With respect to this finishing, by the last touches bestowed on the sculpture of the building, I feel painfully the harmfulness of any ill-advised parsimony at this moment. For it may, perhaps, be alleged by the advocates of retrenchment, that so long as the building is fit for its uses (and your report is conclusive as to its being so), economy in treatment of external feature is perfectly allowable, and will in nowise diminish the serviceableness of the building in the great objects which its designs regarded. To a certain extent this is true. You have comfortable rooms, I hope sufficient apparatus; and it now depends much more on the professors than on the ornaments of the building, whether or not it is to become a bright or obscure centre of public instruction. Yet there are other points to be considered. As the building stands at present, there is a discouraging aspect of parsimony about it. One sees that the architect has done the utmost he could with the means at his disposal, and that just at the point of reaching what was right, he has been stopped for want of funds. This is visible in almost every stone of the edifice. It separates it with broad distinctiveness from all the other buildings in the University. It may be seen at once that our other public institutions, and all our colleges—though some of them simply designed—are yet richly built, never pinchingly. Pieces of princely costliness, every here and there, mingle among the simplicities or severities of the student’s life. What practical need, for instance, have we at Christchurch of the beautiful fan-vaulting under which we ascend to dine? We might have as easily achieved the eminence of our banquets under a plain vault. What need have the readers in the Bodleian of the ribbed traceries which decorate its external walls? Yet, which of those readers would not think that learning was insulted by their removal? And are there any of the students of Balliol devoid of gratitude for the kindly munificence of the man who gave them the beautiful sculptured brackets of their oriel window, when three massy projecting stones would have answered the purpose just as well? In these and also other regarded and pleasant portions of our colleges, we find always a wealthy and worthy completion of all appointed features, which I believe is not without strong, though untraced effect, on the minds of the younger scholars, giving them respect for the branches of learning which these buildings are intended to honor, and increasing, in a certain degree, that sense of the value of delicacy and accuracy which is the first condition of advance in those branches of learning themselves.
Your Museum, if you now bring it to hurried completion, will convey an impression directly the reverse of this. It will have the look of a place, not where a revered system of instruction is established, but where an unadvised experiment is being disadvantageously attempted. It is yet in your power to avoid this, and to make the edifice as noble in aspect as in function. Whatever chance there may be of failure in interior work, rich ornamentation may be given, without any chance of failure, to just that portion of the exterior which will give pleasure to every passer-by, and express the meaning of the building best to the eyes of strangers. There is, I repeat, no chance of serious failure in this external decoration, because your architect has at his command the aid of men, such as worked with the architects of past times. Not only has the art of Gothic sculpture in part remained, though that of Gothic color has been long lost, but the unselfish—and, I regret to say, in part self-sacrificing—zeal of two first-rate sculptors, Mr. Munro and Mr. Woolner, which has already given you a series of noble statues, is still at your disposal, to head and systematize the efforts of inferior workmen.
I do not know if you will attribute it to a higher estimate than yours of the genius of the O’Shea family,[129] or to a lower estimate of what they have as yet accomplished, that I believe they will, as they proceed, produce much better ornamental sculpture than any at present completed in the Museum. It is also to be remembered that sculptors are able to work for us with a directness of meaning which none of our painters could bring to their task, even were they disposed to help us. A painter is scarcely excited to his strength, but by subjects full of circumstance, such as it would be difficult to suggest appropriately in the present building; but a sculptor has room enough for his full power in the portrait statues, which are necessarily the leading features of good Gothic decoration. Let me pray you, therefore, so far as you have influence with the delegacy, to entreat their favorable consideration of the project stated in Mr. Greswell’s appeal—the enrichment of the doorway, and the completion of the sculpture of the West Front. There is a reason for desiring such a plan to be carried out, of wider reach than any bearing on the interests of the Museum itself. I believe that the elevation of all arts in England to their true dignity, depends principally on our recovering that unity of purpose in sculptors and architects, which characterized the designers of all great Christian buildings. Sculpture, separated from architecture, always degenerates into effeminacies and conceits; architecture, stripped of sculpture, is at best a convenient arrangement of dead walls; associated, they not only adorn, but reciprocally exalt each other, and give to all the arts of the country in which they thus exist, a correspondent tone of majesty.
But I would plead for the enrichment of this doorway by portrait sculpture, not so much even on any of these important grounds, as because it would be the first example in modern English architecture of the real value and right place of commemorative statues. We seem never to know at present where to put such statues. In the midst of the blighted trees of desolate squares, or at the crossings of confused streets, or balanced on the pinnacles of pillars, or riding across the tops of triumphal arches, or blocking up the aisles of cathedrals—in none of these positions, I think, does the portrait statue answer its purpose. It may be a question whether the erection of such statues is honorable to the erectors, but assuredly it is not honorable to the persons whom it pretends to commemorate; nor is it anywise matter of exultation to a man who has deserved well of his country to reflect that he may one day encumber a crossing, or disfigure a park gate. But there is no man of worth or heart who would not feel it a high and priceless reward that his statue should be placed where it might remind the youth of England of what had been exemplary in his life, or useful in his labors, and might be regarded with no empty reverence, no fruitless pensiveness, but with the emulative, eager, unstinted passionateness of honor, which youth pays to the dead leaders of the cause it loves, or discoverers of the light by which it lives. To be buried under weight of marble, or with splendor of ceremonial, is still no more than burial; but to be remembered daily, with profitable tenderness, by the activest intelligences of the nation we have served, and to have power granted even to the shadows of the poor features, sunk into dust, still to warn, to animate, to command, as the father’s brow rules and exalts the toil of his children. This is not burial, but immortality.
There is, however, another kind of portraiture, already richly introduced in the works of the Museum; the portraiture, namely, of flowers and animals, respecting which I must ask you to let me say a few selfish, no less than congratulatory words—selfish, inasmuch as they bear on this visible exposition of a principle which it has long been one of my most earnest aims to maintain. We English call ourselves a practical people; but, nevertheless, there are some of our best and most general instincts which it takes us half-centuries to put into practice. Probably no educated Englishman or Englishwoman has ever, for the last forty years, visited Scotland, with leisure on their hands, without making a pilgrimage to Melrose; nor have they ever, I suppose, accomplished the pilgrimage without singing to themselves the burden of Scott’s description of the Abbey. Nor in that description (may it not also be conjectured) do they usually feel any couplets more deeply than the—
“Spreading herbs and flowerets bright
Glistened with the dew of night.
No herb nor floweret glistened there
But was carved in the cloister arches as fair.”
And yet, though we are raising every year in England new examples of every kind of costly and variously intended buildings,—ecclesiastical, civil, and domestic,—none of us, through all that period, had boldness enough to put the pretty couplets into simple practice. We went on, even in the best Gothic work we attempted, clumsily copying the rudest ornaments of previous buildings; we never so much as dreamed of learning from the monks of Melrose, and seeking for help beneath the dew that sparkled on their “gude kail” garden.[130]
Your Museum at Oxford is literally the first building raised in England since the close of the fifteenth century, which has fearlessly put to new trial this old faith in nature, and in the genius of the unassisted workman, who gathered out of nature the materials he needed. I am entirely glad, therefore, that you have decided on engraving for publication one of O’Shea’s capitals;[131] it will be a complete type of the whole work, in its inner meaning, and far better to show one of them in its completeness than to give any reduced sketch of the building. Nevertheless, beautiful as that capital is, and as all the rest of O’Shea’s work is likely to be, it is not yet perfect Gothic sculpture; and it might give rise to dangerous error, if the admiration given to these carvings were unqualified.
I cannot, of course, enter in this letter into any discussion of the question, more and more vexed among us daily, respecting the due meaning and scope of conventionalism in treatment of natural form; but I may state briefly what, I trust, will be the conclusion to which all this “vexing” will at last lead our best architects.