me by the carelessness shown by the picture dealers about the copies
from Turner which it has cost Mr. Ward and me[BL] fifteen years of study
together to enable ourselves to make. "They are only copies," say
they,--"nobody will look at them."
230. It never seems to occur even to the most intelligent persons that
an engraving also is 'only a copy,' and a copy done with refusal of
color, and with disadvantage of means in rendering shade. But just
because this utterly inferior copy can be reduplicated, and introduces a
different kind of skill, in another material, people are content to lose
all the composition, and all the charm, of the original,--so far as
these depend on the chief gift of a _painter_,--color; while they are
gradually misled into attributing to the painter himself qualities
impertinently added by the engraver to make his plate popular: and,
which is far worse, they are as gradually and subtly prevented from
looking, in the original, for the qualities which engraving could never
render. Further, it continually happens that the very best
color-compositions engrave worst; for they often extend colors over
great spaces at equal pitch, and the green is as dark as the red, and
the blue as the brown; so that the engraver can only distinguish them by
lines in different directions, and his plate becomes a vague and dead
mass of neutral tint; but a bad and forced piece of color, or a piece of
work of the Bolognese school, which is everywhere black in the shadows,
and colorless in the lights, will engrave with great ease, and appear
spirited and forcible. Hence engravers, as a rule, are interested in
reproducing the work of the worst schools of painting.
Also, the idea that the merit of an engraving consisted in light and
shade, has prevented the modern masters from even attempting to render
works dependent mainly on outline and expression; like the early
frescoes, which should indeed have been the objects of their most
attentive and continual skill: for outline and expression are entirely
within the scope of engraving; and the scripture histories of an aisle
of a cloister might have been engraved, to perfection, with little more
pains than are given by ordinary workmen to round a limb by Correggio,
or imitate the texture of a dress by Sir Joshua,--and both, at last,
inadequately.
231. I will not lose more time in asserting or lamenting the mischief
arising out of the existing system: but will rapidly state what the
public should now ask for.
1. Exquisitely careful engraved outlines of all remaining frescoes of
the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries in Italy, with so
much pale tinting as may be explanatory of their main masses; and with
the local darks and local lights brilliantly relieved. The Arundel
Society have published some meritorious plates of this kind from
Angelico,--not, however, paying respect enough to the local colors, but
conventionalizing the whole too much into outline.
2. Finished small plates for book illustration. The cheap wood-cutting
and etching of popular illustrated books have been endlessly mischievous
to public taste: they first obtained their power in a general reaction
of the public mind from the insipidity of the lower school of line
engraving, brought on it by servile persistence in hack work for
ignorant publishers. The last dregs of it may still be seen in the
sentimental landscapes engraved for cheap ladies' pocket-books. But the
woodcut can never, educationally, take the place of serene and
accomplished line engraving; and the training of young artists in whom
the gift of delineation prevails over their sense of color, to the
production of scholarly, but small plates, with their utmost honor of
skill, would give a hitherto unconceived dignity to the character and
range of our popular literature.
3. Vigorous mezzotints from pictures of the great masters, which
originally present noble contrasts of light and shade. Many Venetian
works are magnificent in this character.
4. Original design by painters themselves, decisively engraved in few
lines--(_not_ etched); and with such insistence by dotted work on the
main contours as we have seen in the examples given from Italian
engraving.
5. On the other hand, the men whose quiet patience and exquisite manual
dexterity are at present employed in producing large and costly plates,
such as that of the Belle Jardiniere de Florence, by M. Boucher
Desnoyers, should be entirely released from their servile toil, and
employed exclusively in producing colored copies, or light drawings,
from the original work. The same number of hours of labor, applied with
the like conscientious skill, would multiply precious likenesses of the
real picture, full of subtle veracities which no steel line could
approach, and conveying, to thousands, true knowledge and unaffected
enjoyment of painting; while the finished plate lies uncared for in the
portfolio of the virtuoso, serving only, so far as it is seen in the
printseller's window by the people, to make them think that sacred
painting must always be dull, and unnatural.
232. I have named the above engraving, because, for persons wishing to
study the present qualities and methods of line-work, it is a pleasant
and sufficient possession, uniting every variety of texture with great
serenity of unforced effect, and exhibiting every possible artifice and
achievement in the distribution of even and rugged, or of close and open
line; artifices for which,--while I must yet once more and emphatically
repeat that they are illegitimate, and could not be practiced in a
revived school of classic art,--I would fain secure the reader's
reverent admiration, under the conditions exacted by the school to which
they belong. Let him endeavor, with the finest point of pen or pencil he
can obtain, to imitate the profile of this Madonna in its relief against
the gray background of the water surface; let him examine, through a
good lens, the way in which the lines of the background are ended in a
lance-point as they approach it; the exact equality of depth of shade
being restored by inserted dots, which prepare for the transition to the
manner of shade adopted in the flesh: then let him endeavor to trace
with his own hand some of the curved lines at the edge of the eyelid, or
in the rounding of the lip; or if these be too impossible, even a few of
the quiet undulations which gradate the folds of the hood behind the
hair; and he will, I trust, begin to comprehend the range of delightful
work which would be within the reach of such an artist, employed with
more tractable material on more extended subject.
233. If, indeed, the present system were capable of influencing the mass
of the people, and enforcing among them the subtle attention necessary
to appreciate it, something might be pleaded in defense of its severity.
But all these plates are entirely above the means of the lower middle
classes, and perhaps not one reader in a hundred can possess himself,
for the study I ask of him, even of the plate to which I have just
referred. What, in the stead of such, he can and does possess, let him
consider,--and, if possible, just after examining the noble qualities of
this conscientious engraving.
234. Take up, for an average specimen of modern illustrated works, the
volume of Dickens's 'Master Humphrey's Clock,' containing 'Barnaby
Rudge.'
You have in that book an entirely profitless and monstrous story, in
which the principal characters are a coxcomb, an idiot, a madman, a
savage blackguard, a foolish tavern-keeper, a mean old maid, and a
conceited apprentice,--mixed up with a certain quantity of ordinary
operatic pastoral stuff, about a pretty Dolly in ribbons, a lover with a
wooden leg, and an heroic locksmith. For these latter, the only elements
of good, or life, in the filthy mass of the story,[BM] observe that the
author must filch the wreck of those old times of which we fiercely and
frantically destroy every living vestige, whenever it is possible. You
cannot have your Dolly Varden brought up behind the counter of a railway
station; nor your jolly locksmith trained at a Birmingham brass-foundry.
And of these materials, observe that you can only have the ugly ones
illustrated. The cheap popular art cannot draw for you beauty, sense, or
honesty; and for Dolly Varden, or the locksmith, you will look through
the vignettes in vain. But every species of distorted folly and
vice,--the idiot, the blackguard, the coxcomb, the paltry fool, the
degraded woman,--are pictured for your honorable pleasure in every page,
with clumsy caricature, struggling to render its dullness tolerable by
insisting on defect,--if perchance a penny or two more may be coined out
of the Cockney reader's itch for loathsomeness.
235. Or take up, for instance of higher effort, the 'Cornhill Magazine'
for this month, July, 1876. It has a vignette of Venice for an
illuminated letter. That is what your decorative art has become, by help
of Kensington! The letter to be produced is a T. There is a gondola in
the front of the design, with the canopy slipped back to the stern like
a saddle over a horse's tail. There is another in the middle distance,
all gone to seed at the prow, with its gondolier emaciated into an oar,
at the stern; then there is a Church of the Salute, and a Ducal
Palace,--in which I beg you to observe all the felicity and dexterity of
modern cheap engraving; finally, over the Ducal Palace there is
something, I know not in the least what meant for, like an umbrella
dropping out of a balloon, which is the ornamental letter T. Opposite
this ornamental design, there is an engraving of two young ladies and a
parasol, between two trunks of trees. The white face and black feet of
the principal young lady, being the points of the design, are done with
as much care,--not with as much dexterity,--as an ordinary sketch of Du
Maurier's in Punch. The young lady's dress, the next attraction, is done
in cheap white and black cutting, with considerably less skill than that
of any ordinary tailor's or milliner's shop-book pattern drawing. For
the other young lady, and the landscape, take your magnifying glass, and
look at the hacked wood that forms the entire shaded surface--one mass
of idiotic scrabble, without the remotest attempt to express a single
leaf, flower, or clod of earth. It is such landscape as the public sees
out of its railroad window at sixty miles of it in the hour--and good
enough for such a public.
236. Then turn to the last--the poetical plate, p. 122: "Lifts her--lays
her down with care." Look at the gentleman with a spade, promoting the
advance, over a hillock of hay, of the reposing figure in the
black-sided tub. Take your magnifying glass to _that_, and look what a
dainty female arm and hand your modern scientific and anatomical schools
of art have provided you with! Look at the tender horizontal flux of the
sea round the promontory point above. Look at the tender engraving of
the linear light on the divine horizon, above the ravenous sea-gull.
Here is Development and Progress for you, from the days of Perugino's
horizon, and Dante's daybreaks! Truly, here it seems
"Si che le bianche e le vermiglie guance
Per troppa etate divenivan rance."
237. I have chosen no gross or mean instances of modern work. It is one
of the saddest points connected with the matter that the designer of
this last plate is a person of consummate art faculty, but bound to the
wheel of the modern Juggernaut, and broken on it. These woodcuts, for
'Barnaby Rudge' and the 'Cornhill Magazine,' are favorably
representative of the entire illustrative art industry of the modern
press,--industry enslaved to the ghastly service of catching the last
gleams in the glued eyes of the daily more bestial English
mob,--railroad born and bred, which drags itself about the black world
it has withered under its breath, in one eternal grind and
shriek,--gobbling,--staring,--chattering,--giggling,--trampling out
every vestige of national honor and domestic peace, wherever it sets the
staggering hoof of it; incapable of reading, of hearing, of thinking, of
looking,--capable only of greed for money, lust for food, pride of
dress, and the prurient itch of momentary curiosity for the politics
last announced by the newsmonger, and the religion last rolled by the
chemist into electuary for the dead.
238. In the miserably competitive labor of finding new stimulus for the
appetite--daily more gross--of this tyrannous mob, we may count as lost,
beyond any hope, the artists who are dull, docile, or distressed enough
to submit to its demands; and we may count the dull and the distressed
by myriads;--and among the docile, many of the best intellects we
possess. The few who have sense and strength to assert their own place
and supremacy, are driven into discouraged disease by their isolation,
like Turner and Blake; the one abandoning the design of his 'Liber
Studiorum' after imperfectly and sadly, against total public neglect,
carrying it forward to what it is,--monumental, nevertheless, in
landscape engraving; the other producing, with one only majestic series
of designs from the book of Job, nothing for his life's work but
coarsely iridescent sketches of enigmatic dream.
239. And, for total result of our English engraving industry during the
last hundred and fifty years, I find that practically at this moment I
cannot get a _single_ piece of true, sweet, and comprehensible art, to
place for instruction in any children's school! I can get, for ten
pounds apiece, well-engraved portraits of Sir Joshua's beauties showing
graceful limbs through flowery draperies; I can get--dirt-cheap--any
quantity of Dutch flats, ditches, and hedges, enlivened by cows chewing
the cud, and dogs behaving indecently; I can get heaps upon heaps of
temples, and forums, and altars, arranged as for academical competition,
round seaports, with curled-up ships that only touch the water with the
middle of their bottoms. I can get, at the price of lumber, any quantity
of British squires flourishing whips and falling over hurdles; and, in
suburban shops, a dolorous variety of widowed mothers nursing babies in
a high light with the Bible on a table, and baby's shoes on a chair.
Also, of cheap prints, painted red and blue, of Christ blessing little
children, of Joseph and his brethren, the infant Samuel, or Daniel in
the lions' den, the supply is ample enough to make every child in these
islands think of the Bible as a somewhat dull story-book, allowed on
Sunday;--but of trained, wise, and worthy art, applied to gentle
purposes of instruction, no single example can be found in the shops of
the British printseller or bookseller. And after every dilettante tongue
in European society has filled drawing-room and academy alike with idle
clatter concerning the divinity of Raphael and Michael Angelo, for these
last hundred years, I cannot at this instant, for the first school which
I have some power of organizing under St. George's laws, get a good
print of Raphael's Madonna of the tribune, or an ordinarily intelligible
view of the side and dome of St. Peter's!
240. And there are simply no words for the mixed absurdity and
wickedness of the present popular demand for art, as shown by its supply
in our thoroughfares. Abroad, in the shops of the Rue de Rivoli,
brightest and most central of Parisian streets, the putrescent remnant
of what was once Catholicism promotes its poor gilded pedlars' ware of
nativity and crucifixion into such honorable corners as it can find
among the more costly and studious illuminations of the brothel: and
although, in Pall Mall, and the Strand, the large-margined
Landseer,--Stanfield,--or Turner-proofs, in a few stately windows, still
represent, uncared-for by the people, or inaccessible to them, the power
of an English school now wholly perished,--these are too surely
superseded, in the windows that stop the crowd, by the thrilling
attraction with which Dore, Gerome, and Tadema have invested the
gambling table, the dueling ground, and the arena; or by the more
material and almost tangible truth with which the apothecary-artist
stereographs the stripped actress, and the railway mound.
241. Under these conditions, as I have now repeatedly asserted, no
professorship, nor school, of art can be of the least use to the general
public. No race can understand a visionary landscape, which blasts its
real mountains into ruin, and blackens its river-beds with foam of
poison. Nor is it of the least use to exhibit ideal Diana at Kensington,
while substantial Phryne may be worshiped in the Strand. The only
recovery of our art-power possible,--nay, when once we know the full
meaning of it, the only one desirable,--must result from the
purification of the nation's heart, and chastisement of its life:
utterly hopeless now, for our adult population, or in our large cities,
and their neighborhood. But, so far as any of the sacred influence of
former design can be brought to bear on the minds of the young, and so
far as, in rural districts, the first elements of scholarly education
can be made pure, the foundation of a new dynasty of thought may be
slowly laid. I was strangely impressed by the effect produced in a
provincial seaport school for children, chiefly of fishermen's families,
by the gift of a little colored drawing of a single figure from the
Paradise of Angelico in the Accademia of Florence. The drawing was
wretched enough, seen beside the original; I had only bought it from the
poor Italian copyist for charity: but, to the children, it was like an
actual glimpse of heaven; they rejoiced in it with pure joy, and their
mistress thanked me for it more than if I had sent her a whole library
of good books. Of such copies, the grace-giving industry of young
girls, now worse than lost in the spurious charities of the bazaar, or
selfish ornamentations of the drawing-room, might, in a year's time,
provide enough for every dame-school in England; and a year's honest
work of the engravers employed on our base novels, might represent to
our advanced students every frescoed legend of philosophy and morality
extant in Christendom.
242. For my own part, I have no purpose, in what remains to me of
opportunity, either at Oxford or elsewhere, to address any farther
course of instruction towards the development of existing schools. After
seeing the stream of the Teviot as black as ink, and a putrid carcass of
a sheep lying in the dry channel of the Jed, under Jedburgh Abbey, (the
entire strength of the summer stream being taken away to supply a single
mill,) I know, finally, what value the British mind sets on the
'beauties of nature,' and shall attempt no farther the excitement of its
enthusiasm in that direction. I shall indeed endeavor to carry out, with
Mr. Ward's help, my twenty years' held purpose of making the real
character of Turner's work known, to the persons who, formerly
interested by the engravings from him, imagined half the merit was of
the engraver's giving. But I know perfectly that to the general people,
trained in the midst of the ugliest objects that vice can design, in
houses, mills, and machinery, _all_ beautiful form and color is as
invisible as the seventh heaven. It is not a question of appreciation at
all; the thing is physically invisible to them, as human speech is
inaudible during a steam whistle.
243. And I shall also use all the strength I have to convince those,
among our artists of the second order, who are wise and modest enough
not to think themselves the matches of Turner or Michael Angelo, that in
the present state of art they only waste their powers in endeavoring to
produce original pictures of human form or passion. Modern aristocratic
life is too vulgar, and modern peasant life too unhappy, to furnish
subjects of noble study; while, even were it otherwise, the
multiplication of designs by painters of second-rate power is no more
desirable than the writing of music by inferior composers. They may,
with far greater personal happiness, and incalculably greater advantage
to others, devote themselves to the affectionate and sensitive copying
of the works of men of just renown. The dignity of this self-sacrifice
would soon be acknowledged with sincere respect; for copies produced by
men working with such motive would differ no less from the common
trade-article of the galleries than the rendering of music by an
enthusiastic and highly trained executant differs from the grinding of a
street organ. And the change in the tone of public feeling, produced by
familiarity with such work, would soon be no less great than in their
musical enjoyment, if having been accustomed only to hear black
Christys, blind fiddlers, and hoarse beggars scrape or howl about their
streets, they were permitted daily audience of faithful and gentle
orchestral rendering of the work of the highest classical masters.
244. I have not, until very lately, rightly appreciated the results of
the labor of the Arundel Society in this direction. Although, from the
beginning, I have been honored in being a member of its council, my
action has been hitherto rather of check than help, because I thought
more of the differences between our copies and the great originals, than
of their unquestionable superiority to anything the public could
otherwise obtain.
I was practically convinced of their extreme value only this last
winter, by staying at the house of a friend in which the Arundel
engravings were the principal decoration; and where I learned more of
Masaccio from the Arundel copy of the contest with Simon Magus, than in
the Brancacci chapel itself; for the daily companionship with the
engraving taught me subtleties in its composition which had escaped me
in the multitudinous interest of visits to the actual fresco.
But the work of the Society has been sorely hindered hitherto, because
it has had at command only the skill of copyists trained in foreign
schools of color, and accustomed to meet no more accurate requisitions
than those of the fashionable traveler. I have always hoped for, and
trust at last to obtain, co-operation with our too mildly laborious
copyists, of English artists possessing more brilliant color faculty;
and the permission of our subscribers to secure for them the great ruins
of the noble past, undesecrated by the trim, but treacherous, plastering
of modern emendation.