them. We don't want either the life or the decorations of the
thirteenth century back again; and the circumstances with which you
must surround your workmen are those simply of happy modern English
life, because the designs you have now to ask for from your workmen are
such as will make modern English life beautiful. All that gorgeousness
of the middle ages, beautiful as it sounds in description, noble as in
many respects it was in reality, had, nevertheless, for foundation and
for end, nothing but the pride of life--the pride of the so-called
superior classes; a pride which supported itself by violence and
robbery, and led in the end to the destruction both of the arts
themselves and the States in which they nourished.
The great lesson of history is, that all the fine arts hitherto--having
been supported by the selfish power of the noblesse, and never having
extended their range to the comfort or the relief of the mass of the
people--the arts, I say, thus practised, and thus matured, have only
accelerated the ruin of the States they adorned; and at the moment
when, in any kingdom, you point to the triumphs of its greatest
artists, you point also to the determined hour of the kingdom's
decline. The names of great painters are like passing bells: in the
name of Velasquez, you hear sounded the fall of Spain; in the name of
Titian, that of Venice; in the name of Leonardo, that of Milan; in the
name of Raphael, that of Rome. And there is profound justice in this;
for in proportion to the nobleness of the power is the guilt of its use
for purposes vain or vile; and hitherto the greater the art, the more
surely has it been used, and used solely, for the decoration of pride,
[Footnote: Whether religious or profane pride,--chapel or banqueting
room,--is no matter.] or the provoking of sensuality. Another course
lies open to us. We may abandon the hope--or if you like the words
better--we may disdain the temptation, of the pomp and grace of Italy
in her youth. For us there can be no more the throne of marble--for us
no more the vault of gold--but for us there is the loftier and lovelier
privilege of bringing the power and charm of art within the reach of
the humble and the poor; and as the magnificence of past ages failed by
its narrowness and its pride, ours may prevail and continue, by its
universality and its lowliness.
And thus, between the picture of too laborious England, which we
imagined as future, and the picture of too luxurious Italy, which we
remember in the past, there may exist--there will exist, if we do our
duty--an intermediate condition, neither oppressed by labour nor wasted
in vanity--the condition of a peaceful and thoughtful temperance in
aims, and acts, and arts.
We are about to enter upon a period of our world's history in which
domestic life, aided by the arts of peace, will slowly, but at last
entirely, supersede public life and the arts of war. For our own
England, she will not, I believe, be blasted throughout with furnaces;
nor will she be encumbered with palaces. I trust she will keep her
green fields, her cottages, and her homes of middle life; but these
ought to be, and I trust will be enriched with a useful, truthful,
substantial form of art. We want now no more feasts of the gods, nor
martyrdoms of the saints; we have no need of sensuality, no place for
superstition, or for costly insolence. Let us have learned and faithful
historical painting--touching and thoughtful representations of human
nature, in dramatic painting; poetical and familiar renderings of
natural objects and of landscape; and rational, deeply-felt
realizations of the events which are the subjects of our religious
faith. And let these things we want, as far as possible, be scattered
abroad and made accessible to all men.
So also, in manufacture: we require work substantial rather than rich
in make; and refined, rather than splendid in design. Your stuffs need
not be such as would catch the eye of a duchess; but they should be
such as may at once serve the need, and refine the taste, of a
cottager. The prevailing error in English dress, especially among the
lower orders, is a tendency to flimsiness and gaudiness, arising mainly
from the awkward imitation of their superiors. [Footnote: If their
superiors would give them simplicity and economy to imitate, it would,
in the issue, be well for themselves, as well as for those whom they
guide. The typhoid fever of passion for dress, and all other display,
which has struck the upper classes of Europe at this time, is one of
the most dangerous political elements we have to deal with. Its
wickedness I have shown elsewhere (Polit. Economy of Art, p. 62, _et
seq._); but its wickedness is, in the minds of most persons, a
matter of no importance. I wish I had time also to show them its
danger. I cannot enter here into political investigation; but this is a
certain fact, that the wasteful and vain expenses at present indulged
in by the upper classes are hastening the advance of republicanism more
than any other element of modern change. No agitators, no clubs, no
epidemical errors, ever were, or will be, fatal to social order in any
nation. Nothing but the guilt of the upper classes, wanton,
accumulated, reckless, and merciless, ever overthrows them Of such
guilt they have now much to answer for--let them look to it in time.]
It should be one of the first objects of all manufacturers to produce
stuffs not only beautiful and quaint in design, but also adapted for
every-day service, and decorous in humble and secluded life. And you
must remember always that your business, as manufacturers, is to form
the market, as much as to supply it. If, in shortsighted and reckless
eagerness for wealth, you catch at every humour of the populace as it
shapes itself into momentary demand--if, in jealous rivalry with
neighbouring States, or with other producers, you try to attract
attention by singularities, novelties, and gaudinesses--to make every
design an advertisement, and pilfer every idea of a successful
neighbour's, that you may insidiously imitate it, or pompously eclipse
--no good design will ever be possible to you, or perceived by you. You
may, by accident, snatch the market; or, by energy, command it; you may
obtain the confidence of the public, and cause the ruin of opponent
houses; or you may, with equal justice of fortune, be ruined by them.
But whatever happens to you, this, at least, is certain, that the whole
of your life will have been spent in corrupting public taste and
encouraging public extravagance. Every preference you have won by
gaudiness must have been based on the purchaser's vanity; every demand
you have created by novelty has fostered in the consumer a habit of
discontent; and when you retire into inactive life, you may, as a
subject of consolation for your declining years, reflect that precisely
according to the extent of your past operations, your life has been
successful in retarding the arts,--tarnishing the virtues, and
confusing the manners of your country.
But, on the other hand, if you resolve from the first that, so far as
you can ascertain or discern what is best, you will produce what is
best, on an intelligent consideration of the probable tendencies and
possible tastes of the people whom you supply, you may literally become
more influential for all kinds of good than many lecturers on art, or
many treatise-writers on morality. Considering the materials dealt
with, and the crude state of art knowledge at the time, I do not know
that any more wide or effective influence in public taste was ever
exercised than that of the Staffordshire manufacture of pottery under
William Wedgwood, and it only rests with the manufacturer in every
other business to determine whether he will, in like manner, make his
wares educational instruments, or mere drugs of the market. You all
should, be, in a certain sense, authors: you must, indeed, first catch
the public eye, as an author must the public ear; but once gain your
audience, or observance, and as it is in the writer's power
thenceforward to publish what will educate as it amuses--so it is in
yours to publish what will educate as it adorns. Nor is this surely a
subject of poor ambition. I hear it said continually that men are too
ambitious: alas! to me, it seems they are never enough ambitious. How
many are content to be merely the thriving merchants of a state, when
they might be its guides, counsellors, and rulers--wielding powers of
subtle but gigantic beneficence, in restraining its follies while they
supplied its wants. Let such duty, such ambition, be once accepted in
their fulness, and the best glory of European art and of European
manufacture may yet be to come. The paintings of Raphael and of
Buonaroti gave force to the falsehoods of superstition, and majesty to
the imaginations of sin; but the arts of England may have, for their
task, to inform the soul with truth, and touch the heart with
compassion. The steel of Toledo and the silk of Genoa did but give
strength to oppression and lustre to pride: let it be for the furnace
and for the loom of England, as they have already richly earned, still
more abundantly to bestow, comfort on the indigent, civilization on the
rude, and to dispense, through the peaceful homes of nations, the grace
and the preciousness of simple adornment, and useful possession.
LECTURE IV.
INFLUENCE OF IMAGINATION IN ARCHITECTURE
_An Address Delivered to the Members of the Architectural
Association, in Lyon's Inn Hall, 1857._
If we were to be asked abruptly, and required to answer briefly, what
qualities chiefly distinguish great artists from feeble artists, we
should answer, I suppose, first, their sensibility and tenderness;
secondly, their imagination; and thirdly, their industry. Some of us
might, perhaps, doubt the justice of attaching so much importance to
this last character, because we have all known clever men who were
indolent, and dull men who were industrious. But though you may have
known clever men who were indolent, you never knew a great man who was
so; and, during such investigation as I have been able to give to the
lives of the artists whose works are in all points noblest, no fact
ever looms so large upon me--no law remains so steadfast in the
universality of its application, as the fact and law that they are all
great workers: nothing concerning them is matter of more astonishment
than the quantity they have accomplished in the given length of their
life; and when I hear a young man spoken of, as giving promise of high
genius, the first question I ask about him is always--
Does he work?
But though this quality of industry is essential to an artist, it does
not in anywise make an artist; many people are busy, whose doings are
little worth. Neither does sensibility make an artist; since, as I
hope, many can feel both strongly and nobly, who yet care nothing about
art. But the gifts which distinctively mark the artist--_without_
which he must be feeble in life, forgotten in death--_with_ which
he may become one of the shakers of the earth, and one of the signal
lights in heaven--are those of sympathy and imagination. I will not
occupy your time, nor incur the risk of your dissent, by endeavouring
to give any close definition of this last word. We all have a general
and sufficient idea of imagination, and of its work with our hands and
in our hearts: we understand it, I suppose, as the imaging or picturing
of new things in our thoughts; and we always show an involuntary
respect for this power, wherever we can recognize it, acknowledging it
to be a greater power than manipulation, or calculation, or
observation, or any other human faculty. If we see an old woman
spinning at the fireside, and distributing her thread dexterously from
the distaff, we respect her for her manipulation--if we ask her how
much she expects to make in a year, and she answers quickly, we respect
her for her calculation--if she is watching at the same time that none
of her grandchildren fall into the fire, we respect her for her
observation--yet for all this she may still be a commonplace old woman
enough. But if she is all the time telling her grandchildren a fairy
tale out of her head, we praise her for her imagination, and say, she
must be a rather remarkable old woman. Precisely in like manner, if an
architect does his working-drawing well, we praise him for his
manipulation--if he keeps closely within his contract, we praise him
for his honest arithmetic--if he looks well to the laying of his beams,
so that nobody shall drop through the floor, we praise him for his
observation. But he must, somehow, tell us a fairy tale out of his head
beside all this, else we cannot praise him for his imagination, nor
speak of him as we did of the old woman, as being in any wise out of
the common way, a rather remarkable architect. It seemed to me,
therefore, as if it might interest you to-night, if we were to consider
together what fairy tales are, in and by architecture, to be told--what
there is for you to do in this severe art of yours "out of your heads,"
as well as by your hands.
Perhaps the first idea which a young architect is apt to be allured by,
as a head-problem in these experimental days, is its being incumbent
upon him to invent a "new style" worthy of modern civilization in
general, and of England in particular; a style worthy of our engines
and telegraphs; as expansive as steam, and as sparkling as electricity.
But, if there are any of my hearers who have been impressed with this
sense of inventive duty, may I ask them first, whether their plan is
that every inventive architect among us shall invent a new style for
himself, and have a county set aside for his conceptions, or a province
for his practice? Or, must every architect invent a little piece of the
new style, and all put it together at last like a dissected map? And if
so, when the new style is invented, what is to be done next? I will
grant you this Eldorado of imagination--but can you have more than one
Columbus? Or, if you sail in company, and divide the prize of your
discovery and the honour thereof, who is to come after you clustered
Columbuses? to what fortunate islands of style are your architectural
descendants to sail, avaricious of new lands? When our desired style is
invented, will not the best we can all do be simply--to build in it?--
and cannot you now do that in styles that are known? Observe, I grant,
for the sake of your argument, what perhaps many of you know that I
would not grant otherwise--that a new style _can_ be invented. I
grant you not only this, but that it shall be wholly different from any
that was ever practised before. We will suppose that capitals are to be
at the bottom of pillars instead of the top; and that buttresses shall
be on the tops of pinnacles instead of at the bottom; that you roof
your apertures with stones which shall neither be arched nor
horizontal; and that you compose your decoration of lines which shall
neither be crooked nor straight. The furnace and the forge shall be at
your service: you shall draw out your plates of glass and beat out your
bars of iron till you have encompassed us all,--if your style is of the
practical kind,--with endless perspective of black skeleton and
blinding square,--or if your style is to be of the ideal kind--you
shall wreathe your streets with ductile leafage, and roof them with
variegated crystal--you shall put, if you will, all London under one
blazing dome of many colours that shall light the clouds round it with
its flashing, as far as to the sea. And still, I ask you, What after
this? Do you suppose those imaginations of yours will ever lie down
there asleep beneath the shade of your iron leafage, or within the
coloured light of your enchanted dome? Not so. Those souls, and
fancies, and ambitions of yours, are wholly infinite; and, whatever may
be done by others, you will still want to do something for yourselves;
if you cannot rest content with Palladio, neither will you with Paxton:
all the metal and glass that ever were melted have not so much weight
in them as will clog the wings of one human spirit's aspiration.
If you will think over this quietly by yourselves, and can get the
noise out of your ears of the perpetual, empty, idle, incomparably
idiotic talk about the necessity of some novelty in architecture, you
will soon see that the very essence of a Style, properly so called, is
that it should be practised _for ages_, and applied to all
purposes; and that so long as any given style is in practice, all that
is left for individual imagination to accomplish must be within the
scope of that style, not in the invention of a new one. If there are
any here, therefore, who hope to obtain celebrity by the invention of
some strange way of building which must convince all Europe into its
adoption, to them, for the moment, I must not be understood to address
myself, but only to those who would be content with that degree of
celebrity which an artist may enjoy who works in the manner of his
forefathers;--which the builder of Salisbury Cathedral might enjoy in
England, though he did not invent Gothic; and which Titian might enjoy
at Venice, though he did not invent oil painting. Addressing myself
then to those humbler, but wiser, or rather, only wise students who are
content to avail themselves of some system of building already
understood, let us consider together what room for the exercise of the
imagination may be left to us under such conditions. And, first, I
suppose it will be said, or thought, that the architect's principal
field for exercise of his invention must be in the disposition of
lines, mouldings, and masses, in agreeable proportions. Indeed, if you
adopt some styles of architecture, you cannot exercise invention in any
other way. And I admit that it requires genius and special gift to do
this rightly. Not by rule, nor by study, can the gift of graceful
proportionate design be obtained; only by the intuition of genius can
so much as a single tier of façade be beautifully arranged; and the man
has just cause for pride, as far as our gifts can ever be a cause for
pride, who finds himself able, in a design of his own, to rival even
the simplest arrangement of parts in one by Sanmicheli, Inigo Jones, or
Christopher Wren.
Invention, then, and genius being granted, as necessary to accomplish
this, let me ask you, What, after all, with this special gift and
genius, you _have_ accomplished, when you have arranged the lines
of a building beautifully?
In the first place you will not, I think, tell me that the beauty there
attained is of a touching or pathetic kind. A well-disposed group of
notes in music will make you sometimes weep and sometimes laugh. You
can express the depth of all affections by those dispositions of sound:
you can give courage to the soldier, language to the lover, consolation
to the mourner, more joy to the joyful, more humility to the devout.
Can you do as much by your group of lines? Do you suppose the front of
Whitehall, a singularly beautiful one ever inspires the two Horse
Guards, during the hour they sit opposite to it, with military ardour?
Do you think that the lovers in our London walk down to the front of
Whitehall for consolation when mistresses are unkind; or that any
person wavering in duty, or feeble in faith, was ever confirmed in
purpose or in creed by the pathetic appeal of those harmonious
architraves? You will not say so. Then, if they cannot touch, or
inspire, or comfort any one, can your architectural proportions amuse
any one? Christmas is just over; you have doubtless been at many merry
parties during the period. Can you remember any in which architectural
proportions contributed to the entertainment of the evening?
Proportions of notes in music were, I am sure, essential to your
amusement; the setting of flowers in hair, and of ribands on dresses,
were also subjects of frequent admiration with you, not inessential to
your happiness. Among the juvenile members of your society the
proportion of currants in cake, and of sugar in comfits, became
subjects of acute interest; and, when such proportions were harmonious,
motives also of gratitude to cook and to confectioner. But did you ever
see either young or old amused by the architrave of the door? Or
otherwise interested in the proportions of the room than as they
admitted more or fewer friendly faces? Nay, if all the amusement that
there is in the best proportioned architecture of London could be
concentrated into one evening, and you were to issue tickets for
nothing to this great proportional entertainment;--how do you think it
would stand between you and the Drury pantomine?
You are, then, remember, granted to be people of genius--great and
admirable; and you devote your lives to your art, but you admit that
you cannot comfort anybody, you cannot encourage anybody, you cannot
improve anybody, and you cannot amuse anybody. I proceed then farther
to ask, Can you inform anybody? Many sciences cannot be considered as
highly touching or emotional; nay, perhaps not specially amusing;
scientific men may sometimes, in these respects, stand on the same
ground with you. As far as we can judge by the results of the late war,
science helps our soldiers about as much as the front of Whitehall; and
at the Christmas parties, the children wanted no geologists to tell
them about the behaviour of bears and dragons in Queen Elizabeth's
time. Still, your man of science teaches you something; he may be dull
at a party, or helpless in a battle, he is not always that; but he can
give you, at all events, knowledge of noble facts, and open to you the
secrets of the earth and air. Will your architectural proportions do as
much? Your genius is granted, and your life is given, and what do you
teach us?--Nothing, I believe, from one end of that life to the other,
but that two and two make four, and that one is to two as three is to
six.
You cannot, then, it is admitted, comfort any one, serve or amuse any
one, nor teach any one. Finally, I ask, Can you be of _Use_ to any
one? "Yes," you reply; "certainly we are of some use--we architects--in
a climate like this, where it always rains." You are of use certainly;
but, pardon me, only as builders--not as proportionalists. We are not
talking of building as a protection, but only of that special work
which your genius is to do; not of building substantial and comfortable
houses like Mr. Cubitt, but of putting beautiful façades on them like
Inigo Jones. And, again, I ask--Are you of use to any one? Will your
proportions of the façade heal the sick, or clothe the naked? Supposing
you devoted your lives to be merchants, you might reflect at the close
of them, how many, fainting for want, you had brought corn to sustain;
how many, infected with disease, you had brought balms to heal; how
widely, among multitudes of far-away nations, you had scattered the
first seeds of national power, and guided the first rays of sacred
light. Had you been, in fine, _anything_ else in the world
_but_ architectural designers, you might have been of some use or
good to people. Content to be petty tradesmen, you would have saved the
time of mankind;--rough-handed daily labourers, you would have added to
their stock of food or of clothing. But, being men of genius, and
devoting your lives to the exquisite exposition of this genius, on what
achievements do you think the memories of your old age are to fasten?
Whose gratitude will surround you with its glow, or on what
accomplished good, of that greatest kind for which men show _no_
gratitude, will your life rest the contentment of its close? Truly, I
fear that the ghosts of proportionate lines will be thin phantoms at
your bedsides--very speechless to you; and that on all the emanations
of your high genius you will look back with less delight than you might
have done on a cup of cold water given to him who was thirsty, or to a
single moment when you had "prevented with your bread him that fled."