As regards the way in which the Etruscan artists kept to a few stock
subjects, this has been so in all times and countries.
When Christianity convulsed the world and displaced the older mythology,
she did but introduce new subjects of her own, to which her artists kept
as closely as their pagan ancestors had kept to their heathen gods and
goddesses. We now make believe to have freed ourselves from these
trammels, but the departure is more apparent than real. Our works of art
fall into a few well-marked groups and the pictures of each group, though
differing in detail, present the same general characters. We have,
however, broken much new ground, whereas until the last three or four
hundred years it almost seems either as if artists had thought subject a
detail beneath their notice, or publics had insisted on being told only
what they knew already.
The principle of living only to see and to hear some new thing, and the
other principle of avoiding everything with which we are not perfectly
familiar are equally old, equally universal, equally useful. They are
the principles of conservation and accumulation on the one hand, and of
adventure, speculation and progress on the other, each equally
indispensable. The money has been, and will probably always be more
persistently in the hands of the first of these two groups. But, after
all, is not money an art? Nay, is it not the most difficult on earth and
the parent of all? And if life is short and art long, is not money still
longer? And are not works of art, for the most part, more or less works
of money also? In so far as a work of art is a work of money, it must
not complain of being bound by the laws of money; in so far as it is a
work of art, it has nothing to do with money and, again, cannot complain.
It is a great help to the spectator to know the subject of a picture and
not to be bothered with having to find out all about the story. Subjects
should be such as either tell their own story instantly on the face of
them, or things with which all spectators may be supposed familiar. It
must not be forgotten that a work exposed to public view is addressed to
a great many people and should accordingly consider many people rather
than one. I saw an English family not long since looking at a fine
collection of the coins of all nations. They hardly pretended even to
take a languid interest in the French, German, Dutch and Italian coins,
but brightened up at once on being shown a shilling, a florin and a
half-crown. So children do not want new stories; they look for old ones.
“Mamma dear, will you please tell us the story of ‘The Three Bears’?”
“No, my love, not to-day, I have told it you very often lately and I am
busy.”
“Very well, Mamma dear, then we will tell you the story of ‘The Three
Bears.’”
The _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ are only “The Three Bears” upon a larger
scale. Just as the life of a man is only the fission of two amœbas on a
larger scale. _Cui non dictus Hylas puer et Latonia Delos_? That was no
argument against telling it again, but rather for repeating it. So
people look out in the newspapers for what they know rather than for what
they do not know, and the better they know it the more interested they
are to see it in print and, as a general rule, unless they get what they
expect—or think they know already—they are angry. This tendency of our
nature culminates in the well-known lines repeated for ever and ever:
The battle of the Nile
I was there all the while;
I was there all the while
At the battle of the Nile.
The battle of . . .
And so on ad lib. Even this will please very young children. As they
grow older they want to hear about nothing but “The Three Bears.” As
they mature still further they want the greater invention and freer play
of fancy manifested by such people as Homer and our west-end
upholsterers, beyond which there is no liberty, but only eccentricity and
extravagance.
So it is with all fashion. Fashions change, but not radically except
after convulsion and, even then, the change is more apparent than real,
the older fashions continually coming back as new ones.
So it is not only as regards choice of subject but also as regards
treatment of subject within the limits of the work itself, after the
subject is chosen. No matter whether the utterance of a man’s inner mind
is attempted by way of words, painting, or music, the same principle
underlies all these three arts and, of course, also those arts that are
akin to them. In each case a man should have but one subject easily
recognisable as the main motive, and in each case he must develop, treat
and illustrate this by means of episodes and details that are neither so
alien to the subject as to appear lugged in by the heels, nor yet so
germane to it as to be identical. The treatment grows out of the subject
as the family from the parents and the race from the family—each new-born
member being the same and yet not the same with those that have preceded
him. So it is with all the arts and all the sciences—they flourish best
by the addition of but little new at a time in comparison with the old.
And so, lastly, it is with the _ars artium_ itself, that art of arts and
science of sciences, that guild of arts and crafts which is comprised
within each one of us, I mean our bodies. In the detail they are
nourished from day to day by food which must not be too alien from past
food or from the body itself, nor yet too germane to either; and in the
gross, that is to say, in the history of the development of a race or
species, the evolution is admittedly for the most part exceedingly
gradual, by means of many generations, as it were, of episodes that are
kindred to and yet not identical with the subject.
And when we come to think of it, we find in the evolution of bodily form
(which along with modification involves persistence of type) the
explanation why persistence of type in subjects chosen for treatment in
works of art should be so universal. It is because we are so averse to
great changes and at the same time so averse to no change at all, that we
have a bodily form, in the main, persistent and yet, at the same time,
capable of modifications. Without a strong aversion to change its habits
and, with its habits, the pabulum of its mind, there would be no fixity
of type in any species and, indeed, there would be no life at all, as we
are accustomed to think of life, for organs would disappear before they
could be developed, and to try to build life on such a shifting
foundation would be as hopeless as it would be to try and build a
material building on an actual quicksand. Hence the habits, cries,
abodes, food, hopes and fears of each species (and what are these but the
realities of which human arts are as the shadow?) tell the same old tales
in the same old ways from generation to generation, and it is only
because they do so that they appear to us as species at all.
Returning now to the Etruscan cinerary urns—I have no doubt that, perhaps
three or four thousand years hence, a collection of the tombstones from
some of our suburban cemeteries will be thought exceedingly interesting,
but I confess to having found the urns in the Museum at Volterra a little
monotonous and, after looking at about three urns, I hurried over the
remaining 397 as fast as I could. [1889.]