90. Admitting, however, (not that I suppose you will at once admit, but for the sake of argument, supposing,) that this is true, what, we have further to ask, can be done to discourage ourselves from calamitous emulation, and withdraw our workmen from the sight of what is too good to be of use to them?
But this question is not one which can be determined by the needs, or limited to the circumstances of Art. To live generally more modest and contented lives; to win the greatest possible pleasure from the smallest things; to do what is likely to be serviceable to our immediate neighbours, whether it seem to them admirable or not; to make no pretence of admiring what has really no hold upon our hearts; and to be resolute in refusing all additions to our learning, until we have perfectly arranged and secured what learning we have got;—these are conditions, and laws, of unquestionable σοφία and σωφροσύνη, which will indeed lead us up to fine art if we are resolved to have it fine; but will also do what is much better, make rude art precious.
91. It is not, however, by any means necessary that provincial art should be rude, though it may be singular. Often it is no less delicate than quaint, and no less refined in grace than original in character. This is likely always to take place when a people of naturally fine artistic temper work with the respect which, as I endeavoured to show you in a former lecture, ought always to be paid to local material and circumstance.
I have placed in your educational series the photograph of the door of a wooden house in Abbeville, and of the winding stair above; both so exquisitely sculptured that the real vine-leaves which had wreathed themselves about their pillars, cannot, in the photograph, be at once discerned from the carved foliage. The latter, quite as graceful, can only be known for art by its quaint setting.
Yet this school of sculpture is altogether provincial. It could only have risen in a richly-wooded chalk country, where the sapling trees beside the brooks gave example to the workman of the most intricate tracery, and the white cliffs above the meadows furnished docile material to his hand.
92. I have now, to my sorrow, learned to despise the elaborate intricacy, and the playful realizations, of the Norman designers; and can only be satisfied by the reserved and proud imagination of the master schools. But the utmost pleasure I now take in these is almost as nothing, compared to the joy I used to have, when I knew no better, in the fretted pinnacles of Rouen, and white lace, rather than stonework, of the chapels of Reu and Amboise.
Yet observe that the first condition of this really precious provincial work is its being the best that can be done under the given circumstances; and the second is, that though provincial, it is not in the least frivolous or ephemeral, but as definitely civic, or public, in design, and as permanent in the manner of it, as the work of the most learned academies: while its execution brought out the energies of each little state, not necessarily in rivalship, but severally in the perfecting of styles which Nature had rendered it impossible for their neighbours to imitate.
93. This civic unity, and the feeling of the workman that he is performing his part in a great scene which is to endure for centuries, while yet, within the walls of his city, it is to be a part of his own peculiar life, and to be separate from all the world besides, developes, together, whatever duty he acknowledges as a patriot, and whatever complacency he feels as an artist.
We now build, in our villages, by the rules of the Academy of London; and if there be a little original vivacity or genius in any provincial workman, he is almost sure to spend it in making a ridiculous toy. Nothing is to me much more pathetic than the way that our neglected workmen thus throw their lives away. As I was walking the other day through the Crystal Palace, I came upon a toy which had taken the leisure of five years to make; you dropped a penny into the chink of it, and immediately a little brass steam-engine in the middle started into nervously hurried action; some bell-ringers pulled strings at the bottom of a church steeple which had no top; two regiments of cavalry marched out from the sides, and manœuvred in the middle; and two well-dressed persons in a kind of opera-box expressed their satisfaction by approving gestures.
In old Ghent, or Bruges, or York, such a man as the one who made this toy, with companions similarly minded, would have been taught how to employ himself, not to their less amusement, but to better purpose; and in their five years of leisure hours they would have carved a flamboyant crown for the belfry-tower, and would have put chimes into it that would have told the time miles away, with a pleasant tune for the hour, and a variation for the quarters, and cost the passers-by in all the city and plain not so much as the dropping of a penny into a chink.