It is almost pathetic to see the nation doing the best it knows, offering its patronage and its public buildings, its monuments of great men and its money, and then to mark the results. It is fortunate that most of the frescoes are scaling off the walls of the Houses of Parliament. It is fortunate that Nelson and the Duke of York are hoisted up so high that they cannot be scrutinized at all; it is fortunate that most of the public statues are generally so begrimed with dirt and soot that few can make out their intention. But it is we who are responsible for half at least of their failures.[4] We have, as a nation, neither the artistic feeling which delights in the beautiful with a sort of worship, nor the sensuous religious instincts which require an outward and visible sign of our inward faith. Therefore our best chance of great work seems to be when the common-sense necessity is so large in its demands, that carrying it out even on merely utilitarian principles may give a grand result by the force of circumstances, almost without our will,—the very fulfilment of the working conditions on an enormous scale forcing a certain grandeur on the work. As, for instance, when a viaduct is carried over a deep valley and river, upon a lofty series of arches, as in many Welsh railways and at Newcastle, there are elements of strength, durability, might, and therefore majesty, which the barest execution of the requirements cannot take away. The Suspension Bridge hung high in the air above the ships in the Menai Straits, and that over the narrow hollow of the Avon, have a beauty of lightness and grace all their own—Waterloo Bridge, which Canova declared to be worth coming to England to see—are all specimens of a kind of work which we may hope to see multiplied, and even improved upon, as the adaptation of art to the common necessities of our civilization becomes more common, and is taken in hand by a higher and more educated class of men.
Nothing, however, can well be more depressing than the experience of the United States in respect to this question of art and education. Here is a country (in their own magniloquent hyperbole) "bounded on the north by the Aurora Borealis, and on the west by the setting sun," &c., &c., whose proud boast it is that every man, woman, and child (born on its soil) can read, write, and something more,—which has just celebrated its centenary of independent existence, and is in the very spring-time of its national life when the "sap is rising,"—a season which among other nations is that of their greatest artistic vigour, yet which has never produced a poet, painter, sculptor,[5] or architect above mediocrity. Strangely as it would seem at first sight, it is originality which is chiefly wanting in their art; it is all an echo of European models; they have no independent action of thought or interpretation of Nature. Here, again, it is probably the want of culture of the public which is to blame. Evidence is difficult to obtain on such a vast subject as the use made of the reading and writing so freely imparted at the schools in the United States, but there is very good testimony showing that, with the exception of great centres of civilization, like Boston, the nation, as a nation, reads little but newspapers and story-books; and these clearly would produce a soil utterly unfit for the growth of real art.
Lastly, let us not forget Mr. Mill's warning how much the nation, as well as the individual, must suffer by the stifling of original thought in the rigid conformity to system which our present mechanism of Government regulations, of centralized hard-and-fast rules, is bringing about in education.
The State has a right to exact a certain amount of training in the individuals who compose it, but has no right whatever to interfere as to how that result is obtained. Every encouragement should be held out to original action of all kinds, tending to develop the faculties—artistic, scientific, as well as practical—which remain to be utilized among the millions who are now coming under an influence hitherto painfully narrow, rigid, and shallow in its operations, in spite of its magnificent promises and high-sounding notes of self-satisfaction.
F. P. Verney.
[1] Now, alas! under sentence of "restoration;" the age of creation in Italy appears to be over, and that of destruction to have begun.
[2] The monument to the Duke of Wellington has never received its due meed of praise. With all his faults, poor Stevens was a man of true genius.
[3] "Quoique les applaudissemens que j'ai reçus m'aient beaucoup flatté, la moindre critique, quelque mauvaise qu'elle eût été, m'a toujours causé plus de chagrin que toutes les louanges ne m'aient fait de plaisir," writes Racine to his son. He was silent for twelve years after the "insuccès de Phêdre." "Quoique le 'Mercure Gallant' était au dessous de rien, les blessures qu'il fait n'en sont pas moins cruelles à la sensibilité d'un poëte," adds the Revue des Deux Mondes.
[4] The group of "Asia," by Foley, in Prince Albert's Memorial, is one of the few exceptions to the indifferent character of out-door statues in London.
[5] Mr. Story may perhaps be considered an exception; but even the "Cleopatra," and "Sibyl" were produced under the influence of Rome.