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.