The highest art in all kinds is that which conveys the most truth; and the best ornamentation possible would be the painting of interior walls with frescos by Titian, representing perfect Humanity in color; and the sculpture of exterior walls by Phidias, representing perfect Humanity in form. Titian and Phidias are precisely alike in their conception and treatment of nature—everlasting standards of the right.
Beneath ornamentation, such as men like these could bestow, falls in various rank, according to its subordination to vulgar uses or inferior places, what is commonly conceived as ornamental art. The lower its office, and the less tractable its material, the less of nature it should contain, until a zigzag
becomes the best ornament for the hem of a robe, and a mosaic of bits of glass the best design for a colored window. But all these forms of lower art are to be conventional only because they are subordinate—not because conventionalism is in itself a good or desirable thing. All right conventionalism is a wise acceptance of, and compliance with, conditions of restraint or inferiority: it may be inferiority of our knowledge or power, as in the art of a semi-savage nation; or restraint by reason of material, as in the way the glass painter should restrict himself to transparent hue, and a sculptor deny himself the eyelash and the film of flowing hair, which he cannot cut in marble: but in all cases whatever, right conventionalism is either a wise acceptance of an inferior place, or a noble display of power under accepted limitation; it is not an improvement of natural form into something better or purer than Nature herself.
Now this great and most precious principle may be compromised in two quite opposite ways. It is compromised on one side when men suppose that the degradation of a natural form which fits it for some subordinate place is an improvement of it; and that a black profile on a red ground, because it is proper on a water-jug, is therefore an idealization of Humanity, and nobler art than a picture of Titian. And it is compromised equally gravely on the opposite side, when men refuse to submit to the limitation of material and the fitnesses of office—when they try to produce finished pictures in colored glass, or substitute the inconsiderate imitation of natural objects for the perfectness of adapted and disciplined design.
There is a tendency in the work of the Oxford Museum to err on this last side; unavoidable, indeed, in the present state of our art-knowledge—and less to be regretted in a building devoted to natural science than in any other: nevertheless, I cannot close this letter without pointing it out, and warning the general reader against supposing that the ornamentation of the Museum is, or can be as yet, a representation of what Gothic work will be, when its revival is complete. Far more severe, yet more perfect and lovely, that work will involve, under sterner conventional restraint, the expression not only of