WHERE ARE WE IN ART?
"N O doubt education is a fine thing!" said I, meditatively, laying down my thirteenth newspaper. It was a rainy November day, and the reading-room was nearly empty. I had been told the great fact over and over again in some form or other in all the "Dailies" and "Weeklies." It had been repeated in every variety of tone in the little pile of "Monthlies" at my elbow, of which I had skimmed the cream (no one in these days can be expected to go through the labour of a whole article)! The "Quarterlies," in more ponderous fashion, had reiterated the sentiment. We had got hold of the right thing; all that was wanted was more and more of the same. Let everybody be served alike; what is meat for the gander is meat also for the goose, repeated the advocates of women's education, magniloquently (though not exactly in those words). Let everybody learn the same thing that I am learning! How much better and wiser we are than our forefathers! How beautiful for us to be able to say, as in the old story of the French Minister of Instruction when he pulls out his watch, "It is ten o'clock; all the children in the schools in England are doing their sums. It is half-past eleven, they are all writing their copies!"
"What everybody says must be true," thought I; "the schoolmaster has got the better of the world, and rules the roast despotically; but then how great is the result!" I repeated, with pride.
Such perfection was rather oppressive, and I could not help yawning a little as I went upstairs, looking round as I went. The decorations of the club were wonderfully fine, no doubt, but perhaps an Italian of the "Cinque-cento" would not have thought them quite successful. Probably, however, he would have been wrong. He was certainly much less "instructed" in art than we are. I strolled to the window, and looked out at a stucco palace on either hand and over the way, with pillars and pilasters added ad libitum, and a glimpse of a long wall with oblong openings cut in it, stretching the whole length of the street. One of the abominable regiments of black statues which disfigure London stood near the corner, the nicely-finished buttons of whose paletôt, and the creases of whose boots (the originals of which must have been made by Hoby), had often been my wonder, if not admiration.
"Yes, there certainly is a lost art or two, which have somehow made their escape from this best of all worlds, in spite of our drilling and double-distilled training," I sighed.
There was a portfolio of photographs lying on the table, which I turned over abstractedly. The Venus de Milo, and the Theseus of the Parthenon; the Raphael frescoes of the great council of the gods in the Farnesina Palace at Rome; a street in Venice; Durham Cathedral; the decorations of the Certosa at Pavia; some specimens of old Japanese porcelain; some coloured patterns of Persian shawls and prayer-rugs and of Indian inlaid work. Each of them was good and appropriate of its kind, expressing a national or individual taste and feeling, or, best of all, a belief. And none of them were the results of education, but of a kind of instinct of art which no instruction hitherto has been able to give, of which it seems even sometimes to deprive a race, as a savage generally loses his accurate perception of details and his power of memory and artistic perceptions, with his delicacy of hearing and smell, as a consequence of so-called civilization.
The Hindoo arranges colours for a fabric with the same certainty of intuition that a bird weaves his nest, or a spider its web. His blues and greens are as harmonious in their combinations as those of Nature herself; while the "educated" Englishman is now introducing every species of atrocity in form and colour wherever he goes, ruining the beautiful native manufactures by instructions from his superior "standpoint;" forcing the workers to commit every blunder which he does himself at home, in order to adapt their fabrics to the abominable taste of the middle classes in England. Even the missionaries, male and female, cannot hold their hands, and teach the children in schools and hareems crochet and cross-stitch of the worst designs and colours, instead of the exquisite native embroidery of the past. Arsenic greens, magenta and gas-tar dyes, are introduced by order of the merchants into carpets and cashmere shawls; vile colours and forms in pottery and bad lacquer-work are growing up, by command, in China and Japan. There seems to be no check or stay to the irruption of bad taste which is swamping the whole world by our influence. The Japanese have even been recommended to make a Museum of their own beautiful old productions quickly, or the very memory of their existence, and of the manner in which they were made, would be lost.
It is commonly supposed that the taste of the French is better than our own, and the pretty, the bizarre, the becoming, may indeed be said to belong to their domain; but high art is not their vocation. A certain harmony is obtained by quenching colour, as in the "Soupir étouffé," the "Bismarck malade," the "rose dégradée," the "Celadon" of the Sèvres china, all eighth and tenth degrees of dilution; but pure colour, like that of Persia and of the East generally, they never now dare to dip their hands into. The gorgeous effects of their own old painted glass, the "rose windows" of the churches at Rouen and in many other towns of Normandy, are far beyond their present reach.
The stained glass of all countries in Europe, indeed, belonging to the good times, is a feast of colour which none of the modern work can approach. There is a "Last Judgment," said to be from designs by Albert Dürer, which was taken in a sea-fight on its road to Spain, and put up in a little church at Fairford, in Gloucestershire, which dazzles us with its splendour; and the scraps which are still to be found all over England in village churches (many of which are now believed to be of home manufacture) are as beautiful as the great Flemish windows thirty feet high. At the present day the pigments used, we are told, are finer; the glass is infinitely better rolled, all the manufacturing processes have made wonderful progress, as we proudly declare; only the results of it are utterly and simply detestable—the colours of the great modern windows in Cologne Cathedral and Westminster Abbey set one's very teeth on edge—the temptation to use a stone (if it had come under one's hand) would be frightfully great in front of that at the east end of Ripon.
There lies before me an old Persian rug, all out of shape and twisted in the weaving, but full of subtle quantities in colour, perfect in the proportions of its vivid brilliancy, and a grand new Axminster carpet alongside, of faultless construction, with a design as hideous as its colours are harsh.
It is not only now with productions destined for the English market, but the degradation of art is beginning to spread all over the world—the standards of "instructed" European taste are vitiating the very well-springs of beautiful old work. The "mantilla" of Seville, and the "tovaglia" of the Roman peasant, are supplanted by frightful bonnets; the striking old costumes are disappearing alike in Brittany and in Algiers; in Athens and in Turkey they are giving way to the abominations of Parisian toilettes for the women, while the chimney-pot hat is taking the place of the turban and the kalpac for the men.
The picturesque quaintness of the narrow Egyptian streets dies away, as under a frost, under the hand of Western architects; the delicate pierced woodwork of their projecting balconies is changed for flat windows with red and green "jalousies;" and the Khedive builds minarets, it is true, but like enlarged Mordan pencil-cases. The harmony of the lines in an ancient Arabian fountain or mosque at Cairo, the interlacing patterns of fretwork in the Saracenic buildings at Grenada, are marvellous in their exquisite variety; yet the secret of their construction in their own land is nearly gone, the very tradition of the old work seems to have perished in the race—they cannot even imitate their own old creations. "Oh for a touch of a vanished hand!" we say over the ruined tombs of the Memlook Sultans in their desolate beauty, standing lonely in the desert near Cairo, or the wonderful mosques of the deserted city of Beejapore in the Bombay Presidency, whose photographs have lately been printed.
Each nation in the old time had an expression of its thoughts in the buildings in which it housed its gods, its government, and its individuals, which was as distinctive as its language: a tongue, indeed, in stone, in colour and in form, as plain as, indeed plainer than, ever words could frame.
The Egyptian, with the flat square lines of the gigantic slabs placed across the forests of enormous rounded pillars closely packed, the avenues of sphinxes and obelisks leading up (never at right angles, curiously to our sense of conformity) to the temples—solemn, heavy, magnificent, mysterious—with a sentiment of dignified repose, though little of beauty or proportion, but full of symbolism and suggestion and grandeur.
The exquisite Greek buildings, where proportion was almost like music in its scientific harmony of parts, so exact, so modulated, so severe, so lovely—with sculpture forming an almost necessary portion of the architectural design when at its highest point of excellence.
The Saracenic, with its simple grace of construction and delicate detail of ornament, with holy words and combinations of lines in place of natural forms, and soaring beauty of domes, and pierced marble work.
The Middle Age Italian, with its inlaid and decorated façades and wealth of columns, and traceries of gay-coloured stones, and contrasts of brilliant light and dark shadows in the deep-set windows and doors,—bright and lovely like Giotto's Campanile at Florence, rising like a flower over the city, or great churches like those of Orvieto and St. Mark's,[1] with their rich profusion of mosaic and carved stone and quaint modifications of brickwork.
Or the buildings of the Gothic nations (our own included), which often, like those at Mont St. Michel, seem to have so grown out of the situation—where the Art is so interwoven with Nature, that it is hardly possible to discover where one begins and the other ends. There is something also of the manner in which Nature works, in the feeling with which the curves interlace, seeming almost to grow into each other, in a Gothic cathedral. In the perspectives of heavy round arches of Winchester and Durham, in the upward soaring of the Salisbury spire, there is the same impression—they seem to have "come" so. It is like a living organism, the parts of which are as natural and necessary to the whole as is the growth of a tree: like the recipe of old for a poet, they seem to have been "born, not made."
All these different races invented for themselves what is called a "style;" that is to say, an original manner, peculiar and adapted to their special idiosyncrasies, of fulfilling those wants which every nation, as soon as it emerges from the savage state, must feel and provide for in some fashion.
Even to descend to very inferior work—there is character and expression in the old King William houses on the river-bank at Chelsea, in the pretty little Queen Anne Square in Westminster; it is too neat and pretty to be high art, with its unobtrusive moulded brick, its shallow projections, and the carved shells over the doorways; but it is not unlike the poetry of Pope in the delicate finish and adaptation of its parts, while no one can deny that it has an individuality which the smart new houses in Grosvenor Place are totally without, where costly granite and excellent stone seem to have been employed to show the moral lesson that the best materials are of little service unless mixed "with brains, sir," as Opie advised. Every capital of the columns is carved by hand, but of the poorest design and all alike—it is hardly possible to conceive the poverty of invention involved in making every house and every ornament an exact copy of its neighbour, in a situation which invited picturesque treatment—after too, it had been shown at the Oxford Museum that carving was done both quicker and better when the workers exerted their minds in such inventions as they possessed (and some of their renderings of natural forms were beautiful) than when they merely followed a stereotyped pattern.
At present we can as soon invent a new style for ourselves as a new animal; we copy, we combine—that is, under the Georgian era we added a Mahometan cupola to Roman columns in the Regent's Park; or, still later, we made one pediment serve for the whole side of a Belgravian square—i.e., a form intended for a nicely-calculated angle over the front of a temple with a particular number of columns, is stretched as on a rack over the roofs of an acre of houses; or we build a portico designed as a shelter against the cloudless sunshine of the Greek climate to darken a sunless English dwelling-house. Our last achievement has been to make a "pasticcio" of the high "mansarde" Parisian roofs, with hideous little debased Italian porticoes, a quarter of a mile of which may be seen in the Grosvenor Gardens district.
Also we can patch and imitate—that is, rebuild a sham antique—from which, however ingeniously done, the ineffable charm of the original has escaped like a gas. Why the portico of the capital at Washington, or the monument on the Calton Hill at Edinburgh, whose columns are said to be "an exact copy of those at Athens," are so utterly uninteresting, it would take too long to explain; but no one will deny that they are mere lumps of dead stone, while the Parthenon itself, ruined and defaced, wrecked and ill-used, still stands like a glorious poem in marble, which no evil treatment can deprive of its charm. There is mind and soul worked into the material, and somehow inextricably entangled into it, which no copy, however exact, can in the least reproduce.
No doubt we have improved in our street architecture; there are isolated specimens of red brick, a shop-front in South Audley Street, and one in New Bond Street, several excellent buildings in the city, &c, &c, legitimate adaptations of gables, dormers, and windows, exceedingly good of their kind; but these are not original creations, only developments of what already exists.
There is one point in which our present shallow, unintelligent education has wrought irreparable mischief. We have learnt so much of respect for art as to desire to preserve the works of our forefathers, but not so far as to find out how this is to be done. We set to work to "restore" them. Every inch of the surface of an old church is historical as to the manner of the handiwork of the men of the twelfth, thirteenth, or whatever may be the century, and we proceed to put a new face on it, which, at the best, must certainly be that of the nineteenth century; we find a defaced portrait statue on an altar-tomb (as in a church in Devonshire), and we insert a smooth mask out of our own heads; we find an Early English tower with walls fourteen feet thick, and think a vestry would be "nicer" in its place, and the tower is therefore pulled down and rebuilt at the other end of the nave (as in a church in Bucks); or a curious monument to the fifth son of Edward III., or a couple of kneeling figures, clad in ruffs and farthingales, of an old rector and his wife, are within the communion rails (as in two other churches in Bucks); the incumbents do not approve of tombs in such "sacred places," and, regardless of the curious historical fact shown by the very position itself in pre-Reformation days, they are ruthlessly rooted up, and in the latter case a flaming brass to the rector's own family substituted.
Even a little art education would show us that this is not "restoration;" it may be a much finer and smarter kind of work, as many people seem to consider it; but the cutting down an inch of the splendid carved stone porches at Chartres to a new surface is not "restoring" that which was there before—the face of the fifteenth-century lady cannot be "restored" without a portrait which no longer exists—the new tower may be very "pretty," but it is certainly no longer a specimen of rare old Early English work. Like the monks of old carefully scratching their invaluable parchment manuscripts, to put in their own words and notes, we have at one fell swoop scratched the history of English ecclesiastical art off the land, and archæologists are inquiring sadly for instances of unrestored churches, which, alas! now are scarcely to be found.
What may be the reason why architecture, sculpture, painting, and even poetry—i.e., the combination of stone, brick, marble, metal, colours, and, lastly, of metrical forms of words—should all suffer by the advance of our (so-called) civilization and education, is still a mystery; but few will be found to doubt the fact in detail, though they may deny the general formula.
Perhaps our self-consciousness as to our great virtues, our "progress," our knowledge, the learning of the reason of our work, the introversion of our present moods of thought, check the development of an idea, even if we may be fortunate enough to get hold of one. Self-consciousness is fatal to art; there is a certain spontaneity of utterance—singing, as the birds sing, because they cannot help it—"composing," almost as the mountains and clouds "compose," by reason of their existence itself, not because they want to make a picture,—which produces natural work, grown out of the man and the requirements of his nature, to which it seems, with very rare exceptions, that we cannot now attain.
In sculpture, a modern R.A. has acquired ten times as much anatomy as Phidias: dissection was unknown, and not permitted, by the Greeks. Chemistry has produced for the painter colours which Raphael (luckily for us) never dreamed of. Yet one cannot help wondering at the strange daring which permits the honourable society at Burlington House to hang yearly the works of the ancient masters of the craft on the same walls where their own productions are to figure a few weeks later, as if to inform the world most impressively and depressingly from how far we have fallen in pictorial art; to string up our taste, as it were, to concert pitch—to give the key-note of true excellence, in order to mark the depth to which we have sunk.
We now teach drawing diligently in all European countries, and are surprised that we get no Michelangelos. Did Masaccio go to a school of design, or Giotto learn "free-hand" manipulation? Education, as it is generally defined—meaning thereby a knowledge of the accumulation of facts discovered by other people—is good for the general public, for ordinary humanity, but not for original minds, except so far as it saves them time and trouble by preventing them from reinventing what has been already done by others. True, there can be but few "inventors" (in the old Italian sense of creators) in the world at any one moment, and training must, it will be said, be carried on for the use of the many; but one might still plead for a certain elasticity in our teaching, a margin left for free-will among the few who will ever be able to use it. And, meantime, it is allowable to lament over the number of arts we have lost, or are in danger of losing, which can only be practised by the few—whose number seems ever to be diminishing, under our generalizing processes of turning out as many minds of the same pattern as if we wanted nail-heads or patent screws by the million.
This is not education in its true and highest sense—i.e., the bringing forth the best that is in a man; not simply putting knowledge into him, but using the variety of gifts, which even the poorest in endowment possess, to the best possible end. And this seems more and more difficult as the stereotyped pattern is more and more enforced in board-schools, endowed schools, public schools, universities; and each bit of plastic material, while young, is forced as much as possible into the same shape, the only contention being who shall have the construction of the die which all alike are eager to apply to every individual of the nation.
Of all races which have yet existed there can be no doubt that the Greek was the one most highly endowed with artistic powers of all kinds; yet the Greek was certainly not, in our sense of the term, an educated man at all; his powers of every kind, however, were cultivated indirectly by the very atmosphere he lived in. His sensitive artistic nature found food in the forms and colours of the mountains and the islands, the sea and the sky, by which he was surrounded; by the human nature about him in its most perfect development; by every building—his temples, his tombs, his theatres—every pot and pan he used, every seat he sat upon; whereas no man's eye can be other than degraded by the unspeakable ugliness of an English manufacturing town, or, what is almost worse, by the sham art where decoration of any kind is invented or attempted by the richer middle class.
The theory that soil and climate and food produce instincts of beauty, as well as varieties of beasts and plants, is, however, evidently at fault in these questions; for if this were the case at one time in the world's history, why not at another? and the present inhabitants of Greece are as inapt as their neighbours in sculpture, painting, and architecture. Nothing, even out of the workshops of Birmingham, can exceed the ugliness of their present productions—e.g., a Minerva's head without a forehead, done in bead-work on canvas, fastened on to a piece of white marble, which was given as a precious parting gift from the goddess's own city to a valued friend. There seems now a headlong competition in every country after bad art. If we ask for lace and embroidery in the Greek islands, or silver fillagree in Norway,—if we inquire for wood-carving from Burmah, or the old shawls and pottery from Persia and the East,—the answer is always the same: we are told that there is "none such made at present." It is only what remains of the old handmade work that is to be obtained; the present inhabitants "care for none of these things." Sham jewellery from the "Palais Royal," Manchester goods, stamped leather, and the like, are what the natives are seeking for themselves, while they get rid of "all those ugly old things" to the first possible buyer for any price which they can fetch.
Manufacturing an article, (whatever be the real derivation of the word, but) meaning the use of machinery for the multiplication of the greatest number of articles at the least cost, however admirable for the comfort of the million, is evidently fatal to art. When each bit of ironwork, every hinge, every lock scutcheon, was hammered out with care and consideration by the individual blacksmith, even if he were but an indifferent performer, it bore the stamp of the thought of a man's mind directing his hand; now there is only the stamp of a machine running the metal into a mould. When every bit of decorative wood-work was "all made out of the carver's brain,"—when the embroidery of the holiday shirt of a boatman of "Chios' rocky isle" took half a lifetime to devise and stitch, and was intended to last for generations of wearers, art found a way, however humble, through nimble fingers interpreting the fancies of the individual brain. "Fancy work," as an old Hampshire woman called her stitching of the fronts and backs of the old-fashioned smock-frocks, each one differing from the one she made before, as her "fancy" led. It was always interesting, and almost always beautiful.
Now the hinges are cast by the ton, all of one pattern; fortunate, indeed, if the original be a good one (a very hopeful supposition!). The sewing-machine repeats its monotonous curves of embroidery; the wood-carving is the result of skilfully-arranged knives and wheels worked by steam, which only execute forms adapted for them. The initial thought of their designer must be, not what is in itself desirable, but that which the machine can best produce. What is right in a particular place, is the natural object of the workman artist; how to use what has been already cast or stamped, is the object of the present ordinary builder; and what he calls "symmetry"—i.e., monotony, every line repeated ad nauseam—is the result his education aims at. Symmetry, in the sense of the repetition of the infinite variety of exquisitely modulated curves in the two outlines of the human body, is beautiful and harmonious; but there is neither beauty nor harmony in the repetition of the self-same horizontal and perpendicular lines of windows and doors in a London street. A feeling of what in music are called "contrary motion," "oblique motion," is all required in the impression produced by really fine architecture. Yet, if the ordinary builder is asked to vary his hideous row of houses by an additional window or a higher chimney, he exclaims with horror at such a violation of "symmetry," his sole rule of beauty being that all should look alike.
The effect, indeed, of machine-made work is to impress upon the tradesman mind the belief that perfection consists wholly in exact and correct repetition of a pattern, which may be said to be true in his craft; whereas constant variation and development is the law of healthy art, the need being expressed by the design. To save the expense and trouble of fresh drawings, also, as soon as a pattern becomes popular in one material, it is immediately repeated ad nauseam in every other, however incongruous. A bunch of fuchsias has been supposed to look well in a lace curtain; it is then cast in brass for the end of a curtain-rod; is used for wall-papers and stone-carving alike. Whereas if a Japanese artist has designed a flight of cranes on his screen or his paper, it is impossible to get another exactly the same; to reproduce a sketch exactly being, generally, as every artist can tell, more laborious than to make a new one, where the brain assists the fingers in their work.
There is another result of our present shallow "general" education which has a most depressing effect upon art. Every one now can read and write, and it would be considered an infringement of the right of private judgment to doubt the ability of every writer or reader to criticize any work of art whatsoever. In the case of buying a kitchen range or a carriage we should not trust to our own knowledge, but should apply to the experienced expert; but "every one can tell whether he likes a picture or not!"
Now, good criticism in art demands at least as long and severe an apprenticeship as that in ironmongery—the training of the eye by long experience, reading, historical, scientific, mechanical—real study of all the various subjects connected with it; and this can be acquired only by few. It has been said, with perfect truth, that it will not do to depend on the fiat of artists themselves for the value of a picture, statue, or building. With some, the admiration of the technical part of art is too great; the passionate likes and dislikes for particular styles or particular men warp the judgments of others; and this is, perhaps, inherent in the artist nature. But this is only saying that we must not go to the ironfounder for the character of his kitchen range; there are other skilled opinions to be had besides those of the authors of a work.
At the present time, the art of criticism has got so far beyond our powers of creation that it becomes more and more difficult to bring forth a great work of art. The hatching of eggs requires a certain genial warmth to bring them to perfection; creation is a vital act, but the reception which any new-fledged production is likely to meet with is either the scorching fire of fault-finding or the freezing cold of indifference.
It was not thus that great works of old were produced; Cimabue's picture of the Virgin was carried in a triumphal procession through Florence, from the artist's studio to the church which was to be honoured by its possession. It was a worthy religious offering to the goddess Mary, a subject of rejoicing to the whole city, and the quarter of the town where it was first seen, amid cries of delight, was called the "Borgo Allegri," a name which it has kept six hundred years. And the sympathy of the people reacted on the artist, and helped him to carry out his great conceptions. They were proud of him, and he worked at his picture as a labour of love to do his nation honour.
Now, when a man has spent perhaps years over a religious picture, working with all his heart and soul and strength, instead of its being taken into a church, and seen only with the associations for which it is adapted, it is hung up between a smirking lady, clad in the last abominations of the fashion, on one side, and a "horse and dog, the property of Blank, Esq.," on the other; while the artist is fortunate if the best of the critics, who has just glanced at it as he passes by, does not entirely ignore his meaning and mistake the expression of his idea, only discovering that "the drawing of the toe of the left foot is decidedly awkward." So it may be, and there are probably faults in it still more considerable; yet the picture, with all these faults, may be one of great merit.
Is it possible to conceive the Madonna di San Sisto painted under such conditions? The cold chill of the indifferent public would have reacted on the artist, and quenched the fire of his inspiration. The picture was intended to be the incarnation of the religious feeling of the whole Christian world, in the divine expression of the infant Christ gazing into futurity, with those rapt, far-seeing eyes,—in the holy mother, who carries him so reverently, yet with such power and purity in her look and bearing. It was honoured sympathetically by all who had the joy of seeing it borne as a banner through a great city as an act of the highest worship; not cut up into little morsels and set on a fork by every man who can write smart articles for a penny paper, bestowing a little supercilious praise and much wholesome advice on Holman Hunt and Tennyson, on Stevens[2] and Street alike.
But the result is that the world is poorer by the want of the work which only a sense of sympathy between the artist and his public inspires. "Action and reaction are equal," we are told, in science, and the artist cannot produce the best that is in him alone, any more than the most finished musician can play on a dumb piano. The receivers must do their share in the partnership. Mrs. Siddons once said that she lost all her power when annihilated by the coldness of the cream of the cream society of a salon, and preferred any marks of emotion of an unsophisticated if intelligent audience, to the chill of fashionable indifference; and when we complain of the poorness of our art, we must remember for how large a share of this we, the present public, are responsible. It may be all very well for the skylark to "pour his strains of unpremeditated art" for his own pleasure and that of the little skylarks; but Shelley must have had the hope that "the world will listen then, as I am listening now."
The poet and the painter require intelligent cordial belief and sympathy, which is just what we have not to give, and therefore the reign of the highest art is probably at an end: no Phidias or Michelangelo, no Homer or Shakspeare, are likely again to arise. This is pre-eminently a scientific age—a time for the collection and co-ordination of facts; and what imagination we possess we use in the discovery of the laws by which Nature works, and in the application of our knowledge to the ordinary wants and comforts and pleasures of the human race. Electric telegraphs, phonographs, photographs abound; every possible adaptation of steam in majestic engines (almost, it seems, as intelligent as man), to promote our means of communication and locomotion over the surface of the earth, and of production in every conceivable form; great ships and engines of destruction in war, and (curious antithesis) ingenious contrivances for the saving of pain in disease—everything, in short, connected with the comprehension and subjugation of the material world, is more and more carried to perfection. Yet in spite of these marvellous achievements, unless we can manage to secure a supply of good art, there can be no doubt that there will "have passed away a glory from the earth" which we can ill afford to lose.
There is no use in preaching what is called the common sense of the matter, and telling Keats (though he may have died of consumption, and not of the Edinburgh Review) that the critique on his poems was flippant and unintelligent; or one artist that the account of his picture was written by a man who did not understand painting, and the next by a writer who had no notion of the requisites of true poetry. The artist is by necessity of his nature a thin-skinned, impressionable being, with sensitive nerves and perceptions, without which the power of creation does not exist. He writes and paints and acts and sculpts—in short, composes, invents, creates—to make the world feel as he is feeling. Fame is a vulgar word for the sentiment which inspires him; the longing after sympathy is a much truer expression of what the true artist desires. That of his own family and friends is not sufficient; he wants the world at large to hear and understand and join in what he has to say, whether it be in marble or on canvas, in music or in words. To grow such a creature to perfection is very rare in the history of mankind, and when our aloe does flower, we should make the most of it, and feed it with food convenient. Our blame depresses him, even stupid,[3] unintelligent blame, more than our praise elevates him; "he is absurdly sensitive," says the hard-headed man of the world; but that is the very condition of the problem with which we have to deal; if he were not so, we should not have great works of art from him. He is an idealist by nature. If we declare that it is very absurd of our vines to require so much care and kindness, and that a little roughing and neglect will do them a great deal of good, we shall not get many grapes; and, after all, what we want is grapes—results, great artistic works.
It is almost pathetic to see the nation doing the best it knows, offering its patronage and its public buildings, its monuments of great men and its money, and then to mark the results. It is fortunate that most of the frescoes are scaling off the walls of the Houses of Parliament. It is fortunate that Nelson and the Duke of York are hoisted up so high that they cannot be scrutinized at all; it is fortunate that most of the public statues are generally so begrimed with dirt and soot that few can make out their intention. But it is we who are responsible for half at least of their failures.[4] We have, as a nation, neither the artistic feeling which delights in the beautiful with a sort of worship, nor the sensuous religious instincts which require an outward and visible sign of our inward faith. Therefore our best chance of great work seems to be when the common-sense necessity is so large in its demands, that carrying it out even on merely utilitarian principles may give a grand result by the force of circumstances, almost without our will,—the very fulfilment of the working conditions on an enormous scale forcing a certain grandeur on the work. As, for instance, when a viaduct is carried over a deep valley and river, upon a lofty series of arches, as in many Welsh railways and at Newcastle, there are elements of strength, durability, might, and therefore majesty, which the barest execution of the requirements cannot take away. The Suspension Bridge hung high in the air above the ships in the Menai Straits, and that over the narrow hollow of the Avon, have a beauty of lightness and grace all their own—Waterloo Bridge, which Canova declared to be worth coming to England to see—are all specimens of a kind of work which we may hope to see multiplied, and even improved upon, as the adaptation of art to the common necessities of our civilization becomes more common, and is taken in hand by a higher and more educated class of men.
Nothing, however, can well be more depressing than the experience of the United States in respect to this question of art and education. Here is a country (in their own magniloquent hyperbole) "bounded on the north by the Aurora Borealis, and on the west by the setting sun," &c., &c., whose proud boast it is that every man, woman, and child (born on its soil) can read, write, and something more,—which has just celebrated its centenary of independent existence, and is in the very spring-time of its national life when the "sap is rising,"—a season which among other nations is that of their greatest artistic vigour, yet which has never produced a poet, painter, sculptor,[5] or architect above mediocrity. Strangely as it would seem at first sight, it is originality which is chiefly wanting in their art; it is all an echo of European models; they have no independent action of thought or interpretation of Nature. Here, again, it is probably the want of culture of the public which is to blame. Evidence is difficult to obtain on such a vast subject as the use made of the reading and writing so freely imparted at the schools in the United States, but there is very good testimony showing that, with the exception of great centres of civilization, like Boston, the nation, as a nation, reads little but newspapers and story-books; and these clearly would produce a soil utterly unfit for the growth of real art.
Lastly, let us not forget Mr. Mill's warning how much the nation, as well as the individual, must suffer by the stifling of original thought in the rigid conformity to system which our present mechanism of Government regulations, of centralized hard-and-fast rules, is bringing about in education.
The State has a right to exact a certain amount of training in the individuals who compose it, but has no right whatever to interfere as to how that result is obtained. Every encouragement should be held out to original action of all kinds, tending to develop the faculties—artistic, scientific, as well as practical—which remain to be utilized among the millions who are now coming under an influence hitherto painfully narrow, rigid, and shallow in its operations, in spite of its magnificent promises and high-sounding notes of self-satisfaction.
F. P. Verney.
[1] Now, alas! under sentence of "restoration;" the age of creation in Italy appears to be over, and that of destruction to have begun.
[2] The monument to the Duke of Wellington has never received its due meed of praise. With all his faults, poor Stevens was a man of true genius.
[3] "Quoique les applaudissemens que j'ai reçus m'aient beaucoup flatté, la moindre critique, quelque mauvaise qu'elle eût été, m'a toujours causé plus de chagrin que toutes les louanges ne m'aient fait de plaisir," writes Racine to his son. He was silent for twelve years after the "insuccès de Phêdre." "Quoique le 'Mercure Gallant' était au dessous de rien, les blessures qu'il fait n'en sont pas moins cruelles à la sensibilité d'un poëte," adds the Revue des Deux Mondes.
[4] The group of "Asia," by Foley, in Prince Albert's Memorial, is one of the few exceptions to the indifferent character of out-door statues in London.
[5] Mr. Story may perhaps be considered an exception; but even the "Cleopatra," and "Sibyl" were produced under the influence of Rome.