Secondly, Mr. Fergusson tries to make the same divisions fit the subjects of art, and art itself; and therefore talks of technic, æsthetic, and phonetic, arts, (or, translating the Greek,) of artful arts, sensitive arts, and talkative arts; but I have nothing to do with any division of the arts, I have to deal only with the merits of buildings. As, however, I have been led into reference to Mr. Fergusson’s system, I would fain say a word or two to effect Mr. Fergusson’s extrication from it. I hope to find in him a noble ally, ready to join with me in war upon affectation, falsehood, and prejudice, of every kind: I have derived much instruction from his most interesting work, and I hope for much more from its continuation; but he must disentangle himself from his system, or he will be strangled by it; never was anything so ingeniously and hopelessly wrong throughout; the whole of it is founded on a confusion of the instruments of man with his capacities.
Mr. Fergusson would have us take—
“First, man’s muscular action or power.” (Technics.)
“Secondly, those developments of sense by which he does!! as much as by his muscles.” (Æsthetics.)
“Lastly, his intellect, or to confine this more correctly to its external action, his power of speech!!!” (Phonetics.)
Granting this division of humanity correct, or sufficient, the writer then most curiously supposes that he may arrange the arts as if there were some belonging to each division of man,—never observing that every art must be governed by, and addressed to, one division, and executed by another; executed by the muscular, addressed to the sensitive or intellectual; and that, to be an art at all, it must have in it work of the one, and guidance from the other. If, by any lucky accident, he had been led to arrange the arts, either by their objects, and the things to which they are addressed, or by their means, and the things by which they are executed, he would have discovered his mistake in an instant. As thus:—
| These arts are addressed to the,— or executed by,— | Muscles!! Senses, Intellect; Muscles, Senses!! Intellect. |
Indeed it is true that some of the arts are in a sort addressed to the muscles, surgery for instance; but this is not among Mr. Fergusson’s technic, but his politic, arts! and all the arts may, in a sort, be said to be performed by the senses, as the senses guide both muscles and intellect in their work: but they guide them as they receive information, or are standards of accuracy, but not as in themselves capable of action. Mr. Fergusson is, I believe, the first person who has told us of senses that act or do, they having been hitherto supposed only to sustain or perceive. The weight of error, however, rests just as much in the original division of man, as in the endeavor to fit the arts to it. The slight omission of the soul makes a considerable difference when it begins to influence the final results of the arrangement.
Mr. Fergusson calls morals and religion “Politick arts” (as if religion were an art at all! or as if both were not as necessary to individuals as to societies); and therefore, forming these into a body of arts by themselves, leaves the best of the arts to do without the soul and the moral feeling as rest they may. Hence “expression,” or “phonetics,” is of intellect only (as if men never expressed their feelings!); and then, strangest and worst of all, intellect is entirely resolved into talking! There can be no intellect but it must talk, and all talking must be intellectual. I believe people do sometimes talk without understanding; and I think the world would fare ill if they never understood without talking. The intellect is an entirely silent faculty, and has nothing to do with parts of speech any more than the moral part has. A man may feel and know things without expressing either the feeling or knowledge; and the talking is a muscular mode of communicating the workings of the intellect or heart—muscular, whether it be by tongue or by sign, or by carving or writing, or by expression of feature; so that to divide a man into muscular and talking parts, is to divide him into body in general, and tongue in particular, the endless confusion resulting from which arrangement is only less marvellous in itself, than the resolution with which Mr. Fergusson has worked through it, and in spite of it, up to some very interesting and suggestive truths; although starting with a division of humanity which does not in the least raise it above the brute, for a rattlesnake has his muscular, æsthetic, and talking part as much as man, only he talks with his tail, and says, “I am angry with you, and should like to bite you,” more laconically and effectively than any phonetic biped could, were he so minded. And, in fact, the real difference between the brute and man is not so much that the one has fewer means of expression than the other, as that it has fewer thoughts to express, and that we do not understand its expressions. Animals can talk to one another intelligibly enough when they have anything to say, and their captains have words of command just as clear as ours, and better obeyed. We have indeed, in watching the efforts of an intelligent animal to talk to a human being, a melancholy sense of its dumbness; but the fault is still in its intelligence, more than in its tongue. It has not wit enough to systematise its cries or signs, and form them into language.
But there is no end to the fallacies and confusions of Mr. Fergusson’s arrangement. It is a perfect entanglement of gun-cotton, and explodes into vacuity wherever one holds a light to it. I shall leave him to do so with the rest of it for himself, and should perhaps have left it to his own handling altogether, but for the intemperateness of the spirit with which he has spoken on a subject perhaps of all others demanding gentleness and caution. No man could more earnestly have desired the changes lately introduced into the system of the University of Oxford than I did myself: no man can be more deeply sensible than I of grievous failures in the practical working even of the present system: but I believe that these failures may be almost without exception traced to one source, the want of evangelical, and the excess of rubrical religion among the tutors; together with such rustinesses and stiffnesses as necessarily attend the continual operation of any intellectual machine. The fault is, at any rate, far less in the system than in the imperfection of its administration; and had it been otherwise, the terms in which Mr. Fergusson speaks of it are hardly decorous in one who can but be imperfectly acquainted with its working. They are sufficiently answered by the structure of the essay in which they occur; for if the high powers of mind which its author possesses had been subjected to the discipline of the schools, he could not have wasted his time on the development of a system which their simplest formulæ of logic would have shown him to be untenable.