[21] Nature, ix. 461.
[22] Nature, xx. p. 386.
WHERE ARE WE IN ART?
"N O doubt education is a fine thing!" said I, meditatively, laying down my thirteenth newspaper. It was a rainy November day, and the reading-room was nearly empty. I had been told the great fact over and over again in some form or other in all the "Dailies" and "Weeklies." It had been repeated in every variety of tone in the little pile of "Monthlies" at my elbow, of which I had skimmed the cream (no one in these days can be expected to go through the labour of a whole article)! The "Quarterlies," in more ponderous fashion, had reiterated the sentiment. We had got hold of the right thing; all that was wanted was more and more of the same. Let everybody be served alike; what is meat for the gander is meat also for the goose, repeated the advocates of women's education, magniloquently (though not exactly in those words). Let everybody learn the same thing that I am learning! How much better and wiser we are than our forefathers! How beautiful for us to be able to say, as in the old story of the French Minister of Instruction when he pulls out his watch, "It is ten o'clock; all the children in the schools in England are doing their sums. It is half-past eleven, they are all writing their copies!"
"What everybody says must be true," thought I; "the schoolmaster has got the better of the world, and rules the roast despotically; but then how great is the result!" I repeated, with pride.
Such perfection was rather oppressive, and I could not help yawning a little as I went upstairs, looking round as I went. The decorations of the club were wonderfully fine, no doubt, but perhaps an Italian of the "Cinque-cento" would not have thought them quite successful. Probably, however, he would have been wrong. He was certainly much less "instructed" in art than we are. I strolled to the window, and looked out at a stucco palace on either hand and over the way, with pillars and pilasters added ad libitum, and a glimpse of a long wall with oblong openings cut in it, stretching the whole length of the street. One of the abominable regiments of black statues which disfigure London stood near the corner, the nicely-finished buttons of whose paletôt, and the creases of whose boots (the originals of which must have been made by Hoby), had often been my wonder, if not admiration.
"Yes, there certainly is a lost art or two, which have somehow made their escape from this best of all worlds, in spite of our drilling and double-distilled training," I sighed.
There was a portfolio of photographs lying on the table, which I turned over abstractedly. The Venus de Milo, and the Theseus of the Parthenon; the Raphael frescoes of the great council of the gods in the Farnesina Palace at Rome; a street in Venice; Durham Cathedral; the decorations of the Certosa at Pavia; some specimens of old Japanese porcelain; some coloured patterns of Persian shawls and prayer-rugs and of Indian inlaid work. Each of them was good and appropriate of its kind, expressing a national or individual taste and feeling, or, best of all, a belief. And none of them were the results of education, but of a kind of instinct of art which no instruction hitherto has been able to give, of which it seems even sometimes to deprive a race, as a savage generally loses his accurate perception of details and his power of memory and artistic perceptions, with his delicacy of hearing and smell, as a consequence of so-called civilization.