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.