imagination must be vigorous in proportion to the quantity of material
which it has to handle; and that, just as we increase the range of what
we see, we increase the richness of what we can imagine. Granting this,
consider what a field is opened to your fancy merely in the subject
matter which architecture admits. Nearly every other art is severely
limited in its subjects--the landscape painter, for instance, gets
little help from the aspects of beautiful humanity; the historical
painter, less, perhaps, than he ought, from the accidents of wild
nature; and the pure sculptor, still less, from the minor details of
common life. But is there anything within range of sight, or
conception, which may not be of use to _you_, or in which your
interest may not be excited with advantage to your art? From visions of
angels, down to the least important gesture of a child at play,
whatever may be conceived of Divine, or beheld of Human, may be dared
or adopted by you: throughout the kingdom of animal life, no creature
is so vast, or so minute, that you cannot deal with it, or bring it
into service; the lion and the crocodile will couch about your shafts;
the moth and the bee will sun themselves upon your flowers; for you,
the fawn will leap; for you, the snail be slow; for you, the dove
smooth her bosom; and the hawk spread her wings toward the south. All
the wide world of vegetation blooms and bends for you; the leaves
tremble that you may bid them be still under the marble snow; the thorn
and the thistle, which the earth casts forth as evil, are to you the
kindliest servants; no dying petal, nor drooping tendril, is so feeble
as to have no more help for you; no robed pride of blossom so kingly,
but it will lay aside its purple to receive at your hands the pale
immortality. Is there anything in common life too mean,--in common too
trivial,--to be ennobled by your touch? As there is nothing in life, so
there is nothing in lifelessness which has not its lesson for you, or
its gift; and when you are tired of watching the strength of the plume,
and the tenderness of the leaf, you may walk down to your rough river
shore, or into the thickest markets of your thoroughfares, and there is
not a piece of torn cable that will not twine into a perfect moulding;
there is not a fragment of cast-away matting, or shattered basket-work,
that will not work into a chequer or capital. Yes: and if you gather up
the very sand, and break the stone on which you tread, among its
fragments of all but invisible shells you will find forms that will
take their place, and that proudly, among the starred traceries of your
vaulting; and you, who can crown the mountain with its fortress, and
the city with its towers, are thus able also to give beauty to ashes,
and worthiness to dust.
Now, in that your art presents all this material to you, you have
already much to rejoice in. But you have more to rejoice in, because
all this is submitted to you, not to be dissected or analyzed, but to
be sympathized with, and to bring out, therefore, what may be
accurately called the moral part of imagination. We saw that, if we
kept ourselves among lines only, we should have cause to envy the
naturalist, because he was conversant with facts; but you will have
little to envy now, if you make yourselves conversant with the feelings
that arise out of his facts. For instance, the naturalist coming upon a
block of marble, has to begin considering immediately how far its
purple is owing to iron, or its whiteness to magnesia; he breaks his
piece of marble, and at the close of his day, has nothing but a little
sand in his crucible and some data added to the theory of the elements.
But _you_ approach your marble to sympathize with it, and rejoice
over its beauty. You cut it a little indeed; but only to bring out its
veins more perfectly; and at the end of your day's work you leave your
marble shaft with joy and complacency in its perfectness, as marble.
When you have to watch an animal instead of a stone, you differ from
the naturalist in the same way. He may, perhaps, if he be an amiable
naturalist, take delight in having living creatures round him;--still,
the major part of his work is, or has been, in counting feathers,
separating fibres, and analyzing structures. But _your_ work is
always with the living creature; the thing you have to get at in him is
his life, and ways of going about things. It does not matter to you how
many cells there are in his bones, or how many filaments in his
feathers; what you want is his moral character and way of behaving
himself; it is just that which your imagination, if healthy, will first
seize--just that which your chisel, if vigorous, will first cut. You
must get the storm spirit into your eagles, and the lordliness into
your lions, and the tripping fear into your fawns; and in order to do
this, you must be in continual sympathy with every fawn of them; and be
hand-in-glove with all the lions, and hand-in-claw with all the hawks.
And don't fancy that you will lower yourselves by sympathy with the
lower creatures; you cannot sympathize rightly with the higher, unless
you do with those: but you have to sympathize with the higher, too--
with queens, and kings, and martyrs, and angels. Yes, and above all,
and more than all, with simple humanity in all its needs and ways, for
there is not one hurried face that passes you in the street that will
not be impressive, if you can only fathom it. All history is open to
you, all high thoughts and dreams that the past fortunes of men can
suggest, all fairy land is open to you--no vision that ever haunted
forest, or gleamed over hill-side, but calls you to understand how it
came into men's hearts, and may still touch them; and all Paradise is
open to you--yes, and the work of Paradise; for in bringing all this,
in perpetual and attractive truth, before the eyes of your fellow-men,
you have to join in the employment of the angels, as well as to imagine
their companies.
And observe, in this last respect, what a peculiar importance, and
responsibility, are attached to your work, when you consider its
permanence, and the multitudes to whom it is addressed. We frequently
are led, by wise people, to consider what responsibility may sometimes
attach to words, which yet, the chance is, will be heard by few, and
forgotten as soon as heard. But none of _your_ words will be heard
by few, and none will be forgotten, for five or six hundred years, if
you build well. You will talk to all who pass by; and all those little
sympathies, those freaks of fancy, those jests in stone, those
workings-out of problems in caprice, will occupy mind after mind of
utterly countless multitudes, long after you are gone. You have not,
like authors, to plead for a hearing, or to fear oblivion. Do but build
large enough, and carve boldly enough, and all the world will hear you;
they cannot choose but look.
I do not mean to awe you by this thought; I do not mean that because
you will have so many witnesses and watchers, you are never to jest, or
do anything gaily or lightly; on the contrary, I have pleaded, from the
beginning, for this art of yours, especially because it has room for
the whole of your character--if jest is in you, let the jest be jested;
if mathematical ingenuity is yours, let your problem be put, and your
solution worked out, as quaintly as you choose; above all, see that
your work is easily and happily done, else it will never make anybody
else happy; but while you thus give the rein to all your impulses, see
that those impulses be headed and centred by one noble impulse; and let
that be Love--triple love--for the art which you practise, the creation
in which you move, and the creatures to whom you minister.
I. I say, first, Love for the art which you practise. Be assured that
if ever any other motive becomes a leading one in your mind, as the
principal one for exertion, except your love of art, that moment it is
all over with your art. I do not say you are to desire money, nor to
desire fame, nor to desire position; you cannot but desire all three;
nay, you may--if you are willing that I should use the word Love in a
desecrated sense--love all three; that is, passionately covet them, yet
you must not covet or love them in the first place. Men of strong
passions and imaginations must always care a great deal for anything
they care for at all; but the whole question is one of first or second.
Does your art lead you, or your gain lead you? You may like making
money exceedingly; but if it come to a fair question, whether you are
to make five hundred pounds less by this business, or to spoil your
building, and you choose to spoil your building, there's an end of you.
So you may be as thirsty for fame as a cricket is for cream; but, if it
come to a fair question, whether you are to please the mob, or do the
thing as you know it ought to be done; and you can't do both, and
choose to please the mob, it's all over with you--there's no hope for
you; nothing that you can do will ever be worth a man's glance as he
passes by. The test is absolute, inevitable--Is your art first with
you? Then you are artists; you may be, after you have made your money,
misers and usurers; you may be, after you have got your fame, jealous,
and proud, and wretched, and base: but yet, _as long as you won't
spoil your work_, you are artists. On the other hand--Is your money
first with you, and your fame first with you? Then, you may be very
charitable with your money, and very magnificent with your money, and
very graceful in the way you wear your reputation, and very courteous
to those beneath you, and very acceptable to those above you; but you
are _not artists_. You are mechanics, and drudges.
II. You must love the creation you work in the midst of. For, wholly in
proportion to the intensity of feeling which you bring to the subject
you have chosen, will be the depth and justice of our perception of its
character. And this depth of feeling is not to be gained on the
instant, when you want to bring it to bear on this or that. It is the
result of the general habit of striving to feel rightly; and, among
thousands of various means of doing this, perhaps the one I ought
specially to name to you, is the keeping yourselves clear of petty and
mean cares. Whatever you do, don't be anxious, nor fill your heads with
little chagrins and little desires. I have just said, that you may be
great artists, and yet be miserly and jealous, and troubled about many
things. So you may be; but I said also that the miserliness or trouble
must not be in your hearts all day. It is possible that you may get a
habit of saving money; or it is possible, at a time of great trial, you
may yield to the temptation of speaking unjustly of a rival,--and you
will shorten your powers arid dim your sight even by this;--but the
thing that you have to dread far more than any such unconscious habit,
or--any such momentary fall--is the _constancy of small emotions_;--the
anxiety whether Mr. So-and-so will like your work; whether such and such
a workman will do all that you want of him, and so on;--not wrong feelings
or anxieties in themselves, but impertinent, and wholly incompatible with
the full exercise of your imagination.
Keep yourselves, therefore, quiet, peaceful, with your eyes open. It
doesn't matter at all what Mr. So-and-so thinks of your work; but it
matters a great deal what that bird is doing up there in its nest, or
how that vagabond child at the street corner is managing his game of
knuckle-down. And remember, you cannot turn aside from your own
interests, to the birds' and the children's interests, unless you have
long before got into the habit of loving and watching birds and
children; so that it all comes at last to the forgetting yourselves,
and the living out of yourselves, in the calm of the great world, or if
you will, in its agitation; but always in a calm of your own bringing.
Do not think it wasted time to submit yourselves to any influence which
may bring upon you any noble feeling. Rise early, always watch the
sunrise, and the way the clouds break from the dawn; you will cast your
statue-draperies in quite another than your common way, when the
remembrance of that cloud motion is with you, and of the scarlet
vesture of the morning. Live always in the springtime in the country;
you do not know what leaf-form means, unless you have seen the buds
burst, and the young leaves breathing low in the sunshine, and
wondering at the first shower of rain. But above all, accustom
yourselves to look for, and to love, all nobleness of gesture and
feature in the human form; and remember that the highest nobleness is
usually among the aged, the poor, and the infirm; you will find, in the
end, that it is not the strong arm of the soldier, nor the laugh of the
young beauty, that are the best studies for you. Look at them, and look
at them reverently; but be assured that endurance is nobler than
strength, and patience than beauty; and that it is not in the high
church pews, where the gay dresses are, but in the church free seats,
where the widows' weeds are, that you may see the faces that will fit
best between the angels' wings, in the church porch.
III. And therefore, lastly, and chiefly, you must love the creatures to
whom you minister, your fellow-men; for, if you do not love them, not
only will you be little interested in the passing events of life, but
in all your gazing at humanity, you will be apt to be struck only by
outside form, and not by expression. It is only kindness and tenderness
which will ever enable you to see what beauty there is in the dark eyes
that are sunk with weeping, and in the paleness of those fixed faces
which the earth's adversity has compassed about, till they shine in
their patience like dying watchfires through twilight. But it is not
this only which makes it needful for you, if you would be great, to be
also kind; there is a most important and all-essential reason in the
very nature of your own art. So soon as you desire to build largely,
and with addition of noble sculpture, you will find that your work must
be associative. You cannot carve a whole cathedral yourself--you can
carve but few and simple parts of it. Either your own work must be
disgraced in the mass of the collateral inferiority, or you must raise
your fellow-designers to correspondence of power. If you have genius,
you will yourselves take the lead in the building you design; you will
carve its porch and direct its disposition. But for all subsequent
advancement of its detail, you must trust to the agency and the
invention of others; and it rests with you either to repress what
faculties your workmen have, into cunning subordination to your own; or
to rejoice in discovering even the powers that may rival you, and
leading forth mind after mind into fellowship with your fancy, and
association with your fame.
I need not tell you that if you do the first--if you endeavour to
depress or disguise the talents of your subordinates--you are lost; for
nothing could imply more darkly and decisively than this, that your art
and your work were not beloved by you; that it was your own prosperity
that you were seeking, and your own skill only that you cared to
contemplate. I do not say that you must not be jealous at all; it is
rarely in human nature to be wholly without jealousy; and you may be
forgiven for going some day sadly home, when you find some youth,
unpractised and unapproved, giving the life-stroke to his work which
you, after years of training, perhaps, cannot reach; but your jealousy
must not conquer--your love of your building must conquer, helped by
your kindness of heart. See--I set no high or difficult standard before
you. I do not say that you are to surrender your pre-eminence in
_mere_ unselfish generosity. But I do say that you must surrender
your pre-eminence in your love of your building helped by your
kindness; and that whomsoever you find better able to do what will
adorn it than you,--that person you are to give place to; and to
console yourselves for the humiliation, first, by your joy in seeing
the edifice grow more beautiful under his chisel, and secondly, by your
sense of having done kindly and justly. But if you are morally strong
enough to make the kindness and justice the first motive, it will be
better;--best of all, if you do not consider it as kindness at all, but
bare and stern justice; for, truly, such help as we can give each other
in this world is a _debt_ to each other; and the man who perceives
a superiority or a capacity in a subordinate, and neither confesses,
nor assists it, is not merely the withholder of kindness, but the
committer of injury. But be the motive what you will, only see that you
do the thing; and take the joy of the consciousness that, as your art
embraces a wider field than all others--and addresses a vaster
multitude than all others--and is surer of audience than all others--so
it is profounder and holier in Fellowship than all others. The artist,
when his pupil is perfect, must see him leave his side that he may
declare his distinct, perhaps opponent, skill. Man of science wrestles
with man of science for priority of discovery, and pursues in pangs of
jealous haste his solitary inquiry. You alone are called by kindness,--
by necessity,--by equity, to fraternity of toil; and thus, in those
misty and massive piles which rise above the domestic roofs of our
ancient cities, there was--there may be again--a meaning more profound
and true than any that fancy so commonly has attached to them. Men say
their pinnacles point to heaven. Why, so does every tree that buds, and
every bird that rises as it sings. Men say their aisles are good for
worship. Why, so is every mountain glen, and rough sea-shore. But this
they have of distinct and indisputable glory,--that their mighty walls
were never raised, and never shall be, but by men who love and aid each
other in their weakness;--that all their interlacing strength of
vaulted stone has its foundation upon the stronger arches of manly
fellowship, and all their changing grace of depressed or lifted
pinnacle owes its cadence and completeness to sweeter symmetries of
human soul.
LECTURE V.
THE WORK OP IRON, IN NATURE, ART, AND POLICY.
_A Lecture Delivered at Tunbridge Wells, February, 1858._
When first I heard that you wished me to address you this evening, it
was a matter of some doubt with me whether I could find any subject
that would possess any sufficient interest for you to justify my
bringing you out of your comfortable houses on a winter's night. When I
venture to speak about my own special business of art, it is almost
always before students of art, among whom I may sometimes permit myself
to be dull, if I can feel that I am useful: but a mere talk about art,
especially without examples to refer to (and I have been unable to
prepare any careful illustrations for this lecture), is seldom of much
interest to a general audience. As I was considering what you might
best bear with me in speaking about, there came naturally into my mind
a subject connected with the origin and present prosperity of the town
you live in; and, it seemed to me, in the out-branchings of it, capable
of a very general interest. When, long ago (I am afraid to think how
long), Tunbridge Wells was my Switzerland, and I used to be brought
down here in the summer, a sufficiently active child, rejoicing in the
hope of clambering sandstone cliffs of stupendous height above the
common, there used sometimes, as, I suppose, there are in the lives of
all children at the Wells, to be dark days in my life--days of
condemnation to the pantiles and band--under which calamities my only
consolation used to be in watching, at every turn in my walk, the
welling forth of the spring over the orange rim of its marble basin.
The memory of the clear water, sparkling over its saffron stain, came
back to me as the strongest image connected with the place; and it
struck me that you might not be unwilling, to-night, to think a little
over the full significance of that saffron stain, and of the power, in
other ways and other functions, of the steelly element to which so many
here owe returning strength and life;--chief as it has been always, and
is yet more and more markedly so day by day, among the precious gifts
of the earth.
The subject is, of course, too wide to be more than suggestively
treated; and even my suggestions must be few, and drawn chiefly from my
own fields of work; nevertheless, I think I shall have time to indicate
some courses of thought which you may afterwards follow out for
yourselves if they interest you; and so I will not shrink from the full
scope of the subject which I have announced to you--the functions of
Iron, in Nature, Art, and Policy.
Without more preface, I will take up the first head.
I. IRON IN NATURE.--You all probably know that the ochreous stain,
which, perhaps, is often thought to spoil the basin of your spring, is
iron in a state of rust: and when you see rusty iron in other places
you generally think, not only that it spoils the places it stains, but
that it is spoiled itself--that rusty iron is spoiled iron.
For most of our uses it generally is so; and because we cannot use a
rusty knife or razor so well as a polished one, we suppose it to be a
great defect in iron that it is subject to rust. But not at all. On the
contrary, the most perfect and useful state of it is that ochreous
stain; and therefore it is endowed with so ready a disposition to get
itself into that state. It is not a fault in the iron, but a virtue, to
be so fond of getting rusted, for in that condition it fulfils its most
important functions in the universe, and most kindly duties to mankind.
Nay, in a certain sense, and almost a literal one, we may say that iron
rusted is Living; but when pure or polished, Dead. You all probably
know that in the mixed air we breathe, the part of it essentially
needful to us is called oxygen; and that this substance is to all
animals, in the most accurate sense of the word, "breath of life." The
nervous power of life is a different thing; but the supporting element
of the breath, without which the blood, and therefore the life, cannot
be nourished, is this oxygen. Now it is this very same air which the
iron breathes when it gets rusty. It takes the oxygen from the
atmosphere as eagerly as we do, though it uses it differently. The iron
keeps all that it gets; we, and other animals, part with it again; but
the metal absolutely keeps what it has once received of this aerial
gift; and the ochreous dust which we so much despise is, in fact, just
so much nobler than pure iron, in so far as it is _iron and the
air._ Nobler, and more useful--for, indeed, as I shall be able to
show you presently--the main service of this metal, and of all other
metals, to us, is not in making knives, and scissors, and pokers, and
pans, but in making the ground we feed from, and nearly all the
substances first needful to our existence. For these are all nothing
but metals and oxygen--metals with breath put into them. Sand, lime,
clay, and the rest of the earths--potash and soda, and the rest of the
alkalies--are all of them metals which have undergone this, so to
speak, vital change, and have been rendered fit for the service of man
by permanent unity with the purest air which he himself breathes. There
is only one metal which does not rust readily; and that, in its
influence on Man hitherto, has caused Death rather than Life; it will
not be put to its right use till it is made a pavement of, and so
trodden under foot.
Is there not something striking in this fact, considered largely as one
of the types, or lessons, furnished by the inanimate creation? Here you
have your hard, bright, cold, lifeless metal--good enough for swords
and scissors--but not for food. You think, perhaps, that your iron is
wonderfully useful in a pure form, but how would you like the world, if
all your meadows, instead of grass, grew nothing but iron wire--if all
your arable ground, instead of being made of sand and clay, were
suddenly turned into flat surfaces of steel--if the whole earth,
instead of its green and glowing sphere, rich with forest and flower,
showed nothing but the image of the vast furnace of a ghastly engine--a
globe of black, lifeless, excoriated metal? It would be that,--probably
it was once that; but assuredly it would be, were it not that all the
substance of which it is made sucks and breathes the brilliancy of the
atmosphere; and as it breathes, softening from its merciless hardness,
it falls into fruitful and beneficent dust; gathering itself again into
the earths from which we feed, and the stones with which we build;--
into the rocks that frame the mountains, and the sands that bind the
sea.