[From “the Oxford Museum,” pp. 60-90.]
Gothic Architecture and the Oxford Museum.
January 20, 1859.
My Dear Acland: I was not able to write, as I had hoped, from Switzerland, for I found it impossible to lay down any principles respecting the decoration of the Museum which did not in one way or other involve disputed points, too many, and too subtle, to be discussed in a letter. Nor do I feel the difficulty less in writing to you now, so far as regards the question occurring in our late conversations, respecting the best mode of completing those interior decorations. Yet I must write, if only to ask that I may be in some way associated with you in what you are now doing to bring the Museum more definitely before the public mind—that I may be associated at least in the expression of my deep sense of the noble purpose of the building—of the noble sincerity of effort in its architect—of the endless good which the teachings to which it will be devoted must, in their ultimate issue, accomplish for mankind. How vast the range of that issue, you have shown in the lecture which I have just read, in which you have so admirably traced the chain of the physical sciences as it encompasses the great concords of this visible universe.[125] But how deep the workings of these new springs of knowledge are to be, and how great our need of them, and how far the brightness and the beneficence of them are to reach among all the best interests of men—perhaps none of us can yet conceive, far less know or say. For, much as I reverence physical science as a means of mental education (and you know how I have contended for it, as such, now these twenty years, from the sunny afternoon of spring when Ehrenberg and you and I went hunting for infusoria in Christchurch meadow streams, to the hour when the prize offered by Sir Walter Trevelyan and yourself for the best essay on the Fauna of that meadow, marked the opening of a new era in English education[126])—much, I say, as I reverence physical science in this function, I reverence it, at this moment, more as the source of utmost human practical power, and the means by which the far-distant races of the world, who now sit in darkness and the shadow of death, are to be reached and regenerated. At home or far away—the call is equally instant—here, for want of more extended physical science, there is plague in our streets, famine in our fields; the pest strikes root and fruit over a hemisphere of the earth, we know not why; the voices of our children fade away into silence of venomous death, we know not why; the population of this most civilized country resists every effort to lead it into purity of habit and habitation—to give it genuineness of nourishment, and wholesomeness of air, as a new interference with its liberty; and insists vociferously on its right to helpless death. All this is terrible; but it is more terrible yet that dim, phosphorescent, frightful superstitions still hold their own over two-thirds of the inhabited globe, and that all the phenomena of nature which were intended by the Creator to enforce His eternal laws of love and judgment, and which, rightly understood, enforce them more strongly by their patient beneficence, and their salutary destructiveness, than the miraculous dew on Gideon’s fleece, or the restrained lightnings of Horeb—that all these legends of God’s daily dealing with His creatures remain unread, or are read backwards, into blind, hundred-armed horror of idol cosmogony.
How strange it seems that physical science should ever have been thought adverse to religion! The pride of physical science is, indeed, adverse, like every other pride, both to religion and truth; but sincerity of science, so far from being hostile, is the path-maker among the mountains for the feet of those who publish peace.
Now, therefore, and now only, it seems to me, the University has become complete in her function as a teacher of the youth of the nation to which every hour gives wider authority over distant lands; and from which every rood of extended dominion demands new, various, and variously applicable knowledge of the laws which govern the constitution of the globe, and must finally regulate the industry, no less than discipline the intellect, of the human race. I can hardly turn my mind from these deep causes of exultation to the minor difficulties which beset or restrict your undertaking. The great work is accomplished; the immediate impression made by it is of little importance; and as for my own special subjects of thought or aim, though many of them are closely involved in what has been done, and some principles which I believe to be, in their way, of great importance, are awkwardly compromised in what has been imperfectly done—all these I am tempted to waive, or content to compromise when only I know that the building is in main points fit for its mighty work. Yet you will not think that it was matter of indifference to me when I saw, as I went over Professor Brodie’s[127] chemical laboratories the other day, how closely this success of adaptation was connected with the choice of the style. It was very touching and wonderful to me. Here was the architecture which I had learned to know and love in pensive ruins, deserted by the hopes and efforts of men, or in dismantled fortress-fragments recording only their cruelty—here was this very architecture lending itself, as if created only for these, to the foremost activities of human discovery, and the tenderest functions of human mercy. No other architecture, as I felt in an instant, could have thus adapted itself to a new and strange office. No fixed arrangements of frieze and pillar, nor accepted proportions of wall and roof, nor practised refinement of classical decoration, could have otherwise than absurdly and fantastically yielded its bed to the crucible, and its blast to the furnace; but these old vaultings and strong buttresses—ready always to do service to man, whatever his bidding—to shake the waves of war back from his seats of rock, or prolonged through faint twilights of sanctuary, the sighs of his superstition—he had but to ask it of them, and they entered at once into the lowliest ministries of the arts of healing, and the sternest and clearest offices in the service of science.
And the longer I examined the Museum arrangements, the more I felt that it could be only some accidental delay in the recognition of this efficiency for its work which had caused any feeling adverse to its progress among the members of the University. The general idea about the Museum has perhaps been, hitherto, that it is a forced endeavor to bring decorative forms of architecture into uncongenial uses; whereas, the real fact is, as far as I can discern it, that no other architecture would, under the required circumstances, have been possible; and that any effort to introduce classical types of form into these laboratories and museums must have ended in ludicrous discomfiture. But the building has now reached a point of crisis, and it depends upon the treatment which its rooms now receive in completion, whether the facts of their propriety and utility be acknowledged by the public, or lost sight of in the distraction of their attention to matters wholly external.
So strongly I feel this, that, whatever means of decoration had been at your disposal, I should have been inclined to recommend an exceeding reserve in that matter. Perhaps I should even have desired such reserve on abstract grounds of feeling. The study of Natural History is one eminently addressed to the active energies of body and mind. Nothing is to be got out of it by dreaming, not always much by thinking—everything by seeking and seeing. It is work for the hills and fields,—work of foot and hand, knife and hammer,—so far as it is to be afterwards carried on in the house, the more active and workmanlike our proceedings the better, fresh air blowing in from the windows, and nothing interfering with the free space for our shelves and instruments on the walls. I am not sure that much interior imagery or color, or other exciting address to any of the observant faculties, would be desirable under such circumstances. You know best; but I should no more think of painting in bright colors beside you, while you were dissecting or analyzing, than of entertaining you by a concert of fifes and cymbals.
But farther: Do you suppose Gothic decoration is an easy thing, or that it is to be carried out with a certainty of success at the first trial, under new and difficult conditions? The system of the Gothic decorations took eight hundred years to mature, gathering its power by undivided inheritance of traditional method, and unbroken accession of systematic power; from its culminating point in the Sainte Chapelle, it faded through four hundred years of splendid decline; now for two centuries it has lain dead—and more than so—buried; and more than so, forgotten, as a dead man out of mind; do you expect to revive it out of those retorts and furnaces of yours, as the cloud-spirit of the Arabian sea rose from beneath the seals of Solomon? Perhaps I have been myself faultfully answerable for this too eager hope in your mind (as well as in that of others) by what I have urged so often respecting the duty of bringing out the power of subordinate workmen in decorative design. But do you think I meant workmen trained (or untrained) in the way that ours have been until lately, and then cast loose on a sudden, into unassisted contentions with unknown elements of style? I meant the precise contrary of this; I meant workmen as we have yet to create them: men inheriting the instincts of their craft through many generations, rigidly trained in every mechanical art that bears on their materials, and familiarized from infancy with every condition of their beautiful and perfect treatment; informed and refined in manhood, by constant observation of all natural fact and form; then classed, according to their proved capacities, in ordered companies, in which every man shall know his part, and take it calmly and without effort or doubt,—indisputably well, unaccusably accomplished, mailed and weaponed cap-à-pie for his place and function. Can you lay your hand on such men? or do you think that mere natural good-will and good-feeling can at once supply their place? Not so: and the more faithful and earnest the minds you have to deal with, the more careful you should be not to urge them towards fields of effort, in which, too early committed, they can only be put to unserviceable defeat.
Nor can you hope to accomplish by rule or system what cannot be done by individual taste. The laws of color are definable up to certain limits, but they are not yet defined. So far are they from definition, that the last, and, on the whole, best work on the subject (Sir Gardiner Wilkinson’s) declares the “color concords” of preceding authors to be discords, and vice versâ.[128]
Much, therefore, as I love color decoration when it is rightly given, and essential as it has been felt by the great architects of all periods to the completion of their work, I would not, in your place, endeavor to carry out such decoration at present, in any elaborate degree, in the interior of the Museum. Leave it for future thought; above all, try no experiments. Let small drawings be made of the proposed arrangements of color in every room; have them altered on the paper till you feel they are right; then carry them out firmly and simply; but, observe, with as delicate execution as possible. Rough work is good in its place, three hundred feet above the eye, on a cathedral front, but not in the interior of rooms, devoted to studies in which everything depends upon accuracy of touch and keenness of sight.