not in this respect. Orcagna's, like that of every great
+painter of his day, was to write upon the wall, as in a book, the
+greatest possible number of those religious facts or doctrines which the
+Church desired should be known to the people. This he did in the
+simplest and most straightforward way, regardless of artistical
+reputation, and desiring only to be read and understood. But Michael
+Angelo's object was from the beginning that of an artist. He addresses
+not the sympathies of his day, but the understanding of all time, and he
+treats the subject in the mode best adapted to bring every one of his
+own powers into full play. As might have been expected, while the
+self-forgetfulness of Orcagna has given, on the one hand, an awfulness
+to his work, and verity, which are wanting in the studied composition of
+the Sistine, on the other it has admitted a puerility commensurate with
+the narrowness of the religion he had to teach.
+
+78. Greater differences still result from the opposed powers and
+idiosyncrasies of the two men. Orcagna was unable to draw the nude--on
+this inability followed a coldness to the value of flowing lines, and to
+the power of unity in composition--neither could he indicate motion or
+buoyancy in flying or floating figures, nor express violence of action
+in the limbs--he cannot even show the difference between pulling and
+pushing in the muscles of the arm. In M. Angelo these conditions were
+directly reversed. Intense sensibility to the majesty of writhing,
+flowing, and connected lines, was in him associated with a power,
+unequaled except by Angelico, of suggesting aerial motion--motion
+deliberate or disturbed, inherent or impressed, impotent or
+inspired--gathering into glory, or gravitating to death. Orcagna was
+therefore compelled to range his figures symmetrically in ordered lines,
+while Michael Angelo bound them into chains, or hurled them into heaps,
+or scattered them before him as the wind does leaves. Orcagna trusted
+for all his expression to the countenance, or to rudely explained
+gesture aided by grand fall of draperies, though in all these points he
+was still immeasurably inferior to his colossal rival. As for his
+"embracing the whole world of passions which make up the economy of
+man," he had no such power of delineation--nor, we believe, of
+conception. The expressions on the inferno side are all of them
+varieties of grief and fear, differing merely in degree, not in
+character or operation: there is something dramatic in the raised hand
+of a man wearing a green bonnet with a white plume--but the only really
+far-carried effort in the group is the head of a Dominican monk (just
+above the queen in green), who, in the midst of the close crowd,
+struggling, shuddering, and howling on every side, is fixed in quiet,
+total despair, insensible to all things, and seemingly poised in
+existence and sensation upon that one point in his past life when his
+steps first took hold on hell; this head, which is opposed to a face
+distorted by horror beside it, is, we repeat, the only highly wrought
+piece of expression in the group.
+
+79. What Michael Angelo could do by expression of countenance alone, let
+the Pieta of Genoa tell, or the Lorenzo, or the parallel to this very
+head of Orcagna's, the face of the man borne down in the Last Judgment
+with the hand clenched over one of the eyes. Neither in that fresco is
+he wanting in dramatic episode; the adaptation of the Niobe on the
+spectator's left hand is far finer than Orcagna's condemned queen and
+princess; the groups rising below, side by side, supporting each other,
+are full of tenderness, and reciprocal devotion; the contest in the
+center for the body which a demon drags down by the hair is another kind
+of quarrel from that of Orcagna between a feathered angel and bristly
+fiend for a diminutive soul--reminding us, as it forcibly did at first,
+of a vociferous difference in opinion between a cat and a cockatoo. But
+Buonaroti knew that it was useless to concentrate interest in the
+countenances, in a picture of enormous size, ill lighted; and he
+preferred giving full play to the powers of line-grouping, for which he
+could have found no nobler field. Let us not by unwise comparison mingle
+with our admiration of these two sublime works any sense of weakness in
+the naivete of the one, or of coldness in the science of the other. Each
+painter has his own sufficient dominion, and he who complains of the
+want of knowledge in Orcagna, or of the display of it in Michael Angelo,
+has probably brought little to his judgment of either.
+
+80. One passage more we must quote, well worthy of remark in these days
+of hollowness and haste, though we question the truth of the particular
+fact stated in the second volume respecting the shrine of Or San
+Michele. Cement is now visible enough in all the joints, but whether
+from recent repairs we cannot say:--
+
+"There is indeed another, a technical merit, due to Orcagna, which I
+would have mentioned earlier, did it not partake so strongly of a moral
+virtue. Whatever he undertook to do, he did well--by which I mean,
+better than anybody else. His Loggia, in its general structure and its
+provisions against injury from wet and decay, is a model of strength no
+less than symmetry and elegance; the junction of the marbles in the
+tabernacle of Or San Michele, and the exquisite manual workmanship of
+the bas-reliefs, have been the theme of praise for five centuries; his
+colors in the Campo Santo have maintained a freshness unrivaled by those
+of any of his successors there;--nay, even had his mosaics been
+preserved at Orvieto, I am confident the _commettitura_ would be found
+more compact and polished than any previous to the sixteenth century.
+The secret of all this was that he made himself thoroughly an adept in
+the mechanism of the respective arts, and therefore his works have
+stood. Genius is too apt to think herself independent of form and
+matter--never was there such a mistake; she cannot slight either without
+hamstringing herself. But the rule is of universal application; without
+this thorough mastery of their respective tools, this determination
+honestly to make the best use of them, the divine, the soldier, the
+statesman, the philosopher, the poet--however genuine their enthusiasm,
+however lofty their genius--are mere empirics, pretenders to crowns they
+will not run for, children not men--sporters with Imagination, triflers
+with Reason, with the prospects of humanity, with Time, and with
+God."--Vol. iii., pp. 148, 149.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+A noble passage this, and most true, provided we distinguish always
+between mastery of tool together with thorough strength of workmanship,
+and mere neatness of outside polish or fitting of measurement, of which
+ancient masters are daringly scornful.
+
+81. None of Orcagna's pupils, except Francisco Traini, attained
+celebrity--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"nothing in fact is known of them except their names. Had their works,
+however inferior, been preserved, we might have had less difficulty in
+establishing the links between himself and his successor in the
+supremacy of the Semi-Byzantine school at Florence, the Beato Fra
+Angelico da Fiesole.... He was born at Vicchio, near Florence, it is
+said in 1387, and was baptized by the name of Guido. Of a gentle nature,
+averse to the turmoil of the world, and pious to enthusiasm, though as
+free from fanaticism as his youth was innocent of vice, he determined,
+at the age of twenty, though well provided for in a worldly point of
+view, to retire to the cloister; he professed himself accordingly a
+brother of the monastery of S. Domenico at Fiesole in 1407, assuming his
+monastic name from the Apostle of love, S. John. He acquired from his
+residence there the distinguishing surname 'da Fiesole;' and a calmer
+retreat for one weary of earth and desirous of commerce with heaven
+would in vain be sought for;--the purity of the atmosphere, the
+freshness of the morning breeze, the starry clearness and delicious
+fragrance of the nights, the loveliness of the valley at one's feet,
+lengthening out, like a life of happiness, between the Apennine and the
+sea--with the intermingling sounds that ascend perpetually from below,
+softened by distance into music, and by an agreeable compromise at once
+giving a zest to solitude and cheating it of its loneliness--rendering
+Fiesole a spot which angels might alight upon by mistake in quest of
+paradise, a spot where it would be at once sweet to live and sweet to
+die."--Vol. iii., pp. 151-153.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+82. Our readers must recollect that the convent where Fra Giovanni first
+resided is not that whose belfry tower and cypress grove crown the "top
+of Fesole." The Dominican convent is situated at the bottom of the slope
+of olives, distinguished only by its narrow and low spire; a cypress
+avenue recedes from it towards Florence--a stony path, leading to the
+ancient Badia of Fiesole, descends in front of the three-arched loggia
+which protects the entrance to the church. No extended prospect is open
+to it; though over the low wall, and through the sharp, thickset olive
+leaves, may be seen one silver gleam of the Arno, and, at evening, the
+peaks of the Carrara mountains, purple against the twilight, dark and
+calm, while the fire-flies glance beneath, silent and intermittent, like
+stars upon the rippling of mute, soft sea.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"It is by no means an easy task to adjust the chronology of Fra
+Angelico's works; he has affixed no dates to them, and consequently,
+when external evidence is wanting, we are thrown upon internal, which in
+his case is unusually fallacious. It is satisfactory therefore to
+possess a fixed date in 1433, the year in which he painted the great
+tabernacle for the Company of Flax-merchants, now removed to the gallery
+of the Uffizii. It represents the Virgin and child, with attendant
+Saints, on a gold ground--very dignified and noble, although the Madonna
+has not attained the exquisite spirituality of his later efforts. Round
+this tabernacle as a nucleus, may be classed a number of paintings, all
+of similar excellence--admirable that is to say, but not of his very
+best, and in which, if I mistake not, the type of the Virgin bears
+throughout a strong family resemblance."--Vol. iii., pp. 160, 161.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+83. If the painter ever increased in power after this period (he was
+then forty-three), we have been unable to systematize the improvement.
+We much doubt whether, in his modes of execution, advance were possible.
+Men whose merit lies in record of natural facts, increase in knowledge;
+and men whose merit is in dexterity of hand increase in facility; but we
+much doubt whether the faculty of design, or force of feeling, increase
+after the age of twenty-five. By Fra Angelico, who drew always in fear
+and trembling, dexterous execution had been from the first repudiated;
+he neither needed nor sought technical knowledge of the form, and the
+inspiration, to which his power was owing, was not less glowing in youth
+than in age. The inferiority traceable (we grant) in this Madonna
+results not from its early date, but from Fra Angelico's incapability,
+always visible, of drawing the head of life size. He is, in this
+respect, the exact reverse of Giotto; he was essentially a miniature
+painter, and never attained the mastery of muscular play in the features
+necessary in a full-sized drawing. His habit, almost constant, of
+surrounding the iris of the eye by a sharp black line, is, in small
+figures, perfectly successful, giving a transparency and tenderness not
+otherwise expressible. But on a larger scale it gives a stony stare to
+the eyeball, which not all the tenderness of the brow and mouth can
+conquer or redeem.
+
+84. Further, in this particular instance, the ear has by accident been
+set too far back--(Fra Angelico, drawing only from feeling, was liable
+to gross errors of this kind,--often, however, more beautiful than other
+men's truths)--and the hair removed in consequence too far off the brow;
+in other respects the face is very noble--still more so that of the
+Christ. The child _stands_ upon the Virgin's knees,[9] one hand raised
+in the usual attitude of benediction, the other holding a globe. The
+face looks straightforward, quiet, Jupiter-like, and very sublime, owing
+to the smallness of the features in proportion to the head, the eyes
+being placed at about three-sevenths of the whole height, leaving
+four-sevenths for the brow, and themselves only in length about
+one-sixth of the breadth of the face, half closed, giving a peculiar
+appearance of repose. The hair is short, golden, symmetrically curled,
+statuesque in its contour; the mouth tender and full of life: the red
+cross of the glory about the head of an intense ruby enamel, almost fire
+color; the dress brown, with golden girdle. In all the treatment Fra
+Angelico maintains his assertion of the authority of abstract
+imagination, which, depriving his subject of all material or actual
+being, contemplates it as retaining qualities eternal only--adorned by
+incorporeal splendor. The eyes of the beholder are supernaturally
+unsealed: and to this miraculous vision whatever is of the earth
+vanishes, and all things are seen endowed with an harmonious glory--the
+garments falling with strange, visionary grace, glowing with indefinite
+gold--the walls of the chamber dazzling as of a heavenly city--the
+mortal forms themselves impressed with divine changelessness--no
+domesticity--no jest--no anxiety--no expectation--no variety of action
+or of thought. Love, all fulfilling, and various modes of power, are
+alone expressed; the Virgin never shows the complacency or petty
+watchfulness of maternity; she sits serene, supporting the child whom
+she ever looks upon, as a stranger among strangers; "Behold the handmaid
+of the Lord" forever written upon her brow.
+
+85. An approach to an exception in treatment is found in the
+Annunciation of the upper corridor of St. Mark's, most unkindly treated
+by our author:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Probably the earliest of the series--full of faults, but imbued with
+the sweetest feeling; there is a look of naive curiosity, mingling with
+the modest and meek humility of the Virgin, which almost provokes a
+smile."--iii., 176.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+Many a Sabbath evening of bright summer have we passed in that lonely
+corridor--but not to the finding of faults, nor the provoking of smiles.
+The angel is perhaps something less majestic than is usual with the
+painter; but the Virgin is only the more to be worshiped, because here,
+for once, set before us in the verity of life. No gorgeous robe is upon
+her; no lifted throne set for her; the golden border gleams faintly on
+the dark blue dress; the seat is drawn into the shadow of a lowly
+loggia. The face is of no strange, far-sought loveliness; the features
+might even be thought hard, and they are worn with watching, and severe,
+though innocent. She stoops forward with her arms folded on her bosom:
+no casting down of eye nor shrinking of the frame in fear; she is too
+earnest, too self-forgetful for either: wonder and inquiry are there,
+but chastened and free from doubt; meekness, yet mingled with a patient
+majesty; peace, yet sorrowfully sealed, as if the promise of the Angel
+were already underwritten by the prophecy of Simeon. They who pass and
+repass in the twilight of that solemn corridor, need not the adjuration
+inscribed beneath:--
+
+   "Virginis intactae cum veneris ante figuram
+   Praetereundo cave ne sileatur Ave."[10]
+
+We in general allow the inferiority of Angelico's fresco to his tempera
+works; yet even that which of all these latter we think the most
+radiant, the Annunciation on the reliquary of Santa Maria Novella,
+would, we believe, if repeatedly compared with this of St. Mark's, in
+the end have the disadvantage. The eminent value of the tempera
+paintings results partly from their delicacy of line, and partly from
+the purity of color and force of decoration of which the material is
+capable.
+
+86. The passage, to which we have before alluded, respecting Fra
+Angelico's color in general, is one of the most curious and fanciful in
+the work:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"His coloring, on the other hand, is far more beautiful, although of
+questionable brilliancy. This will be found invariably the case in minds
+constituted like his. Spirit and Sense act on each other with livelier
+reciprocity the closer their approximation, the less intervention there
+is of Intellect. Hence the most religious and the most sensual painters
+have always loved the brightest colors--Spiritual Expression and a
+clearly defined (however inaccurate) outline forming the distinction of
+the former class; Animal Expression and a confused and uncertain outline
+(reflecting that lax morality which confounds the limits of light and
+darkness, right and wrong) of the latter. On the other hand, the more
+that Intellect, or the spirit of Form, intervenes in its severe
+precision, the less pure, the paler grow the colors, the nearer they
+tend to the hue of marble, of the bas-relief. We thus find the purest
+and brightest colors only in Fra Angelico's pictures, with a general
+predominance of blue, which we have observed to prevail more or less in
+so many of the Semi-Byzantine painters, and which, fanciful as it may
+appear, I cannot but attribute, independently of mere tradition, to an
+inherent, instinctive sympathy between their mental constitution and the
+color in question; as that of red, or of blood, may be observed to
+prevail among painters in whom Sense or Nature predominates over
+Spirit--for in this, as in all things else, the moral and the material
+world respond to each other as closely as shadow and substance. But, in
+Painting as in Morals, perfection implies the due intervention of
+Intellect between Spirit and Sense--of Form between Expression and
+Coloring--as a power at once controlling and controlled--and therefore,
+although acknowledging its fascination, I cannot unreservedly praise the
+Coloring of Fra Angelico."--Vol. iii., pp. 193, 194.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+87. There is much ingenuity, and some truth, here, but the reader, as in
+other of Lord Lindsay's speculations, must receive his conclusions with
+qualification. It is the natural character of strong effects of color,
+as of high light, to confuse outlines; and it is a necessity in all fine
+harmonies of color that many tints should merge imperceptibly into their
+following or succeeding ones:--we believe Lord Lindsay himself would
+hardly wish to mark the hues of the rainbow into divided zones, or to
+show its edge, as of an iron arch, against the sky, in order that it
+might no longer reflect (a reflection of which we profess ourselves up
+to this moment altogether unconscious) "that lax morality which
+confounds the limits of right and wrong." Again, there is a character of
+energy in all warm colors, as of repose in cold, which necessarily
+causes the former to be preferred by painters of savage subject--that
+is to say, commonly by the coarsest and most degraded;--but when
+sensuality is free from ferocity, it leans to blue more than to red (as
+especially in the flesh tints of Guido), and when intellect prevails
+over this sensuality, its first step is invariably to put more red into
+every color, and so "rubor est virtutis color." We hardly think Lord
+Lindsay would willingly include Luca Giordano among his spiritual
+painters, though that artist's servant was materially enriched by
+washing the ultramarine from the brushes with which he painted the
+Ricardi palace; nor would he, we believe, degrade Ghirlandajo to
+fellowship with the herd of the sensual, though in the fresco of the
+vision of Zacharias there are seventeen different reds in large masses,
+and not a shade of blue. The fact is, there is no color of the spectrum,
+as there is no note of music, whose key and prevalence may not be made
+pure in expression, and elevating in influence, by a great and good
+painter, or degraded to unhallowed purpose by a base one.
+
+88. We are sorry that our author "cannot unreservedly praise the
+coloring of Angelico;" but he is again curbed by his unhappy system of
+balanced perfectibility, and must quarrel with the gentle monk because
+he finds not in him the flames of Giorgione, nor the tempering of
+Titian, nor the melody of Cagliari. This curb of perfection we took
+between our teeth from the first, and we will give up our hearts to
+Angelico without drawback or reservation. His color is, in its sphere
+and to its purpose, as perfect as human work may be: wrought to radiance
+beyond that of the ruby and opal, its inartificialness prevents it from
+arresting the attention it is intended only to direct; were it composed
+with more science it would become vulgar from the loss of its
+unconsciousness; if richer, it must have parted with its purity, if
+deeper, with its joyfulness, if more subdued, with its sincerity.
+Passages are, indeed, sometimes unsuccessful; but it is to be judged in
+its rapture, and forgiven in its fall: he who works by law and system
+may be blamed when he sinks below the line above which he proposes no
+elevation, but to him whose eyes are on a mark far off, and whose
+efforts are impulsive, and to the utmost of his strength, we may not
+unkindly count the slips of his sometime descent into the valley of
+humiliation.
+
+89. The concluding notice of Angelico is true and interesting, though
+rendered obscure by useless recurrence to the favorite theory.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Such are the surviving works of a painter, who has recently been as
+unduly extolled as he had for three centuries past been unduly
+depreciated,--depreciated, through the amalgamation during those
+centuries of the principle of which he was the representative with
+baser, or at least less precious matter--extolled, through the
+recurrence to that principle, in its pure, unsophisticated essence, in
+the present --in a word, to the simple Imaginative Christianity of the
+middle ages, as opposed to the complex Reasoning Christianity of recent
+times. Creeds therefore are at issue, and no exclusive partisan, neither
+Catholic nor Protestant in the absolute sense of the terms, can fairly
+appreciate Fra Angelico. Nevertheless, to those who regard society as
+progressive through the gradual development of the component elements of
+human nature, and who believe that Providence has accommodated the mind
+of man, individually, to the perception of half-truths only, in order to
+create that antagonism from which Truth is generated in the abstract,
+and by which the progression is effected, his rank and position in art
+are clear and definite. All that Spirit could achieve by herself,
+anterior to that struggle with Intellect and Sense which she must in all
+cases pass through in order to work out her destiny, was accomplished by
+him. Last and most gifted of a long and imaginative race--the heir of
+their experience, with collateral advantages which they possessed
+not--and flourishing at the moment when the transition was actually
+taking place from the youth to the early manhood of Europe; he gave
+full, unreserved, and enthusiastic expression to that Love and Hope
+which had winged the Faith of Christendom in her flight towards heaven
+for fourteen centuries,--to those yearnings of the Heart and the
+Imagination which ever precede, in Universal as well as Individual
+development, the severer and more chastened intelligence of
+Reason."--Vol. iii., pp. 188-190.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+90. We must again repeat that if our author wishes to be truly
+serviceable to the schools of England, he must express himself in terms
+requiring less laborious translation. Clearing the above statement of
+its mysticism and metaphor, it amounts only to this,--that Fra Angelico
+was a man of (humanly speaking) _perfect_ piety--humility, charity, and
+faith--that he never employed his art but as a means of expressing his
+love to God and man, and with the view, single, simple, and
+straightforward, of glory to the Creator, and good to the Creature.
+Every quality or subject of art by which these ends were not to be
+attained, or to be attained secondarily only, he rejected; from all
+study of art, as such, he withdrew; whatever might merely please the
+eye, or interest the intellect, he despised, and refused; he used his
+colors and lines, as David his harp, after a kingly fashion, for
+purposes of praise and not of science. To this grace and gift of
+holiness were added, those of a fervent imagination, vivid invention,
+keen sense of loveliness in lines and colors, unwearied energy, and to
+all these gifts the crowning one of quietness of life and mind, while
+yet his convent-cell was at first within view, and afterwards in the
+center, of a city which had lead of all the world in Intellect, and in
+whose streets he might see daily and hourly the noblest setting of manly
+features. It would perhaps be well to wait until we find another man
+thus actuated, thus endowed, and thus circumstanced, before we speak of
+"unduly extolling" the works of Fra Angelico.
+
+91. His artistical attainments, as might be conjectured, are nothing
+more than the development, through practice, of his natural powers in
+accordance with his sacred instincts. His power of expression by bodily
+gesture is greater even than Giotto's, wherever he could feel or
+comprehend the passion to be expressed; but so inherent in him was his
+holy tranquillity of mind, that he could not by any exertion, even for a
+moment, conceive either agitation, doubt, or fear--and all the actions
+proceeding from such passions, or, _a fortiori_, from any yet more
+criminal, are absurdly and powerlessly portrayed by him; while
+contrariwise, every gesture, consistent with emotion pure and saintly,
+is rendered with an intensity of truth to which there is no existing
+parallel; the expression being carried out into every bend of the hand,
+every undulation of the arm, shoulder, and neck, every fold of the dress
+and every wave of the hair. His drawing of movement is subject to the
+same influence; vulgar or vicious motion he cannot represent; his
+running, falling, or struggling figures are drawn with childish
+incapability; but give him for his scene the pavement of heaven, or
+pastures of Paradise, and for his subject the "inoffensive pace" of
+glorified souls, or the spiritual speed of Angels, and Michael Angelo
+alone can contend with him in majesty,--in grace and musical
+continuousness of motion, no one. The inspiration was in some degree
+caught by his pupil Benozzo, but thenceforward forever lost. The angels
+of Perugino appear to be let down by cords and moved by wires; that of
+Titian, in the sacrifice of Isaac, kicks like an awkward swimmer;
+Raphael's Moses and Elias of the Transfiguration are cramped at the
+knees; and the flight of Domenichino's angels is a sprawl paralyzed. The
+authority of Tintoret over movement is, on the other hand, too
+unlimited; the descent of his angels is the swoop of a whirlwind or the
+fall of a thunderbolt; his mortal impulses are oftener impetuous than
+pathetic, and majestic more than melodious.
+
+92. But it is difficult by words to convey to the reader unacquainted
+with Angelico's works, any idea of the thoughtful variety of his
+rendering of movement--Earnest haste of girded faith in the Flight into
+Egypt, the haste of obedience, not of fear; and unweariedness, but
+through spiritual support, and not in human strength--Swift obedience of
+passive earth to the call of its Creator, in the Resurrection of
+Lazarus--March of meditative gladness in the following of the Apostles
+down the Mount of Olives--Rush of adoration breaking through the chains
+and shadows of death, in the Spirits in Prison. Pacing of mighty angels
+above the Firmament, poised on their upright wings, half opened, broad,
+bright, quiet, like eastern clouds before the sun is up;--or going
+forth, with timbrels and with dances, of souls more than conquerors,
+beside the shore of the last great Red Sea, the sea of glass mingled
+with fire, hand knit with hand, and voice with voice, the joyful winds
+of heaven following the measure of their motion, and the flowers of the
+new earth looking on, like stars pausing in their courses.
+
+93. And yet all this is but the lowest part and narrowest reach of
+Angelico's conceptions. Joy and gentleness, patience and power, he could
+indicate by gesture--but Devotion could be told by the countenance only.
+There seems to have been always a stern limit by which the thoughts of
+other men were stayed; the religion that was painted even by Perugino,
+Francia, and Bellini, was finite in its spirit--the religion of earthly
+beings, checked, not indeed by the corruption, but by the veil and the
+sorrow of clay. But with Fra Angelico the glory of the countenance
+reaches to actual transfiguration; eyes that see no more darkly,
+incapable of all tears, foreheads flaming, like Belshazzar's marble
+wall, with the writing of the Father's name upon them, lips tremulous
+with love, and crimson with the light of the coals of the altar--and all
+this loveliness, thus enthusiastic and ineffable, yet sealed with the
+stability which the coming and going of ages as countless as sea-sand
+cannot dim nor weary, and bathed by an ever flowing river of holy
+thought, with God for its source, God for its shore, and God for its
+ocean.
+
+94. We speak in no inconsiderate enthusiasm. We feel assured that to any
+person of just feeling who devotes sufficient time to the examination of
+these works, all terms of description must seem derogatory. Where such
+ends as these have been reached, it ill becomes us to speak of minor
+deficiencies as either to be blamed or regretted: it cannot be
+determined how far even what we deprecate may be accessory to our
+delight, nor by what intricate involution what we deplore may be
+connected with what we love. Every good that nature herself bestows, or
+accomplishes, is given with a counterpoise, or gained at a sacrifice;
+nor is it to be expected of Man that he should win the hardest battles
+and tread the narrowest paths, without the betrayal of a weakness, or
+the acknowledgment of an error.
+
+95. With this final warning against our author's hesitating approbation
+of what is greatest and best, we must close our specific examination of
+the mode in which his design has been worked out. We have done enough to
+set the reader upon his guard against whatever appears slight or
+inconsiderate in his theory or statements, and with the more severity,
+because this was alone wanting to render the book one of the most
+valuable gifts which Art has ever received. Of the translations from the
+lives of the saints we have hardly spoken; they are gracefully rendered,
+and all of them highly interesting--but we could wish to see these, and
+the enumerations of fresco subjects[11] with which the other volumes are
+in great part occupied, published separately for the convenience of
+travelers in Italy. They are something out of place in a work like that
+before us. For the rest, we might have more interested the reader, and
+gratified ourselves, by setting before him some of the many passages of
+tender feeling and earnest eloquence with which the volumes are
+replete--but we felt it necessary rather to anticipate the hesitation
+with which they were liable to be received, and set limits to the halo
+of fancy by which their light is obscured--though enlarged. One or two
+paragraphs, however, of the closing chapter must be given before we
+part:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+96. "What a scene of beauty, what a flower-garden of art--how bright and
+how varied--must Italy have presented at the commencement of the
+sixteenth century, at the death of Raphael! The sacrileges we lament
+took place for the most part after that period; hundreds of frescoes,
+not merely of Giotto and those other elders of Christian Art, but of
+Gentile da Fabriano, Pietro della Francesca, Perugino and their
+compeers, were still existing, charming the eye, elevating the mind, and
+warming the heart. Now alas! few comparatively and fading are the relics
+of those great and good men. While Dante's voice rings as clear as ever,
+communing with us as friend with friend, theirs is dying gradually away,
+fainter and fainter, like the farewell of a spirit. Flaking off the
+walls, uncared for and neglected save in a few rare instances, scarce
+one of their frescoes will survive the century, and the labors of the
+next may not improbably be directed to the recovery and restoration of
+such as may still slumber beneath the whitewash and the daubs with which
+the Bronzinos and Zuccheros 'et id genus omne' have unconsciously sealed
+them up for posterity--their best title to our gratitude.--But why not
+begin at once? at all events in the instances numberless, where merely
+whitewash interposes between us and them.
+
+"It is easy to reply--what need of this? They--the artists--have Moses
+and the prophets, the frescoes of Raphael and Michael Angelo--let them
+study them. Doubtless,--but we still reply, and with no impiety--they
+will not repent, they will not forsake their idols and their evil
+ways--they will not abandon Sense for Spirit, oils for fresco--unless
+these great ones of the past, these Sleepers of Ephesus, arise from the
+dead.... It is not by studying art in its perfection--by worshiping
+Raphael and Michael Angelo exclusively of all other excellence--that we
+can expect to rival them, but by re-ascending to the fountain-head--by
+planting ourselves as acorns in the ground those oaks are rooted in, and
+growing up to their level--in a word, by studying Duccio and Giotto that
+we may paint like Taddeo di Bartolo and Masaccio, Taddeo di Bartolo and
+Masaccio that we may paint like Perugino and Luca Signorelli, Perugino
+and Luca Signorelli that we may paint like Raphael and Michael Angelo.
+And why despair of this, or even of shaming the Vatican? For with genius
+and God's blessing nothing is impossible.
+
+"I would not be a blind partisan, but, with all their faults, the old
+masters I plead for knew how to touch the heart. It may be difficult at
+first to believe this; like children, they are shy with us--like
+strangers, they bear an uncouth mien and aspect--like ghosts from the
+other world, they have an awkward habit of shocking our
+conventionalities with home truths. But with the dead as with the living
+all depends on the frankness with which we greet them, the sincerity
+with which we credit their kindly qualities; sympathy is the key to
+truth--we must love, in order to appreciate."--iii., p. 418.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+97. These are beautiful sentences; yet this let the young painter of
+these days remember always, that whomsoever he may love, or from
+whomsoever learn, he can now no more go back to those hours of infancy
+and be born again.[12] About the faith, the questioning and the
+teaching of childhood there is a joy and grace, which we may often envy,
+but can no more assume:--the voice and the gesture must not be imitated
+when the innocence is lost. Incapability and ignorance in the act of
+being struggled against and cast away are often endowed with a peculiar
+charm--but both are only contemptible when they are pretended. Whatever
+we have now to do, we may be sure, first, that its strength and life
+must be drawn from the real nature with us and about us always, and
+secondly, that, if worth doing, it will be something altogether
+different from what has ever been done before. The visions of the
+cloister must depart with its superstitious peace--the quick,
+apprehensive symbolism of early Faith must yield to the abstract
+teaching of disciplined Reason. Whatever else we may deem of the
+Progress of Nations, one character of that progress is determined and
+discernible. As in the encroaching of the land upon the sea, the
+strength of the sandy bastions is raised out of the sifted ruin of
+ancient inland hills--for every tongue of level land that stretches into
+the deep, the fall of Alps has been heard among the clouds, and as the
+fields of industry enlarge, the intercourse with Heaven is shortened.
+Let it not be doubted that as this change is inevitable, so it is
+expedient, though the form of teaching adopted and of duty prescribed be
+less mythic and contemplative, more active and unassisted: for the light
+of Transfiguration on the Mountain is substituted the Fire of Coals upon
+the Shore, and on the charge to hear the Shepherd, follows that to feed
+the Sheep. Doubtful we may be for a time, and apparently deserted; but
+if, as we wait, we still look forward with steadfast will and humble
+heart, so that our Hope for the Future may be fed, not dulled or
+diverted by our Love for the Past, we shall not long be left without a
+Guide:--the way will be opened, the Precursor appointed--the Hour will
+come, and the Man.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[4] This essay is a review of two books by Lord Lindsay, viz.,
+"Progression by Antagonism," published in 1846, and the "Sketches of the
+History of Christian Art," which appeared in the following year. It is,
+with the paper on Sir C. Eastlake's "History of Oil Painting," one of
+the very few anonymous writings of its author. "I never felt at ease"
+(says Mr. Ruskin, in speaking of anonymous criticism) "in my graduate
+incognito, and although I consented, some nine years ago, to review Lord
+Lindsay's 'Christian Art,' and Sir Charles Eastlake's 'Essay on Oil
+Painting,' in the _Quarterly_, I have ever since steadily refused to
+write even for that once respectable periodical" ("Academy Notes," No.
+II., 1856). For Mr. Ruskin's estimate of Lord Lindsay's work, see the
+"Eagle's Nest," Sec. 46, and "Val d'Arno," Sec. 264, where he speaks of him as
+his "first master in Italian art."--[ED.]
+
+[5] With one exception (see p. 25) the quotations from Lord Lindsay
+are always from the "Christian Art."--ED.
+
+[6] The reader must remember that this arcade was originally quite open,
+the inner wall having been built after the fire, in 1574.
+
+[7] "An Historical Essay on Architecture" by the late Thomas Hope.
+(Murray, 1835) chap, iv., pp. 23-31.
+
+[8] At the feet of his Madonna, in the Gallery of Bologna.
+
+[9] In many pictures of Angelico, the Infant Christ appears
+self-supported--the Virgin not touching the child.
+
+[10] The upper inscription Lord Lindsay has misquoted--it runs thus:--
+
+"Salve Mater Pietatis Et Totius Trinitatis Nobile Triclinium."
+
+
+
+[11] We have been much surprised by the author's frequent reference to
+Lasinio's engravings of various frescoes, unaccompanied by any warning
+of their inaccuracy. No work of Lasinio's can be trusted for _anything_
+except the number and relative position of the figures. All masters are
+by him translated into one monotony of commonplace:--he dilutes
+eloquence, educates naivete, prompts ignorance, stultifies intelligence,
+and paralyzes power; takes the chill off horror, the edge off wit, and
+the bloom off beauty. In all artistical points he is utterly valueless,
+neither drawing nor expression being ever preserved by him. Giotto,
+Benozzo, or Ghirlandajo are all alike to him; and we hardly know whether
+he injures most when he robs or when he redresses.
+
+[12] We do not perhaps enough estimate the assistance which was once
+given both to purpose and perception, by the feeling of wonder which
+with us is destroyed partly by the ceaseless calls upon it, partly by
+our habit of either discovering or anticipating a reason for everything.
+Of the simplicity and ready surprise of heart which supported the spirit
+of the older painters, an interesting example is seen in the diary of
+Albert Duerer, lately published in a work every way valuable, but
+especially so in the carefulness and richness of its illustrations,
+"Divers Works of Early Masters in Christian Decoration," edited by John
+Weale, London, 2 vols. folio, 1846.
+
+
+
+
+EASTLAKE'S HISTORY OF OIL-PAINTING.[13]
+
+
+98. The stranger in Florence who for the first time passes through the
+iron gate which opens from the Green Cloister of Santa Maria Novella
+into the Spezieria, can hardly fail of being surprised, and that perhaps
+painfully, by the suddenness of the transition from the silence and
+gloom of the monastic inclosure, its pavement rough with epitaphs, and
+its walls retaining, still legible, though crumbling and mildewed, their
+imaged records of Scripture History, to the activity of a traffic not
+less frivolous than flourishing, concerned almost exclusively with the
+appliances of bodily adornment or luxury. Yet perhaps, on a moment's
+reflection, the rose-leaves scattered on the floor, and the air filled
+with odor of myrtle and myrrh, aloes and cassia, may arouse associations
+of a different and more elevated character; the preparation of these
+precious perfumes may seem not altogether unfitting the hands of a
+religious brotherhood--or if this should not be conceded, at all events
+it must be matter of rejoicing to observe the evidence of intelligence
+and energy interrupting the apathy and languor of the cloister; nor will
+the institution be regarded with other than respect, as well as
+gratitude, when it is remembered that, as to the convent library we owe
+the preservation of ancient literature, to the convent laboratory we owe
+the duration of mediaeval art.
+
+99. It is at first with surprise not altogether dissimilar, that we find
+a painter of refined feeling and deep thoughtfulness, after manifesting
+in his works the most sincere affection for what is highest in the reach
+of his art, devoting himself for years (there is proof of this in the
+work before us) to the study of the mechanical preparation of its
+appliances, and whatever documentary evidence exists respecting their
+ancient use. But it is with a revulsion of feeling more entire, that we
+perceive the value of the results obtained--the accuracy of the varied
+knowledge by which their sequence has been established--and above all,
+their immediate bearing upon the practice and promise of the schools of
+our own day.
+
+Opposite errors, we know not which the least pardonable, but both
+certainly productive of great harm, have from time to time possessed the
+masters of modern art. It has been held by some that the great early
+painters owed the larger measure of their power to secrets of material
+and method, and that the discovery of a lost vehicle or forgotten
+process might at any time accomplish the regeneration of a fallen
+school. By others it has been asserted that all questions respecting
+materials or manipulation are idle and impertinent; that the methods of
+the older masters were either of no peculiar value, or are still in our
+power; that a great painter is independent of all but the simplest
+mechanical aids, and demonstrates his greatness by scorn of system and
+carelessness of means.
+
+100. It is evident that so long as incapability could shield itself
+under the first of these creeds, or presumption vindicate itself by the
+second; so long as the feeble painter could lay his faults on his
+palette and his panel; and the self-conceited painter, from the assumed
+identity of materials proceed to infer equality of power--(for we
+believe that in most instances those who deny the evil of our present
+methods will deny also the weakness of our present works)--little good
+could be expected from the teaching of the abstract principles of the
+art; and less, if possible, from the example of any mechanical
+qualities, however admirable, whose means might be supposed
+irrecoverable on the one hand, or indeterminate on the other, or of any
+excellence conceived to have been either summoned by an incantation, or
+struck out by an accident. And of late, among our leading masters, the
+loss has not been merely of the system of the ancients, but of all
+system whatsoever: the greater number paint as if the virtue of oil
+pigment were its opacity, or as if its power depended on its polish; of
+the rest, no two agree in use or choice of materials; not many are
+consistent even in their own practice; and the most zealous and earnest,
+therefore the most discontented, reaching impatiently and desperately
+after better things, purchase the momentary satisfaction of their
+feelings by the sacrifice of security of surface and durability of hue.
+The walls of our galleries are for the most part divided between
+pictures whose dead coating of consistent paint, laid on with a heavy
+hand and a cold heart, secures for them the stability of dullness and
+the safety of mediocrity; and pictures whose reckless and experimental
+brilliancy, unequal in its result as lawless in its means, is as
+evanescent as the dust of an insect's wing, and presents in its chief
+perfections so many subjects of future regret.
+
+101. But if these evils now continue, it can only be through rashness
+which no example can warn, or through apathy which no hope can
+stimulate, for Mr. Eastlake has alike withdrawn license from
+experimentalism and apology from indolence. He has done away with all
+legends of forgotten secrets; he has shown that the masters of the great
+Flemish and early Venetian schools possessed no means, followed no
+methods, but such as we may still obtain and pursue; but he has shown
+also, among all these masters, the most admirable care in the
+preparation of materials and the most simple consistency in their use;
+he has shown that their excellence was reached, and could only have been
+reached, by stern and exact science, condescending to the observance,
+care, and conquest of the most minute physical particulars and
+hindrances; that the greatest of them never despised an aid nor avoided
+a difficulty. The loss of imaginative liberty sometimes involved in a
+too scrupulous attention to methods of execution is trivial compared to
+the evils resulting from a careless or inefficient practice. The modes
+in which, with every great painter, realization falls short of
+conception are necessarily so many and so grievous, that he can ill
+afford to undergo the additional discouragement caused by uncertain
+methods and bad materials. Not only so, but even the choice of subjects,
+the amount of completion attempted, nay, even the modes of conception
+and measure of truth are in no small degree involved in the great
+question of materials. On the habitual use of a light or dark ground may
+depend the painter's preference of a broad and faithful, or partial and
+scenic chiaroscuro; correspondent with the facility or fatality of
+alterations, may be the exercise of indolent fancy, or disciplined
+invention; and to the complexities of a system requiring time, patience,
+and succession of process, may be owing the conversion of the ready
+draughtsman into the resolute painter. Farther than this, who shall say
+how unconquerable a barrier to all self-denying effort may exist in the
+consciousness that the best that is accomplished can last but a few
+years, and that the painter's travail must perish with his life?
+
+102. It cannot have been without strong sense of this, the true dignity
+and relation of his subject, that Mr. Eastlake has gone through a toil
+far more irksome, far less selfish than any he could have undergone in
+the practice of his art. The value which we attach to the volume
+depends, however, rather on its preceptive than its antiquarian
+character. As objects of historical inquiry merely, we cannot conceive
+any questions less interesting than those relating to mechanical
+operations generally, nor any honors less worthy of prolonged dispute
+than those which are grounded merely on the invention or amelioration of
+processes and pigments. The subject can only become historically
+interesting when the means ascertained to have been employed at any
+period are considered in their operation upon or procession from the
+artistical aim of such period, the character of its chosen subjects, and
+the effects proposed in their treatment upon the national mind. Mr.
+Eastlake has as yet refused himself the indulgence of such speculation;
+his book is no more than its modest title expresses. For ourselves,
+however, without venturing in the slightest degree to anticipate the
+expression of his ulterior views--though we believe that we can trace
+their extent and direction in a few suggestive sentences, as pregnant as
+they are unobtrusive--we must yet, in giving a rapid sketch of the facts
+established, assume the privilege of directing the reader to one or two
+of their most obvious consequences, and, like honest 'prentices, not
+suffer the abstracted retirement of our master in the back parlor to
+diminish the just recommendation of his wares to the passers-by.
+
+103. Eminently deficient in works representative of the earliest and
+purest tendencies of art, our National Gallery nevertheless affords a
+characteristic and sufficient series of examples of the practice of the
+various schools of painting, after oil had been finally substituted for
+the less manageable glutinous vehicles which, under the general name of
+tempera, were principally employed in the production of easel pictures
+up to the middle of the fifteenth century. If the reader were to make
+the circuit of this collection for the purpose of determining which
+picture represented with least disputable fidelity the first intention
+of its painter, and united in its modes of execution the highest reach
+of achievement with the strongest assurance of durability, we believe
+that--after hesitating long over hypothetical degrees of blackened
+shadow and yellowed light, of lost outline and buried detail, of chilled
+luster, dimmed transparency, altered color, and weakened force--he would
+finally pause before a small picture on panel, representing two quaintly
+dressed figures in a dimly lighted room--dependent for its interest
+little on expression, and less on treatment--but eminently remarkable
+for reality of substance, vacuity of space, and vigor of quiet color;
+nor less for an elaborate finish, united with energetic freshness,
+which seem to show that time has been much concerned in its production,
+and has had no power over its fate.
+
+104. We do not say that the total force of the material is exhibited in
+this picture, or even that it in any degree possesses the lusciousness
+and fullness which are among the chief charms of oil-painting; but that
+upon the whole it would be selected as uniting imperishable firmness
+with exquisite delicacy; as approaching more unaffectedly and more
+closely than any other work to the simple truths of natural color and
+space; and as exhibiting, even in its quaint and minute treatment,
+conquest over many of the difficulties which the boldest practice of art
+involves.
+
+This picture, bearing the inscription "Johannes Van Eyck (fuit?) hic,
+1434," is probably the portrait, certainly the work, of one of those
+brothers to whose ingenuity the first invention of the art of
+oil-painting has been long ascribed. The volume before us is occupied
+chiefly in determining the real extent of the improvements they
+introduced, in examining the processes they employed, and in tracing the
+modifications of those processes adopted by later Flemings, especially
+Rubens, Rembrandt, and Vandyck. Incidental notices of the Italian system
+occur, so far as, in its earlier stages, it corresponded with that of
+the north; but the consideration of its separate character is reserved
+for a following volume, and though we shall expect with interest this
+concluding portion of the treatise, we believe that, in the present
+condition of the English school, the choice of the methods of Van Eyck,
+Bellini, or Rubens, is as much as we could modestly ask or prudently
+desire.
+
+105. It would have been strange indeed if a technical perfection like
+that of the picture above described (equally characteristic of all the
+works of those brothers), had been at once reached by the first
+inventors of the art. So far was this from being the case, and so
+distinct is the evidence of the practice of oil-painting in antecedent
+periods, that of late years the discoveries of the Van Eycks have not
+unfrequently been treated as entirely fabulous; and Raspe, in
+particular, rests their claims to gratitude on the contingent
+introduction of amber-varnish and poppy-oil:--"Such _perhaps_," he says,
+"might have been the misrepresented discovery of the Van Eycks." That
+tradition, however, for which the great painters of Italy, and their
+sufficiently vain historian, had so much respect as never to put forward
+any claim in opposition to it, is not to be clouded by incautious
+suspicion. Mr. Eastlake has approached it with more reverence, stripped
+it of its exaggeration, and shown the foundations for it in the fact
+that the Van Eycks, though they did not create the art, yet were the
+first to enable it for its function; that having found it in servile
+office and with dormant power--laid like the dead Adonis on his
+lettuce-bed--they gave it vitality and dominion. And fortunate it is for
+those who look for another such reanimation, that the method of the Van
+Eycks was not altogether their own discovery. Had it been so, that
+method might still have remained a subject of conjecture; but after
+being put in possession of the principles commonly acknowledged before
+their time, it is comparatively easy to trace the direction of their
+inquiry and the nature of their improvements.
+
+106. With respect to remote periods of antiquity, we believe that the
+use of a hydrofuge oil-varnish for the protection of works in tempera,
+the only fact insisted upon by Mr. Eastlake, is also the only one which
+the labor of innumerable ingenious writers has established: nor up to
+the beginning of the twelfth century is there proof of any practice of
+painting except in tempera, encaustic (wax applied by the aid of heat),
+and fresco. Subsequent to that period, notices of works executed in
+solid color mixed with oil are frequent, but all that can be proved
+respecting earlier times is a gradually increasing acquaintance with the
+different kinds of oil and the modes of their adaptation to artistical
+uses.
+
+Several drying oils are mentioned by the writers of the first three
+centuries of the Christian era--walnut by Pliny and Galen, walnut,
+poppy, and castor-oil (afterwards used by the painters of the twelfth
+century as a varnish) by Dioscorides--yet these notices occur only with
+reference to medicinal or culinary purposes. But at length a drying oil
+is mentioned in connection with works of art by Aetius, a medical writer
+of the fifth century. His words are:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Walnut oil is prepared like that of almonds, either by pounding or
+pressing the nuts, or by throwing them, after they have been bruised,
+into boiling water. The (medicinal) uses are the same: but it has a use
+besides these, being employed by gilders or encaustic painters; for it
+dries, and preserves gildings and encaustic paintings for a long time."
+
+"It is therefore clear," says Mr. Eastlake, "that an oil varnish,
+composed either of inspissated nut oil, or of nut oil combined with a
+dissolved resin, was employed on gilt surfaces and pictures, with a view
+to preserve them, at least as early as the fifth century. It may be
+added that a writer who could then state, as if from his own experience,
+that such varnishes had the effect of preserving works 'for a long
+time,' can hardly be understood to speak of a new invention."--P. 22.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+Linseed-oil is also mentioned by Aetius, though still for medicinal uses
+only; but a varnish, composed of linseed-oil mixed with a variety of
+resins, is described in a manuscript at Lucca, belonging probably to the
+eighth century:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"The age of Charlemagne was an era in the arts; and the addition of
+linseed-oil to the materials of the varnisher and decorator may on the
+above evidence be assigned to it. From this time, and during many ages,
+the linseed-oil varnish, though composed of simpler materials (such as
+sandarac and mastic resin boiled in the oil), alone appears in the
+recipes hitherto brought to light."--_Ib._, p. 24.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+107. The modes of bleaching and thickening oil in the sun, as well as
+the siccative power of metallic oxides, were known to the classical
+writers, and evidence exists of the careful study of Galen, Dioscorides,
+and others by the painters of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: the
+loss (recorded by Vasari) of Antonio Veneziano to the arts, "per che
+studio in Dioscoride le cose dell'erbe," is a remarkable instance of its
+less fortunate results. Still, the immixture of solid color with the
+oil, which had been commonly used as a varnish for tempera paintings and
+gilt surfaces, was hitherto unsuggested; and no distinct notice seems to
+occur of the first occasion of this important step, though in the
+twelfth century, as above stated, the process is described as frequent
+both in Italy and England. Mr. Eastlake's instances have been selected,
+for the most part, from four treatises, two of which, though in an
+imperfect form, have long been known to the public; the third,
+translated by Mrs. Merrifield, is in course of publication; the fourth,
+"Tractatus de Coloribus illuminatorum," is of less importance.
+
+Respecting the dates of the first two, those of Eraclius and Theophilus,
+some difference of opinion exists between Mr. Eastlake and their
+respective editors. The former MS. was published by Raspe,[14] who
+inclines to the opinion of its having been written soon after the time
+of St. Isidore of Seville, probably therefore in the eighth century, but
+insists only on its being prior to the thirteenth. That of Theophilus,
+published first by M. Charles de l'Escalopier, and lately from a more
+perfect MS. by Mr. Hendrie, is ascribed by its English editor (who
+places Eraclius in the tenth) to the early half of the eleventh century.
+Mr. Hendrie maintains his opinion with much analytical ingenuity, and we
+are disposed to think that Mr. Eastlake attaches too much importance to
+the absence of reference to oil-painting in the Mappae Clavicula (a MS.
+of the twelfth century), in placing Theophilus a century and a half
+later on that ground alone. The question is one of some importance in an
+antiquarian point of view, but the general reader will perhaps be
+satisfied with the conclusion that in MSS. which cannot possibly be
+later than the close of the twelfth century, references to oil-painting
+are clear and frequent.
+
+108. Nothing is known of the personality of either Eraclius or
+Theophilus, but what may be collected from their works; amounting, in
+the first case, to the facts of the author's "language being barbarous,
+his credulity exceptionable, and his knowledge superficial," together
+with his written description as "vir sapientissimus;" while all that is
+positively known of Theophilus is that he was a monk, and that
+Theophilus was not his real name. The character, however, of which the
+assumed name is truly expressive, deserves from us no unrespectful
+attention; we shall best possess our readers of it by laying before them
+one or two passages from the preface. We shall make some use of Mr.
+Hendrie's translation; it is evidently the work of a tasteful man, and
+in most cases renders the feeling of the original faithfully; but the
+Latin, monkish though it be, deserved a more accurate following, and
+many of Mr. Hendrie's deviations bear traces of unsound scholarship. An
+awkward instance occurs in the first paragraph:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Theophilus, humilis presbyter, servus servorum Dei, indignus nomine et
+professione monachi, omnibus mentis desidiam animique vagationem utili
+manuum occupatione, et delectabili novitatum meditatione declinare et
+calcare volentibus, retributionem coelestis praemii!"
+
+"I, Theophilus, an humble priest, servant of the servants of God,
+unworthy of the name and profession of a monk, to all wishing to
+overcome and avoid sloth of the mind or wandering of the soul, by useful
+manual occupation and the delightful contemplation of novelties, send a
+recompense of heavenly price."--_Theophilus_, p. 1.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+_Proemium_ is not "price," nor is the verb understood before
+_retributionem_ "send." Mr. Hendrie seems even less familiar with
+Scriptural than with monkish language, or in this and several other
+cases he would have recognized the adoption of apostolic formulae. The
+whole paragraph is such a greeting and prayer as stands at the head of
+the sacred epistles:--"Theophilus, to all who desire to overcome
+wandering of the soul, etc., etc. (wishes) recompense of heavenly
+reward." Thus also the dedication of the Byzantine manuscript, lately
+translated by M. Didron, commences "A tous les peintres, et a tous ceux
+qui, aimant l'instruction, etudieront ce livre, salut dans le Seigneur."
+So, presently afterwards, in the sentence, "divina dignatio quae dat
+omnibus affluenter et non improperat" (translated, "divine _authority_
+which affluently and not precipitately gives to all"), though Mr.
+Hendrie might have perhaps been excused for not perceiving the
+transitive sense of _dignatio_ after _indignus_ in the previous text,
+which indeed, even when felt, is sufficiently difficult to render in
+English; and might not have been aware that the word _impropero_
+frequently bears the sense of _opprobo_; he ought still to have
+recognized the Scriptural "who giveth to all men liberally and
+_upbraideth_ not." "Qui," in the first page, translated "wherefore,"
+mystifies a whole sentence; "ut mereretur," rendered with a schoolboy's
+carelessness "as he merited," reverses the meaning of another;
+"jactantia," in the following page, is less harmfully but not less
+singularly translated "jealousy." We have been obliged to alter several
+expressions in the following passages, in order to bring them near
+enough to the original for our immediate purpose:
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Which knowledge, when he has obtained, let no one magnify himself in
+his own eyes, as if it had been received from himself, and not from
+elsewhere; but let him rejoice humbly in the Lord, from whom and by whom
+are all things, and without whom is nothing; nor let him wrap his gifts
+in the folds of envy, nor hide them in the closet of an avaricious
+heart; but all pride of heart being repelled, let him with a cheerful
+mind give with simplicity to all who ask of him, and let him fear the
+judgment of the Gospel upon that merchant, who, failing to return to his
+lord a talent with accumulated interest, deprived of all reward,
+merited the censure from the mouth of his judge of 'wicked servant.'
+
+"Fearing to incur which sentence, I, a man unworthy and almost without
+name, offer gratuitously to all desirous with humility to learn, that
+which the divine condescension, which giveth to all men liberally and
+upbraideth not, gratuitously conceded to me: and I admonish them that in
+me they acknowledge the goodness, and admire the generosity of God; and
+I would persuade them to believe that if they also add their labor, the
+same gifts are within their reach.
+
+"Wherefore, gentle son, whom God has rendered perfectly happy in this
+respect, that those things are offered to thee gratis, which many,
+plowing the sea waves with the greatest danger to life, consumed by the
+hardship of hunger and cold, or subjected to the weary servitude of
+teachers, and altogether worn out by the desire of learning, yet acquire
+with intolerable labor, covet with greedy looks this 'BOOK OF VARIOUS
+ARTS,' read it through with a tenacious memory, embrace it with an
+ardent love.
+
+"Should you carefully peruse this, you will there find out whatever
+Greece possesses in kinds and mixtures of various colors; whatever
+Tuscany knows of in mosaic-work, or in variety of enamel; whatever
+Arabia shows forth in work of fusion, ductility, or chasing; whatever
+Italy ornaments with gold, in diversity of vases and sculpture of gems
+or ivory; whatever France loves in a costly variety of windows; whatever
+industrious Germany approves in work of gold, silver, copper, and iron,
+of woods and of stones.
+
+"When you shall have re-read this often, and have committed it to your
+tenacious memory, you shall thus recompense me for this care of
+instruction, that as often as you shall have successfully made use of my
+work, you pray for me for the pity of Omnipotent God, who knows that I
+have written these things, which are here arranged, neither through love
+of human approbation, nor through desire of temporal reward, nor have I
+stolen anything precious or rare through envious jealousy, nor have I
+kept back anything reserved served for myself alone; but in
+augmentation of the honor and glory of His name, I have consulted the
+progress and hastened to aid the necessities of many men."--_Ib._ pp.
+xlvii.-li.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+109. There is perhaps something in the naive seriousness with which
+these matters of empiricism, to us of so small importance, are regarded
+by the good monk, which may at first tempt the reader to a smile. It is,
+however, to be kept in mind that some such mode of introduction was
+customary in all works of this order and period. The Byzantine MS.,
+already alluded to, is prefaced still more singularly: "Que celui qui
+veut apprendre la science de la peinture commence a s'y preparer
+d'avance quelque temps en dessinant sans relache ... puis qu'il adresse
+a Jesus Christ la priere et oraison suivante," etc.:--the prayer being
+followed by a homily respecting envy, much resembling that of
+Theophilus. And we may rest assured that until we have again begun to
+teach and to learn in this spirit, art will no more recover its true
+power or place than springs which flow from no heavenward hills can rise
+to useful level in the wells of the plain. The tenderness, tranquillity,
+and resoluteness which we feel in such men's words and thoughts found a
+correspondent expression even in the movements of the hand; precious
+qualities resulted from them even in the most mechanical of their works,
+such as no reward can evoke, no academy teach, nor any other merits
+replace. What force can be summoned by authority, or fostered by
+patronage, which could for an instant equal in intensity the labor of
+this humble love, exerting itself for its own pleasure, looking upon its
+own works by the light of thankfulness, and finishing all, offering all,
+with the irrespective profusion of flowers opened by the wayside, where
+the dust may cover them, and the foot crush them?
+
+110. Not a few passages conceived in the highest spirit of self-denying
+piety would, of themselves, have warranted our sincere thanks to Mr.
+Hendrie for his publication of the manuscript. The practical value of
+its contents is however very variable; most of the processes described
+have been either improved or superseded, and many of the recipes are
+quite as illustrative of the writer's credulity in reception, as
+generosity in communication. The references to the "land of Havilah" for
+gold, and to "Mount Calybe" for iron, are characteristic of monkish
+geographical science; the recipe for the making of Spanish gold is
+interesting, as affording us a clew to the meaning of the mediaeval
+traditions respecting the basilisk. Pliny says nothing about the
+hatching of this chimera from cocks' eggs, and ascribes the power of
+killing at sight to a different animal, the catoblepas, whose head,
+fortunately, was so heavy that it could not be held up. Probably the
+word "basiliscus" in Theophilus would have been better translated
+"cockatrice."
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"There is also a gold called Spanish gold, which is composed from red
+copper, powder of basilisk, and human blood, and acid. The Gentiles,
+whose skillfulness in this art is commendable, make basilisks in this
+manner. They have, underground, a house walled with stones everywhere,
+above and below, with two very small windows, so narrow that scarcely
+any light can appear through them; in this house they place two old
+cocks of twelve or fifteen years, and they give them plenty of food.
+When these have become fat, through the heat of their good condition,
+they agree together and lay eggs. Which being laid, the cocks are taken
+out and toads are placed in, which may hatch the eggs, and to which
+bread is given for food. The eggs being hatched, chickens issue out,
+like hens' chickens, to which after seven days grow the tails of
+serpents, and immediately, if there were not a stone pavement to the
+house, they would enter the earth. Guarding against which, their masters
+have round brass vessels of large size, perforated all over, the mouths
+of which are narrow, in which they place these chickens, and close the
+mouths with copper coverings and inter them underground, and they are
+nourished with the fine earth entering through the holes for six
+months. After this they uncover them and apply a copious fire, until the
+animals' insides are completely burnt. Which done, when they have become
+cold, they are taken out and carefully ground, adding to them a third
+part of the blood of a red man, which blood has been dried and ground.
+These two compositions are tempered with sharp acid in a clean vessel;
+they then take very thin sheets of the purest red copper, and anoint
+this composition over them on both sides, and place them in the fire.
+And when they have become glowing, they take them out and quench and
+wash them in the same confection; and they do this for a long time,
+until this composition eats through the copper, and it takes the color
+of gold. This gold is proper for all work."--_Ib._ p. 267.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+Our readers will find in Mr. Hendrie's interesting note the explanation
+of the symbolical language of this recipe; though we cannot agree with
+him in supposing Theophilus to have so understood it. We have no doubt
+the monk wrote what he had heard in good faith, and with no equivocal
+meaning; and we are even ourselves much disposed to regret and resist
+the transformation of toads into nitrates of potash, and of basilisks
+into sulphates of copper.
+
+111. But whatever may be the value of the recipes of Theophilus, couched
+in the symbolical language of the alchemist, his evidence is as clear as
+it is conclusive, as far as regards the general processes adopted in his
+own time. The treatise of Peter de St. Audemar, contained in a volume
+transcribed by Jehan le Begue in 1431, bears internal evidence of being
+nearly coeval with that of Theophilus. And in addition to these MSS.,
+Mr. Eastlake has examined the records of Ely and Westminster, which are
+full of references to decorative operations. From these sources it is
+not only demonstrated that oil-painting, at least in the broadest sense
+(striking colors mixed with oil on surfaces of wood or stone), was
+perfectly common both in Italy and England in the 12th, 13th, and 14th
+centuries, but every step of the process is determinable. Stone
+surfaces were primed with white lead mixed with linseed oil, applied in
+successive coats, and carefully smoothed when dry. Wood was planed
+smooth (or, for delicate work, covered with leather of horse-skin or
+parchment), then coated with a mixture of white lead, wax, and
+pulverized tile, on which the oil and lead priming was laid. In the
+successive application of the coats of this priming, the painter is
+warned by Eraclius of the danger of letting the superimposed coat be
+more oily than that beneath, the shriveling of the surface being a
+necessary consequence.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"The observation respecting the cause, or one of the causes, of a
+wrinkled and shriveled surface, is not unimportant. Oil, or an oil
+varnish, used in abundance with the colors over a perfectly dry
+preparation, will produce this appearance: the employment of an oil
+varnish is even supposed to be detected by it.... As regards the effect
+itself, the best painters have not been careful to avoid it. Parts of
+Titian's St. Sebastian (now in the Gallery of the Vatican) are
+shriveled; the Giorgione in the Louvre is so; the drapery of the figure
+of Christ in the Duke of Wellington's Correggio exhibits the same
+appearance; a Madonna and Child by Reynolds, at Petworth, is in a
+similar state, as are also parts of some pictures by Greuze. It is the
+reverse of a cracked surface, and is unquestionably the less evil of the
+two."--"Eastlake," pp. 36-38.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+112. On the white surface thus prepared, the colors, ground finely with
+linseed oil, were applied, according to the advice of Theophilus, in not
+less than three successive coats, and finally protected with amber or
+sandarac varnish: each coat of color being carefully dried by the aid of
+heat or in the sun before a second was applied, and the entire work
+before varnishing. The practice of carefully drying each coat was
+continued in the best periods of art, but the necessity of exposure to
+the sun intimated by Theophilus appears to have arisen only from his
+careless preparation of the linseed oil, and ignorance of a proper
+drying medium. Consequent on this necessity is the restriction in
+Theophilus, St. Audemar, and in the British Museum MS., of oil-painting
+to wooden surfaces, because movable panels could be dried in the sun;
+while, for walls, the colors are to be mixed with water, wine, gum, or
+the usual tempera vehicles, egg and fig-tree juice; white lead and
+verdigris, themselves dryers, being the only pigments which could be
+mixed with oil for walls. But the MS. of Eraclius and the records of our
+English cathedrals imply no such absolute restriction. They mention the
+employment of oil for the painting or varnishing of columns and interior
+walls, and in quantity very remarkable. Among the entries relating to
+St. Stephen's chapel, occur--"For 19 flagons of painter's oil, at 3_s._
+4_d._ the flagon, 43_s._ 4_d._" (It might be as well, in the next
+edition, to correct the copyist's reverse of the position of the X and
+L, lest it should be thought that the principles of the science of
+arithmetic have been progressive, as well as those of art.) And
+presently afterwards, in May of the same year, "to John de Hennay, for
+_seventy_ flagons and a half of painter's oil for the painting of the
+same chapel, at 20_d._ the flagon, 117_s._ 6_d._" The expression
+"painter's oil" seems to imply more careful preparation than that
+directed by Theophilus, probably purification from its mucilage in the
+sun; but artificial heat was certainly employed to assist the drying,
+and after reading of flagons supplied by the score, we can hardly be
+surprised at finding charcoal furnished by the cartload--see an entry
+relating to the Painted Chamber. In one MS. of Eraclius, however, a
+distinct description of a drying oil in the modern sense, occurs, white
+lead and lime being added, and the oil thickened by exposure to the sun,
+as was the universal practice in Italy.
+
+113. Such was the system of oil-painting known before the time of Van
+Eyck; but it remains a question in what kind of works and with what
+degree of refinement this system had been applied. The passages in
+Eraclius refer only to ornamental work, imitations of marble, etc.; and
+although, in the records of Ely cathedral, the words "pro ymaginibus
+super columnas depingendis" may perhaps be understood as referring to
+paintings of figures, the applications of oil, which are distinctly
+determinable from these and other English documents, are merely
+decorative; and "the large supplies of it which appear in the
+Westminster and Ely records indicate the coarseness of the operations
+for which it was required." Theophilus, indeed, mentions tints for
+faces--_mixturas vultuum_; but it is to be remarked that Theophilus
+painted with a liquid oil, the drying of which in the sun he expressly
+says "in _ymaginibus_ et aliis picturis diuturnum et taediosum nimis
+est." The oil generally employed was thickened to the consistence of a
+varnish. Cennini recommends that it be kept in the sun until reduced one
+half; and in the Paris copy of Eraclius we are told that "the longer the
+oil remains in the sun the better it will be." Such a vehicle entirely
+precluded delicacy of execution.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Paintings entirely executed with the thickened vehicle, at a time when
+art was in the very lowest state, and when its votaries were ill
+qualified to contend with unnecessary difficulties, must have been of
+the commonest description. Armorial bearings, patterns, and similar
+works of mechanical decoration, were perhaps as much as could be
+attempted.
+
+"Notwithstanding the general reference to flesh-painting, 'e cosi fa
+dello incarnare,' in Cennini's directions, there are no certain examples
+of pictures of the fourteenth century, in which the flesh is executed in
+oil colors. This leads us to inquire what were the ordinary applications
+of oil-painting in Italy at that time. It appears that the method, when
+adopted at all, was considered to belong to the complemental and merely
+decorative parts of a picture. It was employed in portions of the work
+only, on draperies, and over gilding and foils. Cennini describes such
+operations as follows. 'Gild the surface to be occupied by the drapery;
+draw on it what ornaments or patterns you please; glaze the unornamented
+intervals with verdigris ground in oil, shading some folds twice. Then,
+when this is dry, glaze the same color over the whole drapery, both
+ornaments and plain portions.'
+
+"These operations, together with the gilt field round the figures, the
+stucco decorations, and the carved framework, tabernacle, or _ornamento_
+itself of the picture, were completed first; the faces and hands, which
+in Italian pictures of the fourteenth century were always in tempera,
+were added afterwards, or at all events after the draperies and
+background were finished. Cennini teaches the practice of all but the
+carving. In later times the work was divided, and the decorator or
+gilder was sometimes a more important person than the painter. Thus some
+works of an inferior Florentine artist were ornamented with stuccoes,
+carving, and gilding, by the celebrated Donatello, who, in his youth,
+practiced this art in connection with sculpture. Vasari observed the
+following inscription under a picture:--'Simone Cini, a Florentine,
+wrought the carved work; Gabriello Saracini executed the gilding; and
+Spinello di Luca, of Arezzo, painted the picture, in the year
+1385.'"--_Ib._ pp. 71, 72, and 80.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+114. We may pause to consider for a moment what effect upon the mental
+habits of these earlier schools might result from this separate and
+previous completion of minor details. It is to be remembered that the
+painter's object in the backgrounds of works of this period
+(universally, or nearly so, of religious subject) was not the deceptive
+representation of a natural scene, but the adornment and setting forth
+of the central figures with precious work--the conversion of the
+picture, as far as might be, into a gem, flushed with color and alive
+with light. The processes necessary for this purpose were altogether
+mechanical; and those of stamping and burnishing the gold, and of
+enameling, were necessarily performed before any delicate tempera-work
+could be executed. Absolute decision of design was therefore necessary
+throughout; hard linear separations were unavoidable between the
+oil-color and the tempera, or between each and the gold or enamel.
+General harmony of effect, aerial perspective, or deceptive chiaroscuro,
+became totally impossible; and the dignity of the picture depended
+exclusively on the lines of its design, the purity of its ornaments, and
+the beauty of expression which could be attained in those portions (the
+faces and hands) which, set off and framed by this splendor of
+decoration, became the cynosure of eyes. The painter's entire energy was
+given to these portions; and we can hardly imagine any discipline more
+calculated to insure a grand and thoughtful school of art than the
+necessity of discriminated character and varied expression imposed by
+this peculiarly separate and prominent treatment of the features. The
+exquisite drawing of the hand also, at least in outline, remained for
+this reason even to late periods one of the crowning excellences of the
+religious schools. It might be worthy the consideration of our present
+painters whether some disadvantage may not result from the exactly
+opposite treatment now frequently adopted, the finishing of the head
+before the addition of its accessories. A flimsy and indolent background
+is almost a necessary consequence, and probably also a false
+flesh-color, irrecoverable by any after-opposition.
+
+115. The reader is in possession of most of the conclusions relating to
+the practice of oil-painting up to about the year 1406.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Its inconveniences were such that tempera was not unreasonably
+preferred to it for works that required careful design, precision, and
+completeness. Hence the Van Eycks seem to have made it their first
+object to overcome the stigma that attached to oil-painting, as a
+process fit only for ordinary purposes and mechanical decorations. With
+an ambition partly explained by the previous coarse applications of the
+method, they sought to raise wonder by surpassing the finish of tempera
+with the very material that had long been considered intractable. Mere
+finish was, however, the least of the excellences of these reformers.
+The step was short which sufficed to remove the self-imposed
+difficulties of the art; but that effort would probably not have been so
+successful as it was, in overcoming long-established prejudices, had it
+not been accompanied by some of the best qualities which oil-painting,
+as a means of imitating nature, can command."--_Ib._ p. 88.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+116. It has been a question to which of the two brothers, Hubert or
+John, the honor of the invention is to be attributed. Van Mander gives
+the date of the birth of Hubert 1366; and his interesting epitaph in the
+cathedral of St. Bavon, at Ghent, determines that of his death:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Take warning from me, ye who walk over me. I was as you are, but am now
+buried dead beneath you. Thus it appears that neither art nor medicine
+availed me. Art, honor, wisdom, power, affluence, are spared not when
+death comes. I was called Hubert Van Eyck; I am now food for worms.
+Formerly known and highly honored in painting; this all was shortly
+after turned to nothing. It was in the year of the Lord one thousand
+four hundred and twenty-six, on the eighteenth day of September, that I
+rendered up my soul to God, in sufferings. Pray God for me, ye who love
+art, that I may attain to His sight. Flee sin; turn to the best
+[objects]: for you must follow me at last."
+
+       *       *       *
+
+John Van Eyck appears by sufficient evidence to have been born between
+1390 and 1395; and, as the improved oil-painting was certainly
+introduced about 1410, the probability is greater that the system had
+been discovered by the elder brother than by the youth of 15. What the
+improvement actually was is a far more important question. Vasari's
+account, in the Life of Antonello da Messina, is the first piece of
+evidence here examined (p. 205); and it is examined at once with more
+respect and more advantage than the half-negligent, half-embarrassed
+wording of the passage might appear either to deserve or to promise.
+Vasari states that "_Giovanni_ of Bruges," having finished a
+tempera-picture on panel, and varnished it as usual, placed it in the
+sun to dry--that the heat opened the joinings--and that the artist,
+provoked at the destruction of his work--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"began to devise means for preparing a kind of varnish which should dry
+in the shade, so as to avoid placing his pictures in the sun. Having
+made experiments with many things, both pure and mixed together, he at
+last found that linseed-oil and nut-oil, among the many which he had
+tested, were more drying than all the rest. These, therefore, boiled
+with _other mixtures of his_, made him the varnish which he, nay, which
+all the painters of the world, had long desired. Continuing his
+experiments with many other things, he saw that the immixture of the
+colors with these kinds of oils gave them a very firm consistence,
+which, when dry, was proof against wet; and, moreover, that the vehicle
+lit up the colors so powerfully, that it gave a gloss of itself without
+varnish; and that which appeared to him still more admirable was, that
+it allowed of blending [the colors] infinitely better than tempera.
+Giovanni, rejoicing in this invention, and being a person of
+discernment, began many works."
+
+       *       *       *
+
+117. The reader must observe that this account is based upon and
+clumsily accommodated to the idea, prevalent in Vasari's time throughout
+Italy, that Van Eyck not merely improved, but first introduced, the art
+of oil-painting, and that no mixture of color with linseed or nut oil
+had taken place before his time. We are only informed of the new and
+important part of the invention, under the pointedly specific and
+peculiarly Vasarian expression--"altre sue misture." But the real value
+of the passage is dependent on the one fact of which it puts us in
+possession, and with respect to which there is every reason to believe
+it trustworthy, that it was in search of a _Varnish_ which would dry in
+the shade that Van Eyck discovered the new vehicle. The next point to be
+determined is the nature of the Varnish ordinarily employed, and spoken
+of by Cennini and many other writers under the familiar title of Vernice
+liquida. The derivation of the word Vernix bears materially on the
+question, and will not be devoid of interest for the general reader, who
+may perhaps be surprised at finding himself carried by Mr. Eastlake's
+daring philology into regions poetical and planetary:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Eustathius, a writer of the twelfth century, in his commentary on
+Homer, states that the Greeks of his day called amber ([Greek:
+elektron]) Veronice ([Greek: beronike]). Salmasius, quoting from a
+Greek medical MS. of the same period, writes it Verenice ([Greek:
+berenike]). In the Lucca MS. (8th century) the word Veronica more than
+once occurs among the ingredients of varnishes, and it is remarkable
+that in the copies of the same recipes in the _Mappae Clavicula_ (12th
+century) the word is spelt, in the genitive, Verenicis and Vernicis.
+This is probably the earliest instance of the use of the Latinized word
+nearly in its modern form; the original nominative Vernice being
+afterwards changed to Vernix.
+
+"Veronice or Verenice, as a designation for amber, must have been common
+at an earlier period than the date of the Lucca MS., since it there
+occurs as a term in ordinary use. It is scarcely necessary to remark
+that the letter [Greek: beta] was sounded v by the mediaeval Greeks,
+as it is by their present descendants. Even during the classic ages of
+Greece [Greek: beta] represented [Greek: phi] in certain dialects. The
+name Berenice or Beronice, borne by more than one daughter of the
+Ptolemies, would be more correctly written Pherenice or Pheronice. The
+literal coincidence of this name and its modifications with the Vernice
+of the middle ages, might almost warrant the supposition that amber,
+which by the best ancient authorities was considered a mineral, may, at
+an early period, have been distinguished by the name of a constellation,
+the constellation of Berenice's (golden) hair."--_Eastlake_, p. 230.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+118. We are grieved to interrupt our reader's voyage among the
+constellations; but the next page crystallizes us again like ants in
+amber, or worse, in gum-sandarach. It appears, from conclusive and
+abundant evidence, that the greater cheapness of sandarach, and its
+easier solubility in oil rendered it the usual substitute for amber, and
+that the word Vernice, when it occurs alone, is the common synonym for
+dry sandarach resin. This, dissolved by heat in linseed oil, three parts
+oil to one of resin, was the Vernice liquida of the Italians, sold in
+Cennini's time ready prepared, and the customary varnish of tempera
+pictures. Concrete turpentine ("oyle of fir-tree," "Pece Greca,"
+"Pegola"), previously prepared over a slow fire until it ceased to
+swell, was added to assist the liquefaction of the sandarach, first in
+Venice, where the material could easily be procured, and afterwards in
+Florence. The varnish so prepared, especially when it was long boiled to
+render it more drying, was of a dark color, materially affecting the
+tints over which it was passed.[15]
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"It is not impossible that the lighter style of coloring introduced by
+Giotto may have been intended by him to counteract the effects of this
+varnish, the appearance of which in the Greek pictures he could not fail
+to observe. Another peculiarity in the works of the painters of the time
+referred to, particularly those of the Florentine and Sienese schools,
+is the greenish tone of their coloring in the flesh; produced by the
+mode in which they often prepared their works, viz. by a green
+under-painting. The appearance was neutralized by the red sandarac
+varnish, and pictures executed in the manner described must have looked
+better before it was removed."--_Ib._ p. 252.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+Farther on, this remark is thus followed out:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"The paleness or freshness of the tempera may have been sometimes
+calculated for this brown glazing (for such it was in effect), and when
+this was the case, the picture was, strictly speaking, unfinished
+without its varnish. It is, therefore, quite conceivable that a painter,
+averse to mere mechanical operations, would, in his final process, still
+have an eye to the harmony of his work, and, seeing that the tint of his
+varnish was more or less adapted to display the hues over which it was
+spread, would vary that tint, so as to heighten the effect of the
+picture. The practice of tingeing varnishes was not even new, as the
+example given by Cardanus proves. The next step to this would be to
+treat the tempera picture still more as a preparation, and to calculate
+still further on the varnish, by modifying and adapting its color to a
+greater extent. A work so completed must have nearly approached the
+appearance of an oil picture. This was perhaps the moment when the new
+method opened itself to the mind of Hubert Van Eyck.... The next change
+necessarily consisted in using opaque as well as transparent colors; the
+former being applied over the light, the latter over the darker,
+portions of the picture; while the work in tempera was now reduced to a
+light chiaroscuro preparation.... It was now that the hue of the
+original varnish became an objection; for, as a medium, it required to
+be itself colorless."--_Ib._ pp. 271-273.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+119. Our author has perhaps somewhat embarrassed this part of the
+argument, by giving too much importance to the conjectural adaptation of
+the tints of the tempera picture to the brown varnish, and too little to
+the bold transition from transparent to opaque color on the lights. Up
+to this time, we must remember, the entire drawing of the flesh had been
+in tempera; the varnish, however richly tinted, however delicately
+adjusted to the tints beneath, was still broadly applied over the whole
+surface, the design being seen through the transparent glaze. But the
+mixture of opaque color at once implies that portions of the design
+itself were executed with the varnish for a vehicle, and therefore that
+the varnish had been entirely changed both in color and consistence. If,
+as above stated, the improvement in the varnish had been made only after
+it had been mixed with opaque color, it does not appear why the idea of
+so mixing it should have presented itself to Van Eyck more than to any
+other painter of the day, and Vasari's story of the split panel becomes
+nugatory. But we apprehend, from a previous passage (p. 258),
+that Mr. Eastlake would not have us so interpret him. We rather suppose
+that we are expressing his real opinion in stating our own, that Van
+Eyck, seeking for a varnish which would dry in the shade, first
+perfected the methods of dissolving amber or copal in oil, then sought
+for and added a good dryer, and thus obtained a varnish which, having
+been subjected to no long process of boiling, was nearly colorless; that
+in using this new varnish over tempera works he might cautiously and
+gradually mix it with the opaque color, whose purity he now found
+unaffected, by the transparent vehicle; and, finally, as the thickness
+of the varnish in its less perfect state was an obstacle to precision of
+execution, increase the proportion of its oil to the amber, or add a
+diluent, as occasion required.
+
+120. Such, at all events, in the sum, whatever might be the order or
+occasion of discovery, were Van Eyck's improvements in the vehicle of
+color, and to these, applied by singular ingenuity and affection to the
+imitation of nature, with a fidelity hitherto unattempted, Mr. Eastlake
+attributes the influence which his works obtained over his
+contemporaries:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"If we ask in what the chief novelty of his practice consisted, we shall
+at once recognize it in an amount of general excellence before unknown.
+At all times, from Van Eyck's day to the present, whenever nature has
+been surprisingly well imitated in pictures, the first and last question
+with the ignorant has been--What materials did the artist use? The
+superior mechanical secret is always supposed to be in the hands of the
+greatest genius; and an early example of sudden perfection in art, like
+the fame of the heroes of antiquity, was likely to monopolize and
+represent the claims of many."--_Ib._ p. 266.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+This is all true; that Van Eyck saw nature more truly than his
+predecessors is certain; but it is disputable whether this rendering of
+nature recommended his works to the imitation of the Italians. On the
+contrary, Mr. Eastlake himself observes in another place (p. 220), that
+the character of delicate imitation common to the Flemish pictures
+militated _against_ the acceptance of their method:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"The specimens of Van Eyck, Hugo van der Goes, Memling, and others,
+which the Florentines had seen, may have appeared, in the eyes of some
+severe judges (for example, those who daily studied the frescoes of
+Masaccio), to indicate a certain connection between oil painting and
+minuteness, if not always of size, yet of style. The method, by its very
+finish and the possible completeness of its gradations, must have seemed
+well calculated to exhibit numerous objects on a small scale. That this
+was really the impression produced, at a later period, on one who
+represented the highest style of design, has been lately proved by means
+of an interesting document, in which the opinions of Michael Angelo on
+the character of Flemish pictures are recorded by a contemporary
+artist."[16]
+
+       *       *       *
+
+121. It was not, we apprehend, the resemblance to nature, but the
+abstract power of color, which inflamed with admiration and jealousy the
+artists of Italy; it was not the delicate touch nor the precise verity
+of Van Eyck, but the "vivacita de' colori" (says Vasari) which at the
+first glance induced Antonello da Messina to "put aside every other
+avocation and thought, and at once set out for Flanders," assiduously to
+cultivate the friendship of _Giovanni_, presenting to him many drawings
+and other things, until _Giovanni_, finding himself already old, was
+content that Antonello should see the method of his coloring in oil, nor
+then to quit Flanders until he had "thoroughly learned that _process_."
+It was this _process_, separate, mysterious, and admirable, whose
+communication the Venetian, Domenico, thought the most acceptable
+kindness which could repay his hospitality; and whose solitary
+possession Castagno thought cheaply purchased by the guilt of the
+betrayer and murderer; it was in this process, the deduction of watchful
+intelligence, not by fortuitous discovery, that the first impulse was
+given to European art. Many a plank had yawned in the sun before Van
+Eyck's; but he alone saw through the rent, as through an opening portal,
+the lofty perspective of triumph widening its rapid wedge;--many a spot
+of opaque color had clouded the transparent amber of earlier times; but
+the little cloud that rose over Van Eyck's horizon was "like unto a
+man's hand."
+
+What this process was, and how far it differed from preceding practice,
+has hardly, perhaps, been pronounced by Mr. Eastlake with sufficient
+distinctness. One or two conclusions which he has not marked are, we
+think, deducible from his evidence, In one point, and that not an
+unimportant one, we believe that many careful students of coloring will
+be disposed to differ with him: our own intermediate opinion we will
+therefore venture to state, though with all diffidence.
+
+122. We must not, however, pass entirely without notice the two chapters
+on the preparation of oils, and on the oleo-resinous vehicles, though to
+the general reader the recipes contained in them are of little interest;
+and in the absence of all expression of opinion on the part of Mr.
+Eastlake as to their comparative excellence, even to the artist, their
+immediate utility appears somewhat doubtful. One circumstance, however,
+is remarkable in all, the care taken by the great painters, without
+exception, to avoid the yellowing of their oil. Perfect and stable
+clearness is the ultimate aim of all the processes described (many of
+them troublesome and tedious in the extreme): and the effect of the
+altered oil is of course most dreaded on pale and cold colors. Thus
+Philippe Nunez tells us how to purify linseed oil "for white and blues;"
+and Pacheco, "el de linaza no me quele mal: aunque ai quien diga que no
+a de ver el Azul ni el Blanco este Azeite."[17] De Mayerne recommends
+poppy oil "for painting white, blue, and similar colors, so that they
+shall not yellow;" and in another place, "for air-tints and
+blue;"--while the inclination to green is noticed as an imperfection in
+hempseed oil: so Vasari--speaking of linseed-oil in contemporary
+practice--"benche il noce e meglio, perche ingialla meno." The Italians
+generally mixed an essential oil with their delicate tints, including
+flesh tints (p. 431). Extraordinary methods were used by the Flemish
+painters to protect their blues; they were sometimes painted with size,
+and varnished; sometimes strewed in powder on fresh white-lead (p.
+456). Leonardo gives a careful recipe for preventing the change of color
+in nut oil, supposing it to be owing to neglect in removing the skin of
+the nut. His words, given at p. 321, are incorrectly translated: "una
+certa bucciolina," is not a husk or rind--but "a thin skin," meaning the
+white membranous covering of the nut itself, of which it is almost
+impossible to detach all the inner laminae. This, "che tiene della natura
+del mallo," Leonardo supposes to give the expressed oil its property of
+forming a _skin_ at the surface.
+
+123. We think these passages interesting, because they are entirely
+opposed to the modern ideas of the desirableness of yellow lights and
+green blues, which have been introduced chiefly by the study of altered
+pictures. The anxiety of Rubens, expressed in various letters, quoted at
+p. 516, lest any of his whites should have become yellow, and his
+request that his pictures might be exposed to the sun to remedy the
+defect, if it occurred, are conclusive on this subject, as far as
+regards the feeling of the Flemish painters: we shall presently see that
+the _coolness_ of their light was an essential part of their scheme of
+color.
+
+The testing of the various processes given in these two chapters must be
+a matter of time: many of them have been superseded by recent
+discoveries. Copal varnish is in modern practice no inefficient
+substitute for amber, and we believe that most artists will agree with
+us in thinking that the vehicles now in use are sufficient for all
+purposes, if used rightly. We shall, therefore, proceed in the first
+place to give a rapid sketch of the entire process of the Flemish school
+as it is stated by Mr. Eastlake in the 11th chapter, and then examine
+the several steps of it one by one, with the view at once of marking
+what seems disputable, and of deducing from what is certain some
+considerations respecting the consequences of its adoption in subsequent
+art.
+
+124. The ground was with all the early masters pure _white_, plaster of
+Paris, or washed chalk with size; a preparation which has been employed
+without change from remote antiquity--witness the Egyptian mummy-cases.
+Such a ground, becoming brittle with age, is evidently unsafe on canvas,
+unless exceedingly thin; and even on panel is liable to crack and detach
+itself, unless it be carefully guarded against damp. The precautions of
+Van Eyck against this danger, as well as against the warping of his
+panel, are remarkable instances of his regard to points apparently
+trivial:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"In large altar-pieces, necessarily composed of many pieces, it may be
+often remarked that each separate plank has become slightly convex in
+front: this is particularly observable in the picture of the
+Transfiguration by Raphael. The heat of candles on altars is supposed to
+have been the cause of this not uncommon defect; but heat, if
+considerable, would rather produce the contrary appearance. It would
+seem that the layer of paint, with its substratum, slightly operates to
+prevent the wood from contracting or becoming concave on that side; it
+might therefore be concluded that a similar protection at the back, by
+equalizing the conditions, would tend to keep the wood flat. The oak
+panel on which the picture by Van Eyck in the National Gallery is
+painted is protected at the back by a composition of gesso, size, and
+tow, over which a coat of black oil-paint was passed. This, whether
+added when the picture was executed or subsequently, has tended to
+preserve the wood (which is not at all worm-eaten), and perhaps to
+prevent its warping."--_Ib._ pp. 373, 374.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+On the white ground, scraped, when it was perfectly dry, till it was "as
+white as milk and as smooth as ivory" (Cennini), the outline of the
+picture was drawn, and its light and shade expressed, usually with the
+pen, with all possible care; and over this outline a coating of size was
+applied in order to render the gesso ground _non_-absorbent. The
+establishment of this fact is of the greatest importance, for the whole
+question of the true function and use of the gesso ground hangs upon it.
+That use has been supposed by all previous writers on the technical
+processes of painting to be, by absorbing the oil, to remove in some
+degree the cause of yellowness in the colors. Had this been so, the
+ground itself would have lost its brilliancy, and it would have followed
+that a dark ground, equally absorbent, would have answered the purpose
+as well. But the evidence adduced by Mr. Eastlake on this subject is
+conclusive:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"Pictures are sometimes transferred from panel to cloth. The front being
+secured by smooth paper or linen, the picture is laid on its face, and
+the wood is gradually planed and scraped away. At last the ground
+appears; first, the 'gesso grosso,' then, next the painted surface, the
+'gesso sottile.' On scraping this it is found that it is whitest
+immediately next the colors; for on the inner side it may sometimes
+have received slight stains from the wood, if the latter was not first
+sized. When a picture which happens to be much cracked has been oiled or
+varnished, the fluid will sometimes penetrate through the cracks into
+the ground, which in such parts had become accessible. In that case the
+white ground is stained in lines only, corresponding in their direction
+with the cracks of the picture. This last circumstance also proves that
+the ground was not sufficiently hard in itself to prevent the absorption
+of oil. Accordingly, it required to be rendered non-absorbent by a
+coating of size; and this was passed _over_ the outline, before the
+oil-priming was applied."--_Ib._ pp. 383, 384.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+The perfect whiteness of the ground being thus secured, a transparent
+warm oil-priming, in early practice flesh-colored, was usually passed
+over the entire picture. This custom, says Mr. Eastlake, appears to have
+been "a remnant of the old habit of covering tempera pictures with a
+warm varnish, and was sometimes omitted." When used it was permitted to
+dry thoroughly, and over it the shadows were painted in with a rich
+transparent brown, mixed with a somewhat thick oleo-resinous vehicle;
+the lighter colors were then added with a thinner vehicle, taking care
+not to disturb the transparency of the shadows by the unnecessary
+mixture of opaque pigments, and leaving the ground bearing bright
+_through the thin lights_. (?) As the art advanced, the lights were more
+and more loaded, and afterwards glazed, the shadows being still left in
+untouched transparency. This is the method of Rubens. The later Italian
+colorists appear to have laid opaque local color without fear even into
+the shadows, and to have recovered transparency by ultimate glazing.
+
+125. Such are the principal heads of the method of the early Flemish
+masters, as stated by Mr. Eastlake. We have marked as questionable the
+influence of the ground in supporting the lights: our reasons for doing
+so we will give, after we have stated what we suppose to be the
+advantages or disadvantages of the process in its earlier stages,
+guiding ourselves as far as possible by the passages in which any
+expression occurs of Mr. Eastlake's opinion.
+
+The reader cannot but see that the _eminent_ character of the whole
+system is its predeterminateness. From first to last its success
+depended on the decision and clearness of each successive step. The
+drawing and light and shade were secured without any interference of
+color; but when over these the oil-priming was once laid, the design
+could neither be altered nor, if lost, recovered; a color laid too
+opaquely in the shadow destroyed the inner organization of the picture,
+and remained an irremediable blemish; and it was necessary, in laying
+color even on the lights, to follow the guidance of the drawing beneath
+with a caution and precision which rendered anything like freedom of
+handling, in the modern sense, totally impossible. Every quality which
+depends on rapidity, accident, or audacity was interdicted; no
+affectation of ease was suffered to disturb the humility of patient
+exertion. Let our readers consider in what temper such a work must be
+undertaken and carried through--a work in which error was irremediable,
+change impossible--which demanded the drudgery of a student, while it
+involved the deliberation of a master--in which the patience of a
+mechanic was to be united with the foresight of a magician--in which no
+license could be indulged either to fitfulness of temper or felicity of
+invention--in which haste was forbidden, yet languor fatal, and
+consistency of conception no less incumbent than continuity of toil. Let
+them reflect what kind of men must have been called up and trained by
+work such as this, and then compare the tones of mind which are likely
+to be produced by our present practice,--a practice in which alteration
+is admitted to any extent in any stage--in which neither foundation is
+laid nor end foreseen--in which all is dared and nothing resolved,
+everything periled, nothing provided for--in which men play the
+sycophant in the courts of their humors, and hunt wisps in the marshes
+of their wits--a practice which invokes accident, evades law,
+discredits application, despises system, and sets forth with chief
+exultation, contingent beauty, and extempore invention.
+
+126. But it is not only the fixed nature of the successive steps which
+influenced the character of these early painters. A peculiar _direction_
+was given to their efforts by the close attention to drawing which, as
+Mr. Eastlake has especially noticed, was involved in the preparation of
+the design on the white ground. That design was secured with a care and
+finish which in many instances might seem altogether supererogatory.[18]
+The preparation by John Bellini in the Florentine gallery is completed
+with exhaustless diligence into even the portions farthest removed from
+the light, where the thick brown of the shadows must necessarily have
+afterwards concealed the greater part of the work. It was the discipline
+undergone in producing this preparation which fixed the character of the
+school. The most important part of the picture was executed not with the
+brush, but with the point, and the refinements attainable by this
+instrument dictated the treatment of their subject. Hence the transition
+to etching and engraving, and the intense love of minute detail,
+accompanied by an imaginative communication of dignity and power to the
+smallest forms, in Albert Duerer and others. But this attention to
+minutiae was not the only result; the disposition of light and shade was
+also affected by the method. Shade was not to be had at small cost; its
+masses could not be dashed on in impetuous generalization, fields for
+the future recovery of light. They were measured out and wrought to
+their depths only by expenditure of toil and time; and, as future
+grounds for color, they were necessarily restricted to the _natural_
+shadow of every object, white being left for high lights of whatever
+hue. In consequence, the character of pervading daylight, almost
+inevitably produced in the preparation, was afterwards assumed as a
+standard in the painting. Effectism, accidental shadows, all obvious
+and vulgar artistical treatment, were excluded, or introduced only as
+the lights became more loaded, and were consequently imposed with more
+facility on the dark ground. Where shade was required in large mass, it
+was obtained by introducing an object of locally dark color. The Italian
+masters who followed Van Eyck's system were in the constant habit of
+relieving their principal figures by the darkness of some object,
+foliage, throne, or drapery, introduced behind the head, the open sky
+being left visible on each side. A green drapery is thus used with great
+quaintness by John Bellini in the noble picture of the Brera Gallery; a
+black screen, with marbled veins, behind the portraits of himself and
+his brother in the Louvre; a crimson velvet curtain behind the Madonna,
+in Francia's best picture at Bologna. Where the subject was sacred, and
+the painter great, this system of pervading light produced pictures of a
+peculiar and tranquil majesty; where the mind of the painter was
+irregularly or frivolously imaginative, its temptations to accumulative
+detail were too great to be resisted--the spectator was by the German
+masters overwhelmed with the copious inconsistency of a dream, or
+compelled to traverse the picture from corner to corner like a museum of
+curiosities.
+
+127. The chalk or pen preparation being completed, and the oil-priming
+laid, we have seen that the shadows were laid in with a transparent
+_brown_ in considerable body. The question next arises--What influence
+is this part of the process likely to have had upon the _coloring_ of
+the school? It is to be remembered that the practice was continued to
+the latest times, and that when the thin light had been long abandoned,
+and a loaded body of color had taken its place, the brown transparent
+shadow was still retained, and is retained often to this day, when
+asphaltum is used as its base, at the risk of the destruction of the
+picture. The utter loss of many of Reynolds' noblest works has been
+caused by the lavish use of this pigment. What the pigment actually was
+in older times is left by Mr. Eastlake undecided:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"A rich brown, which, whether an earth or mineral alone, or a substance
+of the kind enriched by the addition of a transparent yellow or orange,
+is not an unimportant element of the glowing coloring which is
+remarkable in examples of the school. Such a color, by artificial
+combinations at least, is easily supplied; and it is repeated, that, in
+general, the materials now in use are quite as good as those which the
+Flemish masters had at their command."--_Ib._ p. 488.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+At p. 446 it is also asserted that the peculiar glow of the brown of
+Rubens is hardly to be accounted for by any accidental variety in the
+Cassel earths, but was obtained by the mixture of a transparent yellow.
+Evidence, however, exists of asphaltum having been used in Flemish
+pictures, and with safety, even though prepared in the modern manner:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"It is not ground" (says De Mayerne), "but a drying oil is prepared with
+litharge, and the pulverized asphaltum mixed with this oil is placed in
+a glass vessel, suspended by a thread [in a water bath]. Thus exposed to
+the fire it melts like butter; when it begins to boil it is instantly
+removed. It is an excellent color for shadows, and may be glazed like
+lake; it lasts well."--_Ib._ p. 463.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+128. The great advantage of this primary laying in of the darks in brown
+was the obtaining an unity of shadow throughout the picture, which
+rendered variety of hue, where it occurred, an instantly accepted
+evidence of light. It mattered not how vigorous or how deep in tone the
+masses of local color might be, the eye could not confound them with
+true shadow; it everywhere distinguished the transparent browns as
+indicative of gloom, and became acutely sensible of the presence and
+preciousness of light wherever local tints rose out of their depths. But
+however superior this method may be to the arbitrary use of polychrome
+shadows, utterly unrelated to the lights, which has been admitted in
+modern works; and however beautiful or brilliant its results might be
+in the hands of colorists as faithful as Van Eyck, or as inventive as
+Rubens; the principle on which it is based becomes dangerous whenever,
+in assuming that the ultimate hue of every shadow is brown, it
+presupposes a peculiar and conventional light. It is true, that so long
+as the early practice of finishing the under-drawing with the pen was
+continued, the gray of that preparation might perhaps diminish the force
+of the upper color, which became in that case little more than a glowing
+varnish--even thus sometimes verging on too monotonous warmth, as the
+reader may observe in the head of Dandolo, by John Bellini, in the
+National Gallery. But when, by later and more impetuous hands, the point
+tracing was dispensed with, and the picture boldly thrown in with the
+brown pigment, it became matter of great improbability that the force of
+such a prevalent tint could afterwards be softened or melted into a pure
+harmony; the painter's feeling for truth was blunted; brilliancy and
+richness became his object rather than sincerity or solemnity; with the
+palled sense of color departed the love of light, and the diffused
+sunshine of the early schools died away in the narrowed rays of
+Rembrandt. We think it a deficiency in the work before us that the
+extreme peril of such a principle, incautiously applied, has not been
+pointed out, and that the method of Rubens has been so highly extolled
+for its technical perfection, without the slightest notice of the gross
+mannerism into which its facile brilliancy too frequently betrayed the
+mighty master.
+
+129. Yet it remains a question how far, under certain limitations and
+for certain effects, this system of pure brown shadow may be
+successfully followed. It is not a little singular that it has already
+been revived in water-colors by a painter who, in his realization of
+light and splendor of hue, stands without a rival among living
+schools--Mr. Hunt; his neutral shadows being, we believe, first thrown
+in frankly with sepia, the color introduced upon the lights, and the
+central lights afterwards further raised by body color, and glazed. But
+in this process the sepia shadows are admitted only on objects whose
+local colors are warm or neutral; wherever the tint of the illumined
+portion is delicate or peculiar, a relative hue of shade is at once laid
+on the white paper; and the correspondence with the Flemish school is in
+the use of brown as the ultimate representative of deep gloom, and in
+the careful preservation of its transparency, not in the application of
+brown universally as the shade of all colors. We apprehend that this
+practice represents, in another medium, the very best mode of applying
+the Flemish system; and that when the result proposed is an effect of
+vivid color under bright cool sunshine, it would be impossible to adopt
+any more perfect means. But a system which in any stage prescribes the
+use of a certain pigment, implies the adoption of a constant aim, and
+becomes, in that degree, conventional. Suppose that the effect desired
+be neither of sunlight nor of bright color, but of grave color subdued
+by atmosphere, and we believe that the use of brown for an ultimate
+shadow would be highly inexpedient. With Van Eyck and with Rubens the
+aim was always consistent: clear daylight, diffused in the one case,
+concentrated in the other, was yet the hope, the necessity of both; and
+any process which admitted the slightest dimness, coldness, or opacity,
+would have been considered an error in their system by either. Alike, to
+Rubens, came subjects of tumult or tranquillity, of gayety or terror;
+the nether, earthly, and upper world were to him animated with the same
+feeling, lighted by the same sun; he dyed in the same lake of fire the
+warp of the wedding-garment or of the winding-sheet; swept into the same
+delirium the recklessness of the sensualist, and rapture of the
+anchorite; saw in tears only their glittering, and in torture only its
+flush. To such a painter, regarding every subject in the same temper,
+and all as mere motives for the display of the power of his art, the
+Flemish system, improved as it became in his hands, was alike sufficient
+and habitual. But among the greater colorists of Italy the aim was not
+always so simple nor the method so determinable. We find Tintoret
+passing like a fire-fly from light to darkness in one oscillation,
+ranging from the fullest prism of solar color to the coldest grays of
+twilight, and from the silver tingeing of a morning cloud to the lava
+fire of a volcano: one moment shutting himself into obscure chambers of
+imagery, the next plunged into the revolutionless day of heaven, and
+piercing space, deeper than the mind can follow or the eye fathom; we
+find him by turns appalling, pensive, splendid, profound, profuse; and
+throughout sacrificing every minor quality to the power of his prevalent
+mood. By such an artist it might, perhaps, be presumed that a different
+system of color would be adopted in almost every picture, and that if a
+chiaroscuro ground were independently laid, it would be in a neutral
+gray, susceptible afterwards of harmony with any tone he might determine
+upon, and not in the vivid brown which necessitated brilliancy of
+subsequent effect. We believe, accordingly, that while some of the
+pieces of this master's richer color, such as the Adam and Eve in the
+Gallery of Venice, and we suspect also the miracle of St. Mark, may be
+executed on the pure Flemish system, the greater number of his large
+compositions will be found based on a gray shadow; and that this gray
+shadow was independently laid we have more direct proof in the assertion
+of Boschini, who received his information from the younger Palma:
+"Quando haveva stabilita questa importante distribuzione, _abboggiava il
+quadro tutto di chiaroscuro_;" and we have, therefore, no doubt that
+Tintoret's well-known reply to the question, "What were the most
+beautiful colors?" "_Il nero, e il bianco_," is to be received in a
+perfectly literal sense, beyond and above its evident reference to
+abstract principle. Its main and most valuable meaning was, of course,
+that the design and light and shade of a picture were of greater
+importance than its color; (and this Tintoret felt so thoroughly that
+there is not one of his works which would seriously lose in power if it
+were translated into chiaroscuro); but it implied also that Tintoret's
+idea of a shadowed preparation was in gray, and not in brown.
+
+130. But there is a farther and more essential ground of difference in
+system of shadow between the Flemish and Italian colorists. It is a
+well-known optical fact that the color of shadow is complemental to that
+of light: and that therefore, in general terms, warm light has cool
+shadow, and cool light hot shadow. The noblest masters of the northern
+and southern schools respectively adopted these contrary keys; and while
+the Flemings raised their lights in frosty white and pearly grays out of
+a glowing shadow, the Italians opposed the deep and burning rays of
+their golden heaven to masses of solemn gray and majestic blue. Either,
+therefore, their preparation must have been different, or they were
+able, when they chose, to conquer the warmth of the ground by
+superimposed color. We believe, accordingly, that Correggio will be
+found--as stated in the notes of Reynolds quoted at p. 495--to have
+habitually grounded with black, white, and ultramarine, then glazing
+with golden transparent colors; while Titian used the most vigorous
+browns, and conquered them with cool color in mass above. The remarkable
+sketch of Leonardo in the Uffizii of Florence is commenced in
+brown--over the brown is laid an olive green, on which the highest
+lights are struck with white.
+
+Now it is well known to even the merely decorative painter that no color
+can be brilliant which is laid over one of a corresponding key, and that
+the best ground for any given opaque color will be a comparatively
+subdued tint of the complemental one; of green under red, of violet
+under yellow, and of _orange_ or _brown_ therefore under _blue_. We
+apprehend accordingly that the real value of the brown ground with
+Titian was far greater than even with Rubens; it was to support and give
+preciousness to cool color above, while it remained itself untouched as
+the representative of warm reflexes and extreme depth of transparent
+gloom. We believe this employment of the brown ground to be the only
+means of uniting majesty of hue with profundity of shade. But its value
+to the Fleming is connected with the management of the lights, which we
+have next to consider. As we here venture for the first time to disagree
+in some measure with Mr. Eastlake, let us be sure that we state his
+opinion fairly. He says:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"The light warm tint which Van Mander assumes to have been generally
+used in the oil-priming was sometimes omitted, as unfinished pictures
+prove. Under such circumstances, the picture may have been executed at
+once on the sized outline. In the works of Lucas van Leyden, and
+sometimes in those of Albert Duerer, the thin yet brilliant lights
+exhibit a still brighter ground underneath (p. 389).... It thus
+appears that the method proposed by the inventors of oil-painting, of
+preserving light within the colors, involved a certain order of
+processes. The principal conditions were: first, that the outline should
+be completed on the panel before the painting, properly so called, was
+begun. The object, in thus defining the forms, was to avoid alterations
+and repaintings, which might ultimately render the ground useless
+without supplying its place. Another condition was to avoid loading _the
+opaque_ colors. _This limitation was not essential with regard to the
+transparent colors, as such could hardly exclude the bright ground_
+(p. 398).... The system of coloring adopted by the Van Eycks may have
+been influenced by the practice of glass-painting. They appear, in their
+first efforts at least, to have considered the white panel as
+representing light behind a colored and transparent medium, and aimed at
+giving brilliancy to their tints by allowing the white ground to shine
+through them. If those painters and their followers erred, it was in
+sometimes too literally carrying out this principle. _Their lights are
+always transparent_ (mere white excepted) and their shadows sometimes
+want depth. This is in accordance with the effect of glass-staining, in
+which transparency may cease with darkness, but never with light. The
+superior method of Rubens consisted in preserving transparency chiefly
+in his darks, and in contrasting their lucid depth with solid lights
+(p. 408).... Among the technical improvements on the older process may
+be especially mentioned the preservation of transparency in the darker
+masses, the lights being loaded as required. The system of exhibiting
+the bright ground through the shadows still involved an adherence to the
+original method of defining the composition at first; and the solid
+painting of the lights opened the door to that freedom of execution
+which the works of the early masters wanted." (p. 490.)
+
+       *       *       *
+
+131. We think we cannot have erred in concluding from these scattered
+passages that Mr. Eastlake supposes the brilliancy of the high lights of
+the earlier schools to be attributable to the under-power of the white
+ground. This we admit, so far as that ground gave value to the
+transparent flesh-colored or brown preparation above it; but we doubt
+the transparency of the highest lights, and the power of any white
+ground to add brilliancy to opaque colors. We have ourselves never seen
+an instance of a _painted brilliant_ light that was not loaded to the
+exclusion of the ground. Secondary lights indeed are often perfectly
+transparent, a warm hatching over the under-white; the highest light
+itself may be so--but then it is the white ground itself subdued by
+transparent _darker_ color, not supporting a light color. In the Van
+Eyck in the National Gallery all the brilliant lights are loaded; mere
+white, Mr. Eastlake himself admits, was always so; and we believe that
+the flesh-color and carnations are painted with color as _opaque_ as the
+white head-dress, but fail of brilliancy from not being _loaded enough_;
+the white ground beneath being utterly unable to add to the power of
+such tints, while its effect on more subdued tones depended in great
+measure on its receiving a transparent coat of warm color first. This
+_may_ have been sometimes omitted, as stated at p. 389; when it was
+so, we believe that an utter loss of brilliancy must have resulted; but
+when it was used, the highest lights must have been raised from it by
+opaque color as distinctly by Van Eyck as by Rubens. Rubens' Judgment of
+Paris is quoted at [p. 388] as an example of the best use of the
+bright gesso ground:--and how in that picture, how in all Rubens' best
+pictures, is it used? Over the ground is thrown a transparent glowing
+brown tint, varied and deepened in the shadow; boldly over that brown
+glaze, and into it, are struck and painted the opaque gray middle tints,
+already concealing the ground totally; and above these are loaded the
+high lights like gems--note the sparkling strokes on the peacock's
+plumes. We believe that Van Eyck's high lights were either, in
+proportion to the scale of picture and breadth of handling, as loaded as
+these, or, in the degree of their thinness, less brilliant. Was then his
+system the same as Rubens'? Not so; but it differed more in the
+management of middle tints than in the lights: the main difference was,
+we believe, between the careful preparation of the gradations of drawing
+in the one, and the daring assumption of massy light in the other. There
+are theorists who would assert that their system was the same--but they
+forget the primal work, with the point underneath, and all that it
+implied of transparency above. Van Eyck secured his drawing in dark,
+then threw a pale transparent middle tint over the whole, and recovered
+his _highest_ lights; all was _transparent_ except these. Rubens threw a
+dark middle tint over the whole at first, and then gave the _drawing_
+with opaque gray. All was _opaque_ except the shadows. No slight
+difference this, when we reflect on the contrarieties of practice
+ultimately connected with the opposing principles; above all on the
+eminent one that, as all Van Eyck's color, except the high lights, must
+have been equivalent to a glaze, while the great body of _color_ in
+Rubens was solid (ultimately glazed occasionally, but not necessarily),
+it was possible for Van Eyck to mix his tints to the local hues
+required, with far less danger of heaviness in effect than would have
+been incurred in the solid painting of Rubens. This is especially
+noticed by Mr. Eastlake, with whom we are delighted again to concur:--
+
+       *       *       *
+
+"The practice of using compound tints has not been approved by
+colorists; the method, as introduced by the early masters, was adapted
+to certain conditions, but, like many of their processes, was afterwards
+misapplied. Vasari informs us that Lorenzo di Credi, whose exaggerated
+nicety in technical details almost equaled that of Gerard Dow, was in
+the habit of mixing about thirty tints before he began to work. The
+opposite extreme is perhaps no less objectionable. Much may depend on
+the skillful use of the ground. The purest color in an opaque state and
+superficially light only, is less brilliant than the foulest mixture
+through which light shines. Hence, as long as the white ground was
+visible within the tints, the habit of matching colors from nature (no
+matter by what complication of hues, provided the ingredients were not
+chemically injurious to each other) was likely to combine the truth of
+negative hues with clearness."--_Ib._ p. 400.
+
+       *       *       *
+
+132. These passages open to us a series of questions far too intricate
+to be even cursorily treated within our limits. It is to be held in mind
+that one and the same quality of color or kind of brilliancy is not
+always the best; the phases and phenomena of color are innumerable in
+reality, and even the modes of imitating them become expedient or
+otherwise, according to the aim and scale of the picture. It is no
+question of mere authority whether the mixture of tints to a compound
+one, or their juxtaposition in a state of purity, be the better
+practice. There is not the slightest doubt that, the ground being the
+same, a stippled tint is more brilliant and rich than a mixed one; nor
+is there doubt on the other hand that in some subjects such a tint is
+impossible, and in others vulgar. We have above alluded to the power of
+Mr. Hunt in water-color. The fruit-pieces of that artist are dependent
+for their splendor chiefly on the juxtaposition of pure color for
+compound tints, and we may safely affirm that the method is for such
+purpose as exemplary as its results are admirable. Yet would you desire
+to see the same means adopted in the execution of the fruit in Rubens'
+Peace and War? Or again, would the lusciousness of tint obtained by
+Rubens himself, adopting the same means on a grander scale in his
+painting of flesh, have been conducive to the ends or grateful to the
+feelings of the Bellinis or Albert Duerer? Each method is admirable as
+applied by its master; and Hemling and Van Eyck are as much to be
+followed in the mingling of color, as Rubens and Rembrandt in its
+decomposition. If an award is absolutely to be made of superiority to
+either system, we apprehend that the palm of mechanical skill must be
+rendered to the latter, and higher dignity of moral purpose confessed in
+the former; in proportion to the nobleness of the subject and the
+thoughtfulness of its treatment, simplicity of color will be found more
+desirable. Nor is the far higher perfection of drawing attained by the
+earlier method to be forgotten. Gradations which are expressed by
+delicate execution of the _darks_, and then aided by a few strokes of
+recovered light, must always be more subtle and true than those which
+are struck violently forth with opaque color; and it is to be remembered
+that the handling of the brush, with the early Italian masters,
+approached in its refinement to drawing with the point--the more
+definitely, because the work was executed, as we have just seen, with
+little change or play of local color. And--whatever discredit the looser
+and bolder practice of later masters may have thrown on the hatched and
+penciled execution of earlier periods--we maintain that this method,
+necessary in fresco, and followed habitually in the first oil pictures,
+has produced the noblest renderings of human expression in the whole
+range of the examples of art: the best works of Raphael, all the
+glorious portraiture of Ghirlandajo and Masaccio, all the mightiest
+achievements of religious zeal in Francia, Perugino, Bellini, and such
+others. Take as an example in fresco Masaccio's hasty sketch of himself
+now in the Uffizii; and in oil, the two heads of monks by Perugino in
+the Academy of Florence; and we shall search in vain for any work in
+portraiture, executed in opaque colors, which could contend with them in
+depth of expression or in fullness of _recorded_ life--not mere
+imitative vitality, but chronicled action. And we have no hesitation in
+asserting that where the object of the painter is expression, and the
+picture is of a size admitting careful execution, the transparent
+system, developed as it is found in Bellini or Perugino, will attain the
+most profound and serene color, while it will never betray into
+looseness or audacity. But if in the mind of the painter invention
+prevail over veneration,--if his eye be creative rather than
+penetrative, and his hand more powerful than patient--let him not be
+confined to a system where light, once lost, is as irrecoverable as
+time, and where all success depends on husbandry of resource. Do not
+measure out to him his sunshine in inches of gesso; let him have the
+power of striking it even out of darkness and the deep.
+
+133. If human life were endless, or human spirit could fit its compass
+to its will, it is possible a perfection might be reached which should
+unite the majesty of invention with the meekness of love. We might
+conceive that the thought, arrested by the readiest means, and at first
+represented by the boldest symbols, might afterwards be set forth with
+solemn and studied expression, and that the power might know no
+weariness in clothing which had known no restraint in creating. But
+dilation and contraction are for molluscs, not for men; we are not
+ringed into flexibility like worms, nor gifted with opposite sight and
+mutable color like chameleons. The mind which molds and summons cannot
+at will transmute itself into that which clings and contemplates; nor is
+it given to us at once to have the potter's power over the lump, the
+fire's upon the clay, and the gilder's upon the porcelain. Even the
+temper in which we behold these various displays of mind must be
+different; and it admits of more than doubt whether, if the bold work of
+rapid thought were afterwards in all its forms completed with
+microscopic care, the result would be other than painful. In the shadow
+at the foot of Tintoret's picture of the Temptation, lies a broken
+rock-bowlder.[19] The dark ground has been first laid in, of color
+nearly uniform; and over it a few, not more than fifteen or twenty,
+strokes of the brush, loaded with a light gray, have quarried the solid
+block of stone out of the vacancy. Probably ten minutes are the utmost
+time which those strokes have occupied, though the rock is some four
+feet square. It may safely be affirmed that no other method, however
+laborious, could have reached the truth of form which results from the
+very freedom with which the conception has been expressed; but it is a
+truth of the simplest kind--the definition of a stone, rather than the
+painting of one--and the lights are in some degree dead and cold--the
+natural consequence of striking a mixed opaque pigment over a dark
+ground. It would now be possible to treat this skeleton of a stone,
+which could only have been knit together by Tintoret's rough temper,
+with the care of a Fleming; to leave its fiercely-stricken lights
+emanating from a golden ground, to gradate with the pen its ponderous
+shadows, and in its completion, to dwell with endless and intricate
+precision upon fibers of moss, bells of heath, blades of grass, and
+films of lichen. Love like Van Eyck's would separate the fibers as if
+they were stems of forest, twine the ribbed grass into fanciful
+articulation, shadow forth capes and islands in the variegated film, and
+hang the purple bells in counted chiming. A year might pass away, and
+the work yet be incomplete; yet would the purpose of the great picture
+have been better answered when all had been achieved? or if so, is it to
+be wished that a year of the life of Tintoret (could such a thing be
+conceived possible) had been so devoted?
+
+134. We have put in as broad and extravagant a view as possible the
+difference of object in the two systems of loaded and transparent light;
+but it is to be remembered that both are in a certain degree compatible,
+and that whatever exclusive arguments may be adduced in favor of the
+loaded system apply only to the ultimate stages of the work. The
+question is not whether the white ground be expedient in the
+commencement--but how far it must of necessity be preserved to the
+close? There cannot be the slightest doubt that, whatever the object,
+whatever the power of the painter, the white ground, as intensely bright
+and perfect as it can be obtained, should be the base of his
+operations; that it should be preserved as long as possible, shown
+wherever it is possible, and sacrificed only upon good cause. There are
+indeed many objects which do not admit of imitation unless the hand have
+power of superimposing and modeling the light; but there are others
+which are equally unsusceptible of every rendering except that of
+transparent color over the pure ground.
+
+It appears from the evidence now produced that there are at least three
+distinct systems traceable in the works of good colorists, each having
+its own merit and its peculiar application. First, the white ground,
+with careful chiaroscuro preparation, transparent color in the middle
+tints, and opaque high lights only (Van Eyck). Secondly, white ground,
+transparent brown preparation, and solid painting of lights above
+(Rubens). Thirdly, white ground, brown preparation, and solid painting
+both of lights and shadows above (Titian); on which last method,
+indisputably the noblest, we have not insisted, as it has not yet been
+examined by Mr. Eastlake. But in all these methods the white ground was
+indispensable. It mattered not what transparent color were put over it:
+red, frequently, we believe, by Titian, before the brown shadows--yellow
+sometimes by Rubens:--whatever warm tone might be chosen for the key of
+the composition, and for the support of its grays, depended for its own
+value upon the white gesso beneath; nor can any system of color be
+ultimately successful which excludes it. Noble arrangement, choice, and
+relation of color, will indeed redeem and recommend the falsest system:
+our own Reynolds, and recently Turner, furnish magnificent examples of
+the power attainable by colorists of high caliber, after the light
+ground is lost--(we cannot agree with Mr. Eastlake in thinking the
+practice of painting first in white and black, with cool reds only,
+"equivalent to its preservation"):--but in the works of both, diminished
+splendor and sacrificed durability attest and punish the neglect of the
+best resources of their art.
+
+135. We have stated, though briefly, the major part of the data which
+recent research has furnished respecting the early colorists; enough,
+certainly, to remove all theoretical obstacles to the attainment of a
+perfection equal to theirs. A few carefully conducted experiments, with
+the efficient aids of modern chemistry, would probably put us in
+possession of an amber varnish, if indeed this be necessary, at least
+not inferior to that which they employed; the rest of their materials
+are already in our hands, soliciting only such care in their preparation
+as it ought, we think, to be no irksome duty to bestow. Yet we are not
+sanguine of the immediate result. Mr. Eastlake has done his duty
+excellently; but it is hardly to be expected that, after being long in
+possession of means which we could apply to no profit, the knowledge
+that the greatest men possessed no better, should at once urge to
+emulation and gift with strength. We believe that some consciousness of
+their true position already existed in the minds of many living artists;
+example had at least been given by two of our Academicians, Mr. Mulready
+and Mr. Etty, of a splendor based on the Flemish system, and consistent,
+certainly, in the first case, with a high degree of permanence; while
+the main direction of artistic and public sympathy to works of a
+character altogether opposed to theirs, showed fatally how far more
+perceptible and appreciable to our present instincts is the mechanism of
+handling than the melody of hue. Indeed we firmly believe, that of all
+powers of enjoyment or of judgment, that which is concerned with
+nobility of color is least communicable: it is also perhaps the most
+rare. The achievements of the draughtsman are met by the curiosity of
+all mankind; the appeals of the dramatist answered by their sympathy;
+the creatures of imagination acknowledged by their fear; but the voice
+of the colorist has but the adder's listening, charm he never so wisely.
+Men vie with each other, untaught, in pursuit of smoothness and
+smallness--of Carlo Dolci and Van Huysum; their domestic hearts may
+range them in faithful armies round the throne of Raphael; meditation
+and labor may raise them to the level of the great mountain pedestal of
+Buonarotti--"vestito gia de' raggi del pianeta, che mena dritto altrui
+per ogni calle;" but neither time nor teaching will bestow the sense,
+when it is not innate, of that wherein consists the power of Titian and
+the great Venetians. There is proof of this in the various degrees of
+cost and care devoted to the preservation of their works. The glass, the
+curtain, and the cabinet guard the preciousness of what is petty, guide
+curiosity to what is popular, invoke worship to what is mighty;--Raphael
+has his palace--Michael his dome--respect protects and crowds traverse
+the sacristy and the saloon; but the frescoes of Titian fade in the
+solitudes of Padua, and the gesso falls crumbled from the flapping
+canvas, as the sea-winds shake the Scuola di San Rocco.
+
+136. But if, on the one hand, mere abstract excellence of color be thus
+coldly regarded, it is equally certain that no work ever attains
+enduring celebrity which is eminently deficient in this great respect.
+Color cannot be indifferent; it is either beautiful and auxiliary to the
+purposes of the picture, or false, froward, and opposite to them. Even
+in the painting of Nature herself, this law is palpable; chiefly
+glorious when color is a predominant element in her working, she is in
+the next degree most impressive when it is withdrawn altogether: and
+forms and scenes become sublime in the neutral twilight, which were
+indifferent in the colors of noon. Much more is this the case in the
+feebleness of imitation; all color is bad which is less than beautiful;
+all is gross and intrusive which is not attractive; it repels where it
+cannot inthrall, and destroys what it cannot assist. It is besides the
+painter's peculiar craft; he who cannot color is no painter. It is not
+painting to grind earths with oil and lay them smoothly on a surface. He
+only is a painter who can melodize and harmonize _hue_--if he fail in
+this, he is no member of the brotherhood. Let him etch, or draw, or
+carve: better the unerring graver than the unfaithful pencil--better the
+true sling and stone than the brightness of the unproved armor. And let
+not even those who deal in the deeper magic, and feel in themselves the
+loftier power, presume upon that power--nor believe in the reality of
+any success unless that which has been deserved by deliberate, resolute,
+successive operation. We would neither deny nor disguise the influences
+of sensibility or of imagination, upon this, as upon every other
+admirable quality of art;--we know that there is that in the very stroke
+and fall of the pencil in a master's hand, which creates color with an
+unconscious enchantment--we know that there is a brilliancy which
+springs from the joy of the painter's heart--a gloom which sympathizes
+with its seriousness--a power correlative with its will; but these are
+all vain unless they be ruled by a seemly caution--a manly
+moderation--an indivertible foresight. This we think the one great
+conclusion to be received from the work we have been examining, that all
+power is vain--all invention vain--all enthusiasm vain--all devotion
+even, and fidelity vain, unless these are guided by such severe and
+exact law as we see take place in the development of every great natural
+glory; and, even in the full glow of their bright and burning operation,
+sealed by the cold, majestic, deep-graven impress of the signet on the
+right hand of Time.
+
+
+SAMUEL PROUT.[20]
+
+137. The first pages in the histories of artists, worthy the name, are
+generally alike; records of boyish resistance to every scheme, parental
+or tutorial, at variance with the ruling desire and bent of the opening
+mind. It is so rare an accident that the love of drawing should be
+noticed and fostered in the child, that we are hardly entitled to form
+any conclusions respecting the probable result of an indulgent
+foresight; it is enough to admire the strength of will which usually
+accompanies every noble intellectual gift, and to believe that, in early
+life, direct resistance is better than inefficient guidance. Samuel
+Prout--with how many rich and picturesque imaginations is the name now
+associated!--was born at Plymouth, September 17th, 1783, and intended by
+his father for his own profession; but although the delicate health of
+the child might have appeared likely to induce a languid acquiescence in
+his parent's wish, the love of drawing occupied every leisure hour, and
+at last trespassed upon every other occupation. Reproofs were
+affectionately repeated, and every effort made to dissuade the boy from
+what was considered an "idle amusement," but it was soon discovered that
+opposition was unavailing, and the attachment too strong to be checked.
+It might perhaps have been otherwise, but for some rays of encouragement
+received from the observant kindness of his first schoolmaster. To watch
+the direction of the little hand when it wandered from its task, to draw
+the culprit to him with a smile instead of a reproof, to set him on the
+high stool beside his desk, and stimulate him, by the loan of his own
+pen, to a more patient and elaborate study of the child's usual subject,
+his favorite cat, was a modification of preceptorial care as easy as it
+was wise; but it perhaps had more influence on the mind and after-life
+of the boy than all the rest of his education together.
+
+138. Such happy though rare interludes in school-hours, and occasional
+attempts at home, usually from the carts and horses which stopped at a
+public-house opposite, began the studentship of the young artist before
+he had quitted his pinafore. An unhappy accident which happened about
+the same time, and which farther enfeebled his health, rendered it still
+less advisable to interfere with his beloved occupation. We have heard
+the painter express, with a melancholy smile, the distinct recollection
+remaining with him to this day, of a burning autumn morning, on which he
+had sallied forth alone, himself some four autumns old, armed with a
+hooked stick, to gather nuts. Unrestrainable alike with pencil or crook,
+he was found by a farmer, towards the close of the day, lying moaning
+under a hedge, prostrated by a sunstroke, and was brought home
+insensible. From that day forward he was subject to attacks of violent
+pain in the head, recurring at short intervals; and until thirty years
+after marriage not a week passed without one or two days of absolute
+confinement to his room or to his bed. "Up to this hour," we may perhaps
+be permitted to use his own touching words, "I have to endure a great
+fight of afflictions; can I therefore be sufficiently thankful for the
+merciful gift of a buoyant spirit?"
+
+139. That buoyancy of spirit--one of the brightest and most marked
+elements of his character--never failed to sustain him between the
+recurrences even of his most acute suffering; and the pursuit of his
+most beloved Art became every year more determined and independent. The
+first beginnings in landscape study were made in happy truant
+excursions, now fondly remembered, with the painter Haydon, then also a
+youth. This companionship was probably rather cemented by the energy
+than the delicacy of Haydon's sympathies. The two boys were directly
+opposed in their habits of application and modes of study. Prout
+unremitting in diligence, patient in observation, devoted in copying
+what he loved in nature, never working except with his model before
+him; Haydon restless, ambitious, and fiery; exceedingly imaginative,
+never captivated with simple truth, nor using his pencil on the spot,
+but trusting always to his powers of memory. The fates of the two youths
+were inevitably fixed by their opposite characters. The humble student
+became the originator of a new School of Art, and one of the most
+popular painters of his age. The self-trust of the wanderer in the
+wilderness of his fancy betrayed him into the extravagances, and
+deserted him in the suffering, with which his name must remain sadly,
+but not unjustly, associated.
+
+140. There was, however, little in the sketches made by Prout at this
+period to indicate the presence of dormant power. Common prints, at a
+period when engraving was in the lowest state of decline, were the only
+guides which the youth could obtain; and his style, in endeavoring to
+copy these, became cramped and mannered; but the unremitting sketching
+from nature saved him. Whole days, from dawn till night, were devoted to
+the study of the peculiar objects of his early interest, the ivy-mantled
+bridges, mossy water-mills, and rock-built cottages, which characterize
+the valley scenery of Devon. In spite of every disadvantage, the strong
+love of truth, and the instinctive perception of the chief points of
+shade and characters of form on which his favorite effects mainly
+depended, enabled him not only to obtain an accumulated store of
+memoranda, afterwards valuable, but to publish several elementary works
+which obtained extensive and deserved circulation, and to which many
+artists, now high in reputation, have kindly and frankly confessed their
+early obligations.
+
+141. At that period the art of water-color drawing was little understood
+at Plymouth, and practiced only by Payne, then an engineer in the
+citadel. Though mannered in the extreme, his works obtained reputation;
+for the best drawings of the period were feeble both in color and
+execution, with commonplace light and shadow, a dark foreground being a
+_rule absolute_, as may be seen in several of Turner's first
+productions. But Turner was destined to annihilate such rules, breaking
+through and scattering them with an expansive force commensurate with
+the rigidity of former restraint. It happened "fortunately," as it is
+said,--naturally and deservedly, as it _should_ be said,--that Prout was
+at this period removed from the narrow sphere of his first efforts to
+one in which he could share in, and take advantage of, every progressive
+movement.
+
+142. The most respectable of the Plymouth amateurs was the Rev. Dr.
+Bidlake, who was ever kind in his encouragement of the young painter,
+and with whom many delightful excursions were made. At his house, Mr.
+Britton, the antiquarian, happening to see some of the cottages
+sketches, and being pleased with them, proposed that Prout should
+accompany him into Cornwall, in order to aid him in collecting materials
+for his "Beauties of England and Wales." This was the painter's first
+recognized artistical employment, as well as the occasion of a
+friendship ever gratefully and fondly remembered. On Mr. Britton's
+return to London, after sending to him a portfolio of drawings, which
+were almost the first to create a sensation with lovers of Art, Mr.
+Prout received so many offers of encouragement, if he would consent to
+reside in London, as to induce him to take this important step--the
+first towards being established as an artist.
+
+143. The immediate effect of this change of position was what might
+easily have been foretold, upon a mind naturally sensitive, diffident,
+and enthusiastic. It was a heavy discouragement. The youth felt that he
+had much to eradicate and more to learn, and hardly knew at first how to
+avail himself of the advantages presented by the study of the works of
+Turner, Girtin, Cousins, and others. But he had resolution and ambition
+as well as modesty; he knew that
+
+   "The noblest honors of the mind
+   On rigid terms descend."
+
+He had every inducement to begin the race, in the clearer guidance and
+nobler ends which the very works that had disheartened him afforded and
+pointed out; and the first firm and certain step was made. His range of
+subject was as yet undetermined, and was likely at one time to have been
+very different from that in which he has since obtained pre-eminence so
+confessed. Among the picturesque material of his native place, the forms
+of its shipping had not been neglected, though there was probably less
+in the order of Plymouth dockyard to catch the eye of the boy, always
+determined in its preference of purely picturesque arrangements, than
+might have been afforded by the meanest fishing hamlet. But a strong and
+lasting impression was made upon him by the wreck of the "Dutton" East
+Indiaman on the rocks under the citadel; the crew were saved by the
+personal courage and devotion of Sir Edward Pellew, afterwards Lord
+Exmouth. The wreck held together for many hours under the cliff, rolling
+to and fro as the surges struck her. Haydon and Prout sat on the crags
+together and watched her vanish fragment by fragment into the gnashing
+foam. Both were equally awe-struck at the time; both, on the morrow,
+resolved to paint their first pictures; both failed; but Haydon, always
+incapable of acknowledging and remaining loyal to the majesty of what he
+had seen, lost himself in vulgar thunder and lightning. Prout struggled
+to some resemblance of the actual scene, and the effect upon his mind
+was never effaced.
+
+144. At the time of his first residence in London, he painted more
+marines than anything else. But other work was in store for him. About
+the year 1818, his health, which as we have seen had never been
+vigorous, showed signs of increasing weakness, and a short trial of
+continental air was recommended. The route by Havre to Rouen was chosen,
+and Prout found himself, for the first time, in the grotesque labyrinths
+of the Norman streets. There are few minds so apathetic as to receive no
+impulse of new delight from their first acquaintance with continental
+scenery and architecture; and Rouen was, of all the cities of France,
+the richest in those objects with which the painter's mind had the
+profoundest sympathy. It was other then than it is now; revolutionary
+fury had indeed spent itself upon many of its noblest monuments, but the
+interference of modern restoration or improvement was unknown. Better
+the unloosed rage of the fiend than the scrabble of self-complacent
+idiocy. The facade of the cathedral was as yet unencumbered by the
+blocks of new stonework, never to be carved, by which it is now defaced;
+the Church of St. Nicholas existed, (the last fragments of the niches of
+its gateway were seen by the writer dashed upon the pavement in 1840 to
+make room for the new "Hotel St. Nicholas"); the Gothic turret had not
+vanished from the angle of the Place de la Pucelle, the Palais de
+Justice remained in its gray antiquity, and the Norman houses still
+lifted their fantastic ridges of gable along the busy quay (now fronted
+by as formal a range of hotels and offices as that of the West Cliff of
+Brighton). All was at unity with itself, and the city lay under its
+guarding hills, one labyrinth of delight, its gray and fretted towers,
+misty in their magnificence of height, letting the sky like blue enamel
+through the foiled spaces of their crowns of open work; the walls and
+gates of its countless churches wardered by saintly groups of solemn
+statuary, clasped about by wandering stems of sculptured leafage, and
+crowned by fretted niche and fairy pediment--meshed like gossamer with
+inextricable tracery: many a quaint monument of past times standing to
+tell its far-off tale in the place from which it has since perished--in
+the midst of the throng and murmur of those shadowy streets--all grim
+with jutting props of ebon woodwork, lightened only here and there by a
+sunbeam glancing down from the scaly backs, and points, and pyramids of
+the Norman roofs, or carried out of its narrow range by the gay progress
+of some snowy cap or scarlet camisole. The painter's vocation was fixed
+from that hour. The first effect upon his mind was irrepressible
+enthusiasm, with a strong feeling of a new-born attachment to Art, in a
+new world of exceeding interest. Previous impressions were presently
+obliterated, and the old embankments of fancy gave way to the force of
+overwhelming anticipations, forming another and a wider channel for its
+future course.
+
+145. From this time excursions were continually made to the continent,
+and every corner of France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy
+ransacked for its fragments of carved stone. The enthusiasm of the
+painter was greater than his ambition, and the strict limitation of his
+aim to the rendering of architectural character permitted him to adopt a
+simple and consistent method of execution, from which he has rarely
+departed. It was adapted in the first instance to the necessities of the
+moldering and mystic character of Northern Gothic; and though
+impressions received afterwards in Italy, more especially at Venice,
+have retained as strong a hold upon the painter's mind as those of his
+earlier excursions, his methods of drawing have always been influenced
+by the predilections first awakened. How far his love of the
+picturesque, already alluded to, was reconcilable with an entire
+appreciation of the highest characters of Italian architecture we do not
+pause to inquire; but this we may assert, without hesitation, that the
+picturesque _elements_ of that architecture were unknown until he
+developed them, and that since Gentile Bellini, no one had regarded the
+palaces of Venice with so affectionate an understanding of the purpose
+and expression of their wealth of detail. In this respect the City of
+the Sea has been, and remains, peculiarly his own. There is, probably,
+no single piazza nor sea-paved street from St. Georgio in Aliga to the
+Arsenal, of which Prout has not in order drawn every fragment of
+pictorial material. Probably not a pillar in Venice but occurs in some
+one of his innumerable studies; while the peculiarly beautiful and
+varied arrangements under which he has treated the angle formed by St.
+Mark's Church with the Doge's palace, have not only made every
+successful drawing of those buildings by any other hand look like
+plagiarism, but have added (and what is this but indeed to paint the
+lily!) another charm to the spot itself.
+
+146. This exquisite dexterity of arrangement has always been one of his
+leading characteristics as an artist. Notwithstanding the deserved
+popularity of his works, his greatness in composition remains altogether
+unappreciated. Many modern works exhibit greater pretense at
+arrangement, and a more palpable system; masses of well-concentrated
+light or points of sudden and dextrous color are expedients in the works
+of our second-rate artists as attractive as they are commonplace. But
+the moving and natural crowd, the decomposing composition, the frank and
+unforced, but marvelously intricate grouping, the breadth of
+inartificial and unexaggerated shadow, these are merits of an order only
+the more elevated because unobtrusive. Nor is his system of color less
+admirable. It is a quality from which the character of his subjects
+naturally withdraws much of his attention, and of which sometimes that
+character precludes any high attainment; but, nevertheless, the truest
+and happiest association of hues in sun and shade to be found in modern
+water-color art,[21] (excepting only the studies of Hunt and De Wint)
+will be found in portions of Prout's more important works.
+
+147. Of his _peculiar_ powers we need hardly speak; it would be
+difficult to conceive the circle of their influence widened. There is
+not a landscape of recent times in which the treatment of the
+architectural features has not been affected, however unconsciously, by
+principles which were first developed by Prout. Of those principles the
+most original was his familiarization of the sentiment, while he
+elevated the subject, of the picturesque. That character had been
+sought, before his time, either in solitude or in rusticity; it was
+supposed to belong only to the savageness of the desert or the
+simplicity of the hamlet; it lurked beneath the brows of rocks and the
+eaves of cottages; to seek it in a city would have been deemed an
+extravagance, to raise it to the height of a cathedral, an heresy. Prout
+did both, and both simultaneously; he found and proved in the busy
+shadows and sculptured gables of the Continental street sources of
+picturesque delight as rich and as interesting as those which had been
+sought amidst the darkness of thickets and the eminence of rocks; and he
+contrasted with the familiar circumstances of urban life, the majesty
+and the aerial elevation of the most noble architecture, expressing its
+details in more splendid accumulation, and with a more patient love than
+ever had been reached or manifested before his time by any artist who
+introduced such subjects as members of a general composition. He thus
+became the interpreter of a great period of the world's history, of that
+in which age and neglect had cast the interest of ruin over the noblest
+ecclesiastical structures of Europe, and in which there had been born at
+their feet a generation other in its feelings and thoughts than that to
+which they owed their existence, a generation which understood not their
+meaning, and regarded not their beauty, and which yet had a character of
+its own, full of vigor, animation, and originality, which rendered the
+grotesque association of the circumstances of its ordinary and active
+life with the solemn memorialism of the elder building, one which rather
+pleased by the strangeness than pained by the violence of its contrast.
+
+148. That generation is passing away, and another dynasty is putting
+forth its character and its laws. Care and observance, more mischievous
+in their misdirection than indifference or scorn, have in many places
+given the mediaeval relics the aspect and associations of a kind of
+cabinet preservation, instead of that air of majestic independence, or
+patient and stern endurance, with which they frowned down the insult of
+the regardless crowd. Nominal restoration has done tenfold worse, and
+has hopelessly destroyed what time, and storm, and anarchy, and impiety
+had spared. The picturesque material of a lower kind is fast
+departing--and forever. There is not, so far as we know, one city scene
+in central Europe which has not suffered from some jarring point of
+modernization. The railroad and the iron wheel have done their work, and
+the characters of Venice, Florence, and Rouen are yielding day by day
+to a lifeless extension of those of Paris and Birmingham. A few lusters
+more, and the modernization will be complete: the archaeologist may still
+find work among the wrecks of beauty, and here and there a solitary
+fragment of the old cities may exist by toleration, or rise strangely
+before the workmen who dig the new foundations, left like some isolated
+and tottering rock in the midst of sweeping sea. But the life of the
+middle ages is dying from their embers, and the warm mingling of the
+past and present will soon be forever dissolved. The works of Prout, and
+of those who have followed in his footsteps, will become memorials the
+most precious of the things that have been; to their technical value,
+however great, will be added the far higher interest of faithful and
+fond records of a strange and unreturning era of history. May he long be
+spared to us, and enabled to continue the noble series, conscious of a
+purpose and function worthy of being followed with all the zeal of even
+his most ardent and affectionate mind. A time will come when that zeal
+will be understood, and his works will be cherished with a melancholy
+gratitude when the pillars of Venice shall lie moldering in the salt
+shallows of her sea, and the stones of the goodly towers of Rouen have
+become ballast for the barges of the Seine.
+
+
+SIR JOSHUA AND HOLBEIN.[22]
+
+149. Long ago discarded from our National Gallery, with the contempt
+logically due to national or English pictures,--lost to sight and memory
+for many a year in the Ogygian seclusions of Marlborough House--there
+have reappeared at last, in more honorable exile at Kensington, two
+great pictures by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Two, with others; but these alone
+worth many an entanglement among the cross-roads of the West, to see for
+half an hour by spring sunshine:--the _Holy Family_, and the _Graces_,
+side by side now in the principal room. Great, as ever was work wrought
+by man. In placid strength, and subtlest science, unsurpassed;--in sweet
+felicity, incomparable.
+
+150. If you truly want to know what good work of painter's hand is,
+study those two pictures from side to side, and miss no inch of them
+(you will hardly, eventually, be inclined to miss one): in some respects
+there is no execution like it; none so open in the magic. For the work
+of other great men is hidden in its wonderfulness--you cannot see how it
+was done. But in Sir Joshua's there is no mystery: it is all amazement.
+No question but that the touch was so laid; only that it _could_ have
+been so laid, is a marvel forever. So also there is no painting so
+majestic in sweetness. He is lily-sceptered: his power blossoms, but
+burdens not. All other men of equal dignity paint more slowly; all
+others of equal force paint less lightly. Tintoret lays his line like a
+king marking the boundaries of conquered lands; but Sir Joshua leaves it
+as a summer wind its trace on a lake; he could have painted on a silken
+veil, where it fell free, and not bent it.
+
+151. Such at least is his touch when it is life that he paints: for
+things lifeless he has a severer hand. If you examine that picture of
+the _Graces_ you will find it reverses all the ordinary ideas of
+expedient treatment. By other men flesh is firmly painted, but
+accessories lightly. Sir Joshua paints accessories firmly,[23] flesh
+lightly;--nay, flesh not at all, but spirit. The wreath of flowers he
+feels to be material; and gleam by gleam strikes fearlessly the silver
+and violet leaves out of the darkness. But the three maidens are less
+substantial than rose petals. No flushed nor frosted tissue that ever
+faded in night wind is so tender as they; no hue may reach, no line
+measure, what is in them so gracious and so fair. Let the hand move
+softly--itself as a spirit; for this is Life, of which it touches the
+imagery.
+
+152. "And yet----" Yes: you do well to pause. There is a "yet" to be
+thought of. I did not bring you to these pictures to see wonderful work
+merely, or womanly beauty merely. I brought you chiefly to look at that
+Madonna, believing that you might remember other Madonnas, unlike her;
+and might think it desirable to consider wherein the difference
+lay:--other Madonnas not by Sir Joshua, who painted Madonnas but seldom.
+Who perhaps, if truth must be told, painted them never: for surely this
+dearest pet of an English girl, with the little curl of lovely hair
+under her ear, is _not_ one.
+
+153. Why did not Sir Joshua--or could not--or would not Sir
+Joshua--paint Madonnas? neither he, nor his great rival-friend
+Gainsborough? Both of them painters of women, such as since Giorgione
+and Correggio had not been; both painters of men, such as had not been
+since Titian. How is it that these English friends can so brightly paint
+that particular order of humanity which we call "gentlemen and ladies,"
+but neither heroes, nor saints, nor angels? Can it be because they were
+both country-bred boys, and for ever after strangely sensitive to
+courtliness? Why, Giotto also was a country-bred boy. Allegri's native
+Correggio, Titian's Cadore, were but hill villages; yet these men
+painted, not the court, nor the drawing-room, but the Earth: and not a
+little of Heaven besides: while our good Sir Joshua never trusts himself
+outside the park palings. He could not even have drawn the strawberry
+girl, unless she had got through a gap in them--or rather, I think, she
+must have been let in at the porter's lodge, for her strawberries are in
+a pottle, ready for the ladies at the Hall. Giorgione would have set
+them, wild and fragrant, among their leaves, in her hand. Between his
+fairness, and Sir Joshua's May-fairness, there is a strange, impassable
+limit--as of the white reef that in Pacific isles encircles their inner
+lakelets, and shuts them from the surf and sound of sea. Clear and calm
+they rest, reflecting fringed shadows of the palm-trees, and the passing
+of fretted clouds across their own sweet circle of blue sky. But beyond,
+and round and round their coral bar, lies the blue of sea and heaven
+together--blue of eternal deep.
+
+154. You will find it a pregnant question, if you follow it forth, and
+leading to many others, not trivial, Why it is, that in Sir Joshua's
+girl, or Gainsborough's, we always think first of the Ladyhood; but in
+Giotto's, of the Womanhood? Why, in Sir Joshua's hero, or Vandyck's, it
+is always the Prince or the Sir whom we see first; but in Titian's, the
+man.
+
+Not that Titian's gentlemen are less finished than Sir Joshua's; but
+their gentlemanliness[24] is not the principal thing about them; their
+manhood absorbs, conquers, wears it as a despised thing. Nor--and this
+is another stern ground of separation--will Titian make a gentleman of
+everyone he paints. He will make him so if he is so, not otherwise; and
+this not merely in general servitude to truth, but because in his
+sympathy with deeper humanity, the courtier is not more interesting to
+him than anyone else. "You have learned to dance and fence; you can
+speak with clearness, and think with precision; your hands are small,
+your senses acute, and your features well-shaped. Yes: I see all this in
+you, and will do it justice. You shall stand as none but a well-bred man
+could stand; and your fingers shall fall on the sword-hilt as no fingers
+could but those that knew the grasp of it. But for the rest, this grisly
+fisherman, with rusty cheek and rope-frayed hand, is a man as well as
+you, and might possibly make several of you, if souls were divisible.
+His bronze color is quite as interesting to me, Titian, as your
+paleness, and his hoary spray of stormy hair takes the light as well as
+your waving curls. Him also I will paint, with such picturesqueness as
+he may have; yet not putting the picturesqueness first in him, as in you
+I have not put the gentlemanliness first. In him I see a strong human
+creature, contending with all hardship: in you also a human creature,
+uncontending, and possibly not strong. Contention or strength, weakness
+or picturesqueness, and all other such accidents in either, shall have
+due place. But the immortality and miracle of you--this clay that burns,
+this color that changes--are in truth the awful things in both: these
+shall be first painted--and last."
+
+155. With which question respecting treatment of character we have to
+connect also this further one: How is it that the attempts of so great
+painters as Reynolds and Gainsborough are, beyond portraiture, limited
+almost like children's? No domestic drama--no history--no noble natural
+scenes, far less any religious subject:--only market carts; girls with
+pigs; woodmen going home to supper; watering-places; gray cart-horses in
+fields, and such like. Reynolds, indeed, once or twice touched higher
+themes,--"among the chords his fingers laid," and recoiled: wisely; for,
+strange to say, his very sensibility deserts him when he leaves his
+courtly quiet. The horror of the subjects he chose (Cardinal Beaufort
+and Ugolino) showed inherent apathy: had he felt deeply, he would not
+have sought for this strongest possible excitement of feeling,--would
+not willingly have dwelt on the worst conditions of despair--the despair
+of the ignoble. His religious subjects are conceived even with less care
+than these. Beautiful as it is, this Holy Family by which we stand has
+neither dignity nor sacredness, other than those which attach to every
+group of gentle mother and ruddy babe; while his Faiths, Charities, or
+other well-ordered and emblem-fitted virtues are even less lovely than
+his ordinary portraits of women.
+
+It was a faultful temper, which, having so mighty a power of realization
+at command, never became so much interested in any fact of human history
+as to spend one touch of heartfelt skill upon it;--which, yielding
+momentarily to indolent imagination, ended, at best, in a Puck, or a
+Thais; a Mercury as Thief, or a Cupid as Linkboy. How wide the interval
+between this gently trivial humor, guided by the wave of a feather, or
+arrested by the enchantment of a smile,--and the habitual dwelling of
+the thoughts of the great Greeks and Florentines among the beings and
+the interests of the eternal world!
+
+156. In some degree it may indeed be true that the modesty and sense of
+the English painters are the causes of their simple practice. All that
+they did, they did well, and attempted nothing over which conquest was
+doubtful. They knew they could paint men and women: it did not follow
+that they could paint angels. Their own gifts never appeared to them so
+great as to call for serious question as to the use to be made of them.
+"They could mix colors and catch likeness--yes; but were they therefore
+able to teach religion, or reform the world? To support themselves
+honorably, pass the hours of life happily, please their friends, and
+leave no enemies, was not this all that duty could require, or prudence
+recommend? Their own art was, it seemed, difficult enough to employ all
+their genius: was it reasonable to hope also to be poets or theologians?
+Such men had, indeed, existed; but the age of miracles and prophets was
+long past; nor, because they could seize the trick of an expression, or
+the turn of a head, had they any right to think themselves able to
+conceive heroes with Homer, or gods with Michael Angelo."
+
+157. Such was, in the main, their feeling: wise, modest, unenvious, and
+unambitious. Meaner men, their contemporaries or successors, raved of
+high art with incoherent passion; arrogated to themselves an equality
+with the masters of elder time, and declaimed against the degenerate
+tastes of a public which acknowledged not the return of the Heraclidae.
+But the two great--the two only painters of their age--happy in a
+reputation founded as deeply in the heart as in the judgment of mankind,
+demanded no higher function than that of soothing the domestic
+affections; and achieved for themselves at last an immortality not the
+less noble, because in their lifetime they had concerned themselves less
+to claim it than to bestow.
+
+158. Yet, while we acknowledge the discretion and simple-heartedness of
+these men, honoring them for both: and the more when we compare their
+tranquil powers with the hot egotism and hollow ambition of their
+inferiors: we have to remember, on the other hand, that the measure they
+thus set to their aims was, if a just, yet a narrow one; that amiable
+discretion is not the highest virtue; nor to please the frivolous, the
+best success. There is probably some strange weakness in the painter,
+and some fatal error in the age, when in thinking over the examples of
+their greatest work, for some type of culminating loveliness or
+veracity, we remember no expression either of religion or heroism, and
+instead of reverently naming a Madonna di San Sisto, can only whisper,
+modestly, "Mrs. Pelham feeding chickens."
+
+159. The nature of the fault, so far as it exists in the painters
+themselves, may perhaps best be discerned by comparing them with a man
+who went not far beyond them in his general range of effort, but who did
+all his work in a wholly different temper--Hans Holbein.
+
+The first great difference between them is of course in completeness of
+execution. Sir Joshua's and Gainsborough's work, at its best, is only
+magnificent sketching; giving indeed, in places, a perfection of result
+unattainable by other methods, and possessing always a charm of grace
+and power exclusively its own; yet, in its slightness addressing itself,
+purposefully, to the casual glance, and common thought--eager to arrest
+the passer-by, but careless to detain him; or detaining him, if at all,
+by an unexplained enchantment, not by continuance of teaching, or
+development of idea. But the work of Holbein is true and thorough;
+accomplished, in the highest as the most literal sense, with a calm
+entireness of unaffected resolution, which sacrifices nothing, forgets
+nothing, and fears nothing.
+
+160. In the portrait of the Hausmann George Gyzen,[25] every accessory
+is perfect with a fine perfection: the carnations in the glass vase by
+his side--the ball of gold, chased with blue enamel, suspended on the
+wall--the books--the steelyard--the papers on the table, the seal-ring,
+with its quartered bearings,--all intensely there, and there in beauty
+of which no one could have dreamed that even flowers or gold were
+capable, far less parchment or steel. But every change of shade is felt,
+every rich and rubied line of petal followed; every subdued gleam in the
+soft blue of the enamel and bending of the gold touched with a hand
+whose patience of regard creates rather than paints. The jewel itself
+was not so precious as the rays of enduring light which form it, and
+flash from it, beneath that errorless hand. The man himself, what he
+was--not more; but to all conceivable proof of sight--in all aspect of
+life or thought--not less. He sits alone in his accustomed room, his
+common work laid out before him; he is conscious of no presence, assumes
+no dignity, bears no sudden or superficial look of care or interest,
+lives only as he lived--but forever.
+
+161. The time occupied in painting this portrait was probably twenty
+times greater than Sir Joshua ever spent on a single picture, however
+large. The result is, to the general spectator, less attractive. In some
+qualities of force and grace it is absolutely inferior. But it is
+inexhaustible. Every detail of it wins, retains, rewards the attention
+with a continually increasing sense of wonderfulness. It is also wholly
+true. So far as it reaches, it contains the absolute facts of color,
+form, and character, rendered with an unaccusable faithfulness. There is
+no question respecting things which it is best worth while to know, or
+things which it is unnecessary to state, or which might be overlooked
+with advantage. What of this man and his house were visible to Holbein,
+are visible to us: we may despise if we will; deny or doubt, we shall
+not; if we care to know anything concerning them, great or small, so
+much as may by the eye be known is forever knowable, reliable,
+indisputable.
+
+162. Respecting the advantage, or the contrary, of so great earnestness
+in drawing a portrait of an uncelebrated person, we raise at present no
+debate: I only wish the reader to note this quality of earnestness, as
+entirely separating Holbein from Sir Joshua,--raising him into another
+sphere of intellect. For here is no question of mere difference in style
+or in power, none of minuteness or largeness. It is a question of
+Entireness. Holbein is _complete_ in intellect: what he sees, he sees
+with his whole soul: what he paints, he paints with his whole might. Sir
+Joshua sees partially, slightly, tenderly--catches the flying lights of
+things, the momentary glooms: paints also partially, tenderly, never
+with half his strength; content with uncertain visions, insecure
+delights; the truth not precious nor significant to him, only pleasing;
+falsehood also pleasurable, even useful on occasion--must, however, be
+discreetly touched, just enough to make all men noble, all women lovely:
+"we do not need this flattery often, most of those we know being such;
+and it is a pleasant world, and with diligence--for nothing can be done
+without diligence--every day till four" (says Sir Joshua)--"a painter's
+is a happy life."
+
+Yes: and the Isis; with her swans, and shadows of Windsor Forest, is a
+sweet stream, touching her shores softly. The Rhine at Basle is of
+another temper, stern and deep, as strong, however bright its face:
+winding far through the solemn plain, beneath the slopes of Jura, tufted
+and steep: sweeping away into its regardless calm of current the waves
+of that little brook of St. Jakob, that bathe the Swiss Thermopylae;[26]
+the low village nestling beneath a little bank of sloping fields--its
+spire seen white against the deep blue shadows of the Jura pines.
+
+163. Gazing on that scene day by day, Holbein went his own way, with the
+earnestness and silent swell of the strong river--not unconscious of the
+awe, nor of the sanctities of his life. The snows of the eternal Alps
+giving forth their strength to it; the blood of the St. Jakob brook
+poured into it as it passes by--not in vain. He also could feel his
+strength coming from white snows far off in heaven. He also bore upon
+him the purple stain of the earth sorrow. A grave man, knowing what
+steps of men keep truest time to the chanting of Death. Having grave
+friends also;--the same singing heard far off, it seems to me, or,
+perhaps, even low in the room, by that family of Sir Thomas More; or
+mingling with the hum of bees in the meadows outside the towered wall of
+Basle; or making the words of the book more tunable, which meditative
+Erasmus looks upon. Nay, that same soft Death-music is on the lips even
+of Holbein's Madonna. Who, among many, is the Virgin you had best
+compare with the one before whose image we have stood so long.
+
+Holbein's is at Dresden, companioned by the Madonna di San Sisto; but
+both are visible enough to you here, for, by a strange coincidence, they
+are (at least so far as I know) the only two great pictures in the world
+which have been faultlessly engraved.
+
+164. The received tradition respecting the Holbein Madonna is beautiful;
+and I believe the interpretation to be true. A father and mother have
+prayed to her for the life of their sick child. She appears to them, her
+own Christ in her arms. She puts down her Christ beside them--takes
+their child into her arms instead. It lies down upon her bosom, and
+stretches its hand to its father and mother, saying farewell.
+
+This interpretation of the picture has been doubted, as nearly all the
+most precious truths of pictures have been doubted, and forgotten. But
+even supposing it erroneous, the design is not less characteristic of
+Holbein. For that there are signs of suffering on the features of the
+child in the arms of the Virgin, is beyond question; and if this child
+be intended for the Christ, it would not be doubtful to my mind, that,
+of the two--Raphael and Holbein--the latter had given the truest aspect
+and deepest reading of the early life of the Redeemer. Raphael sought to
+express His power only; but Holbein His labor and sorrow.
+
+165. There are two other pictures which you should remember together
+with this (attributed, indeed, but with no semblance of probability, to
+the elder Holbein, none of whose work, preserved at Basle, or elsewhere,
+approaches in the slightest degree to their power), the St. Barbara and
+St. Elizabeth.[27] I do not know among the pictures of the great sacred
+schools any at once so powerful, so simple, so pathetically expressive
+of the need of the heart that conceived them. Not ascetic, nor quaint,
+nor feverishly or fondly passionate, nor wrapt in withdrawn solemnities
+of thought. Only entirely true--entirely pure. No depth of glowing
+heaven beyond them--but the clear sharp sweetness of the northern air:
+no splendor of rich color, striving to adorn them with better brightness
+than of the day: a gray glory, as of moonlight without mist, dwelling on
+face and fold of dress;--all faultless-fair. Creatures they are, humble
+by nature, not by self-condemnation; merciful by habit, not by tearful
+impulse; lofty without consciousness; gentle without weakness; wholly in
+this present world, doing its work calmly; beautiful with all that
+holiest life can reach--yet already freed from all that holiest death
+can cast away.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[13] A review of the following-books:--
+
+1. "Materials for a History of Oil-Painting." By Charles Lock Eastlake,
+R.A., F.R.S., F.S.A., Secretary to the Royal Commission for promoting
+the Fine Arts in Connection with the Rebuilding of the Houses of
+Parliament, etc., etc. London, 1847.
+
+2. "Theophili, qui et Rugerus, Presbyteri et Monachi, Libri III. de
+Diversis Artibus; seu Diversarum Artium Schedula. (An Essay upon Various
+Arts, in Three Books, by Theophilus, called also Rugerus, Priest and
+Monk, forming an Encyclopaedia of Christian Art of the Eleventh Century."
+Translated, with Notes, by Robert Hendrie.) London, 1847.
+
+[14] "A Critical Essay on Oil-Painting," London, 1781.
+
+[15] "The mediaeval painters were so accustomed to this appearance in
+varnishes, and considered it so indispensable, that they even supplied
+the tint when it did not exist. Thus Cardanus observes that when white
+of eggs was used as a varnish, it was customary to tinge it with red
+lead."--_Eastlake_, p. 270.
+
+[16] "Si je dis tant de mal de la peinture flamande, ce n'est pas
+qu'elle soit entierement mauvaise, mais elle veut _rendre avec
+perfection_ tant de choses, dont une seule suffirait par son importance,
+qu'elle n'en fait aucune d'une maniere satisfaisante." This opinion of
+M. Angelo's is preserved by Francisco de Ollanda, quoted by Comte
+Raczynski, "Les Arts en Portugal," Paris, 1846.
+
+[17] "Arte de Pintura." Sevilla, 1649.
+
+[18] The preparations of Hemling, at Bruges, we imagine to have been in
+water-color, and perhaps the picture was carried to some degree of
+completion in this material. Van Mander observes that Van Eyck's dead
+colorings "were cleaner and sharper than the finished works of other
+painters."
+
+[19] [See _Stones of Venice_, vol. iii. Venetian Index, _s._ Rocco,
+Scuola di San, Sec. 20, _Temptation_.--ED. 1899.]
+
+[20] _Art Journal_, March 1849.--ED.
+
+[21] We do not mean under this term to include the drawings of professed
+oil-painters, as of Stothard or Turner.
+
+[22] _Cornhill Magazine_, March, 1860.--ED.
+
+[23] As showing gigantic power of hand, joined with utmost accuracy and
+rapidity, the folds of drapery under the breast of the Virgin are,
+perhaps, as marvelous a piece of work as could be found in any picture,
+of whatever time or master.
+
+[24] The reader must observe that I use the word here in a limited
+sense, as meaning only the effect of careful education, good society,
+and refined habits of life, on average temper and character. Of deep and
+true gentlemanliness--based as it is on intense sensibility and
+sincerity, perfected by courage, and other qualities of race; as well as
+of that union of insensibility with cunning, which is the essence of
+vulgarity, I shall have to speak at length in another place.
+
+[25] Museum of Berlin.
+
+[26] Of 1,200 Swiss, who fought by that brookside, ten only returned.
+The battle checked the attack of the French, led by Louis XI. (then
+Dauphin) in 1444; and was the first of the great series of efforts and
+victories which were closed at Nancy by the death of Charles of
+Burgundy.
+
+[27] Pinacothek of Munich.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+ART.
+
+II.
+
+PRE-RAPHAELITISM.
+
+ITS PRINCIPLES, AND TURNER.
+
+(_Pamphlet_, 1851.)
+
+ITS THREE COLORS.
+
+(_Nineteenth Century, Nov.-Dec. 1878._)
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+_Eight years ago, in the close of the first volume of "Modern Painters,"
+I ventured to give the following advice to the young artists of
+England:--_
+
+_"They should go to nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her
+laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to
+penetrate her meaning; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and
+scorning nothing." Advice which, whether bad or good, involved infinite
+labor and humiliation in the following it, and was therefore, for the
+most part, rejected._
+
+_It has, however, at last been carried out, to the very letter, by a
+group of men who, for their reward, have been assailed with the most
+scurrilous abuse which I ever recollect seeing issue from the public
+press. I have, therefore, thought it due to them to contradict the
+directly false statements which have been made respecting their works;
+and to point out the kind of merit which, however deficient in some
+respects, those works possess beyond the possibility of dispute._
+
+_Denmark Hill, August, 1851._
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+PRE-RAPHAELITISM.[28]
+
+
+166. It may be proved, with much certainty, that God intends no man to
+live in this world without working: but it seems to me no less evident
+that He intends every man to be happy in his work. It is written, "in
+the sweat of thy brow," but it was never written, "in the breaking of
+thine heart," thou shalt eat bread: and I find that, as on the one hand,
+infinite misery is caused by idle people, who both fail in doing what
+was appointed for them to do, and set in motion various springs of
+mischief in matters in which they should have had no concern, so on the
+other hand, no small misery is caused by overworked and unhappy people,
+in the dark views which they necessarily take up themselves, and force
+upon others, of work itself. Were it not so, I believe the fact of their
+being unhappy is in itself a violation of divine law, and a sign of some
+kind of folly or sin in their way of life. Now in order that people may
+be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit
+for it: They must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense of
+success in it--not a doubtful sense, such as needs some testimony of
+other people for its confirmation, but a sure sense, or rather
+knowledge, that so much work has been done well, and fruitfully done,
+whatever the world may say or think about it. So that in order that a
+man may be happy, it is necessary that he should not only be capable of
+his work, but a good judge of his work.
+
+167. The first thing then that he has to do, if unhappily his parents or
+masters have not done it for him, is to find out what he is fit for. In
+which inquiry a man may be safely guided by his likings, if he be not
+also guided by his pride. People usually reason in some such fashion as
+this: "I don't seem quite fit for a head-manager in the firm of ---- &
+Co., therefore, in all probability, I am fit to be Chancellor of the
+Exchequer." Whereas, they ought rather to reason thus: "I don't seem
+quite fit to be head-manager in the firm of ---- & Co., but I dare say I
+might do something in a small green-grocery business; I used to be a
+good judge of pease;" that is to say, always trying lower instead of
+trying higher, until they find bottom: once well set on the ground, a
+man may build up by degrees, safely, instead of disturbing everyone in
+his neighborhood by perpetual catastrophes. But this kind of humility is
+rendered especially difficult in these days, by the contumely thrown on
+men in humble employments. The very removal of the massy bars which once
+separated one class of society from another, has rendered it tenfold
+more shameful in foolish people's, _i.e._, in most people's eyes, to
+remain in the lower grades of it, than ever it was before. When a man
+born of an artisan was looked upon as an entirely different species of
+animal from a man born of a noble, it made him no more uncomfortable or
+ashamed to remain that different species of animal, than it makes a
+horse ashamed to remain a horse, and not to become a giraffe. But now
+that a man may make money, and rise in the world, and associate himself,
+unreproached, with people once far above him, not only is the natural
+discontentedness of humanity developed to an unheard-of extent, whatever
+a man's position, but it becomes a veritable shame to him to remain in
+the state he was born in, and everybody thinks it his _duty_ to try to
+be a "gentleman." Persons who have any influence in the management of
+public institutions for charitable education know how common this
+feeling has become. Hardly a day passes but they receive letters from
+mothers who want all their six or eight sons to go to college, and make
+the grand tour in the long vacation, and who think there is something
+wrong in the foundations of society because this is not possible. Out of
+every ten letters of this kind, nine will allege, as the reason of the
+writers' importunity, their desire to keep their families in such and
+such a "station of life."[29] There is no real desire for the safety,
+the discipline, or the moral good of the children, only a panic horror
+of the inexpressibly pitiable calamity of their living a ledge or two
+lower on the molehill of the world--a calamity to be averted at any cost
+whatever, of struggle, anxiety, and shortening of life itself. I do not
+believe that any greater good could be achieved for the country, than
+the change in public feeling on this head, which might be brought about
+by a few benevolent men, undeniably in the class of "gentlemen," who
+would, on principle, enter into some of our commonest trades, and make
+them honorable; showing that it was possible for a man to retain his
+dignity, and remain, in the best sense, a gentleman, though part of his
+time was every day occupied in manual labor, or even in serving
+customers over a counter. I do not in the least see why courtesy, and
+gravity, and sympathy with the feelings of others, and courage, and
+truth, and piety, and what else goes to make up a gentleman's character,
+should not be found behind a counter as well as elsewhere, if they were
+demanded, or even hoped for, there.
+
+168. Let us suppose, then, that the man's way of life, and manner of
+work have been discreetly chosen; then the next thing to be required is,
+that he do not overwork himself therein. I am not going to say anything
+here about the various errors in our systems of society and commerce,
+which appear (I am not sure if they ever do more than appear) to force
+us to overwork ourselves merely that we may live; nor about the still
+more fruitful cause of unhealthy toil--the incapability, in many men, of
+being content with the little that is indeed necessary to their
+happiness. I have only a word or two to say about one special cause of
+overwork--the ambitious desire of doing great or clever things, and the
+hope of accomplishing them by immense efforts: hope as vain as it is
+pernicious; not only making men overwork themselves, but rendering all
+the work they do unwholesome to them. I say it is a vain hope, and let
+the reader be assured of this (it is a truth all-important to the best
+interests of humanity). _No great intellectual thing was ever done by
+great effort_; a great thing can only be done by a great man, and he
+does it _without_ effort. Nothing is, at present, less understood by us
+than this--nothing is more necessary to be understood. Let me try to say
+it as clearly, and explain it as fully as I may.
+
+169. I have said no great _intellectual_ thing: for I do not mean the
+assertion to extend to things moral. On the contrary, it seems to me
+that just because we are intended, as long as we live, to be in a state
+of intense moral effort, we are _not_ intended to be in intense physical
+or intellectual effort. Our full energies are to be given to the soul's
+work--to the great fight with the Dragon--the taking the kingdom of
+heaven by force. But the body's work and head's work are to be done
+quietly, and comparatively without effort. Neither limbs nor brain are
+ever to be strained to their utmost; that is not the way in which the
+greatest quantity of work is to be got out of them: they are never to be
+worked furiously, but with tranquillity and constancy. We are to follow
+the plow from sunrise to sunset, but not to pull in race-boats at the
+twilight: we shall get no fruit of that kind of work, only disease of
+the heart.
+
+170. How many pangs would be spared to thousands, if this great truth
+and law were but once sincerely, humbly understood--that if a great
+thing can be done at all, it can be done easily; that, when it is needed
+to be done, there is perhaps only one man in the world who can do it;
+but _he_ can do it without any trouble--without more trouble, that is,
+than it costs small people to do small things; nay, perhaps, with less.
+And yet what truth lies more openly on the surface of all human
+phenomena? Is not the evidence of Ease on the very front of all the
+greatest works in existence? Do they not say plainly to us, not, "there
+has been a great _effort_ here," but, "there has been a great _power_
+here"? It is not the weariness of mortality, but the strength of
+divinity, which we have to recognize in all mighty things; and that is
+just what we now _never_ recognize, but think that we are to do great
+things, by help of iron bars and perspiration:--alas! we shall do
+nothing that way but lose some pounds of our own weight.
+
+171. Yet let me not be misunderstood, nor this great truth be supposed
+anywise resolvable into the favorite dogma of young men, that they need
+not work if they have genius. The fact is that a man of genius is always
+far more ready to work than other people, and gets so much more good
+from the work that he does, and is often so little conscious of the
+inherent divinity in himself, that he is very apt to ascribe all his
+capacity to his work, and to tell those who ask how he came to be what
+he is: "If I _am_ anything, which I much doubt, I made myself so merely
+by labor." This was Newton's way of talking, and I suppose it would be
+the general tone of men whose genius had been devoted to the physical
+sciences. Genius in the Arts must commonly be more self-conscious, but
+in whatever field, it will always be distinguished by its perpetual,
+steady, well-directed, happy, and faithful labor in accumulating and
+disciplining its powers, as well as by its gigantic, incommunicable
+facility in exercising them. Therefore, literally, it is no man's
+business whether he has genius or not: work he must, whatever he is, but
+quietly and steadily; and the natural and unforced results of such work
+will be always the things that God meant him to do, and will be his
+best. No agonies nor heart-rendings will enable him to do any better. If
+he be a great man, they will be great things; if a small man, small
+things; but always, if thus peacefully done, good and right; always, if
+restlessly and ambitiously done, false, hollow, and despicable.
+
+172. Then the third thing needed was, I said, that a man should be a
+good judge of his work; and this chiefly that he may not be dependent
+upon popular opinion for the manner of doing it, but also that he may
+have the just encouragement of the sense of progress, and an honest
+consciousness of victory; how else can he become
+
+   "That awful independent on to-morrow,
+   Whose yesterdays look backwards with a smile "?
+
+I am persuaded that the real nourishment and help of such a feeling as
+this is nearly unknown to half the workmen of the present day. For
+whatever appearance of self-complacency there may be in their outward
+bearing, it is visible enough, by their feverish jealousy of each other,
+how little confidence they have in the sterling value of their several
+doings. Conceit may puff a man up, but never prop him up; and there is
+too visible distress and hopelessness in men's aspects to admit of the
+supposition that they have any stable support of faith in themselves.
+
+173. I have stated these principles generally, because there is no
+branch of labor to which they do not apply: but there is one in which
+our ignorance or forgetfulness of them has caused an incalculable amount
+of suffering; and I would endeavor now to reconsider them with special
+reference to it--the branch of the Arts.
+
+In general, the men who are employed in the Arts have freely chosen
+their profession, and suppose themselves to have special faculty for it;
+yet, as a body, they are not happy men. For which this seems to me the
+reason--that they are expected, and themselves expect, to make their
+bread _by being clever_--not by steady or quiet work; and are therefore,
+for the most part, trying to be clever, and so living in an utterly
+false state of mind and action.
+
+174. This is the case, to the same extent, in no other profession or
+employment. A lawyer may indeed suspect that, unless he has more wit
+than those around him, he is not likely to advance in his profession;
+but he will not be always thinking how he is to display his wit. He
+will generally understand, early in his career, that wit must be left to
+take care of itself, and that it is hard knowledge of law and vigorous
+examination and collation of the facts of every case intrusted to him,
+which his clients will mainly demand: this it is which he is to be paid
+for; and this is healthy and measurable labor, payable by the hour. If
+he happen to have keen natural perception and quick wit, these will come
+into play in their due time and place, but he will not think of them as
+his chief power; and if he have them not, he may still hope that
+industry and conscientiousness may enable him to rise in his profession
+without them. Again in the case of clergymen: that they are sorely
+tempted to display their eloquence or wit, none who know their own
+hearts will deny, but then they _know_ this to _be_ a temptation: they
+never would suppose that cleverness was all that was to be expected from
+them, or would sit down deliberately to write a clever sermon: even the
+dullest or vainest of them would throw some veil over their vanity, and
+pretend to some profitableness of purpose in what they did. They would
+not openly ask of their hearers--Did you think my sermon ingenious, or
+my language poetical? They would early understand that they were not
+paid for being ingenious, nor called to be so, but to preach truth; that
+if they happened to possess wit, eloquence, or originality, these would
+appear and be of service in due time, but were not to be continually
+sought after or exhibited; and if it should happen that they had them
+not, they might still be serviceable pastors without them.
+
+175. Not so with the unhappy artist. No one expects any honest or useful
+work of him; but everyone expects him to be ingenious. Originality,
+dexterity, invention, imagination, everything is asked of him except
+what alone is to be had for asking--honesty and sound work, and the due
+discharge of his function as a painter. What function? asks the reader
+in some surprise. He may well ask; for I suppose few painters have any
+idea what their function is, or even that they have any at all.
+
+176. And yet surely it is not so difficult to discover. The faculties,
+which when a man finds in himself, he resolves to be a painter, are, I
+suppose, intenseness of observation and facility of imitation. The man
+is created an observer and an imitator; and his function is to convey
+knowledge to his fellow-men, of such things as cannot be taught
+otherwise than ocularly. For a long time this function remained a
+religious one: it was to impress upon the popular mind the reality of
+the objects of faith, and the truth of the histories of Scripture, by
+giving visible form to both. That function has now passed away, and none
+has as yet taken its place. The painter has no profession, no purpose.
+He is an idler on the earth, chasing the shadows of his own fancies.
+
+177. But he was never meant to be this. The sudden and universal
+Naturalism, or inclination to copy ordinary natural objects, which
+manifested itself among the painters of Europe, at the moment when the
+invention of printing superseded their legendary labors, was no false
+instinct. It was misunderstood and misapplied, but it came at the right
+time, and has maintained itself through all kinds of abuse; presenting,
+in the recent schools of landscape, perhaps only the first fruits of its
+power. That instinct was urging every painter in Europe at the same
+moment to his true duty--_the faithful representation of all objects of
+historical interest, or of natural beauty existent at the period_;
+representation such as might at once aid the advance of the sciences,
+and keep faithful record of every monument of past ages which was likely
+to be swept away in the approaching eras of revolutionary change.
+
+178. The instinct came, as I said, exactly at the right moment; and let
+the reader consider what amount and kind of general knowledge might by
+this time have been possessed by the nations of Europe, had their
+painters understood and obeyed it. Suppose that, after disciplining
+themselves so as to be able to draw, with unerring precision, each the
+particular kind of subject in which he most delighted, they had
+separated into two great armies of historians and naturalists;--that
+the first had painted with absolute faithfulness every edifice, every
+city, every battlefield, every scene of the slightest historical
+interest, precisely and completely rendering their aspect at the time;
+and that their companions, according to their several powers, had
+painted with like fidelity the plants and animals, the natural scenery,
+and the atmospheric phenomena of every country on the earth--suppose
+that a faithful and complete record were now in our museums of every
+building destroyed by war, or time, or innovation, during these last 200
+years--suppose that each recess of every mountain chain of Europe had
+been penetrated, and its rocks drawn with such accuracy that the
+geologist's diagram was no longer necessary--suppose that every tree of
+the forest had been drawn in its noblest aspect, every beast of the
+field in its savage life--that all these gatherings were already in our
+national galleries, and that the painters of the present day were
+laboring, happily and earnestly, to multiply them, and put such means of
+knowledge more and more within reach of the common people--would not
+that be a more honorable life for them, than gaining precarious bread by
+"bright effects"? They think not, perhaps. They think it easy, and
+therefore contemptible, to be truthful; they have been taught so all
+their lives. But it is not so, whoever taught it them. It is most
+difficult, and worthy of the greatest men's greatest effort, to render,
+as it should be rendered, the simplest of the natural features of the
+earth; but also be it remembered, no man is confined to the simplest;
+each may look out work for himself where he chooses, and it will be
+strange if he cannot find something hard enough for him. The excuse is,
+however, one of the lips only; for every painter knows, that when he
+draws back from the attempt to render nature as she is, it is oftener in
+cowardice than in disdain.
+
+179. I must leave the reader to pursue this subject for himself; I have
+not space to suggest to him the tenth part of the advantages which would
+follow, both to the painter from such an understanding of his mission,
+and to the whole people, in the results of his labor. Consider how the
+man himself would be elevated; how content he would become, how earnest,
+how full of all accurate and noble knowledge, how free from
+envy--knowing creation to be infinite, feeling at once the value of what
+he did, and yet the nothingness. Consider the advantage to the people:
+the immeasurably larger interest given to art itself; the easy,
+pleasurable, and perfect knowledge conveyed by it, in every subject; the
+far greater number of men who might be healthily and profitably occupied
+with it as a means of livelihood; the useful direction of myriads of
+inferior talents now left fading away in misery. Conceive all this, and
+then look around at our exhibitions, and behold the "cattle pieces," and
+"sea pieces," and "fruit pieces," and "family pieces"; the eternal brown
+cows in ditches, and white sails in squalls, and sliced lemons in
+saucers, and foolish faces in simpers;--and try to feel what we are, and
+what we might have been.
+
+180. Take a single instance in one branch of archaeology. Let those who
+are interested in the history of Religion consider what a treasure we
+should now have possessed, if, instead of painting pots, and vegetables,
+and drunken peasantry, the most accurate painters of the seventeenth and
+eighteenth centuries had been set to copy, line for line, the religious
+and domestic sculpture on the German, Flemish, and French cathedrals and
+castles; and if every building destroyed in the French or in any other
+subsequent revolution, had thus been drawn in all its parts with the
+same precision with which Gerard Dow or Mieris paint bas-reliefs of
+Cupids. Consider, even now, what incalculable treasure is still left in
+ancient bas-reliefs, full of every kind of legendary interest, of subtle
+expression, of priceless evidence as to the character, feelings, habits,
+histories, of past generations, in neglected and shattered churches and
+domestic buildings, rapidly disappearing over the whole of
+Europe--treasure which, once lost, the labor of all men living cannot
+bring back again; and then look at the myriads of men, with skill
+enough, if they had but the commonest schooling, to record all this
+faithfully, who are making their bread by drawing dances of naked women
+from academy models, or idealities of chivalry fitted out with Wardour
+Street armor, or eternal scenes from Gil Blas, Don Quixote, and the
+Vicar of Wakefield, or mountain sceneries with young idiots of Londoners
+wearing Highland bonnets and brandishing rifles in the foregrounds. Do
+but think of these things in the breadth of their inexpressible
+imbecility, and then go and stand before that broken bas-relief in the
+southern gate of Lincoln Cathedral, and see if there is no fiber of the
+heart in you that will break too.
+
+181. But is there to be no place left, it will be indignantly asked, for
+imagination and invention, for poetical power, or love of ideal beauty?
+Yes, the highest, the noblest place--that which these only can attain
+when they are all used in the cause, and with the aid of truth. Wherever
+imagination and sentiment are, they will either show themselves without
+forcing, or, if capable of artificial development, the kind of training
+which such a school of art would give them would be the best they could
+receive. The infinite absurdity and failure of our present training
+consists mainly in this, that we do not rank imagination and invention
+high enough, and suppose that they _can_ be taught. Throughout every
+sentence that I ever have written, the reader will find the same rank
+attributed to these powers--the rank of a purely divine gift, not to be
+attained, increased, or in anywise modified by teaching, only in various
+ways capable of being concealed or quenched. Understand this thoroughly;
+know once for all, that a poet on canvas is exactly the same species of
+creature as a poet in song, and nearly every error in our methods of
+teaching will be done away with. For who among us now thinks of bringing
+men up to be poets?--of producing poets by any kind of general recipe or
+method of cultivation? Suppose even that we see in a youth that which we
+hope may, in its development, become a power of this kind, should we
+instantly, supposing that we wanted to make a poet of him, and nothing
+else, forbid him all quiet, steady, rational labor? Should we force him
+to perpetual spinning of new crudities out of his boyish brain, and set
+before him, as the only objects of his study, the laws of versification
+which criticism has supposed itself to discover in the works of previous
+writers? Whatever gifts the boy had, would much be likely to come of
+them so treated? unless, indeed, they were so great as to break through
+all such snares of falsehood and vanity, and build their own foundation
+in spite of us; whereas if, as in cases numbering millions against
+units, the natural gifts were too weak to do this, could anything come
+of such training but utter inanity and spuriousness of the whole man?
+But if we had sense, should we not rather restrain and bridle the first
+flame of invention in early youth, heaping material on it as one would
+on the first sparks and tongues of a fire which we desired to feed into
+greatness? Should we not educate the whole intellect into general
+strength, and all the affections into warmth and honesty, and look to
+heaven for the rest? This, I say, we should have sense enough to do, in
+order to produce a poet in words: but, it being required to produce a
+poet on canvas, what is our way of setting to work? We begin, in all
+probability, by telling the youth of fifteen or sixteen, that Nature is
+full of faults, and that he is to improve her; but that Raphael is
+perfection, and that the more he copies Raphael the better; that after
+much copying of Raphael, he is to try what he can do himself in a
+Raphaelesque, but yet original manner: that is to say, he is to try to
+do something very clever, all out of his own head, but yet this clever
+something is to be properly subjected to Raphaelesque rules, is to have
+a principal light occupying one-seventh of its space, and a principal
+shadow occupying one-third of the same; that no two people's heads in
+the picture are to be turned the same way, and that all the personages
+represented are to possess ideal beauty of the highest order, which
+ideal beauty consists partly in a Greek outline of nose, partly in
+proportions expressible in decimal fractions between the lips and chin;
+but mostly in that degree of improvement which the youth of sixteen is
+to bestow upon God's work in general. This I say is the kind of teaching
+which through various channels, Royal Academy lecturings, press
+criticisms, public enthusiasm, and not least by solid weight of gold, we
+give to our young men. And we wonder we have no painters!
+
+182. But we do worse than this. Within the last few years some sense of
+the real tendency of such teaching has appeared in some of our younger
+painters. It only _could_ appear in the younger ones, our older men
+having become familiarized with the false system, or else having
+passed through it and forgotten it, not well knowing the degree
+of harm they had sustained. This sense appeared, among our
+youths,--increased,--matured into resolute action. Necessarily, to exist
+at all, it needed the support both of strong instincts and of
+considerable self-confidence, otherwise it must at once have been borne
+down by the weight of general authority and received canon law. Strong
+instincts are apt to make men strange and rude; self-confidence, however
+well founded, to give much of what they do or say the appearance of
+impertinence. Look at the self-confidence of Wordsworth, stiffening
+every other sentence of his prefaces into defiance; there is no more of
+it than was needed to enable him to do his work, yet it is not a little
+ungraceful here and there. Suppose this stubbornness and self-trust in a
+youth, laboring in an art of which the executive part is confessedly to
+be best learnt from masters, and we shall hardly wonder that much of his
+work has a certain awkwardness and stiffness in it, or that he should be
+regarded with disfavor by many, even the most temperate, of the judges
+trained in the system he was breaking through, and with utter contempt
+and reprobation by the envious and the dull. Consider, further, that the
+particular system to be overthrown was, in the present case, one of
+which the main characteristic was the pursuit of beauty at the expense
+of manliness and truth; and it will seem likely _a priori_, that the men
+intended successfully to resist the influence of such a system should be
+endowed with little natural sense of beauty, and thus rendered dead to
+the temptation it presented. Summing up these conditions, there is
+surely little cause for surprise that pictures painted, in a temper of
+resistance, by exceedingly young men, of stubborn instincts and positive
+self-trust, and with little natural perception of beauty, should not be
+calculated, at the first glance, to win us from works enriched by
+plagiarism, polished by convention, invested with all the attractiveness
+of artificial grace, and recommended to our respect by established
+authority.
+
+183. We should, however, on the other hand, have anticipated, that in
+proportion to the strength of character required for the effort, and to
+the absence of distracting sentiments, whether respect for precedent, or
+affection for ideal beauty, would be the energy exhibited in the pursuit
+of the special objects which the youths proposed to themselves, and
+their success in attaining them.
+
+All this has actually been the case, but in a degree which it would have
+been impossible to anticipate. That two youths, of the respective ages
+of eighteen and twenty, should have conceived for themselves a totally
+independent and sincere method of study, and enthusiastically persevered
+in it against every kind of dissuasion and opposition, is strange
+enough; that in the third or fourth year of their efforts they should
+have produced works in many parts not inferior to the best of Albert
+Duerer, this is perhaps not less strange. But the loudness and
+universality of the howl which the common critics of the press have
+raised against them, the utter absence of all generous help or
+encouragement from those who can both measure their toil and appreciate
+their success, and the shrill, shallow laughter of those who can do
+neither the one nor the other--these are strangest of all--unimaginable
+unless they had been experienced.
+
+184. And as if these were not enough, private malice is at work against
+them, in its own small, slimy way. The very day after I had written my
+second letter to the "Times" in the defense of the Pre-Raphaelites,[30]
+I received an anonymous letter respecting one of them, from some person
+apparently hardly capable of spelling, and about as vile a specimen of
+petty malignity as ever blotted paper. I think it well that the public
+should know this, and so get some insight into the sources of the spirit
+which is at work against these men: how first roused it is difficult to
+say, for one would hardly have thought that mere eccentricity in young
+artists could have excited an hostility so determined and so cruel;
+hostility which hesitated at no assertion, however impudent. That of the
+"absence of perspective" was one of the most curious pieces of the hue
+and cry which began with the "Times," and died away in feeble maundering
+in the Art Union; I contradicted it in the "Times"--I here contradict it
+directly for the second time. There was not a single error in
+perspective in three out of the four pictures in question. But if
+otherwise, would it have been anything remarkable in them? I doubt if,
+with the exception of the pictures of David Roberts, there were one
+architectural drawing in perspective on the walls of the Academy; I
+never met but with two men in my life who knew enough of perspective to
+draw a Gothic arch in a retiring plane, so that its lateral dimensions
+and curvatures might be calculated to scale from the drawing. Our
+architects certainly do not, and it was but the other day that, talking
+to one of the most distinguished among them, the author of several most
+valuable works, I found he actually did not know how to draw a circle in
+perspective. And in this state of general science our writers for the
+press take it upon them to tell us, that the forest-trees in Mr. Hunt's
+_Sylvia_, and the bunches of lilies in Mr. Collins's _Convent Thoughts_,
+are out of perspective.[31]
+
+185. It might not, I think, in such circumstances, have been ungraceful
+or unwise in the Academicians themselves to have defended their young
+pupils, at least by the contradiction of statements directly false
+respecting them,[32] and the direction of the mind and sight of the
+public to such real merit as they possess. If Sir Charles Eastlake,
+Mulready, Edwin and Charles Landseer, Cope, and Dyce would each of them
+simply state their own private opinion respecting their paintings, sign
+it, and publish it, I believe the act would be of more service to
+English art than anything the Academy has done since it was founded. But
+as I cannot hope for this, I can only ask the public to give their
+pictures careful examination, and to look at them at once with the
+indulgence and the respect which I have endeavored to show they deserve.
+
+Yet let me not be misunderstood. I have adduced them only as examples of
+the kind of study which I would desire to see substituted for that of
+our modern schools, and of singular success in certain characters,
+finish of detail, and brilliancy of color. What faculties, higher than
+imitative, may be in these men, I do not yet venture to say; but I do
+say, that if they exist, such faculties will manifest themselves in due
+time all the more forcibly because they have received training so
+severe.
+
+186. For it is always to be remembered that no one mind is like another,
+either in its powers or perceptions; and while the main principles of
+training must be the same for all, the result in each will be as various
+as the kinds of truth which each will apprehend; therefore, also, the
+modes of effort, even in men whose inner principles and final aims are
+exactly the same. Suppose, for instance, two men, equally honest,
+equally industrious, equally impressed with a humble desire to render
+some part of what they saw in nature faithfully; and, otherwise, trained
+in convictions such as I have above endeavored to induce. But one of
+them is quiet in temperament, has a feeble memory, no invention, and
+excessively keen sight. The other is impatient in temperament, has a
+memory which nothing escapes, an invention which never rests, and is
+comparatively near-sighted.
+
+187. Set them both free in the same field in a mountain valley. One sees
+everything, small and large, with almost the same clearness; mountains
+and grasshoppers alike; the leaves on the branches, the veins in the
+pebbles, the bubbles in the stream; but he can remember nothing, and
+invent nothing. Patiently he sets himself to his mighty task; abandoning
+at once all thoughts of seizing transient effects, or giving general
+impressions of that which his eyes present to him in microscopical
+dissection, he chooses some small portion out of the infinite scene, and
+calculates with courage the number of weeks which must elapse before he
+can do justice to the intensity of his perceptions, or the fullness of
+matter in his subject.
+
+188. Meantime, the other has been watching the change of the clouds, and
+the march of the light along the mountain sides; he beholds the entire
+scene in broad, soft masses of true gradation, and the very feebleness
+of his sight is in some sort an advantage to him, in making him more
+sensible of the aerial mystery of distance, and hiding from him the
+multitudes of circumstances which it would have been impossible for him
+to represent. But there is not one change in the casting of the jagged
+shadows along the hollows of the hills, but it is fixed on his mind
+forever; not a flake of spray has broken from the sea of cloud about
+their bases, but he has watched it as it melts away, and could recall it
+to its lost place in heaven by the slightest effort of his thoughts. Not
+only so, but thousands and thousands of such images, of older scenes,
+remain congregated in his mind, each mingling in new associations with
+those now visibly passing before him, and these again confused with
+other images of his own ceaseless, sleepless imagination, flashing by in
+sudden troops. Fancy how his paper will be covered with stray symbols
+and blots, and undecipherable shorthand:--as for his sitting down to
+"draw from Nature," there was not one of the things which he wished to
+represent, that stayed for so much as five seconds together: but none of
+them escaped for all that: they are sealed up in that strange storehouse
+of his; he may take one of them out perhaps, this day twenty years, and
+paint it in his dark room, far away. Now, observe, you may tell both of
+these men, when they are young, that they are to be honest, that they
+have an important function, and that they are not to care what Raphael
+did. This you may wholesomely impress on them both. But fancy the
+exquisite absurdity of expecting either of them to possess any of the
+qualities of the other.
+
+189. I have supposed the feebleness of sight in the last, and of
+invention in the first painter, that the contrast between them might be
+more striking; but, with very slight modification, both the characters
+are real. Grant to the first considerable inventive power, with
+exquisite sense of color; and give to the second, in addition to all his
+other faculties, the eye of an eagle; and the first is John Everett
+Millais, the second Joseph Mallard William Turner.
+
+They are among the few men who have defied all false teaching, and have
+therefore, in great measure, done justice to the gifts with which they
+were intrusted. They stand at opposite poles, marking culminating points
+of art in both directions; between them, or in various relations to
+them, we may class five or six more living artists who, in like manner,
+have done justice to their powers. I trust that I may be pardoned for
+naming them, in order that the reader may know how the strong innate
+genius in each has been invariably accompanied with the same humility,
+earnestness, and industry in study.
+
+190. It is hardly necessary to point out the earnestness or humility in
+the works of William Hunt; but it may be so to suggest the high value
+they possess as records of English rural life, and _still_ life. Who is
+there who for a moment could contend with him in the unaffected, yet
+humorous truth with which he has painted our peasant children? Who is
+there who does not sympathize with him in the simple love with which he
+dwells on the brightness and bloom of our summer fruit and flowers? And
+yet there is something to be regretted concerning him: why should he be
+allowed continually to paint the same bunches of hot-house grapes, and
+supply to the Water Color Society a succession of pine-apples with the
+regularity of a Covent Garden fruiterer? He has of late discovered that
+primrose banks are lovely, but there are other things grow wild besides
+primroses: what undreamt-of loveliness might he not bring back to us, if
+he would lose himself for a summer in Highland foregrounds; if he would
+paint the heather as it grows, and the foxglove and the harebell as they
+nestle in the clefts of the rocks, and the mosses and bright lichens of
+the rocks themselves. And then, cross to the Jura, and bring back a
+piece of Jura pasture in spring; with the gentians in their earliest
+blue, and a soldanelle beside the fading snow! And return again, and
+paint a gray wall of alpine crag, with budding roses crowning it like a
+wreath of rubies. That is what he was meant to do in this world; not to
+paint bouquets in china vases.
+
+191. I have in various other places expressed my sincere respect for the
+works of Samuel Prout: his shortness of sight has necessarily prevented
+their possessing delicacy of finish or fullness of minor detail; but I
+think that those of no other living artist furnish an example so
+striking of innate and special instinct, sent to do a particular work at
+the exact and only period when it was possible. At the instant when
+peace had been established all over Europe, but when neither national
+character nor national architecture had as yet been seriously changed by
+promiscuous intercourse or modern "improvement"; when, however, nearly
+every ancient and beautiful building had been long left in a state of
+comparative neglect, so that its aspect of partial ruinousness, and of
+separation from recent active life, gave to every edifice a peculiar
+interest--half sorrowful, half sublime;--at that moment Prout was
+trained among the rough rocks and simple cottages of Cornwall, until his
+eye was accustomed to follow with delight the rents and breaks, and
+irregularities which, to another man, would have been offensive; and
+then, gifted with infinite readiness in composition, but also with
+infinite affection for the kind of subjects he had to portray, he was
+sent to preserve, in an almost innumerable series of drawings, _every
+one made on the spot_, the aspect borne, at the beginning of the
+nineteenth century, by cities which, in a few years more, re-kindled
+wars, or unexpected prosperities, were to ravage, or renovate, into
+nothingness.[33]
+
+192. It seems strange to pass from Prout to John Lewis; but there is
+this fellowship between them, that both seem to have been intended to
+appreciate the characters of foreign countries more than of their own,
+nay, to have been born in England chiefly that the excitement of
+strangeness might enhance to them the interest of the scenes they had to
+represent. I believe John Lewis to have done more entire justice to all
+his powers (and they are magnificent ones), than any other man amongst
+us. His mission was evidently to portray the comparatively animal life
+of the southern and eastern families of mankind. For this he was
+prepared in a somewhat singular way--by being led to study, and endowed
+with altogether peculiar apprehension of, the most sublime characters of
+animals themselves. Rubens, Rembrandt, Snyders, Tintoret, and Titian,
+have all, in various ways, drawn wild beasts magnificently; but they
+have in some sort humanized or demonized them, making them either
+ravenous fiends, or educated beasts, that would draw cars, and had
+respect for hermits. The sullen isolation of the brutal nature; the
+dignity and quietness of the mighty limbs; the shaggy mountainous power,
+mingled with grace as of a flowing stream; the stealthy restraint of
+strength and wrath in every soundless motion of the gigantic frame; all
+this seems never to have been seen, much less drawn, until Lewis drew
+and himself engraved a series of animal subjects, now many years ago.
+Since then, he has devoted himself to the portraiture of those European
+and Asiatic races, among whom the refinements of civilization exist
+without its laws or its energies, and in whom the fierceness, indolence,
+and subtlety of animal nature are associated with brilliant imagination
+and strong affections. To this task he has brought not only intense
+perception of the kind of character, but powers of artistical
+composition like those of the great Venetians, displaying, at the same
+time, a refinement of drawing almost miraculous, and appreciable only,
+as the minutiae of nature itself are appreciable, by the help of the
+microscope. The value, therefore, of his works, as records of the aspect
+of the scenery and inhabitants of the south of Spain and of the East, in
+the earlier part of the nineteenth century, is quite above all estimate.
+
+193. I hardly know how to speak of Mulready: in delicacy and completion
+of drawing, and splendor of color, he takes place beside John Lewis and
+the Pre-Raphaelites; but he has, throughout his career, displayed no
+definiteness in choice of subject. He must be named among the painters
+who have studied with industry, and have made themselves great by doing
+so; but, having obtained a consummate method of execution, he has thrown
+it away on subjects either altogether uninteresting, or above his
+powers, or unfit for pictorial representation. "The Cherry Woman,"
+exhibited in 1850, may be named as an example of the first kind; the
+"Burchell and Sophia" of the second (the character of Sir William
+Thornhill being utterly missed); the "Seven Ages" of the third; for this
+subject cannot be painted. In the written passage, the thoughts are
+progressive and connected; in the picture they must be co-existent, and
+yet separate; nor can all the characters of the ages be rendered in
+painting at all. One may represent the soldier at the cannon's mouth,
+but one cannot paint the "bubble reputation" which he seeks. Mulready,
+therefore, while he has always produced exquisite pieces of painting,
+has failed in doing anything which can be of true or extensive use. He
+has, indeed, understood how to discipline his genius, but never how to
+direct it.
+
+194. Edwin Landseer is the last painter but one whom I shall name: I
+need not point out to anyone acquainted with his earlier works, the
+labor, or watchfulness of nature which they involve, nor need I do more
+than allude to the peculiar faculties of his mind. It will at once be
+granted that the highest merits of his pictures are throughout found in
+those parts of them which are least like what had before been
+accomplished; and that it was not by the study of Raphael that he
+attained his eminent success, but by a healthy love of Scotch terriers.
+
+None of these painters, however, it will be answered, afford examples of
+the rise of the highest imaginative power out of close study of matters
+of fact. Be it remembered, however, that the imaginative power, in its
+magnificence, is not to be found every day. Lewis has it in no mean
+degree, but we cannot hope to find it at its highest more than once in
+an age. We _have_ had it once, and must be content.
+
+195. Towards the close of the last century, among the various drawings
+executed, according to the quiet manner of the time, in grayish blue,
+with brown foregrounds, some began to be noticed as exhibiting rather
+more than ordinary diligence and delicacy, signed W. Turner.[34] There
+was nothing, however, in them at all indicative of genius, or even of
+more than ordinary talent, unless in some of the subjects a large
+perception of space, and excessive clearness and decision in the
+arrangement of masses. Gradually and cautiously the blues became mingled
+with delicate green, and then with gold; the browns in the foreground
+became first more positive, and then were slightly mingled with other
+local colors; while the touch, which had at first been heavy and broken,
+like that of the ordinary drawing masters of the time, grew more and
+more refined and expressive, until it lost itself in a method of
+execution often too delicate for the eye to follow, rendering, with a
+precision before unexampled, both the texture and the form of every
+object. The style may be considered as perfectly formed about the year
+1800, and it remained unchanged for twenty years.
+
+During that period the painter had attempted, and with more or less
+success had rendered, every order of landscape subject, but always on
+the same principle, subduing the colors of nature into a harmony of
+which the keynotes are grayish green and brown; pure blues, and
+delicate golden yellows being admitted in small quantity as the lowest
+and highest limits of shade and light: and bright local colors in
+extremely small quantity in figures or other minor accessories.
+
+196. Pictures executed on such a system are not, properly speaking,
+works in _color_ at all; they are studies of light and shade, in which
+both the shade and the distance are rendered in the general hue which
+best expresses their attributes of coolness and transparency; and the
+lights and the foreground are executed in that which best expresses
+their warmth and solidity. This advantage may just as well be taken as
+not, in studies of light and shadow to be executed with the hand; but
+the use of two, three, or four colors, always in the same relations and
+places, does not in the least constitute the work a study of color, any
+more than the brown engravings of the Liber Studiorum; nor would the
+idea of color be in general more present to the artist's mind when he
+was at work on one of these drawings, than when he was using pure brown
+in the mezzotint engraving. But the idea of space, warmth, and freshness
+being not successfully expressible in a single tint, and perfectly
+expressible by the admission of three or four, he allows himself this
+advantage when it is possible, without in the least embarrassing himself
+with the actual color of the objects to be represented. A stone in the
+foreground might in nature have been cold gray, but it will be drawn
+nevertheless of a rich brown, because it is in the foreground; a hill in
+the distance might in nature be purple with heath, or golden with furze;
+but it will be drawn, nevertheless, of a cool gray, because it is in the
+distance.
+
+197. This at least was the general theory,--carried out with great
+severity in many, both of the drawings and pictures executed by him
+during the period: in others more or less modified by the cautious
+introduction of color, as the painter felt his liberty increasing; for
+the system was evidently never considered as final, or as anything more
+than a means of progress: the conventional, easily manageable color,
+was visibly adopted, only that his mind might be at perfect liberty to
+address itself to the acquirement of the first and most necessary
+knowledge in all art--that of form. But as form, in landscape, implies
+vast bulk and space, the use of the tints which enabled him best to
+express them, was actually auxiliary to the mere drawing; and,
+therefore, not only permissible, but even necessary, while more
+brilliant or varied tints were never indulged in, except when they might
+be introduced without the slightest danger of diverting his mind for an
+instant from his principal object. And, therefore, it will be generally
+found in the works of this period, that exactly in proportion to the
+importance and general toil of the composition, is the severity of the
+tint; and that the play of color begins to show itself first in slight
+and small drawings, where he felt that he could easily secure all that
+he wanted in form.
+
+198. Thus the "Crossing the Brook," and such other elaborate and large
+compositions, are actually painted in nothing but gray, brown, and blue,
+with a point or two of severe local color in the figures; but in the
+minor drawings, tender passages of complicated color occur not
+unfrequently in easy places; and even before the year 1800 he begins to
+introduce it with evident joyfulness and longing in his rude and simple
+studies, just as a child, if it could be supposed to govern itself by a
+fully developed intellect, would cautiously, but with infinite pleasure,
+add now and then a tiny dish of fruit or other dangerous luxury to the
+simple order of its daily fare. Thus, in the foregrounds of his most
+severe drawings, we not unfrequently find him indulging in the luxury of
+a peacock; and it is impossible to express the joyfulness with which he
+seems to design its graceful form, and deepen with soft penciling the
+bloom of its blue, after he has worked through the stern detail of his
+almost colorless drawing. A rainbow is another of his most frequently
+permitted indulgences; and we find him very early allowing the edges of
+his evening clouds to be touched with soft rose-color or gold; while,
+whenever the hues of nature in anywise fall into his system, and can be
+caught without a dangerous departure from it, he instantly throws his
+whole soul into the faithful rendering of them. Thus the usual brown
+tones of his foreground become warmed into sudden vigor, and are varied
+and enhanced with indescribable delight, when he finds himself by the
+shore of a moorland stream, where they truly express the stain of its
+golden rocks, and the darkness of its clear, Cairngorm-like pools, and
+the usual serenity of his aerial blue is enriched into the softness and
+depth of the sapphire, when it can deepen the distant slumber of some
+Highland lake, or temper the gloomy shadows of the evening upon its
+hills.
+
+199. The system of his color being thus simplified, he could address all
+the strength of his mind to the accumulation of facts of form; his
+choice of subject, and his methods of treatment, are therefore as
+various as his color is simple; and it is not a little difficult to give
+the reader who is unacquainted with his works, an idea either of their
+infinitude of aims, on the one hand, or of the kind of feeling which
+pervades them all, on the other. No subject was too low or too high for
+him; we find him one day hard at work on a cock and hen, with their
+family of chickens in a farm-yard; and bringing all the refinement of
+his execution into play to express the texture of the plumage; next day
+he is drawing the Dragon of Colchis. One hour he is much interested in a
+gust of wind blowing away an old woman's cap; the next, he is painting
+the fifth plague of Egypt. Every landscape painter before him had
+acquired distinction by confining his efforts to one class of subject.
+Hobbima painted oaks; Ruysdael, waterfalls and copses; Cuyp, river or
+meadow scenes in quiet afternoons; Salvator and Poussin, such kind of
+mountain scenery as people could conceive, who lived in towns in the
+seventeenth century. But I am well persuaded that if all the works of
+Turner, up to the year 1820, were divided into classes (as he has
+himself divided them in the Liber Studiorum), no preponderance could be
+assigned to one class over another. There is architecture, including a
+large number of formal "gentlemen's seats," I suppose drawings
+commissioned by the owners; then lowland pastoral scenery of every kind,
+including nearly all farming operations---plowing, harrowing, hedging
+and ditching, felling trees, sheep-washing, and I know not what else;
+then all kinds of town life--courtyards of inns, starting of mail
+coaches, interiors of shops, house-buildings, fairs, elections, etc.;
+then all kinds of inner domestic life--interiors of rooms, studies of
+costumes, of still life, and heraldry, including multitudes of
+symbolical vignettes; then marine scenery of every kind, full of local
+incident; every kind of boat and method of fishing for particular fish,
+being specifically drawn, round the whole coast of England--pilchard
+fishing at St. Ives, whiting fishing at Margate, herring at Loch Fyne;
+and all kinds of shipping, including studies of every separate part of
+the vessels, and many marine battle pieces, two in particular of
+Trafalgar, both of high importance--one of the Victory after the battle,
+now in Greenwich Hospital; another of the death of Nelson, in his own
+gallery; then all kinds of mountain scenery, some idealized into
+compositions, others of definite localities; together with classical
+compositions, Romes, and Carthages, and such others, by the myriad, with
+mythological, historical, or allegorical figures--nymphs, monsters, and
+specters; heroes and divinities.[35]
+
+200. What general feeling, it may be asked incredulously, can possibly
+pervade all this? This, the greatest of all feelings--an utter
+forgetfulness of self. Throughout the whole period with which we are at
+present concerned, Turner appears as a man of sympathy absolutely
+infinite--a sympathy so all-embracing, that I know nothing but that of
+Shakspeare comparable with it. A soldier's wife resting by the roadside
+is not beneath it;[36] Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, watching the dead
+bodies of her sons, not above it. Nothing can possibly be so mean as
+that it will not interest his whole mind, and carry away his whole
+heart; nothing so great or solemn but that he can raise himself into
+harmony with it; and it is impossible to prophesy of him at any moment,
+whether, the next, he will be in laughter or in tears.
+
+201. This is the root of the man's greatness; and it follows as a matter
+of course that this sympathy must give him a subtle power of expression,
+even of the characters of mere material things, such as no other painter
+ever possessed. The man who can best feel the difference between
+rudeness and tenderness in humanity, perceives also more difference
+between the branches of an oak and a willow than anyone else would; and,
+therefore, necessarily the most striking character of the drawings
+themselves is the speciality of whatever they represent--the thorough
+stiffness of what is stiff, and grace of what is graceful, and vastness
+of what is vast; but through and beyond all this, the condition of the
+mind of the painter himself is easily enough discoverable by comparison
+of a large number of the drawings. It is singularly serene and peaceful:
+in itself quite passionless, though entering with ease into the external
+passion which it contemplates. By the effort of its will it sympathizes
+with tumult or distress, even in their extremes, but there is no tumult,
+no sorrow in itself, only a chastened and exquisitely peaceful
+cheerfulness, deeply meditative; touched, without loss of its own
+perfect balance, by sadness on the one side, and stooping to playfulness
+upon the other. I shall never cease to regret the destruction, by fire,
+now several years ago, of a drawing which always seemed to me to be the
+perfect image of the painter's mind at this period,--the drawing of
+Brignal Church near Rokeby, of which a feeble idea may still be gathered
+from the engraving (in the Yorkshire series). The spectator stands on
+the "Brignal banks," looking down into the glen at twilight; the sky is
+still full of soft rays, though the sun is gone, and the Greta glances
+brightly in the valley, singing its even-song; two white clouds,
+following each other, move without wind through the hollows of the
+ravine, and others lie couched on the far away moorlands; every leaf of
+the woods is still in the delicate air; a boy's kite, incapable of
+rising, has become entangled in their branches, he is climbing to
+recover it; and just behind it in the picture, almost indicated by it,
+the lowly church is seen in its secluded field between the rocks and the
+stream; and around, it the low churchyard wall, and a few white stones
+which mark the resting places of those who can climb the rocks no more,
+nor hear the river sing as it passes.
+
+There are many other existing drawings which indicate the same character
+of mind, though I think none so touching or so beautiful: yet they are
+not, as I said above, more numerous than those which express his
+sympathy with sublimer or more active scenes; but they are almost always
+marked by a tenderness of execution, and have a look of being beloved in
+every part of them, which shows them to be the truest expression of his
+own feelings.
+
+202. One other characteristic of his mind at this period remains to be
+noticed--its reverence for talent in others. Not the reverence which
+acts upon the practices of men as if they were the laws of nature, but
+that which is ready to appreciate the power, and receive the assistance,
+of every mind which has been previously employed in the same direction,
+so far as its teaching seems to be consistent with the great text-book
+of nature itself. Turner thus studied almost every preceding landscape
+painter, chiefly Claude, Poussin, Vandevelde, Loutherbourg, and Wilson.
+It was probably by the Sir George Beaumonts and other feeble
+conventionalists of the period, that he was persuaded to devote his
+attention to the works of these men; and his having done so will be
+thought, a few scores of years hence, evidence of perhaps the greatest
+modesty ever shown by a man of original power. Modesty at once admirable
+and unfortunate, for the study of the works of Vandevelde and Claude was
+productive of unmixed mischief to him: he spoiled many of his marine
+pictures, as for instance Lord Ellesmere's, by imitation of the former;
+and from the latter learned a false ideal, which, confirmed by the
+notions of Greek art prevalent in London in the beginning of this
+century, has manifested itself in many vulgarities in his composition
+pictures, vulgarities which may perhaps be best expressed by the general
+term "Twickenham Classicism," as consisting principally in conceptions
+of ancient or of rural life such as have influenced the erection of most
+of our suburban villas. From Nicole Poussin and Loutherbourg he seems to
+have derived advantage; perhaps also from Wilson; and much in his
+subsequent travels from far higher men, especially Tintoret and Paul
+Veronese. I have myself heard him speaking with singular delight of the
+putting in of the beech leaves in the upper right-hand corner of
+Titian's Peter Martyr. I cannot in any of his works trace the slightest
+influence of Salvator; and I am not surprised at it, for though Salvator
+was a man of far higher powers than either Vandevelde or Claude, he was
+a willful and gross caricaturist. Turner would condescend to be helped
+by feeble men, but could not be corrupted by false men. Besides, he had
+never himself seen classical life, and Claude was represented to him as
+competent authority for it. But he _had_ seen mountains and torrents,
+and knew therefore that Salvator could not paint them.
+
+203. One of the most characteristic drawings of this period fortunately
+bears a date, 1818, and brings us within two years of another dated
+drawing, no less characteristic of what I shall henceforward call
+Turner's Second period. It is in the possession of Mr. Hawkesworth
+Fawkes of Farnley, one of Turner's earliest and truest friends; and
+bears the inscription, unusually conspicuous, heaving itself up and down
+over the eminences of the foreground--"PASSAGE OF MONT CENIS. J. M. W.
+TURNER, January 15th, 1820."
+
+The scene is on the summit of the pass close to the hospice, or what
+seems to have been a hospice at that time,--I do not remember any such
+at present,--a small square built house, built as if partly for a
+fortress, with a detached flight of stone steps in front of it, and a
+kind of drawbridge to the door. This building, about 400 or 500 yards
+off, is seen in a dim, ashy gray against the light, which by help of a
+violent blast of mountain wind has broken through the depth of clouds
+which hang upon the crags. There is no sky, properly so called, nothing
+but this roof of drifting cloud; but neither is there any weight of
+darkness--the high air is too thin for it,--all savage, howling, and
+luminous with cold, the massy bases of the granite hills jutting out
+here and there grimly through the snow wreaths. There is a
+desolate-looking refuge on the left, with its number 16, marked on it in
+long ghastly figures, and the wind is drifting the snow off the roof and
+through its window in a frantic whirl; the near ground is all wan with
+half-thawed, half-trampled snow; a diligence in front, whose horses,
+unable to face the wind, have turned right round with fright, its
+passengers struggling to escape, jammed in the window; a little farther
+on is another carriage off the road, some figures pushing at its wheels,
+and its driver at the horses' heads, pulling and lashing with all his
+strength, his lifted arm stretched out against the light of the
+distance, though too far off for the whip to be seen.
+
+204. Now I am perfectly certain that anyone thoroughly accustomed to the
+earlier works of the painter, and shown this picture for the first time,
+would be struck by two altogether new characters in it.
+
+The first, a seeming enjoyment of the excitement of the scene, totally
+different from the contemplative philosophy with which it would formerly
+have been regarded. Every incident of motion and of energy is seized
+upon with indescribable delight, and every line of the composition
+animated with a force and fury which are now no longer the mere
+expression of a contemplated external truth, but have origin in some
+inherent feeling in the painter's mind.
+
+The second, that although the subject is one in itself almost incapable
+of color, and although, in order to increase the wildness of the
+impression, all brilliant local color has been refused even where it
+might easily have been introduced, as in the figures; yet in the low
+minor key which has been chosen, the melodies of _color_ have been
+elaborated to the utmost possible pitch, so as to become a leading,
+instead of a subordinate, element in the composition; the subdued warm
+hues of the granite promontories, the dull stone color of the walls of
+the buildings, clearly opposed, even in shade, to the gray of the snow
+wreaths heaped against them, and the faint greens and ghastly blues of
+the glacier ice, being all expressed with delicacies of transition
+utterly unexampled in any previous drawings.
+
+205. These, accordingly, are the chief characteristics of the works of
+Turner's second period, as distinguished from the first,--a new energy
+inherent in the mind of the painter, diminishing the repose and exalting
+the force and fire of his conceptions, and the presence of Color, as at
+least an essential, and often a principal, element of design.
+
+Not that it is impossible, or even unusual, to find drawings of serene
+subject, and perfectly quiet feeling, among the compositions of this
+period; but the repose is in them, just as the energy and tumult were in
+the earlier period, an external quality, which the painter images by an
+effort of the will: it is no longer a character inherent in himself. The
+"Ulleswater," in the England series, is one of those which are in most
+perfect peace; in the "Cowes," the silence is only broken by the dash of
+the boat's oars, and in the "Alnwick" by a stag drinking; but in at
+least nine drawings out of ten, either sky, water, or figures are in
+rapid motion, and the grandest drawings are almost always those which
+have even violent action in one or other, or in all; _e.g._ high force
+of Tees, Coventry, Llanthony, Salisbury, Llanberis, and such others.
+
+206. The color is, however, a more absolute distinction; and we must
+return to Mr. Fawkes's collection in order to see how the change in it
+was effected. That such a change would take place at one time or other
+was of course to be securely anticipated, the conventional system of the
+first period being, as above stated, merely a means of study. But the
+immediate cause was the journey of the year 1820. As might be guessed
+from the legend on the drawing above described, "Passage of Mont Cenis,
+January 15th, 1820," that drawing represents what happened on the day in
+question to the painter himself. He passed the Alps then in the winter
+of 1820; and either in the previous or subsequent summer, but on the
+same journey, he made a series of sketches on the Rhine, in body color,
+now in Mr. Fawkes's collection. Every one of those sketches is the
+almost instantaneous record of an _effect_ of color or atmosphere, taken
+strictly from nature, the drawing and the details of every subject being
+comparatively subordinate, and the color nearly as principal as the
+light and shade had been before,--certainly the leading feature, though
+the light and shade are always exquisitely harmonized with it. And
+naturally, as the color becomes the leading object, those times of day
+are chosen in which it is most lovely; and whereas before, at least five
+out of six of Turner's drawings represented ordinary daylight, we now
+find his attention directed constantly to the evening: and, for the
+first time, we have those rosy lights upon the hills, those gorgeous
+falls of sun through flaming heavens, those solemn twilights, with the
+blue moon rising as the western sky grows dim, which have ever since
+been the themes of his mightiest thoughts.
+
+207. I have no doubt, that the _immediate_ reason of this change was the
+impression made upon him by the colors of the continental skies. When he
+first traveled on the Continent (1800), he was comparatively a young
+student; not yet able to draw form as he wanted, he was forced to give
+all his thoughts and strength to this primary object. But now he was
+free to receive other impressions; the time was come for perfecting his
+art, and the first sunset which he saw on the Rhine taught him that all
+previous landscape art was vain and valueless, that in comparison with
+natural color, the things that had been called paintings were mere ink
+and charcoal, and that all precedent and all authority must be cast away
+at once, and trodden underfoot. He cast them away: the memories of
+Vandevelde and Claude were at once weeded out of the great mind they had
+encumbered; they and all the rubbish of the schools together with them;
+the waves of the Rhine swept them away forever: and a new dawn rose over
+the rocks of the Siebengebirge.
+
+208. There was another motive at work, which rendered the change still
+more complete. His fellow artists were already conscious enough of his
+superior power in drawing, and their best hope was that he might not be
+able to color. They had begun to express this hope loudly enough for it
+to reach his ears. The engraver of one of his most important marine
+pictures told me, not long ago, that one day about the period in
+question, Turner came into his room to examine the progress of the
+plate, not having seen his own picture for several months. It was one of
+his dark early pictures, but in the foreground was a little piece of
+luxury, a pearly fish wrought into hues like those of an opal. He stood
+before the picture for some moments; then laughed, and pointed joyously
+to the fish:--"They say that Turner can't color!" and turned away.
+
+209. Under the force of these various impulses the change was total.
+_Every subject thenceforward was primarily conceived in color_; and no
+engraving ever gave the slightest idea of any drawing of this period.
+
+The artists who had any perception of the truth were in despair; the
+Beaumontites, classicalists, and "owl species" in general, in as much
+indignation as their dullness was capable of. They had deliberately
+closed their eyes to all nature, and had gone on inquiring, "Where do
+you put your brown 'tree'?" A vast revelation was made to them at once,
+enough to have dazzled anyone; but to _them_, light unendurable as
+incomprehensible. They "did to the moon complain," in one vociferous,
+unanimous, continuous "Tu whoo." Shrieking rose from all dark places at
+the same instant, just the same kind of shrieking that is now raised
+against the Pre-Raphaelites. Those glorious old Arabian Nights, how true
+they are! Mocking and whispering, and abuse loud and low by turns, from
+all the black stones beside the road, when one living soul is toiling up
+the hill to get the golden water. Mocking and whispering, that he may
+look back, and become a black stone like themselves.
+
+210. Turner looked not back, but he went on in such a temper as a strong
+man must be in, when he is forced to walk with his fingers in his ears.
+He retired into himself; he could look no longer for help, or counsel,
+or sympathy from anyone; and the spirit of defiance in which he was
+forced to labor led him sometimes into violences, from which the
+slightest expression of sympathy would have saved him. The new energy
+that was upon him, and the utter isolation into which he was driven,
+were both alike dangerous, and many drawings of the time show the evil
+effects of both; some of them being hasty, wild, or experimental, and
+others little more than magnificent expressions of defiance of public
+opinion.
+
+But all have this noble virtue--they are in everything his own: there
+are no more reminiscences of dead masters, no more trials of skill in
+the manner of Claude or Poussin; every faculty of his soul is fixed upon
+nature only, as he saw her, or as he remembered her.
+
+211. I have spoken above of his gigantic memory: it is especially
+necessary to notice this, in order that we may understand the kind of
+grasp which a man of real imagination takes of all things that are once
+brought within his reach--grasp thenceforth not to be relaxed forever.
+
+On looking over any catalogues of his works, or of particular series of
+them, we shall notice the recurrence of the same subject two, three, or
+even many times. In any other artist this would be nothing remarkable.
+Probably, most modern landscape painters multiply a favorite subject
+twenty, thirty, or sixty fold, putting the shadows and the clouds in
+different places, and "inventing," as they are pleased to call it, a new
+"effect" every time. But if we examine the successions of Turner's
+subjects, we shall find them either the records of a succession of
+impressions actually received by him at some favorite locality, or else
+repetitions of one impression received in early youth, and again and
+again realized as his increasing powers enabled him to do better
+justice to it. In either case we shall find them records of _seen
+facts_; _never_ compositions in his room to fill up a favorite outline.
+
+212. For instance, every traveler--at least, every traveler of thirty
+years' standing--must love Calais, the place where he first felt himself
+in a strange world. Turner evidently loved it excessively. I have never
+catalogued his studies of Calais, but I remember, at this moment, five:
+there is first the "Pas de Calais," a very large oil painting, which is
+what he saw in broad daylight as he crossed over, when he got near the
+French side. It is a careful study of French fishing-boats running for
+the shore before the wind, with the picturesque old city in the
+distance. Then there is the "Calais Harbor" in the Liber Studiorum: that
+is what he saw just as he was going into the harbor--a heavy brig
+warping out, and very likely to get in his way or run against the pier,
+and bad weather coming on. Then there is the "Calais Pier," a large
+painting, engraved some years ago by Mr. Lupton:[37] that is what he saw
+when he had landed, and ran back directly to the pier to see what had
+become of the brig. The weather had got still worse, the fishwomen were
+being blown about in a distressful manner on the pier head, and some
+more fishing-boats were running in with all speed. Then there is the
+"Fortrouge," Calais: that is what he saw after he had been home to
+Dessein's, and dined, and went out again in the evening to walk on the
+sands, the tide being down. He had never seen such a waste of sands
+before, and it made an impression on him. The shrimp girls were all
+scattered over them too, and moved about in white spots on the wild
+shore; and the storm had lulled a little, and there was a sunset--such a
+sunset!--and the bars of Fortrouge seen against it, skeleton-wise. He
+did not paint that directly; thought over it--painted it a long while
+afterwards.
+
+213. Then there is the vignette in the illustrations to Scott. That is
+what he saw as he was going home, meditatively; and the revolving
+lighthouse came blazing out upon him suddenly, and disturbed him. He
+did not like that so much; made a vignette of it, however, when he was
+asked to do a bit of Calais, twenty or thirty years afterwards, having
+already done all the rest.
+
+Turner never told me all this, but anyone may see it if he will compare
+the pictures. They might, possibly, not be impressions of a single day,
+but of two days or three; though, in all human probability, they were
+seen just as I have stated them;[38] but they _are_ records of
+successive impressions, as plainly written as ever traveler's diary. All
+of them pure veracities. Therefore immortal.
+
+214. I could multiply these series almost indefinitely from the rest of
+his works. What is curious, some of them have a kind of private mark
+running through all the subjects. Thus, I know three drawings of
+Scarborough, and all of them have a starfish in the foreground: I do not
+remember any others of his marine subjects which have a starfish.
+
+The other kind of repetition--the recurrence to one early
+impression--is, however, still more remarkable. In the collection of F.
+H. Bale, Esq., there is a small drawing of Llanthony Abbey. It is in his
+boyish manner, its date probably about 1795; evidently a sketch from
+nature, finished at home. It had been a showery day; the hills were
+partially concealed by the rain, and gleams of sunshine breaking out at
+intervals. A man was fishing in the mountain stream. The young Turner
+sought a place of some shelter under the bushes; made his sketch; took
+great pains when he got home to imitate the rain, as he best could;
+added his child's luxury of a rainbow; put in the very bush under which
+he had taken shelter, and the fisherman, a somewhat ill-jointed and
+long-legged fisherman, in the courtly short breeches which were the
+fashion of the time.
+
+215. Some thirty years afterwards, with all his powers in their
+strongest training, and after the total change in his feelings and
+principles, which I have endeavored to describe, he undertook the series
+of "England and Wales," and in that series introduced the subject of
+Llanthony Abbey. And behold, he went back to his boy's sketch and boy's
+thought. He kept the very bushes in their places, but brought the
+fisherman to the other side of the river, and put him, in somewhat less
+courtly dress, under their shelter, instead of himself. And then he set
+all his gained strength and new knowledge at work on the well-remembered
+shower of rain, that had fallen thirty years before, to do it better.
+The resultant drawing[39] is one of the very noblest of his second
+period.
+
+216. Another of the drawings of the England series, Ulleswater, is the
+repetition of one in Mr. Fawkes's collection, which, by the method of
+its execution, I should conjecture to have been executed about the year
+1808 or 1810: at all events, it is a very quiet drawing of the first
+period. The lake is quite calm; the western hills in gray shadow, the
+eastern massed in light. Helvellyn rising like a mist between them, all
+being mirrored in the calm water. Some thin and slightly evanescent cows
+are standing in the shallow water in front; a boat floats motionless
+about a hundred yards from the shore; the foreground is of broken rocks,
+with some lovely pieces of copse on the right and left.
+
+This was evidently Turner's record of a quiet evening by the shore of
+Ulleswater, but it was a feeble one. He could not at that time render
+the sunset colors: he went back to it, therefore, in the England series,
+and painted it again with his new power. The same hills are there, the
+same shadows, the same cows,--they had stood in his mind, on the same
+spot, for twenty years,--the same boat, the same rocks, only the copse
+is cut away--it interfered with the masses of his color. Some figures
+are introduced bathing; and what was gray, and feeble gold in the first
+drawing, becomes purple and burning rose-color in the last.
+
+217. But perhaps one of the most curious examples is in the series of
+subjects from Winchelsea. That in the Liber Studiorum, "Winchelsea,
+Sussex," bears date 1812, and its figures consist of a soldier speaking
+to a woman, who is resting on the bank beside the road. There is another
+small subject, with Winchelsea in the distance, of which the engraving
+bears date 1817. It has _two_ women with bundles, and _two_ soldiers
+toiling along the embankment in the plain, and a baggage wagon in the
+distance. Neither of these seems to have satisfied him, and at last he
+did another for the England series, of which the engraving bears date
+1830. There is now a regiment on the march; the baggage wagon is there,
+having got no farther on in the thirteen years, but one of the women is
+tired, and has fainted on the bank; another is supporting her against
+her bundle, and giving her drink; a third sympathetic woman is added,
+and the two soldiers have stopped, and one is drinking from his
+canteen.[40]
+
+218. Nor is it merely of entire scenes, or of particular incidents that
+Turner's memory is thus tenacious. The slightest passages of color or
+arrangement that have pleased him--the fork of a bough, the casting of a
+shadow, the fracture of a stone--will be taken up again and again, and
+strangely worked into new relations with other thoughts. There is a
+single sketch from nature in one of the portfolios at Farnley, of a
+common wood-walk on the estate, which has furnished passages to no fewer
+than three of the most elaborate compositions in the Liber Studiorum.
+
+219. I am thus tedious in dwelling on Turner's powers of memory, because
+I wish it to be thoroughly seen how all his greatness, all his infinite
+luxuriance of invention, depends on his taking possession of everything
+that he sees,--on his grasping all, and losing hold of nothing,--on his
+forgetting himself, and forgetting nothing else. I wish it to be
+understood how every great man paints what he sees or did see, his
+greatness being indeed little else than his intense sense of fact. And
+thus Pre-Raphaelitism and Raphaelitism, and Turnerism, are all one and
+the same, so far as education can influence them. They are different in
+their choice, different in their faculties, but all the same in this,
+that Raphael himself, so far as he was great, and all who preceded or
+followed him who ever were great, became so by painting the truths
+around them as they appeared to each man's own mind, not as he had been
+taught to see them, except by the God who made both him and them.
+
+220. There is, however, one more characteristic of Turner's second
+period, on which I have still to dwell, especially with reference to
+what has been above advanced respecting the fallacy of overtoil; namely,
+the magnificent ease with which all is done when it is _successfully_
+done. For there are one or two drawings of this time which are _not_
+done easily. Turner had in these set himself to do a fine thing to
+exhibit his powers; in the common phrase, to excel himself; so sure as
+he does this, the work is a failure. The worst drawings that have ever
+come from his hands are some of this second period, on which he has
+spent much time and laborious thought; drawings filled with incident
+from one side to the other, with skies stippled into morbid blue, and
+warm lights set against them in violent contrast; one of Bamborough
+Castle, a large water-color, may be named as an example. But the truly
+noble works are those in which, without effort, he has expressed his
+thoughts as they came, and forgotten himself; and in these the
+outpouring of invention is not less miraculous than the swiftness and
+obedience of the mighty hand that expresses it. Anyone who examines the
+drawings may see the evidence of this facility, in the strange freshness
+and sharpness of every touch of color; but when the multitude of
+delicate touches, with which all the aerial tones are worked, is taken
+into consideration, it would still appear impossible that the drawing
+could have been completed with _ease_, unless we had direct evidence on
+the matter: fortunately, it is not wanting. There is a drawing in Mr.
+Fawkes's collection of a man-of-war taking in stores: it is of the usual
+size of those of the England series, about sixteen inches by eleven: it
+does not appear one of the most highly finished, but it is still farther
+removed from slightness. The hull of a first-rate occupies nearly
+one-half of the picture on the right, her bows towards the spectator,
+seen in sharp perspective from stem to stern, with all her port-holes,
+guns, anchors, and lower rigging elaborately detailed; there are two
+other ships of the line in the middle distance, drawn with equal
+precision; a noble breezy sea dancing against their broad bows, full of
+delicate drawing in its waves; a store-ship beneath the hull of the
+larger vessel, and several other boats, and a complicated cloudy sky. It
+might appear no small exertion of mind to draw the detail of all this
+shipping down to the smallest ropes, from memory, in the drawing-room of
+a mansion in the middle of Yorkshire, even if considerable time had been
+given for the effort. But Mr. Fawkes sat beside the painter from the
+first stroke to the last. Turner took a piece of blank paper one morning
+after breakfast, outlined his ships, finished the drawing in three
+hours, and went out to shoot.
+
+221. Let this single fact be quietly meditated upon by our ordinary
+painters, and they will see the truth of what was above asserted,--that
+if a great thing can be done at all, it can be done easily; and let them
+not torment themselves with twisting of compositions this way and that,
+and repeating, and experimenting, and scene-shifting. If a man can
+compose at all, he can compose at once, or rather he must compose in
+spite of himself. And this is the reason of that silence which I have
+kept in most of my works, on the subject of Composition. Many critics,
+especially the architects, have found fault with me for not "teaching
+people how to arrange masses;" for not "attributing sufficient
+importance to composition." Alas! I attribute far more importance to it
+than they do;--so much importance, that I should just as soon think of
+sitting down to teach a man how to write a Divina Commedia, or King
+Lear, as how to "compose," in the true sense, a single building or
+picture. The marvelous stupidity of this age of lecturers is, that they
+do not see that what they call, "principles of composition," are mere
+principles of common sense in everything, as well as in pictures and
+buildings;--A picture is to have a principal light? Yes; and so a dinner
+is to have a principal dish, and an oration a principal point, and an
+air of music a principal note, and every man a principal object. A
+picture is to have harmony of relation among its parts? Yes; and so is a
+speech well uttered, and an action well ordered, and a company well
+chosen, and a ragout well mixed. Composition! As if a man were not
+composing every moment of his life, well or ill, and would not do it
+instinctively in his picture as well as elsewhere, if he could.
+Composition of this lower or common kind is of exactly the same
+importance in a picture that it is in anything else,--no more. It is
+well that a man should say what he has to say in good order and
+sequence, but the main thing is to say it truly. And yet we go on
+preaching to our pupils as if to have a principal light was everything,
+and so cover our academy walls with Shacabac feasts, wherein the courses
+are indeed well ordered, but the dishes empty.
+
+222. It is not, however, only in invention that men overwork themselves,
+but in execution also; and here I have a word to say to the
+Pre-Raphaelites specially. They are working too hard. There is evidence
+in failing portions of their pictures, showing that they have wrought so
+long upon them that their very sight has failed for weariness, and that
+the hand refused any more to obey the heart. And, besides this, there
+are certain qualities of drawing which they miss from over-carefulness.
+For, let them be assured, there is a great truth lurking in that common
+desire of men to see things done in what they call a "masterly," or
+"bold," or "broad," manner: a truth oppressed and abused, like almost
+every other in this world, but an eternal one nevertheless; and whatever
+mischief may have followed from men's looking for nothing else but this
+facility of execution, and supposing that a picture was assuredly all
+right if only it were done with broad dashes of the brush, still the
+truth remains the same:--that because it is not intended that men shall
+torment or weary themselves with any earthly labor, it is appointed that
+the noblest results should only be attainable by a certain ease and
+decision of manipulation. I only wish people understood this much of
+sculpture, as well as of painting, and could see that the finely
+finished statue is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a far more
+vulgar work than that which shows rough signs of the right hand laid to
+the workman's hammer: but at all events, in painting it is felt by all
+men, and justly felt. The freedom of the lines of nature can only be
+represented by a similar freedom in the hand that follows them; there
+are curves in the flow of the hair, and in the form of the features, and
+in the muscular outline of the body, which can in no wise be caught but
+by a sympathetic freedom in the stroke of the pencil. I do not care what
+example is taken; be it the most subtle and careful work of Leonardo
+himself, there will be found a play and power and ease in the outlines,
+which no _slow_ effort could ever imitate. And if the Pre-Raphaelites do
+not understand how this kind of power, in its highest perfection, may be
+united with the most severe rendering of all other orders of truth, and
+especially of those with which they themselves have most sympathy, let
+them look at the drawings of John Lewis.
+
+223. These then are the principal lessons which we have to learn from
+Turner, in his second or central period of labor. There is one more,
+however, to be received; and that is a warning; for towards the close of
+it, what with doing small conventional vignettes for publishers, making
+showy drawings from sketches taken by other people of places he had
+never seen, and touching up the bad engravings from his works submitted
+to him almost every day,--engravings utterly destitute of animation, and
+which had to be raised into a specious brilliancy by scratching them
+over with white, spotty lights, he gradually got inured to many
+conventionalities, and even falsities; and, having trusted for ten or
+twelve years almost entirely to his memory and invention, living, I
+believe, mostly in London, and receiving a new sensation only from the
+burning of the Houses of Parliament, he painted many pictures between
+1830 and 1840 altogether unworthy of him. But he was not thus to close
+his career.
+
+224. In the summer either of 1840 or 1841, he undertook another journey
+into Switzerland. It was then at least forty years since he had first
+seen the Alps; (the source of the Arveron, in Mr. Fawkes's collection,
+which could not have been painted till he had seen the thing itself,
+bears date 1800,) and the direction of his journey in 1840 marks his
+fond memory of that earliest one; for, if we look over the Swiss studies
+and drawings executed in his first period, we shall be struck by his
+fondness for the pass of the St. Gothard; the most elaborate drawing in
+the Farnley collection is one of the Lake of Lucerne from Fluelen; and,
+counting the Liber Studiorum subjects, there are, to my knowledge, six
+compositions taken at the same period from the pass of St. Gothard, and,
+probably, several others are in existence. The valleys of Sallenche and
+Chamouni, and Lake of Geneva, are the only other Swiss scenes which seem
+to have made very profound impressions on him.
+
+He returned in 1841 to Lucerne; walked up Mont Pilate on foot, crossed
+the St. Gothard, and returned by Lausanne and Geneva. He made a large
+number of colored sketches on this journey, and realized several of them
+on his return. The drawings thus produced are different from all that
+had preceded them, and are the first which belong definitely to what I
+shall henceforward call his Third period.
+
+The perfect repose of his youth had returned to his mind, while the
+faculties of imagination and execution appeared in renewed strength; all
+conventionality being done away by the force of the impression which he
+had received from the Alps, after his long separation from them. The
+drawings are marked by a peculiar largeness and simplicity of thought:
+most of them by deep serenity, passing into melancholy; all by a
+richness of color, such as he had never before conceived. They, and the
+works done in following years, bear the same relation to those of the
+rest of his life that the colors of sunset do to those of the day; and
+will be recognized, in a few years more, as the noblest landscapes ever
+yet conceived by human intellect.
+
+225. Such has been the career of the greatest painter of this century.
+Many a century may pass away before there rises such another; but what
+greatness any among us may be capable of, will, at least, be best
+attained by following in his path;--by beginning in all quietness and
+hopefulness to use whatever powers we may possess to represent the
+things around us as we see and feel them; trusting to the close of life
+to give the perfect crown to the course of its labors, and knowing
+assuredly that the determination of the degree in which watchfulness is
+to be exalted into invention, rests with a higher will than our own.
+And, if not greatness, at least a certain good, is thus to be achieved;
+for though I have above spoken of the mission of the more humble artist,
+as if it were merely to be subservient to that of the antiquarian or the
+man of science, there is an ulterior aspect, in which it is not
+subservient, but superior. Every archaeologist, every natural
+philosopher, knows that there is a peculiar rigidity of mind brought on
+by long devotion to logical and analytical inquiries. Weak men, giving
+themselves to such studies, are utterly hardened by them, and become
+incapable of understanding anything nobler, or even of feeling the value
+of the results to which they lead. But even the best men are in a sort
+injured by them, and pay a definite price, as in most other matters, for
+definite advantages. They gain a peculiar strength, but lose in
+tenderness, elasticity, and impressibility. The man who has gone, hammer
+in hand, over the surface of a romantic country, feels no longer, in the
+mountain ranges he has so laboriously explored, the sublimity or mystery
+with which they were veiled when he first beheld them, and with which
+they are adorned in the mind of the passing traveler. In his more
+informed conception, they arrange themselves like a dissected model:
+where another man would be awe-struck by the magnificence of the
+precipice, he sees nothing but the emergence of a fossiliferous rock,
+familiarized already to his imagination as extending in a shallow
+stratum, over a perhaps uninteresting district; where the unlearned
+spectator would be touched with strong emotion by the aspect of the
+snowy summits which rise in the distance, he sees only the culminating
+points of a metamorphic formation, with an uncomfortable web of fanlike
+fissures radiating, in his imagination, though their centers.[41] That
+in the grasp he has obtained of the inner relations of all these things
+to the universe, and to man, that in the views which have been opened to
+him of natural energies such as no human mind would have ventured to
+conceive, and of past states of being, each in some new way bearing
+witness to the unity of purpose and everlastingly consistent providence
+of the Maker of all things, he has received reward well worthy the
+sacrifice, I would not for an instant deny; but the sense of the loss is
+not less painful to him if his mind be rightly constituted; and it would
+be with infinite gratitude that he would regard the man, who, retaining
+in his delineation of natural scenery a fidelity to the facts of science
+so rigid as to make his work at once acceptable and credible to the most
+sternly critical intellect, should yet invest its features again with
+the sweet veil of their daily aspect; should make them dazzling with the
+splendor of wandering light, and involve them in the unsearchableness of
+stormy obscurity; should restore to the divided anatomy its visible
+vitality of operation, clothe the naked crags with soft forests, enrich
+the mountain ruins with bright pastures, and lead the thoughts from the
+monotonous recurrence of the phenomena of the physical world, to the
+sweet interests and sorrows of human life and death.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[28] This essay was first published in 1851 as a separate pamphlet
+entitled "Pre-Raphaelitism," by the author of "Modern Painters." (8vo,
+pp. 68. London: Smith, Elder, & Co.) It was afterwards reprinted in
+1862, without alteration, except that the later issue bore the author's
+name, and omitted a dedication which in the first edition ran as
+follows:--"To Francis Hawkesworth Fawkes, Esq., of Farnley, These pages,
+Which owe their present form to advantages granted By his kindness, Are
+affectionately inscribed, By his obliged friend, John Ruskin."--ED.
+
+[29] Compare "Sesame and Lilies," Sec. 2.--ED.
+
+[30] See "Arrows of the Chace," vol. i., which gives several letters
+there collected under the head of Pre-Raphaelitism.--ED.
+
+[31] It was not a little curious, that in the very number of the Art
+Union which repeated this direct falsehood about the Pre-Raphaelite
+rejection of "linear perspective" (by-the-bye, the next time J. B. takes
+upon him to speak of anyone connected with the Universities, he may as
+well first ascertain the difference between a Graduate and an
+Under-Graduate), the second plate given should have been of a picture of
+Bonington's--a professional landscape painter, observe--for the want of
+_aerial_ perspective in which the Art Union itself was obliged to
+apologize, and in which, the artist has committed nearly as many
+blunders in _linear_ perspective as there are lines in the picture.
+
+[32] These false statements may be reduced to three principal heads, and
+directly contradicted in succession.
+
+The first, the current fallacy of society as well as of the press, was,
+that the Pre-Raphaelites imitated the _errors_ of early painters.
+
+A falsehood of this kind could not have obtained credence anywhere but
+in England, few English people, comparatively, having ever seen a
+picture of early Italian Masters. If they had they would have known that
+the Pre-Raphaelite pictures are just as superior to the early Italian in
+skill of manipulation, power of drawing, and knowledge of effect, as
+inferior to them in grace of design; and that in a word, there is not a
+shadow of resemblance between the two styles. The Pre-Raphaelites
+imitate no pictures: they paint from nature only. But they have opposed
+themselves as a body, to that kind of teaching above described, which
+only began after Raphael's time: and they have opposed themselves as
+sternly to the entire feeling of the Renaissance schools; a feeling
+compounded of indolence, infidelity, sensuality, and shallow pride.
+Therefore they have called themselves Pre-Raphaelite. If they adhere to
+their principles, and paint nature as it is around them, with the help
+of modern science, with the earnestness of the men of the thirteenth and
+fourteenth centuries, they will, as I said, found a new and noble school
+in England. If their sympathies with the early artists lead them into
+mediaevalism or Romanism, they will of course come to nothing. But I
+believe there is no danger of this, at least for the strongest among
+them. There may be some weak ones, whom the Tractarian heresies may
+touch; but if so, they will drop off like decayed branches from a strong
+stem. I hope all things from the school.
+
+The second falsehood was, that the Pre-Raphaelites did not draw well.
+This was asserted, and could have been asserted only by persons who had
+never looked at the pictures.
+
+The third falsehood was, that they had no system of light and shade. To
+which it may be simply replied that their system of light and shade is
+exactly the same as the Sun's; which is, I believe, likely to outlast
+that of the Renaissance, however brilliant.
+
+[33] See ante, pp. 148-157.--ED.
+
+[34] He did not use his full signature, "J. M. W.," until about the year
+1800.
+
+[35] I shall give a _catalogue raisonnee_ of all this in the third
+volume of _Modern Painters_.
+
+[36] See _post_, Sec. 217.
+
+[37] The plate was, however, never published.
+
+[38] And the more probably because Turner was never fond of staying long
+at any place, and was least of all likely to make a pause of two or
+three days at the beginning of his journey.
+
+[39] _Vide Modern Painters_, Part II. Sect. III. Chap. IV. Sec. 13.
+
+[40] See _ante_, Sec. 200.
+
+[41] This state of mind appears to have been the only one which
+Wordsworth had been able to discern in men of science; and in disdain of
+which, he wrote that short-sighted passage in the Excursion, Book III,
+P. 165-190, which is, I think, the only one in the whole range of his
+works which his true friends would have desired to see blotted out. What
+else has been found fault with as feeble or superfluous, is not so in
+the intense distinctive relief which it gives to his character. But
+these lines are written in mere ignorance of the matter they treat; in
+mere want of sympathy with the men they describe: for, observe, though
+the passage is put into the mouth of the Solitary, it is fully
+confirmed, and even rendered more scornful, by the speech which follows.
+
+
+
+
+THE THREE COLORS OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM.[42]
+
+I.
+
+
+226. I was lately staying in a country house, in which, opposite each
+other at the sides of the drawing-room window, were two pictures,
+belonging to what in the nineteenth century must be called old times,
+namely Rossetti's "Annunciation," and Millais' "Blind Girl"; while, at
+the corner of the chimney-piece in the same room, there was a little
+drawing of a Marriage-dance, by Edward Burne Jones. And in my bedroom,
+at one side of my bed, there was a photograph of the tomb of Ilaria di
+Caretto at Lucca, and on the other, an engraving, in long since
+superannuated manner, from Raphael's "Transfiguration." Also over the
+looking-glass in my bedroom, there was this large illuminated text,
+fairly well written, but with more vermilion in it than was needful;
+"Lord, teach us to pray."
+
+And for many reasons I would fain endeavor to tell my Oxford pupils some
+facts which seem to me worth memory about these six works of art; which,
+if they will reflect upon, being, in the present state of my health, the
+best I can do for them in the way of autumn lecturing, it will be kind
+to me. And as I cannot speak what I would say, and believe my pupils are
+more likely to read it if printed in the _Nineteenth Century_ than in a
+separate pamphlet, I have asked, and obtained of the editor, space in
+columns which ought, nevertheless, I think, usually to be occupied with
+sterner subjects, as the Fates are now driving the nineteenth century on
+its missionary path.
+
+227. The first picture I named, Rossetti's "Annunciation," was, I
+believe, among the earliest that drew some public attention to the
+so-called "Pre-Raphaelite" school. The one opposite to it,--Millais'
+"Blind Girl," is among those chiefly characteristic of that school in
+its determined manner. And the third, though small and unimportant, is
+no less characteristic, in its essential qualities, of the mind of the
+greatest master whom that school has yet produced.
+
+I believe most readers will start at the application of the term
+"master," to any English painter. For the hope of the nineteenth century
+is more and more distinctly every day, to teach all men how to live
+without mastership either in art or morals (primarily, of course,
+substituting for the words of Christ, "Ye say well, for so I am,"--the
+probable emendation, "Ye say ill, for so I am not"); and to limit the
+idea of magistracy altogether, no less than the functions of the
+magistrate, to the suppression of disturbance in the manufacturing
+districts.
+
+Nor would I myself use the word "Master" in any but the most qualified
+sense, of any "modern painter"; scarcely even of Turner, and not at all,
+except for convenience and as a matter of courtesy, of any workman of
+the Pre-Raphaelite school, as yet. In such courtesy, only, let the
+masterless reader permit it me.
+
+228. I must endeavor first to give, as well as I can by description,
+some general notion of the subjects and treatment of the three pictures.
+
+Rossetti's "Annunciation" differs from every previous conception of the
+scene known to me, in representing the angel as waking the Virgin from
+sleep to give her his message. The Messenger himself also differs from
+angels as they are commonly represented, in not depending, for
+recognition of his supernatural character, on the insertion of bird's
+wings at his shoulders. If we are to know him for an angel at all, it
+must be by his face, which is that simply of youthful, but grave,
+manhood. He is neither transparent in body, luminous in presence, nor
+auriferous in apparel;--wears a plain, long, white robe,--casts a
+natural and undiminished shadow,--and, although there are flames beneath
+his feet, which upbear him, so that he does not touch the earth, these
+are unseen by the Virgin.
+
+She herself is an English, not a Jewish girl, of about sixteen or
+seventeen, of such pale and thoughtful beauty as Rossetti could best
+imagine for her; concerning which effort, and its degree of success, we
+will inquire farther presently.
+
+She has risen half up, not _started_ up, in being awakened; and is not
+looking at the angel, but only thinking, it seems, with eyes cast down,
+as if supposing herself in a strange dream. The morning light fills the
+room, and shows at the foot of her little pallet-bed, her embroidery
+work, left off the evening before,--an upright lily.
+
+Upright, and very accurately upright, as also the edges of the piece of
+cloth in its frame,--as also the gliding form of the angel,--as also, in
+severe foreshortening, that of the Virgin herself. It has been studied,
+so far as it has been studied at all, from a very thin model; and the
+disturbed coverlid is thrown into confused angular folds, which admit no
+suggestion whatever of ordinary girlish grace. So that, to any spectator
+little inclined towards the praise of barren "uprightnesse," and
+accustomed on the contrary to expect radiance in archangels, and grace
+in Madonnas, the first effect of the design must be extremely
+displeasing, and the first is perhaps, with most art-amateurs of modern
+days, likely to be the last.
+
+229. The background of the second picture (Millais' "Blind Girl"), is an
+open English common, skirted by the tidy houses of a well-to-do village
+in the cockney rural districts. I have no doubt the scene is a real one
+within some twenty miles from London, and painted mostly on the spot.
+The houses are entirely uninteresting, but decent, trim, as human
+dwellings should be, and on the whole inoffensive--not "cottages," mind
+you, in any sense, but respectable brick-walled and slated
+constructions, old-fashioned in the sense of "old" at, suppose, Bromley
+or Sevenoaks, and with a pretty little church belonging to them, its
+window traceries freshly whitewashed by order of the careful warden.
+
+The common is a fairly spacious bit of ragged pasture, with a couple of
+donkeys feeding on it, and a cow or two, and at the side of the public
+road passing over it, the blind girl has sat down to rest awhile. She is
+a simple beggar, not a poetical or vicious one;--being peripatetic with
+musical instrument, she will, I suppose, come under the general term of
+tramp; a girl of eighteen or twenty, extremely plain-featured, but
+healthy, and just now resting, as any one of us would rest, not because
+she is much tired, but because the sun has but this moment come out
+after a shower, and the smell of the grass is pleasant.
+
+The shower has been heavy, and is so still in the distance, where an
+intensely bright double rainbow is relieved against the departing
+thunder-cloud. The freshly wet grass is all radiant through and through
+with the new sunshine; full noon at its purest, the very donkeys bathed
+in the rain-dew, and prismatic with it under their rough breasts as they
+graze; the weeds at the girl's side as bright as a Byzantine enamel, and
+inlaid with blue veronica; her upturned face all aglow with the light
+that seeks its way through her wet eyelashes (wet only with the rain).
+Very quiet she is,--so quiet that a radiant butterfly has settled on her
+shoulder, and basks there in the warm sun. Against her knee, on which
+her poor instrument of musical beggary rests (harmonium), leans another
+child, half her age--her guide;--indifferent, this one, either to sun or
+rain, only a little tired of waiting. No more than a half profile of her
+face is seen; and that is quite expressionless, and not the least
+pretty.
+
+230. Both of these pictures are oil-paintings. The third, Mr. Burne
+Jones's "Bridal," is a small water-color drawing, scarcely more than a
+sketch; but full and deep in such color as it admits. Any careful
+readers of my recent lectures at Oxford know that I entirely ignore the
+difference of material between oil and water as diluents of color, when
+I am examining any grave art question: nor shall I hereafter, throughout
+this paper, take notice of it. Nor do I think it needful to ask the
+pardon of any of the three artists for confining the reader's attention
+at present to comparatively minor and elementary examples of their
+works. If I can succeed in explaining the principles involved in them,
+their application by the reader will be easily extended to the enjoyment
+of better examples.
+
+This drawing of Mr. Jones's, however, is far less representative of his
+scale of power than either of the two pieces already described, which
+have both cost their artists much care and time; while this little
+water-color has been perhaps done in the course of a summer afternoon.
+It is only about seven inches by nine: the figures of the average size
+of Angelico's on any altar predella; and the heads, of those on an
+average Corinthian or Syracusan coin. The bride and bridegroom sit on a
+slightly raised throne at the side of the picture, the bride nearest us;
+her head seen in profile, a little bowed. Before them, the three
+bridesmaids and their groomsmen dance in circle, holding each other's
+hands, bare-footed, and dressed in long dark blue robes. Their figures
+are scarcely detached from the dark background, which is a willful
+mingling of shadow and light, as the artist chose to put them,
+representing, as far as I remember, nothing in particular. The deep tone
+of the picture leaves several of the faces in obscurity, and none are
+drawn with much care, not even the bride's; but with enough to show that
+her features are at least as beautiful as those of an ordinary Greek
+goddess, while the depth of the distant background throws out her pale
+head in an almost lunar, yet unexaggerated, light; and the white and
+blue flowers of her narrow coronal, though _merely_ white and blue,
+shine, one knows not how, like gems. Her bridegroom stoops forward a
+little to look at her, so that we see his front face, and can see also
+that he loves her.
+
+231. Such being the respective effort and design of the three pictures,
+although I put by, for the moment, any question of their mechanical
+skill or manner, it must yet, I believe, be felt by the reader that, as
+works of young men, they contained, and even nailed to the Academy
+gates, a kind of Lutheran challenge to the then accepted teachers in
+all European schools of Art: perhaps a little too shrill and petulant in
+the tone of it, but yet curiously resolute and steady in its triple
+Fraternity, as of William of Burglen with his Melchthal and Stauffacher,
+in the Grutli meadow, not wholly to be scorned by even the knightliest
+powers of the Past.
+
+We have indeed, since these pictures were first exhibited, become
+accustomed to many forms both of pleasing and revolting innovation: but
+consider, in those early times, how the pious persons who had always
+been accustomed to see their Madonnas dressed in scrupulously folded and
+exquisitely falling robes of blue, with edges embroidered in gold,--to
+find them also, sitting under arcades of exquisitest architecture by
+Bernini,--and reverently to observe them receive the angel's message
+with their hands folded on their breasts in the most graceful positions,
+and the missals they had been previously studying laid open on their
+knees, (see my own outline from Angelico of the "Ancilla Domini," the
+first plate of the fifth volume of _Modern Painters_);--consider, I
+repeat, the shock to the feelings of all these delicately minded
+persons, on being asked to conceive a Virgin waking from her sleep on a
+pallet bed, in a plain room, startled by sudden words and ghostly
+presence which she does not comprehend, and casting in her mind what
+manner of Salutation this should be.
+
+232. Again, consider, with respect to the second picture, how the
+learned possessors of works of established reputation by the ancient
+masters, classically catalogued as "landscapes with figures"; and who
+held it for eternal, artistic law that such pictures should either
+consist of a rock, with a Spanish chestnut growing out of the side of
+it, and three banditti in helmets and big feathers on the top, or else
+of a Corinthian temple, built beside an arm of the sea, with the Queen
+of Sheba beneath, preparing for embarkation to visit Solomon,--the whole
+properly toned down with amber varnish;--imagine the first
+consternation, and final wrath, of these _cognoscenti_, at being asked
+to contemplate, deliberately, and to the last rent of her ragged gown,
+and for principal object in a finished picture, a vagrant who ought at
+once to have been sent to the workhouse; and some really green grass and
+blue flowers, as they actually may any day be seen on an English
+common-side.
+
+And finally, let us imagine, if imagination fail us not, the far more
+wide and weighty indignation of the public, accustomed always to see its
+paintings of marriages elaborated in Christian propriety and splendor;
+with a bishop officiating, assisted by a dean and an archdeacon; the
+modesty of the bride expressed by a veil of the most expensive
+Valenciennes, and the robes of the bridesmaids designed by the
+perfectest of Parisian artists, and looped up with stuffed robins or
+other such tender rarities;--think with what sense of hitherto
+unheard-of impropriety, the British public must have received a picture
+of a marriage, in which the bride was only crowned with flowers,--at
+which the bridesmaids danced barefoot,--and in which nothing was known,
+or even conjecturable, respecting the bridegroom, but his love!
+
+233. Such being the manifestly opponent and agonistic temper of these
+three pictures (and admitting, which I will crave the reader to do for
+the nonce, their real worth and power to be considerable), it surely
+becomes a matter of no little interest to see what spirit it is that
+they have in common, which, recognized as revolutionary in the minds of
+the young artists themselves, caused them, with more or less of
+firmness, to constitute themselves into a society, partly monastic,
+partly predicatory, called "Pre-Raphaelite": and also recognized as
+such, with indignation, by the public, caused the youthfully didactic
+society to be regarded with various degrees of contempt, passing into
+anger (as of offended personal dignity), and embittered farther, among
+certain classes of persons, even into a kind of instinctive abhorrence.
+
+234. I believe the reader will discover, on reflection, that there is
+really only one quite common and sympathetic impulse shown in these
+three works, otherwise so distinct in aim and execution. And this
+fraternal link he will, if careful in reflection, discover to be an
+effort to represent, so far as in these youths lay either the choice or
+the power, things as they are, or were, or may be, instead of, according
+to the practice of their instructors and the wishes of their public,
+things as they are _not_, never were, and never can be: this effort
+being founded deeply on a conviction that it is at first better, and
+finally more pleasing, for human minds to contemplate things as they
+are, than as they are not.
+
+Thus, Mr. Rossetti, in this and subsequent works of the kind, thought it
+better for himself and his public to make some effort towards a real
+notion of what actually did happen in the carpenter's cottage at
+Nazareth, giving rise to the subsequent traditions delivered in the
+Gospels, than merely to produce a variety in the pattern of Virgin,
+pattern of Virgin's gown, and pattern of Virgin's house, which had been
+set by the jewelers of the fifteenth century.
+
+Similarly, Mr. Millais, in this and other works of the kind, thought it
+desirable rather to paint such grass and foliage as he saw in Kent,
+Surrey, and other solidly accessible English counties, than to imitate
+even the most Elysian fields enameled by Claude, or the gloomiest
+branches of Hades forest rent by Salvator: and yet more, to manifest his
+own strong personal feeling that the humanity, no less than the herbage,
+near us and around, was that which it was the painter's duty first to
+portray; and that, if Wordsworth were indeed right in feeling that the
+meanest flower that blows can give,--much more, for any kindly heart it
+should be true that the meanest tramp that walks can give--"thoughts
+that do often lie too deep for tears."
+
+235. And if at first--or even always to careless sight--the third of
+these pictures seem opposite to the two others in the very point of
+choice, between what is and what is not; insomuch that while _they_ with
+all their strength avouch realities, _this_ with simplest confession
+dwells upon a dream,--yet in this very separation from them it sums
+their power and seals their brotherhood; reaching beyond them to the
+more perfect truth of things, not only that once were,--not only that
+now are,--but which are the same yesterday, to-day, and forever;--the
+love by whose ordaining the world itself, and all that dwell therein,
+live, and move, and have their being; by which the Morning stars rejoice
+in their courses--in which the virgins of deathless Israel rejoice in
+the dance--and in whose constancy the Giver of light to stars, and love
+to men, Himself is glad in the creatures of His hand,--day by new day
+proclaiming to His Church of all the ages, "As the bridegroom rejoiceth
+over the bride, so shall thy Lord rejoice over thee."
+
+Such, the reader will find, if he cares to learn it, is indeed the
+purport and effort of these three designs--so far as, by youthful hands
+and in a time of trouble and rebuke, such effort could be brought to
+good end. Of their visible weaknesses, with the best justice I may,--of
+their veritable merits with the best insight I may, and of the farther
+history of the school which these masters founded, I hope to be
+permitted to speak more under the branches that do not "remember their
+green felicity"; adding a corollary or two respecting the other pieces
+of art above named[43] as having taken part in the tenor of my country
+hours of idleness.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[42] _Nineteenth Century_, NOV.-DEC. 1878.--ED.
+
+[43] May I in the meantime recommend any reader interested in these
+matters to obtain for himself such photographic representation as may be
+easily acquirable of the tomb of Ilaria? It is in the north transept of
+the Cathedral of Lucca; and is certainly the most beautiful work
+existing by the master who wrought it,--Jacopo della Quercia.
+
+
+
+
+THE THREE COLORS OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM.
+
+II.
+
+
+236. The feeling which, in the foregoing notes on the pictures that
+entertained my vacation, I endeavored to illustrate as dominant over
+early Pre-Raphaelite work, is very far from being new in the world.
+Demonstrations in support of fact against fancy have been periodical
+motives of earthquake and heartquake, under the two rigidly incumbent
+burdens of drifted tradition, which, throughout the history of humanity,
+during phases of languid thought, cover the vaults of searching fire
+that must at last try every man's work, what it is.
+
+But the movement under present question derived unusual force, and in
+some directions a morbid and mischievous force, from the vulgarly
+called[44] "scientific" modes of investigation which had destroyed in
+the minds of the public it appealed to, all possibility, or even
+conception, of reverence for anything, past, present, or future,
+invisible to the eyes of a mob, and inexpressible by popular
+vociferation. It was indeed, and had long been, too true, as the wisest
+of us felt, that the mystery of the domain between things that are
+universally visible, and are only occasionally so to some persons,--no
+less than the myths or words in which those who had entered that kingdom
+related what they had seen, had become, the one uninviting, and the
+other useless, to men dealing with the immediate business of our day; so
+that the historian of the last of European kings might most reasonably
+mourn that "the Berlin Galleries, which are made up, like other
+galleries, of goat-footed Pan, Europa's Bull, Romulus's She-wolf, and
+the Correggiosity of Correggio, 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 of 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."
+
+       *       *       *
+
+237. But we must surely, in fairness to modernism, remember that
+although no portraits of great Frederick, of a trustworthy character,
+may be found at Berlin, portraits of the English squire, be he great or
+small, may usually be seen at his country house. And Edinburgh, as I
+lately saw,--if she boasts of no Venetian perfectness of art in the
+portraiture of her Bruce or James, her Douglas or Knox, at Holyrood, has
+at least a charming portrait of a Scottish beauty in the Attic
+Institution, whose majesty, together with that of the more extensive
+glass roofs of the railway station, and the tall chimney of the
+gasworks, inflates the Caledonian mind, contemplative around the spot
+where the last of its minstrels appears to be awaiting eternal
+extinction under his special extinguisher;--and pronouncing of all its
+works and ways that they are very good.
+
+And are there not also sufficiently resembling portraits of all the
+mouthpieces of constituents in British Parliament--as their vocal powers
+advance them into that worshipful society--presented to the people, with
+due felicitation on the new pipe it has got to its organ, in the
+_Illustrated_ or other graphic _News_? Surely, therefore, it cannot be
+portraiture of merely human greatness of mind that we are anyway short
+of; but another manner of greatness altogether? And may we not regret
+that as great Frederick is dead, so also great Pan is dead, and only the
+goat-footed Pan, or rather the goat's feet of him without the Pan, left
+for portraiture?
+
+       *       *       *
+
+238. I chanced to walk, to-day, 9th of November, through the gallery of
+the Liverpool Museum, in which the good zeal and sense of Mr. Gatty have
+already, in beautiful order, arranged the Egyptian antiquities, but have
+not yet prevailed far enough to group, in like manner, the scattered
+Byzantine and Italian ivories above. Out of which collection, every way
+valuable, two primarily important pieces, it seems to me, may be
+recommended for accurate juxtaposition, bringing then for us into
+briefest compass an extensive story of the Arts of Mankind.
+
+The first is an image of St. John the Baptist, carved in the eleventh
+century; being then conceived by the image-maker as decently covered by
+his raiment of camel's hair; bearing a gentle aspect, because the herald
+of a gentle Lord; and pointing to his quite legibly written message
+concerning the Lamb which is that gentle Lord's heraldic symbol.
+
+The other carving is also of St. John the Baptist, Italian work of the
+sixteenth century. He is represented thereby as bearing no aspect, for
+he is without his head;--wearing no camel's hair, for he is without his
+raiment;--and indicative of no message, for he has none to bring.
+
+239. Now if these two carvings are ever put in due relative position,
+they will constitute a precise and permanent art-lecture to the
+museum-visitants of Liverpool-burg; exhibiting to them instantly, and in
+sum, the conditions of the change in the aims of art which, beginning in
+the thirteenth century under Niccolo Pisano, consummated itself three
+hundred years afterwards in Raphael and his scholars. Niccolo, first
+among Italians, thought mainly in carving the Crucifixion, not how heavy
+Christ's head was when He bowed it;--but how heavy His body was when
+people came to take it down. And the apotheosis of flesh, or, in modern
+scientific terms, the molecular development of flesh, went steadily on,
+until at last, as we see in the instance before us, it became really of
+small consequence to the artists of the Renaissance Incarnadine, whether
+a man had his head on or not, so only that his legs were handsome: and
+the decapitation, whether of St. John or St. Cecilia; the massacre of
+any quantity of Innocents; the flaying, whether of Marsyas or St.
+Bartholomew, and the deaths, it might be of Laocoon by his vipers, it
+might be of Adonis by his pig, or it might be of Christ by His people,
+became, one and all, simply subjects for analysis of muscular
+mortification; and the vast body of artists accurately, therefore,
+little more than a chirurgically useless sect of medical students.
+
+Of course there were many reactionary tendencies among the men who had
+been trained in the pure Tuscan schools, which partly concealed, or
+adorned, the materialism of their advance; and Raphael himself, after
+profoundly studying the arabesques of Pompeii and of the palace of the
+Caesars, beguiled the tedium, and illustrated the spirituality of the
+converse of Moses and Elias with Christ concerning His decease which He
+should accomplish at Jerusalem, by placing them, above the Mount of
+Transfiguration, in the attitudes of two humming-birds on the top of a
+honeysuckle.
+
+240. But the best of these ornamental arrangements were insufficient to
+sustain the vivacity, while they conclusively undermined the sincerity,
+of the Christian faith, and "the real consequences of the acceptance of
+this kind (Roman Bath and Sarcophagus kind)" of religious idealism were
+instant and manifold.[45]
+
+       *       *       *
+
+So far as it was received and trusted in by thoughtful persons, it only
+served to chill all the conceptions of sacred history which they might
+otherwise have obtained. Whatever they could have fancied for themselves
+about the wild, strange, infinitely stern, infinitely tender, infinitely
+varied veracities of the life of Christ, was blotted out by the vapid
+fineries of Raphael: the rough Galilean pilot, the orderly custom
+receiver, and all the questioning wonder and fire of uneducated
+apostleship, were obscured under an antique mask of philosophical faces
+and long robes. The feeble, subtle, suffering, ceaseless energy and
+humiliation of St. Paul were confused with an idea of a meditative
+Hercules leaning on a sweeping sword; and the mighty presences of Moses
+and Elias were softened by introductions of delicate grace, adopted from
+dancing nymphs and rising Auroras.
+
+Now no vigorously minded religious person could possibly receive
+pleasure or help from such art as this; and the necessary result was the
+instant rejection of it by the healthy religion of the world. Raphael
+ministered, with applause, to the impious luxury of the Vatican, but was
+trampled underfoot at once by every believing and advancing Christian of
+his own and subsequent times; and thenceforward pure Christianity and
+"high art" took separate roads, and fared on, as best they might,
+independently of each other.
+
+But although Calvin, and Knox, and Luther, and their flocks, with all
+the hardest-headed and truest-hearted faithful left in Christendom, thus
+spurned away the spurious art, and all art with it (not without harm to
+themselves, such as a man must needs sustain in cutting off a decayed
+limb), certain conditions of weaker Christianity suffered the false
+system to retain influence over them; and to this day the clear and
+tasteless poison of the art of Raphael infects with sleep of infidelity
+the hearts of millions of Christians. It is the first cause of all that
+pre-eminent _dullness_ which characterizes what Protestants call sacred
+art; a dullness not merely baneful in making religion distasteful to the
+young, but in sickening, as we have seen, all vital belief of religion
+in the old. A dim sense of impossibility attaches itself always to the
+graceful emptiness of the representation; we feel instinctively that the
+painted Christ and painted apostle are not beings that ever did or could
+exist; and this fatal sense of fair fabulousness, and well-composed
+impossibility, steals gradually from the picture into the history, until
+we find ourselves reading St. Mark or St. Luke with the same admiring,
+but uninterested, incredulity, with which we contemplate Raphael.
+
+241. Without claiming,--nay, so far as my knowledge can reach, utterly
+disclaiming--any personal influence over, or any originality of
+suggestion to, the men who founded our presently realistic schools, I
+may yet be permitted to point out the sympathy which I had as an
+outstanding spectator with their effort; and the more or less active
+fellowship with it, which, unrecognized, I had held from the beginning.
+The passage I have just quoted (with many others enforcing similar
+truths) is in the third volume of _Modern Painters_; but if the reader
+can refer to the close of the preface to the second edition[46] of the
+first, he will find this very principle of realism asserted for the
+groundwork of all I had to teach in that volume. The lesson so far
+pleased the public of that day, that ever since, they have refused to
+listen to any corollaries or conclusions from it, assuring me, year by
+year, continually, that the older I grew, the less I knew, and the worse
+I wrote. Nevertheless, that first volume of _Modern Painters_ did by no
+means contain all that even then I knew; and in the third, nominally
+treating of "Many Things," will be found the full expression of what I
+knew best; namely, that all "things," many or few, which we ought to
+paint, must be first distinguished boldly from the nothings which we
+ought not; and that a faithful realist, before he could question whether
+his art was representing anything truly, had first to ask whether it
+meant seriously to represent anything at all!
+
+242. And such definition has in these days become more needful than ever
+before, in this solid, or spectral--which-ever the reader pleases to
+consider it--world of ours. For some of us, who have no perception but
+of solidity, are agreed to consider all that is not solid, or weighably
+liquid, nothing. And others of us, who have also perception of the
+spectral, are sometimes too much inclined to call what is no more than
+solid, or weighably liquid, nothing. But the general reader may be at
+least assured that it is not at all possible for the student to enter
+into useful discussion concerning the qualities of art which takes on
+itself to represent things as they are, unless he include in its
+subjects the spectral, no less than the substantial, reality; and
+understand what difference must be between the powers of veritable
+representation, for the men whose models are of ponderable flesh, as for
+instance, the "Sculptor's model," lately under debate in Liverpool,--and
+the men whose models pause perhaps only for an instant--painted on the
+immeasurable air,--forms which they themselves can but discern darkly,
+and remember uncertainly, saying: "A vision passed before me, but I
+could not discern the form thereof."
+
+243. And the most curious, yet the most common, deficiency in the modern
+contemplative mind, is its inability to comprehend that these phenomena
+of true imagination are yet no less real, and often more vivid than
+phenomena of matter. We continually hear artists blamed or praised for
+having painted this or that (either of material or spectral kind),
+without the slightest implied inquiry whether they _saw_ this, or that.
+Whereas the quite primal difference between the first and second order
+of artists, is that the first is indeed painting what he has seen; and
+the second only what he would like to see! But as the one that can paint
+what he would like, has therefore the power, if he chooses, of painting
+more or less what also his public likes, he has a chance of being
+received with sympathetic applause, on all hands, while the first, it
+may be, meets only reproach for not having painted something more
+agreeable. Thus Mr. Millais, going out at Tunbridge or Sevenoaks, sees a
+blind vagrant led by an ugly child; and paints that highly objectionable
+group, as they appeared to him. But your pliably minded painter gives
+you a beautiful young lady guiding a sightless Belisarius (see the gift
+by one of our most tasteful modistes to our National Gallery), and the
+gratified public never troubles itself to ask whether these ethereal
+mendicants were ever indeed apparent in this world, or any other. Much
+more, if, in deeper vistas of his imagination, some presently graphic
+Zechariah paint--(let us say) four carpenters, the public will most
+likely declare that he ought to have painted persons in a higher class
+of life, without ever inquiring whether the Lord had shown him four
+carpenters or not. And the worst of the business is that the public
+impatience, in such sort, is not wholly unreasonable. For truly, a
+painter who has eyes can, for the most part, see what he "likes" with
+them; and is, by divine law, answerable for his liking. And, even at
+this late hour of the day, it is still conceivable that such of them as
+would _verily_ prefer to see, suppose, instead of a tramp with a
+harmonium, Orpheus with his lute, or Arion on his dolphin, pleased
+Proteus rising beside him from the sea,--might, standing on the
+"pleasant lea" of Margate or Brighton, have sight of those personages.
+
+Orpheus with his lute,--Jubal with his harp and horn,--Harmonia, bride
+of the warrior seed-sower,--Musica herself, lady of all timely thought
+and sweetly ordered things,--Cantatrice and Incantatrice to all but the
+museless adder; these the Amphion of Fesole saw, as he shaped the marble
+of his tower; these, Memmi of Siena, fair-figured on the shadows of his
+vault;--but for us, here is the only manifestation granted to our best
+practical painter--a vagrant with harmonium--and yonder blackbirds and
+iridescent jackasses, to be harmonized thereby.
+
+244. Our best _painter_ (among the living) I say;--no question has ever
+been of that. Since Van Eyck and Duerer there has nothing been seen so
+well done in laying of clear oil-color within definite line. And what he
+might have painted for us, if _we_ had only known what we would have of
+him! Heaven only knows. But we none of us knew,--nor he neither; and on
+the whole the perfectest of his works, and the representative picture of
+that generation--was no Annunciate Maria bowing herself; but only a
+Newsless Mariana stretching herself: which is indeed the best symbol of
+the mud-moated Nineteenth century; in _its_ Grange, Stable--Sty, or
+whatever name of dwelling may best befit the things it calls Houses and
+Cities: imprisoned therein by the unassailablest of walls, and blackest
+of ditches--by the pride of Babel, and the filthiness of Aholah and
+Aholibamah; and their worse younger sister;--craving for any manner of
+News from any world--and getting none trustworthy even of its own.
+
+245. I said that in this second paper I would try to give some brief
+history of the rise, and the issue, of that Pre-Raphaelite school: but,
+as I look over two of the essays[47] that were printed with mine in that
+last number of the _Nineteenth Century_--the first--in laud of the
+Science which accepts for practical spirits, inside of men, only Avarice
+and Indolence; and the other,--in laud of the Science which "rejects the
+Worker" outside of Men, I am less and less confident in offering to the
+readers of the _Nineteenth Century_ any History relating to such
+despised things as unavaricious industry,--or incorporeal vision. I will
+be as brief as I can.
+
+246. The central branch of the school, represented by the central
+picture above described:--"The Blind Girl"--was essentially and vitally
+an uneducated one. It was headed, in literary power, by Wordsworth; but
+the first pure example of its mind and manner of Art, as opposed to the
+erudite and _artificial_ schools, will be found, so far as I know, in
+Moliere's song: _j'aime mieux ma mie_.
+
+Its mental power consisted in discerning what was lovely in present
+nature, and in pure moral emotion concerning it.
+
+Its physical power, in an intense veracity of direct realization to the
+eye.
+
+So far as Mr. Millais saw what was beautiful in vagrants, or commons, or
+crows, or donkeys, or the straw under children's feet in the Ark (Noah's
+or anybody else's does not matter),--in the Huguenot and his mistress,
+or the ivy behind them,--in the face of Ophelia, or in the flowers
+floating over it as it sank;--much more, so far as he saw what
+instantly comprehensible nobleness of passion might be in the binding
+of a handkerchief,--in the utterance of two words, "Trust me" or the
+like: he prevailed, and rightly prevailed, over all prejudice and
+opposition; to that extent he will in what he has done, or may yet do,
+take, as a standard-bearer, an honorable place among the reformers of
+our day.
+
+So far as he could not see what was beautiful, but what was essentially
+and forever common (in that God had not cleansed it), and so far as he
+did not see truly what he thought he saw; (as for instance, in this
+picture, under immediate consideration, when he paints the spark of
+light in a crow's eye a hundred yards off, as if he were only painting a
+miniature of a crow close by,)--he failed of his purpose and hope; but
+how far I have neither the power nor the disposition to consider.
+
+247. The school represented by Mr. Rossetti's picture and adopted for
+his own by Mr. Holman Hunt, professed, necessarily, to be a learned one;
+and to represent things which had happened long ago, in a manner
+credible to any moderns who were interested in them. The value to us of
+such a school necessarily depends on the things it chooses to represent,
+out of the infinite history of mankind. For instance, David, of the
+first Republican Academe, was a true master of this school; and,
+painting the Horatii receiving their swords, foretold the triumph of
+that Republican Power. Gerome, of the latest Republican Academe, paints
+the dying Polichinelle, and the _morituri_ gladiators: foretelling, in
+like manner, the shame and virtual ruin of modern Republicanism. What
+our own painters have done for us in this kind has been too unworthy of
+their real powers, for Mr. Rossetti threw more than half his strength
+into literature, and, in that precise measure, left himself unequal to
+his appointed task in painting; while Mr. Hunt, not knowing the
+necessity of masters any more than the rest of our painters, and
+attaching too great importance to the externals of the life of Christ,
+separated himself for long years from all discipline by the recognized
+laws of his art; and fell into errors which wofully shortened his hand
+and discredited his cause--into which again I hold it no part of my duty
+to enter. But such works as either of these painters have done, without
+antagonism or ostentation, and in their own true instincts; as all
+Rossetti's drawing from the life of Christ, more especially that of the
+Madonna gathering the bitter herbs for the Passover when He was twelve
+years old; and that of the Magdalen leaving her companions to come to
+Him; these, together with all the mythic scenes which he painted from
+the _Vita Nuova_ and _Paradiso_ of Dante, are of quite imperishable
+power and value: as also many of the poems to which he gave up part of
+his painter's strength. Of Holman Hunt's "Light of the World," and
+"Awakening Conscience," I have publicly spoken and written, now for many
+years, as standard in their kind: the study of sunset on the Egean,
+lately placed by me in the schools of Oxford, is not less authoritative
+in landscape, so far as its aim extends.
+
+248. But the School represented by the third painting, "The Bridal," is
+that into which the greatest masters of _all_ ages are gathered, and in
+which they are walled round as in Elysian fields, unapproachable but by
+the reverent and loving souls, in some sort already among the Dead.
+
+They interpret to those of us who can read them, so far as they already
+see and know, the things that are forever. "Charity never faileth; but
+whether there be prophecies, they shall fail--tongues, they shall
+cease--knowledge, it shall vanish."
+
+And the one message they bear to us is the commandment of the Eternal
+Charity. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with _all_ thine heart, and
+thy neighbor as thyself." As thyself--no more, even the dearest of
+neighbors.
+
+"Therefore let every man see that he love his wife even as himself."
+
+No more--else she has become an idol, not a fellow-servant; a creature
+between us and our Master.
+
+And they teach us that what higher creatures exist between Him and us,
+we are also bound to know, and to love in their place and state, as
+they ascend and descend on the stairs of their watch and ward.
+
+The principal masters of this faithful religious school in painting,
+known to me, are Giotto, Angelico, Sandro Botticelli, Filippo Lippi,
+Luini, and Carpaccio; but for a central illustration of their mind, I
+take that piece of work by the sculptor of Quercia,[48] of which some
+shadow of representation, true to an available degree, is within reach
+of my reader.
+
+249. This sculpture is central in every respect; being the last
+Florentine work in which the proper form of the Etruscan tomb is
+preserved, and the first in which all right Christian sentiment
+respecting death is embodied. It is perfectly severe in classical
+tradition, and perfectly frank in concession to the passions of existing
+life. It submits to all the laws of the past, and expresses all the
+hopes of the future.
+
+Now every work of the great Christian schools expresses primarily,
+conquest over death; conquest not grievous, but absolute and serene;
+rising with the greatest of them, into rapture.
+
+But this, as a _central_ work, has all the peace of the Christian
+Eternity, but only in part its gladness. Young children wreathe round
+the tomb a garland of abundant flowers, but she herself, Ilaria, yet
+sleeps; the time is not yet come for her to be awakened out of sleep.
+
+Her image is a simple portrait of her--how much less beautiful than she
+was in life, we cannot know--but as beautiful as marble can be.
+
+And through and in the marble we may see that the damsel is not dead,
+but sleepeth: yet as visibly a sleep that shall know no ending until
+the last day break, and the last shadow flee away; until then, she
+"shall not return." Her hands are laid on her breast--not praying--she
+has no need to pray now. She wears her dress of every day, clasped at
+her throat, girdled at her waist, the hem of it drooping over her feet.
+No disturbance of its folds by pain of sickness, no binding, no
+shrouding of her sweet form, in death more than in life. As a soft, low
+wave of summer sea, her breast rises; no more: the rippled gathering of
+its close mantle droops to the belt, then sweeps to her feet, straight
+as drifting snow. And at her feet her dog lies watching her; the mystery
+of his mortal life joined, by love, to her immortal one.
+
+Few know, and fewer love, the tomb and its place,--not shrine, for it
+stands bare by the cathedral wall: only, by chance, a cross is cut deep
+into one of the foundation stones behind her head. But no goddess statue
+of the Greek cities, no nun's image among the cloisters of Apennine, no
+fancied light of angel in the homes of heaven, has more divine rank
+among the thoughts of men.
+
+250. In so much as the reader can see of it, and learn, either by print
+or cast, or beside it; (and he would do well to stay longer in that
+transept than in the Tribune at Florence,) he may receive from it,
+unerring canon of what is evermore Lovely and Right in the dealing of
+the Art of Man with his fate, and his passions. Evermore _lovely_, and
+_right_. These two virtues of visible things go always hand in hand: but
+the workman is bound to assure himself of his Rightness first; then the
+loveliness will come.
+
+And primarily, from this sculpture, you are to learn what a "Master" is.
+Here was one man at least, who knew his business, once upon a time!
+Unaccusably;--none of your fool's heads or clown's hearts can find a
+fault here! "Dog-fancier,[49] cobbler, tailor, or churl, look
+here"--says Master Jacopo--"look! I know what a brute is, better than
+you, I know what a silken tassel is--what a leathern belt is--Also,
+what a woman is; and also--what a Law of God is, if you care to know."
+This it is, to be a Master.
+
+Then secondly--you are to note that with all the certain rightness of
+its material fact, this sculpture still is the Sculpture of a Dream.
+Ilaria is dressed as she was in life. But she never lay so on her
+pillow! nor so, in her grave. Those straight folds, straightly laid as a
+snowdrift, are impossible; known by the Master to be so--chiseled with a
+hand as steady as an iron beam, and as true as a ray of light--in
+defiance of your law of Gravity to the Earth. _That_ law prevailed on
+her shroud, and prevails on her dust: but not on herself, nor on the
+Vision of her.
+
+Then thirdly, and lastly. You are to learn that the doing of a piece of
+Art such as this is _possible_ to the hand of Man just in the measure of
+his obedience to the laws which are indeed over his heart, and not over
+his dust: primarily, as I have said, to that great one, "Thou shalt
+_Love_ the Lord thy God." Which command is straight and clear; and all
+men may obey it if they will,--so only that they be early taught to know
+Him.
+
+And that is precisely the piece of exact Science which is not taught at
+present in our Board Schools--so that although my friend, with whom I
+was staying, was not himself, in the modern sense, ill-educated; neither
+did he conceive me to be so,--he yet thought it good for himself and me
+to have that Inscription, "Lord, teach us to Pray," illuminated on the
+house wall--if perchance either he or I could yet learn what John (when
+he still had his head) taught _his_ Disciples.
+
+251. But alas, for us only at last, among the people of all ages and in
+all climes, the lesson has become too difficult; and the Father of all,
+in every age, in every clime adored, is Rejected of science, as an
+Outside Worker, in Cockneydom of the nineteenth century.
+
+Rejected of Science: well; but not yet, not yet--by the men who can do,
+as well as know. And though I have neither strength nor time, nor at
+present the mind to go into any review of the work done by the Third and
+chief School of our younger painters, headed by Burne Jones;[50] and
+though I know its faults, palpable enough, like those of Turner, to the
+poorest sight; and though I am discouraged in all its discouragements, I
+still hold in fullness to the hope of it in which I wrote the close of
+the third lecture I ever gave in Oxford--of which I will ask the reader
+here in conclusion to weigh the words, set down in the days of my best
+strength, so far as I know; and with the uttermost care given to that
+inaugural Oxford work, to "speak only that which I did know."
+
+252. "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' or
+'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.
+
+"And perfect the day shall be, when it is of all men understood that the
+beauty of Holiness must be in labor as well as in rest. Nay! more, if it
+may be, in labor; 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 labor 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."[51]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[44] "Vulgarly"; the use of the word "scientia," as if it differed from
+"knowledge," being a modern barbarism; enhanced usually by the
+assumption that the knowledge of the difference between acids and
+alkalies is a more respectable one than that of the difference between
+vice and virtue.
+
+[45] _Modern Painters_, volume iii. I proceed in my old words, of which
+I cannot better the substance, though--with all deference to the taste
+of those who call that book my best--I could, the expression.
+
+[46] The _third_ edition was published in 1846, while the Pre-Raphaelite
+School was still in swaddling clothes.
+
+[47] These essays were, "Recent Attacks on Political Economy," by Robert
+Lowe, and "Virchow and Evolution," by Prof. Tyndall,--ED.
+
+[48] James of Quercia: see the rank assigned to this master in _Ariadne
+Florentina_. The best photographs of the monument are, I believe, those
+published by the Arundel Society; of whom I would very earnestly request
+that if ever they quote _Modern Painters_, they would not interpolate
+its text with unmarked parentheses of modern information such as "emblem
+of conjugal fidelity." I must not be made to answer for either the
+rhythm or the contents of sentences thus manipulated.
+
+[49] I foolishly, in _Modern Painters_, used the generic word "hound" to
+make my sentence prettier. He is a flat-nosed bulldog.
+
+[50] It would be utterly vain to attempt any general account of the
+works of this painter, unless I were able also to give abstract of the
+subtlest mythologies of Greek worship and Christian romance. Besides,
+many of his best designs are pale pencil drawings like Florentine
+engravings, of which the delicacy is literally invisible, and the manner
+irksome, to a public trained among the black scrabblings of modern
+wood-cutter's and etcher's prints. I will only say that the single
+series of these pencil-drawings, from the story of Psyche, which I have
+been able to place in the schools of Oxford, together with the two
+colored beginnings from the stories of Jason and Alcestis, are, in my
+estimate, quite the most precious gift, not excepting even the Loire
+series of Turners, in the ratified acceptance of which my University has
+honored with some fixed memorial the aims of her first Art-Teacher.
+
+[51] _Lectures on Art_, Sec.Sec. 95-6.--ED.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+ART.
+
+III.
+
+ARCHITECTURE.
+
+
+THE OPENING OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE.
+
+(_Pamphlet, 1854._)
+
+THE STUDY OF ARCHITECTURE IN OUR SCHOOLS.
+
+(_R.I.B.A. Transactions, 1865._)
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE OPENING OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE.[52]
+
+
+253. I read the account in the _Times_ newspaper of the opening of the
+Crystal Palace at Sydenham as I ascended the hill between Vevay and
+Chatel St. Denis, and the thoughts which it called up haunted me all day
+long as my road wound among the grassy slopes of the Simmenthal. There
+was a strange contrast between the image of that mighty palace, raised
+so high above the hills on which it is built as to make them seem little
+else than a basement for its glittering stateliness, and those lowland
+huts, half hidden beneath their coverts of forest, and scattered like
+gray stones along the masses of far-away mountain. Here man contending
+with the power of Nature for his existence; there commanding them for
+his recreation; here a feeble folk nested among the rocks with the wild
+goat and the coney, and retaining the same quiet thoughts from
+generation to generation; there a great multitude triumphing in the
+splendor of immeasurable habitation, and haughty with hope of endless
+progress and irresistible power.
+
+254. It is indeed impossible to limit, in imagination, the beneficent
+results which may follow from the undertaking thus happily begun.[53]
+For the first time in the history of the world, a national museum is
+formed in which a whole nation is interested; formed on a scale which
+permits the exhibition of monuments of art in unbroken symmetry, and of
+the productions of nature in unthwarted growth,--formed under the
+auspices of science which can hardly err, and of wealth which can
+hardly be exhausted; and placed in the close neighborhood of a
+metropolis overflowing with a population weary of labor, yet thirsting
+for knowledge, where contemplation may be consistent with rest, and
+instruction with enjoyment. It is impossible, I repeat, to estimate the
+influence of such an institution on the minds of the working-classes.
+How many hours once wasted may now be profitably dedicated to pursuits
+in which interest was first awakened by some accidental display in the
+Norwood palace; how many constitutions, almost broken, may be restored
+by the healthy temptation into the country air; how many intellects,
+once dormant, may be roused into activity within the crystal walls, and
+how these noble results may go on multiplying and increasing and bearing
+fruit seventy times seven-fold, as the nation pursues its career,--are
+questions as full of hope as incapable of calculation. But with all
+these grounds for hope there are others for despondency, giving rise to
+a group of melancholy thoughts, of which I can neither repress the
+importunity nor forbear the expression.
+
+255. For three hundred years, the art of architecture has been the
+subject of the most curious investigation; its principles have been
+discussed with all earnestness and acuteness; its models in all
+countries and of all ages have been examined with scrupulous care, and
+imitated with unsparing expenditure. And of all this refinement of
+inquiry,--this lofty search after the ideal,--this subtlety of
+investigation and sumptuousness of practice,--the great result, the
+admirable and long-expected conclusion is, that in the center of the
+19th century, we suppose ourselves to have invented a new style of
+architecture, when we have magnified a conservatory!
+
+256. In Mr. Laing's speech, at the opening of the palace, he declares
+that "_an entirely novel order of architecture_, producing, by means of
+unrivaled mechanical ingenuity, the most marvelous and beautiful
+effects, sprang into existence to provide a building."[54] In these
+words, the speaker is not merely giving utterance to his own feelings.
+He is expressing the popular view of the facts, nor that a view merely
+popular, but one which has been encouraged by nearly all the professors
+of art of our time.
+
+It is to this, then, that our Doric and Palladian pride is at last
+reduced! We have vaunted the divinity of the Greek ideal--we have plumed
+ourselves on the purity of our Italian taste--we have cast our whole
+souls into the proportions of pillars and the relations of orders--and
+behold the end! Our taste, thus exalted and disciplined, is dazzled by
+the luster of a few rows of panes of glass; and the first principles of
+architectural sublimity, so far sought, are found all the while to have
+consisted merely in sparkling and in space.
+
+Let it not be thought that I would depreciate (were it possible to
+depreciate) the mechanical ingenuity which has been displayed in the
+erection of the Crystal Palace, or that I underrate the effect which its
+vastness may continue to produce on the popular imagination. But
+mechanical ingenuity is _not_ the essence either of painting or
+architecture, and largeness of dimension does not necessarily involve
+nobleness of design. There is assuredly as much ingenuity required to
+build a screw frigate, or a tubular bridge, as a hall of glass;--all
+these are works characteristic of the age; and all, in their several
+ways, deserve our highest admiration, but not admiration of the kind
+that is rendered to poetry or to art. We may cover the German Ocean with
+frigates, and bridge the Bristol Channel with iron, and roof the county
+of Middlesex with crystal, and yet not possess one Milton, or Michael
+Angelo.
+
+257. Well, it may be replied, we need our bridges, and have pleasure in
+our palaces; but we do not want Miltons, nor Michael Angelos.
+
+Truly, it seems so; for, in the year in which the first Crystal Palace
+was built, there died among us a man whose name, in after-ages, will
+stand with those of the great of all time. Dying, he bequeathed to the
+nation the whole mass of his most cherished works; and for these three
+years, while we have been building this colossal receptacle for casts
+and copies of the art of other nations, these works of our own greatest
+painter have been left to decay in a dark room near Cavendish Square,
+under the custody of an aged servant.
+
+This is quite natural. But it is also memorable.
+
+258. There is another interesting fact connected with the history of the
+Crystal Palace as it bears on that of the art of Europe, namely, that in
+the year 1851, when all that glittering roof was built, in order to
+exhibit the paltry arts of our fashionable luxury--the carved bedsteads
+of Vienna, and glued toys of Switzerland, and gay jewelry of France--in
+that very year, I say, the greatest pictures of the Venetian masters
+were rotting at Venice in the rain, for want of roof to cover them, with
+holes made by cannon shot through their canvas.
+
+There is another fact, however, more curious than either of these, which
+will hereafter be connected with the history of the palace now in
+building; namely, that at the very period when Europe is congratulated
+on the invention of a new style of architecture, because fourteen acres
+of ground have been covered with glass, the greatest examples in
+existence of true and noble Christian architecture are being resolutely
+destroyed, and destroyed by the effects of the very interest which was
+beginning to be excited by them.
+
+259. Under the firm and wise government of the third Napoleon, France
+has entered on a new epoch of prosperity, one of the signs of which is a
+zealous care for the preservation of her noble public buildings. Under
+the influence of this healthy impulse, repairs of the most extensive
+kind are at this moment proceeding, on the cathedrals of Rheims, Amiens,
+Rouen, Chartres, and Paris; (probably also in many other instances
+unknown to me). These repairs were, in many cases, necessary up to a
+certain point; and they have been executed by architects as skillful and
+learned as at present exist,--executed with noble disregard of expense,
+and sincere desire on the part of their superintendents that they
+should be completed in a manner honorable to the country.
+
+260. They are, nevertheless, more fatal to the monuments they are
+intended to preserve, than fire, war, or revolution. For they are
+undertaken, in the plurality of instances, under an impression, which
+the efforts of all true antiquaries have as yet been unable to remove,
+that it is impossible to reproduce the mutilated sculpture of past ages
+in its original beauty.
+
+"Reproduire avec une exactitude mathematique," are the words used, by
+one of the most intelligent writers on this subject,[55] of the proposed
+regeneration of the statue of Ste. Modeste, on the north porch of the
+Cathedral of Chartres.
+
+Now it is not the question at present whether thirteenth century
+sculpture be of value, or not. Its value is assumed by the authorities
+who have devoted sums so large to its so-called restoration, and may
+therefore be assumed in my argument. The worst state of the sculptures
+whose restoration is demanded may be fairly represented by that of the
+celebrated group of the Fates, among the Elgin Marbles in the British
+Museum. With what favor would the guardians of those marbles, or any
+other persons interested in Greek art, receive a proposal from a living
+sculptor to "reproduce with mathematical exactitude" the group of the
+Fates, in a perfect form, and to destroy the original? For with exactly
+such favor, those who are interested in Gothic art should receive
+proposals to reproduce the sculpture of Chartres or Rouen.
+
+261. In like manner, the state of the architecture which it is proposed
+to restore may, at its worst, be fairly represented to the British
+public by that of the best preserved portions of Melrose Abbey. With
+what encouragement would those among us who are sincerely interested in
+history, or in art, receive a proposal to pull down Melrose Abbey, and
+"reproduce it mathematically"? There can be no doubt of the answer
+which, in the instances supposed, it would be proper to return. "By all
+means, if you can, reproduce mathematically, elsewhere, the group of the
+Fates, and the Abbey of Melrose. But leave unharmed the original
+fragment, and the existing ruin."[56] And an answer of the same tenor
+ought to be given to every proposal to restore a Gothic sculpture or
+building. Carve or raise a model of it in some other part of the city;
+but touch not the actual edifice, except only so far as may be necessary
+to sustain, to protect it. I said above that repairs were in many
+instances necessary. These necessary operations consist in substituting
+new stones for decayed ones, where they are absolutely essential to the
+stability of the fabric; in propping, with wood or metal, the portions
+likely to give way; in binding or cementing into their places the
+sculptures which are ready to detach themselves; and in general care to
+remove luxuriant weeds and obstructions of the channels for the
+discharge of the rain. But no modern or imitative sculpture ought
+_ever_, under any circumstances, to be mingled with the ancient work.
+
+262. Unfortunately, repairs thus conscientiously executed are always
+unsightly, and meet with little approbation from the general public; so
+that a strong temptation is necessarily felt by the superintendents of
+public works to execute the required repairs in a manner which, though
+indeed fatal to the monument, may be, in appearance, seemly. But a far
+more cruel temptation is held out to the architect. He who should
+propose to a municipal body to build in the form of a new church, to be
+erected in some other part of their city, models of such portions of
+their cathedral as were falling into decay, would be looked upon as
+merely asking for employment, and his offer would be rejected with
+disdain. But let an architect declare that the existing fabric stands in
+need of repairs, and offer to restore it to its original beauty, and he
+is instantly regarded as a lover of his country, and has a chance of
+obtaining a commission which will furnish him with a large and ready
+income, and enormous patronage, for twenty or thirty years to come.
+
+263. I have great respect for human nature. But I would rather leave it
+to others than myself to pronounce how far such a temptation is always
+likely to be resisted, and how far, when repairs are once permitted to
+be undertaken, a fabric is likely to be spared from mere interest in its
+beauty, when its destruction, under the name of restoration, has become
+permanently remunerative to a large body of workmen.
+
+Let us assume, however, that the architect is always
+conscientious--always willing, the moment he has done what is strictly
+necessary for the safety and decorous aspect of the building, to abandon
+his income, and declare his farther services unnecessary. Let us
+presume, also, that every one of the two or three hundred workmen who
+must be employed under him is equally conscientious, and, during the
+course of years of labor, will never destroy in carelessness what it may
+be inconvenient to save, or in cunning what it is difficult to imitate.
+Will all this probity of purpose preserve the hand from error, and the
+heart from weariness? Will it give dexterity to the awkward--sagacity to
+the dull--and at once invest two or three hundred imperfectly educated
+men with the feeling, intention, and information of the freemasons of
+the thirteenth century? Grant that it can do all this, and that the new
+building is both equal to the old in beauty, and precisely correspondent
+to it in detail. Is it, therefore, altogether _worth_ the old building?
+Is the stone carved to-day in their masons' yards altogether the same in
+value to the hearts of the French people as that which the eyes of St.
+Louis saw lifted to its place? Would a loving daughter, in mere desire
+for gaudy dress, ask a jeweler for a bright fac-simile of the worn cross
+which her mother bequeathed to her on her deathbed?--would a thoughtful
+nation, in mere fondness for splendor of streets, ask its architects to
+provide for it fac-similes of the temples which for centuries had given
+joy to its saints, comfort to its mourners, and strength to its
+chivalry?
+
+264. But it may be replied, that all this is already admitted by the
+antiquaries of France and England; and that it is impossible that works
+so important should now be undertaken with due consideration and
+faithful superintendence.
+
+I answer, that the men who justly feel these truths are rarely those who
+have much influence in public affairs. It is the poor abbe, whose little
+garden is sheltered by the mighty buttresses from the north wind, who
+knows the worth of the cathedral. It is the bustling mayor and the
+prosperous architect who determine its fate.
+
+I answer farther, by the statement of a simple fact. I have given many
+years, in many cities, to the study of Gothic architecture; and of all
+that I know, or knew, the entrance to the north transept of Rouen
+Cathedral was, on the whole, the most beautiful--beautiful, not only as
+an elaborate and faultless work of the finest time of Gothic art, but
+yet more beautiful in the partial, though not dangerous, decay which had
+touched its pinnacles with pensive coloring, and softened its severer
+lines with unexpected change and delicate fracture, like sweet breaks in
+a distant music. The upper part of it has been already restored to the
+white accuracies of novelty; the lower pinnacles, which flanked its
+approach, far more exquisite in their partial ruin than the loveliest
+remains of our English abbeys, have been entirely destroyed, and rebuilt
+in rough blocks, now in process of sculpture. This restoration, so far
+as it has gone, has been executed by peculiarly skillful workmen; it is
+an unusually favorable example of restoration, especially in the care
+which has been taken to preserve intact the exquisite, and hitherto
+almost uninjured sculptures which fill the quatrefoils of the tracery
+above the arch. But I happened myself to have made, five years ago,
+detailed drawings of the buttress decorations on the right and left of
+this tracery, which are part of the work that has been completely
+restored. And I found the restorations as inaccurate as they were
+unnecessary.
+
+265. If this is the case in a most favorable instance, in that of a
+well-known monument, highly esteemed by every antiquary in France, what,
+during the progress of the now almost universal repair, is likely to
+become of architecture which is unwatched and despised?
+
+Despised! and more than despised--even hated! It is a sad truth, that
+there is something in the solemn aspect of ancient architecture which,
+in rebuking frivolity and chastening gayety, has become at this time
+literally _repulsive_ to a large majority of the population of Europe.
+Examine the direction which is taken by all the influences of fortune
+and of fancy, wherever they concern themselves with art, and it will be
+found that the real, earnest effort of the upper classes of European
+society is to make every place in the world as much like the Champs
+Elysees of Paris as possible. Wherever the influence of that educated
+society is felt, the old buildings are relentlessly destroyed; vast
+hotels, like barracks, and rows of high, square-windowed
+dwelling-houses, thrust themselves forward to conceal the hated
+antiquities of the great cities of France and Italy. Gay promenades,
+with fountains and statues, prolong themselves along the quays once
+dedicated to commerce; ball-rooms and theaters rise upon the dust of
+desecrated chapels, and thrust into darkness the humility of domestic
+life. And when the formal street, in all its pride of perfumery and
+confectionery, has successfully consumed its way through wrecks of
+historical monuments, and consummated its symmetry in the ruin of all
+that once prompted a reflection, or pleaded for regard, the whitened
+city is praised for its splendor, and the exulting inhabitants for their
+patriotism--patriotism which consists in insulting their fathers with
+forgetfulness, and surrounding their children with temptation.
+
+266. I am far from intending my words to involve any disrespectful
+allusion to the very noble improvements in the city of Paris itself,
+lately carried out under the encouragement of the Emperor. Paris, in its
+own peculiar character of bright magnificence, had nothing to fear, and
+everything to gain, from the gorgeous prolongation of the Rue Rivoli.
+But I speak of the general influence of the rich travelers and
+proprietors of Europe on the cities which they pretend to admire, or
+endeavor to improve. I speak of the changes wrought during my own
+lifetime on the cities of Venice, Florence, Geneva, Lucerne, and chief
+of all on Rouen, a city altogether inestimable for its retention of
+mediaeval character in the infinitely varied streets in which one half of
+the existing and inhabited houses date from the 15th or early 16th
+century, and the only town left in France in which the effect of old
+French domestic architecture can yet be seen in its collective groups.
+But when I was there, this last spring, I heard that these noble old
+Norman houses are all, as speedily as may be, to be stripped of the dark
+slates which protected their timbers, and deliberately whitewashed over
+all their sculptures and ornaments, in order to bring the interior of
+the town into some conformity with the "handsome fronts" of the hotels
+and offices on the quay.
+
+Hotels and offices, and "handsome fronts" in general--they can be built
+in America or Australia--built at any moment, and in any height of
+splendor. But who shall give us back, when once destroyed, the
+habitations of the French chivalry and bourgeoisie in the days of the
+Field of the Cloth of Gold?
+
+267. It is strange that no one seems to think of this! What do men
+travel for, in this Europe of ours? Is it only to gamble with French
+dies--to drink coffee out of French porcelain--to dance to the beat of
+German drums, and sleep in the soft air of Italy? Are the ball-room, the
+billiard-room, and the Boulevard, the only attractions that win us into
+wandering, or tempt us to repose? And when the time is come, as come it
+will, and that shortly, when the parsimony--or lassitude--which, for the
+most part, are the only protectors of the remnants of elder time, shall
+be scattered by the advance of civilization--when all the monuments,
+preserved only because it was too costly to destroy them, shall have
+been crushed by the energies of the new world, will the proud nations of
+the twentieth century, looking round on the plains of Europe,
+disencumbered of their memorial marbles,--will those nations indeed
+stand up with no other feeling than one of triumph, freed from the
+paralysis of precedent and the entanglement of memory, to thank us, the
+fathers of progress, that no saddening shadows can any more trouble the
+enjoyments of the future,--no moments of reflection retard its
+activities; and that the new-born population of a world without a record
+and without a ruin may, in the fullness of ephemeral felicity, dispose
+itself to eat, and to drink, and to die?
+
+268. Is this verily the end at which we aim, and will the mission of the
+age have been then only accomplished, when the last castle has fallen
+from our rocks, the last cloisters faded from our valleys, the last
+streets, in which the dead have dwelt, been effaced from our cities, and
+regenerated society is left in luxurious possession of towns composed
+only of bright saloons, overlooking gay parterres? If this indeed be our
+end, yet why must it be so laboriously accomplished? Are there no new
+countries on the earth, as yet uncrowned by thorns of cathedral spires,
+untenanted by the consciousness of a past? Must this little Europe--this
+corner of our globe, gilded with the blood of old battles, and gray with
+the temples of old pieties--this narrow piece of the world's pavement,
+worn down by so many pilgrims' feet, be utterly swept and garnished for
+the masque of the Future? Is America not wide enough for the
+elasticities of our humanity? Asia not rich enough for its pride? or
+among the quiet meadowlands and solitary hills of the old land, is there
+not yet room enough for the spreadings of power, or the indulgences of
+magnificence, without founding all glory upon ruin, and prefacing all
+progress with obliteration?
+
+269. We must answer these questions speedily, or we answer them in vain.
+The peculiar character of the evil which is being wrought by this age is
+its utter irreparableness. Its newly formed schools of art, its
+extending galleries, and well-ordered museums will assuredly bear some
+fruit in time, and give once more to the popular mind the power to
+discern what is great, and the disposition to protect what is precious.
+But it will be too late. We shall wander through our palaces of
+crystal, gazing sadly on copies of pictures torn by cannon-shot, and on
+casts of sculpture dashed to pieces long ago. We shall gradually learn
+to distinguish originality and sincerity from the decrepitudes of
+imitation and palsies of repetition; but it will be only in hopelessness
+to recognize the truth, that architecture and painting can be "restored"
+when the dead can be raised,--and not till then.
+
+270. Something might yet be done, if it were but possible thoroughly to
+awaken and alarm the men whose studies of archaeology have enabled them
+to form an accurate judgment of the importance of the crisis. But it is
+one of the strange characters of the human mind, necessary indeed to its
+peace, but infinitely destructive of its power, that we never thoroughly
+feel the evils which are not actually set before our eyes. If, suddenly,
+in the midst of the enjoyments of the palate and lightnesses of heart of
+a London dinner-party, the walls of the chamber were parted, and through
+their gap, the nearest human beings who were famishing, and in misery,
+were borne into the midst of the company--feasting and fancy-free--if,
+pale with sickness, horrible in destitution, broken by despair, body by
+body, they were laid upon the soft carpet, one beside the chair of every
+guest, would only the crumbs of the dainties be cast to them--would only
+a passing glance, a passing thought be vouchsafed to them? Yet the
+actual facts, the real relations of each Dives and Lazarus, are not
+altered by the intervention of the house wall between the table and the
+sick-bed--by the few feet of ground (how few!) which are indeed all that
+separate the merriment from the misery.
+
+271. It is the same in the matters of which I have hitherto been
+speaking. If every one of us, who knows what food for the human heart
+there is in the great works of elder time, could indeed see with his own
+eyes their progressive ruin; if every earnest antiquarian, happy in his
+well-ordered library, and in the sense of having been useful in
+preserving an old stone or two out of his parish church, and an old coin
+or two out of a furrow in the next plowed field, could indeed behold,
+each morning as he awaked, the mightiest works of departed nations
+moldering to the ground in disregarded heaps; if he could always have in
+clear phantasm before his eyes the ignorant monk trampling on the
+manuscript, the village mason striking down the monument, the court
+painter daubing the despised and priceless masterpiece into freshness of
+fatuity, he would not always smile so complacently in the thoughts of
+the little learnings and petty preservations of his own immediate
+sphere. And if every man, who has the interest of Art and of History at
+heart, would at once devote himself earnestly--not to enrich his own
+collection--not even to enlighten his own neighbors or investigate his
+own parish-territory--but to far-sighted and _fore_-sighted endeavor in
+the great field of Europe, there is yet time to do much. An association
+might be formed, thoroughly organized so as to maintain active watchers
+and agents in every town of importance, who, in the first place, should
+furnish the society with a _perfect_ account of every monument of
+interest in its neighborhood, and then with a yearly or half-yearly
+report of the state of such monuments, and of the changes proposed to be
+made upon them; the society then furnishing funds, either to buy,
+freehold, such buildings or other works of untransferable art as at any
+time might be offered for sale, or to assist their proprietors, whether
+private individuals or public bodies, in the maintenance of such
+guardianship as was really necessary for their safety; and exerting
+itself, with all the influence which such an association would rapidly
+command, to prevent unwise restoration and unnecessary destruction.
+
+272. Such a society would of course be rewarded only by the
+consciousness of its usefulness. Its funds would have to be supplied, in
+pure self-denial, by its members, who would be required, so far as they
+assisted it, to give up the pleasure of purchasing prints or pictures
+for their own walls, that they might save pictures which in their
+lifetime they might never behold; they would have to forego the
+enlargement of their own estates, that they might buy, for a European
+property, ground on which their feet might never tread. But is it absurd
+to believe that men are capable of doing this? Is the love of art
+altogether a selfish principle in the heart? and are its emotions
+altogether incompatible with the exertions of self-denial or enjoyments
+of generosity?
+
+273. I make this appeal at the risk of incurring only contempt for my
+Utopianism. But I should forever reproach myself if I were prevented
+from making it by such a risk; and I pray those who may be disposed in
+any wise to favor it to remember that it must be answered at once or
+never. The next five years determine what is to be saved--what
+destroyed. The restorations have actually begun like cancers on every
+important piece of Gothic architecture in Christendom; the question is
+only how much can yet be saved. All projects, all pursuits, having
+reference to art, are at this moment of less importance than those which
+are simply protective. There is time enough for everything else. Time
+enough for teaching--time enough for criticising--time enough for
+inventing. But time little enough for saving. Hereafter we can create,
+but it is now only that we can preserve. By the exertion of great
+national powers, and under the guidance of enlightened monarchs, we may
+raise magnificent temples and gorgeous cities; we may furnish labor for
+the idle, and interest for the ignorant. But the power neither of
+emperors, nor queens, nor kingdoms, can ever print again upon the sands
+of time the effaced footsteps of departed generations, or gather
+together from the dust the stones which had been stamped with the spirit
+of our ancestors.
+
+
+THE STUDY OF ARCHITECTURE IN OUR SCHOOLS.[57]
+
+274. I suppose there is no man who, permitted to address, for the first
+time, the Institute of British Architects, would not feel himself
+abashed and restrained, doubtful of his claim to be heard by them, even
+if he attempted only to describe what had come under his personal
+observation, much more if on the occasion he thought it would be
+expected of him to touch upon any of the general principles of the art
+of architecture before its principal English masters.
+
+But if any more than another should feel thus abashed, it is certainly
+one who has first to ask their pardon for the petulance of boyish
+expressions of partial thought; for ungraceful advocacy of principles
+which needed no support from him, and discourteous blame of work of
+which he had never felt the difficulty.
+
+275. Yet, when I ask this pardon, gentlemen--and I do it sincerely and
+in shame--it is not as desiring to retract anything in the general tenor
+and scope of what I have hitherto tried to say. Permit me the pain, and
+the apparent impertinence, of speaking for a moment of my own past work;
+for it is necessary that what I am about to submit to you to-night
+should be spoken in no disadvantageous connection with that; and yet
+understood as spoken, in no discordance of purpose with that. Indeed
+there is much in old work of mine which I could wish to put out of mind.
+Reasonings, perhaps not in themselves false, but founded on
+insufficient data and imperfect experience--eager preferences, and
+dislikes, dependent on chance circumstances of association, and
+limitations of sphere of labor: but, while I would fain now, if I could,
+modify the applications, and chasten the extravagance of my writings,
+let me also say of them that they were the expression of a delight in
+the art of architecture which was too intense to be vitally deceived,
+and of an inquiry too honest and eager to be without some useful result;
+and I only wish I had now time, and strength and power of mind, to carry
+on, more worthily, the main endeavor of my early work. That main
+endeavor has been throughout to set forth the life of the individual
+human spirit as modifying the application of the formal laws of
+architecture, no less than of all other arts; and to show that the power
+and advance of this art, even in conditions of formal nobleness, were
+dependent on its just association with sculpture as a means of
+expressing the beauty of natural forms: and I the more boldly ask your
+permission to insist somewhat on this main meaning of my past work,
+because there are many buildings now rising in the streets of London, as
+in other cities of England, which appear to be designed in accordance
+with this principle, and which are, I believe, more offensive to all who
+thoughtfully concur with me in accepting the principle of Naturalism
+than they are to the classical architect to whose modes of design they
+are visibly antagonistic. These buildings, in which the mere cast of a
+flower, or the realization of a vulgar face, carved without pleasure by
+a workman who is only endeavoring to attract attention by novelty, and
+then fastened on, or appearing to be fastened, as chance may dictate, to
+an arch, or a pillar, or a wall, hold such relation to nobly
+naturalistic architecture as common sign-painter's furniture landscapes
+do to painting, or commonest wax-work to Greek sculpture; and the
+feelings with which true naturalists regard such buildings of this class
+are, as nearly as might be, what a painter would experience, if, having
+contended earnestly against conventional schools, and having asserted
+that Greek vase-painting and Egyptian wall-painting, and Mediaeval
+glass-painting, though beautiful, all, in their place and way, were yet
+subordinate arts, and culminated only in perfectly naturalistic work
+such as Raphael's in fresco, and Titian's on canvas;--if, I say, a
+painter, fixed in such faith in an entire, intellectual and manly truth,
+and maintaining that an Egyptian profile of a head, however decoratively
+applicable, was only noble for such human truth as it contained, and was
+imperfect and ignoble beside a work of Titian's, were shown, by his
+antagonist, the colored daguerreotype of a human body in its nakedness,
+and told that it was art such as that which he really advocated, and to
+such art that his principles, if carried out, would finally lead.
+
+276. And because this question lies at the very root of the organization
+of the system of instruction for our youth, I venture boldly to express
+the surprise and regret with which I see our schools still agitated by
+assertions of the opposition of Naturalism to Invention, and to the
+higher conditions of art. Even in this very room I believe there has
+lately been question whether a sculptor should look at a real living
+creature of which he had to carve the image. I would answer in one
+sense,--no; that is to say, he ought to carve no living creature while
+he still needs to look at it. If we do not know what a human body is
+like, we certainly had better look, and look often, at it, before we
+carve it; but if we already know the human likeness so well that we can
+carve it by light of memory, we shall not need to ask whether we ought
+now to look at it or not; and what is true of man is true of all other
+creatures and organisms--of bird, and beast, and leaf. No assertion is
+more at variance with the laws of classical as well as of subsequent art
+than the common one that species should not be distinguished in great
+design. We might as well say that we ought to carve a man so as not to
+know him from an ape, as that we should carve a lily so as not to know
+it from a thistle. It is difficult for me to conceive how this can be
+asserted in the presence of any remains either of great Greek or Italian
+art. A Greek looked at a cockle-shell or a cuttlefish as carefully as
+he looked at an Olympic conqueror. The eagle of Elis, the lion of Velia,
+the horse of Syracuse, the bull of Thurii, the dolphin of Tarentum, the
+crab of Agrigentum, and the crawfish of Catana, are studied as closely,
+every one of them, as the Juno of Argos, or Apollo of Clazomenae.
+Idealism, so far from being contrary to special truth, is the very
+abstraction of speciality from everything else. It is the earnest
+statement of the characters which make man man, and cockle cockle, and
+flesh flesh, and fish fish. Feeble thinkers, indeed, always suppose that
+distinction of kind involves meanness of style; but the meanness is in
+the treatment, not in the distinction. There is a noble way of carving a
+man, and a mean one; and there is a noble way of carving a beetle, and a
+mean one; and a great sculptor carves his scarabaeus grandly, as he
+carves his king, while a mean sculptor makes vermin of both. And it is a
+sorrowful truth, yet a sublime one, that this greatness of treatment
+cannot be taught by talking about it. No, nor even by enforced imitative
+practice of it. Men treat their subjects nobly only when they themselves
+become noble; not till then. And that elevation of their own nature is
+assuredly not to be effected by a course of drawing from models, however
+well chosen, or of listening to lectures, however well intended.
+
+Art, national or individual, is the result of a long course of previous
+life and training; a necessary result, if that life has been loyal, and
+an impossible one, if it has been base. Let a nation be healthful,
+happy, pure in its enjoyments, brave in its acts, and broad in its
+affections, and its art will spring round and within it as freely as the
+foam from a fountain; but let the spring of its life be impure, and its
+course polluted, and you will not get the bright spray by treatises on
+the mathematical structure of bubbles.
+
+277. And I am to-night the more restrained in addressing you, because,
+gentlemen--I tell you honestly--I am weary of all writing and speaking
+about art, and most of my own. No good is to be reached that way. The
+last fifty years have, in every civilized country of Europe, produced
+more brilliant thought, and more subtle reasoning about art than the
+five thousand before them, and what has it all come to? Do not let it be
+thought that I am insensible to the high merits of much of our modern
+work. It cannot be for a moment supposed that in speaking of the
+inefficient expression of the doctrines which writers on art have tried
+to enforce, I was thinking of such Gothic as has been designed and built
+by Mr. Scott, Mr. Butterfield, Mr. Street, Mr. Waterhouse, Mr. Godwin,
+or my dead friend, Mr. Woodward. Their work has been original and
+independent. So far as it is good, it has been founded on principles
+learned not from books, but by study of the monuments of the great
+schools, developed by national grandeur, not by philosophical
+speculation. But I am entirely assured that those who have done best
+among us are the least satisfied with what they have done, and will
+admit a sorrowful concurrence in my belief that the spirit, or rather, I
+should say, the dispirit, of the age, is heavily against them; that all
+the ingenious writing or thinking which is so rife amongst us has failed
+to educate a public capable of taking true pleasure in any kind of art,
+and that the best designers never satisfy their own requirements of
+themselves, unless by vainly addressing another temper of mind, and
+providing for another manner of life, than ours. All lovely architecture
+was designed for cities in cloudless air; for cities in which piazzas
+and gardens opened in bright populousness and peace; cities built that
+men might live happily in them, and take delight daily in each other's
+presence and powers. But our cities, built in black air which, by its
+accumulated foulness, first renders all ornament invisible in distance,
+and then chokes its interstices with soot; cities which are mere crowded
+masses of store, and warehouse, and counter, and are therefore to the
+rest of the world what the larder and cellar are to a private house;
+cities in which the object of men is not life, but labor; and in which
+all chief magnitude of edifice is to inclose machinery; cities in which
+the streets are not the avenues for the passing and procession of a
+happy people, but the drains for the discharge of a tormented mob, in
+which the only object in reaching any spot is to be transferred to
+another; in which existence becomes mere transition, and every creature
+is only one atom in a drift of human dust, and current of interchanging
+particles, circulating here by tunnels underground, and there by tubes
+in the air; for a city, or cities, such as this no architecture is
+possible--nay, no desire of it is possible to their inhabitants.
+
+278. One of the most singular proofs of the vanity of all hope that
+conditions of art may be combined with the occupations of such a city,
+has been given lately in the design of the new iron bridge over the
+Thames at Blackfriars. Distinct attempt has been there made to obtain
+architectural effect on a grand scale. Nor was there anything in the
+nature of the work to prevent such an effort being successful. It is not
+edifices, being of iron, or of glass, or thrown into new forms, demanded
+by new purposes, which need hinder its being beautiful. But it is the
+absence of all desire of beauty, of all joy in fancy, and of all freedom
+in thought. If a Greek, or Egyptian, or Gothic architect had been
+required to design such a bridge, he would have looked instantly at the
+main conditions of its structure, and dwelt on them with the delight of
+imagination. He would have seen that the main thing to be done was to
+hold a horizontal group of iron rods steadily and straight over stone
+piers. Then he would have said to himself (or felt without saying), "It
+is this holding,--this grasp,--this securing tenor of a thing which
+might be shaken, so that it cannot be shaken, on which I have to
+insist." And he would have put some life into those iron tenons. As a
+Greek put human life into his pillars and produced the caryatid; and an
+Egyptian lotus life into his pillars and produced the lily capital: so
+here, either of them would have put some gigantic or some angelic life
+into those colossal sockets. He would perhaps have put vast winged
+statues of bronze, folding their wings, and grasping the iron rails with
+their hands; or monstrous eagles, or serpents holding with claw or
+coil, or strong four-footed animals couchant, holding with the paw, or
+in fierce action, holding with teeth. Thousands of grotesque or of
+lovely thoughts would have risen before him, and the bronze forms,
+animal or human, would have signified, either in symbol or in legend,
+whatever might be gracefully told respecting the purposes of the work
+and the districts to which it conducted. Whereas, now, the entire
+invention of the designer seems to have exhausted itself in exaggerating
+to an enormous size a weak form of iron nut, and in conveying the
+information upon it, in large letters, that it belongs to the London,
+Chatham, and Dover Railway Company. I believe then, gentlemen, that if
+there were any life in the national mind in such respects, it would be
+shown in these its most energetic and costly works. But that there is no
+such life, nothing but a galvanic restlessness and covetousness, with
+which it is for the present vain to strive; and in the midst of which,
+tormented at once by its activities and its apathies, having their work
+continually thrust aside and dishonored, always seen to disadvantage,
+and overtopped by huge masses, discordant and destructive, even the best
+architects must be unable to do justice to their own powers.
+
+279. But, gentlemen, while thus the mechanisms of the age prevent even
+the wisest and best of its artists from producing entirely good work,
+may we not reflect with consternation what a marvelous ability the
+luxury of the age, and the very advantages of education, confer on the
+unwise and ignoble for the production of attractively and infectiously
+_bad_ work? I do not think that this adverse influence, necessarily
+affecting all conditions of so-called civilization, has been ever enough
+considered. It is impossible to calculate the power of the false workman
+in an advanced period of national life, nor the temptation to all
+workmen, to _become_ false.
+
+280. First, there is the irresistible appeal to vanity. There is hardly
+any temptation of the kind (there cannot be) while the arts are in
+progress. The best men must then always be ashamed of themselves; they
+never can be satisfied with their work absolutely, but only as it is
+progressive. Take, for instance, any archaic head intended to be
+beautiful; say, the Attic Athena, or the early Arethusa of Syracuse. In
+that, and in all archaic work of promise, there is much that is
+inefficient, much that to us appears ridiculous--but nothing sensual,
+nothing vain, nothing spurious or imitative. It is a child's work, a
+childish nation's work, but not a fool's work. You find in children the
+same tolerance of ugliness, the same eager and innocent delight in their
+own work for the moment, however feeble; but next day it is thrown
+aside, and something better is done. Now, in this careless play, a child
+or a childish nation differs inherently from a foolish educated person,
+or a nation advanced in pseudo-civilization. The educated person has
+seen all kinds of beautiful things, of which he would fain do the
+like--not to add to their number--but for his own vanity, that he also
+may be called an artist. Here is at once a singular and fatal
+difference. The childish nation sees nothing in its own past work to
+satisfy itself. It is pleased at having done this, but wants something
+better; it is struggling forward always to reach this better, this ideal
+conception. It wants more beauty to look at, it wants more subject to
+feel. It calls out to all its artists--stretching its hands to them as a
+little child does--"Oh, if you would but tell me another story,"--"Oh,
+if I might but have a doll with bluer eyes." That's the right temper to
+work in, and to get work done for you in. But the vain, aged,
+highly-educated nation is satiated with beautiful things--it has myriads
+more than it can look at; it has fallen into a habit of inattention; it
+passes weary and jaded through galleries which contain the best fruit of
+a thousand years of human travail; it gapes and shrugs over them, and
+pushes its way past them to the door.
+
+281. But there is one feeling that is always distinct; however jaded and
+languid we may be in all other pleasures, we are never languid in
+vanity, and we would still paint and carve for fame. What other motive
+have the nations of Europe to-day? If they wanted art for art's sake
+they would take care of what they have already got. But at this instant
+the two noblest pictures in Venice are lying rolled up in outhouses, and
+the noblest portrait of Titian in existence is hung forty feet from the
+ground. We have absolutely no motive but vanity and the love of
+money--no others, as nations, than these, whatever we may have as
+individuals. And as the thirst of vanity thus increases, so the
+temptation to it. There was no fame of artists in these archaic days.
+Every year, every hour, saw someone rise to surpass what had been done
+before. And there was always better work to be done, but never any
+credit to be got by it. The artist lived in an atmosphere of perpetual,
+wholesome, inevitable eclipse. Do as well as you choose to-day,--make
+the whole Borgo dance with delight, they would dance to a better man's
+pipe to-morrow. _Credette Cimabue nella pittura, tener lo campo, et ora
+ha Giotto il grido._ This was the fate, the necessary fate, even of the
+strongest. They could only hope to be remembered as links in an endless
+chain. For the weaker men it was no use even to put their name on their
+works. They did not. If they could not work for joy and for love, and
+take their part simply in the choir of human toil, they might throw up
+their tools. But now it is far otherwise--now, the best having been
+done--and for a couple of hundred years, the best of us being confessed
+to have come short of it, everybody thinks that he may be the great man
+once again, and this is certain, that whatever in art is done for
+display, is invariably wrong.
+
+282. But, secondly, consider the attractive power of false art,
+completed, as compared with imperfect art advancing to completion.
+Archaic work, so far as faultful, is repulsive, but advanced work is, in
+all its faults, attractive. The moment that art has reached the point at
+which it becomes sensitively and delicately imitative, it appeals to a
+new audience. From that instant it addresses the sensualist and the
+idler. Its deceptions, its successes, its subtleties, become interesting
+to every condition of folly, of frivolity, and of vice. And this new
+audience brings to bear upon the art in which its foolish and wicked
+interest has been unhappily awakened, the full power of its riches: the
+largest bribes of gold as well as of praise are offered to the artist
+who will betray his art, until at last, from the sculpture of Phidias
+and fresco of Luini, it sinks into the cabinet ivory and the picture
+kept under lock and key. Between these highest and lowest types, there
+is a vast mass of merely imitative and delicately sensual
+sculpture;--veiled nymphs--chained slaves--soft goddesses seen by
+roselight through suspended curtains--drawing room portraits and
+domesticities, and such like, in which the interest is either merely
+personal and selfish, or dramatic and sensational; in either case,
+destructive of the power of the public to sympathize with the aims of
+great architects.
+
+283. Gentlemen,--I am no Puritan, and have never praised or advocated
+puritanical art. The two pictures which I would last part with out of
+our National Gallery, if there were question of parting with any, would
+be Titian's Bacchus and Correggio's Venus. But the noble naturalism of
+these was the fruit of ages of previous courage, continence, and
+religion--it was the fullness of passion in the life of a Britomart. But
+the mid-age and old age of nations is not like the mid-age or old age of
+noble women. National decrepitude must be criminal. National death can
+only be by disease, and yet it is almost impossible, out of the history
+of the art of nations, to elicit the true conditions relating to its
+decline in any demonstrable manner. The history of Italian art is that
+of a struggle between superstition and naturalism on one side, between
+continence and sensuality on another. So far as naturalism prevailed
+over superstition, there is always progress; so far as sensuality over
+chastity, death. And the two contests are simultaneous. It is impossible
+to distinguish one victory from the other. Observe, however, I say
+victory over superstition, not over religion. Let me carefully define
+the difference. Superstition, in all times and among all nations, is the
+fear of a spirit whose passions are those of a man, whose acts are the
+acts of a man; who is present in some places, not in others; who makes
+some places holy and not others; who is kind to one person, unkind to
+another; who is pleased or angry according to the degree of attention
+you pay to him, or praise you refuse to him; who is hostile generally to
+human pleasure, but may be bribed by sacrifice of a part of that
+pleasure into permitting the rest. This, whatever form of faith it
+colors, is the essence of superstition. And religion is the belief in a
+Spirit whose mercies are over all His works--who is kind even to the
+unthankful and the evil; who is everywhere present, and therefore is in
+no place to be sought, and in no place to be evaded; to whom all
+creatures, times, and things are everlastingly holy, and who claims--not
+tithes of wealth, nor sevenths of days--but all the wealth that we have,
+and all the days that we live, and all the beings that we are, but who
+claims that totality because He delights only in the delight of His
+creatures; and because, therefore, the one duty that they owe to Him,
+and the only service they can render Him, is to be happy. A Spirit,
+therefore, whose eternal benevolence cannot be angered, cannot be
+appeased; whose laws are everlasting and inexorable, so that heaven and
+earth must indeed pass away if one jot of them failed: laws which attach
+to every wrong and error a measured, inevitable penalty; to every
+rightness and prudence, an assured reward; penalty, of which the
+remittance cannot be purchased; and reward, of which the promise cannot
+be broken.
+
+284. And thus, in the history of art, we ought continually to endeavor
+to distinguish (while, except in broadest lights, it is impossible to
+distinguish) the work of religion from that of superstition, and the
+work of reason from that of infidelity. Religion devotes the artist,
+hand and mind, to the service of the gods; superstition makes him the
+slave of ecclesiastical pride, or forbids his work altogether, in terror
+or disdain. Religion perfects the form of the divine statue,
+superstition distorts it into ghastly grotesque. Religion contemplates
+the gods as the lords of healing and life, surrounds them with glory of
+affectionate service, and festivity of pure human beauty. Superstition
+contemplates its idols as lords of death, appeases them with blood, and
+vows itself to them in torture and solitude. Religion proselytes by
+love, superstition by war; religion teaches by example, superstition by
+persecution. Religion gave granite shrine to the Egyptian, golden temple
+to the Jew, sculptured corridor to the Greek, pillared aisle and
+frescoed wall to the Christian. Superstition made idols of the splendors
+by which Religion had spoken: reverenced pictures and stones, instead of
+truths; letters and laws, instead of acts, and forever, in various
+madness of fantastic desolation, kneels in the temple while it crucifies
+the Christ.
+
+285. On the other hand, to reason resisting superstition, we owe the
+entire compass of modern energies and sciences; the healthy laws of
+life, and the possibilities of future progress. But to infidelity
+resisting religion (or which is often enough the case, taking the mask
+of it), we owe sensuality, cruelty, and war, insolence and avarice,
+modern political economy, life by conservation of forces, and salvation
+by every man's looking after his own interest; and, generally,
+whatsoever of guilt, and folly, and death, there is abroad among us. And
+of the two, a thousand-fold rather let us retain some color of
+superstition, so that we may keep also some strength of religion, than
+comfort ourselves with color of reason for the desolation of
+godlessness. I would say to every youth who entered our schools--Be a
+Mahometan, a Diana-worshiper, a Fire-worshiper, Root-worshiper, if you
+will; but at least be so much a man as to know what worship means. I had
+rather, a million-fold rather, see you one of those "quibus haec
+nascuntur in hortis numina," than one of those "quibus haec _non_
+nascuntur in cordibus lumina"; and who are, by everlasting orphanage,
+divided from the Father of Spirits, who is also the Father of lights,
+from whom cometh every good and perfect gift.
+
+286. "So much of man," I say, feeling profoundly that all right exercise
+of any human gift, so descended from the Giver of good, depends on the
+primary formation of the character of true manliness in the youth--that
+is to say, of a majestic, grave, and deliberate strength. How strange
+the words sound; how little does it seem possible to conceive of
+majesty, and gravity, and deliberation in the daily track of modern
+life. Yet, gentlemen, we need not hope that our work will be majestic if
+there is no majesty in ourselves. The word "manly" has come to mean
+practically, among us, a schoolboy's character, not a man's. We are, at
+our best, thoughtlessly impetuous, fond of adventure and excitement;
+curious in knowledge for its novelty, not for its system and results;
+faithful and affectionate to those among whom we are by chance cast, but
+gently and calmly insolent to strangers: we are stupidly conscientious,
+and instinctively brave, and always ready to cast away the lives we take
+no pains to make valuable, in causes of which we have never ascertained
+the justice. This is our highest type--notable peculiarly among nations
+for its gentleness, together with its courage; but in lower conditions
+it is especially liable to degradation by its love of jest and of vulgar
+sensation. It is against this fatal tendency to vile play that we have
+chiefly to contend. It is the spirit of Milton's Comus; bestial itself,
+but having power to arrest and paralyze all who come within its
+influence, even pure creatures sitting helpless, mocked by it on their
+marble thrones. It is incompatible, not only with all greatness of
+character, but with all true gladness of heart, and it develops itself
+in nations in proportion to their degradation, connected with a peculiar
+gloom and a singular tendency to play with death, which is a morbid
+reaction from the morbid excess.
+
+287. A book has lately been published on the Mythology of the Rhine,
+with illustrations by Gustave Dore. The Rhine god is represented in the
+vignette title-page with a pipe in one hand and a pot of beer in the
+other. You cannot have a more complete type of the tendency which is
+chiefly to be dreaded in this age than in this conception, as opposed to
+any possibility of representation of a river-god, however playful, in
+the mind of a Greek painter. The example is the more notable because
+Gustave Dore's is not a common mind, and, if born in any other epoch, he
+would probably have done valuable (though never first rate) work; but by
+glancing (it will be impossible for you to do more than glance) at his
+illustrations of Balzac's "Contes Drolatiques," you will see further how
+this "drolatique," or semi-comic mask is, in the truth of it, the mask
+of a skull, and how the tendency to burlesque jest is both in France and
+England only an effervescence from the _cloaca maxima_ of the putrid
+instincts which fasten themselves on national sin, and are in the midst
+of the luxury of European capitals, what Dante meant when he wrote "quel
+mi sveglio col puzzo," of the body of the Wealth-Siren; the mocking
+levity and mocking gloom being equally signs of the death of the soul;
+just as, contrariwise, a passionate seriousness and passionate
+joyfulness are signs of its full life in works such as those of
+Angelico, Luini, Ghiberti, or La Robbia.
+
+It is to recover this stern seriousness, this pure and thrilling joy,
+together with perpetual sense of spiritual presence, that all true
+education of youth must now be directed. This seriousness, this passion,
+this universal human religion, are the first principles, the true roots
+of all art, as they are of all doing, of all being. Get this _vis viva_
+first and all great work will follow. Lose it, and your schools of art
+will stand among other living schools as the frozen corpses stand by the
+winding stair of the St. Michael's Convent of Mont Cenis, holding their
+hands stretched out under their shrouds, as if beseeching the passer by
+to look upon the wasting of their death.
+
+288. And all the higher branches of technical teaching are vain without
+this; nay are in some sort vain altogether, for they are superseded by
+this. You may teach imitation, because the meanest man can imitate; but
+you can neither teach idealism nor composition, because only a great man
+can choose, conceive, or compose; and he does all these necessarily, and
+because of his nature. His greatness is in his choice of things, in his
+analysis of them, and his combining powers involve the totality of his
+knowledge in life. His methods of observation and abstraction are
+essential habits of his thought, conditions of his being. If he looks at
+a human form he recognizes the signs of nobility in it, and loves
+them--hates whatever is diseased, frightful, sinful, or _designant_ of
+decay. All ugliness, and abortion, and fading away; all signs of vice
+and foulness, he turns away from, as inherently diabolic and horrible;
+all signs of unconquered emotion he regrets, as weaknesses. He looks
+only for the calm purity of the human creature, in living conquests of
+its passions and of fate. That is idealism; but you cannot teach anyone
+else that preference. Take a man who likes to see and paint the
+gambler's rage; the hedge-ruffian's enjoyment; the debauched soldier's
+strife; the vicious woman's degradation;--take a man fed on the dusty
+picturesque of rags and guilt; talk to him of principles of beauty! make
+him draw what you will, how you will, he will leave the stain of himself
+on whatever he touches. You had better go lecture to a snail, and tell
+it to leave no slime behind it. Try to make a mean man compose; you will
+find nothing in his thoughts consecutive or proportioned--nothing
+consistent in his sight--nothing in his fancy. He cannot comprehend two
+things in relation at once--how much less twenty! How much less all!
+Everything is uppermost with him in its turn, and each as large as the
+rest; but Titian or Veronese compose as tranquilly as they would
+speak--inevitably. The thing comes to them so--they see it so--rightly,
+and in harmony: they will not talk to you of composition, hardly even
+understanding how lower people see things otherwise, but knowing that if
+they _do_ see otherwise, there is for them the end there, talk as you
+will.
+
+289. I had intended, in conclusion, gentlemen, to incur such blame of
+presumption as might be involved in offering some hints for present
+practical methods in architectural schools, but here again I am checked,
+as I have been throughout, by a sense of the uselessness of all minor
+means, and helps, without the establishment of a true and broad
+educational system. My wish would be to see the profession of the
+architect united, not with that of the engineer, but of the sculptor. I
+think there should be a separate school and university course for
+engineers, in which the principal branches of study connected with that
+of practical building should be the physical and exact sciences, and
+honors should be taken in mathematics; but I think there should be
+another school and university course for the sculptor and architect, in
+which literature and philosophy should be the associated branches of
+study, and honors should be taken _in literis humanioribus_; and I think
+a young architect's examination for his degree (for mere pass), should
+be much stricter than that of youths intending to enter other
+professions. The quantity of scholarship necessary for the efficiency of
+a country clergyman is not great. So that he be modest and kindly, the
+main truths he has to teach may be learned better in his heart than in
+books, and taught in very simple English. The best physicians I have
+known spent very little time in their libraries; and though my lawyer
+sometimes chats with me over a Greek coin, I think he regards the time
+so spent in the light rather of concession to my idleness than as
+helpful to his professional labors.
+
+But there is no task undertaken by a true architect of which the
+honorable fulfillment will not require a range of knowledge and habitual
+feeling only attainable by advanced scholarship.
+
+290. Since, however, such expansion of system is, at present, beyond
+hope, the best we can do is to render the studies undertaken in our
+schools thoughtful, reverent, and refined, according to our power.
+Especially, it should be our aim to prevent the minds of the students
+from being distracted by models of an unworthy or mixed character. A
+museum is one thing--a school another; and I am persuaded that as the
+efficiency of a school of literature depends on the mastering a few good
+books, so the efficiency of a school of art will depend on the
+understanding a few good models. And so strongly do I feel this that I
+would, for my own part, at once consent to sacrifice my personal
+predilections in art, and to vote for the exclusion of all Gothic or
+Mediaeval models whatsoever, if by this sacrifice I could obtain also the
+exclusion of Byzantine, Indian, Renaissance-French, and other more or
+less attractive but barbarous work; and thus concentrate the mind of the
+student wholly upon the study of natural form, and upon its treatment by
+the sculptors and metal workers of Greece, Ionia, Sicily, and Magna
+Graecia, between 500 and 350 B.C. But I should hope that exclusiveness
+need not be carried quite so far. I think Donatello, Mino of Fiesole,
+the Robbias, Ghiberti, Verrocchio, and Michael Angelo, should be
+adequately represented in our schools--together with the Greeks--and
+that a few carefully chosen examples of the floral sculpture of the
+North in the thirteenth century should be added, with especial view to
+display the treatment of naturalistic ornament in subtle connection with
+constructive requirements; and in the course of study pursued with
+reference to these models, as of admitted perfection, I should endeavor
+first to make the student thoroughly acquainted with the natural forms
+and characters of the objects he had to treat, and then to exercise him
+in the abstraction of these forms, and the suggestion of these
+characters, under due sculptural limitation. He should first be taught
+to draw largely and simply; then he should make quick and firm sketches
+of flowers, animals, drapery, and figures, from nature, in the simplest
+terms of line, and light and shade; always being taught to look at the
+organic, actions and masses, not at the textures or accidental effects
+of shade; meantime his sentiment respecting all these things should be
+cultivated by close and constant inquiry into their mythological
+significance and associated traditions; then, knowing the things and
+creatures thoroughly, and regarding them through an atmosphere of
+enchanted memory, he should be shown how the facts he has taken so long
+to learn are summed by a great sculptor in a few touches; how those
+touches are invariably arranged in musical and decorative relations; how
+every detail unnecessary for his purpose is refused; how those
+necessary for his purpose are insisted upon, or even exaggerated, or
+represented by singular artifice, when literal representation is
+impossible; and how all this is done under the instinct and passion of
+an inner commanding spirit which it is indeed impossible to imitate, but
+possible, perhaps, to share.
+
+291. Perhaps! Pardon me that I speak despondingly. For my own part, I
+feel the force of mechanism and the fury of avaricious commerce to be at
+present so irresistible, that I have seceded from the study not only of
+architecture, but nearly of all art; and have given myself, as I would
+in a besieged city, to seek the best modes of getting bread and water
+for its multitudes, there remaining no question, it seems, to me, of
+other than such grave business for the time. But there is, at least,
+this ground for courage, if not for hope: As the evil spirits of avarice
+and luxury are directly contrary to art, so, also, art is directly
+contrary to them; and according to its force, expulsive of them and
+medicinal against them; so that the establishment of such schools as I
+have ventured to describe--whatever their immediate success or ill
+success in the teaching of art--would yet be the directest method of
+resistance to those conditions of evil among which our youth are cast at
+the most critical period of their lives. We may not be able to produce
+architecture, but, at the least, we shall resist vice. I do not know if
+it has been observed that while Dante rightly connects architecture, as
+the most permanent expression of the pride of humanity, whether just or
+unjust, with the first cornice of Purgatory, he indicates its noble
+function by engraving upon it, in perfect sculpture, the stories which
+rebuke the errors and purify the purposes of noblest souls. In the
+fulfillment of such function, literally and practically, here among men,
+is the only real use of pride of noble architecture, and on its
+acceptance or surrender of that function it depends whether, in future,
+the cities of England melt into a ruin more confused and ghastly than
+ever storm wasted or wolf inhabited, or purge and exalt themselves into
+true habitations of men, whose walls shall be Safety, and whose gates
+shall be Praise.
+
+NOTE.--In the course of the discussion which followed this paper the
+meeting was addressed by Prof. Donaldson, who alluded to the
+architectural improvements in France under the Third Napoleon, by Mr.
+George Edmund Street, by Prof. Kerr, Mr. Digby Wyatt, and others. The
+President then proposed a vote of thanks to Mr. Ruskin, who, in
+acknowledging the high compliment paid him, said he would detain the
+meeting but a few minutes, but he felt he ought to make some attempt to
+explain what he had inefficiently stated in his paper; and there was
+hardly anything said in the discussion in which he did not concur: the
+supposed differences of opinion were either because he had ill-expressed
+himself, or because of things left unsaid. In the first place he was
+surprised to hear dissent from Professor Donaldson while he expressed
+his admiration of some of the changes which had been developed in modern
+architecture. There were two conditions of architecture adapted for
+different climates; one with narrow streets, calculated for shade;
+another for broad avenues beneath bright skies; but both conditions had
+their beautiful effects. He sympathized with the admirers of Italy, and
+he was delighted with Genoa. He had been delighted also by the view of
+the long vistas from the Tuileries. Mr. Street had showed that he had
+not sufficiently dwelt on the distinction between near and distant
+carving--between carving and sculpture. He (Mr. Ruskin) could allow of
+no distinction. Sculpture which was to be viewed at a height of 500 feet
+above the eye might be executed with a few touches of the chisel;
+opposed to that there was the exquisite finish which was the perfection
+of sculpture as displayed in the Greek statues, after a full knowledge
+of the whole nature of the object portrayed; both styles were admirable
+in their true application--both were "sculpture"--perfect according to
+their places and requirements. The attack of Professor Kerr he regarded
+as in play, and in that spirit he would reply to him that he was afraid
+a practical association with bricks and mortar would hardly produce the
+effects upon him which had been suggested, for having of late in his
+residence experienced the transition of large extents of ground into
+bricks and mortar, it had had no effect in changing his views; and when
+he said he was tired of writing upon art, it was not that he was ashamed
+of what he had written, but that he was tired of writing in vain, and of
+knocking his head, thick as it might be, against a wall. There was
+another point which he would answer very gravely. It was referred to by
+Mr. Digby Wyatt, and was the one point he had mainly at heart all
+through--viz., that religion and high morality were at the root of all
+great art in all great times. The instances referred to by Mr. Digby
+Wyatt did not counteract that proposition. Modern and ancient forms of
+life might be different, nor could all men be judged by formal canons,
+but a true human heart was in the breast of every really great artist.
+He had the greatest detestation of anything approaching to cant in
+respect of art; but, after long investigation of the historical
+evidence, as well as of the metaphysical laws bearing on this question,
+he was absolutely certain that a high moral and religious training was
+the only way to get good fruits from our youth; make them good men
+first, and only so, if at all, they would become good artists. With
+regard to the points mooted respecting the practical and poetical uses
+of architecture, he thought they did not sufficiently define their
+terms; they spoke of poetry as rhyme. He thanked the President for his
+definition to-night, and he was sure he would concur with him that
+poetry meant as its derivation implied--"the _doing_." What was rightly
+done was done forever, and that which was only a crude work for the time
+was not poetry; poetry was only that which would recreate or remake the
+human soul. In that sense poetical architecture was separated from all
+utilitarian work. He had said long ago men could not decorate their
+shops and counters; they could decorate only where they lived in peace
+and rest--where they existed to be happy. There ornament would find use,
+and there their "doing" would be permanent. In other cases they wasted
+their money if they attempted to make utilitarian work ornamental. He
+might be wrong in that principle, but he had always asserted it, and had
+seen no reason in recent works for any modification of it. He thanked
+the meeting sincerely for the honor they had conferred upon him by their
+invitation to address them that evening, and for the indulgence with
+which they had heard him.--ED.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[52] pamphlet, the full title of which was "The Opening of the Crystal
+Palace Considered in some of its Relations to the Progress of Art," by
+John Ruskin, M.A. London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1854.--ED.
+
+[53] But see now _Aratra Pentelici_, Sec. 53.--ED.
+
+[54] See the _Times_ of Monday, June 12th.
+
+[55] M. l'Abbe Bulteau, Description de la Cathedral de Chartres (8vo,
+Paris, Sagnier et Bray, 1850), p. 98, _note_.
+
+[56] See _Arrows of the Chace_.
+
+[57] This paper was read by Mr. Ruskin at the ordinary meeting of the
+Royal Institute of British Architects, May 15, 1865, and was afterwards
+published in the Sessional Papers of the Institute, 1864-5, Part III.,
+No. 2, pp. 139-147. Its full title (as there appears) was "An Inquiry
+into some of the conditions at present affecting the Study of
+Architecture in our Schools."--ED.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+ART.
+
+IV.
+
+INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
+
+
+
+CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL OF ART.
+
+(_Pamphlet, 1858._)
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+INAUGURAL ADDRESS[58]
+
+DELIVERED AT THE
+
+CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL OF ART,
+
+OCTOBER 29TH, 1858.
+
+
+1. I suppose the persons interested in establishing a School of Art for
+workmen may in the main be divided into two classes, namely, first,
+those who chiefly desire to make the men themselves happier, wiser, and
+better; and secondly, those who desire to enable them to produce better
+and more valuable work. These two objects may, of course, be kept both
+in view at the same time; nevertheless, there is a wide difference in
+the spirit with which we shall approach our task, according to the
+motive of these two which weighs most with us--a difference great enough
+to divide, as I have said, the promoters of any such scheme into two
+distinct classes; one philanthropic in the gist of its aim, and the
+other commercial in the gist of its aim; one desiring the workman to be
+better informed chiefly for his own sake, and the other chiefly that he
+may be enabled to produce for us commodities precious in themselves,
+and which shall successfully compete with those of other countries.
+
+2. And this separation in motives must lead also to a distinction in the
+machinery of the work. The philanthropists address themselves, not to
+the artisan merely, but to the laborer in general, desiring in any
+possible way to refine the habits or increase the happiness of our whole
+working population, by giving them new recreations or new thoughts: and
+the principles of Art-Education adopted in a school which has this wide
+but somewhat indeterminate aim, are, or should be, very different from
+those adopted in a school meant for the special instruction of the
+artisan in his own business. I do not think this distinction is yet
+firmly enough fixed in our minds, or calculated upon in our plans of
+operation. We have hitherto acted, it seems to me, under a vague
+impression that the arts of drawing and painting might be, up to a
+certain point, taught in a general way to everyone, and would do
+everyone equal good; and that each class of operatives might afterwards
+bring this general knowledge into use in their own trade, according to
+its requirements. Now, that is not so. A wood-carver needs for his
+business to learn drawing in quite a different way from a china-painter,
+and a jeweler from a worker in iron. They must be led to study quite
+different characters in the natural forms they introduce in their
+various manufacture. It is no use to teach an iron-worker to observe the
+down on a peach, and of none to teach laws of atmospheric effect to a
+carver in wood. So far as their business is concerned, their brains
+would be vainly occupied by such things, and they would be prevented
+from pursuing, with enough distinctness or intensity, the qualities of
+Art which can alone be expressed in the materials with which they each
+have to do.
+
+3. Now, I believe it to be wholly impossible to teach special
+application of Art principles to various trades in a single school. That
+special application can be only learned rightly by the experience of
+years in the particular work required. The power of each material, and
+the difficulties connected with its treatment are not so much to be
+taught as to be felt; it is only by repeated touch and continued trial
+beside the forge or the furnace, that the goldsmith can find out how to
+govern his gold, or the glass-worker his crystal; and it is only by
+watching and assisting the actual practice of a master in the business,
+that the apprentice can learn the efficient secrets of manipulation, or
+perceive the true limits of the involved conditions of design. It seems
+to me, therefore, that all idea of reference to definite businesses
+should be abandoned in such schools as that just established: we can
+have neither the materials, the conveniences, nor the empirical skill in
+the master, necessary to make such teaching useful. All specific
+Art-teaching must be given in schools established by each trade for
+itself: and when our operatives are a little more enlightened on these
+matters, there will be found, as I have already stated in my lectures on
+the political economy of Art,[59] absolute necessity for the
+establishment of guilds of trades in an active and practical form, for
+the purposes of ascertaining the principles of Art proper to their
+business, and instructing their apprentices in them, as well as making
+experiments on materials, and on newly-invented methods of procedure;
+besides many other functions which I cannot now enter into account of.
+All this for the present, and in a school such as this, I repeat, we
+cannot hope for: we shall obtain no satisfactory result, unless we give
+up such hope, and set ourselves to teaching the operative, however
+employed--be he farmer's laborer, or manufacturer's; be he mechanic,
+artificer, shopman, sailor, or plowman--teaching, I say, as far as we
+can, one and the same thing to all; namely, Sight.
+
+4. Not a slight thing to teach, this: perhaps, on the whole, the most
+important thing to be taught in the whole range of teaching. To be
+taught to read--what is the use of that, if you know not whether what
+you read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speak--but what
+is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to
+think--nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing
+to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at
+once, and both true. There is a vague acknowledgment of this in the way
+people are continually expressing their longing for light, until all the
+common language of our prayers and hymns has sunk into little more than
+one monotonous metaphor, dimly twisted into alternate languages,--asking
+first in Latin to be illuminated; and then in English to be enlightened;
+and then in Latin again to be delivered out of obscurity; and then in
+English to be delivered out of darkness; and then for beams, and rays,
+and suns, and stars, and lamps, until sometimes one wishes that, at
+least for religious purposes, there were no such words as light or
+darkness in existence. Still, the main instinct which makes people
+endure this perpetuity of repetition is a true one; only the main thing
+they want and ought to ask for is, not light, but Sight. It doesn't
+matter how much light you have if you don't know how to use it. It may
+very possibly put out your eyes, instead of helping them. Besides, we
+want, in this world of ours, very often to be able to see in the
+dark--that's the great gift of all;--but at any rate to see no matter by
+what light, so only we can see things as they are. On my word, we should
+soon make it a different world, if we could get but a little--ever so
+little--of the dervish's ointment in the Arabian Nights, not to show us
+the treasures of the earth, but the facts of it.
+
+5. However, whether these things be generally true or not, at all events
+it is certain that our immediate business, in such a school as this,
+will prosper more by attending to eyes than to hands; we shall always do
+most good by simply endeavoring to enable the student to see natural
+objects clearly and truly. We ought not even to try too strenuously to
+give him the power of representing them. That power may be acquired,
+more or less, by exercises which are no wise conducive to accuracy of
+sight: and, _vice versa_, accuracy of sight may be gained by exercises
+which in no wise conduce to ease of representation. For instance, it
+very much assists the power of drawing to spend many hours in the
+practice of washing in flat tints; but all this manual practice does not
+in the least increase the student's power of determining what the tint
+of a given object actually is. He would be more advanced in the
+knowledge of the facts by a single hour of well-directed and
+well-_corrected_ effort, rubbing out and putting in again, lightening,
+and darkening, and scratching, and blotching, in patient endeavors to
+obtain concordance with fact, issuing perhaps, after all, in total
+destruction or unpresentability of the drawing; but also in acute
+perception of the things he has been attempting to copy in it. Of
+course, there is always a vast temptation, felt both by the master and
+student, to struggle towards visible results, and obtain something
+beautiful, creditable, or salable, in way of actual drawing: but the
+more I see of schools, the more reason I see to look with doubt upon
+those which produce too many showy and complete works by pupils. A showy
+work will always be found, on stern examination of it, to have been done
+by some conventional rule;--some servile compliance with directions
+which the student does not see the reason for; and representation of
+truths which he has not himself perceived: the execution of such
+drawings will be found monotonous and lifeless; their light and shade
+specious and formal, but false. A drawing which the pupil has learned
+much in doing, is nearly always full of blunders and mishaps, and it is
+highly necessary for the formation of a truly public or universal school
+of Art, that the masters should not try to conceal or anticipate such
+blunders, but only seek to employ the pupil's time so as to get the most
+precious results for his understanding and his heart, not for his hand.
+
+6. For, observe, the best that you can do in the production of drawing,
+or of draughtsmanship, must always be nothing in itself, unless the
+whole life be given to it. An amateur's drawing, or a workman's
+drawing--anybody's drawing but an artist's, is always valueless in
+itself. It may be, as you have just heard Mr. Redgrave tell you, most
+precious as a memorial, or as a gift, or as a means of noting useful
+facts; but as _Art_, an amateur's drawing is always wholly worthless;
+and it ought to be one of our great objects to make the pupil understand
+and feel that, and prevent his trying to make his valueless work look,
+in some superficial, hypocritical, eye-catching, penny-catching way,
+like work that is really good.
+
+7. If, therefore, we have to do with pupils belonging to the higher
+ranks of life, our main duty will be to make them good judges of Art,
+rather than artists; for though I had a month to speak to you, instead
+of an hour, time would fail me if I tried to trace the various ways in
+which we suffer, nationally, for want of powers of enlightened judgment
+of Art in our upper and middle classes. Not that this judgment can ever
+be obtained without discipline of the hand: no man ever was a thorough
+judge of painting who could not draw; but the drawing should only be
+thought of as a means of fixing his attention upon the subtleties of the
+Art put before him, or of enabling him to record such natural facts as
+are necessary for comparison with it. I should also attach the greatest
+importance to severe limitation of choice in the examples submitted to
+him. To study one good master till you understand him will teach you
+more than a superficial acquaintance with a thousand: power of criticism
+does not consist in knowing the names or the manner of many painters,
+but in discerning the excellence of a few.
+
+If, on the contrary, our teaching is addressed more definitely to the
+operative, we need not endeavor to render his powers of criticism very
+acute. About many forms of existing Art, the less he knows the better.
+His sensibilities are to be cultivated with respect to nature chiefly;
+and his imagination, if possible, to be developed, even though somewhat
+to the disadvantage of his judgment. It is better that his work should
+be bold, than faultless: and better that it should be delightful, than
+discreet.
+
+8. And this leads me to the second, or commercial, question; namely, how
+to get from the workman, after we have trained him, the best and most
+precious work, so as to enable ourselves to compete with foreign
+countries, or develop new branches of commerce in our own.
+
+Many of us, perhaps, are under the impression that plenty of schooling
+will do this; that plenty of lecturing will do it; that sending abroad
+for patterns will do it; or that patience, time, and money, and good
+will may do it. And, alas, none of these things, nor all of them put
+together, will do it. If you want really good work, such as will be
+acknowledged by all the world, there is but one way of getting it, and
+that is a difficult one. You may offer any premium you choose for
+it--but you will find it can't be done for premiums. You may send for
+patterns to the antipodes--but you will find it can't be done upon
+patterns. You may lecture on the principles of Art to every school in
+the kingdom--and you will find it can't be done upon principles. You may
+wait patiently for the progress of the age--and you will find your Art
+is unprogressive. Or you may set yourselves impatiently to urge it by
+the inventions of the age--and you will find your chariot of Art
+entirely immovable either by screw or paddle. There's no way of getting
+good Art, I repeat, but one--at once the simplest and most
+difficult--namely, to enjoy it. Examine the history of nations, and you
+will find this great fact clear and unmistakable on the front of
+it--that good Art has only been produced by nations who rejoiced in it;
+fed themselves with it, as if it were bread; basked in it, as if it were
+sunshine; shouted at the sight of it; danced with the delight of it;
+quarreled for it; fought for it; starved for it; did, in fact, precisely
+the opposite with it of what we want to do with it--they made it to
+keep, and we to sell.
+
+9. And truly this is a serious difficulty for us as a commercial nation.
+The very primary motive with which we set about the business, makes the
+business impossible. The first and absolute condition of the thing's
+ever becoming salable is, that we shall make it without wanting to sell
+it; nay, rather with a determination not to sell it at any price, if
+once we get hold of it. Try to make your Art popular, cheap--a fair
+article for your foreign market; and the foreign market will always show
+something better. But make it only to please yourselves, and even be
+resolved that you won't let anybody else have any; and forthwith you
+will find everybody else wants it. And observe, the insuperable
+difficulty is this making it to please ourselves, while we are incapable
+of pleasure. Take, for instance, the simplest example, which we can all
+understand, in the art of dress. We have made a great fuss about the
+patterns of silk lately; wanting to vie with Lyons, and make a Paris of
+London. Well, we may try forever: so long as we don't really enjoy silk
+patterns, we shall never get any. And we don't enjoy them. Of course,
+all ladies like their dresses to sit well, and be becoming; but of real
+enjoyment of the beauty of the silk, for the silk's own sake, I find
+none; for the test of that enjoyment is, that they would like it also to
+sit well, and look well, on somebody else. The pleasure of being well
+dressed, or even of seeing well-dressed people--for I will suppose in my
+fair hearers that degree of unselfishness--be that pleasure great or
+small, is quite a different thing from delight in the beauty and play of
+the silken folds and colors themselves, for their own gorgeousness or
+grace.
+
+10. I have just had a remarkable proof of the total want of this feeling
+in the modern mind. I was staying part of this summer in Turin, for the
+purpose of studying one of the Paul Veroneses there--the presentation of
+the Queen of Sheba to Solomon. Well, one of the most notable characters
+in this picture is the splendor of its silken dresses: and, in
+particular, there was a piece of white brocade, with designs upon it in
+gold, which it was one of my chief objects in stopping at Turin to copy.
+You may, perhaps, be surprised at this; but I must just note in passing,
+that I share this weakness of enjoying dress patterns with all good
+students and all good painters. It doesn't matter what school they
+belong to,--Fra Angelico, Perugino, John Bellini, Giorgione, Titian,
+Tintoret, Veronese, Leonardo da Vinci--no matter how they differ in
+other respects, all of them like dress patterns; and what is more, the
+nobler the painter is, the surer he is to do his patterns well.
+
+11. I stayed then, as I say, to make a study of this white brocade. It
+generally happens in public galleries that the best pictures are the
+worst placed; and this Veronese is not only hung at considerable height
+above the eye, but over a door, through which, however, as all the
+visitors to the gallery must pass, they cannot easily overlook the
+picture, though they would find great difficulty in examining it. Beside
+this door, I had a stage erected for my work, which being of some height
+and rather in a corner, enabled me to observe, without being observed
+myself, the impression made by the picture on the various visitors. It
+seemed to me that if ever a work of Art caught popular attention, this
+ought to do so. It was of very large size; of brilliant color, and of
+agreeable subject. There are about twenty figures in it, the principal
+ones being life size: that of Solomon, though in the shade, is by far
+the most perfect conception of the young king in his pride of wisdom and
+beauty which I know in the range of Italian art; the queen is one of the
+loveliest of Veronese's female figures; all the accessories are full of
+grace and imagination; and the finish of the whole so perfect that one
+day I was upwards of two hours vainly trying to render, with perfect
+accuracy, the curves of two leaves of the brocaded silk. The English
+travelers used to walk through the room in considerable numbers; and
+were invariably directed to the picture by their laquais de place, if
+they missed seeing it themselves. And to this painting--in which it took
+me six weeks to examine rightly two figures--I found that on an average,
+the English traveler who was doing Italy conscientiously, and seeing
+everything as he thought he ought, gave about half or three-quarters of
+a minute; but the flying or fashionable traveler, who came to do as much
+as he could in a given time, never gave more than a single glance, most
+of such people turning aside instantly to a bad landscape hung on the
+right, containing a vigorously painted white wall, and an opaque green
+moat. What especially impressed me, however, was that none of the
+ladies ever stopped to look at the dresses in the Veronese. Certainly
+they were far more beautiful than any in the shops in the great square,
+yet no one ever noticed them. Sometimes when any nice, sharp-looking,
+bright-eyed girl came into the room, I used to watch her all the way,
+thinking--"Come, at least _you'll_ see what the Queen of Sheba has got
+on." But no--on she would come carelessly, with a little toss of the
+head, apparently signifying "nothing in _this_ room worth looking
+at--except myself," and so trip through the door, and away.
+
+12. The fact is, we don't care for pictures: in very deed we don't. The
+Academy exhibition is a thing to talk of and to amuse vacant hours;
+those who are rich amongst us buy a painting or two, for mixed reasons,
+sometimes to fill the corner of a passage--sometimes to help the
+drawing-room talk before dinner--sometimes because the painter is
+fashionable--occasionally because he is poor--not unfrequently that we
+may have a collection of specimens of painting, as we have specimens of
+minerals or butterflies--and in the best and rarest case of all, because
+we have really, as we call it, taken a fancy to the picture; meaning the
+same sort of fancy which one would take to a pretty arm-chair or a
+newly-shaped decanter. But as for real love of the picture, and joy of
+it when we have got it, I do not believe it is felt by one in a
+thousand.
+
+13. I am afraid this apathy of ours will not be easily conquered; but
+even supposing it should, and that we should begin to enjoy pictures
+properly, and that the supply of good ones increased as in that case it
+_would_ increase--then comes another question. Perhaps some of my
+hearers this evening may occasionally have heard it stated of me that I
+am rather apt to contradict myself. I hope I am exceedingly apt to do
+so. I never met with a question yet, of any importance, which did not
+need, for the right solution of it, at least one positive and one
+negative answer, like an equation of the second degree. Mostly, matters
+of any consequence are three-sided, or four-sided, or polygonal; and the
+trotting round a polygon is severe work for people any way stiff in
+their opinions. For myself, I am never satisfied that I have handled a
+subject properly till I have contradicted myself at least three times:
+but once must do for this evening. I have just said that there is no
+chance of our getting good Art unless we delight in it: next I say, and
+just as positively, that there is no chance of our getting good Art
+unless we resist our delight in it. We must love it first, and restrain
+our love for it afterwards.
+
+14. This sounds strange; and yet I assure you it is true. In fact,
+whenever anything does not sound strange, you may generally doubt its
+being true; for all truth is wonderful. But take an instance in physical
+matters, of the same kind of contradiction. Suppose you were explaining
+to a young student in astronomy how the earth was kept steady in its
+orbit; you would have to state to him--would you not?--that the earth
+always had a tendency to fall to the sun; and that also it always had a
+tendency to fly away from the sun. These are two precisely contrary
+statements for him to digest at his leisure, before he can understand
+how the earth moves. Now, in like manner, when Art is set in its true
+and serviceable course, it moves under the luminous attraction of
+pleasure on the one side, and with a stout moral purpose of going about
+some useful business on the other. If the artist works without delight,
+he passes away into space, and perishes of cold: if he works only for
+delight, he falls into the sun, and extinguishes himself in ashes. On
+the whole, this last is the fate, I do not say the most to be feared,
+but which Art has generally hitherto suffered, and which the great
+nations of the earth have suffered with it.
+
+15. For, while most distinctly you may perceive in past history that Art
+has never been produced, except by nations who took pleasure in it, just
+as assuredly, and even more plainly, you may perceive that Art has
+always destroyed the power and life of those who pursued it for pleasure
+only. Surely this fact must have struck you as you glanced at the career
+of the great nations of the earth: surely it must have occurred to you
+as a point for serious questioning, how far, even in our days, we were
+wise in promoting the advancement of pleasures which appeared as yet
+only to have corrupted the souls and numbed the strength of those who
+attained to them. I have been complaining of England that she despises
+the Arts; but I might, with still more appearance of justice, complain
+that she does not rather dread them than despise. For, what has been the
+source of the ruin of nations since the world began? Has it been plague,
+or famine, earthquake-shock or volcano-flame? None of these ever
+prevailed against a great people, so as to make their name pass from the
+earth. In every period and place of national decline, you will find
+other causes than these at work to bring it about, namely, luxury,
+effeminacy, love of pleasure, fineness in Art, ingenuity in enjoyment.
+What is the main lesson which, as far as we seek any in our classical
+reading, we gather for our youth from ancient history? Surely this--that
+simplicity of life, of language, and of manners gives strength to a
+nation; and that luxuriousness of life, subtlety of language, and
+smoothness of manners bring weakness and destruction on a nation. While
+men possess little and desire less, they remain brave and noble: while
+they are scornful of all the arts of luxury, and are in the sight of
+other nations as barbarians, their swords are irresistible and their
+sway illimitable: but let them become sensitive to the refinements of
+taste, and quick in the capacities of pleasure, and that instant the
+fingers that had grasped the iron rod, fail from the golden scepter. You
+cannot charge me with any exaggeration in this matter; it is impossible
+to state the truth too strongly, or as too universal. Forever you will
+see the rude and simple nation at once more virtuous and more victorious
+than one practiced in the arts. Watch how the Lydian is overthrown by
+the Persian; the Persian by the Athenian; the Athenian by the Spartan;
+then the whole of polished Greece by the rougher Roman; the Roman, in
+his turn refined, only to be crushed by the Goth: and at the turning
+point of the middle ages, the liberty of Europe first asserted, the
+virtues of Christianity best practiced, and its doctrines best attested,
+by a handful of mountain shepherds, without art, without literature,
+almost without a language, yet remaining unconquered in the midst of the
+Teutonic chivalry, and uncorrupted amidst the hierarchies of Rome.[60]
+
+16. I was strangely struck by this great fact during the course of a
+journey last summer among the northern vales of Switzerland. My mind had
+been turned to the subject of the ultimate effects of Art on national
+mind before I left England, and I went straight to the chief fields of
+Swiss history: first to the center of her feudal power, Hapsburg, the
+hawk's nest from which the Swiss Rodolph rose to found the Austrian
+empire; and then to the heart of her republicanism, that little glen of
+Morgarten, where first in the history of Europe the shepherd's staff
+prevailed over the soldier's spear. And it was somewhat depressing to me
+to find, as day by day I found more certainly, that this people which
+first asserted the liberties of Europe, and first conceived the idea of
+equitable laws, was in all the--shall I call them the slighter, or the
+higher?--sensibilities of the human mind, utterly deficient; and not
+only had remained from its earliest ages till now, without poetry,
+without Art, and without music, except a mere modulated cry; but as far
+as I could judge from the rude efforts of their early monuments, would
+have been, at the time of their greatest national probity and power,
+incapable of producing good poetry or Art under any circumstances of
+education.
+
+17. I say, this was a sad thing for me to find. And then, to mend the
+matter, I went straight over into Italy, and came at once upon a
+curious instance of the patronage of Art, of the character that usually
+inclines most to such patronage, and of the consequences thereof.
+
+From Morgarten and Grutli, I intended to have crossed to the Vaudois
+Valleys, to examine the shepherd character there; but on the way I had
+to pass through Turin, where unexpectedly I found the Paul Veroneses,
+one of which, as I told you just now, stayed me at once for six weeks.
+Naturally enough, one asked how these beautiful Veroneses came there:
+and found they had been commissioned by Cardinal Maurice of Savoy.
+Worthy Cardinal, I thought: that's what Cardinals were made for.
+However, going a little farther in the gallery, one comes upon four very
+graceful pictures by Albani--these also commissioned by the Cardinal,
+and commissioned with special directions, according to the Cardinal's
+fancy. Four pictures, to be illustrative of the four elements.
+
+18. One of the most curious things in the mind of the people of that
+century is their delight in these four elements, and in the four
+seasons. They had hardly any other idea of decorating a room, or of
+choosing a subject for a picture, than by some renewed reference to fire
+and water, or summer and winter; nor were ever tired of hearing that
+summer came after spring, and that air was not earth, until these
+interesting pieces of information got finally and poetically expressed
+in that well-known piece of elegant English conversation about the
+weather, Thomson's "Seasons." So the Cardinal, not appearing to have any
+better idea than the popular one, orders the four elements; but thinking
+that the elements pure would be slightly dull, he orders them, in one
+way or another, to be mixed up with Cupids; to have, in his own words,
+"una copiosa quantita di Amorini." Albani supplied the Cardinal
+accordingly with Cupids in clusters: they hang in the sky like bunches
+of cherries; and leap out of the sea like flying fish; grow out of the
+earth in fairy rings; and explode out of the fire like squibs. No work
+whatsoever is done in any of the four elements, but by the Cardinal's
+Cupids. They are plowing the earth with their arrows; fishing in the
+sea with their bowstrings; driving the clouds with their breath; and
+fanning the fire with their wings. A few beautiful nymphs are assisting
+them here and there in pearl-fishing, flower-gathering, and other such
+branches of graceful industry; the moral of the whole being, that the
+sea was made for its pearls, the earth for its flowers, and all the
+world for pleasure.
+
+19. Well, the Cardinal, this great encourager of the arts, having these
+industrial and social theories, carried them out in practice, as you may
+perhaps remember, by obtaining a dispensation from the Pope to marry his
+own niece, and building a villa for her on one of the slopes of the
+pretty hills which rise to the east of the city. The villa which he
+built is now one of the principal objects of interest to the traveler as
+an example of Italian domestic architecture: to me, during my stay in
+the city, it was much more than an object of interest; for its deserted
+gardens were by much the pleasantest place I could find for walking or
+thinking in, in the hot summer afternoons.
+
+I say thinking, for these gardens often gave me a good deal to think
+about. They are, as I told you, on the slope of the hill above the city,
+to the east; commanding, therefore, the view over it and beyond it,
+westward--a view which, perhaps, of all those that can be obtained north
+of the Apennines, gives the most comprehensive idea of the nature of
+Italy, considered as one great country. If you glance at the map, you
+will observe that Turin is placed in the center of the crescent which
+the Alps form round the basin of Piedmont; it is within ten miles of the
+foot of the mountains at the nearest point; and from that point the
+chain extends half round the city in one unbroken Moorish crescent,
+forming three-fourths of a circle from the Col de Tende to the St.
+Gothard; that is to say, just two hundred miles of Alps, as the bird
+flies. I don't speak rhetorically or carelessly; I speak as I ought to
+speak here--with mathematical precision. Take the scale on your map;
+measure fifty miles of it accurately; try that measure from the Col de
+Tende to the St. Gothard, and you will find that four cords of fifty
+miles will not quite reach to the two extremities of the curve.
+
+20. You see, then, from this spot, the plain of Piedmont, on the north
+and south, literally as far as the eye can reach; so that the plain
+terminates as the sea does, with a level blue line, only tufted with
+woods instead of waves, and crowded with towers of cities instead of
+ships. Then in the luminous air beyond and behind this blue
+horizon-line, stand, as it were, the shadows of mountains, they
+themselves dark, for the southern slopes of the Alps of the Lago
+Maggiore and Bellinzona are all without snow; but the light of the
+unseen snowfields, lying level behind the visible peaks, is sent up with
+strange reflection upon the clouds; an everlasting light of calm Aurora
+in the north. Then, higher and higher around the approaching darkness of
+the plain, rise the central chains, not as on the Switzer's side, a
+recognizable group and following of successive and separate hills, but a
+wilderness of jagged peaks, cast in passionate and fierce profusion
+along the circumference of heaven; precipice behind precipice, and gulf
+beyond gulf, filled with the flaming of the sunset, and forming mighty
+channels for the flowings of the clouds, which roll up against them out
+of the vast Italian plain, forced together by the narrowing crescent,
+and breaking up at last against the Alpine wall in towers of spectral
+spray; or sweeping up its ravines with long moans of complaining
+thunder. Out from between the cloudy pillars, as they pass, emerge
+forever the great battlements of the memorable and perpetual hills:
+Viso, with her shepherd-witnesses to ancient faith; Rocca-Melone, the
+highest place of Alpine pilgrimage;[61] Iseran, who shed her burial
+sheets of snow about the march of Hannibal; Cenis, who shone with her
+glacier light on the descent of Charlemagne; Paradiso, who watched with
+her opposite crest the stoop of the French eagle to Marengo; and
+underneath all these, lying in her soft languor, this tender Italy,
+lapped in dews of sleep, or more than sleep--one knows not if it is
+trance, from which morning shall yet roll the blinding mists away, or if
+the fair shadows of her quietude are indeed the shades of purple death.
+And, lifted a little above this solemn plain, and looking beyond it to
+its snowy ramparts, vainly guardian, stands this palace dedicate to
+pleasure, the whole legend of Italy's past history written before it by
+the finger of God, written as with an iron pen upon the rock forever, on
+all those fronting walls of reproachful Alp; blazoned in gold of
+lightning upon the clouds that still open and close their unsealed
+scrolls in heaven; painted in purple and scarlet upon the mighty missal
+pages of sunset after sunset, spread vainly before a nation's eyes for a
+nation's prayer. So stands this palace of pleasure; desolate as it
+deserves--desolate in smooth corridor and glittering chamber--desolate
+in pleached walk and planted bower--desolate in that worst and bitterest
+abandonment which leaves no light of memory. No ruins are here of walls
+rent by war, and falling above their defenders into mounds of graves: no
+remnants are here of chapel-altar, or temple porch, left shattered or
+silent by the power of some purer worship: no vestiges are here of
+sacred hearth and sweet homestead, left lonely through vicissitudes of
+fate, and heaven-sent sorrow. Nothing is here but the vain apparelings
+of pride sunk into dishonor, and vain appanages of delight now no more
+delightsome. The hill-waters, that once flowed and plashed in the
+garden fountains, now trickle sadly through the weeds that encumber
+their basins, with a sound as of tears: the creeping, insidious,
+neglected flowers weave their burning nets about the white marble of the
+balustrades, and rend them slowly, block from block, and stone from
+stone: the thin, sweet-scented leaves tremble along the old masonry
+joints as if with palsy at every breeze; and the dark lichens, golden
+and gray, make the footfall silent in the path's center.
+
+And day by day as I walked there, the same sentence seemed whispered by
+every shaking leaf, and every dying echo, of garden and chamber. "Thus
+end all the arts of life, only in death; and thus issue all the gifts of
+man, only in his dishonor, when they are pursued or possessed in the
+service of pleasure only."
+
+21. This then is the great enigma of Art History,--you must not follow
+Art without pleasure, nor must you follow it for the sake of pleasure.
+And the solution of that enigma is simply this fact; that wherever Art
+has been followed _only_ for the sake of luxury or delight, it has
+contributed, and largely contributed, to bring about the destruction of
+the nation practicing it: but wherever Art has been used _also_ to teach
+any truth, or supposed truth--religious, moral, or natural--there it has
+elevated the nation practicing it, and itself with the nation.
+
+22. Thus the Art of Greece rose, and did service to the people, so long
+as it was to them the earnest interpreter of a religion they believed
+in: the Arts of northern sculpture and architecture rose, as
+interpreters of Christian legend and doctrine: the Art of painting in
+Italy, not only as religious, but also mainly as expressive of truths of
+moral philosophy, and powerful in pure human portraiture. The only great
+painters in our schools of painting in England have either been of
+portrait--Reynolds and Gainsborough; of the philosophy of social
+life--Hogarth; or of the facts of nature in landscape--Wilson and
+Turner. In all these cases, if I had time, I could show you that the
+success of the painter depended on his desire to convey a truth, rather
+than to produce a merely beautiful picture; that is to say, to get a
+likeness of a man, or of a place; to get some moral principle rightly
+stated, or some historical character rightly described, rather than
+merely to give pleasure to the eyes. Compare the feeling with which a
+Moorish architect decorated an arch of the Alhambra, with that of
+Hogarth painting the "Marriage a la Mode," or of Wilkie painting the
+"Chelsea Pensioners," and you will at once feel the difference between
+Art pursued for pleasure only, and for the sake of some useful principle
+or impression.
+
+23. But what you might not so easily discern is, that even when painting
+does appear to have been pursued for pleasure only, if ever you find it
+rise to any noble level, you will also find that a stern search after
+truth has been at the root of its nobleness. You may fancy, perhaps,
+that Titian, Veronese, and Tintoret were painters for the sake of
+pleasure only: but in reality they were the only painters who ever
+sought entirely to master, and who did entirely master, the truths of
+light and shade as associated with color, in the noblest of all physical
+created things, the human form. They were the only men who ever painted
+the human body; all other painters of the great schools are mere
+anatomical draughtsmen compared to them; rather makers of maps of the
+body, than painters of it. The Venetians alone, by a toil almost
+super-human, succeeded at last in obtaining a power almost super-human;
+and were able finally to paint the highest visible work of God with
+unexaggerated structure, undegraded color, and unaffected gesture. It
+seems little to say this; but I assure you it is much to have _done_
+this--so much, that no other men but the Venetians ever did it: none of
+them ever painted the human body without in some degree caricaturing the
+anatomy, forcing the action, or degrading the hue.
+
+24. Now, therefore, the sum of all is, that you who wish to encourage
+Art in England have to do two things with it: you must delight in it, in
+the first place; and you must get it to serve some serious work, in the
+second place. I don't mean by serious, necessarily moral: all that I
+mean by serious is in some way or other useful, not merely selfish,
+careless, or indolent. I had, indeed, intended before closing my
+address, to have traced out a few of the directions in which, as it
+seems to me, Art may be seriously and practically serviceable to us in
+the career of civilization. I had hoped to show you how many of the
+great phenomena of nature still remained unrecorded by it, for _us_ to
+record; how many of the historical monuments of Europe were perishing
+without memorial, for the want of but a little honest, simple,
+laborious, loving draughtsmanship; how many of the most impressive
+historical events of the day failed of teaching us half of what they
+were meant to teach, for want of painters to represent them faithfully,
+instead of fancifully, and with historical truth for their aim, instead
+of national self-glorification. I had hoped to show you how many of the
+best impulses of the heart were lost in frivolity or sensuality, for
+want of purer beauty to contemplate, and of noble thoughts to associate
+with the fervor of hallowed human passion; how, finally, a great part of
+the vital power of our religious faith was lost in us, for want of such
+art as would realize in some rational, probable, believable way, those
+events of sacred history which, as they visibly and intelligibly
+occurred, may also be visibly and intelligibly represented. But all this
+I dare not do yet. I felt, as I thought over these things, that the time
+was not yet come for their declaration: the time will come for it, and I
+believe soon; but as yet, the man would only lay himself open to the
+charge of vanity, of imagination, and of idle fondness of hope, who
+should venture to trace in words the course of the higher blessings
+which the Arts may have yet in store for mankind. As yet there is no
+need to do so: all that we have to plead for is an earnest and
+straightforward exertion in those courses of study which are opened to
+us day by day, believing only that they are to be followed gravely and
+for grave purposes, as by men, and not by children. I appeal, finally,
+to all those who are to become the pupils of these schools, to keep
+clear of the notion of following Art as dilettantism: it ought to
+delight you, as your reading delights you--but you never think of your
+reading as dilettantism. It ought to delight you as your studies of
+physical science delight you--but you don't call physical science
+dilettantism. If you are determined only to think of Art as a play or a
+pleasure, give it up at once: you will do no good to yourselves, and you
+will degrade the pursuit in the sight of others. Better, infinitely
+better, that you should never enter a picture gallery, than that you
+should enter only to saunter and to smile: better, infinitely better,
+that you should never handle a pencil at all, than handle it only for
+the sake of complacency in your small dexterity: better, infinitely
+better, that you should be wholly uninterested in pictures, and
+uninformed respecting them, than that you should just know enough to
+detect blemishes in great works,--to give a color of reasonableness to
+presumption, and an appearance of acuteness to misunderstanding. Above
+all, I would plead for this so far as the teaching of these schools may
+be addressed to the junior Members of the University. Men employed in
+any kind of manual labor, by which they must live, are not likely to
+take up the notion that they can learn any other art for amusement only;
+but amateurs are: and it is of the highest importance, nay, it is just
+the one thing of all importance, to show them what drawing really means;
+and not so much to teach them to produce a good work themselves, as to
+know it when they see it done by others. Good work, in the stern sense
+of the word, as I before said, no mere amateur can do; and good work, in
+any sense, that is to say, profitable work for himself or for anyone
+else, he can only do by being made in the beginning to see what is
+possible for him, and what not;--what is accessible, and what not; and
+by having the majesty and sternness of the everlasting laws of fact set
+before him in their infinitude. It is no matter for appalling him: the
+man is great already who is made well capable of being appalled; nor do
+we even wisely hope, nor truly understand, till we are humiliated by our
+hope, and awe-struck by our understanding. Nay, I will go farther than
+this, and say boldly, that what you have mainly to teach the young men
+here is, not so much what they can do, as what they cannot;--to make
+them see how much there is in nature which cannot be imitated, and how
+much in man which cannot be emulated. He only can be truly said to be
+educated in Art to whom all his work is only a feeble sign of glories
+which he cannot convey, and a feeble means of measuring, with
+ever-enlarging admiration, the great and untraversable gulf which God
+has set between the great and the common intelligences of mankind: and
+all the triumphs of Art which man can commonly achieve are only truly
+crowned by pure delight in natural scenes themselves, and by the sacred
+and self-forgetful veneration which can be nobly abashed, and
+tremblingly exalted, in the presence of a human spirit greater than his
+own.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[58] This Address has been already printed in three forms,--(_a_) in a
+pamphlet printed at Cambridge "for the committee of the School of Art,"
+by Naylor & Co., _Chronicle_ office, 1858; (_b_) in a second pamphlet,
+Cambridge, Deighton & Bell; London, Bell & Daldy, 1858; and (_c_) a new
+edition, published for Mr. Ruskin by Mr. George Allen in 1879. The first
+of these pamphlets contains, in addition to the address, a full account
+of the "inaugural soiree" at which it was read, and a report of speeches
+then made by Mr. Redgrave, R.A., and Mr. George Cruikshank; and both the
+first and second pamphlet also contain a few introductory words spoken,
+by Mr. Ruskin, before proceeding to deliver his address.--ED.
+
+[59] See "A Joy For Ever," Sec. 113, and "Time and Tide," Sec. 78.--ED.
+
+[60] I ought perhaps to remind the reader that this statement refers to
+two different societies among the Alps; the Waldenses in the 13th, and
+the people of the Forest Cantons in the 14th and following centuries.
+Protestants are perhaps apt sometimes to forget that the virtues of
+these mountaineers were shown in connection with vital forms of opposing
+religions; and that the patriots of Schwytz and Uri were as zealous
+Roman Catholics as they were good soldiers. We have to lay to their
+charge the death of Zuinglius as well as of Gessler.
+
+[61] The summit of Rocca-Melone is the sharp peak seen from Turin on the
+right hand of the gorge of the Cenis, dominant over the low projecting
+pyramid of the hill called by De Saussure Montagne de Musinet.
+Rocca-Melone rises to a height of 11,000 feet above the sea, and its
+peak is a place of pilgrimage to this day, though it seems temporarily
+to have ceased to be so in the time of De Saussure, who thus speaks of
+it:
+
+"Il y a eu pendant longtemps sur cette cime, une petite chapelle avec
+une image de Notre Dame qui etoit en grande veneration dans le pays, et
+ou un grand nombre de gens alloient au mois d'aout en procession, de
+Suze et des environs; mais le sentier qui conduit a cette chapelle est
+si etroit et si scabreux qu'il n'y avoit presque pas d'annees qu'il n'y
+perit du monde; la fatigue et la rarete de l'air saisissoient ceux qui
+avoient plutot consulte leur devotion que leurs forces; ils tomberent en
+defalliance, et de la dans le precipice."
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+ART.
+
+V.
+
+THE CESTUS OF AGLAIA.
+
+
+(_Art Journal, January-July 1865; January, February, and April 1866._)
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE CESTUS OF AGLAIA.
+
+
+   "[Greek: Poikilon o eni panta teteuchatai oude se phemi
+   Aprekton ge neesthai, ho ti phresi sesi menoinas.]"
+
+   (HOM. _Il._ xiv. 220-21.)
+
+
+
+
+PREFATORY.[62]
+
+
+25. Not many months ago, a friend, whose familiarity with both living
+and past schools of Art rendered his opinion of great authority, said
+casually to me in the course of talk, "I believe we have now as able
+painters as ever lived; but they never paint as good pictures as were
+once painted." That was the substance of his saying; I forget the exact
+words, but their tenor surprised me, and I have thought much of them
+since. Without pressing the statement too far, or examining it with an
+unintended strictness, this I believe to be at all events true, that we
+have men among us, now in Europe, who might have been noble painters,
+and are not; men whose doings are altogether as wonderful in skill, as
+inexhaustible in fancy, as the work of the really great painters; and
+yet these doings of theirs are not great. Shall I write the commonplace
+that rings in sequence in my ear, and draws on my hand--"are not Great,
+for they are not (in the broad human and ethical sense) Good"? I write
+it, and ask forgiveness for the truism, with its implied
+uncharitableness of blame; for this trite thing is ill understood and
+little thought upon by any of us, and the implied blame is divided among
+us all; only let me at once partly modify it, and partly define.
+
+26. In one sense, modern Art has more goodness in it than ever Art had
+before. Its kindly spirit, its quick sympathy with pure domestic and
+social feeling, the occasional seriousness of its instructive purpose,
+and its honest effort to grasp the reality of conceived scenes, are all
+eminently "good," as compared with the insane picturesqueness and
+conventional piety of many among the old masters. Such domestic
+painting, for instance, as Richter's in Germany, Edward Frere's in
+France, and Hook's in England, together with such historical and ideal
+work as----perhaps the reader would be offended with me were I to set
+down the several names that occur to me here, so I will set down one
+only, and say--as that of Paul de la Roche; such work, I repeat, as
+these men have done, or are doing, is entirely good in its influence on
+the public mind; and may, in thankful exultation, be compared with the
+renderings of besotted, vicious, and vulgar human life perpetrated by
+Dutch painters, or with the deathful formalism and fallacy of what was
+once called "Historical Art." Also, this gentleness and veracity of
+theirs, being in part communicable, are gradually learned, though in a
+somewhat servile manner, yet not without a sincere sympathy, by many
+inferior painters, so that our exhibitions and currently popular books
+are full of very lovely and pathetic ideas, expressed with a care, and
+appealing to an interest, quite unknown in past times. I will take two
+instances of merely average power, as more illustrative of what I mean
+than any more singular and distinguished work could be. Last year, in
+the British Institution, there were two pictures by the same painter,
+one of a domestic, the other of a sacred subject. I will say nothing of
+the way in which they were painted; it may have been bad, or good, or
+neither: it is not to my point. I wish to direct attention only to the
+conception of them. One, "Cradled in his Calling," was of a fisherman
+and his wife, and helpful grown-up son, and helpless new-born little
+one; the two men carrying the young child up from the shore, rocking it
+between them in the wet net for a hammock, the mother looking on
+joyously, and the baby laughing. The thought was pretty and good, and
+one might go on dreaming over it long--not unprofitably. But the second
+picture was more interesting. I describe it only in the circumstances
+of the invented scene--sunset after the crucifixion. The bodies have
+been taken away, and the crosses are left lying on the broken earth; a
+group of children have strayed up the hill, and stopped beside them in
+such shadowy awe as is possible to childhood, and they have picked up
+one or two of the drawn nails to feel how sharp they are. Meantime a
+girl with her little brother--goat-herds both--have been watering their
+flock at Kidron, and are driving it home. The girl, strong in grace and
+honor of youth, carrying her pitcher of water on her erect head, has
+gone on past the place steadily, minding her flock; but her little
+curly-headed brother, with cheeks of burning Eastern brown, has lingered
+behind to look, and is feeling the point of one of the nails, held in
+another child's hand. A lovely little kid of the goats has stayed behind
+to keep him company, and is amusing itself by jumping backwards and
+forwards over an arm of the cross. The sister looks back, and, wondering
+what he can have stopped in that dreadful place for, waves her hand for
+the little boy to come away.
+
+I have no hesitation in saying that, as compared with the ancient and
+stereotyped conceptions of the "Taking down from the Cross," there is a
+living feeling in that picture which is of great price. It may perhaps
+be weak, nay, even superficial, or untenable--that will depend on the
+other conditions of character out of which it springs--but, so far as it
+reaches, it is pure and good; and we may gain more by looking
+thoughtfully at such a picture than at any even of the least formal
+types of the work of older schools. It would be unfair to compare it
+with first-rate, or even approximately first-rate designs; but even
+accepting such unjust terms, put it beside Rembrandt's ghastly white
+sheet, laid over the two poles at the Cross-foot, and see which has most
+good in it for you of any communicable kind.
+
+27. I trust, then, that I fully admit whatever may, on due deliberation,
+be alleged in favor of modern Art. Nay, I have heretofore asserted more
+for some modern Art than others were disposed to admit, nor do I
+withdraw one word from such assertion. But when all has been said and
+granted that may be, there remains this painful fact to be dealt
+with,--the consciousness, namely, both in living artists themselves and
+in us their admirers, that something, and that not a little, is wrong
+with us; that they, relentlessly examined, could not say they thoroughly
+knew how to paint, and that we, relentlessly examined, could not say we
+thoroughly know how to judge. The best of our painters will look a
+little to us, the beholders, for confirmation of his having done well.
+We, appealed to, look to each other to see what we ought to say. If we
+venture to find fault, however submissively, the artist will probably
+feel a little uncomfortable: he will by no means venture to meet us with
+a serenely crushing "Sir, it cannot be better done," in the manner of
+Albert Duerer. And yet, if it could not be better done, he, of all men,
+should know that best, nor fear to say so; it is good for himself, and
+for us, that he should assert that, if he knows that. The last time my
+dear old friend William Hunt came to see me, I took down one of his
+early drawings for him to see (three blue plums and one amber one, and
+two nuts). So he looked at it, happily, for a minute or two and then
+said, "Well, it's very nice, isn't it? I did not think I could have done
+so well." The saying was entirely right, exquisitely modest and true;
+only I fear he would not have had the courage to maintain that his
+drawing was good, if anybody had been there to say otherwise. Still,
+having done well, he knew it; and what is more no man ever does do well
+without knowing it: he may not know _how_ well, nor be conscious of the
+best of his own qualities; nor measure, or care to measure, the relation
+of his power to that of other men, but he will know that what he has
+done is, in an intended, accomplished, and ascertainable degree, good.
+Every able and honest workman, as he wins a right to rest, so he wins a
+right to approval,--his own if no one's beside; nay, his only true rest
+_is_ in the calm consciousness that the thing has been honorably
+done--[Greek: suneidesis hoti kalon]. I do not use the Greek words in
+pedantry, I want them for future service and interpretation; no English
+words, nor any of any other language, would do as well. For I mean to
+try to show, and believe I _can_ show, that a simple and sure conviction
+of our having done rightly is not only an attainable, but a necessary
+seal and sign of our having so done; and that the doing well or rightly,
+and ill or wrongly, are both conditions of the whole being of each
+person, coming of a nature in him which affects all things that he may
+do, from the least to the greatest, according to the noble old phrase
+for the conquering rightness, of "integrity," "wholeness," or
+"wholesomeness." So that when we do external things (that are our
+business) ill, it is a sign that internal, and, in fact, that all
+things, are ill with us; and when we do external things well, it is a
+sign that internal and all things are well with us. And I believe there
+are two principal adversities to this wholesomeness of work, and to all
+else that issues out of wholeness of inner character, with which we have
+in these days specially to contend. The first is the variety of Art
+round us, tempting us to thoughtless imitation; the second our own want
+of belief in the existence of a rule of right.
+
+28. I. I say the first is the variety of Art around us. No man can
+pursue his own track in peace, nor obtain consistent guidance, if
+doubtful of his track. All places are full of inconsistent example, all
+mouths of contradictory advice, all prospects of opposite temptations.
+The young artist sees myriads of things he would like to do, but cannot
+learn from their authors how they were done, nor choose decisively any
+method which he may follow with the accuracy and confidence necessary to
+success. He is not even sure if his thoughts are his own; for the whole
+atmosphere round him is full of floating suggestion: those which are his
+own he cannot keep pure, for he breathes a dust of decayed ideas, wreck
+of the souls of dead nations, driven by contrary winds. He may stiffen
+himself (and all the worse for him) into an iron self-will, but if the
+iron has any magnetism in it, he cannot pass a day without finding
+himself, at the end of it, instead of sharpened or tempered, covered
+with a ragged fringe of iron filings. If there be anything better than
+iron--living wood fiber--in him, he cannot be allowed any natural
+growth, but gets hacked in every extremity, and bossed over with lumps
+of frozen clay;--grafts of incongruous blossom that will never set;
+while some even recognize no need of knife or clay (though both are good
+in a gardener's hand), but deck themselves out with incongruous
+glittering, like a Christmas-tree. Even were the style chosen true to
+his own nature, and persisted in, there is harm in the very eminence of
+the models set before him at the beginning of his career. If he feels
+their power, they make him restless and impatient, it may be despondent,
+it may be madly and fruitlessly ambitious. If he does not feel it, he is
+sure to be struck by what is weakest or slightest of their peculiar
+qualities; fancies that _this_ is what they are praised for; tries to
+catch the trick of it; and whatever easy vice or mechanical habit the
+master may have been betrayed or warped into, the unhappy pupil watches
+and adopts, triumphant in its ease:--has not sense to steal the
+peacock's feather, but imitates its voice. Better for him, far better,
+never to have seen what had been accomplished by others, but to have
+gained gradually his own quiet way, or at least with his guide only a
+step in advance of him, and the lantern low on the difficult path.
+Better even, it has lately seemed, to be guideless and lightless;
+fortunate those who, by desolate effort, trying hither and thither, have
+groped their way to some independent power. So, from Cornish rock, from
+St. Giles's Lane, from Thames mudshore, you get your Prout, your Hunt,
+your Turner; not, indeed, any of them well able to spell English, nor
+taught so much of their own business as to lay a color safely; but yet
+at last, or first, doing somehow something, wholly ineffective on the
+national mind, yet real, and valued at last after they are dead, in
+money;--valued otherwise not even at so much as the space of dead brick
+wall it would cover; their work being left for years packed in parcels
+at the National Gallery, or hung conclusively out of sight under the
+shadowy iron vaults of Kensington. The men themselves, quite
+inarticulate, determine nothing of their Art, interpret nothing of their
+own minds; teach perhaps a trick or two of their stage business in
+early life--as, for instance, that it is good where there is much black
+to break it with white, and where there is much white to break it with
+black, etc., etc.; in later life remain silent altogether, or speak only
+in despair (fretful or patient according to their character); one who
+might have been among the best of them,[63] the last we heard of,
+finding refuge for an entirely honest heart from a world which declares
+honesty to be impossible, only in a madness nearly as sorrowful as its
+own;--the religious madness which makes a beautiful soul ludicrous and
+ineffectual; and so passes away, bequeathing for our inheritance from
+its true and strong life, a pretty song about a tiger, another about a
+bird-cage, two or three golden couplets, which no one will ever take the
+trouble to understand,--the spiritual portrait of the ghost of a
+flea,--and the critical opinion that "the unorganized blots of Rubens
+and Titian are not Art." Which opinion the public mind perhaps not
+boldly indorsing, is yet incapable of pronouncing adversely to it, that
+the said blots of Titian and Rubens _are_ Art, perceiving for itself
+little good in them, and hanging _them_ also well out of its way, at
+tops of walls (Titian's portrait of Charles V. at Munich, for example;
+Tintoret's Susannah, and Veronese's Magdalen, in the Louvre), that it
+may have room and readiness for what may be generally termed "railroad
+work," bearing on matters more immediately in hand; said public looking
+to the present pleasure of its fancy, and the portraiture of itself in
+official and otherwise imposing or entertaining circumstances, as the
+only "Right" cognizable by it.
+
+29. II. And this is a deeper source of evil, by far, than the former
+one, for though it is ill for us to strain towards a right for which we
+have never ripened it is worse for us to believe in no right at all.
+"Anything," we say, "that a clever man can do to amuse us is good; what
+does not amuse us we do not want. Taste is assuredly a frivolous,
+apparently a dangerous gift; vicious persons and vicious nations have
+it; we are a practical people, content to know what we like, wise in
+not liking it too much, and when tired of it, wise in getting something
+we like better. Painting is of course an agreeable ornamental Art,
+maintaining a number of persons respectably, deserving therefore
+encouragement, and getting it pecuniarily, to a hitherto unheard-of
+extent. What would you have more?" This is, I believe, very nearly our
+Art-creed. The fact being (very ascertainably by anyone who will take
+the trouble to examine the matter), that there is a cultivated Art among
+all great nations, inevitably necessary to them as the fulfillment of
+one part of their human nature. None but savage nations are without Art,
+and civilized nations who do their Art ill, do it because there is
+something deeply wrong at their hearts. They paint badly as a paralyzed
+man stammers, because his life is touched somewhere within; when the
+deeper life is full in a people, they speak clearly and rightly; paint
+clearly and rightly; think clearly and rightly. There is some reverse
+effect, but very little. Good pictures do not teach a nation; they are
+the signs of its having been taught. Good thoughts do not form a nation;
+it must be formed before it can think them. Let it once decay at the
+heart, and its good work and good thoughts will become subtle luxury and
+aimless sophism; and it and they will perish together.
+
+30. It is my purpose, therefore, in some subsequent papers, with such
+help as I may anywise receive, to try if there may not be determined
+some of the simplest laws which are indeed binding on Art practice and
+judgment. Beginning with elementary principle, and proceeding upwards as
+far as guiding laws are discernible, I hope to show, that if we do not
+yet know them, there are at least such laws to be known, and that it is
+of a deep and intimate importance to any people, especially to the
+English at this time, that their children should be sincerely taught
+whatever arts they learn, and in riper age become capable of a just
+choice and wise pleasure in the accomplished works of the artist. But I
+earnestly ask for help in this task. It is one which can only come to
+good issue by the consent and aid of many thinkers; and I would, with
+the permission of the Editor of this Journal, invite debate on the
+subject of each paper, together with brief and clear statements of
+consent or objection, with name of consenter or objector; so that after
+courteous discussion had, and due correction of the original statement,
+we may get something at last set down, as harmoniously believed by such
+and such known artists. If nothing can thus be determined, at least the
+manner and variety of dissent will show whether it is owing to the
+nature of the subject, or to the impossibility, under present
+circumstances, that different persons should approach it from similar
+points of view; and the inquiry, whatever its immediate issue, cannot be
+ultimately fruitless.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[62] _Art Journal_, New Series, vol. iv., pp. 5-6. January 1865.--ED.
+
+[63] See p. 353, Sec. 83, for a further mention of William Blake.--ED.
+
+
+
+
+THE CESTUS OF AGLAIA
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.[64]
+
+
+31. Our knowledge of human labor, if intimate enough, will, I think,
+mass it for the most part into two kinds--mining and molding; the labor
+that seeks for things, and the labor that shapes them. Of these the last
+should be always orderly, for we ought to have some conception of the
+whole of what we have to make before we try to make any part of it; but
+the labor of seeking must be often methodless, following the veins of
+the mine as they branch, or trying for them where they are broken. And
+the mine, which we would now open into the souls of men, as they govern
+the mysteries of their handicrafts, being rent into many dark and
+divided ways, it is not possible to map our work beforehand, or resolve
+on its directions. We will not attempt to bind ourselves to any
+methodical treatment of our subject, but will get at the truths of it
+here and there, as they seem extricable; only, though we cannot know to
+what depth we may have to dig, let us know clearly what we are digging
+for. We desire to find by what rule some Art is called good, and other
+Art bad: we desire to find the conditions of character in the artist
+which are essentially connected with the goodness of his work: we desire
+to find what are the methods of practice which form this character or
+corrupt it; and finally, how the formation or corruption of this
+character is connected with the general prosperity of nations.
+
+32. And all this we want to learn practically: not for mere pleasant
+speculation on things that have been; but for instant direction of those
+that are yet to be. My first object is to get at some fixed principles
+for the teaching of Art to our youth; and I am about to ask, of all who
+may be able to give me a serviceable answer, and with and for all who
+are anxious for such answer, what arts should be generally taught to the
+English boy and girl,--by what methods,--and to what ends? How well, or
+how imperfectly, our youth of the higher classes should be disciplined
+in the practice of music and painting?--how far, among the lower
+classes, exercise in certain mechanical arts might become a part of
+their school life?--how far, in the adult life of this nation, the Fine
+Arts may advisably supersede or regulate the mechanical Arts? Plain
+questions these, enough; clearly also important ones; and, as clearly,
+boundless ones--mountainous--infinite in contents--only to be mined into
+in a scrambling manner by poor inquirers, as their present tools and
+sight may serve.
+
+33. I have often been accused of dogmatism, and confess to the holding
+strong opinions on some matters; but I tell the reader in sincerity, and
+entreat him in sincerity to believe, that I do not think myself able to
+dictate anything positive respecting questions of this magnitude. The
+one thing I am sure of is, the need of some form of dictation; or, where
+that is as yet impossible, at least of consistent experiment, for the
+just solution of doubts which present themselves every day in more
+significant and more impatient temper of interrogation.
+
+Here is one, for instance, lying at the base of all the rest--namely,
+what may be the real dignity of mechanical Art itself? I cannot express
+the amazed awe, the crushed humility, with which I sometimes watch a
+locomotive take its breath at a railway station, and think what work
+there is in its bars and wheels, and what manner of men they must be who
+dig brown iron-stone out of the ground, and forge it into THAT! What
+assemblage of accurate and mighty faculties in them; more than fleshly
+power over melting crag and coiling fire, fettered, and finessed at last
+into the precision of watchmaking; Titanian hammer-strokes beating, out
+of lava, these glittering cylinders and timely-respondent valves, and
+fine ribbed rods, which touch each other as a serpent writhes, in
+noiseless gliding, and omnipotence of grasp; infinitely complex anatomy
+of active steel, compared with which the skeleton of a living creature
+would seem, to a careless observer, clumsy and vile--a mere morbid
+secretion and phosphatous prop of flesh! What would the men who thought
+out this--who beat it out, who touched it into its polished calm of
+power, who set it to its appointed task, and triumphantly saw it fulfill
+this task to the utmost of their will--feel or think about this weak
+hand of mine, timidly leading a little stain of water-color, which I
+cannot manage, into an imperfect shadow of something else--mere failure
+in every motion, and endless disappointment; what, I repeat, would these
+Iron-dominant Genii think of me? and what ought I to think of them?
+
+34. But as I reach this point of reverence, the unreasonable thing is
+sure to give a shriek as of a thousand unanimous vultures, which leaves
+me shuddering in real physical pain for some half minute following; and
+assures me, during slow recovery, that a people which can endure such
+fluting and piping among them is not likely soon to have its modest ear
+pleased by aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song. Perhaps I am then led
+on into meditation respecting the spiritual nature of the Tenth Muse,
+who invented this gracious instrument, and guides its modulation by
+stokers' fingers; meditation, also, as to the influence of her invention
+amidst the other parts of the Parnassian melody of English education.
+Then it cannot but occur to me to inquire how far this modern "pneuma,"
+Steam, may be connected with other pneumatic powers talked of in that
+old religious literature, of which we fight so fiercely to keep the
+letters bright, and the working valves, so to speak, in good order
+(while we let the steam of it all carefully off into the cold
+condenser), what connection, I say, this modern "spiritus," in its
+valve-directed inspiration, has with that more ancient spiritus, or warm
+breath, which people used to think they might be "born of." Whether, in
+fine, there be any such thing as an entirely human Art, with spiritual
+motive power, and signal as of human voice, distinct inherently from
+this mechanical Art, with its mechanical motive force, and signal of
+vulture voice. For after all, this shrieking thing, whatever the fine
+make of it may be, can but pull or push, and do oxen's work in an
+impetuous manner. That proud king of Assyria, who lost his reason, and
+ate oxen's food, would he have much more cause for pride, if he had been
+allowed to spend his reason in doing oxen's work?
+
+35. These things, then, I would fain consult about, and plead with the
+reader for his patience in council, even while we begin with the
+simplest practical matters; for raveled briers of thought entangle our
+feet, even at our first step. We would teach a boy to draw. Well, what
+shall he draw?--Gods, or men, or beasts, or clouds, or leaves, or iron
+cylinders? Are there any gods to be drawn? any men or women worth
+drawing, or only worth caricaturing? What are the aesthetic laws
+respecting iron cylinders; and would Titian have liked them rusty, or
+fresh cleaned with oil and rag, to fill the place once lightened by St.
+George's armor? How can we begin the smallest practical business, unless
+we get first some whisper of answer to such questions? We may tell a boy
+to draw a straight line straight, and a crooked one crooked; but what
+else?
+
+And it renders the dilemma, or multilemma, more embarrassing, that
+whatever teaching is to be had from the founders and masters of art is
+quite unpractical. The first source from which we should naturally seek
+for guidance would, of course, be the sayings of great workmen; but a
+sorrowful perception presently dawns on us that the great workmen have
+nothing to say. They are silent, absolutely in proportion to their
+creative power. The contributions to our practical knowledge
+of the principles of Art, furnished by the true captains of its
+hosts, may, I think, be arithmetically summed by the +O+ of
+Giotto: the inferior teachers become didactic in the degree of their
+inferiority; and those who can do nothing have always much to advise.
+
+36. This however, observe, is only true of advice direct. You never, I
+grieve to say, get from the great men a plain answer to a plain
+question; still less can you entangle them in any agreeable gossip, out
+of which something might unawares be picked up. But of enigmatical
+teaching, broken signs and sullen mutterings, of which you can
+understand nothing, and may make anything;--of confused discourse in the
+work itself, about the work, as in Duerer's Melancolia;--and of discourse
+not merely confused, but apparently unreasonable and ridiculous, about
+all manner of things _except_ the work,--the great Egyptian and Greek
+artists give us much: from which, however, all that by utmost industry
+may be gathered, comes briefly to this,--that they have no conception of
+what modern men of science call the "Conservation of forces," but deduce
+all the force they feel in themselves, and hope for in others, from
+certain fountains or centers of perpetually supplied strength, to which
+they give various names: as, for instance, these seven following, more
+specially:--
+
+     1. The Spirit of Light, moral and physical, by name the
+     "Physician-Destroyer," bearing arrows in his hand, and a lyre;
+     pre-eminently the destroyer of human pride, and the guide of human
+     harmony. Physically, Lord of the Sun; and a mountain Spirit,
+     because the sun seems first to rise and set upon hills.
+
+     2. The Spirit of helpful Darkness--of shade and rest. Night the
+     Restorer.
+
+     3. The Spirit of Wisdom in _Conduct_, bearing, in sign of conquest
+     over troublous and disturbing evil, the skin of the wild goat, and
+     the head of the slain Spirit of physical storm. In her hand, a
+     weaver's shuttle, or a spear.
+
+     4. The Spirit of Wisdom in _Arrangement_; called the Lord or Father
+     of Truth: throned on a four-square cubit, with a measuring-rod in
+     his hand, or a potter's wheel.
+
+     5. The Spirit of Wisdom in _Adaptation_; or of serviceable labor:
+     the Master of human effort in its glow; and Lord of useful fire,
+     moral and physical.
+
+     6. The Spirit, first of young or nascent grace, and then of
+     fulfilled beauty: the wife of the Lord of Labor. I have taken the
+     two lines in which Homer describes her girdle, for the motto of
+     these essays: partly in memory of these outcast fancies of the
+     great masters: and partly for the sake of a meaning which we shall
+     find as we go on.
+
+     7. The Spirit of pure human life and gladness. Master of wholesome
+     vital passion; and physically, Lord of the Vine.
+
+
+37. From these ludicrous notions of motive force, inconsistent as they
+are with modern physiology and organic chemistry, we may, nevertheless,
+hereafter gather, in the details of their various expressions, something
+useful to us. But I grieve to say that when our provoking teachers
+descend from dreams about the doings of Gods to assertions respecting
+the deeds of Men, little beyond the blankest discouragement is to be had
+from them. Thus, they represent the ingenuity, and deceptive or
+imitative Arts of men, under the type of a Master who builds labyrinths,
+and makes images of living creatures, for evil purposes, or for none;
+and pleases himself and the people with idle jointing of toys, and
+filling of them with quicksilver motion; and brings his child to
+foolish, remediless catastrophe, in fancying his father's work as good,
+and strong, and fit to bear sunlight, as if it had been God's work. So,
+again, they represent the foresight and kindly zeal of men by a most
+rueful figure of one chained down to a rock by the brute force and bias
+and methodical hammer-stroke of the merely practical Arts, and by the
+merciless Necessities or Fates of present time; and so having his very
+heart torn piece by piece out of him by a vulturous hunger and sorrow,
+respecting things he cannot reach, nor prevent, nor achieve. So, again,
+they describe the sentiment and pure soul-power of Man, as moving the
+very rocks and trees, and giving them life, by its sympathy with them;
+but losing its own best-beloved thing by mere venomous accident: and
+afterwards going down to hell for it, in vain; being impatient and
+unwise, though full of gentleness; and, in the issue, after as vainly
+trying to teach this gentleness to others, and to guide them out of
+their lower passions to sunlight of true healing Life, it drives the
+sensual heart of them, and the gods that govern it, into mere and pure
+frenzy of resolved rage, and gets torn to pieces by them, and ended;
+only the nightingale staying by its grave to sing. All which appearing
+to be anything rather than helpful or encouraging instruction for
+beginners, we shall, for the present, I think, do well to desire these
+enigmatical teachers to put up their pipes and be gone; and betaking
+ourselves in the humblest manner to intelligible business, at least set
+down some definite matter for decision, to be made a first
+stepping-stone at the shore of this brook of despond and difficulty.
+
+38. Most masters agree (and I believe they are right) that the first
+thing to be taught to any pupil, is how to draw an outline of such
+things as can be outlined.
+
+Now, there are two kinds of outline--the soft and hard. One must be
+executed with a soft instrument, as a piece of chalk or lead; and the
+other with some instrument producing for ultimate result a firm line of
+equal darkness; as a pen with ink, or the engraving tool on wood or
+metal.
+
+And these two kinds of outline have both of them their particular
+objects and uses, as well as their proper scale of size in work. Thus
+Raphael will sketch a miniature head with his pen, but always takes
+chalk if he draws of the size of life. So also Holbein, and generally
+the other strong masters.
+
+But the black outline seems to be peculiarly that which we ought to
+begin to reason upon, because it is simple and open-hearted, and does
+not endeavor to escape into mist. A pencil line may be obscurely and
+undemonstrably wrong; false in a cowardly manner, and without
+confession: but the ink line, if it goes wrong at all, goes wrong with a
+will, and may be convicted at our leisure, and put to such shame as its
+black complexion is capable of. May we, therefore, begin with the hard
+line? It will lead us far, if we can come to conclusions about it.
+
+39. Presuming, then, that our schoolboys are such as Coleridge would
+have them--_i.e._ that they are
+
+           "Innocent, steady, and wise,
+   And delight in the things of earth, water, and skies,"
+
+and, above all, in a moral state in which they may be trusted with
+ink--we put a pen into their hands (shall it be steel?) and a piece of
+smooth white paper, and something before them to draw. But what? "Nay,"
+the reader answers, "you had surely better give them pencil first, for
+that may be rubbed out." Perhaps so; but I am not sure that the power of
+rubbing out is an advantage; at all events, we shall best discover what
+the pencil outline ought to be, by investigating the power of the black
+one, and the kind of things we can draw with it.
+
+40. Suppose, for instance, my first scholar has a turn for entomology,
+and asks me to draw for him a wasp's leg, or its sting; having first
+humanely provided me with a model by pulling one off or out. My pen must
+clearly be fine at the point, and my execution none of the boldest, if I
+comply with his request. If I decline, and he thereupon challenges me at
+least to draw the wasp's body, with its pretty bands of black
+crinoline--behold us involved instantly in the profound question of
+local color! Am I to tell him he is not to draw outlines of bands or
+spots? How, then, shall he know a wasp's body from a bee's? I escape,
+for the present, by telling him the story of Daedalus and the honeycomb;
+set him to draw a pattern of hexagons, and lay the question of black
+bands up in my mind.
+
+41. The next boy, we may suppose, is a conchologist, and asks me to draw
+a white snail-shell for him! Veiling my consternation at the idea of
+having to give a lesson on the perspective of geometrical spirals, with
+an "austere regard of control" I pass on to the next student:--Who,
+bringing after him, with acclamation, all the rest of the form,
+requires of me contemptuously, to "draw a horse."
+
+And I retreat in final discomfiture; for not only I cannot myself
+execute, but I have never seen, an outline, quite simply and rightly
+done, either of a shell or a pony; nay, not so much as of a pony's nose.
+At a girls' school we might perhaps take refuge in rosebuds: but these
+boys, with their impatient battle-cry, "my kingdom for a horse," what is
+to be done for them?
+
+42. Well, this is what I should like to be able to do for them. To show
+them an enlarged black outline, nobly done, of the two sides of a coin
+of Tarentum, with that fiery rider kneeling, careless, on his horse's
+neck, and reclined on his surging dolphin, with the curled sea lapping
+round them; and then to convince my boys that no one (unless it were
+Taras's father himself, with the middle prong of his trident) could draw
+a horse like that, without learning;--that for poor mortals like us
+there must be sorrowful preparatory stages; and, having convinced them
+of this, set them to draw (if I had a good copy to give them) a horse's
+hoof, or his rib, or a vertebra of his thunder-clothed neck, or any
+other constructive piece of him.
+
+43. Meanwhile, all this being far out of present reach, I am fain to
+shrink back into my snail-shell, both for shelter and calm of peace; and
+ask of artists in general how the said shell, or any other simple object
+involving varied contour, _should_ be outlined in ink?--how thick the
+lines should be, and how varied? My own idea of an elementary outline is
+that it should be unvaried; distinctly visible; not thickened towards
+the shaded sides of the object; not express any exaggerations of aerial
+perspective, nor fade at the further side of a cup as if it were the
+further side of a crater of a volcano; and therefore, in objects of
+ordinary size, show no gradation at all, unless where the real outline
+disappears, as in soft contours and folds. Nay, I think it may even be a
+question whether we ought not to resolve that the line should never
+gradate itself at all, but terminate quite bluntly! Albert Duerer's
+"Cannon" furnishes a very peculiar and curious example of this entirely
+equal line, even to the extreme distance; being in that respect opposed
+to nearly all his other work, which is wrought mostly by tapering lines;
+and his work in general, and Holbein's, which appear to me entirely
+typical of rightness in use of the graver and pen, are to be considered
+carefully in their relation to Rembrandt's loose etching, as in the
+"Spotted Shell."
+
+44. But I do not want to press my own opinions now, even when I have
+been able to form them distinctly. I want to get at some unanimous
+expression of opinion and method; and would propose, therefore, in all
+modesty, this question for discussion, by such artists as will favor me
+with answer,[65] giving their names:--_How ought the pen to be used to
+outline a form of varied contour; and ought outline to be entirely pure,
+or, even in its most elementary types, to pass into some suggestion of
+shade in the inner masses?_ For there are no examples whatever of pure
+outlines by the great masters. They are always touched or modified by
+inner lines, more or less suggestive of solid form, and they are lost or
+accentuated in certain places, not so much in conformity with any
+explicable law, as in expression of the master's future purpose, or of
+what he wishes immediately to note in the character of the object. Most
+of them are irregular memoranda, not systematic elementary work: of
+those which are systematized, the greater part are carried far beyond
+the initiative stage; and Holbein's are nearly all washed with color:
+the exact degree in which he depends upon the softening and extending
+his touch of ink by subsequent solution of it, being indeterminable,
+though exquisitely successful. His stupendous drawings in the British
+Museum (I can justly use no other term than "stupendous," of their
+consummately decisive power) furnish finer instances of this treatment
+than any at Basle; but it would be very difficult to reduce them to a
+definable law. Venetian outlines are rare, except preparations on
+canvas, often shaded before coloring;--while Raphael's, if not shaded,
+are quite loose, and useless as examples to a beginner: so that we are
+left wholly without guide as to the preparatory steps on which we should
+decisively insist; and I am myself haunted by the notion that the
+students were forced to shade firmly from the very beginning, in all the
+greatest schools; only we never can get hold of any beginnings, or any
+weak work of those schools: whatever is bad in them comes of decadence,
+not infancy.
+
+45. I purpose in the next essay[66] to enter upon quite another part of
+the inquiry, so as to leave time for the reception of communications
+bearing upon the present paper: and, according to their importance, I
+shall ask leave still to defer our return to the subject until I have
+had time to reflect upon them, and to collect for public service the
+concurrent opinions they may contain.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[64] _Art Journal_, vol. iv., pp. 33-5. February 1865. The first word
+being printed in plain capitals instead of with an ornamental initial
+letter generally used by the _Art Journal_, the following note was added
+by the author:--"I beg the Editor's and reader's pardon for an
+informality in the type; but I shrink from ornamental letters, and have
+begged for a legible capital instead."--ED.
+
+[65] I need not say that this inquiry can only be pursued by the help of
+those who will take it up good-humoredly and graciously: such help I
+will receive in the spirit in which it is given; entering into no
+controversy, but questioning further where there is doubt: gathering all
+I can into focus, and passing silently by what seems at last
+irreconcilable.
+
+[66] This essay, Chapter II. in the _Art Journal_, is here omitted as
+having been already reprinted with only a few verbal alterations in _The
+Queen of the Air_, Sec.Sec. 135 to 142 inclusive, which see. The _Art
+Journal_, however, contained a final paragraph, introductory of Chapter
+III., which is omitted in _The Queen of the Air_, and was as
+follows:--"To the discernment of this law" (_i.e._, that to which the
+arts are subject, see _Queen of the Air_, Sec. 142) "we will now address
+ourselves slowly, beginning with the consideration of little things, and
+of easily definable virtues. And since Patience is the pioneer of all
+the others, I shall endeavor in the next paper to show how that modest
+virtue has been either held of no account, or else set to vilest work in
+our modern Art-schools; and what harm has resulted from such disdain, or
+such employment of her."--ED.
+
++----------------------------------------+
+|Transcriber's note:                     |
+|                                        |
+|Chapter II is missing from the original.|
++----------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.[67]
+
+   "Dame Pacience sitting there I fonde,
+   With face pale, upon an hill of sonde."
+
+
+46. As I try to summon this vision of Chaucer's into definiteness, and
+as it fades before me, and reappears, like the image of Piccarda in the
+moon, there mingles with it another;--the image of an Italian child,
+lying, she also, upon a hill of sand, by Eridanus' side; a vision which
+has never quite left me since I saw it. A girl of ten or twelve, it
+might be; one of the children to whom there has never been any other
+lesson taught than that of patience:--patience of famine and thirst;
+patience of heat and cold; patience of fierce word and sullen blow;
+patience of changeless fate and giftless time. She was lying with her
+arms thrown back over her head, all languid and lax, on an earth-heap by
+the river side (the softness of the dust being the only softness she had
+ever known), in the southern suburb of Turin, one golden afternoon in
+August, years ago. She had been at play, after her fashion, with other
+patient children, and had thrown herself down to rest, full in the sun,
+like a lizard. The sand was mixed with the draggled locks of her black
+hair, and some of it sprinkled over her face and body, in an
+"ashes to ashes" kind of way; a few black rags about her loins,
+but her limbs nearly bare, and her little breasts, scarce dimpled
+yet,--white,--marble-like--but, as wasted marble, thin with the
+scorching and the rains of Time. So she lay, motionless; black and white
+by the shore in the sun; the yellow light flickering back upon her from
+the passing eddies of the river, and burning down on her from the west.
+So she lay, like a dead Niobid: it seemed as if the Sun-God, as he sank
+towards gray Viso (who stood pale in the southwest, and pyramidal as a
+tomb), had been wroth with Italy for numbering her children too
+carefully, and slain this little one. Black and white she lay, all
+breathless, in a sufficiently pictorial manner: the gardens of the Villa
+Regina gleamed beyond, graceful with laurel-grove and labyrinthine
+terrace; and folds of purple mountain were drawn afar, for curtains
+round her little dusty bed.
+
+47. Pictorial enough, I repeat; and yet I might not now have remembered
+her, so as to find her figure mingling, against my will, with other
+images, but for her manner of "revival." For one of her playmates coming
+near, cast some word at her which angered her; and she rose--"en ego,
+victa situ"--she rose with a single spring, like a snake; one hardly saw
+the motion; and with a shriek so shrill that I put my hands upon my
+ears; and so uttered herself, indignant and vengeful, with words of
+justice,--Alecto standing by, satisfied, teaching her acute, articulate
+syllables, and adding her own voice to carry them thrilling through the
+blue laurel shadows. And having spoken, she went her way, wearily: and I
+passed by on the other side, meditating, with such Levitical propriety
+as a respectable person should, on the asplike Passion, following the
+sorrowful Patience; and on the way in which the saying, "Dust shalt thou
+eat all thy days" has been confusedly fulfilled, first by much provision
+of human dust for the meat of what Keats calls "human serpentry;" and
+last, by gathering the Consumed and Consumer into dust together, for the
+meat of the death spirit, or serpent Apap. Neither could I, for long,
+get rid of the thought of this strange dust-manufacture under the
+mill-stones, as it were, of Death; and of the two colors of the grain,
+discriminate beneath, though indiscriminately cast into the hopper. For
+indeed some of it seems only to be made whiter for its patience, and
+becomes kneadable into spiced bread, where they sell in Babylonian
+shops "slaves, and souls of men;" but other some runs dark from under
+the mill-stones; a little sulphurous and nitrous foam being mingled in
+the conception of it; and is ominously stored up in magazines near
+river-embankments; patient enough--for the present.
+
+48. But it is provoking to me that the image of this child mingles
+itself now with Chaucer's; for I should like truly to know what Chaucer
+means by his sand-hill. Not but that this is just one of those
+enigmatical pieces of teaching which we have made up our minds not to be
+troubled with, since it may evidently mean just what we like. Sometimes
+I would fain have it to mean the ghostly sand of the horologe of the
+world: and I think that the pale figure is seated on the recording heap,
+which rises slowly, and ebbs in giddiness, and flows again, and rises,
+tottering; and still she sees, falling beside her, the never-ending
+stream of phantom sand. Sometimes I like to think that she is seated on
+the sand because she is herself the Spirit of Staying, and victor over
+all things that pass and change;--quicksand of the desert in moving
+pillar; quicksand of the sea in moving floor; roofless all, and
+unabiding, but she abiding;--to herself, her home. And sometimes I
+think, though I do not like to think (neither did Chaucer mean this, for
+he always meant the lovely thing first, not the low one), that she is
+seated on her sand-heap as the only treasure to be gained by human toil;
+and that the little ant-hill, where the best of us creep to and fro,
+bears to angelic eyes, in the patientest gathering of its galleries,
+only the aspect of a little heap of dust; while for the worst of us, the
+heap, still lower by the leveling of those winged surveyors, is high
+enough, nevertheless, to overhang, and at last to close in judgment, on
+the seventh day, over the journeyers to the fortunate Islands; while to
+their dying eyes, through the mirage, "the city sparkles like a grain of
+salt."
+
+49. But of course it does not in the least matter what it means. All
+that matters specially to us in Chaucer's vision, is that, next to
+Patience (as the reader will find by looking at the context in the
+"Assembly of Foules"), were "Beheste" and "Art;"--Promise, that is, and
+Art: and that, although these visionary powers are here waiting only in
+one of the outer courts of Love, and the intended patience is here only
+the long-suffering of love; and the intended beheste, its promise; and
+the intended art, its cunning,--the same powers companion each other
+necessarily in the courts and antechamber of every triumphal home of
+man. I say triumphal home, for, indeed, triumphal _arches_ which you
+pass under, are but foolish things, and may be nailed together any day,
+out of pasteboard and filched laurel; but triumphal _doors_, which you
+can enter in at, with living laurel crowning the Lares, are not so easy
+of access: and outside of them waits always this sad portress, Patience;
+that is to say, the submission to the eternal laws of Pain and Time, and
+acceptance of them as inevitable, smiling at the grief. So much pains
+you shall take--so much time you shall wait: that is the Law. Understand
+it, honor it; with peace of heart accept the pain, and attend the hours;
+and as the husbandman in his waiting, you shall see, first the blade,
+and then the ear, and then the laughing of the valleys. But refuse the
+Law, and seek to do your work in your own time, or by any serpentine way
+to evade the pain, and you shall have no harvest--nothing but apples of
+Sodom: dust shall be your meat, and dust in your throat--there is no
+singing in such harvest time.
+
+50. And this is true for all things, little and great. There is a time
+and a way in which they can be done: none shorter--none smoother. For
+all noble things, the time is long and the way rude. You may fret and
+fume as you will; for every start and struggle of impatience there shall
+be so much attendant failure; if impatience become a habit, nothing but
+failure: until on the path you have chosen for your better swiftness,
+rather than the honest flinty one, there shall follow you, fast at hand,
+instead of Beheste and Art for companions, those two wicked hags,
+
+   "With hoary locks all loose, and visage grim;
+   Their feet unshod, their bodies wrapt in rags,
+   And both as swift on foot as chased stags;
+   And yet the one her other legge had lame,
+   Which with a staff all full of little snags
+   She did support, and Impotence her name:
+   But th' other was Impatience, armed with raging flame."
+
+"_Raging_ flame," note; unserviceable;--flame of the black grain. But
+the fire which Patience carries in her hand is that truly stolen from
+Heaven, in the _pith_ of the rod--fire of the slow match; persistent
+Fire like it also in her own body,--fire in the marrow; unquenchable
+incense of life: though it may seem to the bystanders that there is no
+breath in her, and she holds herself like a statue, as Hermione, "the
+statue lady," or Griselda, "the stone lady;" unless indeed one looks
+close for the glance _forward_, in the eyes, which distinguishes such
+pillars from the pillars, not of flesh, but of salt, whose eyes are set
+backwards.
+
+51. I cannot get to my work in this paper, somehow; the web of these old
+enigmas entangles me again and again. That rough syllable which begins
+the name of Griselda, "Gries," "the stone;" the roar of the long fall of
+the Toccia seems to mix with the sound of it, bringing thoughts of the
+great Alpine patience; mute snow wreathed by gray rock, till avalanche
+time comes--patience of mute tormented races till the time of the Gray
+league came; at last impatient. (Not that, hitherto, it has hewn its way
+to much: the Rhine-foam of the Via Mala seeming to have done its work
+better.) But it is a noble color that Grison Gray;--dawn color--graceful
+for a faded silk to ride in, and wonderful, in paper, for getting a glow
+upon, if you begin wisely, as you may some day perhaps see by those
+Turner sketches at Kensington, if ever anybody can see them.
+
+52. But we _will_ get to work now; the work being to understand, if we
+may, what tender creatures are indeed riding with us, the British
+public, in faded silk, and handing our plates for us with tender little
+thumbs, and never wearing, or doing, anything else (not always having
+much to put on their own plates). The loveliest arts, the arts of
+noblest descent, have been long doing this for us, and are still, and we
+have no idea of their being Princesses, but keep them ill-entreated and
+enslaved: vociferous as we are against Black slavery, while we are
+gladly acceptant of Gray; and fain to keep Aglaia and her
+sisters--Urania and hers,--serving us in faded silk, and taken for
+kitchen-wenches. We are mad Sanchos, not mad Quixotes: our eyes enchant
+_Down_wards.
+
+53. For one instance only: has the reader ever reflected on the
+patience, and deliberate subtlety, and unostentatious will, involved in
+the ordinary process of steel engraving; that process of which engravers
+themselves now with doleful voices deplore the decline, and with
+sorrowful hearts expect the extinction, after their own days?
+
+By the way--my friends of the field of steel,--you need fear nothing of
+the kind. What there is of mechanical in your work; of habitual and
+thoughtless, of vulgar or servile--for that, indeed, the time has come;
+the sun will burn it up for you, very ruthlessly; but what there is of
+human liberty, and of sanguine life, in finger and fancy, is kindred of
+the sun, and quite inextinguishable by him. He is the very last of
+divinities who would wish to extinguish it. With his red right hand,
+though full of lightning coruscation, he will faithfully and tenderly
+clasp yours, warm blooded; you will see the vermilion in the
+flesh-shadows all the clearer; but your hand will not be withered. I
+tell you--(dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well)--a
+square inch of man's engraving is worth all the photographs that ever
+were dipped in acid (or left half-washed afterwards, which is saying
+much)--only it must be man's engraving; not machine's engraving. You
+have founded a school on patience and labor--only. That school must soon
+be extinct. You will have to found one on thought, which is Phoenician
+in immortality and fears no fire. Believe me, photography can do against
+line engraving just what Madame Tussaud's wax-work can do against
+sculpture. That, and no more. You are too timid in this matter; you are
+like Isaac in that picture of Mr. Schnorr's in the last number of this
+Journal, and with Teutonically metaphysical precaution, shade your eyes
+from the sun with your back to it. Take courage; turn your eyes to it
+in an aquiline manner; put more sunshine on your steel, and less burr;
+and leave the photographers to their Phoebus of Magnesium wire.
+
+54. Not that I mean to speak disrespectfully of magnesium. I honor it to
+its utmost fiery particle (though I think the soul a fierier one); and I
+wish the said magnesium all comfort and triumph; nightly-lodging in
+lighthouses, and utter victory over coal gas. Could Titian but have
+known what the gnomes who built his dolomite crags above Cadore had
+mixed in the make of them,--and that one day--one night, I mean--his
+blue distances would still be seen pure blue, by light got out of his
+own mountains!
+
+Light out of limestone--color out of coal--and white wings out of hot
+water! It is a great age this of ours, for traction and extraction, if
+it only knew what to extract from itself, or where to drag itself to!
+
+55. But in the meantime I want the public to admire this patience of
+yours, while they have it, and to understand what it has cost to give
+them even this, which has to pass away. We will not take instance in
+figure engraving, of which the complex skill and textural gradation by
+dot and checker must be wholly incomprehensible to amateurs; but we will
+take a piece of average landscape engraving, such as is sent out of any
+good workshop--the master who puts his name at the bottom of the plate
+being of course responsible only for the general method, for the
+sufficient skill of subordinate hands, and for the few finishing touches
+if necessary. We will take, for example, the plate of Turner's "Mercury
+and Argus," engraved in this Journal.[68]
+
+56. I suppose most people, looking at such a plate, fancy it is produced
+by some simple mechanical artifice, which is to drawing only what
+printing is to writing. They conclude, at all events, that there is
+something complacent, sympathetic, and helpful in the nature of steel;
+so that while a pen-and-ink sketch may always be considered an
+achievement proving cleverness in the sketcher, a sketch on steel comes
+out by mere favor of the indulgent metal: or perhaps they think the
+plate is woven like a piece of pattern silk, and the pattern is
+developed by pasteboard cards punched full of holes. Not so. Look close
+at that engraving--imagine it to be a drawing in pen and ink, and
+yourself required similarly to produce its parallel! True, the steel
+point has the one advantage of not blotting, but it has tenfold or
+twentyfold disadvantage, in that you cannot slur, nor efface, except in
+a very resolute and laborious way, nor play with it, nor even see what
+you are doing with it at the moment, far less the effect that is to be.
+You must _feel_ what you are doing with it, and know precisely what you
+have got to do; how deep--how broad--how far apart--your lines must be,
+etc. and etc. (a couple of lines of etc.'s would not be enough to imply
+all you must know). But suppose the plate _were_ only a pen drawing:
+take your pen--your finest--and just try to copy the leaves that
+entangle the nearest cow's head and the head itself; remembering always
+that the kind of work required here is mere child's play compared to
+that of fine figure engraving. Nevertheless, take a strong magnifying
+glass to this--count the dots and lines that gradate the nostrils and
+the edges of the facial bone; notice how the light is left on the top of
+the head by the stopping at its outline of the coarse touches which form
+the shadows under the leaves; examine it well, and then--I humbly ask of
+you--try to do a piece of it yourself! You clever sketcher--you young
+lady or gentleman of genius--you eye-glassed dilettante--you current
+writer of criticism royally plural,--I beseech you--do it yourself; do
+the merely etched outline yourself, if no more. Look you,--you hold your
+etching needle this way, as you would a pencil, nearly; and then,--you
+scratch with it! it is as easy as lying. Or if you think that too
+difficult, take an easier piece;--take either of the light sprays of
+foliage that rise against the fortress on the right, put your glass over
+them--look how their fine outline is first drawn, leaf by leaf; then
+how the distant rock is put in between, with broken lines, mostly
+stopping before they touch the leaf outline, and--again, I pray you, do
+it yourself; if not on that scale, on a larger. Go on into the hollows
+of the distant rock--traverse its thickets--number its towers--count how
+many lines there are in a laurel bush--in an arch--in a casement: some
+hundred and fifty, or two hundred, deliberately drawn lines, you will
+find, in every square quarter of an inch;--say three thousand to the
+inch,--each with skillful intent put in its place! and then consider
+what the ordinary sketcher's work must appear to the men who have been
+trained to this!
+
+57. "But might not more have been done by three thousand lines to a
+square inch?" you will perhaps ask. Well, possibly. It may be with lines
+as with soldiers: three hundred, knowing their work thoroughly, may be
+stronger than three thousand less sure of their game. We shall have
+to press close home this question about numbers and purpose
+presently;--it is not the question now. Supposing certain results
+required,--atmospheric effects, surface textures, transparencies of
+shade, confusions of light,--more could _not_ be done with less. There
+are engravings of this modern school, of which, with respect to their
+particular aim, it may be said, most truly, they "_cannot_ be better
+done."
+
+58. Whether an engraving should aim at effects of atmosphere, may be
+disputable (just as also whether a sculptor should aim at effects of
+perspective); but I do not raise these points to-day. Admit the aim--let
+us note the patience; nor this in engraving only. I have taken an
+engraving for my instance, but I might have taken any form of Art. I
+call upon all good artists, painters, sculptors, metal-workers, to bear
+witness with me in what I now tell the public in their name,--that the
+same Fortitude, the same deliberation, the same perseverance in resolute
+act--is needed to do _anything_ in Art that is worthy. And why is it,
+you workmen, that you are silent always concerning your toil; and mock
+at us in your hearts, within that shrine at Eleusis, to the gate of
+which you have hewn your way through so deadly thickets of thorn; and
+leave us, foolish children, outside, in our conceited thinking either
+that we can enter it in play, or that we are grander for not entering?
+Far more earnestly is it to be asked, why do you _stoop_ to us as you
+mock us? If your secrecy were a noble one,--if, in that incommunicant
+contempt, you wrought your own work with majesty, whether we would
+receive it or not, it were kindly, though ungraciously, done; but now
+you make yourselves our toys, and do our childish will in servile
+silence. If engraving were to come to an end this day, and no guided
+point should press metal more, do you think it would be in a blaze of
+glory that your art would expire?--that those plates in the annuals, and
+black proofs in broad shop windows, are of a nobly monumental
+character,--"chalybe perennius"? I am afraid your patience has been too
+much like yonder poor Italian child's; and over that genius of yours,
+low laid by the Matin shore, if it expired so, the lament for Archytas
+would have to be sung again;--"pulveris exigui--munera." Suppose you
+were to shake off the dust again! cleanse your wings, like the morning
+bees on that Matin promontory; rise, in noble _im_patience, for there is
+such a thing: the Impatience of the Fourth Cornice.
+
+   "Cui buon voler, e giusto amor cavalca."
+
+Shall we try, together, to think over the meaning of that Haste, when
+the May mornings come?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[67] A small portion of this chapter was read by Mr. Ruskin, at Oxford,
+in November 1884, as a by-lecture, during the delivery of the course on
+the "Pleasures of England."--ED.
+
+[68] The rest of this and the whole of the succeeding paragraph is also
+reprinted in _Ariadne Florentina_, Sec. 115, and para. i. of 116.--ED.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.[69]
+
+
+59. It is a wild March day,--the 20th; and very probably due course of
+English Spring will bring as wild a May-day by the time this writing
+meets anyone's eyes; but at all events, as yet the days are rough, and
+as I look out of my fitfully lighted window into the garden, everything
+seems in a singular hurry. The dead leaves; and yonder two living ones,
+on the same stalk, tumbling over and over each other on the lawn, like a
+quaint mechanical toy; and the fallen sticks from the rooks' nests, and
+the twisted straws out of the stable-yard--all going one way, in the
+hastiest manner! The puffs of steam, moreover, which pass under the
+wooded hills where what used to be my sweetest field-walk ends now,
+prematurely, in an abyss of blue clay; and which signify, in their
+silvery expiring between the successive trunks of wintry trees, that
+some human beings, thereabouts, are in a hurry as well as the sticks and
+straws, and, having fastened themselves to the tail of a manageable
+breeze, are being blown down to Folkestone.
+
+60. In the general effect of these various passages and passengers, as
+seen from my quiet room, they look all very much alike. One begins
+seriously to question with one's self whether those passengers by the
+Folkestone train are in truth one whit more in a hurry than the dead
+leaves. The difference consists, of course, in the said passengers
+knowing where they are going to, and why; and having resolved to go
+there--which, indeed, as far as Folkestone, may, perhaps, properly
+distinguish them from the leaves: but will it distinguish them any
+farther? Do many of them know what they are going to Folkestone
+for?--what they are going anywhere for? and where, at last, by sum of
+all the days' journeys, of which this glittering transit is one, they
+are going for peace? For if they know not this, certainly they are no
+more making haste than the straws are. Perhaps swiftly going the wrong
+way; more likely going no way--any way, as the winds and their own
+wills, wilder than the winds, dictate; to find themselves at last at the
+end which would have come to them quickly enough without their seeking.
+
+61. And, indeed, this is a very preliminary question to all measurement
+of the rate of going, this "where to?" or, even before that, "are we
+going on at all?"--"getting on" (as the world says) on any road
+whatever? Most men's eyes are so fixed on the mere swirl of the wheel of
+their fortunes, and their souls so vexed at the reversed cadences of it
+when they come, that they forget to ask if the curve they have been
+carried through on its circumference was circular or cycloidal; whether
+they have been bound to the ups and downs of a mill-wheel or of a
+chariot-wheel.
+
+That phrase, of "getting on," so perpetually on our lips (as indeed it
+should be), do any of us take it to our hearts, and seriously ask where
+we can get on _to_? That instinct of hurry has surely good grounds. It
+is all very well for lazy and nervous people (like myself for instance)
+to retreat into tubs, and holes, and corners, anywhere out of the dust,
+and wonder within ourselves, "what all the fuss can be about?" The fussy
+people might have the best of it, if they know their end. Suppose they
+were to answer this March or May morning thus:--"Not bestir ourselves,
+indeed! and the spring sun up these four hours!--and this first of May,
+1865, never to come back again; and of Firsts of May in perspective,
+supposing ourselves to be 'nel mezzo del cammin,' perhaps some twenty or
+twenty-five to be, not without presumption, hoped for, and by no means
+calculated upon. Say, twenty of them, with their following groups of
+summer days; and though they may be long, one cannot make much more than
+sixteen hours apiece out of them, poor sleepy wretches that we are; for
+even if we get up at four, we must go to bed while the red yet stays
+from the sunset: and half the time we are awake, we must be lying among
+haycocks, or playing at something, if we are wise; not to speak of
+eating, and previously earning whereof to eat, which takes time: and
+then, how much of us and of our day will be left for getting on? Shall
+we have a seventh, or even a tithe, of our twenty-four hours?--two hours
+and twenty-four minutes clear, a day, or, roughly, a thousand hours a
+year, and (violently presuming on fortune, as we said) twenty years of
+working life: twenty thousand hours to get on in, altogether? Many men
+would think it hard to be limited to an utmost twenty thousand pounds
+for their fortunes, but here is a sterner limitation; the Pactolus of
+time, sand, and gold together, would, with such a fortune, count us a
+pound an hour, through our real and serviceable life. If this time
+capital would reproduce itself! and for our twenty thousand hours we
+could get some rate of interest, if well spent? At all events, we will
+do something with them; not lie moping out of the way of the dust, as
+you do."
+
+62. A sufficient answer, indeed; yet, friends, if you would _make_ a
+little less dust, perhaps we should all see our way better. But I am
+ready to take the road with you, if you mean it so seriously--only let
+us at least consider where we are now, at starting.
+
+Here, on a little spinning, askew-axised thing we call a
+planet--(impertinently enough, since we are far more planetary
+ourselves). A round, rusty, rough little metallic ball--very hard to
+live upon; most of it much too hot or too cold: a couple of narrow
+habitable belts about it, which, to wandering spirits, must look like
+the places where it has got damp, and green-moldy, with accompanying
+small activities of animal life in the midst of the lichen. Explosive
+gases, seemingly, inside it, and possibilities of very sudden
+dispersion.
+
+63. This is where we are; and roundabout us, there seem to be more of
+such balls, variously heated and chilled, ringed and mooned, moved and
+comforted; the whole giddy group of us forming an atom in a milky mist,
+itself another atom in a shoreless phosphorescent sea of such Volvoces
+and Medusae.
+
+Whereupon, I presume, one would first ask, have we any chance of getting
+off this ball of ours, and getting on to one of those finer ones? Wise
+people say we have, and that it is very wicked to think otherwise. So we
+will think no otherwise; but, with their permission, think nothing about
+the matter now, since it is certain that the more we make of our little
+rusty world, such as it is, the more chance we have of being one day
+promoted into a merrier one.
+
+64. And even on this rusty and moldy Earth, there appear to be things
+which may be seen with pleasure, and things which might be done with
+advantage. The stones of it have strange shapes; the plants and the
+beasts of it strange ways. Its air is coinable into wonderful sounds;
+its light into manifold colors: the trees of it bring forth pippins, and
+the fields cheese (though both of these may be, in a finer sense, "to
+come"). There are bright eyes upon it which reflect the light of other
+eyes quite singularly; and foolish feelings to be cherished upon it; and
+gladdenings of dust by neighbor dust, not easily explained, but
+pleasant, and which take time to win. One would like to know something
+of all this, I suppose?--to divide one's score of thousand hours as
+shrewdly as might be. Ten minutes to every herb of the field is not
+much; yet we shall not know them all, so, before the time comes to be
+made grass of ourselves! Half an hour for every crystalline form of clay
+and flint, and we shall be near the need of shaping the gray flint stone
+that is to weigh upon our feet. And we would fain dance a measure or two
+before that cumber is laid upon them: there having been hitherto much
+piping to which we have not danced. And we must leave time for loving,
+if we are to take Marmontel's wise peasant's word for it, "_Il n'y a de
+bon que c'a!_" And if there should be fighting to do also? and weeping?
+and much burying? truly, we had better make haste.
+
+65. Which means, simply, that we must lose neither strength nor moment.
+Hurry is not haste; but economy is, and rightness is. Whatever is
+rightly done stays with us, to support another right beyond, or higher
+up: whatever is wrongly done, vanishes; and by the blank, betrays what
+we would have built above. Wasting no word, no thought, no doing, we
+shall have speed enough; but then there is that farther question, what
+shall we do?--what we are fittest (worthiest, that is) to do, and what
+is best worth doing? Note that word "worthy," both of the man and the
+thing, for the two dignities go together. Is _it_ worth the pains? Are
+we worth the task? The dignity of a man depends wholly upon this
+harmony. If his task is above him, he will be undignified in failure; if
+he is above it, he will be undignified in success. His own composure and
+nobleness must be according to the composure of his thought to his toil.
+
+66. As I was dreaming over this, my eyes fell by chance on a page of my
+favorite thirteenth century psalter, just where two dragons, one with
+red legs, and another with green,--one with a blue tail on a purple
+ground, and the other with a rosy tail on a golden ground, follow the
+verse "_Quis ascendet in montem Domini_," and begin the solemn "_Qui non
+accepit in vano animam suam_." Who hath not lift up his soul unto
+vanity, we have it; and [Greek: elaben epi mataio], the Greeks (not that
+I know what that means accurately): broadly, they all mean, "who has not
+received nor given his soul in vain," this is the man who can make
+haste, even uphill, the only haste worth making; and it must be up the
+right hill, too: not that Corinthian Acropolis, of which, I suppose, the
+white specter stood eighteen hundred feet high, in Hades, for Sisyphus
+to roll his fantastic stone up--image, himself, forever of the greater
+part of our wise mortal work.
+
+67. Now all this time, whatever the reader may think, I have never for a
+moment lost sight of that original black line with which is our own
+special business. The patience, the speed, the dignity, we can give to
+that, the choice to be made of subject for it, are the matters I want to
+get at. You think, perhaps, that an engraver's function is one of no
+very high dignity;--does not involve a serious choice of work. Consider
+a little of it. Here is a steel point, and 'tis like Job's "iron
+pen"--and you are going to cut into steel with it, in a most deliberate
+way, as into the rock forever. And this scratch or inscription of yours
+will be seen of a multitude of eyes. It is not like a single picture or
+a single wall painting; this multipliable work will pass through
+thousand thousand hands, strengthen and inform innumerable souls, if it
+be worthy; vivify the folly of thousands if unworthy. Remember, also, it
+will mix in the very closest manner in domestic life. This engraving
+will not be gossiped over and fluttered past at private views of
+academies; listlessly sauntered by in corners of great galleries. Ah,
+no! This will hang over parlor chimney-pieces--shed down its hourly
+influence on children's forenoon work. This will hang in little luminous
+corners by sick beds; mix with flickering dreams by candlelight, and
+catch the first rays from the window's "glimmering square." You had
+better put something good into it! I do not know a more solemn field of
+labor than that _champ d'acier_. From a pulpit, perhaps a man can only
+reach one or two people, for that time,--even your book, once carelessly
+read, probably goes into a bookcase catacomb, and is thought of no more.
+But this; taking the eye unawares again and again, and always again:
+persisting and inevitable! where will you look for a chance of saying
+something nobly, if it is not here?
+
+68. And the choice is peculiarly free; to you of all men most free. An
+artist, at first invention, cannot always choose what shall come into
+his mind, nor know what it will eventually turn into. But you, professed
+copyists, unless you have mistaken your profession, have the power of
+governing your own thoughts, and of following and interpreting the
+thoughts of others. Also, you see the work to be done put plainly before
+you; you can deliberately choose what seems to you best, out of myriads
+of examples of perfect Art. You can count the cost accurately; saying,
+"It will take me a year--two years--five--a fourth or fifth, probably,
+of my remaining life, to do this." Is the thing worth it? There is no
+excuse for choosing wrongly; no other men whatever have data so full,
+and position so firm, for forecast of their labor.
+
+69. I put my psalter aside (not, observe, vouching for its red and
+green dragons:--men lifted up their souls to vanity sometimes in the
+thirteenth as in the nineteenth century), and I take up, instead, a book
+of English verses, published--there is no occasion to say when. It is
+full of costliest engravings--large, skillful, appallingly laborious;
+dotted into textures like the dust on a lily leaf,--smoothed through
+gradations like clouds,--graved to surfaces like mother-of-pearl; and by
+all this toil there is set forth for the delight of Englishwomen, a
+series of the basest dreams that ungoverned feminine imagination can
+coin in sickliest indolence,--ball-room amours, combats of curled
+knights, pilgrimages of disguised girl-pages, romantic pieties,
+charities in costume,--a mass of disguised sensualism and feverish
+vanity--impotent, pestilent, prurient, scented with a venomous elixir,
+and rouged with a deadly dust of outward good; and all this done, as
+such things only can be done, in a boundless ignorance of all natural
+veracity; the faces falsely drawn--the lights falsely cast--the forms
+effaced or distorted, and all common human wit and sense extinguished in
+the vicious scum of lying sensation.
+
+And this, I grieve to say, is only a characteristic type of a large mass
+of popular English work. This is what we spend our Teutonic lives in;
+engraving with an iron pen in the rock forever; this, the passion of the
+Teutonic woman (as opposed to Virgilia), just as foxhunting is the
+passion of the Teutonic man, as opposed to Valerius.
+
+70. And while we deliberately spend all our strength, and all our
+tenderness, all our skill, and all our money, in doing, relishing,
+buying, this absolute Wrongness, of which nothing can ever come but
+disease in heart and brain, remember that all the mighty works of the
+great painters of the world, full of life, truth, and blessing, remain
+to this present hour of the year 1865 unengraved! There literally exists
+no earnestly studied and fully accomplished engraving of any very great
+work, except Leonardo's Cena. No large Venetian picture has ever been
+thoroughly engraved. Of Titian's Peter Martyr, there is even no worthy
+memorial transcript but Le Febre's. The Cartoons have been multiplied
+in false readings; never in faithful ones till lately by photography. Of
+the Disputa and the Parnassus, what can the English public know? of the
+thoughtful Florentines and Milanese, of Ghirlandajo, and Luini, and
+their accompanying hosts--what do they yet so much as care to know?
+
+"The English public will not pay," you reply, "for engravings from the
+great masters. The English public will only pay for pictures of itself;
+of its races, its rifle-meetings, its rail stations, its
+parlor-passions, and kitchen interests; you must make your bread as you
+may, by holding the mirror to it."
+
+71. Friends, there have been hard fighting and heavy sleeping, this many
+a day, on the other side of the Atlantic, in the cause, as you suppose,
+of Freedom against slavery; and you are all, open-mouthed, expecting the
+glories of Black Emancipation. Perhaps a little White Emancipation on
+this side of the water might be still more desirable, and more easily
+and guiltlessly won.
+
+Do you know what slavery means? Suppose a gentleman taken by a Barbary
+corsair--set to field-work; chained and flogged to it from dawn to eve.
+Need he be a slave therefore? By no means; he is but a hardly-treated
+prisoner. There is some work which the Barbary corsair will not be able
+to make him do; such work as a Christian gentleman may not do, that he
+will not, though he die for it. Bound and scourged he may be, but he has
+heard of a Person's being bound and scourged before now, who was not
+therefore a slave. He is not a whit more slave for that. But suppose he
+take the pirate's pay, and stretch his back at piratical oars, for due
+salary, how then? Suppose for fitting price he betray his fellow
+prisoners, and take up the scourge instead of enduring it--become the
+smiter instead of the smitten, at the African's bidding--how then? Of
+all the sheepish notions in our English public "mind," I think the
+simplest is that slavery is neutralized when you are well paid for it!
+Whereas it is precisely that fact of its being paid for which makes it
+complete. A man who has been sold by another, may be but half a slave
+or none; but the man who has sold himself! He is the accurately Finished
+Bondsman.
+
+72. And gravely I say that I know _no_ captivity so sorrowful as that of
+an artist doing, consciously, bad work for pay. It is the serfdom of the
+finest gifts--of all that should lead and master men, offering itself to
+be spit upon, and that for a bribe. There is much serfdom, in Europe, of
+speakers and writers, but they only sell words; and their talk, even
+honestly uttered, might not have been worth much; it will not be thought
+of ten years hence; still less a hundred years hence. No one will buy
+our parliamentary speeches to keep in portfolios this time next century;
+and if people are weak enough now to pay for any special and flattering
+cadence of syllable, it is little matter. But _you_, with your painfully
+acquired power, your unwearied patience, your admirable and manifold
+gifts, your eloquence in black and white, which people will buy, if it
+is good (and has a broad margin), for fifty guineas a copy--in the year
+2000; to sell it all, as Ananias his land, "yea, for so much," and hold
+yourselves at every fool's beck, with your ready points, polished and
+sharp, hasting to scratch what _he_ wills! To bite permanent mischief in
+with acid; to spread an inked infection of evil all your days, and pass
+away at last from a life of the skillfulest industry--having done
+whatsoever your hand found (remuneratively) to do, with your might, and
+a great might, but with cause to thank God only for this--that the end
+of it all has at last come, and that "there is no device nor work in the
+Grave." One would get quit of _this_ servitude, I think, though we
+reached the place of Rest a little sooner, and reached it fasting.
+
+73. My English fellow-workmen, you have the name of liberty often on
+your lips; get the fact of it oftener into your business! talk of it
+less, and try to understand it better. You have given students many
+copy-books of free-hand outlines--give them a few of free _heart_
+outlines.
+
+It appears, however, that you do not intend to help me with any
+utterance respecting these same outlines.[70] Be it so: I must make out
+what I can by myself. And under the influence of the Solstitial sign of
+June I will go backwards, or askance, to the practical part of the
+business, where I left it three months ago, and take up that question
+first, touching Liberty, and the relation of the loose swift line to the
+resolute slow one and of the etched line to the engraved one. It is a
+worthy question, for the open field afforded by illustrated works is
+tempting even to our best painters, and many an earnest hour and active
+fancy spend and speak themselves in the black line, vigorously enough,
+and dramatically, at all events: if wisely, may be considered. The
+French also are throwing great passion into their _eaux fortes_--working
+with a vivid haste and dark, brilliant freedom, which looked as if they
+etched with very energetic waters indeed--quite waters of life (it does
+not look so well, written in French). So we will take, with the reader's
+permission, for text next month, "Rembrandt, and strong waters."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[69] _Art Journal_, vol. iv., pp. 129-30. May 1865.--ED.
+
+[70] I have received some interesting private letters, but cannot make
+use of them at present, because they enter into general discussion
+instead of answering the specific question I asked, respecting the power
+of the black line; and I must observe to correspondents that in future
+their letters should be addressed to the Editor of this Journal, not to
+me; as I do not wish to incur the responsibility of selection.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.[71]
+
+
+74. The work I have to do in this paper ought, rightly, to have been
+thrown into the form of an appendix to the last chapter; for it is no
+link of the cestus of Aglaia we have to examine, but one of the crests
+of canine passion in the cestus of Scylla. Nevertheless, the girdle of
+the Grace cannot be discerned in the full brightness of it, but by
+comparing it with the dark torment of that other; and (in what place or
+form matters little) the work has to be done.
+
+"Rembrandt Van Rhyn"--it is said, in the last edition of a very valuable
+work[72] (for which, nevertheless, I could wish that greater lightness
+in the hand should be obtained by the publication of its information in
+one volume, and its criticism in another)--was "the most attractive and
+original of painters." It may be so; but there are attractions, and
+attractions. The sun attracts the planets--and a candle, night-moths;
+the one with perhaps somewhat of benefit to the planets;--but with what
+benefit the other to the moths, one would be glad to learn from those
+desert flies, of whom, one company having extinguished Mr. Kinglake's
+candle with their bodies, the remainder, "who had failed in obtaining
+this martyrdom, became suddenly serious, and clung despondingly to the
+canvas."
+
+75. Also, there are originalities, and originalities. To invent a new
+thing, which is also a precious thing; to be struck by a divinely-guided
+Rod, and become a sudden fountain of life to thirsty multitudes--this is
+enviable. But to be distinct of men in an original Sin; elect for the
+initial letter of a Lie; the first apparent spot of an unknown plague; a
+Root of bitterness, and the first-born worm of a company, studying an
+original De-Composition,--this is perhaps not so enviable. And if we
+think of it, most human originality is apt to be of that kind. Goodness
+is one, and immortal; it may be received and communicated--not
+originated: but Evil is various and recurrent, and may be misbegotten in
+endlessly surprising ways.
+
+76. But, that we may know better in what this originality consists, we
+find that our author, after expatiating on the vast area of the
+Pantheon, "illuminated solely by the small circular opening in the dome
+above," and on other similar conditions of luminous contraction, tells
+us that "to Rembrandt belongs the glory of having first embodied in Art,
+and perpetuated, these rare and beautiful effects of nature." Such
+effects are indeed rare in nature; but they are not rare, absolutely.
+The sky, with the sun in it, does not usually give the impression of
+being dimly lighted through a circular hole; but you may observe a very
+similar effect any day in your coal-cellar. The light is not
+Rembrandtesque on the current, or banks, of a river; but it is on those
+of a drain. Color is not Rembrandtesque, usually, in a clean house; but
+is presently obtainable of that quality in a dirty one. And without
+denying the pleasantness of the mode of progression which Mr. Hazlitt,
+perhaps too enthusiastically, describes as attainable in a background of
+Rembrandt's--"You stagger from one abyss of obscurity to another"--I
+cannot feel it an entirely glorious speciality to be distinguished, as
+Rembrandt was, from other great painters, chiefly by the liveliness of
+his darkness, and the dullness of his light. Glorious, or inglorious,
+the speciality itself is easily and accurately definable. It is the aim
+of the best painters to paint the noblest things they can see by
+sunlight. It was the aim of Rembrandt to paint the foulest things he
+could see--by rushlight.
+
+77. By rushlight, observe: material and spiritual. As the sun for the
+outer world; so in the inner world of man, that which "[Greek: ereuna
+tameua koilias]"[73]--"the candle of God, searching the inmost parts."
+If that light within become but a more active kind of darkness;--if,
+abdicating the measuring reed of modesty for scepter, and ceasing to
+measure with it, we dip it in such unctuous and inflammable refuse as we
+can find, and make our soul's light into a _tallow_ candle, and
+thenceforward take our guttering, sputtering, ill-smelling illumination
+about with us, holding it out in fetid fingers--encumbered with its
+lurid warmth of fungous wick, and drip of stalactitic grease--that we
+may see, when another man would have seen, or dreamed he saw, the flight
+of a divine Virgin--only the lamplight upon the hair of a costermonger's
+ass;--that, having to paint the good Samaritan, we may see only in
+distance the back of the good Samaritan, and in nearness the back of the
+good Samaritan's dog;--that having to paint the Annunciation to the
+Shepherds, we may turn the announcement of peace to men, into an
+announcement of mere panic to beasts; and, in an unsightly firework of
+unsightlier angels, see, as we see always, the feet instead of the head,
+and the shame instead of the honor;--and finally concentrate and rest
+the sum of our fame, as Titian on the Assumption of a spirit, so we on
+the dissection of a carcass,--perhaps by such fatuous fire, the less we
+walk, and by such phosphoric glow, the less we shine, the better it may
+be for us, and for all who would follow us.
+
+78. Do not think I deny the greatness of Rembrandt. In mere technical
+power (none of his eulogists know that power better than I, nor declare
+it in more distinct terms) he might, if he had been educated in a true
+school, have taken rank with the Venetians themselves. But that type of
+distinction between Titian's Assumption, and Rembrandt's Dissection,
+will represent for you with sufficient significance the manner of choice
+in all their work; only it should be associated with another
+characteristic example of the same opposition (which I have dwelt upon
+elsewhere) between Veronese and Rembrandt, in their conception of
+domestic life. Rembrandt's picture, at Dresden, of himself, with his
+wife sitting on his knee, a roasted peacock on the table, and a glass of
+champagne in his hand, is the best work I know of all he has left; and
+it marks his speciality with entire decision. It is, of course, a dim
+candlelight; and the choice of the sensual passions as the things
+specially and forever to be described and immortalized out of his own
+private life and love, is exactly that "painting the foulest thing by
+rushlight" which I have stated to be the enduring purpose of his mind.
+And you will find this hold in all minor treatment; and that to the
+uttermost: for as by your broken rushlight you see little, and only
+corners and points of things, and those very corners and points ill and
+distortedly; so, although Rembrandt knows the human face and hand, and
+never fails in these, when they are ugly, and he chooses to take pains
+with them, he knows nothing else: the more pains he takes with even
+familiar animals, the worse they are (witness the horse in that plate of
+the Good Samaritan), and any attempts to finish the first scribbled
+energy of his imaginary lions and tigers, end always only in the loss of
+the fiendish power and rage which were all he could conceive in an
+animal.
+
+79. His landscape, and foreground vegetation, I mean afterwards to
+examine in comparison with Duerer's; but the real caliber and nature of
+the man are best to be understood by comparing the puny, ill-drawn,
+terrorless, helpless, beggarly skeleton in his "Youth Surprised by
+Death," with the figure behind the tree in Duerer's plate (though it is
+quite one of Duerer's feeblest) of the same subject. Absolutely ignorant
+of all natural phenomena and law; absolutely careless of all lovely
+living form, or growth, or structure; able only to render with some
+approach to veracity, what alone he had looked at with some approach to
+attention,--the pawnbroker's festering heaps of old clothes, and caps,
+and shoes--Rembrandt's execution is one grand evasion, and his temper
+the grim contempt of a strong and sullen animal in its defiled den, for
+the humanity with which it is at war, for the flowers which it tramples,
+and the light which it fears.
+
+80. Again, do not let it be thought that when I call his execution
+evasive, I ignore the difference between his touch, on brow or lip, and
+a common workman's; but the whole school of etching which he founded,
+(and of painting, so far as it differs from Venetian work) is inherently
+loose and experimental. Etching is the very refuge and mask of
+sentimental uncertainty, and of vigorous ignorance. If you know anything
+clearly, and have a firm hand, depend upon it, you will draw it clearly;
+you will not care to hide it among scratches and burrs. And herein is
+the first grand distinction between etching and engraving--that in the
+etching needle you have an almost irresistible temptation to a wanton
+speed. There is, however, no real necessity for such a distinction; an
+etched line may have been just as steadily drawn, and seriously meant,
+as an engraved one; and for the moment, waiving consideration of this
+distinction, and opposing Rembrandt's work, considered merely as work of
+the black line, to Holbein's and Duerer's, as work of the black line, I
+assert Rembrandt's to be inherently _evasive_. You cannot unite his
+manner with theirs; choice between them is sternly put to you, when
+first you touch the steel. Suppose, for instance, you have to engrave,
+or etch, or draw with pen and ink, a single head, and that the head is
+to be approximately half an inch in height more or less (there is a
+reason for assigning this condition respecting size, which we will
+examine in due time): you have it in your power to do it in one of two
+ways. You may lay down some twenty or thirty entirely firm and visible
+lines, of which every one shall be absolutely right, and do the utmost a
+line can do. By their curvature they shall render contour; by their
+thickness, shade; by their place and form, every truth of expression,
+and every condition of design. The head of the soldier drawing his
+sword, in Duerer's "Cannon," is about half an inch high, supposing the
+brow to be seen. The chin is drawn with three lines, the lower lip with
+two, the upper, including the shadow from the nose, with five. Three
+separate the cheek from the chin, giving the principal points of
+character. Six lines draw the cheek, and its incised traces of care;
+four are given to each of the eyes; one, with the outline, to the nose;
+three to the frown of the forehead. None of these touches could anywhere
+be altered--none removed, without instantly visible harm; and their
+result is a head as perfect in character as a portrait by Reynolds.
+
+81. You may either do this--which, if you can, it will generally be very
+advisable to do--or, on the other hand, you may cover the face with
+innumerable scratches, and let your hand play with wanton freedom, until
+the graceful scrabble concentrates itself into shade. You may
+soften--efface--retouch--rebite--dot, and hatch, and redefine. If you
+are a great master, you will soon get your character, and probably keep
+it (Rembrandt often gets it at first, nearly as securely as Duerer); but
+the design of it will be necessarily seen through loose work, and
+modified by accident (as you think) fortunate. The accidents which occur
+to a practiced hand are always at first pleasing--the details which can
+be hinted, however falsely, through the gathering mystery, are always
+seducing. You will find yourself gradually dwelling more and more on
+little meannesses of form and texture, and lusters of surface: on cracks
+of skin, and films of fur and plume. You will lose your way, and then
+see two ways, and then many ways, and try to walk a little distance on
+all of them in turn, and so, back again. You will find yourself thinking
+of colors, and vexed because you cannot imitate them; next, struggling
+to render distances by indecision, which you cannot by tone. Presently
+you will be contending with finished pictures; laboring at the etching,
+as if it were a painting. You will leave off, after a whole day's work
+(after many days' work if you choose to give them), still unsatisfied.
+For final result--if you are as great as Rembrandt--you will have most
+likely a heavy, black, cloudy stain, with less character in it than the
+first ten lines had. If you are not as great as Rembrandt, you will have
+a stain by no means cloudy; but sandy and broken,--instead of a face,
+a speckled phantom of a face, patched, blotched, discomfited in every
+texture and form--ugly, assuredly; dull, probably; an unmanageable and
+manifold failure ill concealed by momentary, accidental, undelightful,
+ignoble success.
+
+Undelightful; note this especially, for it is the peculiar character of
+etching that it cannot render beauty. You may hatch and scratch your way
+to picturesqueness or to deformity--never to beauty. You can etch an old
+woman, or an ill-conditioned fellow. But you cannot etch a girl--nor,
+unless in his old age, or with very partial rendering of him, a
+gentleman.
+
+82. And thus, as farther belonging to, and partly causative of, their
+choice of means, there is always a tendency in etchers to fasten on
+unlovely objects; and the whole scheme of modern rapid work of this kind
+is connected with a peculiar gloom which results from the confinement of
+men, partially informed, and wholly untrained, in the midst of foul and
+vicious cities. A sensitive and imaginative youth, early driven to get
+his living by his art, has to lodge, we will say, somewhere in the
+by-streets of Paris, and is left there, tutorless, to his own devices.
+Suppose him also vicious or reckless, and there need be no talk of his
+work farther; he will certainly do nothing in a Duereresque manner. But
+suppose him self-denying, virtuous, full of gift and power--what are the
+elements of living study within his reach? All supreme beauty is
+confined to the higher salons. There are pretty faces in the streets,
+but no stateliness nor splendor of humanity; all pathos and grandeur is
+in suffering; no purity of nature is accessible, but only a terrible
+picturesqueness, mixed with ghastly, with ludicrous, with base
+concomitants. Huge walls and roofs, dark on the sunset sky, but
+plastered with advertisement bills, monstrous-figured, seen farther than
+ever Parthenon shaft, or spire of Sainte Chapelle. Interminable lines of
+massy streets, wearisome with repetition of commonest design, and
+degraded by their gilded shops, wide-fuming, flaunting, glittering, with
+apparatus of eating or of dress. Splendor of palace-flank and goodly
+quay, insulted by floating cumber of barge and bath, trivial, grotesque,
+indecent, as cleansing vessels in a royal reception room. Solemn avenues
+of blossomed trees, shading puppet-show and baby-play; glades of
+wild-wood, long withdrawn, purple with faded shadows of blood; sweet
+windings and reaches of river far among the brown vines and white
+orchards, checked here by the Ile Notre Dame, to receive their nightly
+sacrifice, and after playing with it among their eddies, to give it up
+again, in those quiet shapes that lie on the sloped slate tables of the
+square-built Temple of the Death-Sibyl, who presides here over spray of
+Seine, as yonder at Tiber over spray of Anio. Sibylline, indeed, in her
+secrecy, and her sealing of destinies, by the baptism of the quick
+water-drops which fall on each fading face, unrecognized, nameless in
+_this_ Baptism forever. Wreathed thus throughout, that Paris town, with
+beauty, and with unseemly sin, unseemlier death, as a fiend-city with
+fair eyes; forever letting fall her silken raiment so far as that one
+may "behold her bosom and half her side." Under whose whispered
+teaching, and substitution of "Contes Drolatiques" for the tales of the
+wood fairy, her children of Imagination will do, what Gerome and Gustave
+Dore are doing, and her whole world of lesser Art will sink into shadows
+of the street and of the boudoir-curtain, wherein the etching point may
+disport itself with freedom enough.[74]
+
+83. Nor are we slack in our companionship in these courses. Our
+imagination is slower and clumsier than the French--rarer also, by far,
+in the average English mind. The only man of power equal to Dore's whom
+we have had lately among us, was William Blake, whose temper fortunately
+took another turn. But in the calamity and vulgarity of daily
+circumstance, in the horror of our streets, in the discordance of our
+thoughts, in the laborious looseness and ostentatious cleverness of our
+work, we are alike. And to French faults we add a stupidity of our own;
+for which, so far as I may in modesty take blame for anything, as
+resulting from my own teaching, I am more answerable than most men.
+Having spoken earnestly against painting without thinking, I now find
+our exhibitions decorated with works of students who think without
+painting; and our books illustrated by scratched wood-cuts, representing
+very ordinary people, who are presumed to be interesting in the picture,
+because the text tells a story about them. Of this least lively form of
+modern sensational work, however, I shall have to speak on other
+grounds; meantime, I am concerned only with its manner; its incontinence
+of line and method, associated with the slightness of its real thought,
+and morbid acuteness of irregular sensation; ungoverned all, and one of
+the external and slight phases of that beautiful Liberty which we are
+proclaiming as essence of gospel to all the earth, and shall presently,
+I suppose, when we have had enough of it here, proclaim also to the
+stars, with invitation to them _out_ of their courses.
+
+84. "But you asked us for 'free-heart' outlines, and told us not to be
+slaves, only thirty days ago."[75]
+
+Inconsistent that I am! so I did. But as there are attractions, and
+attractions; originalities, and originalities, there are liberties, and
+liberties. Yonder torrent, crystal-clear, and arrow-swift, with its
+spray leaping into the air like white troops of fawns, is free, I think.
+Lost, yonder, amidst bankless, boundless marsh--soaking in slow
+shallowness, as it will, hither and thither, listless, among the
+poisonous reeds and unresisting slime--it is free also. You may choose
+which liberty you will, and restraint of voiceful rock, or the dumb and
+edgeless shore of darkened sand. Of that evil liberty, which men are now
+glorifying,--and of its opposite continence--which is the clasp and
+[Greek: chrusee perone] of Aglaia's cestus--we will try to find out
+something in next chapter.[76]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[71] _Art Journal_, vol. iv., pp. 177-8. June 1865.--ED.
+
+[72] Wornum's "Epochs of Painting." I have continual occasion to quarrel
+with my friend on these matters of critical question; but I have deep
+respect for his earnest and patient research, and we remain friends--on
+the condition that I am to learn much from him, and he (though it may be
+questionable whose fault that is) nothing from me.
+
+[73] Prov. xx, 27.
+
+[74] As I was preparing these sheets for press, I chanced on a passage
+in a novel of Champfleury's, in which one young student is encouraging
+another in his contest with these and other such evils;--the evils are
+in this passage accepted as necessities; the inevitable deadliness of
+the element is not seen, as it can hardly be except by those who live
+out of it. The encouragement, on such view, is good and right; the
+connection of the young etcher's power with his poverty is curiously
+illustrative of the statements in the text, and the whole passage,
+though long, is well worth such space as it will ask here, in our small
+print.
+
+    "Cependant," dit Thomas, "on a vu des peintres de talent qui etaient
+    partis de Paris apres avoir expose de bons tableaux et qui s'en
+    revenaient classiquement ennuyeux. C'est done la faute de
+    l'enseignement de l'Academie."
+
+    "Bah!" dit Gerard, "rien n'arrete le developpement d'un homme
+    puisqu'il comprend l'art, pourquoi ne fait-il pas d'art?"
+
+    "Parce qu'il gagne a peu pres sa vie en faisant du commerce."
+
+    "On dirait que tu ne veux pas me comprendre, toi qui as justement
+    passe par la. Comment faisais-tu quand tu etais compositeur d'une
+    imprimerie?"
+
+    "Le soir," dit Thomas, "et le matin en hiver, a partir de quatre
+    heures, je faisais des etudes a la lampe pendant deux heures,
+    jusqu'au moment ou j'allais a l'atelier."
+
+    "Et tu ne vivais pas de la peinture?"
+
+    "Je ne gagnais pas un sou."
+
+    "Bon!" dit Gerard; "tu vois bien que tu faisais du commerce en
+    dehors de l'art et que cependant tu etudiais. Quand tu es sorti de
+    l'imprimerie comment as-tu vecu?"
+
+    "Je faisais cinq ou six petites aquarelles par jour, que je vendais,
+    sous les arcades de l'Institut, six sous piece."
+
+    "Et tu en vivais; c'est encore du commerce. Tu vois done que ni
+    l'imprimerie, ni les petits dessins, a cinq sous, ni la privation,
+    ni la misere ne t'ont empeche d'arriver."
+
+    "Je ne suis pas arrive."
+
+    "N'importe, tu arriveras certainement. . . . Si tu veux d'autres
+    exemples qui prouvent que la misere et les autres pieges tendus sous
+    nos pas ne doivent rien arreter, tu te rappelles bien ce pauvre
+    garcon dont vous admiriez les eaux-fortes, que vous mettiez aussi
+    haut que Rembrandt, et qui aurait ete lion, disiez-vous, s'il
+    n'avait tant souffert de la faim. Qu'a-t-il fait le jour ou il lui
+    est tombe un petit heritage du ciel?"
+
+    "Il est vrai," dit Thomas, embarrasse; "qu'il a perdu tout son
+    sentiment."
+
+    "Ce n'etait pas cependant une de ces grosses fortunes qui tuent un
+    homme, qui le rendent lourd, fier et insolent: il avait juste de
+    quoi vivre, six cents francs de rentes, une fortune pour lui, qui
+    vivait avec cinq francs par mois. Il a continue a travailler; mais
+    ses eaux-fortes n'etaient plus supportables; tandis qu'avant, il
+    vivait avec un morceau de pain et des legumes; alors il avait du
+    talent. Cela, Thomas, doit te prouver que ni les mauvais
+    enseignements, ni les influences, ni la misere, ni la faim, ni la
+    maladie, ne peuvent corrompre une nature bien douee. Elle souffre;
+    mais trouve moi un grand artiste qui n'ait pas souffert. Il n'y a
+    pas un seul homme de denie heureux depuis que l'humanite existe."
+
+    "J'ai envie," dit Thomas, "de te faire cadeau d'une jolie cravate."
+
+    "Pourquoi?" dit Gerard.
+
+    "Parce que tu as bien parle."
+
+[75] See _ante_, p. 343, Sec. 73.--ED.
+
+[76] Chapter VI., which is here omitted, having been already reprinted
+in _The Queen of the Air_ (Sec.Sec. 142-159), together with the last paragraph
+(somewhat altered) of the present chapter. After the publication of
+Chapter VI. the essays were discontinued until January 1866.--ED.
+
+
++----------------------------------------+
+|Transcriber's note:                     |
+|                                        |
+|Chapter VI is missing from the original.|
++----------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.[77]
+
+
+85. In recommencing this series of papers, I may perhaps take permission
+briefly to remind the reader of the special purpose which my desultory
+way of writing, (of so vast a subject I find it impossible to write
+otherwise than desultorily), may cause him sometimes to lose sight of;
+the ascertainment, namely, of some laws for present practice of Art in
+our schools, which may be admitted, if not with absolute, at least with
+a sufficient consent, by leading artists.
+
+There are indeed many principles on which different men must ever be at
+variance; others, respecting which it may be impossible to obtain any
+practical consent in certain phases of particular schools. But there are
+a few, which, I think, in all times of meritorious Art, the leading
+painters would admit; and others which, by discussion, might be arrived
+at, as, at all events, the best discoverable for the time.
+
+86. One of those which I suppose great workmen would always admit, is,
+that, whatever material we use, the virtues of that material are to be
+exhibited, and its defects frankly admitted; no effort being made to
+conquer those defects by such skill as may make the material resemble
+another. For instance, in the dispute so frequently revived by the
+public, touching the relative merits of oil color and water color; I do
+not think a great painter would ever consider it a merit in a water
+color to have the "force of oil." He would like it to have the peculiar
+delicacy, paleness, and transparency belonging specially to its own
+material. On the other hand, I think he would not like an oil painting
+to have the deadness or paleness of a water color. He would like it to
+have the deep shadows, and the rich glow, and crumbling and bossy
+touches which are alone attainable in oil color. And if he painted in
+fresco, he would neither aim at the transparency of water color, nor the
+richness of oil; but at luminous bloom of surface, and dignity of
+clearly visible form. I do not think that this principle would be
+disputed by artists of great power at any time, or in any country;
+though, if by mischance they had been compelled to work in one material,
+while desiring the qualities only attainable in another, they might
+strive, and meritoriously strive, for those better results, with what
+they had under their hand. The change of manner in William Hunt's work,
+in the later part of his life, was an example of this. As his art became
+more developed, he perceived in his subjects qualities which it was
+impossible to express in a transparent medium; and employed opaque white
+to draw with, when the finer forms of relieved light could not be
+otherwise followed. It was out of his power to do more than this, since
+in later life any attempt to learn the manipulation of oil color would
+have been unadvisable; and he obtained results of singular beauty;
+though their preciousness and completion would never, in a well-founded
+school of Art, have been trusted to the frail substance of water color.
+
+87. But although I do not suppose that the abstract principle of doing
+with each material what it is best fitted to do, would be, in terms,
+anywhere denied; the practical question is always, not what should be
+done with this, or that, if everything were in our power; but what can
+be, or ought to be, accomplished with the means at our disposal, and in
+the circumstances under which we must necessarily work. Thus, in the
+question immediately before us, of the proper use of the black line--it
+is easy to establish the proper virtue of Line work, as essentially
+"De-Lineation," the expressing by outline the true limits of forms,
+which distinguish and part them from other forms; just as the virtue of
+brush work is essentially breadth, softness, and blending of forms. And,
+in the abstract, the point ought not to be used where the aim is not
+that of definition, nor the brush to be used where the aim is not that
+of breadth. Every painting in which the aim is primarily that of
+drawing, and every drawing in which the aim is primarily that of
+painting, must alike be in a measure erroneous. But it is one thing to
+determine what should be done with the black line, in a period of highly
+disciplined and widely practiced art, and quite another thing to say
+what should be done with it, at this present time, in England.
+Especially, the increasing interest and usefulness of our illustrated
+books render this an inquiry of very great social and educational
+importance. On the one side, the skill and felicity of the work spent
+upon them, and the advantage which young readers, if not those of all
+ages, _might_ derive from having examples of good drawing put familiarly
+before their eyes, cannot be overrated; yet, on the other side, neither
+the admirable skill nor free felicity of the work can ultimately be held
+a counterpoise for the want--if there be a want--of sterling excellence:
+while, farther, this increased power of obtaining examples of art for
+private possession, at an almost nominal price, has two accompanying
+evils: it prevents the proper use of what we have, by dividing the
+attention, and continually leading us restlessly to demand new subjects
+of interest, while the old are as yet not half exhausted; and it
+prevents us--satisfied with the multiplication of minor art in our own
+possession--from looking for a better satisfaction in great public
+works.
+
+88. Observe, first, it prevents the proper use of what we have. I often
+endeavor, though with little success, to conceive what would have been
+the effect on my mind, when I was a boy, of having such a book given me
+as Watson's "Illustrated Robinson Crusoe."[78] The edition I had was a
+small octavo one, in two volumes, printed at the _Chiswick Press_ in
+1812. It has, in each volume, eight or ten very rude vignettes, about a
+couple of inches wide; cut in the simple, but legitimate, manner of
+Bewick, and, though wholly commonplace and devoid of beauty, yet, as far
+as they go, rightly done; and here and there sufficiently suggestive of
+plain facts. I am quite unable to say how far I wasted,--how far I spent
+to advantage,--the unaccountable hours during which I pored over these
+wood-cuts; receiving more real sensation of sympathetic terror from the
+drifting hair and fear-stricken face of Crusoe dashed against the rock,
+in the rude attempt at the representation of his escape from the wreck,
+than I can now from the highest art; though the rocks and water are
+alike cut only with a few twisted or curved lines, and there is not the
+slightest attempt at light and shade, or imitative resemblance. For one
+thing, I am quite sure that being forced to make all I could out of very
+little things, and to remain long contented with them, not only in great
+part formed the power of close analysis in my mind, and the habit of
+steady contemplation; but rendered the power of greater art over me,
+when I first saw it, as intense as that of magic; so that it appealed to
+me like a vision out of another world.
+
+89. On the other hand this long contentment with inferior work, and the
+consequent acute enjoyment of whatever was the least suggestive of truth
+in a higher degree, rendered me long careless of the highest virtues of
+execution, and retarded by many years the maturing and balancing of the
+general power of judgment. And I am now, as I said, quite unable to
+imagine what would have been the result upon me, of being enabled to
+study, instead of these coarse vignettes, such lovely and expressive
+work as that of Watson; suppose, for instance, the vignette at p. 87,
+which would have been sure to have caught my fancy, because of the dog,
+with its head on Crusoe's knee, looking up and trying to understand what
+is the matter with his master. It remains to be seen, and can only be
+known by experience, what will actually be the effect of these treasures
+on the minds of children that possess them. The result must be in some
+sort different from anything yet known; no such art was ever yet
+attainable by the youth of any nation. Yet of this there can, as I have
+just said, be no reasonable doubt;--that it is not well to make the
+imagination indolent, or take its work out of its hands by supplying
+continual pictures of what might be sufficiently conceived without
+pictures.
+
+90. Take, for instance, the preceding vignette, in the same book,
+"Crusoe looking at the first shoots of barley." Nothing can be more
+natural or successful as a representation; but, after all, whatever the
+importance of the moment in Crusoe's history, the picture can show us
+nothing more than a man in a white shirt and dark pantaloons, in an
+attitude of surprise; and the imagination ought to be able to compass so
+much as this without help. And if so laborious aid be given, much more
+ought to be given. The virtue of Art, as of life, is that no line shall
+be in vain. Now the number of lines in this vignette, applied with full
+intention of thought in every touch, as they would have been by Holbein
+or Duerer, are quite enough to have produced,--not a merely deceptive
+dash of local color, with evanescent background,--but an entirely
+perfect piece of chiaroscuro, with its lights all truly limited and
+gradated, and with every form of leaf and rock in the background
+entirely right, complete,--and full not of mere suggestion, but of
+accurate information, exactly such as the fancy by itself cannot
+furnish. A work so treated by any man of power and sentiment such as the
+designer of this vignette possesses, would be an eternal thing; ten in
+the volume, for real enduring and educational power, were worth two
+hundred in imperfect development, and would have been a perpetual
+possession to the reader; whereas one certain result of the
+multiplication of these lovely but imperfect drawings, is to increase
+the feverish thirst for excitement, and to weaken the power of attention
+by endless diversion and division. This volume, beautiful as it is, will
+be forgotten; the strength in it is, in final outcome, spent for naught;
+and others, and still others, following it, will "come like shadows, so
+depart."
+
+91. There is, however, a quite different disadvantage, but no less
+grave, to be apprehended from this rich multiplication of private
+possession. The more we have of books, and cabinet pictures, and cabinet
+ornaments, and other such domestic objects of art, the less capable we
+shall become of understanding or enjoying the lofty character of work
+noble in scale, and intended for public service. The most practical and
+immediate distinction between the orders of "mean" and "high" Art, is
+that the first is private,--the second public; the first for the
+individual, the second for all. It may be that domestic Art is the only
+kind which is likely to flourish in a country of cold climate, and in
+the hands of a nation tempered as the English are; but it is necessary
+that we should at least understand the disadvantage under which we thus
+labor; and the duty of not allowing the untowardness of our
+circumstances, or the selfishness of our dispositions, to have
+unresisted and unchecked influence over the adopted style of our art.
+But this part of the subject requires to be examined at length, and I
+must therefore reserve it for the following paper.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[77] _Art Journal_, vol. v., pp. 9, 10. January 1866.--ED.
+
+[78] Routledge, 1864. The engraving is all by Dalziel. I do not ask the
+reader's pardon for speaking of myself, with reference to the point at
+issue. It is perhaps quite as modest to relate personal experience as to
+offer personal opinion; and the accurate statement of such experience
+is, in questions of this sort, the only contribution at present possible
+towards their solution.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.[79]
+
+
+92. In pursuing the question put at the close of the last paper, it must
+be observed that there are essentially two conditions under which we
+have to examine the difference between the effects of public and private
+Art on national prosperity. The first in immediate influence is their
+Economical function, the second their Ethical. We have first to consider
+what class of persons they in each case support; and, secondly, what
+classes they teach or please.
+
+Looking over the list of the gift-books of this year, perhaps the first
+circumstance which would naturally strike us would be the number of
+persons living by this industry; and, in any consideration of the
+probable effects of a transference of the public attention to other
+kinds of work, we ought first to contemplate the result on the interests
+of the workman. The guinea spent on one of our ordinary illustrated
+gift-books is divided among--
+
+   1. A number of second-rate or third-rate artists, producing
+   designs as fast as they can, and realizing them up to
+   the standard required by the public of that year. Men
+   of consummate power may sometimes put their hands
+   to the business; but exceptionally.
+
+   2. Engravers, trained to mechanical imitation of this
+   second or third-rate work; of these engravers the inferior
+   classes are usually much overworked.
+
+   3. Printers, paper-makers, ornamental binders, and other
+   craftsmen.
+
+   4. Publishers and booksellers.
+
+93. Let us suppose the book can be remuneratively produced if there is
+a sale of five thousand copies. Then L5000, contributed for it by the
+public, are divided among the different workers; it does not matter what
+actual rate of division we assume, for the mere object of comparison
+with other modes of employing the money; but let us say these L5000 are
+divided among five hundred persons, giving on an average L10 to each.
+And let us suppose these L10 to be a fortnight's maintenance to each.
+Then, to maintain them through the year, twenty-five such books must be
+published; or to keep certainly within the mark of the probable cost of
+our autumnal gift-books, suppose L100,000 are spent by the public, with
+resultant supply of 100,000 households with one illustrated book, of
+second or third-rate quality each (there being twenty different books
+thus supplied), and resultant maintenance of five hundred persons for
+the year, at severe work of a second or third-rate order, mostly
+mechanical.
+
+94. Now, if the mind of the nation, instead of private, be set on public
+work, there is of course no expense incurred for multiplication, or
+mechanical copying of any kind, or for retail dealing. The L5000,
+instead of being given for five thousand _copies_ of the work, and
+divided among five hundred persons, are given for one original work, and
+given to one person. This one person will of course employ assistants;
+but these will be chosen by himself, and will form a superior class of
+men, out of whom the future leading artists of the time will rise in
+succession. The broad difference will therefore be, that, in the one
+case, L5000 are divided among five hundred persons of different classes,
+doing second-rate or wholly mechanical work; and in the other case, the
+same sum is divided among a few chosen persons of the best material of
+mind producible by the state at the given epoch. It may seem an unfair
+assumption that work for the public will be more honestly and earnestly
+done than that for private possession. But every motive that can touch
+either conscience or ambition is brought to bear upon the artist who is
+employed on a public service, and only a few such motives in other modes
+of occupation. The greater permanence, scale, dignity of office, and
+fuller display of Art in a National building, combine to call forth the
+energies of the artist; and if a man will not do his best under such
+circumstances, there is no "best" in him.
+
+95. It might also at first seem an unwarrantable assumption that fewer
+persons would be employed in the private than in the national work,
+since, at least in architecture, quite as many subordinate craftsmen are
+employed as in the production of a book. It is, however, necessary, for
+the purpose of clearly seeing the effect of the two forms of occupation,
+that we should oppose them where their contrast is most complete; and
+that we should compare, not merely bookbinding with bricklaying, but the
+presentation of Art in books, necessarily involving much subordinate
+employment, with its presentation in statues or wall-pictures, involving
+only the labor of the artist and of his immediate assistants. In the one
+case, then, I repeat, the sum set aside by the public for Art-purposes
+is divided among many persons, very indiscriminately chosen; in the
+other among few carefully chosen. But it does not, for that reason,
+support fewer persons. The few artists live on their larger incomes,[80]
+by expenditure among various tradesmen, who in no wise produce Art, but
+the means of pleasant life; so that the real economical question is, not
+how many men shall we maintain, but at what work shall they be
+kept?--shall they every one be set to produce Art for us, in which case
+they must all live poorly, and produce bad Art; or out of the whole
+number shall ten be chosen who can and will produce noble Art; and shall
+the others be employed in providing the means of pleasant life for these
+chosen ten? Will you have, that is to say, four hundred and ninety
+tradesmen, butchers, carpet-weavers, carpenters, and the like, and ten
+fine artists, or will you, under the vain hope of finding, for each of
+them within your realm, "five hundred good as he," have your full
+complement of bad draughtsmen, and retail distributors of their bad
+work?
+
+96. It will be seen in a moment that this is no question of economy
+merely; but, as all economical questions become, when set on their true
+foundation, a dilemma relating to modes of discipline and education. It
+is only one instance of the perpetually recurring offer to our
+choice--shall we have one man educated perfectly, and others trained
+only to serve him, or shall we have all educated equally ill?--Which,
+when the outcries of mere tyranny and pride-defiant on one side, and of
+mere envy and pride-concupiscent on the other, excited by the peril and
+promise of a changeful time, shall be a little abated, will be found to
+be, in brief terms, the one social question of the day.
+
+Without attempting an answer which would lead us far from the business
+in hand, I pass to the Ethical part of the inquiry; to examine, namely,
+the effect of this cheaply diffused Art on the public mind.
+
+97. The first great principle we have to hold by in dealing with the
+matter is, that the end of Art is NOT to _amuse_; and that all Art which
+proposes amusement as its end, or which is sought for that end, must be
+of an inferior, and is probably of a harmful, class.
+
+The end of Art is as serious as that of all other beautiful things--of
+the blue sky and the green grass, and the clouds and the dew. They are
+either useless, or they are of much deeper function than giving
+amusement. Whatever delight we take in them, be it less or more, is not
+the delight we take in play, or receive from momentary surprise. It
+might be a matter of some metaphysical difficulty to define the two
+kinds of pleasure, but it is perfectly easy for any of us to feel that
+there _is_ generic difference between the delight we have in seeing a
+comedy and in watching a sunrise. Not but that there is a kind of Divina
+Commedia,--a dramatic change and power,--in all beautiful things: the
+joy of surprise and incident mingles in music, painting, architecture,
+and natural beauty itself, in an ennobled and enduring manner, with the
+perfectness of eternal hue and form. But whenever the desire of change
+becomes principal; whenever we care only for new tunes, and new
+pictures, and new scenes, all power of enjoying Nature or Art is so far
+perished from us: and a child's love of toys has taken its place. The
+continual advertisement of new music (as if novelty were its virtue)
+signifies, in the inner fact of it, that no one now cares for music. The
+continual desire for new exhibitions means that we do not care for
+pictures; the continual demand for new books means that nobody cares to
+read.
+
+98. Not that it would necessarily, and at all times, mean this; for in a
+living school of Art there will always be an exceeding thirst for, and
+eager watching of freshly-developed thought. But it specially and
+sternly means this, when the interest is merely in the novelty; and
+great work in our possession is forgotten, while mean work, because
+strange and of some personal interest, is annually made the subject of
+eager observation and discussion. As long as (for one of many instances
+of such neglect) two great pictures of Tintoret's lie rolled up in an
+outhouse at Venice, all the exhibitions and schools in Europe mean
+nothing but promotion of costly commerce. Through that, we might indeed
+arrive at better things; but there is no proof, in the eager talk of the
+public about Art, that we _are_ arriving at them. Portraiture of the
+said public's many faces, and tickling of its twice as many eyes, by
+changeful phantasm, are all that the patron-multitudes of the present
+day in reality seek; and this may be supplied to them in multiplying
+excess forever, yet no steps made to the formation of a school of Art
+now, or to the understanding of any that have hitherto existed.
+
+99. It is the carrying of this annual Exhibition into the recesses of
+home which is especially to be dreaded in the multiplication of inferior
+Art for private possession. Public amusement or excitement may often be
+quite wholesomely sought, in gay spectacles, or enthusiastic festivals;
+but we must be careful to the uttermost how we allow the desire for any
+kind of excitement to mingle among the peaceful continuities of home
+happiness. The one stern condition of that happiness is that our
+possessions should be no more than we can thoroughly use; and that to
+this use they should be practically and continually put. Calculate the
+hours which, during the possible duration of life, can, under the most
+favorable circumstances, be employed in reading, and the number of books
+which it is possible to read in that utmost space of time;--it will be
+soon seen what a limited library is all that we need, and how careful we
+ought to be in choosing its volumes. Similarly, the time which most
+people have at their command for any observation of Art is not more than
+would be required for the just understanding of the works of one great
+master. How are we to estimate the futility of wasting this fragment of
+time on works from which nothing can be learned? For the only real
+pleasure, and the richest of all amusements, to be derived from either
+reading or looking, are in the steady progress of the mind and heart,
+which day by day are more deeply satisfied, and yet more divinely
+athirst.
+
+100. As far as I know the homes of England of the present day, they show
+a grievous tendency to fall, in these important respects, into the two
+great classes of over-furnished and unfurnished:--of those in which the
+Greek marble in its niche, and the precious shelf-loads of the luxurious
+library, leave the inmates nevertheless dependent for all their true
+pastime on horse, gun, and croquet-ground;--and those in which Art,
+honored only by the presence of a couple of engravings from Landseer,
+and literature, represented by a few magazines and annuals arranged in a
+star on the drawing-room table, are felt to be entirely foreign to the
+daily business of life, and entirely unnecessary to its domestic
+pleasures.
+
+101. The introduction of furniture of Art into households of this latter
+class is now taking place rapidly; and, of course, by the usual system
+of the ingenious English practical mind, will take place under the
+general law of supply and demand; that is to say, that whatever a class
+of consumers, entirely unacquainted with the different qualities of the
+article they are buying, choose to ask for, will be duly supplied to
+them by the trade. I observe that this beautiful system is gradually
+extending lower and lower in education; and that children, like grown-up
+persons, are more and more able to obtain their toys without any
+reference to what is useful or useless, or right or wrong; but on the
+great horseleech's law of "demand and supply." And, indeed, I write
+these papers, knowing well how effectless all speculations on abstract
+proprieties or possibilities must be in the present ravening state of
+national desire for excitement; but the tracing of moral or of
+mathematical law brings its own quiet reward; though it may be, for the
+time, impossible to apply either to use.
+
+The power of the new influences which have been brought to bear on the
+middle-class mind, with respect to Art, may be sufficiently seen in the
+great rise in the price of pictures which has taken place (principally
+during the last twenty years) owing to the interest occasioned by
+national exhibitions, coupled with facilities of carriage, stimulating
+the activity of dealers, and the collateral discovery by mercantile men
+that pictures are not a bad investment.
+
+102. The following copy of a document in my own possession will give us
+a sufficiently accurate standard of Art-price at the date of it:--
+
+                                   "London, June 11th, 1814.
+
+     "Received of Mr. Cooke the sum of twenty-two pounds ten shillings
+     for three drawings, viz., Lyme, Land's End, and Poole.
+
+       "L22, 10s.
+
+                                          "J. M. W. TURNER."
+
+
+
+It would be a very pleasant surprise to me if any _one_ of these three
+(southern coast) drawings, for which the artist received seven guineas
+each (the odd nine shillings being, I suppose, for the great resource of
+tale-tellers about Turner--"coach-hire") were now offered to me by any
+dealer for a hundred. The rise is somewhat greater in the instance of
+Turner than of any other unpopular[81] artist; but it is at least three
+hundred per cent. on all work by artists of established reputation,
+whether the public can themselves see anything in it, or not. A certain
+quantity of intelligent interest mixes, of course, with the mere fever
+of desire for novelty; and the excellent book illustrations, which are
+the special subjects of our inquiry, are peculiarly adapted to meet
+this; for there are at least twenty people who know a good engraving or
+wood-cut, for one who knows a good picture. The best book illustrations
+fall into three main classes: fine line engravings (always grave in
+purpose), typically represented by Goodall's illustrations to Rogers's
+poems;--fine wood-cuts, or etchings, grave in purpose, such as those by
+Dalziel, from Thomson and Gilbert;--and fine wood-cuts, or etchings, for
+purpose of caricature, such as Leech's and Tenniel's in _Punch_. Each of
+these have a possibly instructive power special to them, which we will
+endeavor severally to examine in the next chapter.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[79] _Art Journal_, vol. v., pp. 33-4. February 1866,--ED.
+
+[80] It may be, they would not ask larger incomes in a time of highest
+national life; and that then the noble art would be far cheaper to the
+nation than the ignoble. But I speak of existing circumstances.
+
+[81] I have never found more than two people (students excepted) in the
+room occupied by Turner's drawings at Kensington, and one of the two, if
+there _are_ two, always looks as if he had got in by mistake.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.[82]
+
+
+103. I purpose in this chapter, as intimated in the last, to sketch
+briefly what I believe to be the real uses and powers of the three kinds
+of engraving, by black line; either for book illustration, or general
+public instruction by distribution of multiplied copies. After thus
+stating what seems to me the proper purpose of each kind of work, I may,
+perhaps, be able to trace some advisable limitations of its technical
+methods.
+
+I. And first, of pure line engraving.
+
+This is the only means by which entire refinement of intellectual
+representation can be given to the public. Photographs have an
+inimitable mechanical refinement, and their legal evidence is of great
+use if you know how to cross-examine them. They are popularly supposed
+to be "true," and, at the worst, they are so, in the sense in which an
+echo is true to a conversation of which it omits the most important
+syllables and reduplicates the rest. But this truth of mere transcript
+has nothing to do with Art properly so called; and will never supersede
+it. Delicate art of design, or of selected truth, can only be presented
+to the general public by true line engraving. It will be enough for my
+purpose to instance three books in which its power has been sincerely
+used. I am more in fields than libraries, and have never cared to look
+much into book illustrations; there are, therefore, of course, numbers
+of well-illustrated works of which I know nothing: but the three I
+should myself name as typical of good use of the method, are I. Rogers's
+Poems, II. the Leipsic edition of Heyne's Virgil (1800), and III. the
+great "Description de l'Egypte."
+
+104. The vignettes in the first named volumes (considering the Italy
+and Poems as one book) I believe to be as skillful and tender as any
+hand work, of the kind, ever done; they are also wholly free from
+affectation of overwrought fineness, on the one side, and from hasty or
+cheap expediencies on the other; and they were produced, under the
+direction and influence of a gentleman and a scholar. Multitudes of
+works, imitative of these, and far more attractive, have been produced
+since; but none of any sterling quality: the good books were (I was
+told) a loss to their publisher, and the money spent since in the same
+manner has been wholly thrown away. Yet these volumes are enough to show
+what lovely service line engraving might be put upon, if the general
+taste were advanced enough to desire it. Their vignettes from Stothard,
+however conventional, show in the grace and tenderness of their living
+subjects how types of innocent beauty, as pure as Angelico's, and far
+lovelier, might indeed be given from modern English life, to exalt the
+conception of youthful dignity and sweetness in every household. I know
+nothing among the phenomena of the present age more sorrowful than that
+the beauty of our youth should remain wholly unrepresented in Fine Art,
+because unfelt by ourselves; and that the only vestiges of a likeness to
+it should be in some of the more subtle passages of caricatures, popular
+(and justly popular) as much because they were the only attainable
+reflection of the prettiness, as because they were the only sympathizing
+records of the humors, of English girls and boys. Of our oil portraits
+of them, in which their beauty is always conceived as consisting in a
+fixed simper--feet not more than two inches long, and accessory grounds,
+pony, and groom--our sentence need not be "_guarda e passa_," but
+"_passa_" only. Yet one oil picture has been painted, and so far as I
+know, one only, representing the deeper loveliness of English youth--the
+portraits of the three children of the Dean of Christ Church, by the son
+of the great portrait painter, who has recorded whatever is tender and
+beautiful in the faces of the aged men of England, bequeathing, as it
+seems, the beauty of their children to the genius of his child.
+
+105. The second book which I named, Heyne's Virgil, shows, though
+unequally and insufficiently, what might be done by line engraving to
+give vital image of classical design, and symbol of classical thought.
+It is profoundly to be regretted that none of these old and
+well-illustrated classics can be put frankly into the hands of youth;
+while all books lately published for general service, pretending to
+classical illustration, are, in point of Art, absolutely dead and
+harmful rubbish. I cannot but think that the production of
+well-illustrated classics would at least leave free of money-scathe, and
+in great honor, any publisher who undertook it; and although schoolboys
+in general might not care for any such help, to one, here and there, it
+would make all the difference between loving his work and hating it. For
+myself, I am quite certain that a single vignette, like that of the
+fountain of Arethusa in Heyne, would have set me on an eager quest,
+which would have saved me years of sluggish and fruitless labor.
+
+106. It is the more strange, and the more to be regretted, that no such
+worthy applications of line engraving are now made, because, merely to
+gratify a fantastic pride, works are often undertaken in which, for want
+of well-educated draughtsmen, the mechanical skill of the engraver has
+been wholly wasted, and nothing produced useful, except for common
+reference. In the great work published by the Dilettanti Society, for
+instance, the engravers have been set to imitate, at endless cost of
+sickly fineness in dotted and hatched execution, drawings in which the
+light and shade is always forced and vulgar, if not utterly false.
+Constantly (as in the 37th plate of the first volume), waving hair casts
+a straight shadow, not only on the forehead, but even on the ripples of
+other curls emerging beneath it: while the publication of plate 41, as a
+representation of the most beautiful statue in the British Museum, may
+well arouse any artist's wonder what kind of "diletto" in antiquity it
+might be, from which the Society assumed its name.
+
+107. The third book above named as a typical example of right work in
+line, the "Description de l'Egypte," is one of the greatest monuments
+of calm human industry, honestly and delicately applied, which exist in
+the world. The front of Rouen Cathedral, or the most richly-wrought
+illuminated missal, as pieces of resolute industry, are mere child's
+play compared to any group of the plates of natural history in this
+book. Of unemotional, but devotedly earnest and rigidly faithful labor,
+I know no other such example. The lithographs to Agassiz's "poissons
+fossiles" are good in their kind, but it is a far lower and easier kind,
+and the popularly visible result is in larger proportion to the skill;
+whereas none but workmen can know the magnificent devotion of
+unpretending and observant toil, involved in even a single figure of an
+insect or a starfish on these unapproachable plates. Apply such skill to
+the simple presentation of the natural history of every English county,
+and make the books portable in size, and I cannot conceive any other
+book-gift to our youth so precious.
+
+108. II. Wood-cutting and etching for serious purpose.
+
+The tendency of wood-cutting in England has been to imitate the fineness
+and manner of engraving. This is a false tendency; and so far as the
+productions obtained under its influence have been successful, they are
+to be considered only as an inferior kind of engraving, under the last
+head. But the real power of wood-cutting is, with little labor, to
+express in clear delineation the most impressive essential qualities of
+form and light and shade, in objects which owe their interest not to
+grace, but to power and character. It can never express beauty of the
+subtlest kind, and is not in any way available on a large scale; but
+used rightly, on its own ground, it is the _most purely intellectual_ of
+all Art; sculpture, even of the highest order, being slightly sensual
+and imitative; while fine wood-cutting is entirely abstract, thoughtful,
+and passionate. The best wood-cuts that I know in the whole range of Art
+are those of Duerer's "Life of the Virgin;" after these come the other
+works of Duerer, slightly inferior from a more complex and wiry treatment
+of line. I have never seen any other work in wood deserving to be named
+with his; but the best vignettes of Bewick approach Duerer in execution
+of plumage, as nearly as a clown's work can approach a gentleman's.
+
+109. Some very brilliant execution on an inferior system--less false,
+however, than the modern English one--has been exhibited by the French;
+and if we accept its false conditions, nothing can surpass the
+cleverness of our own school of Dalziel, or even of the average
+wood-cutting in our daily journals, which however, as aforesaid, is only
+to be reckoned an inferior method of engraving. These meet the demand of
+the imperfectly-educated public in every kind; and it would be absurd to
+urge any change in the method, as long as the public remain in the same
+state of knowledge or temper. But, allowing for the time during which
+these illustrated papers have now been bringing whatever information and
+example of Art they could to the million, it seems likely that the said
+million will remain in the same stage of knowledge yet for some time.
+Perhaps the horse is an animal as antagonistic to Art in England, as he
+was in harmony with it in Greece; still, allowing for the general
+intelligence of the London bred lower classes, I was surprised by a
+paragraph in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, quoting the _Star_ of November 6th
+of last year, in its report upon the use made of illustrated papers by
+the omnibus stablemen,--to the following effect:--
+
+
+"They are frequently employed in the omnibus yards from five o'clock in
+the morning till twelve at night, so that a fair day's work for a
+'horse-keeper' is about eighteen hours. For this enormous labor they
+receive a guinea per week, which for them means seven, not six, days;
+though they do contrive to make Sunday an 'off-day' now and then. The
+ignorance of aught in the world save ''orses and 'buses' which prevails
+amongst these stablemen is almost incredible. A veteran horse-keeper,
+who had passed his days in an omnibus-yard, was once overheard praising
+the 'Lus-trated London News with much enthusiasm, as the best periodical
+in London, 'leastways at the coffee-shop.' When pressed for the reason
+of his partiality, he confessed it was the 'pickshers' which delighted
+him. He amused himself during his meal-times by 'counting the images!'"
+
+
+110. But for the classes among whom there is a real demand for
+educational art, it is highly singular that no systematic use has yet
+been made of wood-cutting on its own terms; and only here and there,
+even in the best books, is there an example of what might be done by it.
+The frontispieces to the two volumes of Mr. Birch's "Ancient Pottery and
+Porcelain," and such simpler cuts as that at p. 273 of the first volume,
+show what might be cheaply done for illustration of archaic classical
+work; two or three volumes of such cuts chosen from the best vases of
+European collections and illustrated by a short and trustworthy
+commentary, would be to any earnest schoolboy worth a whole library of
+common books. But his father can give him nothing of the kind--and if
+the father himself wish to study Greek Art, he must spend something like
+a hundred pounds to put himself in possession of any sufficiently
+illustrative books of reference. As to any use of such means for
+representing objects in the round, the plate of the head of Pallas
+facing p. 168 in the same volume sufficiently shows the hopelessness of
+setting the modern engraver to such service. Again, in a book like
+Smith's dictionary of geography, the wood-cuts of coins are at present
+useful only for comparison and reference. They are absolutely valueless
+as representations of the art of the coin.
+
+111. Now, supposing that an educated scholar and draughtsman had drawn
+each of these blocks, and that they had been cut with as much average
+skill as that employed in the wood-cuts of _Punch_, each of these
+vignettes of coins might have been an exquisite lesson, both of high Art
+treatment in the coin, and of beautiful black and white drawing in the
+representation; and this just as cheaply--nay, more cheaply--than the
+present common and useless drawing. The things necessary are indeed not
+small,--nothing less than well educated intellect and feeling in the
+draughtsmen; but intellect and feeling, as I have often said before now,
+are always to be had cheap if you go the right way about it--and they
+cannot otherwise be had for any price. There are quite brains enough,
+and there is quite sentiment enough, among the gentlemen of England to
+answer all the purposes of England: but if you so train your youths of
+the richer classes that they shall think it more gentlemanly to scrawl a
+figure on a bit of note paper, to be presently rolled up to light a
+cigar with, than to draw one nobly and rightly for the seeing of all
+men;--and if you practically show your youths, of all classes, that they
+will be held gentlemen, for babbling with a simper in Sunday pulpits; or
+grinning through, not a horse's, but a hound's, collar, in Saturday
+journals; or dirtily living on the public money in government
+non-offices:--but that they shall be held less than gentlemen for doing
+a man's work honestly with a man's right hand--you will of course find
+that intellect and feeling cannot be had when you want them. But if you
+like to train some of your best youth into scholarly artists,--men of
+the temper of Leonardo, of Holbein, of Duerer, or of Velasquez, instead
+of decomposing them into the early efflorescences and putrescences of
+idle clerks, sharp lawyers, soft curates, and rotten journalists,--you
+will find that you can always get a good line drawn when you need it,
+without paying large subscriptions to schools of Art.
+
+112. III. This relation of social character to the possible supply
+of good Art is still more direct when we include in our survey the
+mass of illustration coming under the general head of dramatic
+caricature--caricature, that is to say, involving right understanding of
+the true grotesque in human life; caricature of which the worth or
+harmfulness cannot be estimated, unless we can first somewhat answer the
+wide question, What is the meaning and worth of English laughter? I say,
+"of English laughter," because if you can well determine the value of
+that, you determine the value of the true laughter of all men--the
+English laugh being the purest and truest in the metal that can be
+minted. And indeed only Heaven can know what the country owes to it, on
+the lips of such men as Sydney Smith and Thomas Hood. For indeed the
+true wit of all countries, but especially English wit (because the
+openest), must always be essentially on the side of truth--for the
+nature of wit is one with truth. Sentiment may be false--reasoning
+false--reverence false---love false,--everything false except wit; that
+_must_ be true--and even if it is ever harmful, it is as divided against
+itself--a small truth undermining a mightier.
+
+On the other hand, the spirit of levity, and habit of mockery, are among
+the chief instruments of final ruin both to individual and nations. I
+believe no business will ever be rightly done by a laughing Parliament:
+and that the public perception of vice or of folly which only finds
+expression in caricature, neither reforms the one, nor instructs the
+other. No man is fit for much, we know, "who has not a good laugh in
+him"--but a sad wise valor is the only complexion for a leader; and if
+there was ever a time for laughing in this dark and hollow world, I do
+not think it is now. This is a wide subject, and I must follow it in
+another place; for our present purpose, all that needs to be noted is
+that, for the expression of true humor, few and imperfect lines are
+often sufficient, and that in this direction lies the only opening for
+the serviceable presentation of amateur work to public notice.
+
+113. I have said nothing of lithography, because, with the exception of
+Samuel Prout's sketches, no work of standard Art-value has ever been
+produced by it, nor can be: its opaque and gritty texture being wholly
+offensive to the eye of any well trained artist. Its use in connection
+with color is, of course, foreign to our present subject. Nor do I take
+any note of the various current patents for cheap modes of drawing,
+though they are sometimes to be thanked for rendering possible the
+publication of sketches like those of the pretty little "Voyage en
+Zigzag" ("how we spent the summer") published by Longmans--which are
+full of charming humor, character, and freshness of expression; and
+might have lost more by the reduction to the severe terms of
+wood-cutting than they do by the ragged interruptions of line which are
+an inevitable defect in nearly all these cheap processes. It will be
+enough, therefore, for all serious purpose, that we confine ourselves
+to the study of the black line, as produced in steel and wood; and I
+will endeavor in the next paper[83] to set down some of the technical
+laws belonging to each mode of its employment.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[82] _Art Journal_, vol. v., pp. 97-8. April 1866.--ED.
+
+[83] The present paper was, however, the last.--ED.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's On the Old Road  Vol. 1  (of 2), by John Ruskin
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