[7] Lectures on Art (1870), p. 50.
[8] Aratra Pentelici (1870), p. 118. It is true that this is followed by a restriction; but what does this restriction amount to? Ruskin says: "We must produce what shall look like Nature to people who know what Nature is."
[9] On the Nature of the Gothic (Smith, Elder, 1854), p. 19.
[2. A Thrust parried. Police or Detective Art defined.]
But to return to the movement initiated by Semper[10]—here we certainly have the scientific and Christian coup de grâce levelled at the expiring spirit of nineteenth-century Art. For the actors in this movement not only maintained that Art is imitation, but that it actually took its origin in imitation—and of the basest sort—that is to say, of accidental combinations of lines and colours produced in basket-work, weaving and plaiting.
This conclusion, which was arrived at, once more, by means of a formidable array of facts, and which called itself "Evolution in Art," was, like its first cousin, "Evolution in the Organic World," absolutely democratic, ignoble, and vulgar; seeking the source of the highest human achievements either in automatic mimicry, slavish and even faulty copying, or involuntary adoption of natural or purely utilitarian forms.
Taking the beauty of Nature for granted—an assumption which, as the first part of this lecture shows, is quite unwarrantable—these Art-Evolutionists sought to prove that all artistic beauty was the outcome of man's Simian virtues working either in the realm of Nature or in the realm of his own utilitarian handiwork. And from the purely imitative productions found in the Madeleine Cavern in La Dordogne, to the repetitive patterns worked on wooden bowls by the natives in British New Guinea, the origin of all art lay in schoolboy "cribbing."
This was a new scientific valuation of Art—foreshadowed, as I have shown, by philosophical æsthetic, but arriving independently, as it were, at the conclusion that Art was no longer a giver, but a robber.
Volumes were written to show the origin in technical industry of individual patterns and ornaments on antique vases. And as Alois Riegl rightly observes, the authors of these works spoke with such assurance, that one might almost have believed that they had been present when the vases were made.[11]