We have had philosophers who have told us there is really no such thing as beauty, consequently there can be no such thing as taste; that it is a mere idea, an unaccountable prejudice somehow or other engendered in the brain. And though there exists not a head in the universe without a portion of this disorder-breeding brain, the philosopher persists that the product is a worthless nonentity, and altogether out of the nature of things. We maintain, however, in favour of prejudices and tastes—that there are real grounds for both; and, presuming not to be so wise as to deny the evidences of our senses, and conclusions of our minds, think it scarcely worth while to unravel the threads of our convictions. In matters of science we marvel and can believe almost anything; but in our tastes and feelings we naturally, and by an undoubting instinct, shrink from the touch of an innovator, as we would shun the heel of a donkey.
Whenever an innovator of this kind sets up “An Apology” for his intended folly, we invariably feel that he means a very audacious insult upon our best perceptions. The worst of it is, he is not one easily put aside—he will labour to get a commission into your house, ransack it to its sewers, and turn it out of windows. He is the man that must ever be doing. He will think himself entitled to perambulate the world with his pot of polychrome in his hand, and bedaub every man’s door-post; and if multitudes—the whole offended neighbourhood—rush out to upset his pot and brush, he will laugh in their faces, defend his plastering instruments, and throw to them with an air his circular, “An Apology;” and perhaps afterwards knock the doors down for an authorised payment. Such a one shall get no “Apology”-pence out of us.
We are prejudiced—we delight in being prejudiced—will continue prejudiced as long as we live, and will entertain none but prejudiced friends. There are things we will believe, and give no reasons for, ever; and things we never will believe, whatever reasons are to be given in their favour. We think the man who said, “Of course, I believe it, if you say you saw it; but I would not believe it if I saw it myself,” used an irresistible argument of good sound prejudice, mixed with discretion. It is better, safer, and honester, to bristle up like a hedgehog, and let him touch who dares, than to sit and be smoothed and smoothed over with oily handling of sophisticated arguments, till every decent palpable roughness of reason is taken from you.
Reader, do you like white marble? What a question! you will ask,—do you suppose me to have no eyes? Do not all people covet it—import it from Carrara? Do not sculptors, as sculptors have done in all ages, make statues from it—monuments, ornaments, and costly floors? Of course, everybody loves white marble. Then, reader, if such is your taste, you are a prejudiced ignoramus; you belong to that age “devoid of the capacity to appreciate and the power to execute works of art”—that age which certain persons profess to illuminate. You are now, under the new dictators of taste, to know that you had no business to admire white marble,[[45]]—that you are so steeped in this old prejudice that it will require a long time before you can eradicate this stain of a vile admiration, although your teachers have acquired a true knowledge in an incredible time. You must put yourself under the great colourman of the great Crystal Palace, Mr Owen Jones, who, if he does not put out your eyes in the experiments he will set before you, will at least endeavour to convince you that you are a fool of the first water. But beware how you don his livery of motley. Hear him: “Under this influence (the admiration of white marble), however, we have been born and bred, and it requires time to shake off the trammels which such early education leaves.” You have sillily believed that the Athenians built with marble because of its beauty,—that the Egyptians thought there was beauty in granite. You thought in your historical dream that he who found the city of brick, and left it of marble, had done something whereof he might reasonably boast. You have been egregiously mistaken. If you ever read that the Greeks and Romans, and other people since their times civilised, sent great distances for marble for their palaces and statues, you must put it down in your note-book of new “historic doubts.” You learn a fact you never dreamed of, from Mr Owen Jones. They merely used it (marble) because it lay accidentally at their feet. He puts the richest colouring of his contempt on “the artificial value which white marble has in our eyes.” Learn the real cause of its use: “The Athenians built with marble, because they found it almost beneath their feet, and also from the same cause which led the Egyptians to employ granite, which was afterwards painted—viz. because it was the most enduring, and capable of receiving a higher finish of workmanship.” He maintains that so utterly regardless were these Greeks of any supposed beauty in marble—especially white marble—that they took pains to hide every appearance of its texture; that they not only painted it all over, but covered it with a coating of stucco. Listen to an oracle that, we will answer for it, never came from Delphi, that no Pythia in her madness ever conceived, and that, if uttered in the recesses, would have made Apollo shake his temple to pieces.
“To what extent were white marble temples painted and ornamented? I would maintain that they were entirely so; that neither the colour of the marble, nor even its surface, was preserved; and that preparatory to the ornamenting and colouring of the surface, the whole was covered with a thin coating of stucco, something in the nature of a gilder’s ground, to stop the absorption of the colours by the marble.”
“A thin coat of stucco!” and no exception with respect to statues—to be applied wherever the offensive white marble showed its unblushing nakedness and beauty!! Let us imagine it tested on a new statue—thus stucco over, however thin, Mr Bayley’s Eve, or Mr Power’s Greek Slave—the thought is enough to make the sculptor go mad, and commit a murder on himself or the plasterer—to see all his fine, his delicate chisellings obliterated! all the nice markings, the scarcely perceptible dimplings gone!—for let the coat of stucco be thin as a wafer, it must, according to that thickness, enlarge every rising and diminish the spaces between them: thus, all true proportion must be lost; between two risings the space must be less. “What fine chisel,” says our immortal Shakespeare, “could ever yet cut breath?” How did he imagine, in these few words, the living motion of the “breath of life” in the statue! and who doubts either the attempt or the success so to represent perfect humanity, when he looks at the finest antique statues? Let an audacious innovator dare to daub one of them with his coat of stucco, and all the chiselling of the life, breath, and motion is annihilated. It must be so, whatever be the thickness of the coat; though it be but a nail-paring it must diminish risings and hollows, and all nicer touches must disappear. We should heartily desire to see the innovator suffocated in his plaster and paint-pot, that in his suffering he may know it is a serious thing to knock the life-breath out of the body even of a statue.
“Nec lex est justior ulla
Quam necis artifices arte perire suâ.”
There is one slight objection to our getting rid of this prejudice in favour of white marble which we suggest to Mr Owen Jones, and all the “Stainers’” Company—the unseemly blots we shall have to make in the fairest pages of poetry, old and new. Albums will of course be ruined, and a general smear, bad as a “coat of stucco,” be passed over the whole books of beauties who have “dreamed they dwelt in marble halls.” The new professors, polychromatists, must bring out, if they are able, new editions of all our classics. How must this passage from Horace provoke their bile:
“Urit me Glycone nitor