PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS[ToC]
Delivered by Sir F. Leighton, Bart., P.R.A., at the Art Congress, held at Liverpool, December 3rd, 1888.
I cannot but feel that to some of my hearers, and to not a few of those who do not hear me, but whom the words spoken in this place may chance to reach through the Press, some brief explanation is, at the outset, due as to my occupancy of this chair. To them it is known that weighty reasons have for many years compelled me to decline all requests—and those requests have been frequent, urgent, and most gratifying to me in form and spirit—that I should publicly address audiences, beyond the walls of Burlington House, on the subject which is to occupy this Congress, the subject of Art. It is not without some compunction that I have followed this course, but the exigencies, on the one hand, of the duties of my office, and, on the other, a firm purpose, which you will not, I hope, rebuke, to remain always and before all things a working artist, have left to my too limited strength and powers no alternative but that which I have adopted. Nevertheless, I have felt justified in obeying the summons of the founders of this Congress—and for this reason that, while the far-reaching character of the effort here initiated, and my earnest desire to contribute, in however small a measure, to whatever of good may flow from it have seemed to make it incumbent on me to accept the duty of saying a few words on this occasion, its comprehensive and national character lifts it into a category wholly apart from and outside the sphere of purely local interests such as those which I had hitherto been invited to support.
I trust I shall be pardoned this short obtrusion of private considerations, and that you will see in it not a movement of egotism but the discharge of a simple debt of courtesy; which said, let me address myself to the task imposed upon me—the task of showing cause and need for the existence of the association which inaugurates to-day its public work, and of arousing, if it is in my power, your efficient sympathy in that work, that it may not remain barren and without fruit. But here I am at once conscious of a perplexity lurking in your minds. "Why," I hear you ask, "should an organisation have been called into life for the sole purpose of considering in public matters relating to the development and spread of art in this country? What hitherto unfulfilled ends do you seek to achieve? Do you aim at the wider extension of artistic education in this country? But vast sums from the public purse are annually devoted to its promotion; schools of art multiply, one might almost say swarm, over the face of the land. Or do you tax the great municipal bodies of England with remissness on this score? But day by day efforts in this direction among the great provincial centres of trade and industry become more marked and effectual. No announcement more frequently meets our eyes than that of the opening, with due ceremony and circumstance, and seemingly with full recognition that the event is an important one, of spacious public galleries for the annual exhibition, or for the permanent housing, of works of contemporary art. Or does art find private individuals lacking in that noble spirit which so often prompts Englishmen to devote to the enjoyment and profit of their fellow-citizens a large share of the wealth gained by them in the pursuit of their avocations? But a great gallery of art which rises hard by across the road would shame and silence any such assertion. Or, again, can it be denied that what encouragement to artists is afforded by the purchase of innumerable pictures, at all events, was never more liberally meted out to them than within our generation, and does not the crowding of exhibitions, of which the name is legion, evince abundantly the responsive attitude of the country, as far at least as one of the arts is concerned? Are not statues multiplying in our streets? Is not architecture, as an art, finding at this time increasing, if tardy, acceptance at the hands of private individuals? Is not a wholesome sense dawning among us that even a private dwelling should not offend, nay, should conciliate, the eye of the passer-by in our public thoroughfares? and lastly, has not a more than marked improvement taken place within our day in the character of all those intimate domestic surroundings which are the daily diet of our eyes, and should be daily their delight? Are these not facts patent to all, and do they not seem to cut from under your feet the ground on which you seek to stand?" Yes, all this and more may be said; and I should be blind as an observer—I should be ungrateful as one speaking in the name of artists—did I not recognise the force of these words which I have put into the mouth of an imaginary querist. I acknowledge with joy that there is in all these facts, and still more in their significance, much on which we may justly congratulate ourselves, much that points to a quickening consciousness, a stirring of slumbering æsthetic impulse, a receptive readiness, a growing malleability in the general temper, which promise well; and it is precisely such a condition of things which justifies our hope of good results from this Congress, and in it we find our best encouragement.
Well, what then is our charge in respect to the present relation of the country to art? What are the shortcomings for which we are here to seek a remedy? Our charge is that with the great majority of Englishmen the appreciation of art, as art, is blunt, is superficial, is desultory, is spasmodic; that our countrymen have no adequate perception of the place of art as an element of national greatness; that they do not count its achievements among the sources of their national pride; that they do not appreciate its vital importance in the present day to certain branches of national prosperity; that while what is excellent receives from them honour and recognition, what is ignoble and hideous is not detested by them, is, indeed, accepted and borne with a dull, indifferent acquiescence; that the æsthetic consciousness is not with them a living force, impelling them towards the beautiful, and rebelling against the unsightly. We charge that while a desire to possess works of art, but especially pictures, is very widespread, it is in a large number, perhaps in a majority of cases, not the essential quality of art that has attracted the purchaser to his acquisition; not the emanation of beauty in any one of its innumerable forms, but something outside and wholly independent of art. In a word, there is, we charge, among the many in our country, little consciousness that every product of men's hands claiming to rank as a work of art, be it lofty in its uses and monumental, or lowly and dedicated to humble ends, be it a temple or a palace, the sacred home of prayer or a Sovereign's boasted seat, be it a statue or a picture, or any implement or utensil bearing the traces of an artist's thought and the imprint of an artist's finger—there is, I say, little adequate consciousness that each of these works is a work of art only on condition that, is a work of art exactly in proportion as, it contains within itself the precious spark from the Promethean rod, the divine fire-germ of living beauty; and that the presence of this divine germ ennobles and lifts into one and the same family every creation which reveals it; for even as the life-sustaining fire which streams out in splendour from the sun's molten heart is one with the fire which lurks for our uses in the grey and homely flint, so the vital flame of beauty is one and the same, though kindled now to higher and now to humbler purpose, whether it be manifest in the creations of a Phidias or of a Michael Angelo, of an Ictinus or of some nameless builder of a sublime cathedral; in a jewel designed by Holbein or a lamp from Pompeii, a sword-hilt from Toledo, a caprice in ivory from Japan or the enamelled frontlet of an Egyptian queen. We say, further, that the absence of this perception is fraught with infinite mischief, direct and indirect, to the development of art among us, tending, as it does, to divorce from it whole classes of industrial production, and incalculably narrowing the field of the influence of beauty in our lives. And with the absence of this true æsthetic instinct, we find not unnaturally the absence of any national consciousness that the sense of what is beautiful, and the manifestation of that sense through the language of art, adorn and exalt a people in the face of the world and before the tribunal of history; a national consciousness which should become a national conscience—a sense, that is, of public duty and of a collective responsibility in regard to this loveliest flower of civilisation.
Well, it is in the belief that the consciousness of which I have spoken is rather dormant with us than absent, waiting to be aroused rather than wholly wanting, that the founders of this Association have initiated the movement which has brought you together, and laid upon me the ungracious task to which I am now addressing myself—a task I have accepted in the hope that, at least, some good to others may come out of the wreck and ruin of any character for courtesy which may hitherto have been conceded to me.
But let us now look closer into my indictment; and let us, first, for a moment, and by way of getting at a standard, turn our thoughts to one or two of those races among which art has reached its highest level and round whose memory art has shed an inextinguishable splendour. Let us first consider the Greek race in the day of its greatest achievements and the most perfect balance of its transcendent gifts. What is it that impresses us most in the contemplation of the artistic activity of this race? It is, first, that the stirring æsthetic instinct, the impulse towards and absolute need of beauty, was universal with it, and lay, a living force, at the root of its emotional being; and, secondly, that the Greeks were conscious of this impulse as of a just source of pride and a sign of their supremacy among the nations. So saturated were they with it that whatever left their hands bore its stamp. Whatever of Greek work has been preserved to us, temple or statue, vessel or implement, is marked with the same attributes of stately and rhythmic beauty; in all their creations, from the highest to the lowest, one spirit lives, and whatever be the rank of each of these creations in the hierarchy of works of art, in one thing they are even-born and kin—in the spirit of loveliness. And of the dignity of this artistic instinct, which they regarded as their birthright, they were, as I have said, proudly conscious. Would you have an instance of this high consciousness? Here is one. At the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian war the Athenians having, according to ancestral custom, decreed a public funeral to those who had fallen in battle, Pericles, the son of Xanthippus, was chosen by them to speak the praises of the dead. It is a famous speech, that in which he obeyed their injunction, and it opens with a lofty eulogy of the Republic for which the heroes whom they mourned had fallen. In this magnificent song of praise he enumerates the virtues of the Athenians; he shows them heroic, wise, just, tolerant, lovers of beauty, philosophers—in all things foremost amongst men. Mark this! At a celebration of the most moving solemnity—in a breathing space between two acts of a gigantic international struggle for hegemony—you have here a great statesman enumerating the titles of his fellow-citizens to headship among the nations, and placing not at the end of his panegyric and as an oratorical embellishment, but in its very heart and centre, these words: "We love the beautiful."
But we may gain, perhaps, a yet more vivid sense of the extent to which the artistic impulse possessed and filled this people in the fascinating epitome of Grecian handicraft which is presented to us in Pompeii, or rather in the Museo Nazionale at Naples. Here you have the work, not of Athenian Greeks, of the Periclean or of the Alexandrian age, but the work of provincial Greeks inhabiting a watering-place of no very great importance, in the first century of our era; a period as far removed from the days of the Parthenon sculptures as we are from the days of the Canterbury Tales. And what a display it is! How full of interest! Here we are admitted into the most intimate privacy of a multitude of Pompeian houses—the kitchens, the pantries, the cellars of the contemporaries of the Plinies have here no secret for us; indeed, for aught we know, more than one of those dinners of which that delicate bon vivant, the nephew of the naturalist, was so appreciative a judge may have been cooked in one of these very ranges, one of these ladles may have skimmed his soup, his quails may have been roasted on yonder spit. Nothing is wanting that goes to make the complete armament of a kitchen—stoves, cauldrons, vessels of every kind, lamps of every shape, forks, spoons, ladles of every dimension. And in all this mass of manifold material perhaps the most marked characteristic is not the high level of executive merit it reveals, high as that level is, but the amazing wealth of idea, the marvellous intellectual activity brought to bear on what we now call objects of industrial art—whatever that may mean—in this outpost of Greek civilisation. These accumulated appliances of the kitchen and the pantry form a museum of art—a museum of art of inexhaustible fascination; and not only does this vast collection of necessary things contain nothing ugly, but it displays, as I have just said, an amazing wealth of ideas; each bowl, each lamp, each spoon almost, is an individual work of art, a separate and distinct conception, a special birth of the joy of creation in a genuine artist. But, above all, let us bear this fact in mind—the absence there of any ugly thing; for the instinct of what is beautiful not only delights and seeks to express itself in lovely work, but forbids and banishes whatever is graceless and unsightly.
As next to the Greeks, and as almost their equals in this craving for the beautiful, the Italians will occur to you. And here it may be well to note, in a parenthesis, that a vivid sense of abstract beauty in line and form does not necessarily carry with it a keen perception of shapliness in the human frame. This curious fact we see strikingly illustrated in a race which possesses the artistic instinct in certain of its developments in a greater degree than any other in our time—I mean the Japanese. With them the sense of decorative distribution and of subtle loveliness of form and colour is absolutely universal, and expresses itself in every most ordinary appliance of daily life, overflowing, indeed, into every toy or trifle that may amuse an idle moment; and yet majesty and beauty in the human form are as absent from their works as from their persons. Be this said without prejudice to the fact that in the movement imparted by them to the figures in their designs there is often much of daintiness and dignity, the outcome of that keen perception of beauty of line in the abstract which we have seen to be dominant in them. I need not follow further this, I think, interesting train of thought, but the digression seemed to me useful, not as illustrating the fact that beauty is not to be regarded only in connection with the human form, which is a mere truism, but as showing that the abstract sense of it, in certain aspects, may possess and penetrate a race in which the perception of comeliness in the human body is almost entirely absent; and I meet by it also, in anticipation, certain objections that may suggest themselves to you in connection with the Italians, as far, at least, as the Tuscans are concerned; for in them, too, we find occasionally, side by side with an unsurpassed sense of the expressiveness of line and form, a defective perception of beauty in the human frame—witness the ungainly angularities, for instance, of a Verrocchio, a Gozzoli, a Signorelli.
The thirst for the artistically delightful was the mark in Italy of no particular class; it was common to all, high and low, to the Pontiff on his throne, to the trader behind his counter, to the people in the market-place. And here, again, observe that this desire was not alone for the adornment of walls and public places with painting and statuary—though every wall in every church or public building was, in fact, enriched by the hand of painters and of sculptors—but it embraced every humbler form of artistic expression, and was, indeed, especially directed to one which has in our time touched, here and there, a melancholy depth—the craft of the goldsmith. I said "humbler form" of art for lack of a better word; for a craft cannot fitly be called humble which has occupied and delighted men of the very highest gifts. Did not the mind that conceived the "Perseus" of the Loggia dei Lanzi pour out some of its richest fancies in a jewelled salt-cellar for the table of a Pope? Did not the sublimest genius that ever shone upon the world of art receive its first guidance in the workshop of a jeweller—a jeweller who was himself a painter also of high renown? For was it not that painter-goldsmith whose hands adorned with noble frescoes the famous choir of Sta. Maria Novella?