The life, letters and work of Frederic Leighton. Volume II

by Mrs. Russell Barrington

Now, to a cultured audience such as that which I am here addressing, these facts are familiar and trite, so trite and so familiar that it may, perhaps, be doubted whether their true significance has ever stood quite clearly before your minds, and whether you have fully grasped the solidarity of the arts—if I may use an outlandish expression—which at one time prevailed. Let us in imagination transfer the last quoted fact into contemporary life. Let us suppose that the municipality of a great English city, proud of its annals and of its culture, determined to decorate with paintings in some comprehensive manner the walls of a great public building; and suppose, further, that an artist, admittedly of the first rank, were to answer to its call from the workshop—and I say advisedly from the workshop, for it is there, and not on an armchair in the office, that the head of the house would have been found in the old day—suppose, I say, that such an artist came forth from some great firm of jewellers, in Bond Street for instance, we should have, on the artistic side, the exact parallel of the case of the Dominicans of Sta. Maria Nuova and Domenico, the son of Thomas the garland-maker of Florence. Meanwhile, striking as is this instance of the unity of art in long past days, it is but just to add, and I rejoice to be able here to do so, that signs are not wanting on the side of our own artists of a strong tendency towards a return to closer bonds between its various branches, in which direction, indeed, a movement has been for some years increasingly marked and practical; and it is with a glad outlook into the future, and with a sense of breathing a wider air, that I place by the side of the cases which I have just mentioned—cases which were, in their time, of natural and frequent occurrence—one which is of yesterday. The chief magistrate of an important provincial centre of English industry, the Mayor of Preston, wears at this time a chain of office which is a beautiful work of art, and this chain was not only designed but wrought throughout by the sculptor who modelled the stately commemorative statue of the Queen that adorns the County Square of Winchester, the artist who presides over the section of sculpture in this Congress, my young friend and colleague, Mr. Alfred Gilbert.

I have pointed to the Italians and the Greeks as culminating instances of people filled with a love of beauty and achieving the highest excellence in its embodiment, and I have named the Japanese as manifesting the æsthetic temper in a high degree of sensitiveness, but within certain limitations. It is not necessary to remind you that I might extend this list, if with some qualification, and that the same lesson—the lesson that the nations which love beauty seek it in the humblest as well as the highest things—is taught us by others than those I have mentioned. Whosoever, for instance, has wondered at the work of Persian looms, or felt the fascination of the manuscripts illuminated by the artists of Iran, or noted the unfailing grace of subtle line revealed in their metal-work, will feel that for this race also the merit of a work of art did not reside in its category, but in the degree to which it manifested the spirit which alone could ennoble it, the spirit of beauty. And if, further, this dominant instinct of the beautiful is not in our own time found in any Western race in its fullest force, and among one Eastern people, with, as we saw, important limitations, there is yet one modern nation in our own hemisphere in which the thirst for artistic excellence is widespread to a degree unknown elsewhere in Europe; a people with whom the sense of the dignity of artistic achievement, as an element of national greatness, an element which it is the duty of its Government to foster and to further, and to proclaim before the world, is keen and constant; I mean, of course, your brilliant neighbours, the people of France. Here, then, are standards to which we may appeal to see how far, all allowance being made for many signs of improvement in things concerning art, we yet fall short, as a nation, of the ideal which we should have before us.

Let me now revert to my indictment. I said that the sense of abstract beauty with the mass of our countrymen—and once again I must be understood not to ignore, but only to leave out of view for the moment, the considerable and growing number of those in whom this sense is astir and active—with the mass, I repeat, of our countrymen, the perception of beauty is blunt, and the desire for it sluggish and superficial; with them the beautiful is, indeed, sometimes a source of vague, half-conscious satisfaction, especially when it appeals to them conjointly with other incitements to emotion, but their perception of it is passive, and does not pass into active desire; it accepts, it does not demand; it is uncertain of itself, for it lacks definiteness of intuition, and having no definite intuition, it is necessarily uncritical. This weakness, among the many, of the critical faculty in æsthetic matters, and the curious bluntness of their perceptions, is seen not in connection with the plastic arts only, but over the whole artistic field, in the domains of music and the drama, as in that of painting and sculpture. Who, for instance, where a body of English men and women has been gathered together in a concert room, has not, at one moment, heard a storm of applause go up to meet some matchless executant of noble music, and then, five minutes later, watched in wonder and dismay the same crepitation of eager hands proclaiming an equal satisfaction with the efforts of some feeblest servant of Apollo? Or have you not often, in your theatres, blushed to see the lowest buffoonery received with exuberant delight by an audience—and a cultivated audience—which had just before not seemed insensible to some fine piece of histrionic art? And what could proclaim the lack of true, spontaneous instinct in more startling fashion than the notorious fact that the most thrilling touch of pathos in the performance of an actor reputed to be comic will be infallibly received with a titter by a British audience, which has paid to laugh and come to the play focussed for the funny?

Now this little glimpse into the attitude of the public in regard to other arts than ours has its bearing upon our present subject. This same feebleness of the critical sense which arises out of the indefiniteness—to say the best of it—of the inner standard of artistic excellence, is not unnaturally accompanied by and fosters an apathy in regard to that excellence, and an attitude of callous acquiescence in the unsightly, which are inexpressibly mischievous; for you cannot too strongly print this on your minds, that what you demand that will you get, and according to what you accept will be that which is provided for you. Let an atmosphere be generated among you in which the appetite for what is beautiful and noble is whetted and becomes imperative, in which whatever is ugly and vulgar shall be repugnant and hateful to the beholder, and assuredly what is beautiful and noble will, in due time, be furnished to you, and in steadily increasing excellence, satisfying your taste, and at the same time further purifying it and heightening its sensitiveness.

The enemy, then, is this indifference in the presence of the ugly; it is only by the victory over this apathy that you can rise to better things, it is only by the rooting out and extermination of what is ugly that you can bring about conditions in which beauty shall be a power among you. Now, this callous tolerance of the unsightly, although it is, I am grateful to think, yielding by degrees to a healthier feeling, is still strangely prevalent and widespread among us, and its deadening influence is seen in the too frequent absence of any articulate protest of public opinion against the disfigurement of our towns.

Let me give you an instance of this indifference. Our country is happy in possessing a collection of paintings by the old masters of exceptional interest and splendour, a collection which, thanks to the taste and highly trained discernment of its present accomplished head, Sir Frederick Burton, is, with what speed the short-sighted policy of successive Governments permits, rising steadily to a foremost place among the famous galleries in the world. Some years ago, the building destined to receive it being found no longer adequate, it became necessary to provide, by some means, ampler space for the display of the national treasure. It was resolved that another edifice should take the place of that designed by Wilkins, an edifice which, be it said in passing, has been made the butt of curiously unmerited ridicule in the world of connoisseurship, and which, apart from certain very obvious blemishes, it has always seemed to me to be much easier to deride than to better. A competition was opened, and designs were demanded for a spacious building, equal to present and future needs, and worthy of the magnificence of the collection it was to house. It is hardly necessary to say that we have here no concern whatever with the controversy which arose over these designs. My concern is with its final outcome, which is this: the original building has remained unaltered as to its exterior; but on the rear of one of its flanks loom now into view, first, an appendage in an entirely different style of architecture, and further on, an excrescence of no style of architecture at all; the one an Italian tower, the other a flat cone of glass, surmounted by a ventilator—a structure of the warehouse type—the whole resulting in a jarring jumble and an aspect of chaotic incongruity which would be ludicrous if it were not distressing; and we enjoy, further, this instructive phenomenon that a public opinion which sensitively shrank from the blemishes of the original edifice has accepted its retention, with all those blemishes unmodified, plus an appendage which adds to the whole the worst almost of all sins architectural—a lack of unity of conception. Now, I have never to my knowledge heard one single word of articulate public reprobation levelled at this now irremediable blot on what we complacently call the finest site in the world; and yet I cannot find it in me to believe that many have not, like myself, groaned in spirit before a spectacle so deplorable—a spectacle which, indeed, is only conceivable within these islands. I think that a good deal is summed up in this episode, and I need not, for my present purpose, seek another in the domain of architecture.

In regard to sculpture, the public apathy and blindness are yet more depressing and complete, and illustrate the deadness of the many to the perception of the essential qualities of art. To the overwhelming majority of Englishmen sculpture means simply the perpetuation of the form of Mr. So-and-So in marble, bronze, or terra-cotta—this, and no more. That marble, bronze, or terra-cotta may, under cunning hands, become vehicles, for those who have eyes to see, of emotions, æsthetic and poetic, not less lofty than those which are stirred in us by the verse of a Dante or a Milton, or by strains of noblest music, of this the consciousness is for practical purposes non-existent. For sculpture, for an art through which alone the name of Greece would have been famous for all time, there is, outside portraiture, even now, under conditions admittedly improved, little or no field in this country. Portrait-statues galore bristle, indeed, within our streets; but the notion of setting up in public places pieces of monumental sculpture solely for adornment and dignity, or of monuments that shall remind us of deeds in which our country or our town has earned fame and deserved gratitude, and incite the young to emulation of those deeds, or that shall be the allegorised expression of any great idea—and yet our race has had great ideas, and clothed them in deeds as great—hardly ever, it would seem, enters the heads of a people whose aspirations are surely not less noble or less high than those of other nations. Nay, even a monument commemorative of the great public services of some individual man which shall be a monument to him rather than exclusively an image of him, a monument of which his effigy shall form a part, but of which the main feature shall be the embodiment or illustration, in forms of art, of the virtues that have earned for him the homage of his countrymen—even this is suggested in vain.

And if we are tolerant of treason against fitness in architecture, what shall we say of our tolerance in regard to its sculptural adornments? What shall we say of the complacent acceptance, above and about windows and doorways in clubs, offices, barracks, and the like buildings, of carven wonders such as no other civilised community would accept in silence? Though I fear I must here, with all deference, add that my brethren, the architects, who suffer their work to be so defaced, are themselves not wholly blameless; and indeed, it is a truth in the assertion of which the most enlightened workmen in every branch of art will stand by me, that among ourselves also the sense of the kinship of the arts is too often a mere theory, received, no doubt, with respect as an abstract proposition, but not perceptibly colouring our practical activity.

In sculpture the inertness of demand and tolerance of inferior supply is due mainly to the want, to which I have alluded, of a sense of and a joy in the purely æsthetic quality in artistic production, an insensibility to the power inherent in form, by its own virtue, of producing the emotion and exciting the imagination, a power on which the dignity of this pure and severe art does or should mainly rest.

In the appreciation of painting, which on various grounds appeals as an art to a far wider public than either architecture or sculpture, the same shortcomings are evident, though in a less degree, and with less mischievous results; for the witchery of colour, at least, is felt and appreciated, more or less consciously, by a very large number of people. The inadequacy of the general standard of artistic insight is here seen in the fact that to a great multitude of persons the attractiveness of a painted canvas is in proportion to the amount of literary element which it carries, not in proportion to the degree of æsthetic emotion stirred by it, or of appeal to the imagination contained in it—persons, those, who regard a picture as a compound of anecdote and mechanism, and with whom looking at it would seem to mean only another form of reading. Time after time, in listening to the description—the enthusiastic description—of a picture, we become aware that the points emphasised by the speaker are such as did not specially call for treatment in art at all, were often not fitted for expression through form or colour, their natural vehicle being not paint but ink, which is the proper and appointed conveyor of abstract thoughts and concrete narrative. I have heard pictures extolled as works of genius simply because they expressed, not because they nobly clothed in forms of art, ideas not beyond the reach of the average penny-a-liner.