I am now about to use as models for your rock drawings stones which my year’s income, when I was a boy, would not have bought. But I have long ceased to take any pleasure in their possession; and am only thinking, now, to whom else they can be of use, since they can be of no more to me.
84. But the loss of pleasure to me caused by advance in knowledge of drawings has been far greater than that induced by my riches in minerals.
I have placed, in your reference series, one or two drawings of architecture, made when I was a youth of twenty, with perfect ease to myself, and some pleasure to other people. A day spent in sketching then brought with it no weariness, and infinite complacency. I know better now what drawing should be; the effort to do my work rightly fatigues me in an hour, and I never care to look at it again from that day forward.
85. It is true that men of great and real power do the best things with comparative ease; but you will never hear them express the complacency which simple persons feel in partial success. There is nothing to be regretted in this; it is appointed for all men to enjoy, but for few to achieve.
And do not think that I am wasting your time in dwelling on these simple moralities. From the facts I have been stating we must derive this great principle for all effort. That we must endeavour to do, not what is absolutely best, but what is easily within our power and adapted to our temper and condition.
86. In your educational series is a lithographic drawing, by Prout, of an old house in Strasbourg. The carvings of its woodwork are in a style altogether provincial, yet of which the origin is very distant. The delicate Renaissance architecture of Italy was affected, even in its finest periods, by a tendency to throw out convex masses at the bases of its pillars; the wood-carvers of the 16th century adopted this bulged form as their first element of ornamentation, and these windows of Strasbourg are only imitations by the German peasantry of what, in its finest type, you must seek as far away as the Duomo of Bergamo.
But the burgher, or peasant, of Alsace enjoyed his rude imitation, adapted, as it was, boldly and frankly to the size of his house and the grain of the larch logs of which he built it, infinitely more than the refined Italian enjoyed the floral luxuriance of his marble; and all the treasures of a great exhibition could not have given him the tenth part of the exultation with which he saw the gable of his roof completed over its jutting fret-work; and wrote among the rude intricacies of its sculpture, in flourished black letter, that “He and his wife had built their house with God’s help, and prayed Him to let them live long in it,—they, and their children.”
87. But it is not only the rustic method of architecture which I wish you to note in this plate; it is the rustic method of drawing also. The manner in which these blunt timber carvings are drawn by Prout is just as provincial as the carvings themselves. Born in a faraway district of England, and learning to draw, unhelped, with fishing-boats for his models; making his way instinctively until he had command of his pencil enough to secure a small income by lithographic drawing; and finding picturesque character in buildings from which all the finest lines of their carving had been effaced by time; possessing also an instinct in the expression of such subjects so peculiar as to win for him a satisfying popularity, and, far better, to enable him to derive perpetual pleasure in the seclusion of country hamlets, and the quiet streets of deserted cities,—Prout had never any motive to acquaint himself with the refinements, or contend with the difficulties, of a more accomplished art. So far from this, his manner of work was, by its very imperfection, in the most perfect sympathy with the subjects he enjoyed. The broad chalk touches in which he has represented to us this house at Strasbourg are entirely sufficient to give true idea of its effect. To have drawn its ornaments with subtlety of Leonardesque delineation would only have exposed their faults, and mocked their rusticity. The drawing would have become painful to you from the sense of the time which it had taken to represent what was not worth the labour, and to direct your attention to what could only, if closely examined, be matter of offence. But here you have a simple and provincial draughtsman happily and adequately expressing a simple and provincial architecture; nor could either builder or painter have become wiser, but to their loss.
88. Is it then, you will ask me, seriously to be recommended, and, however recommendable, is it possible, that men should remain contented with attainments which they know to be imperfect? and that now, as in former times, large districts of country, and generations of men, should be enriched or amused by the products of a clumsy ignorance? I do not know how far it is possible, but I know that wherever you desire to have true art, it is necessary. Ignorance, which is contented and clumsy, will produce what is imperfect, but not offensive. But ignorance discontented and dexterous, learning what it cannot understand, and imitating what it cannot enjoy, produces the most loathsome forms of manufacture that can disgrace or mislead humanity. Some years since, as I was looking through the modern gallery at the quite provincial German School of Düsseldorf, I was fain to leave all their epic and religious designs, that I might stay long before a little painting of a shepherd boy carving his dog out of a bit of deal. The dog was sitting by, with the satisfied and dignified air of a personage about for the first time in his life to be worthily represented in sculpture; and his master was evidently succeeding to his mind in expressing the features of his friend. The little scene was one which, as you know, must take place continually among the cottage artists who supply the toys of Nuremberg and Berne. Happy, these! so long as, undisturbed by ambition, they spend their leisure time in work pretending only to amuse, yet capable, in its own way, of showing accomplished dexterity, and vivid perception of nature. We, in the hope of doing great things, have surrounded our workmen with Italian models, and tempted them with prizes into competitive mimicry of all that is best, or that we imagine to be best, in the work of every people under the sun. And the result of our instruction is only that we are able to produce—I am now quoting the statement I made last May, “the most perfectly and roundly ill-done things” that ever came from human hands. I should thankfully put upon my chimney-piece the wooden dog cut by the shepherd boy; but I should be willing to forfeit a large sum rather than keep in my room the number 1 of the Kensington Museum—thus described in its catalogue—“Statue in black and white marble, of a Newfoundland dog standing on a serpent, which rests on a marble cushion;—the pedestal ornamented with Pietra Dura fruits in relief.”
89. You will, however, I fear, imagine me indulging in my usual paradox, when I assure you that all the efforts we have been making to surround ourselves with heterogeneous means of instruction, will have the exactly reverse effect from that which we intend;—and that, whereas formerly we were able only to do a little well, we are qualifying ourselves now to do everything ill. Nor is the result confined to our workmen only. The introduction of French dexterity and of German erudition has been harmful chiefly to our most accomplished artists—and in the last Exhibition of our Royal Academy there was, I think, no exception to the manifest fact that every painter of reputation painted worse than he did ten years ago.