What may be the reason why architecture, sculpture, painting, and even poetry—i.e., the combination of stone, brick, marble, metal, colours, and, lastly, of metrical forms of words—should all suffer by the advance of our (so-called) civilization and education, is still a mystery; but few will be found to doubt the fact in detail, though they may deny the general formula.
Perhaps our self-consciousness as to our great virtues, our "progress," our knowledge, the learning of the reason of our work, the introversion of our present moods of thought, check the development of an idea, even if we may be fortunate enough to get hold of one. Self-consciousness is fatal to art; there is a certain spontaneity of utterance—singing, as the birds sing, because they cannot help it—"composing," almost as the mountains and clouds "compose," by reason of their existence itself, not because they want to make a picture,—which produces natural work, grown out of the man and the requirements of his nature, to which it seems, with very rare exceptions, that we cannot now attain.
In sculpture, a modern R.A. has acquired ten times as much anatomy as Phidias: dissection was unknown, and not permitted, by the Greeks. Chemistry has produced for the painter colours which Raphael (luckily for us) never dreamed of. Yet one cannot help wondering at the strange daring which permits the honourable society at Burlington House to hang yearly the works of the ancient masters of the craft on the same walls where their own productions are to figure a few weeks later, as if to inform the world most impressively and depressingly from how far we have fallen in pictorial art; to string up our taste, as it were, to concert pitch—to give the key-note of true excellence, in order to mark the depth to which we have sunk.
We now teach drawing diligently in all European countries, and are surprised that we get no Michelangelos. Did Masaccio go to a school of design, or Giotto learn "free-hand" manipulation? Education, as it is generally defined—meaning thereby a knowledge of the accumulation of facts discovered by other people—is good for the general public, for ordinary humanity, but not for original minds, except so far as it saves them time and trouble by preventing them from reinventing what has been already done by others. True, there can be but few "inventors" (in the old Italian sense of creators) in the world at any one moment, and training must, it will be said, be carried on for the use of the many; but one might still plead for a certain elasticity in our teaching, a margin left for free-will among the few who will ever be able to use it. And, meantime, it is allowable to lament over the number of arts we have lost, or are in danger of losing, which can only be practised by the few—whose number seems ever to be diminishing, under our generalizing processes of turning out as many minds of the same pattern as if we wanted nail-heads or patent screws by the million.
This is not education in its true and highest sense—i.e., the bringing forth the best that is in a man; not simply putting knowledge into him, but using the variety of gifts, which even the poorest in endowment possess, to the best possible end. And this seems more and more difficult as the stereotyped pattern is more and more enforced in board-schools, endowed schools, public schools, universities; and each bit of plastic material, while young, is forced as much as possible into the same shape, the only contention being who shall have the construction of the die which all alike are eager to apply to every individual of the nation.
Of all races which have yet existed there can be no doubt that the Greek was the one most highly endowed with artistic powers of all kinds; yet the Greek was certainly not, in our sense of the term, an educated man at all; his powers of every kind, however, were cultivated indirectly by the very atmosphere he lived in. His sensitive artistic nature found food in the forms and colours of the mountains and the islands, the sea and the sky, by which he was surrounded; by the human nature about him in its most perfect development; by every building—his temples, his tombs, his theatres—every pot and pan he used, every seat he sat upon; whereas no man's eye can be other than degraded by the unspeakable ugliness of an English manufacturing town, or, what is almost worse, by the sham art where decoration of any kind is invented or attempted by the richer middle class.
The theory that soil and climate and food produce instincts of beauty, as well as varieties of beasts and plants, is, however, evidently at fault in these questions; for if this were the case at one time in the world's history, why not at another? and the present inhabitants of Greece are as inapt as their neighbours in sculpture, painting, and architecture. Nothing, even out of the workshops of Birmingham, can exceed the ugliness of their present productions—e.g., a Minerva's head without a forehead, done in bead-work on canvas, fastened on to a piece of white marble, which was given as a precious parting gift from the goddess's own city to a valued friend. There seems now a headlong competition in every country after bad art. If we ask for lace and embroidery in the Greek islands, or silver fillagree in Norway,—if we inquire for wood-carving from Burmah, or the old shawls and pottery from Persia and the East,—the answer is always the same: we are told that there is "none such made at present." It is only what remains of the old handmade work that is to be obtained; the present inhabitants "care for none of these things." Sham jewellery from the "Palais Royal," Manchester goods, stamped leather, and the like, are what the natives are seeking for themselves, while they get rid of "all those ugly old things" to the first possible buyer for any price which they can fetch.
Manufacturing an article, (whatever be the real derivation of the word, but) meaning the use of machinery for the multiplication of the greatest number of articles at the least cost, however admirable for the comfort of the million, is evidently fatal to art. When each bit of ironwork, every hinge, every lock scutcheon, was hammered out with care and consideration by the individual blacksmith, even if he were but an indifferent performer, it bore the stamp of the thought of a man's mind directing his hand; now there is only the stamp of a machine running the metal into a mould. When every bit of decorative wood-work was "all made out of the carver's brain,"—when the embroidery of the holiday shirt of a boatman of "Chios' rocky isle" took half a lifetime to devise and stitch, and was intended to last for generations of wearers, art found a way, however humble, through nimble fingers interpreting the fancies of the individual brain. "Fancy work," as an old Hampshire woman called her stitching of the fronts and backs of the old-fashioned smock-frocks, each one differing from the one she made before, as her "fancy" led. It was always interesting, and almost always beautiful.
Now the hinges are cast by the ton, all of one pattern; fortunate, indeed, if the original be a good one (a very hopeful supposition!). The sewing-machine repeats its monotonous curves of embroidery; the wood-carving is the result of skilfully-arranged knives and wheels worked by steam, which only execute forms adapted for them. The initial thought of their designer must be, not what is in itself desirable, but that which the machine can best produce. What is right in a particular place, is the natural object of the workman artist; how to use what has been already cast or stamped, is the object of the present ordinary builder; and what he calls "symmetry"—i.e., monotony, every line repeated ad nauseam—is the result his education aims at. Symmetry, in the sense of the repetition of the infinite variety of exquisitely modulated curves in the two outlines of the human body, is beautiful and harmonious; but there is neither beauty nor harmony in the repetition of the self-same horizontal and perpendicular lines of windows and doors in a London street. A feeling of what in music are called "contrary motion," "oblique motion," is all required in the impression produced by really fine architecture. Yet, if the ordinary builder is asked to vary his hideous row of houses by an additional window or a higher chimney, he exclaims with horror at such a violation of "symmetry," his sole rule of beauty being that all should look alike.
The effect, indeed, of machine-made work is to impress upon the tradesman mind the belief that perfection consists wholly in exact and correct repetition of a pattern, which may be said to be true in his craft; whereas constant variation and development is the law of healthy art, the need being expressed by the design. To save the expense and trouble of fresh drawings, also, as soon as a pattern becomes popular in one material, it is immediately repeated ad nauseam in every other, however incongruous. A bunch of fuchsias has been supposed to look well in a lace curtain; it is then cast in brass for the end of a curtain-rod; is used for wall-papers and stone-carving alike. Whereas if a Japanese artist has designed a flight of cranes on his screen or his paper, it is impossible to get another exactly the same; to reproduce a sketch exactly being, generally, as every artist can tell, more laborious than to make a new one, where the brain assists the fingers in their work.