158. Anatomy, then,—I will assume that you grant, for the moment, as I will assuredly prove to you eventually,—will not help us to draw the true appearances of things. But may it not add to our intelligent conception of their nature?
So far from doing this, the anatomical study which has, to our much degradation and misfortune, usurped the place, and taken the name, at once of art and of natural history, has produced the most singularly mischievous effect on the faculty of delineation with respect to different races of animals. In all recent books on natural history, you will find the ridiculous and ugly creatures clone well, the noble and beautiful creatures done, I do not say merely ill, but in no wise. You will find the law hold universally that apes, pigs, rats, weasels, foxes, and the like,—but especially apes,—are drawn admirably; but not a stag, not a lamb, not a horse, not a lion;—the nobler the creature, the more stupidly it is always drawn, not from feebleness of art power, but a far deadlier fault than that—a total want of sympathy with the noble qualities of any creature, and a loathsome delight in their disgusting qualities. And this law is so thoroughly carried out that the great French historian of the mammalia, St. Hilaire, chooses, as his single example of the highest of the race, the most nearly bestial type he can find, human, in the world. Let no girl ever look at the book, nor any youth who is willing to take my word; let those who doubt me, look at the example he has given of womankind.
159. But admit that this is only French anatomy, or ill-studied anatomy, and that, rightly studied, as Dr. Acland, for instance, would teach it us, it might do us some kind of good.
I must reserve for my lectures on the school of Florence any analysis of the effect of anatomical study on European art and character; you will find some notice of it in my lecture on Michael Angelo; and in the course of that analysis, it will be necessary for me to withdraw the statement made in the “Stones of Venice,” that anatomical science was helpful to great men, though harmful to mean ones. I am now certain that the greater the intellect, the more fatal are the forms of degradation to which it becomes liable in the course of anatomical studies; and that to Michael Angelo, of all men, the mischief was greatest, in destroying his religious passion and imagination, and leading him to make every spiritual conception subordinate to the display of his knowledge of the body. To-day, however, I only wish to give you my reasons for withdrawing anatomy from your course of study in these schools.
160. I do so, first, simply with reference to our time, convenience, and systematic method. It has become a habit with drawing-masters to confuse this particular science of anatomy with their own art of drawing, though they confuse no other science with that art. Admit that, in order to draw a tree, you should have a knowledge of botany: Do you expect me to teach you botany here? Whatever I want you to know of it I shall send you to your Professor of Botany and to the Botanic Gardens, to learn. I may, perhaps, give you a rough sketch of the lines of timber in a bough, but nothing more.
So again, admit that, to draw a stone, you need a knowledge of geology. I have told you that you do not, but admit it. Do you expect me to teach you, here, the relations between quartz and oxide of iron; or between the Silurian and Permian systems? If you care about them, go to Professor Phillips, and come back to me when you know them.
And, in like manner, admit that, to draw a man, you want the knowledge of his bones:—you do not; but admit that you do. Why should you expect me, here, to teach you the most difficult of all the sciences? If you want to know it, go to an hospital, and cut dead bodies to pieces till you are satisfied; then come to me, and I’ll make a shift to teach you to draw, even then—though your eyes and memory will be full of horrible things which Heaven never meant you so much as a glance at. But don’t expect me to help you in that ghastly work: any more than among the furnaces and retorts in Professor Maskelyne’s laboratory.
161. Let us take one more step in the logical sequence. You do not, I have told you, need either chemistry, botany, geology, or anatomy, to enable you to understand art, or produce it. But there is one science which you must be acquainted with. You must very intensely and thoroughly know—how to behave. You cannot so much as feel the difference between two casts of drapery, between two tendencies of line,—how much less between dignity and baseness of gesture,—but by your own dignity of character. But, though this is an essential science, and although I cannot teach you to lay one line beside another rightly, unless you have this science, you don’t expect me in these schools to teach you how to behave, if you happen not to know it before!
162. Well, here is one reason, and a sufficiently logical one, as you will find it on consideration, for the exclusion of anatomical study from all drawing schools. But there is a more cogent reason than this for its exclusion, especially from elementary drawing-schools. It may be sometimes desirable that a student should see, as I said, how very unlike a face a skull is; and at a leisure moment he may, without much harm, observe the equivocation between knees and ankles by which it is contrived that his legs, if properly made at the joints, will only bend backwards, but a crane’s forwards. But that a young boy, or girl, brought up fresh to the schools of art from the country, should be set to stare, against every particle of wholesome grain in their natures, at the Elgin marbles, and to draw them with dismal application, until they imagine they like them, makes the whole youthful temper rotten with affectation, and sickly with strained and ambitious fancy. It is still worse for young persons to be compelled to endure the horror of the dissecting-room, or to be made familiar with the conditions of actual bodily form, in a climate where the restraints of dress must for ever prevent the body from being perfect in contour, or regarded with entirely simple feeling.
163. I have now, perhaps too often for your patience, told you that you must always draw for the sake of your subject—never for the sake of your picture. What you wish to see in reality, that you should make an effort to show, in pictures and statues; what you do not wish to see in reality, you should not try to draw.