Meantime, at the apothecary’s shop in the village, I can buy, besides drugs,—cigars, and stationery; and among other stationery, the ‘College card,’ of “eighteen useful articles,”—namely, Bohemian glass ruler, Bohemian glass penholder, pen-box with gilt and diapered lid, pen-wiper [[290]]with a gilt tin fern leaf for ornament, pencil, india-rubber, and twelve steel pens,—all stitched separately and neatly on the card; and the whole array of them to be bought for sixpence.
What times!—what civilization!—what ingenuity!—what cheapness!
Yes; but what does it mean? First, that I, who buy the card, can’t get cream to my tea? And secondly, that the unhappy wretches,—Bohemian and other,—glass blowers, iron diggers, pen manufacturers, and the like,—who have made the eighteen useful articles, have sixpence to divide among them for their trouble! What sort of cream have they to their tea?
But the question of questions about it all, is—Are these eighteen articles ‘useful articles’? For what? Here’s a—nominal—‘pencil’ on our ‘College card.’ But not a collegian, that I know of, wants to draw,—and if he did, he couldn’t draw with this thing, which is not a pencil, but some sand and coal-dust jammed in a stick. The ‘india-rubber’ also, I perceive, is not india-rubber; but a composition for tearing up the surface of paper,—useful only to filthy blunderers; the nasty glass-handled things, which will break if I drop them, and cut the housemaid’s fingers, I shall instantly turn out of the house; the pens, for which I bought the card, will perhaps be useful to me, because I have, to my much misery, writing to do: but you, happier animals, who may exist without scratching either paper or your [[291]]heads,—what is the use of them to you? (N.B. I couldn’t write a word with one of them, after all.)
I must go back to my Warrington friend; for there are more lessons to be received from him. I looked at him, in one sense, not undeferentially. He was, to the extent of his experience, as good a judge of art as I. He knew what his ‘Graphic’ was worth. Pronounced an entirely divine verdict upon it. Put it, beneficently, out of its pictorial pain,—for ever.
Do not think that it is so difficult to know good art from bad. The poorest-minded public cannot rest in its bad possessions,—wants them new, and ever new. I have given my readers, who have trusted me, four art-possessions, which I do not fear their wishing to destroy; and it will be a long while before I wish them to get another. I have too long delayed beginning to tell them why they are good; and one of my Sheffield men asked Mr. Swan the other day what I had commended the Leucothea for,—“he couldn’t see anything in it.” To whom the first answer must be—Did you expect to, then? My good manufacturing friend, be assured there was no more thought of pleasing you when Leucothea was carved, than of pleasing—Ganymede, when Rosalind was christened. Some day you will come to “like her name.”
But, whether you ever come to ‘see anything in it’ or not, be assured that this, and the Lippi, and the Titian, and the Velasquez, are, all four, alike in one [[292]]quality, which you can respect, even if you do not envy. They are work of men doing their best. And whose pride is in doing their best and most. You modern British workmen’s pride, I find more and more, is in doing ingeniously the worst, and least, you can.
Again: they all four agree in being the work of men trained under true masters, and themselves able to be true masters to others. They belong, therefore, to what are properly called ‘schools’ of art. Whereas your modern British workman recognizes no master; but is, (as the result of his increasing intelligence, according to Mr. Mill,) less and less disposed “to be guided in the way which he should go by any prestige or authority.” The result of which is that every British artist has to find out how to paint as he best can; and usually begins to see his way to it, by the time he is sixty.
Thirdly. They belong to schools which, orderly and obedient themselves, understood the law of order in all things. Which is the chief distinction between Art and Rudeness. And the first aim of every great painter, is to express clearly his obedience to the law of Kosmos, Order, or Symmetry.[3] The only perfect work of the four [[293]]I have given, the Titian, binds itself by this symmetry most severely. Absolutely straight lines of screen behind the Madonna’s head,—a dark head on one side, a dark head on the other; a child on one side, a child on the other; a veil falling one way on one side, a scroll curling the other way on the other; a group of leaves in the child’s right hand balanced by another in the Madonna’s left; two opposed sprays of leaves on the table, and the whole clasped by a single cherry. In the Lippi, the symmetry is lateral; the Madonna fronting the group of the child central, with supporting angel on each side. In the Leucothea, the diminishing magnitudes of the attendant goddesses on the right are answered by the diminishing magnitudes from the seated goddess and the child, to the smallest figure at her knee, which clasps both the sides of the chain.
Lastly, in the Velasquez, the little pyramid of a child, with her three tassels and central brooch, and a chair on each side of her, would have been too symmetrical, but for the interferent light in the dog.