“Mrs. Lethbridge thought of putting there two little stuffed canary-birds.”
“Did she? Good heavens!” exclaimed Kenelm.
“But somehow,” continued Will, “I did not like that, and I made bold to say so.”
“Why did not you do it?”
“Well, I don’t know; but I did not think it would be the right thing.”
“It would have been very bad taste, and spoiled the effect of your basket-work; and I’ll endeavour to explain why. You see here, in the next page, a drawing of a very beautiful statue. Of course this statue is intended to be a representation of nature, but nature idealized. You don’t know the meaning of that hard word, idealized, and very few people do. But it means the performance of a something in art according to the idea which a man’s mind forms to itself out of a something in nature. That something in nature must, of course, have been carefully studied before the man can work out anything in art by which it is faithfully represented. The artist, for instance, who made that statue, must have known the proportions of the human frame. He must have made studies of various parts of it,—heads and hands, and arms and legs, and so forth,—and having done so, he then puts together all his various studies of details, so as to form a new whole, which is intended to personate an idea formed in his own mind. Do you go with me?”
“Partly, sir; but I am puzzled a little still.”
“Of course you are; but you’ll puzzle yourself right if you think over what I say. Now if, in order to make this statue, which is composed of metal or stone, more natural, I stuck on it a wig of real hair, would not you feel at once that I had spoilt the work; that as you clearly express it, ‘it would not be the right thing’? and instead of making the work of art more natural, I should have made it laughably unnatural, by forcing insensibly upon the mind of him who looked at it the contrast between the real life, represented by a wig of actual hair, and the artistic life, represented by an idea embodied in stone or metal. The higher the work of art (that is, the higher the idea it represents as a new combination of details taken from nature), the more it is degraded or spoilt by an attempt to give it a kind of reality which is out of keeping with the materials employed. But the same rule applies to everything in art, however humble. And a couple of stuffed canary-birds at the brim of a basket-work imitation of a Greek drinking-cup would be as bad taste as a wig from the barber’s on the head of a marble statue of Apollo.”
“I see,” said Will, his head downcast, like a man pondering,—“at least I think I see; and I’m very much obliged to you, sir.”
Mrs. Somers had long since returned with the work-basket, but stood with it in her hands, not daring to interrupt the gentleman, and listening to his discourse with as much patience and as little comprehension as if it had been one of the controversial sermons upon Ritualism with which on great occasions Mr. Lethbridge favoured his congregation.