By 
John Ruskin, M.A.




CONTENTS.


THE TWO PATHS.


LECTURE I.
THE DETERIORATIVE POWER OF CONVENTIONAL ART OVER NATIONS

LECTURE II.
THE UNITY OF ART

LECTURE III.
MODERN MANUFACTURE AND DESIGN

LECTURE IV.
THE INFLUENCE OF IMAGINATION IN ARCHITECTURE

LECTURE V.
THE WORK OF IRON, IN NATURE, ART, AND POLICY

APPENDICES





LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.


THE TWO PATHS.

THE IDEAL OF AN ANGEL
THE SERPENT BEGUILING EVE
CONTRAST
SYMMETRY
ORNAMENT
CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE
CENTREPIECE OF BALCONY
GENERAL EFFECT OF MASSES
PROFILE
TEETH OF THE BORDER
BORDER AT THE SIDE OF BALCONY
OUTLINE OF RETRACTED LEAVES




PREFACE.


The following addresses, though spoken at different times, are
intentionally connected in subject; their aim being to set one or two
main principles of art in simple light before the general student, and
to indicate their practical bearing on modern design. The law which it
has been my effort chiefly to illustrate is the dependence of all noble
design, in any kind, on the sculpture or painting of Organic Form.

This is the vital law; lying at the root of all that I have ever tried
to teach respecting architecture or any other art. It is also the law
most generally disallowed.

I believe this must be so in every subject. We are all of us willing
enough to accept dead truths or blunt ones; which can be fitted
harmlessly into spare niches, or shrouded and coffined at once out of
the way, we holding complacently the cemetery keys, and supposing we
have learned something. But a sapling truth, with earth at its root and
blossom on its branches; or a trenchant truth, that can cut its way
through bars and sods; most men, it seems to me, dislike the sight or
entertainment of, if by any means such guest or vision may be avoided.
And, indeed, this is no wonder; for one such truth, thoroughly
accepted, connects itself strangely with others, and there is no saying
what it may lead us to.

And thus the gist of what I have tried to teach about architecture has
been throughout denied by my architect readers, even when they thought
what I said suggestive in other particulars. "Anything but that. Study
Italian Gothic?--perhaps it would be as well: build with pointed
arches?--there is no objection: use solid stone and well-burnt brick?--
by all means: but--learn to carve or paint organic form ourselves! How
can such a thing be asked? We are above all that. The carvers and painters
are our servants--quite subordinate people. They ought to be glad if we
leave room for them."

Well: on that it all turns. For those who will not learn to carve or
paint, and think themselves greater men because they cannot, it is
wholly wasted time to read any words of mine; in the truest and
sternest sense they can read no words of mine; for the most familiar I
can use--"form," "proportion," "beauty," "curvature," "colour"--are
used in a sense which by no effort I can communicate to such readers;
and in no building that I praise, is the thing that I praise it for,
visible to them.

And it is the more necessary for me to state this fully; because so-
called Gothic or Romanesque buildings are now rising every day around
us, which might be supposed by the public more or less to embody the
principles of those styles, but which embody not one of them, nor any
shadow or fragment of them; but merely serve to caricature the noble
buildings of past ages, and to bring their form into dishonour by
leaving out their soul.

The following addresses are therefore arranged, as I have just stated,
to put this great law, and one or two collateral ones, in less
mistakeable light, securing even in this irregular form at least
clearness of assertion. For the rest, the question at issue is not one
to be decided by argument, but by experiment, which if the reader is
disinclined to make, all demonstration must be useless to him.

The lectures are for the most part printed as they were read, mending
only obscure sentences here and there. The parts which were trusted to
extempore speaking are supplied, as well as I can remember (only with
an addition here and there of things I forgot to say), in the words, or
at least the kind of words, used at the time; and they contain, at all
events, the substance of what I said more accurately than hurried
journal reports. I must beg my readers not in general to trust to such,
for even in fast speaking I try to use words carefully; and any
alteration of expression will sometimes involve a great alteration in
meaning. A little while ago I had to speak of an architectural design,
and called it "elegant," meaning, founded on good and well "elected"
models; the printed report gave "excellent" design (that is to say,
design _excellingly_ good), which I did not mean, and should, even
in the most hurried speaking, never have said.

The illustrations of the lecture on iron were sketches made too roughly
to be engraved, and yet of too elaborate subjects to allow of my
drawing them completely. Those now substituted will, however, answer
the purpose nearly as well, and are more directly connected with the
subjects of the preceding lectures; so that I hope throughout the
volume the student will perceive an insistance upon one main truth, nor
lose in any minor direction of inquiry the sense of the responsibility
which the acceptance of that truth fastens upon him; responsibility for
choice, decisive and conclusive, between two modes of study, which
involve ultimately the development, or deadening, of every power he
possesses. I have tried to hold that choice clearly out to him, and to
unveil for him to its farthest the issue of his turning to the right
hand or the left. Guides he may find many, and aids many; but all these
will be in vain unless he has first recognised the hour and the point
of life when the way divides itself, one way leading to the Olive
mountains--one to the vale of the Salt Sea. There are few cross roads,
that I know of, from one to the other. Let him pause at the parting of
THE TWO PATHS.




THE TWO PATHS


_BEING_

LECTURES ON ART, AND ITS APPLICATION TO DECORATION AND
MANUFACTURE DELIVERED IN 1858-9.




LECTURE I.

THE DETERIORATIVE POWER OF CONVENTIONAL ART OVER
NATIONS.


_An Inaugural Lecture, Delivered at the Kensington Museum,
January, 1858._

[Footnote: A few introductory words, in which, at the opening of this
lecture, I thanked the Chairman (Mr. Cockerell), for his support on the
occasion, and asked his pardon for any hasty expressions in my
writings, which might have seemed discourteous towards him, or other
architects whose general opinions were opposed to mine, may be found by
those who care for preambles, not much misreported, in the _Building
Chronicle;_ with such comments as the genius of that journal was
likely to suggest to it.]


As I passed, last summer, for the first time, through the north of
Scotland, it seemed to me that there was a peculiar painfulness in its 
scenery, caused by the non-manifestation of the powers of human art. I
had never travelled in, nor even heard or conceived of such a country
before; nor, though I had passed much of my life amidst mountain
scenery in the south, was I before aware how much of its charm depended
on the little gracefulnesses and tendernesses of human work, which are
mingled with the beauty of the Alps, or spared by their desolation. It
is true that the art which carves and colours the front of a Swiss
cottage is not of any very exalted kind; yet it testifies to the
completeness and the delicacy of the faculties of the mountaineer; it
is true that the remnants of tower and battlement, which afford footing
to the wild vine on the Alpine promontory, form but a small part of the
great serration of its rocks; and yet it is just that fragment of their
broken outline which gives them their pathetic power, and historical
majesty. And this element among the wilds of our own country I found
wholly wanting. The Highland cottage is literally a heap of gray
stones, choked up, rather than roofed over, with black peat and
withered heather; the only approach to an effort at decoration consists
in the placing of the clods of protective peat obliquely on its roof,
so as to give a diagonal arrangement of lines, looking somewhat as if
the surface had been scored over by a gigantic claymore.

And, at least among the northern hills of Scotland, elements of more
ancient architectural interest are equally absent. The solitary peel-
house is hardly discernible by the windings of the stream; the roofless
aisle of the priory is lost among the enclosures of the village; and
the capital city of the Highlands, Inverness, placed where it might
ennoble one of the sweetest landscapes, and by the shore of one of the
loveliest estuaries in the world;--placed between the crests of the
Grampians and the flowing of the Moray Firth, as if it were a jewel
clasping the folds of the mountains to the blue zone of the sea,--is
only distinguishable from a distance by one architectural feature, and
exalts all the surrounding landscape by no other associations than
those which can be connected with its modern castellated gaol.

While these conditions of Scottish scenery affected me very painfully,
it being the first time in my life that I had been in any country
possessing no valuable monuments or examples of art, they also forced
me into the consideration of one or two difficult questions respecting
the effect of art on the human mind; and they forced these questions
upon me eminently for this reason, that while I was wandering
disconsolately among the moors of the Grampians, where there was no art
to be found, news of peculiar interest was every day arriving from a
country where there was a great deal of art, and art of a delicate
kind, to be found. Among the models set before you in this institution,
and in the others established throughout the kingdom for the teaching
of design, there are, I suppose, none in their kind more admirable than
the decorated works of India. They are, indeed, in all materials
capable of colour, wool, marble, or metal, almost inimitable in their
delicate application of divided hue, and fine arrangement of fantastic
line. Nor is this power of theirs exerted by the people rarely, or
without enjoyment; the love of subtle design seems universal in the
race, and is developed in every implement that they shape, and every
building that they raise; it attaches itself with the same intensity,
and with the same success, to the service of superstition, of pleasure
or of cruelty; and enriches alike, with one profusion on enchanted
iridescence, the dome of the pagoda, the fringe of the girdle and the
edge of the sword.

So then you have, in these two great populations, Indian and Highland--
in the races of the jungle and of the moor--two national capacities
distinctly and accurately opposed. On the one side you have a race
rejoicing in art, and eminently and universally endowed with the gift
of it; on the other you have a people careless of art, and apparently
incapable of it, their utmost effort hitherto reaching no farther than
to the variation of the positions of the bars of colour in square
chequers. And we are thus urged naturally to enquire what is the effect
on the moral character, in each nation, of this vast difference in
their pursuits and apparent capacities? and whether those rude chequers
of the tartan, or the exquisitely fancied involutions of the Cashmere,
fold habitually over the noblest hearts? We have had our answer. Since
the race of man began its course of sin on this earth, nothing has ever
been done by it so significative of all bestial, and lower than bestial
degradation, as the acts the Indian race in the year that has just
passed by. Cruelty as fierce may indeed have been wreaked, and
brutality as abominable been practised before, but never under like
circumstances; rage of prolonged war, and resentment of prolonged
oppression, have made men as cruel before now; and gradual decline into
barbarism, where no examples of decency or civilization existed around
them, has sunk, before now, isolated populations to the lowest level of
possible humanity. But cruelty stretched to its fiercest against the
gentle and unoffending, and corruption festered to its loathsomest in
the midst of the witnessing presence of a disciplined civilization,--
these we could not have known to be within the practicable compass of
human guilt, but for the acts of the Indian mutineer. And, as thus, on
the one hand, you have an extreme energy of baseness displayed by these
lovers of art; on the other,--as if to put the question into the
narrowest compass--you have had an extreme energy of virtue displayed
by the despisers of art. Among all the soldiers to whom you owe your
victories in the Crimea, and your avenging in the Indies, to none are
you bound by closer bonds of gratitude than to the men who have been
born and bred among those desolate Highland moors. And thus you have
the differences in capacity and circumstance between the two nations,
and the differences in result on the moral habits of two nations, put
into the most significant--the most palpable--the most brief
opposition. Out of the peat cottage come faith, courage, self-
sacrifice, purity, and piety, and whatever else is fruitful in the work
of Heaven; out of the ivory palace come treachery, cruelty, cowardice,
idolatry, bestiality,--whatever else is fruitful in the work of Hell.

But the difficulty does not close here. From one instance, of however
great apparent force, it would be wholly unfair to gather any general
conclusion--wholly illogical to assert that because we had once found
love of art connected with moral baseness, the love of art must be the
general root of moral baseness; and equally unfair to assert that,
because we had once found neglect of art coincident with nobleness of
disposition, neglect of art must be always the source or sign of that
nobleness. But if we pass from the Indian peninsula into other
countries of the globe; and from our own recent experience, to the
records of history, we shall still find one great fact fronting us, in
stern universality--namely, the apparent connection of great success in
art with subsequent national degradation. You find, in the first place,
that the nations which possessed a refined art were always subdued by
those who possessed none: you find the Lydian subdued by the Mede; the
Athenian by the Spartan; the Greek by the Roman; the Roman by the Goth;
the Burgundian by the Switzer: but you find, beyond this--that even
where no attack by any external power has accelerated the catastrophe
of the state, the period in which any given people reach their highest
power in art is precisely that in which they appear to sign the warrant
of their own ruin; and that, from the moment in which a perfect statue
appears in Florence, a perfect picture in Venice, or a perfect fresco
in Rome, from that hour forward, probity, industry, and courage seem to
be exiled from their walls, and they perish in a sculpturesque
paralysis, or a many-coloured corruption.

But even this is not all. As art seems thus, in its delicate form, to
be one of the chief promoters of indolence and sensuality,--so, I need
hardly remind you, it hitherto has appeared only in energetic
manifestation when it was in the service of superstition. The four
greatest manifestations of human intellect which founded the four
principal kingdoms of art, Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, and Italian,
were developed by the strong excitement of active superstition in the
worship of Osiris, Belus, Minerva, and the Queen of Heaven. Therefore,
to speak briefly, it may appear very difficult to show that art has
ever yet existed in a consistent and thoroughly energetic school,
unless it was engaged in the propagation of falsehood, or the
encouragement of vice.

And finally, while art has thus shown itself always active in the
service of luxury and idolatry, it has also been strongly directed to
the exaltation of cruelty. A nation which lives a pastoral and innocent
life never decorates the shepherd's staff or the plough-handle, but
races who live by depredation and slaughter nearly always bestow
exquisite ornaments on the quiver, the helmet, and the spear.

Does it not seem to you, then, on all these three counts, more than
questionable whether we are assembled here in Kensington Museum to any
good purpose? Might we not justly be looked upon with suspicion and
fear, rather than with sympathy, by the innocent and unartistical
public? Are we even sure of ourselves? Do we know what we are about?
Are we met here as honest people? or are we not rather so many
Catilines assembled to devise the hasty degradation of our country, or,
like a conclave of midnight witches, to summon and send forth, on new
and unexpected missions, the demons of luxury, cruelty, and
superstition?

I trust, upon the whole, that it is not so: I am sure that Mr. Redgrave
and Mr. Cole do not at all include results of this kind in their
conception of the ultimate objects of the institution which owes so
much to their strenuous and well-directed exertions. And I have put
this painful question before you, only that we may face it thoroughly,
and, as I hope, out-face it. If you will give it a little sincere
attention this evening, I trust we may find sufficiently good reasons
for our work, and proceed to it hereafter, as all good workmen should
do, with clear heads, and calm consciences.

To return, then, to the first point of difficulty, the relations
between art and mental disposition in India and Scotland. It is quite
true that the art of India is delicate and refined. But it has one
curious character distinguishing it from all other art of equal merit
in design--_it never represents a natural fact_. It either forms
its compositions out of meaningless fragments of colour and flowings of
line; or if it represents any living creature, it represents that
creature under some distorted and monstrous form. To all the facts and
forms of nature it wilfully and resolutely opposes itself; it will not
draw a man, but an eight-armed monster; it will not draw a flower, but
only a spiral or a zigzag.

It thus indicates that the people who practise it are cut off from all
possible sources of healthy knowledge or natural delight; that they
have wilfully sealed up and put aside the entire volume of the world,
and have got nothing to read, nothing to dwell upon, but that
imagination of the thoughts of their hearts, of which we are told that
"it is only evil continually." Over the whole spectacle of creation
they have thrown a veil in which there is no rent. For them no star
peeps through the blanket of the dark--for them neither their heaven
shines nor their mountains rise--for them the flowers do not blossom--
for them the creatures of field and forest do not live. They lie bound
in the dungeon of their own corruption, encompassed only by doleful
phantoms, or by spectral vacancy.

Need I remind you what an exact reverse of this condition of mind, as
respects the observance of nature, is presented by the people whom we
have just been led to contemplate in contrast with the Indian race? You
will find upon reflection, that all the highest points of the Scottish
character are connected with impressions derived straight from the
natural scenery of their country. No nation has ever before shown, in
the general tone of its language--in the general current of its
literature--so constant a habit of hallowing its passions and
confirming its principles by direct association with the charm, or
power, of nature. The writings of Scott and Burns--and yet more, of the
far greater poets than Burns who gave Scotland her traditional
ballads,--furnish you in every stanza--almost in every line--with
examples of this association of natural scenery with the passions;
[Footnote: The great poets of Scotland, like the great poets of all
other countries, never write dissolutely, either in matter or method;
but with stern and measured meaning in every syllable. Here's a bit of
first-rate work for example:

                      "Tweed said to Till,
                      'What gars ye rin sae still?'
                       Till said to Tweed,
                      'Though ye rin wi' speed,
                       And I rin slaw,
                       Whar ye droon ae man,
                       I droon twa.'"]

but an instance of its farther connection with moral principle struck
me forcibly just at the time when I was most lamenting the absence of
art among the people. In one of the loneliest districts of Scotland,
where the peat cottages are darkest, just at the western foot of that
great mass of the Grampians which encircles the sources of the Spey and
the Dee, the main road which traverses the chain winds round the foot
of a broken rock called Crag, or Craig Ellachie. There is nothing
remarkable in either its height or form; it is darkened with a few
scattered pines, and touched along its summit with a flush of heather;
but it constitutes a kind of headland, or leading promontory, in the
group of hills to which it belongs--a sort of initial letter of the
mountains; and thus stands in the mind of the inhabitants of the
district, the Clan Grant, for a type of their country, and of the
influence of that country upon themselves. Their sense of this is
beautifully indicated in the war-cry of the clan, "Stand fast, Craig
Ellachie." You may think long over those few words without exhausting
the deep wells of feeling and thought contained in them--the love of
the native land, the assurance of their faithfulness to it; the subdued
and gentle assertion of indomitable courage--I _may_ need to be
told to stand, but, if I do, Craig Ellachie does. You could not but
have felt, had you passed beneath it at the time when so many of
England's dearest children were being defended by the strength of heart
of men born at its foot, how often among the delicate Indian palaces,
whose marble was pallid with horror, and whose vermilion was darkened
with blood, the remembrance of its rough grey rocks and purple heaths
must have risen before the sight of the Highland soldier; how often the
hailing of the shot and the shriek of battle would pass away from his
hearing, and leave only the whisper of the old pine branches--"Stand 
fast, Craig Ellachie!"

You have, in these two nations, seen in direct opposition the effects
on moral sentiment of art without nature, and of nature without art.
And you see enough to justify you in suspecting--while, if you choose
to investigate the subject more deeply and with other examples, you
will find enough to justify you in _concluding_--that art,
followed as such, and for its own sake, irrespective of the
interpretation of nature by it, is destructive of whatever is best and 
noblest in humanity; but that nature, however simply observed, or
imperfectly known, is, in the degree of the affection felt for it,
protective and helpful to all that is noblest in humanity.

You might then conclude farther, that art, so far as it was devoted to
the record or the interpretation of nature, would be helpful and
ennobling also.

And you would conclude this with perfect truth. Let me repeat the
assertion distinctly and solemnly, as the first that I am permitted to
make in this building, devoted in a way so new and so admirable to the
service of the art-students of England--Wherever art is practised for
its own sake, and the delight of the workman is in what he _does_
and _produces_, instead of what he _interprets_ or _exhibits_,
--there art has an influence of the most fatal kind on brain and heart,
and it issues, if long so pursued, in the _destruction both of intellectual
power_ and _moral principal_; whereas art, devoted humbly and self-
forgetfully to the clear statement and record of the facts of the universe,
is always helpful and beneficent to mankind, full of comfort, strength,
and salvation.

Now, when you were once well assured of this, you might logically infer
another thing, namely, that when Art was occupied in the function in
which she was serviceable, she would herself be strengthened by the
service, and when she was doing what Providence without doubt intended
her to do, she would gain in vitality and dignity just as she advanced
in usefulness. On the other hand, you might gather, that when her
agency was distorted to the deception or degradation of mankind, she
would herself be equally misled and degraded--that she would be checked
in advance, or precipitated in decline.

And this is the truth also; and holding this clue you will easily and
justly interpret the phenomena of history. So long as Art is steady in
the contemplation and exhibition of natural facts, so long she herself
lives and grows; and in her own life and growth partly implies, partly
secures, that of the nation in the midst of which she is practised. But
a time has always hitherto come, in which, having thus reached a
singular perfection, she begins to contemplate that perfection, and to
imitate it, and deduce rules and forms from it; and thus to forget her
duty and ministry as the interpreter and discoverer of Truth. And in
the very instant when this diversion of her purpose and forgetfulness
of her function take place--forgetfulness generally coincident with her
apparent perfection--in that instant, I say, begins her actual
catastrophe; and by her own fall--so far as she has influence--she
accelerates the ruin of the nation by which she is practised.

The study, however, of the effect of art on the mind of nations is one
rather for the historian than for us; at all events it is one for the
discussion of which we have no more time this evening. But I will ask
your patience with me while I try to illustrate, in some further
particulars, the dependence of the healthy state and power of art
itself upon the exercise of its appointed function in the
interpretation of fact.

You observe that I always say _interpretation_, never
_imitation_. My reason for so doing is, first, that good art
rarely imitates; it usually only describes or explains. But my second
and chief reason is that good art always consists of two things: First,
the observation of fact; secondly, the manifesting of human design and
authority in the way that fact is told. Great and good art must unite
the two; it cannot exist for a moment but in their unity; it consists
of the two as essentially as water consists of oxygen and hydrogen, or
marble of lime and carbonic acid.

Let us inquire a little into the nature of each of the elements. The
first element, we say, is the love of Nature, leading to the effort to
observe and report her truly. And this is the first and leading
element. Review for yourselves the history of art, and you will find
this to be a manifest certainty, that _no great school ever yet
existed which had not for primal aim the representation of some natural
fact as truly as possible_. There have only yet appeared in the
world three schools of perfect art--schools, that is to say, that did
their work as well as it seems possible to do it. These are the
Athenian, [Footnote: See below, the farther notice of the real spirit
of Greek work, in the address at Bradford.] Florentine, and Venetian.
The Athenian proposed to itself the perfect representation of the form
of the human body. It strove to do that as well as it could; it did
that as well as it can be done; and all its greatness was founded upon
and involved in that single and honest effort. The Florentine school
proposed to itself the perfect expression of human emotion--the showing
of the effects of passion in the human face and gesture. I call this
the Florentine school, because, whether you take Raphael for the
culminating master of expressional art in Italy, or Leonardo, or
Michael Angelo, you will find that the whole energy of the national
effort which produced those masters had its root in Florence; not at
Urbino or Milan. I say, then, this Florentine or leading Italian school
proposed to itself human expression for its aim in natural truth; it
strove to do that as well as it could--did it as well as it can be
done--and all its greatness is rooted in that single and honest effort.
Thirdly, the Venetian school propose the representation of the effect
of colour and shade on all things; chiefly on the human form. It tried
to do that as well as it could--did it as well as it can be done--and
all its greatness is founded on that single and honest effort.

Pray, do not leave this room without a perfectly clear holding of these
three ideas. You may try them, and toss them about afterwards, as much
as you like, to see if they'll bear shaking; but do let me put them
well and plainly into your possession. Attach them to three works of
art which you all have either seen or continually heard of. There's the
(so-called) "Theseus" of the Elgin marbles. That represents the whole
end and aim of the Athenian school--the natural form of the human body.
All their conventional architecture--their graceful shaping and
painting of pottery--whatsoever other art they practised--was dependent
for its greatness on this sheet-anchor of central aim: true shape of
living man. Then take, for your type of the Italian school, Raphael's
"Disputa del Sacramento;" that will be an accepted type by everybody,
and will involve no possibly questionable points: the Germans will
admit it; the English academicians will admit it; and the English
purists and pre-Raphaelites will admit it. Well, there you have the
truth of human expression proposed as an aim. That is the way people
look when they feel this or that--when they have this or that other
mental character: are they devotional, thoughtful, affectionate,
indignant, or inspired? are they prophets, saints, priests, or kings?
then--whatsoever is truly thoughtful, affectionate, prophetic,
priestly, kingly--_that_ the Florentine school tried to discern,
and show; _that_ they have discerned and shown; and all their
greatness is first fastened in their aim at this central truth--the
open expression of the living human soul. Lastly, take Veronese's
"Marriage in Cana" in the Louvre. There you have the most perfect
representation possible of colour, and light, and shade, as they affect
the external aspect of the human form, and its immediate accessories,
architecture, furniture, and dress. This external aspect of noblest
nature was the first aim of the Venetians, and all their greatness
depended on their resolution to achieve, and their patience in
achieving it.

Here, then, are the three greatest schools of the former world
exemplified for you in three well-known works. The Phidian "Theseus"
represents the Greek school pursuing truth of form; the "Disputa" of
Raphael, the Florentine school pursuing truth of mental expression; the
"Marriage in Cana," the Venetian school pursuing truth of colour and
light. But do not suppose that the law which I am stating to you--the
great law of art-life--can only be seen in these, the most powerful of
all art schools. It is just as manifest in each and every school that
ever has had life in it at all. Wheresoever the search after truth
begins, there life begins; wheresoever that search ceases, there life
ceases. As long as a school of art holds any chain of natural facts,
trying to discover more of them and express them better daily, it may
play hither and thither as it likes on this side of the chain or that;
it may design grotesques and conventionalisms, build the simplest
buildings, serve the most practical utilities, yet all it does will be
gloriously designed and gloriously done; but let it once quit hold of
the chain of natural fact, cease to pursue that as the clue to its
work; let it propose to itself any other end than preaching this living
word, and think first of showing its own skill or its own fancy, and
from that hour its fall is precipitate--its destruction sure; nothing
that it does or designs will ever have life or loveliness in it more;
its hour has come, and there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor
wisdom in the grave whither it goeth.

Let us take for example that school of art over which many of you would
perhaps think this law had but little power--the school of Gothic
architecture. Many of us may have been in the habit of thinking of that
school rather as of one of forms than of facts--a school of pinnacles,
and buttresses, and conventional mouldings, and disguise of nature by
monstrous imaginings--not a school of truth at all. I think I shall be
able, even in the little time we have to-night, to show that this is
not so; and that our great law holds just as good at Amiens and
Salisbury, as it does at Athens and Florence.

I will go back then first to the very beginnings of Gothic art, and
before you, the students of Kensington, as an impanelled jury, I will
bring two examples of the barbarism out of which Gothic art emerges,
approximately contemporary in date and parallel in executive skill;
but, the one, a barbarism that did not get on, and could not get on;
the other, a barbarism that could get on, and did get on; and you, the
impanelled jury, shall judge what is the essential difference between
the two barbarisms, and decide for yourselves what is the seed of life
in the one, and the sign of death in the other.

The first,--that which has in it the sign of death,--furnishes us at
the same time with an illustration far too interesting to be passed by,
of certain principles much depended on by our common modern designers.
Taking up one of our architectural publications the other day, and
opening it at random, I chanced upon this piece of information, put in
rather curious English; but you shall have it as it stands--

"Aristotle asserts, that the greatest species of the beautiful are
Order, Symmetry, and the Definite."

I should tell you, however, that this statement is not given as
authoritative; it is one example of various Architectural teachings,
given in a report in the _Building Chronicle_ for May, 1857, of a
lecture on Proportion; in which the only thing the lecturer appears to
have proved was that,--

The system of dividing the diameter of the shaft of a column into
parts for copying the ancient architectural remains of Greece and Rome,
adopted by architects from Vitruvius (circa B.C. 25) to the present
period, as a method for producing ancient architecture, _is entirely
useless_, for the several parts of Grecian architecture cannot be
reduced or subdivided by this system; neither does it apply to the
architecture of Rome.

Still, as far as I can make it out, the lecture appears to have been
one of those of which you will just at present hear so many, the
protests of architects who have no knowledge of sculpture--or of any
other mode of expressing natural beauty--_against_ natural beauty;
and their endeavour to substitute mathematical proportions for the
knowledge of life they do not possess, and the representation of life
of which they are incapable.[Illustration] Now, this substitution of
obedience to mathematical law for sympathy with observed life, is the
first characteristic of the hopeless work of all ages; as such, you
will find it eminently manifested in the specimen I have to give you of
the hopeless Gothic barbarism; the barbarism from which nothing could
emerge--for which no future was possible but extinction. The
Aristotelian principles of the Beautiful are, you remember, Order,
Symmetry, and the Definite. Here you have the three, in perfection,
applied to the ideal of an angel, in a psalter of the eighth century,
existing in the library of St. John's College, Cambridge.[Footnote: I
copy this woodcut from Westwood's "Palaeographia Sacra."]

Now, you see the characteristics of this utterly dead school are, first
the wilful closing of its eyes to natural facts;--for, however ignorant
a person may be, he need only look at a human being to see that it has
a mouth as well as eyes; and secondly, the endeavour to adorn or
idealize natural fact according to its own notions: it puts red spots
in the middle of the hands, and sharpens the thumbs, thinking to
improve them. Here you have the most pure type possible of the
principles of idealism in all ages: whenever people don't look at
Nature, they always think they can improve her. You will also admire,
doubtless, the exquisite result of the application of our great modern 
architectural principle of beauty--symmetry, or equal balance of part
by part; you see even the eyes are made symmetrical--entirely round,
instead of irregular, oval; and the iris is set properly in the middle,
instead of--as nature has absurdly put it--rather under the upper lid.
You will also observe the "principle of the pyramid" in the general
arrangement of the figure, and the value of "series" in the placing of
dots.

From this dead barbarism we pass to living barbarism--to work done by
hands quite as rude, if not ruder, and by minds as uninformed; and yet
work which in every line of it is prophetic of power, and has in it the
sure dawn of day. You have often heard it said that Giotto was the
founder of art in Italy. He was not: neither he, nor Giunta Pisano, nor
Niccolo Pisano. They all laid strong hands to the work, and brought it
first into aspect above ground; but the foundation had been laid for
them by the builders of the Lombardic churches in the valleys of the
Adda and the Arno. It is in the sculpture of the round arched churches
of North Italy, bearing disputable dates, ranging from the eighth to
the twelfth century, that you will find the lowest struck roots of the
art of Titian and Raphael. [Footnote: I have said elsewhere, "the root
of _all_ art is struck in the thirteenth century." This is quite
true: but of course some of the smallest fibres run lower, as in this
instance.] I go, therefore, to the church which is certainly the
earliest of these, St. Ambrogio, of Milan, said still to retain some
portions of the actual structure from which St. Ambrose excluded
Theodosius, and at all events furnishing the most archaic examples of
Lombardic sculpture in North Italy. I do not venture to guess their
date; they are barbarous enough for any date.

We find the pulpit of this church covered with interlacing patterns,
closely resembling those of the manuscript at Cambridge, but among them
is figure sculpture of a very different kind. It is wrought with mere
incisions in the stone, of which the effect may be tolerably given by
single lines in a drawing. Remember, therefore, for a moment--as
characteristic of culminating Italian art--Michael Angelo's fresco of
the "Temptation of Eve," in the Sistine chapel, and you will be more
interested in seeing the birth of Italian art, illustrated by the same
subject, from St. Ambrogio, of Milan, the "Serpent beguiling Eve."
[Footnote: This cut is ruder than it should be: the incisions in the
marble have a lighter effect than these rough black lines; but it is
not worth while to do it better.]

Yet, in that sketch, rude and ludicrous as it is, you have the elements
of life in their first form. The people who could do that were sure to
get on. For, observe, the workman's whole aim is straight at the facts,
as well as he can get them; and not merely at the facts, but at the
very heart of the facts. A common workman might have looked at nature
for his serpent, but he would have thought only of its scales. But this
fellow does not want scales, nor coils; he can do without them; he
wants the serpent's heart--malice and insinuation;--and he has actually
got them to some extent. So also a common workman, even in this
barbarous stage of art, might have carved Eve's arms and body a good
deal better; but this man does not care about arms and body, if he can
only get at Eve's mind--show that she is pleased at being flattered,
and yet in a state of uncomfortable hesitation. And some look of
listening, of complacency, and of embarrassment he has verily got:--
note the eyes slightly askance, the lips compressed, and the right hand
nervously grasping the left arm: nothing can be declared impossible to
the people who could begin thus--the world is open to them, and all
that is in it; while, on the contrary, nothing is possible to the man
who did the symmetrical angel--the world is keyless to him; he has
built a cell for himself in which he must abide, barred up for ever--
there is no more hope for him than for a sponge or a madrepore.

I shall not trace from this embryo the progress of Gothic art in Italy,
because it is much complicated and involved with traditions of other
schools, and because most of the students will be less familiar with
its results than with their own northern buildings. So, these two
designs indicating Death and Life in the beginnings of mediaeval art,
we will take an example of the _progress_ of that art from our
northern work. Now, many of you, doubtless, have been interested by the
mass, grandeur, and gloom of Norman architecture, as much as by Gothic
traceries; and when you hear me say that the root of all good work lies
in natural facts, you doubtless think instantly of your round arches,
with their rude cushion capitals, and of the billet or zigzag work by
which they are surrounded, and you cannot see what the knowledge of
nature has to do with either the simple plan or the rude mouldings. But
all those simple conditions of Norman art are merely the expiring of it
towards the extreme north. Do not study Norman architecture in
Northumberland, but in Normandy, and then you will find that it is just
a peculiarly manly, and practically useful, form of the whole great
French school of rounded architecture. And where has that French school
its origin? Wholly in the rich conditions of sculpture, which, rising
first out of imitations of the Roman bas-reliefs, covered all the
facades of the French early churches with one continuous arabesque of
floral or animal life. If you want to study round-arched buildings, do
not go to Durham, but go to Poictiers, and there you will see how all
the simple decorations which give you so much pleasure even in their
isolated application were invented by persons practised in carving men,
monsters, wild animals, birds, and flowers, in overwhelming redundance;
and then trace this architecture forward in central France, and you
will find it loses nothing of its richness--it only gains in truth, and
therefore in grace, until just at the moment of transition into the
pointed style, you have the consummate type of the sculpture of the
school given you in the west front of the Cathedral of Chartres. From
that front I have chosen two fragments to illustrate it. [Footnote:
This part of the lecture was illustrated by two drawings, made
admirably by Mr. J. T. Laing, with the help of photographs from statues
at Chartres. The drawings may be seen at present at the Kensington
Museum: but any large photograph of the west front of Chartres will
enable the reader to follow what is stated in the lecture, as far as is
needful.]

These statues have been long, and justly, considered as representative
of the highest skill of the twelfth or earliest part of the thirteenth
century in France; and they indeed possess a dignity and delicate
charm, which are for the most part wanting in later works. It is owing
partly to real nobleness of feature, but chiefly to the grace, mingled
with severity, of the falling lines of excessively _thin_ drapery;
as well as to a most studied finish in composition, every part of the
ornamentation tenderly harmonizing with the rest. So far as their power
over certain tones of religious mind is owing to a palpable degree of
non-naturalism in them, I do not praise it--the exaggerated thinness of
body and stiffness of attitude are faults; but they are noble faults,
and give the statues a strange look of forming part of the very
building itself, and sustaining it--not like the Greek caryatid,
without effort--nor like the Renaissance caryatid, by painful or
impossible effort--but as if all that was silent and stern, and
withdrawn apart, and stiffened in chill of heart against the terror of
earth, had passed into a shape of eternal marble; and thus the Ghost
had given, to bear up the pillars of the church on earth, all the
patient and expectant nature that it needed no more in heaven. This is
the transcendental view of the meaning of those sculptures. I do not
dwell upon it. What I do lean upon is their purely naturalistic and
vital power. They are all portraits--unknown, most of them, I believe,
--but palpably and unmistakeably portraits, if not taken from the actual
person for whom the statue stands, at all events studied from some
living person whose features might fairly represent those of the king
or saint intended. Several of them I suppose to be authentic: there is
one of a queen, who has evidently, while she lived, been notable for
her bright black eyes. The sculptor has cut the iris deep into the
stone, and her dark eyes are still suggested with her smile.

There is another thing I wish you to notice specially in these statues
--the way in which the floral moulding is associated with the vertical
lines of the figure. You have thus the utmost complexity and richness
of curvature set side by side with the pure and delicate parallel
lines, and both the characters gain in interest and beauty; but there
is deeper significance in the thing than that of mere effect in
composition; significance not intended on the part of the sculptor, but
all the more valuable because unintentional. I mean the close
association of the beauty of lower nature in animals and flowers, with
the beauty of higher nature in human form. You never get this in Greek
work. Greek statues are always isolated; blank fields of stone, or
depths of shadow, relieving the form of the statue, as the world of
lower nature which they despised retired in darkness from their hearts.
Here, the clothed figure seems the type of the Christian spirit--in
many respects feebler and more contracted--but purer; clothed in its
white robes and crown, and with the riches of all creation at its side.

The next step in the change will be set before you in a moment, merely
by comparing this statue from the west front of Chartres with that of
the Madonna, from the south transept door of Amiens. [Footnote: There
are many photographs of this door and of its central statue. Its
sculpture in the tympanum is farther described in the Fourth Lecture.]

This Madonna, with the sculpture round her, represents the culminating
power of Gothic art in the thirteenth century. Sculpture has been
gaining continually in the interval; gaining, simply because becoming
every day more truthful, more tender, and more suggestive. By the way,
the old Douglas motto, "Tender and true," may wisely be taken up again
by all of us, for our own, in art no less than in other things. Depend
upon it, the first universal characteristic of all great art is
Tenderness, as the second is Truth. I find this more and more every
day: an infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift and inheritance of
all the truly great men. It is sure to involve a relative intensity of
disdain towards base things, and an appearance of sternness and
arrogance in the eyes of all hard, stupid, and vulgar people--quite
terrific to such, if they are capable of terror, and hateful to them,
if they are capable of nothing higher than hatred. Dante's is the great
type of this class of mind. I say the first inheritance is Tenderness--
the second Truth, because the Tenderness is in the make of the
creature, the Truth in his acquired habits and knowledge; besides, the
love comes first in dignity as well as in time, and that is always pure
and complete: the truth, at best, imperfect.

To come back to our statue. You will observe that the arrangement of
this sculpture is exactly the same as at Chartres--severe falling
drapery, set off by rich floral ornament at the side; but the statue is
now completely animated: it is no longer fixed as an upright pillar,
but bends aside out of its niche, and the floral ornament, instead of
being a conventional wreath, is of exquisitely arranged hawthorn. The
work, however, as a whole, though perfectly characteristic of the
advance of the age in style and purpose, is in some subtler qualities
inferior to that of Chartres. The individual sculptor, though trained
in a more advanced school, has been himself a man of inferior order of
mind compared to the one who worked at Chartres. But I have not time to
point out to you the subtler characters by which I know this.

This statue, then, marks the culminating point of Gothic art, because,
up to this time, the eyes of its designers had been steadily fixed on
natural truth--they had been advancing from flower to flower, from form
to form, from face to face,--gaining perpetually in knowledge and
veracity--therefore, perpetually in power and in grace. But at this
point a fatal change came over their aim. From the statue they now
began to turn the attention chiefly to the niche of the statue, and
from the floral ornament to the mouldings that enclosed the floral
ornament. The first result of this was, however, though not the
grandest, yet the most finished of northern genius. You have, in the
earlier Gothic, less wonderful construction, less careful masonry, far
less expression of harmony of parts in the balance of the building.
Earlier work always has more or less of the character of a good solid
wall with irregular holes in it, well carved wherever there is room.
But the last phase of good Gothic has no room to spare; it rises as
high as it can on narrowest foundation, stands in perfect strength with
the least possible substance in its bars; connects niche with niche,
and line with line, in an exquisite harmony, from which no stone can be
removed, and to which you can add not a pinnacle; and yet introduces in
rich, though now more calculated profusion, the living element of its
sculpture: sculpture in the quatrefoils--sculpture in the brackets--
sculpture in the gargoyles--sculpture in the niches--sculpture in the
ridges and hollows of its mouldings,--not a shadow without meaning, and
not a light without life. [Footnote: The two _transepts_ of Rouen
Cathedral illustrate this style. There are plenty of photographs of
them. I take this opportunity of repeating what I have several times
before stated, for the sake of travellers, that St. Ouen, impressive as
it is, is entirely inferior to the transepts of Rouen Cathedral.] But
with this very perfection of his work came the unhappy pride of the
builder in what he had done. As long as he had been merely raising
clumsy walls and carving them like a child, in waywardness of fancy,
his delight was in the things he thought of as he carved; but when he
had once reached this pitch of constructive science, he began to think
only how cleverly he could put the stones together. The question was
not now with him, What can I represent? but, How high can I build--how
wonderfully can I hang this arch in air, or weave this tracery across
the clouds? And the catastrophe was instant and irrevocable.
Architecture became in France a mere web of waving lines,--in England a
mere grating of perpendicular ones. Redundance was substituted for
invention, and geometry for passion; tho Gothic art became a mere
expression of wanton expenditure, and vulgar mathematics; and was swept
away, as it then deserved to be swept away, by the severer pride, and
purer learning, of the schools founded on classical traditions.

You cannot now fail to see, how, throughout the history of this
wonderful art--from its earliest dawn in Lombardy to its last
catastrophe in France and England--sculpture, founded on love of
nature, was the talisman of its existence; wherever sculpture was
practised, architecture arose--wherever that was neglected,
architecture expired; and, believe me, all you students who love this
mediaeval art, there is no hope of your ever doing any good with it,
but on this everlasting principle. Your patriotic associations with it
are of no use; your romantic associations with it--either of chivalry
or religion--are of no use; they are worse than useless, they are
false. Gothic is not an art for knights and nobles; it is an art for
the people: it is not an art for churches or sanctuaries; it is an art
for houses and homes: it is not an art for England only, but an art for
the world: above all, it is not an art of form or tradition only, but
an art of vital practice and perpetual renewal. And whosoever pleads
for it as an ancient or a formal thing, and tries to teach it you as an
ecclesiastical tradition or a geometrical science, knows nothing of its
essence, less than nothing of its power.

Leave, therefore, boldly, though not irreverently, mysticism and
symbolism on the one side; cast away with utter scorn geometry and
legalism on the other; seize hold of God's hand and look full in the
face of His creation, and there is nothing He will not enable you to
achieve.

Thus, then, you will find--and the more profound and accurate your
knowledge of the history of art the more assuredly you will find--that
the living power in all the real schools, be they great or small, is
love of nature. But do not mistake me by supposing that I mean this law
to be all that is necessary to form a school. There needs to be much
superadded to it, though there never must be anything superseding it.
The main thing which needs to be superadded is the gift of design.

It is always dangerous, and liable to diminish the clearness of
impression, to go over much ground in the course of one lecture. But I
dare not present you with a maimed view of this important subject: I
dare not put off to another time, when the same persons would not be
again assembled, the statement of the great collateral necessity which,
as well as the necessity of truth, governs all noble art.

That collateral necessity is _the visible operation of human
intellect in the presentation of truth, _the evidence of what is
properly called design or plan in the work, no less than of veracity. A
looking-glass does not design--it receives and communicates
indiscriminately all that passes before it; a painter designs when he
chooses some things, refuses others, and arranges all.

This selection and arrangement must have influence over everything that
the art is concerned with, great or small--over lines, over colours,
and over ideas. Given a certain group of colours, by adding another
colour at the side of them, you will either improve the group and
render it more delightful, or injure it, and render it discordant and
unintelligible. "Design" is the choosing and placing the colour so as
to help and enhance all the other colours it is set beside. So of
thoughts: in a good composition, every idea is presented in just that
order, and with just that force, which will perfectly connect it with
all the other thoughts in the work, and will illustrate the others as
well as receive illustration from them; so that the entire chain of
thoughts offered to the beholder's mind shall be received by him with
as much delight and with as little effort as is possible. And thus you
see design, properly so called, is human invention, consulting human
capacity. Out of the infinite heap of things around us in the world, it
chooses a certain number which it can thoroughly grasp, and presents
this group to the spectator in the form best calculated to enable him
to grasp it also, and to grasp it with delight.

And accordingly, the capacities of both gatherer and receiver being
limited, the object is to make _everything that you offer helpful_
and precious. If you give one grain of weight too much, so as to
increase fatigue without profit, or bulk without value--that added
grain is hurtful; if you put one spot or one syllable out of its proper
place, that spot or syllable will be destructive--how far destructive
it is almost impossible to tell: a misplaced touch may sometimes
annihilate the labour of hours. Nor are any of us prepared to
understand the work of any great master, till we feel this, and feel it
as distinctly as we do the value of arrangement in the notes of music.
Take any noble musical air, and you find, on examining it, that not one
even of the faintest or shortest notes can be removed without
destruction to the whole passage in which it occurs; and that every
note in the passage is twenty times more beautiful so introduced, than
it would have been if played singly on the instrument. Precisely this
degree of arrangement and relation must exist between every touch
[Footnote: Literally. I know how exaggerated this statement sounds; but
I mean it,--every syllable of it.--See Appendix IV.] and line in a
great picture. You may consider the whole as a prolonged musical
composition: its parts, as separate airs connected in the story; its
little bits and fragments of colour and line, as separate passages or
bars in melodies; and down to the minutest note of the whole--down to
the minutest _touch_,--if there is one that can be spared--that
one is doing mischief.

Remember therefore always, you have two characters in which all
greatness of art consists:--First, the earnest and intense seizing of
natural facts; then the ordering those facts by strength of human
intellect, so as to make them, for all who look upon them, to the
utmost serviceable, memorable, and beautiful. And thus great art is
nothing else than the type of strong and noble life; for, as the
ignoble person, in his dealings with all that occurs in the world about
him, first sees nothing clearly,--looks nothing fairly in the face, and
then allows himself to be swept away by the trampling torrent, and
unescapable force, of the things that he would not foresee, and could
not understand: so the noble person, looking the facts of the world
full in the face, and fathoming them with deep faculty, then deals with
them in unalarmed intelligence and unhurried strength, and becomes,
with his human intellect and will, no unconscious nor insignificant
agent, in consummating their good, and restraining their evil.

Thus in human life you have the two fields of rightful toil for ever
distinguished, yet for ever associated; Truth first--plan or design,
founded thereon; so in art, you have the same two fields for ever
distinguished, for ever associated; Truth first--plan, or design,
founded thereon.

Now hitherto there is not the least difficulty in the subject; none of
you can look for a moment at any great sculptor or painter without
seeing the full bearing of these principles. But a difficulty arises
when you come to examine the art of a lower order, concerned with
furniture and manufacture, for in that art the element of design enters
without, apparently, the element of truth. You have often to obtain
beauty and display invention without direct representation of nature.
Yet, respecting all these things also, the principle is perfectly
simple. If the designer of furniture, of cups and vases, of dress
patterns, and the like, exercises himself continually in the imitation
of natural form in some leading division of his work; then, holding by
this stem of life, he may pass down into all kinds of merely
geometrical or formal design with perfect safety, and with noble
results.[Footnote: This principle, here cursorily stated, is one of the
chief subjects of inquiry in the following Lectures.] Thus Giotto,
being primarily a figure painter and sculptor, is, secondarily, the
richest of all designers in mere mosaic of coloured bars and triangles;
thus Benvenuto Cellini, being in all the higher branches of metal work
a perfect imitator of nature, is in all its lower branches the best
designer of curve for lips of cups and handles of vases; thus Holbein,
exercised primarily in the noble art of truthful portraiture, becomes,
secondarily, the most exquisite designer of embroideries of robe, and
blazonries on wall; and thus Michael Angelo, exercised primarily in the
drawing of body and limb, distributes in the mightiest masses the order
of his pillars, and in the loftiest shadow the hollows of his dome. But
once quit hold of this living stem, and set yourself to the designing
of ornamentation, either in the ignorant play of your own heartless
fancy, as the Indian does, or according to received application of
heartless laws, as the modern European does, and there is but one word
for you--Death:--death of every healthy faculty, and of every noble
intelligence, incapacity of understanding one great work that man has
ever done, or of doing anything that it shall be helpful for him to
behold. You have cut yourselves off voluntarily, presumptuously,
insolently, from the whole teaching of your Maker in His Universe; you
have cut yourselves off from it, not because you were forced to
mechanical labour for your bread--not because your fate had appointed
you to wear away your life in walled chambers, or dig your life out of
dusty furrows; but, when your whole profession, your whole occupation--
all the necessities and chances of your existence, led you straight to
the feet of the great Teacher, and thrust you into the treasury of His
works; where you have nothing to do but to live by gazing, and to grow
by wondering;--wilfully you bind up your eyes from the splendour--
wilfully bind up your life-blood from its beating--wilfully turn your
backs upon all the majesties of Omnipotence--wilfully snatch your hands
from all the aids of love, and what can remain for you, but
helplessness and blindness,--except the worse fate than the being blind
yourselves--that of becoming Leaders of the blind?

Do not think that I am speaking under excited feeling, or in any
exaggerated terms. I have written the words I use, that I may know what
I say, and that you, if you choose, may see what I have said. For,
indeed, I have set before you tonight, to the best of my power, the sum
and substance of the system of art to the promulgation of which I have
devoted my life hitherto, and intend to devote what of life may still
be spared to me. I have had but one steady aim in all that I have ever
tried to teach, namely--to declare that whatever was great in human art
was the expression of man's delight in God's work.

And at this time I have endeavoured to prove to you--if you investigate
the subject you may more entirely prove to yourselves--that no school
ever advanced far which had not the love of natural fact as a primal
energy. But it is still more important for you to be assured that the
conditions of life and death in the art of nations are also the
conditions of life and death in your own; and that you have it, each in
his power at this very instant, to determine in which direction his
steps are turning. It seems almost a terrible thing to tell you, that
all here have all the power of knowing at once what hope there is for
them as artists; you would, perhaps, like better that there was some
unremovable doubt about the chances of the future--some possibility
that you might be advancing, in unconscious ways, towards unexpected
successes--some excuse or reason for going about, as students do so
often, to this master or the other, asking him if they have genius, and
whether they are doing right, and gathering, from his careless or
formal replies, vague flashes of encouragement, or fitfulnesses of
despair. There is no need for this--no excuse for it. All of you have
the trial of yourselves in your own power; each may undergo at this
instant, before his own judgment seat, the ordeal by fire. Ask
yourselves what is the leading motive which actuates you while you are
at work. I do not ask you what your leading motive is for working--that
is a different thing; you may have families to support--parents to
help--brides to win; you may have all these, or other such sacred and
pre-eminent motives, to press the morning's labour and prompt the
twilight thought. But when you are fairly _at_ the work, what is
the motive then which tells upon every touch of it? If it is the love
of that which your work represents--if, being a landscape painter, it
is love of hills and trees that moves you--if, being a figure painter,
it is love of human beauty and human soul that moves you--if, being a
flower or animal painter, it is love, and wonder, and delight in petal
and in limb that move you, then the Spirit is upon you, and the earth
is yours, and the fulness thereof. But if, on the other hand, it is
petty self-complacency in your own skill, trust in precepts and laws,
hope for academical or popular approbation, or avarice of wealth,--it
is quite possible that by steady industry, or even by fortunate chance,
you may win the applause, the position, the fortune, that you desire;--
but one touch of true art you will never lay on canvas or on stone as
long as you live.

Make, then, your choice, boldly and consciously, for one way or other
it _must_ be made. On the dark and dangerous side are set, the
pride which delights in self-contemplation--the indolence which rests
in unquestioned forms--the ignorance that despises what is fairest
among God's creatures, and the dulness that denies what is marvellous
in His working: there is a life of monotony for your own souls, and of
misguiding for those of others. And, on the other side, is open to your
choice the life of the crowned spirit, moving as a light in creation--
discovering always--illuminating always, gaining every hour in
strength, yet bowed down every hour into deeper humility; sure of being
right in its aim, sure of being irresistible in its progress; happy in
what it has securely done--happier in what, day by day, it may as
securely hope; happiest at the close of life, when the right hand
begins to forget its cunning, to remember, that there never was a touch
of the chisel or the pencil it wielded, but has added to the knowledge
and quickened the happiness of mankind.




LECTURE II.

THE UNITY OF ART.

_Part of an Address delivered at Manchester, 14th March, 1859._

[Footnote: I was prevented, by press of other engagements, from
preparing this address with the care I wished; and forced to trust to
such expression as I could give at the moment to the points of
principal importance; reading, however, the close of the preceding
lecture, which I thought contained some truths that would bear
repetition. The whole was reported, better than it deserved, by Mr.
Pitman, of the _Manchester Courier_, and published nearly
verbatim. I have here extracted, from the published report, the facts
which I wish especially to enforce; and have a little cleared their
expression; its loose and colloquial character I cannot now help,
unless by re-writing the whole, which it seems not worth while to do.]


It is sometimes my pleasant duty to visit other cities, in the hope of
being able to encourage their art students; but here it is my
pleasanter privilege to come for encouragement myself. I do not know
when I have received so much as from the report read this evening by
Mr. Hammersley, bearing upon a subject which has caused me great
anxiety. For I have always felt in my own pursuit of art, and in my
endeavors to urge the pursuit of art on others, that while there are
many advantages now that never existed before, there are certain
grievous difficulties existing, just in the very cause that is giving
the stimulus to art--in the immense spread of the manufactures of every
country which is now attending vigorously to art. We find that
manufacture and art are now going on always together; that where there
is no manufacture there is no art. I know how much there is of
pretended art where there is no manufacture: there is much in Italy,
for instance; no country makes so bold pretence to the production of
new art as Italy at this moment; yet no country produces so little. If
you glance over the map of Europe, you will find that where the
manufactures are strongest, there art also is strongest. And yet I
always felt that there was an immense difficulty to be encountered by
the students who were in these centres of modern movement. They had to
avoid the notion that art and manufacture were in any respect one. Art
may be healthily associated with manufacture, and probably in future
will always be so; but the student must be strenuously warned against
supposing that they can ever be one and the same thing, that art can
ever be followed on the principles of manufacture. Each must be
followed separately; the one must influence the other, but each must be
kept distinctly separate from the other.

It would be well if all students would keep clearly in their mind the
real distinction between those words which we use so often,
"Manufacture," "Art," and "Fine Art." "MANUFACTURE" is, according to
the etymology and right use of the word, "the making of anything by
hands,"--directly or indirectly, with or without the help of
instruments or machines. Anything proceeding from the hand of man is
manufacture; but it must have proceeded from his hand only, acting
mechanically, and uninfluenced at the moment by direct intelligence.

Then, secondly, ART is the operation of the hand and the intelligence
of man together; there is an art of making machinery; there is an art
of building ships; an art of making carriages; and so on. All these,
properly called Arts, but not Fine Arts, are pursuits in which the hand
of man and his head go together, working at the same instant.

Then FINE ART is that in which the hand, the head, and the _heart_
of man go together.

Recollect this triple group; it will help you to solve many difficult
problems. And remember that though the hand must be at the bottom of
everything, it must also go to the top of everything; for Fine Art must
be produced by the hand of man in a much greater and clearer sense than
manufacture is. Fine Art must always be produced by the subtlest of all
machines, which is the human hand. No machine yet contrived, or
hereafter contrivable, will ever equal the fine machinery of the human
fingers. Thoroughly perfect art is that which proceeds from the heart,
which involves all the noble emotions;--associates with these the head,
yet as inferior to the heart; and the hand, yet as inferior to the
heart and head; and thus brings out the whole man.

Hence it follows that since Manufacture is simply the operation of the
hand of man in producing that which is useful to him, it essentially
separates itself from the emotions; when emotions interfere with
machinery they spoil it: machinery must go evenly, without emotion. But
the Fine Arts cannot go evenly; they always must have emotion ruling
their mechanism, and until the pupil begins to feel, and until all he
does associates itself with the current of his feeling, he is not an
artist. But pupils in all the schools in this country are now exposed
to all kinds of temptations which blunt their feelings. I constantly
feel discouraged in addressing them because I know not how to tell them
boldly what they ought to do, when I feel how practically difficult it
is for them to do it. There are all sorts of demands made upon them in
every direction, and money is to be made in every conceivable way but
the right way. If you paint as you ought, and study as you ought,
depend upon it the public will take no notice of you for a long while.
If you study wrongly, and try to draw the attention of the public upon
you,--supposing you to be clever students--you will get swift reward;
but the reward does not come fast when it is sought wisely; it is
always held aloof for a little while; the right roads of early life are
very quiet ones, hedged in from nearly all help or praise. But the
wrong roads are noisy,--vociferous everywhere with all kinds of demand
upon you for art which is not properly art at all; and in the various
meetings of modern interests, money is to be made in every way; but art
is to be followed only in _one_ way. That is what I want mainly to
say to you, or if not to you yourselves (for, from what I have heard
from your excellent master to-night, I know you are going on all
rightly), you must let me say it through you to others. Our Schools of
Art are confused by the various teaching and various interests that are
now abroad among us. Everybody is talking about art, and writing about
it, and more or less interested in it; everybody wants art, and there
is not art for everybody, and few who talk know what they are talking
about; thus students are led in all variable ways, while there is only
one way in which they can make steady progress, for true art is always
and will be always one. Whatever changes may be made in the customs of
society, whatever new machines we may invent, whatever new manufactures
we may supply, Fine Art must remain what it was two thousand years ago,
in the days of Phidias; two thousand years hence, it will be, in all
its principles, and in all its great effects upon the mind of man, just
the same. Observe this that I say, please, carefully, for I mean it to
the very utmost. _There is but one right way of doing any given thing
required of an artist_; there may be a hundred wrong, deficient, or
mannered ways, but there is only one complete and right way. Whenever
two artists are trying to do the same thing with the same materials,
and do it in different ways, one of them is wrong; he may be charmingly
wrong, or impressively wrong--various circumstances in his temper may
make his wrong pleasanter than any person's right; it may for him,
under his given limitations of knowledge or temper, be better perhaps
that he should err in his own way than try for anybody else's--but for
all that his way is wrong, and it is essential for all masters of
schools to know what the right way is, and what right art is, and to
see how simple and how single all right art has been, since the
beginning of it.

But farther, not only is there but one way of _doing_ things
rightly, but there is only one way of _seeing_ them, and that is,
seeing the whole of them, without any choice, or more intense
perception of one point than another, owing to our special
idiosyncrasies. Thus, when Titian or Tintoret look at a human being,
they see at a glance the whole of its nature, outside and in; all that
it has of form, of colour, of passion, or of thought; saintliness, and
loveliness; fleshly body, and spiritual power; grace, or strength, or
softness, or whatsoever other quality, those men will see to the full,
and so paint, that, when narrower people come to look at what they have
done, every one may, if he chooses, find his own special pleasure in
the work. The sensualist will find sensuality in Titian; the thinker
will find thought; the saint, sanctity; the colourist, colour; the
anatomist, form; and yet the picture will never be a popular one in the 
full sense, for none of these narrower people will find their special
taste so alone consulted, as that the qualities which would ensure
their gratification shall be sifted or separated from others; they are
checked by the presence of the other qualities which ensure the
gratification of other men. Thus, Titian is not soft enough for the
sensualist, Correggio suits him better; Titian is not defined enough
for the formalist,--Leonardo suits him better; Titian is not pure
enough for the religionist,--Raphael suits him better; Titian is not
polite enough for the man of the world,--Vandyke suits him better;
Titian is not forcible enough for the lovers of the picturesque,--
Rembrandt suits him better. So Correggio is popular with a certain set,
and Vandyke with a certain set, and Rembrandt with a certain set. All
are great men, but of inferior stamp, and therefore Vandyke is popular,
and Rembrandt is popular, [Footnote: And Murillo, of all true painters
the narrowest, feeblest, and most superficial, for those reasons the
most popular.] but nobody cares much at heart about Titian; only there
is a strange under-current of everlasting murmur about his name, which
means the deep consent of all great men that he is greater than they--
the consent of those who, having sat long enough at his feet, have
found in that restrained harmony of his strength there are indeed
depths of each balanced power more wonderful than all those separate
manifestations in inferior painters: that there is a softness more
exquisite than Correggio's, a purity loftier than Leonardo's, a force
mightier than Rembrandt's, a sanctity more solemn even than
Raffaelle's.

Do not suppose that in saying this of Titian, I am returning to the old
eclectic theories of Bologna; for all those eclectic theories, observe,
were based, not upon an endeavour to unite the various characters of
nature (which it is possible to do), but the various narrownesses of
taste, which it is impossible to do. Rubens is not more vigorous than
Titian, but less vigorous; but because he is so narrow-minded as to
enjoy vigour only, he refuses to give the other qualities of nature,
which would interfere with that vigour and with our perception of it.
Again, Rembrandt is not a greater master of chiaroscuro than Titian;--
he is a less master, but because he is so narrow-minded as to enjoy
chiaroscuro only, he withdraws from you the splendour of hue which
would interfere with this, and gives you only the shadow in which you
can at once feel it.

Now all these specialties have their own charm in their own way: and
there are times when the particular humour of each man is refreshing to
us from its very distinctness; but the effort to add any other
qualities to this refreshing one instantly takes away the
distinctiveness, and therefore the exact character to be enjoyed in its
appeal to a particular humour in us. Our enjoyment arose from a
weakness meeting a weakness, from a partiality in the painter fitting
to a partiality in us, and giving us sugar when we wanted sugar, and
myrrh when we wanted myrrh; but sugar and myrrh are not meat: and when
we want meat and bread, we must go to better men.

The eclectic schools endeavoured to unite these opposite partialities
and weaknesses. They trained themselves under masters of exaggeration,
and tried to unite opposite exaggerations. That was impossible. They
did not see that the only possible eclecticism had been already
accomplished;--the eclecticism of temperance, which, by the restraint
of force, gains higher force; and by the self-denial of delight, gains
higher delight. This you will find is ultimately the case with every
true and right master; at first, while we are tyros in art, or before
we have earnestly studied the man in question, we shall see little in
him; or perhaps see, as we think, deficiencies; we shall fancy he is
inferior to this man in that, and to the other man in the other; but as
we go on studying him we shall find that he has got both that and the
other; and both in a far higher sense than the man who seemed to
possess those qualities in excess. Thus in Turner's lifetime, when
people first looked at him, those who liked rainy, weather, said he was
not equal to Copley Fielding; but those who looked at Turner long
enough found that he could be much more wet than Copley Fielding, when
he chose. The people who liked force, said that "Turner was not strong
enough for them; he was effeminate; they liked De Wint,--nice strong
tone;--or Cox--great, greeny, dark masses of colour--solemn feeling of
the freshness and depth of nature;--they liked Cox--Turner was too hot
for them." Had they looked long enough they would have found that he
had far more force than De Wint, far more freshness than Cox when he
chose,--only united with other elements; and that he didn't choose to
be cool, if nature had appointed the weather to be hot. The people who
liked Prout said "Turner had not firmness of hand--he did not know
enough about architecture--he was not picturesque enough." Had they
looked at his architecture long, they would have found that it
contained subtle picturesquenesses, infinitely more picturesque than
anything of Prout's. People who liked Callcott said that "Turner was
not correct or pure enough--had no classical taste." Had they looked at
Turner long enough they would have found him as severe, when he chose,
as the greater Poussin;--Callcott, a mere vulgar imitator of other
men's high breeding. And so throughout with all thoroughly great men,
their strength is not seen at first, precisely because they unite, in
due place and measure, every great quality.

Now the question is, whether, as students, we are to study only these
mightiest men, who unite all greatness, or whether we are to study the
works of inferior men, who present us with the greatness which we
particularly like? That question often comes before me when I see a
strong idiosyncrasy in a student, and he asks me what he should study.
Shall I send him to a true master, who does not present the quality in
a prominent way in which that student delights, or send him to a man
with whom he has direct sympathy? It is a hard question. For very
curious results have sometimes been brought out, especially in late
years, not only by students following their own bent, but by their
being withdrawn from teaching altogether. I have just named a very
great man in his own field--Prout. We all know his drawings, and love
them: they have a peculiar character which no other architectural
drawings ever possessed, and which no others can possess, because all
Prout's subjects are being knocked down or restored. (Prout did not
like restored buildings any more than I do.) There will never be any
more Prout drawings. Nor could he have been what he was, or expressed
with that mysteriously effective touch that peculiar delight in broken
and old buildings, unless he had been withdrawn from all high art
influence. You know that Prout was born of poor parents--that he was
educated down in Cornwall;--and that, for many years, all the art-
teaching he had was his own, or the fishermen's. Under the keels of the
fishing-boats, on the sands of our southern coasts, Prout learned all
that he needed to learn about art. Entirely by himself, he felt his way
to this particular style, and became the painter of pictures which I
think we should all regret to lose. It becomes a very difficult
question what that man would have been, had he been brought under some
entirely wholesome artistic influence, He had immense gifts of
composition. I do not know any man who had more power of invention than
Prout, or who had a sublimer instinct in his treatment of things; but
being entirely withdrawn from all artistical help, he blunders his way
to that short-coming representation, which, by the very reason of its
short-coming, has a certain charm we should all be sorry to lose. And
therefore I feel embarrassed when a student comes to me, in whom I see
a strong instinct of that kind: and cannot tell whether I ought to say
to him, "Give up all your studies of old boats, and keep away from the
sea-shore, and come up to the Royal Academy in London, and look at
nothing but Titian." It is a difficult thing to make up one's mind to
say that. However, I believe, on the whole, we may wisely leave such
matters in the hands of Providence; that if we have the power of
teaching the right to anybody, we should teach them the right; if we
have the power of showing them the best thing, we should show them the
best thing; there will always, I fear, be enough want of teaching, and
enough bad teaching, to bring out very curious erratical results if we
want them. So, if we are to teach at all, let us teach the right thing,
and ever the right thing. There are many attractive qualities
inconsistent with rightness;--do not let us teach them,--let us be
content to waive them. There are attractive qualities in Burns, and
attractive qualities in Dickens, which neither of those writers would
have possessed if the one had been educated, and the other had been
studying higher nature than that of cockney London; but those
attractive qualities are not such as we should seek in a school of
literature. If we want to teach young men a good manner of writing, we
should teach it from Shakspeare,--not from Burns; from Walter Scott,--
and not from Dickens. And I believe that our schools of painting are at
present inefficient in their action, because they have not fixed on
this high principle what are the painters to whom to point; nor boldly
resolved to point to the best, if determinable. It is becoming a matter
of stern necessity that they should give a simple direction to the
attention of the student, and that they should say, "This is the mark
you are to aim at; and you are not to go about to the print-shops, and
peep in, to see how this engraver does that, and the other engraver
does the other, and how a nice bit of character has been caught by a
new man, and why this odd picture has caught the popular attention. You
are to have nothing to do with all that; you are not to mind about
popular attention just now; but here is a thing which is eternally
right and good: you are to look at that, and see if you cannot do
something eternally right and good too."

But suppose you accept this principle: and resolve to look to some
great man, Titian, or Turner, or whomsoever it may be, as the model of
perfection in art;--then the question is, since this great man pursued
his art in Venice, or in the fields of England, under totally different
conditions from those possible to us now--how are you to make your
study of him effective here in Manchester? how bring it down into
patterns, and all that you are called upon as operatives to produce?
how make it the means of your livelihood, and associate inferior
branches of art with this great art? That may become a serious doubt to
you. You may think there is some other way of producing clever, and
pretty, and saleable patterns than going to look at Titian, or any
other great man. And that brings me to the question, perhaps the most
vexed question of all amongst us just now, between conventional and 
perfect art. You know that among architects and artists there are, and
have been almost always, since art became a subject of much discussion,
two parties, one maintaining that nature should be always altered and
modified, and that the artist is greater than nature; they do not
maintain, indeed, in words, but they maintain in idea, that the artist
is greater than the Divine Maker of these things, and can improve them;
while the other party say that he cannot improve nature, and that
nature on the whole should improve him. That is the real meaning of the
two parties, the essence of them; the practical result of their several
theories being that the Idealists are always producing more or less
formal conditions of art, and the Realists striving to produce in all
their art either some image of nature, or record of nature; these,
observe, being quite different things, the image being a resemblance,
and the record, something which will give information about nature, but
not necessarily imitate it.

[Footnote: The portion of the lecture here omitted was a recapitulation
of that part of the previous one which opposed conventional art to
natural art.]

       *       *       *       *       *

You may separate these two groups of artists more distinctly in your
mind as those who seek for the pleasure of art, in the relations of its
colours and lines, without caring to convey any truth with it; and
those who seek for the truth first, and then go down from the truth to
the pleasure of colour and line. Marking those two bodies distinctly as
separate, and thinking over them, you may come to some rather notable
conclusions respecting the mental dispositions which are involved in
each mode of study. You will find that large masses of the art of the
world fall definitely under one or the other of these heads. Observe,
pleasure first and truth afterwards, (or not at all,) as with the
Arabians and Indians; or, truth first and pleasure afterwards, as with 
Angelico and all other great European painters. You will find that the
art whose end is pleasure only is pre-eminently the gift of cruel and
savage nations, cruel in temper, savage in habits and conception; but
that the art which is especially dedicated to natural fact always
indicates a peculiar gentleness and tenderness of mind, and that all
great and successful work of that kind will assuredly be the production
of thoughtful, sensitive, earnest, kind men, large in their views of
life, and full of various intellectual power. And farther, when you
examine the men in whom the gifts of art are variously mingled, or
universally mingled, you will discern that the ornamental, or
pleasurable power, though it may be possessed by good men, is not in
itself an indication of their goodness, but is rather, unless balanced
by other faculties, indicative of violence of temper, inclining to
cruelty and to irreligion. On the other hand, so sure as you find any
man endowed with a keen and separate faculty of representing natural
fact, so surely you will find that man gentle and upright, full of
nobleness and breadth of thought. I will give you two instances, the
first peculiarly English, and another peculiarly interesting because it
occurs among a nation not generally very kind or gentle.

I am inclined to think that, considering all the disadvantages of
circumstances and education under which his genius was developed, there
was perhaps hardly ever born a man with a more intense and innate gift
of insight into nature than our own Sir Joshua Reynolds. Considered as
a painter of individuality in the human form and mind, I think him,
even as it is, the prince of portrait painters. Titian paints nobler
pictures, and Vandyke had nobler subjects, but neither of them entered
so subtly as Sir Joshua did into the minor varieties of human heart and
temper; arid when you consider that, with a frightful conventionality
of social habitude all around him, he yet conceived the simplest types
of all feminine and childish loveliness;--that in a northern climate,
and with gray, and white, and black, as the principal colours around
him, he yet became a colourist who can be crushed by none, even of the
Venetians;--and that with Dutch painting and Dresden china for the
prevailing types of art in the saloons of his day, he threw himself at
once at the feet of the great masters of Italy, and arose from their
feet to share their throne--I know not that in the whole history of art
you can produce another instance of so strong, so unaided, so unerring
an instinct for all that was true, pure, and noble.

Now, do you recollect the evidence respecting the character of this
man,--the two points of bright peculiar evidence given by the sayings
of the two greatest literary men of his day, Johnson and Goldsmith?
Johnson, who, as you know, was always Reynolds' attached friend, had
but one complaint to make against him, that he hated nobody:--
"Reynolds," he said, "you hate no one living; I like a good hater!"
Still more significant is the little touch in Goldsmith's
"Retaliation." You recollect how in that poem he describes the various
persons who met at one of their dinners at St. James's Coffee-house,
each person being described under the name of some appropriate dish.
You will often hear the concluding lines about Reynolds Quoted--

                  "He shifted his trumpet," &c;--

less often, or at least less attentively, the preceding ones, far more
important--

        "Still born to improve us in every part--
         His pencil our faces, his _manners our heart;_"

and never, the most characteristic touch of all, near the beginning:--

        "Our dean shall be venison, just fresh from the plains;
         Our Burke shall be tongue, with a garnish of brains.
         To make out the dinner, full certain I am,
         That Rich is anchovy, and Reynolds is _lamb_."

The other painter whom I would give you as an instance of this
gentleness is a man of another nation, on the whole I suppose one of
the most cruel civilized nations in the world--the Spaniards. They
produced but one great painter, only one; but he among the very
greatest of painters, Velasquez. You would not suppose, from looking at
Velasquez' portraits generally, that he was an especially kind or good
man; you perceive a peculiar sternness about them; for they were as
true as steel, and the persons whom he had to paint being not generally
kind or good people, they were stern in expression, and Velasquez gave
the sternness; but he had precisely the same intense perception of
truth, the same marvellous instinct for the rendering of all natural
soul and all natural form that our Reynolds had. Let me, then, read you
his character as it is given by Mr. Stirling, of Kier:--

"Certain charges, of what nature we are not informed, brought against
him after his death, made it necessary for his executor, Fuensalida, to
refute them at a private audience granted to him by the king for that
purpose. After listening to the defence of his friend, Philip
immediately made answer: 'I can believe all you say of the excellent
disposition of Diego Velasquez.' Having lived for half his life in
courts, he was yet capable both of gratitude and generosity, and in the
misfortunes, he could remember the early kindness of Olivares. The
friend of the exile of Loeches, it is just to believe that he was also
the friend of the all-powerful favourite at Buenretiro. No mean
jealousy ever influenced his conduct to his brother artists; he could
afford not only to acknowledge the merits, but to forgive the malice,
of his rivals. His character was of that _rare and happy kind, in
which high intellectual power is combined with indomitable strength of
will, and a winning sweetness of temper_, and which seldom fails to
raise the possessor above his fellow-men, making his life a

               'laurelled victory, and smooth success
                Be strewed before his feet.'"

I am sometimes accused of trying to make art too moral; yet, observe, I
do not say in the least that in order to be a good painter you must be
a good man; but I do say that in order to be a good natural painter
there must be strong elements of good in the mind, however warped by
other parts of the character. There are hundreds of other gifts of
painting which are not at all involved with moral conditions, but this
one, the perception of nature, is never given but under certain moral
conditions. Therefore, now you have it in your choice; here are your
two paths for you: it is required of you to produce conventional
ornament, and you may approach the task as the Hindoo does, and as the
Arab did,--without nature at all, with the chance of approximating your
disposition somewhat to that of the Hindoos and Arabs; or as Sir Joshua
and Velasquez did, with, not the chance, but the certainty, of
approximating your disposition, according to the sincerity of your
effort--to the disposition of those great and good men.

And do you suppose you will lose anything by approaching your
conventional art from this higher side? Not so. I called, with
deliberate measurement of my expression, long ago, the decoration of
the Alhambra "detestable," not merely because indicative of base
conditions of moral being, but because merely as decorative work,
however captivating in some respects, it is wholly wanting in the real,
deep, and intense qualities of ornamental art. Noble conventional
decoration belongs only to three periods. First, there is the
conventional decoration of the Greeks, used in subordination to their
sculpture. There are then the noble conventional decoration of the
early Gothic schools, and the noble conventional arabesque of the great
Italian schools. All these were reached from above, all reached by
stooping from a knowledge of the human form. Depend upon it you will
find, as you look more and more into the matter, that good subordinate
ornament has ever been rooted in a higher knowledge; and if you are
again to produce anything that is noble, you must have the higher
knowledge first, and descend to all lower service; condescend as much
as you like,--condescension never does any man any harm,--but get your
noble standing first. So, then, without any scruple, whatever branch of
art you may be inclined as a student here to follow,--whatever you are
to make your bread by, I say, so far as you have time and power, make
yourself first a noble and accomplished artist; understand at least
what noble and accomplished art is, and then you will be able to apply
your knowledge to all service whatsoever.

I am now going to ask your permission to name the masters whom I think
it would be well if we could agree, in our Schools of Art in England,
to consider our leaders. The first and chief I will not myself presume
to name; he shall be distinguished for you by the authority of those
two great painters of whom we have just been speaking--Reynolds and
Velasquez. You may remember that in your Manchester Art Treasures
Exhibition the most impressive things were the works of those two men--
nothing told upon the eye so much; no other pictures retained it with
such a persistent power. Now, I have the testimony, first of Reynolds
to Velasquez, and then of Velasquez to the man whom I want you to take
as the master of all your English schools. The testimony of Reynolds to
Velasquez is very striking. I take it from some fragments which have
just been published by Mr. William Cotton--precious fragments--of
Reynolds' diaries, which I chanced upon luckily as I was coming down
here: for I was going to take Velasquez' testimony alone, and then fell
upon this testimony of Reynolds to Velasquez, written most fortunately
in Reynolds' own hand-you may see the manuscript. "What _we_ are
all," said Reynolds, "attempting to do with great labor, Velasquez does
at once." Just think what is implied when a man of the enormous power
and facility that Reynolds had, says he was "trying to do with great
labor" what Velasquez "did at once."

Having thus Reynolds' testimony to Velasquez, I will take Velasquez'
testimony to somebody else. You know that Velasquez was sent by Philip
of Spain to Italy, to buy pictures for him. He went all over Italy, saw
the living artists there, and all their best pictures when freshly
painted, so that he had every opportunity of judging; and never was a
man so capable of judging. He went to Rome and ordered various works of
living artists; and while there, he was one day asked by Salvator Rosa
what he thought of Raphael. His reply, and the ensuing conversation,
are thus reported by Boschini, in curious Italian verse, which, thus
translated by Dr. Donaldson, is quoted in Mr. Stirling's Life of
Velasquez:--

          "The master" [Velasquez] "stiffly bowed his figure tall
             And said, 'For Rafael, to speak the truth--
             I always was plain-spoken from my youth--
           I cannot say I like his works at all.'

          "'Well,' said the other" [Salvator], 'if you can run down
             So great a man, I really cannot see
             What you can find to like in Italy;
           To him we all agree to give the crown.'

          "Diego answered thus: 'I saw in Venice
             The true test of the good and beautiful;
             First in my judgment, ever stands that school,
           And Titian first of all Italian men is.'"

          "_Tizian ze quel die porta la bandiera_"

Learn that line by heart and act, at all events for some time to come,
upon Velasquez' opinion in that matter. Titian is much the safest
master for you. Raphael's power, such as it characters in his mind; it
is "Raphaelesque," properly so called; but Titian's power is simply the
power of doing right. Whatever came before Titian, he did wholly as it
_ought_ to be done. Do not suppose that now in recommending Titian
to you so strongly, and speaking of nobody else to-night, I am
retreating in anywise from what some of you may perhaps recollect in my
works, the enthusiasm with which I have always spoken of another
Venetian painter. There are three Venetians who are never separated in
my mind--Titian, Veronese, and Tintoret. They all have their own
unequalled gifts, and Tintoret especially has imagination and depth of
soul which I think renders him indisputably the greatest man; but,
equally indisputably, Titian is the greatest painter; and therefore the
greatest painter who ever lived. You may be led wrong by Tintoret
[Footnote: See Appendix I.--"Right and Wrong."] in many respects, wrong
by Raphael in more; all that you learn from Titian will be right. Then,
with Titian, take Leonardo, Rembrandt, and Albert Duerer. I name those
three masters for this reason: Leonardo has powers of subtle drawing
which are peculiarly applicable in many ways to the drawing of fine
ornament, and are very useful for all students. Rembrandt and Duerer are
the only men whose actual work of hand you can have to look at; you can
have Rembrandt's etchings, or Duerer's engravings actually hung in your
schools; and it is a main point for the student to see the real thing,
and avoid judging of masters at second-hand. As, however, in obeying
this principle, you cannot often have opportunities of studying
Venetian painting, it is desirable that you should have a useful
standard of colour, and I think it is possible for you to obtain this.
I cannot, indeed, without entering upon ground which might involve the
hurting the feelings of living artists, state exactly what I believe to
be the relative position of various painters in England at present with
respect to power of colour. But I may say this, that in the peculiar
gifts of colour which will be useful to you as students, there are only
one or two of the pre-Raphaelites, and William Hunt, of the old Water
Colour Society, who would be safe guides for you: and as quite a safe
guide, there is nobody but William Hunt, because the pre-Raphaelites
are all more or less affected by enthusiasm and by various morbid
conditions of intellect and temper; but old William Hunt--I am sorry to
say "old," but I say it in a loving way, for every year that has added
to his life has added also to his skill--William Hunt is as right as
the Venetians, as far as he goes, and what is more, nearly as
inimitable as they. And I think if we manage to put in the principal
schools of England a little bit of Hunt's work, and make that somewhat
of a standard of colour, that we can apply his principles of colouring
to subjects of all kinds. Until you have had a work of his long near
you; nay, unless you have been labouring at it, and trying to copy it,
you do not know the thoroughly grand qualities that are concentrated in
it. Simplicity, and intensity, both of the highest character;--
simplicity of aim, and intensity of power and success, are involved in
that man's unpretending labour.

Finally, you cannot believe that I would omit my own favourite, Turner.
I fear from the very number of his works left to the nation, that there
is a disposition now rising to look upon his vast bequest with some
contempt. I beg of you, if in nothing else, to believe me in this, that
you cannot further the art of England in any way more distinctly than
by giving attention to every fragment that has been left by that man.
The time will come when his full power and right place will be
acknowledged; that time will not be for many a day yet: nevertheless,
be assured--as far as you are inclined to give the least faith to
anything I may say to you, be assured--that you can act for the good of
art in England in no better way than by using whatever influence any of
you have in any direction to urge the reverent study and yet more
reverent preservation of the works of Turner. I do not say "the
exhibition" of his works, for we are not altogether ripe for it: they
are still too far above us; uniting, as I was telling you, too many
qualities for us yet to feel fully their range and their influence;--
but let us only try to keep them safe from harm, and show thoroughly
and conveniently what we show of them at all, and day by day their
greatness will dawn upon us more and more, and be the root of a school
of art in England, which I do not doubt may be as bright, as just, and
as refined as even that of Venice herself. The dominion of the sea
seems to have been associated, in past time, with dominion in the arts
also: Athens had them together; Venice had them together; but by so
much as our authority over the ocean is wider than theirs over the
AEgean or Adriatic, let us strive to make our art more widely beneficent
than theirs, though it cannot be more exalted; so working out the
fulfilment, in their wakening as well as their warning sense, of those
great words of the aged Tintoret:

                    "Sempre si fa il mare maggiore."




LECTURE III.

MODERN MANUFACTURE AND DESIGN.

_A Lecture delivered at Bradford, March, 1859_.


It is with a deep sense of necessity for your indulgence that I venture
to address you to-night, or that I venture at any time to address the
pupils of schools of design intended for the advancement of taste in
special branches of manufacture. No person is able to give useful and
definite help towards such special applications of art, unless he is
entirely familiar with the conditions of labour and natures of material
involved in the work; and indefinite help is little better than no help
at all. Nay, the few remarks which I propose to lay before you this
evening will, I fear, be rather suggestive of difficulties than helpful
in conquering them: nevertheless, it may not be altogether
unserviceable to define clearly for you (and this, at least, I am able
to do) one or two of the more stern general obstacles which stand at
present in the way of our success in design; and to warn you against
exertion of effort in any vain or wasteful way, till these main
obstacles are removed.

The first of these is our not understanding the scope and dignity of
Decorative design. With all our talk about it, the very meaning of the
words "Decorative art" remains confused and undecided. I want, if
possible, to settle this question for you to-night, and to show you
that the principles on which you must work are likely to be false, in
proportion as they are narrow; true, only as they are founded on a
perception of the connection of all branches of art with each other.

Observe, then, first--the only essential distinction between Decorative
and other art is the being fitted for a fixed place; and in that place,
related, either in subordination or command, to the effect of other
pieces of art. And all the greatest art which the world has produced is
thus fitted for a place, and subordinated to a purpose. There is no
existing highest-order art but is decorative. The best sculpture yet
produced has been the decoration of a temple front--the best painting,
the decoration of a room. Raphael's best doing is merely the wall-
colouring of a suite of apartments in the Vatican, and his cartoons
were made for tapestries. Correggio's best doing is the decoration of
two small church cupolas at Parma; Michael Angelo's of a ceiling in the
Pope's private chapel; Tintoret's, of a ceiling and side wall belonging
to a charitable society at Venice; while Titian and Veronese threw out
their noblest thoughts, not even on the inside, but on the outside of
the common brick and plaster walls of Venice.

Get rid, then, at once of any idea of Decorative art being a degraded
or a separate kind of art. Its nature or essence is simply its being
fitted for a definite place; and, in that place, forming part of a
great and harmonious whole, in companionship with other art; and so far
from this being a degradation to it--so far from Decorative art being
inferior to other art because it is fixed to a spot--on the whole it
may be considered as rather a piece of degradation that it should be
portable. Portable art--independent of all place--is for the most part
ignoble art. Your little Dutch landscape, which you put over your
sideboard to-day, and between the windows tomorrow, is a far more
contemptible piece of work than the extents of field and forest with
which Benozzo has made green and beautiful the once melancholy arcade
of the Campo Santo at Pisa; and the wild boar of silver which you use
for a seal, or lock into a velvet case, is little likely to be so noble
a beast as the bronze boar who foams forth the fountain from under his
tusks in the market-place of Florence. It is, indeed, possible that the
portable picture or image may be first-rate of its kind, but it is not
first-rate because it is portable; nor are Titian's frescoes less than
first-rate because they are fixed; nay, very frequently the highest
compliment you can pay to a cabinet picture is to say--"It is as grand
as a fresco."

Keeping, then, this fact fixed in our minds,--that all art _may_
be decorative, and that the greatest art yet produced has been
decorative,--we may proceed to distinguish the orders and dignities of
decorative art, thus:--

I. The first order of it is that which is meant for places where it
cannot be disturbed or injured, and where it can be perfectly seen; and
then the main parts of it should be, and have always been made, by the
great masters, as perfect, and as full of nature as possible.

You will every day hear it absurdly said that room decoration should be
by flat patterns--by dead colours--by conventional monotonies, and I
know not what. Now, just be assured of this--nobody ever yet used
conventional art to decorate with, when he could do anything better,
and knew that what he did would be safe. Nay, a great painter will
always give you the natural art, safe or not. Correggio gets a
commission to paint a room on the ground floor of a palace at Parma:
any of our people--bred on our fine modern principles--would have
covered it with a diaper, or with stripes or flourishes, or mosaic
patterns. Not so Correggio: he paints a thick trellis of vine-leaves,
with oval openings, and lovely children leaping through them into the
room; and lovely children, depend upon it, are rather more desirable
decorations than diaper, if you can do them--but they are not quite so
easily done. In like manner Tintoret has to paint the whole end of the
Council Hall at Venice. An orthodox decorator would have set himself to
make the wall look like a wall--Tintoret thinks it would be rather
better, if he can manage it, to make it look a little like Paradise;--
stretches his canvas right over the wall, and his clouds right over his
canvas; brings the light through his clouds--all blue and clear--zodiac
beyond zodiac; rolls away the vaporous flood from under the feet of
saints, leaving them at last in infinitudes of light--unorthodox in the
last degree, but, on the whole, pleasant.

And so in all other cases whatever, the greatest decorative art is
wholly unconventional--downright, pure, good painting and sculpture,
but always fitted for its place; and subordinated to the purpose it has
to serve in that place.

II. But if art is to be placed where it is liable to injury--to wear
and tear; or to alteration of its form; as, for instance, on domestic
utensils, and armour, and weapons, and dress; in which either the
ornament will be worn out by the usage of the thing, or will be cast
into altered shape by the play of its folds; then it is wrong to put
beautiful and perfect art to such uses, and you want forms of inferior
art, such as will be by their simplicity less liable to injury; or, by
reason of their complexity and continuousness, may show to advantage,
however distorted by the folds they are cast into.

And thus arise the various forms of inferior decorative art, respecting
which the general law is, that the lower the place and office of the
thing, the less of natural or perfect form you should have in it; a
zigzag or a chequer is thus a better, because a more consistent
ornament for a cup or platter than a landscape or portrait is: hence
the general definition of the true forms of conventional ornament is,
that they consist in the bestowal of as much beauty on the object as
shall be consistent with its Material, its Place, and its Office.

Let us consider these three modes of consistency a little.

(A.) Conventionalism by cause of inefficiency of material.

If, for instance, we are required to represent a human figure with
stone only, we cannot represent its colour; we reduce its colour to
whiteness. That is not elevating the human body, but degrading it; only
it would be a much greater degradation to give its colour falsely.
Diminish beauty as much as you will, but do not misrepresent it. So
again, when we are sculpturing a face, we can't carve its eyelashes. 
The face is none the better for wanting its eyelashes--it is injured by
the want; but would be much more injured by a clumsy representation of
them.

Neither can we carve the hair. We must be content with the
conventionalism of vile solid knots and lumps of marble, instead of the
golden cloud that encompasses the fair human face with its waving
mystery. The lumps of marble are not an elevated representation of
hair--they are a degraded one; yet better than any attempt to imitate
hair with the incapable material.

In all cases in which such imitation is attempted, instant degradation
to a still lower level is the result. For the effort to imitate shows
that the workman has only a base and poor conception of the beauty of
the reality--else he would know his task to be hopeless, and give it up
at once; so that all endeavours to avoid conventionalism, when the
material demands it, result from insensibility to truth, and are among
the worst forms of vulgarity. Hence, in the greatest Greek statues, the
hair is very slightly indicated--not because the sculptor disdained
hair, but because he knew what it was too well to touch it insolently.
I do not doubt but that the Greek painters drew hair exactly as Titian
does. Modern attempts to produce finished pictures on glass result from
the same base vulgarism. No man who knows what painting means, can
endure a painted glass window which emulates painter's work. But he
rejoices in a glowing mosaic of broken colour: for that is what the
glass has the special gift and right of producing. [Footnote: See
Appendix II., Sir Joshua Reynolds's disappointment.]

(B.) Conventionalism by cause of inferiority of place.

When work is to be seen at a great distance, or in dark places, or in
some other imperfect way, it constantly becomes necessary to treat it
coarsely or severely, in order to make it effective. The statues on
cathedral fronts, in good times of design, are variously treated
according to their distances: no fine execution is put into the
features of the Madonna who rules the group of figures above the south
transept of Rouen at 150 feet above the ground; but in base modern
work, as Milan Cathedral, the sculpture is finished without any
reference to distance; and the merit of every statue is supposed to
consist in the visitor's being obliged to ascend three hundred steps
before he can see it.

(C.) Conventionalism by cause of inferiority of office.

When one piece of ornament is to be subordinated to another (as the
moulding is to the sculpture it encloses, or the fringe of a drapery to
the statue it veils), this inferior ornament needs to be degraded in
order to mark its lower office; and this is best done by refusing, more
or less, the introduction of natural form. The less of nature it
contains, the more degraded is the ornament, and the fitter for a
humble place; but, however far a great workman may go in refusing the
higher organisms of nature, he always takes care to retain the
magnificence of natural lines; that is to say, of the infinite curves,
such as I have analyzed in the fourth volume of "Modern Painters." His
copyists, fancying that they can follow him without nature, miss
precisely the essence of all the work; so that even the simplest piece
of Greek conventional ornament loses the whole of its value in any
modern imitation of it, the finer curves being always missed. Perhaps
one of the dullest and least justifiable mistakes which have yet been
made about my writing, is the supposition that I have attacked or
despised Greek work. I have attacked Palladian work, and modern
imitation of Greek work. Of Greek work itself I have never spoken but
with a reverence quite infinite: I name Phidias always in exactly the
same tone with which I speak of Michael Angelo, Titian, and Dante. My
first statement of this faith, now thirteen years ago, was surely clear
enough. "We shall see by this light three colossal images standing up
side by side, looming in their great rest of spirituality above the
whole world horizon. Phidias, Michael Angelo, and Dante,--from these we
may go down step by step among the mighty men of every age, securely
and certainly observant of diminished lustre in every appearance of
restlessness and effort, until the last trace of inspiration vanishes
in the tottering affectation or tortured insanities of modern times."
("Modern Painters," vol. ii., p. 253.) This was surely plain speaking
enough, and from that day to this my effort has been not less
continually to make the heart of Greek work known than the heart of
Gothic: namely, the nobleness of conception of form derived from
perpetual study of the figure; and my complaint of the modern architect
has been not that he followed the Greeks, but that he denied the first
laws of life in theirs as in all other art.

The fact is, that all good subordinate forms of ornamentation ever yet
existent in the world have been invented, and others as beautiful can
only be invented, by men primarily exercised in drawing or carving the
human figure. I will not repeat here what I have already twice insisted
upon, to the students of London and Manchester, respecting the
degradation of temper and intellect which follows the pursuit of art
without reference to natural form, as among the Asiatics: here, I will
only trespass on your patience so far as to mark the inseparable
connection between figure-drawing and good ornamental work, in the
great European schools, and all that are connected with them.

Tell me, then, first of all, what ornamental work is usually put before
our students as the type of decorative perfection? Raphael's
arabesques; are they not? Well, Raphael knew a little about the figure,
I suppose, before he drew them. I do not say that I like those
arabesques; but there are certain qualities in them which are
inimitable by modern designers; and those qualities are just the fruit
of the master's figure study. What is given the student as next to
Raphael's work? Cinquecento ornament generally. Well, cinquecento
generally, with its birds, and cherubs, and wreathed foliage, and
clustered fruit, was the amusement of men who habitually and easily
carved the figure, or painted it. All the truly fine specimens of it
have figures or animals as main parts of the design.

"Nay, but," some anciently or mediaevally minded person will exclaim,
"we don't want to study cinquecento. We want severer, purer
conventionalism." What will you have? Egyptian ornament? Why, the whole
mass of it is made up of multitudinous human figures in every kind of
action--and magnificent action; their kings drawing their bows in their
chariots, their sheaves of arrows rattling at their shoulders; the
slain falling under them as before a pestilence; their captors driven
before them in astonied troops; and do you expect to imitate Egyptian
ornament without knowing how to draw the human figure? Nay, but you
will take Christian ornament--purest mediaeval Christian--thirteenth
century! Yes: and do you suppose you will find the Christian less
human? The least natural and most purely conventional ornament of the
Gothic schools is that of their painted glass; and do you suppose
painted glass, in the fine times, was ever wrought without figures? We
have got into the way, among our other modern wretchednesses, of trying
to make windows of leaf diapers, and of strips of twisted red and
yellow bands, looking like the patterns of currant jelly on the top of
Christmas cakes; but every casement of old glass contained a saint's
history. The windows of Bourges, Chartres, or Rouen have ten, fifteen,
or twenty medallions in each, and each medallion contains two figures
at least, often six or seven, representing every event of interest in
the history of the saint whose life is in question. Nay, but, you say
those figures are rude and quaint, and ought not to be imitated. Why,
so is the leafage rude and quaint, yet you imitate that. The coloured
border pattern of geranium or ivy leaf is not one whit better drawn, or
more like geraniums and ivy, than the figures are like figures; but you
call the geranium leaf idealized--why don't you call the figures so?
The fact is, neither are idealized, but both are conventionalized on
the same principles, and in the same way; and if you want to learn how
to treat the leafage, the only way is to learn first how to treat the
figure. And you may soon test your powers in this respect. Those old
workmen were not afraid of the most familiar subjects. The windows of
Chartres were presented by the trades of the town, and at the bottom of
each window is a representation of the proceedings of the tradesmen at
the business which enabled them to pay for the window. There are smiths
at the forge, curriers at their hides, tanners looking into their pits,
mercers selling goods over the counter--all made into beautiful
medallions. Therefore, whenever you want to know whether you have got
any real power of composition or adaptation in ornament, don't be
content with sticking leaves together by the ends,--anybody can do
that; but try to conventionalize a butcher's or a greengrocer's, with
Saturday night customers buying cabbage and beef. That will tell you if
you can design or not.

I can fancy your losing patience with me altogether just now. "We asked
this fellow down to tell our workmen how to make shawls, and he is only
trying to teach them how to caricature." But have a little patience
with me, and examine, after I have done, a little for yourselves into
the history of ornamental art, and you will discover why I do this. You
will discover, I repeat, that all great ornamental art whatever is
founded on the effort of the workman to draw the figure, and, in the
best schools, to draw all that he saw about him in living nature. The
best art of pottery is acknowledged to be that of Greece, and all the
power of design exhibited in it, down to the merest zigzag, arises
primarily from the workman having been forced to outline nymphs and
knights; from those helmed and draped figures he holds his power. Of
Egyptian ornament I have just spoken. You have everything given there
that the workman saw; people of his nation employed in hunting,
fighting, fishing, visiting, making love, building, cooking--everything
they did is drawn, magnificently or familiarly, as was needed. In
Byzantine ornament, saints, or animals which are types of various
spiritual power, are the main subjects; and from the church down to the
piece of enamelled metal, figure,--figure,--figure, always principal.
In Norman and Gothic work you have, with all their quiet saints, also
other much disquieted persons, hunting, feasting, fighting, and so on;
or whole hordes of animals racing after each other. In the Bayeux
tapestry, Queen Matilda gave, as well as she could,--in many respects
graphically enough,--the whole history of the conquest of England.
Thence, as you increase in power of art, you have more and more
finished figures, up to the solemn sculptures of Wells Cathedral, or
the cherubic enrichments of the Venetian Madonna dei Miracoli.
Therefore, I will tell you fearlessly, for I know it is true, you must
raise your workman up to life, or you will never get from him one line
of well-imagined conventionalism. We have at present no good ornamental
design. We can't have it yet, and we must be patient if we want to have
it. Do not hope to feel the effect of your schools at once, but raise
the men as high as you can, and then let them stoop as low as you need;
no great man ever minds stooping. Encourage the students, in sketching
accurately and continually from nature anything that comes in their
way--still life, flowers, animals; but, above all, figures; and so far
as you allow of any difference between an artist's training and theirs,
let it be, not in what they draw, but in the degree of conventionalism
you require in the sketch.

For my own part, I should always endeavour to give thorough artistical
training first; but I am not certain (the experiment being yet untried)
what results may be obtained by a truly intelligent practice of
conventional drawing, such as that of the Egyptians, Greeks, or
thirteenth century French, which consists in the utmost possible
rendering of natural form by the fewest possible lines. The animal and
bird drawing of the Egyptians is, in their fine age, quite magnificent
under its conditions; magnificent in two ways--first, in keenest
perception of the main forms and facts in the creature; and, secondly,
in the grandeur of line by which their forms are abstracted and
insisted on, making every asp, ibis, and vulture a sublime spectre of
asp or ibis or vulture power. The way for students to get some of this
gift again (_some_ only, for I believe the fulness of the gift
itself to be connected with vital superstition, and with resulting
intensity of reverence; people were likely to know something about
hawks and ibises, when to kill one was to be irrevocably judged to
death) is never to pass a day without drawing some animal from the
life, allowing themselves the fewest possible lines and colours to do
it with, but resolving that whatever is characteristic of the animal
shall in some way or other be shown. [Footnote: Plate 75 in Vol. V. of
Wilkinson's "Ancient Egypt" will give the student an idea of how to set
to work.] I repeat, it cannot yet be judged what results might be
obtained by a nobly practised conventionalism of this kind; but,
however that may be, the first fact,--the necessity of animal and
figure drawing, is absolutely certain, and no person who shrinks from
it will ever become a great designer.

One great good arises even from the first step in figure drawing, that
it gets the student quit at once of the notion of formal symmetry. If
you learn only to draw a leaf well, you are taught in some of our
schools to turn it the other way, opposite to itself; and the two
leaves set opposite ways are called "a design:" and thus it is supposed
possible to produce ornamentation, though you have no more brains than
a looking-glass or