No excuse therefore can be found for us if we continue to neglect to avail ourselves of them as though they were still undiscovered. We have alabaster, which may be wrought at a really trifling expense; large fields of marbles, of which those of Devonshire and Ireland are particularly valuable for architectural decoration, and those of Derbyshire and Purbeck for the formation of shafts and columns: we have, moreover, an exhaustless supply of granites of various colours; of serpentine; and, lastly, of building-stones of many tints, many of which may be very effective when contrasted. In addition to these natural materials we have every facility for making the most perfect bricks; and, owing to the excellence already achieved by our manufacturers of glass and pottery, we have no difficulty in making mosaics and tiles, either for roofing, flooring, or inlaying, of any degree of beauty, either of colour or form.
With such advantages we ought long since to have effected far more than we have ever attempted, or apparently ever thought of. Our buildings should, both outside and inside, have had some of that warmth which colour only can give; they should have enabled the educated eye to revel in bright tints of nature’s own formation, whilst to the uneducated eye they would have afforded the best of all possible lessons, and, by familiarizing it with the proper combination of colour and form, would have enabled it to appreciate it.
And then, if ever the day shall come when our buildings thus do their duty and teach their proper lesson to the eye, we may hope that we shall see a feeling, more general and more natural, for colour of all kinds and for art of every variety in the bulk of our people. At present it is really saddening to converse with the majority of educated men on any question of colour. For them it has no charms and no delight. The puritanical uniformity of our coats and of all our garments is but a reflection from the prevailing lack of love of art or colour of any kind. A rich colour is thought vulgar, and that only is refined which is neutral, plain, and ugly.
Perhaps in all this there may be something more than art can ever grapple with; it may be ingrain, and part of the necessity of the present age; but if so, oh for the days when, as of yore, colour may be appreciated and beloved, when uniformity shall not be considered beauty, nor a hideous plainness be considered a fit substitute for severity! Oh too, for the days when men shall have cast off their dependence on other men’s works, and the customs of their own days, and, like true men and faithful, shall honestly and with energy, each in his own sphere, set to work to do all that in them lies to increase the power of art and to advance its best interests. All these aims and objects are more or less bound up with the best interests of a people, however old and however powerful, because they depend for ultimate and real success upon the thorough belief, on the part of all its votaries, in certain great and eternal principles, which, if always acted upon, would beyond all doubt sometimes make great artists and always good men.
The principle which artists now have mainly to contend for is that of Truth; forgotten, trodden under foot, despised, if not hated for ages, this must be their watchword. If they be architects, let them remember how vitally necessary truthfulness in construction, in design, and in decoration, is to any permanent success in even the smallest of their works; or sculptors, let them recollect how vain and unsatisfactory has been their abandonment of truth in their attempted revival among us of what in Classic times were—what they no longer are—real representations and natural works of art; if painters, let them remember how all-important a return to first principles and truth in the delineation of nature and natural forms is to them, if they are ever to create a school of art by which they may be remembered in another age.
Finally, I wish that all artists would remember the one great fact which separates by so wide a gap the architects, sculptors, and painters of the best days of the Middle Ages from us now—their earnestness and their thorough self-sacrifice in the pursuit of art, and in the exaltation of their religion. They were men who had a faith, and hearts earnestly bent on the propagation of that faith; and were it not for this, their works would never have had the life, vigour, and freshness which even now they so remarkably retain. Why should we not be equally remembered three centuries hence? Have we less to contend for, less faith to exhibit, or less self-sacrifice to offer than they, because we live in later days? Or is it true that the temper of men is so much changed, and that the vocation of art has changed with it? I believe not. There have been evidences enough that there is no lack of liberality on the part of our employers, where there is any evidence of skill and enthusiasm for his work on the part of the artist. The English architect of to-day has opportunities as great as those of any of his predecessors, if he will but use them. But he must use his art as one who respects both himself and it. There is no real respect for an art when it is treated, as it always has been by the Renaissance architects and their followers, as a mere affair of display. No good building was ever yet erected in which the architect designed the front, and left the flanks or internal courts to take care of themselves. So also no good building was ever seen, in which the exterior only was thought of, and the internal decoration and design neglected. But this is almost universal now, except in the few buildings in which the Gothic style has been carefully revived. In such treatment of art as this, there is an ingrain falseness, which is as demoralizing as it is ruinous. If architecture is only an affair of outside display, no one will take any real interest in it, for from the first it is the evidence of the architect’s love for his work which has given the human interest which is all in all to it.
It is this truthfulness only, in every line and every detail of every part of a building, which can ever make great architecture—it is this only which one would wish to extract from the works of our forefathers—and this only which I have desired to discover in the works of those Italian artists whose labours I have been considering, and whose efforts I have endeavoured to set before my readers; and it is this desire which can alone be my excuse for having undertaken the work which I have now brought to a conclusion.
