DECORATIVE ART AND ARCHITECTURE IN ENGLAND.
MICHAEL ANGELO was once commissioned to lead in the destruction of the beautiful villas around Florence. He of all men! The expelled Medici, now of papal dignity, were menacing the city. The first thought of the great artist was to save the Campanile, and he covered that noble work of Giotto with protecting wool-sacks. But the suburban villas must not stand to give aid to the enemy, and at word of command he started out, and for once the track of the great artist was indicated in the destruction instead of in the creation of beautiful things. But he came upon one house whose wall was covered with a beautiful fresco, and he had not the heart to destroy it; the soul of the artist held back the hand of the patriot, and in the field of desolation one mansion remained standing alone—saved by the protecting genius of Beauty.
It is but one incident in the long history of the career of Use and Beauty through the world, hand in hand, undivorceable. All our science is engaged in spelling out their story. Every spot of color on bird or insect it finds to be the trace of a utility. What weary struggles carried on through ages to mimic blossom and leaf, and so hide from pursuing foes! The same force works on when the art of man enters the arena for new creation. The thin and feeble blossom of the brier passes through all the phases of culture until it becomes the full rose of the horticulturist, like unto some little maiden’s face for size and lustre, all by merest mercenary influence. Our fairest flowers have migrated from East to West, cherished and preserved for highest use as oracles and symbols of successive goddesses and saints, transplanted from temple courts to flourish under the holier chrism of convent gardens. Despite his proverb, man has painted the lily and adorned the rose, until we may almost say with the Persian Nizámi, “Every flower growing in the many-colored garden of the earth is a drop of blood from the heart of a man.” Out of a dry and hard necessity comes still the beauty of the world. Behind our tinted Salviati glass, our painted Sèvres china and Minton majolica and shining silver plate, are the long rows of pallid faces inhaling poison in stifling rooms, breathing death that they may live. Sad experience is the prelude to each charming symphony. The noblest statues and paintings which the world cherishes were wrought in a “sad sincerity;” in the divine depths of sorrow were found the quarries from which emerged the Apollo Belvidere and the Laokoon; the blood of great hearts supplied the chief pigment of the Dresden Madonna and the Transfiguration; and the magnificent frescoes of Italian churches were born of the hopes and fears of millions, for whom they meant not picturesque beauty, but a world’s redemption. Man in his best epochs of art has thus carried on the ancient creative power of Nature, giving her potential germs and forms a new blossoming under the heat of his never-ending battle of life. And where it is not thus impelled by nor surrendered to this utilitarian, this most real, force, what does Art amount to? Mere copying of works which denote that force in the past; mere Art Ritualism, crying to other ages, Give us of your oil, for our lamps are gone out!
If Michael Angelo could to-day be set on a work of general demolition in London, one may fear it would hardly require patriotism to encourage his zeal. Would he, in what the London Times once called “this our ugly but not altogether uncomfortable metropolis,” have reached a single building which would have made him pause? Here and there he might meet one of those ancient mansions whose bricks have hardened into one solid stone that will stand, as Carlyle once said, “till Gabriel’s trump blows it down;” but of the miles of modern houses in which—to remember the Chelsea sage again—“every brick is a lie,” one may fancy that but few would be saved by any genius of Beauty.
And yet this is, after all, not so certain. That an artist filled with iconoclastic rage might quickly despatch most of the mansions and many of the churches of English suburbs, erected specially for beauty and effect, is quite probable; but there are a number of buildings built without reference to beauty which might perhaps have made Michael Angelo pause with a feeling not unrelated to admiration. If any one will stand beside the Thames River near Charing Cross and gaze for a while on the tremendous sections of the railway bridge there, at its huge iron supports and girders—if he will then go up on it and realize its vast breadth, see four trains passing each other, with room enough between, and room enough for the men and women moving to and fro on their own side-path—he will surely bear away an impression of grandeur. Nay, there will blend with it an impression of beauty also: there is no arch, no slightest foliation or other prettiness, not even a relief to the iron hue save the gilded heads of certain enormous rivets and the gilded monograms of the railway company fixed on the supports of the triple gas-lamps; the bridge is not even straight; and yet beauty there is, and it arises from two sources. The first is the beauty of adequacy for a purpose, involving at once strength and proportion, suggesting what the Greeks may have meant when, in their myth, they wedded Aphrodite to Hephaistos. The second is a beauty almost indescribable in physical terms, but resembling the simplicity which expresses character—the subtle charm playing unconsciously through eye and voice of even a homely man, who in word and act is content with the simple truth. In fact, the beauty of this Charing Cross bridge, which has least aimed at architectural effect among those spanning the Thames, is closely related to its ugliness. If any one find this assertion paradoxical, he shall at least find it not doubtful if he can and will do three things—read Oersted’s chapter on “Ugliness in Nature,” observe carefully Turner’s “Rain, Wind, and Speed” (a railway train thundering over a viaduct through English rain and fog), and finally give twenty minutes to the bridge in question, especially taking care to pass beneath it on one of the small iron steamers (water omnibuses) that ply the river. When afterward he shall see the many ornaments of the present copied from the utilities of the past—the towers, steeples, cupolas, crenelles—and remember that they were constructed originally for landmarks, cross-bows, and the watches of war, he will acquire an imaginative respect for this unpretending product of the Iron Age. The same simple grandeur invests old Newgate Prison—perfect reality, entire adequacy for its purpose, a relation of every part to the end for which it was built, like the harmonies that make the lion. Did man forbear, it were by no means inconceivable that when Macaulay’s artistic New Zealander came he might sit upon a broken column of St. Paul’s to sketch the still strong, gray fortress of Newgate!
He who explores the cities of England to discover that kind of beauty in architecture which is familiar in other lands will not find it. In a late satire on the royal family published in London, The Silliad, the Queen is represented as reproaching her eldest son with not taking more after his father, and interesting himself in the industrial affairs of the country. The poor Prince of Wales can only reply, “I’ve not a model-farming soul.” And a somewhat similar answer is all that England can return to the immeasurable scoldings poured out upon her because she cannot do the work of the old Italian and Dutch masters. But the time was when England had a reputation such as no other country possessed for just one thing—genuineness of work. It was almost proverbial in Europe to say that you could get pretty things in every capital on the Continent, but if you wanted a thing which would do what it professed to do—the knife that would cut, the carriage that would bear and wear—you must go to England for it. Nay, I remember in my boyhood in Virginia that the belief in the solid character of everything English was such, that even articles which could by no possible means have come from England were yet called “English” to enhance their value; not merely watches made in New England, but I have known American fanciers commend a bird unknown to England by calling it the “English mocking-bird!” All this was a droll re-appearance of the reputation which Eastern gold once had in England, the word “sterling” being a relic of “Easterling,” as applied to the British pound of silver when represented in gold. But the most enthusiastic Briton must admit that the virtue of the “English” label has followed that of the “Easterling,” and is now a mere survival. The absence of prettiness remains, but the old compensation of genuineness can no longer be claimed, or certainly not in the same general way. The genuine and thorough thing is now exceptional enough to strike one as almost ornamental. But still the word “solidity” has a meaning in Great Britain, and whenever Englishmen undertake to have anything done, their first effort is to have it substantial and useful. They may not get it, but that is what they pay for, and a real demand is likely in the long-run to overtake its real supply. It has already to some extent overtaken it, and that not alone in the great viaducts and railway bridges which the age of steam has called about it.
