pebble at your feet, without being able to read, if you like, this
curious lesson in it. You look upon it at first as if it were earth
only. Nay, it answers, "I am not earth--I am earth and air in one; part
of that blue heaven which you love, and long for, is already in me; it
is all my life--without it I should be nothing, and able for nothing; I
could not minister to you, nor nourish you--I should be a cruel and
helpless thing; but, because there is, according to my need and place
in creation, a kind of soul in me, I have become capable of good, and
helpful in the circles of vitality."
Thus far the same interest attaches to all the earths, and all the
metals of which they are made; but a deeper interest, and larger
beneficence belong to that ochreous earth of iron which stains the
marble of your springs. It stains much besides that marble. It stains
the great earth wheresoever you can see it, far and wide--it is the
colouring substance appointed to colour the globe for the sight, as
well as subdue it to the service of man. You have just seen your hills
covered with snow, and, perhaps, have enjoyed, at first, the contrast
of their fair white with the dark blocks of pine woods; but have you
ever considered how you would like them always white--not pure white,
but dirty white--the white of thaw, with all the chill of snow in it,
but none of its brightness? That is what the colour of the earth would
be without its iron; that would be its colour, not here or there only,
but in all places, and at all times. Follow out that idea till you get
it in some detail. Think first of your pretty gravel walks in your
gardens, yellow and fine, like plots of sunshine between the flower-
beds; fancy them all suddenly turned to the colour of ashes. That is
what they would be without iron ochre. Think of your winding walks over
the common, as warm to the eye as they are dry to the foot, and imagine
them all laid down suddenly with gray cinders. Then pass beyond the
common into the country, and pause at the first ploughed field that you
see sweeping up the hill sides in the sun, with its deep brown furrows,
and wealth of ridges all a-glow, heaved aside by the ploughshare, like
deep folds of a mantle of russet velvet--fancy it all changed suddenly
into grisly furrows in a field of mud. That is what it would be without
iron. Pass on, in fancy, over hill and dale, till you reach the bending
line of the sea shore; go down upon its breezy beach--watch the white
foam flashing among the amber of it, and all the blue sea embayed in
belts of gold: then fancy those circlets of far sweeping shore suddenly
put into mounds of mourning--all those golden sands turned into gray
slime, the fairies no more able to call to each other, "Come unto these
yellow sands;" but, "Come unto these drab sands." That is what they
would be, without iron.
Iron is in some sort, therefore, the sunshine and light of landscape,
so far as that light depends on the ground; but it is a source of
another kind of sunshine, quite as important to us in the way we live
at present--sunshine, not of landscape, but of dwelling-place.
In these days of swift locomotion I may doubtless assume that most of
my audience have been somewhere out of England--have been in Scotland,
or France, or Switzerland. Whatever may have been their impression, on
returning to their own country, of its superiority or inferiority in
other respects, they cannot but have felt one thing about it--the
comfortable look of its towns and villages. Foreign towns are often
very picturesque, very beautiful, but they never have quite that look
of warm self-sufficiency and wholesome quiet, with which our villages
nestle themselves down among the green fields. If you will take the
trouble to examine into the sources of this impression, you will find
that by far the greater part of that warm and satisfactory appearance
depends upon the rich scarlet colour of the bricks and tiles. It does
not belong to the neat building--very neat building has an
uncomfortable rather than a comfortable look--but it depends on the
_warm_ building; our villages are dressed in red tiles as our old
women are in red cloaks; and it does not matter how worn the cloaks, or
how bent and bowed the roof may be, so long as there are no holes in
either one or the other, and the sobered but unextinguishable colour
still glows in the shadow of the hood, and burns among the green mosses
of the gable. And what do you suppose dyes your tiles of cottage roof?
You don't paint them. It is nature who puts all that lovely vermilion
into the clay for you; and all that lovely vermilion is this oxide of
iron. Think, therefore, what your streets of towns would become--ugly
enough, indeed, already, some of them, but still comfortable-looking--
if instead of that warm brick red, the houses became all pepper-and-
salt colour. Fancy your country villages changing from that homely
scarlet of theirs which, in its sweet suggestion of laborious peace, is
as honourable as the soldiers' scarlet of laborious battle--suppose all
those cottage roofs, I say, turned at once into the colour of unbaked
clay, the colour of street gutters in rainy weather. That's what they
would be, without iron.
There is, however, yet another effect of colour in our English country
towns which, perhaps, you may not all yourselves have noticed, but for
which you must take the word of a sketcher. They are not so often
merely warm scarlet as they are warm purple;--a more beautiful colour
still: and they owe this colour to a mingling with the vermilion of the
deep grayish or purple hue of our fine Welsh slates on the more
respectable roofs, made more blue still by the colour of intervening
atmosphere. If you examine one of these Welsh slates freshly broken,
you will find its purple colour clear and vivid; and although never
strikingly so after it has been long exposed to weather, it always
retains enough of the tint to give rich harmonies of distant purple in
opposition to the green of our woods and fields. Whatever brightness or
power there is in the hue is entirely owing to the oxide of iron.
Without it the slates would either be pale stone colour, or cold gray,
or black.
Thus far we have only been considering the use and pleasantness of iron
in the common earth of clay. But there are three kinds of earth which
in mixed mass and prevalent quantity, form the world. Those are, in
common language, the earths of clay, of lime, and of flint. Many other
elements are mingled with these in sparing quantities; but the great
frame and substance of the earth is made of these three, so that
wherever you stand on solid ground, in any country of the globe, the
thing that is mainly under your feet will be either clay, limestone, or
some condition of the earth of flint, mingled with both.
These being what we have usually to deal with, Nature seems to have set
herself to make these three substances as interesting to us, and as
beautiful for us, as she can. The clay, being a soft and changeable
substance, she doesn't take much pains about, as we have seen, till it
is baked; she brings the colour into it only when it receives a
permanent form. But the limestone and flint she paints, in her own way,
in their native state: and her object in painting them seems to be much
the same as in her painting of flowers; to draw us, careless and idle
human creatures, to watch her a little, and see what she is about--that
being on the whole good for us,--her children. For Nature is always
carrying on very strange work with this limestone and flint of hers:
laying down beds of them at the bottom of the sea; building islands out
of the sea; filling chinks and veins in mountains with curious
treasures; petrifying mosses, and trees, and shells; in fact, carrying
on all sorts of business, subterranean or submarine, which it would be
highly desirable for us, who profit and live by it, to notice as it
goes on. And apparently to lead us to do this, she makes picture-books
for us of limestone and flint; and tempts us, like foolish children as
we are, to read her books by the pretty colours in them. The pretty
colours in her limestone-books form those variegated marbles which all
mankind have taken delight to polish and build with from the beginning
of time; and the pretty colours in her flint-books form those agates,
jaspers, cornelians, bloodstones, onyxes, cairngorms, chrysoprases,
which men have in like manner taken delight to cut, and polish, and
make ornaments of, from the beginning of time; and yet, so much of
babies are they, and so fond of looking at the pictures instead of
reading the book, that I question whether, after six thousand years of
cutting and polishing, there are above two or three people out of any
given hundred, who know, or care to know, how a bit of agate or a bit
of marble was made, or painted.
How it was made, may not be always very easy to say; but with what it
was painted there is no manner of question. All those beautiful violet
veinings and variegations of the marbles of Sicily and Spain, the
glowing orange and amber colours of those of Siena, the deep russet of
the Rosso antico, and the blood-colour of all the precious jaspers that
enrich the temples of Italy; and, finally, all the lovely transitions
of tint in the pebbles of Scotland and the Rhine, which form, though
not the most precious, by far the most interesting portion of our
modern jewellers' work;--all these are painted by nature with this one
material only, variously proportioned and applied--the oxide of iron
that stains your Tunbridge springs.
But this is not all, nor the best part of the work of iron. Its service
in producing these beautiful stones is only rendered to rich people,
who can afford to quarry and polish them. But Nature paints for all the
world, poor and rich together: and while, therefore, she thus adorns
the innermost rocks of her hills, to tempt your investigation, or
indulge your luxury,--she paints, far more carefully, the outsides of
the hills, which are for the eyes of the shepherd and the ploughman. I
spoke just now of the effect in the roofs of our villages of their
purple slates: but if the slates are beautiful even in their flat and
formal rows on house-roofs, much more are they beautiful on the rugged
crests and flanks of their native mountains. Have you ever considered,
in speaking as we do so often of distant blue hills, what it is that
makes them blue? To a certain extent it is distance; but distance alone
will not do it. Many hills look white, however distant. That lovely
dark purple colour of our Welsh and Highland hills is owing, not to
their distance merely, but to their rocks. Some of their rocks are,
indeed, too dark to be beautiful, being black or ashy gray; owing to
imperfect and porous structure. But when you see this dark colour
dashed with russet and blue, and coming out in masses among the green
ferns, so purple that you can hardly tell at first whether it is rock
or heather, then you must thank your old Tunbridge friend, the oxide of
iron.
But this is not all. It is necessary for the beauty of hill scenery
that Nature should colour not only her soft rocks, but her hard ones;
and she colours them with the same thing, only more beautifully.
Perhaps you have wondered at my use of the word "purple," so often of
stones; but the Greeks, and still more the Romans, who had profound
respect for purple, used it of stone long ago. You have all heard of
"porphyry" as among the most precious of the harder massive stones. The
colour which gave it that noble name, as well as that which gives the
flush to all the rosy granite of Egypt--yes, and to the rosiest summits
of the Alps themselves--is still owing to the same substance--your
humble oxide of iron.
And last of all:
A nobler colour than all these--the noblest colour ever seen on this
earth--one which belongs to a strength greater than that of the
Egyptian granite, and to a beauty greater than that of the sunset or
the rose--is still mysteriously connected with the presence of this
dark iron. I believe it is not ascertained on what the crimson of blood
actually depends; but the colour is connected, of course, with its
vitality, and that vitality with the existence of iron as one of its
substantial elements.
Is it not strange to find this stern and strong metal mingled so
delicately in our human life, that we cannot even blush without its
help? Think of it, my fair and gentle hearers; how terrible the
alternative--sometimes you have actually no choice but to be brazen-
faced, or iron-faced!
In this slight review of some of the functions of the metal, you
observe that I confine myself strictly to its operations as a colouring
element. I should only confuse your conception of the facts, if I
endeavoured to describe its uses as a substantial element, either in
strengthening rocks, or influencing vegetation by the decomposition of
rocks. I have not, therefore, even glanced at any of the more serious
uses of the metal in the economy of nature. But what I wish you to
carry clearly away with you is the remembrance that in all these uses
the metal would be nothing without the air. The pure metal has no
power, and never occurs in nature at all except in meteoric stones,
whose fall no one can account for, and which are useless after they
have fallen: in the necessary work of the world, the iron is invariably
joined with the oxygen, and would be capable of no service or beauty
whatever without it.
II. IRON IN ART.--Passing, then, from the offices of the metal in the
operations of nature to its uses in the hands of man, you must
remember, in the outset, that the type which has been thus given you,
by the lifeless metal, of the action of body and soul together, has
noble antitype in the operation of all human power. All art worthy the
name is the energy--neither of the human body alone, nor of the human
soul alone, but of both united, one guiding the other: good
craftsmanship and work of the fingers, joined with good emotion and
work of the heart.
There is no good art, nor possible judgment of art, when these two are
not united; yet we are constantly trying to separate them. Our amateurs
cannot be persuaded but that they may produce some kind of art by their
fancy or sensibility, without going through the necessary manual toil.
That is entirely hopeless. Without a certain number, and that a very
great number, of steady acts of hand--a practice as careful and
constant as would be necessary to learn any other manual business--no
drawing is possible. On the other side, the workman, and those who
employ him, are continually trying to produce art by trick or habit of
fingers, without using their fancy or sensibility. That also is
hopeless. Without mingling of heart-passion with hand-power, no art is
possible. [Footnote: No fine art, that is. See the previous definition
of fine art at p. 38.] The highest art unites both in their intensest
degrees: the action of the hand at its finest, with that of the heart
at its fullest.
Hence it follows that the utmost power of art can only be given in a
material capable of receiving and retaining the influence of the
subtlest touch of the human hand. That hand is the most perfect agent
of material power existing in the universe; and its full subtlety can
only be shown when the material it works on, or with, is entirely
yielding. The chords of a perfect instrument will receive it, but not
of an imperfect one; the softly bending point of the hair pencil, and
soft melting of colour, will receive it, but not even the chalk or pen
point, still less the steel point, chisel, or marble. The hand of a
sculptor may, indeed, be as subtle as that of a painter, but all its
subtlety is not bestowable nor expressible: the touch of Titian,
Correggio, or Turner, [Footnote: See Appendix IV., "Subtlety of Hand."]
is a far more marvellous piece of nervous action than can be shown in
anything but colour, or in the very highest conditions of executive
expression in music. In proportion as the material worked upon is less
delicate, the execution necessarily becomes lower, and the art with it.
This is one main principle of all work. Another is, that whatever the
material you choose to work with, your art is base if it does not bring
out the distinctive qualities of that material.
The reason of this second law is, that if you don't want the qualities
of the substance you use, you ought to use some other substance: it can
be only affectation, and desire to display your skill, that lead you to
employ a refractory substance, and therefore your art will all be base.
Glass, for instance, is eminently, in its nature, transparent. If you
don't want transparency, let the glass alone. Do not try to make a
window look like an opaque picture, but take an opaque ground to begin
with. Again, marble is eminently a solid and massive substance. Unless
you want mass and solidity, don't work in marble. If you wish for
lightness, take wood; if for freedom, take stucco; if for ductility,
take glass. Don't try to carve leathers, or trees, or nets, or foam,
out of marble. Carve white limbs and broad breasts only out of that.
So again, iron is eminently a ductile and tenacious substance--
tenacious above all things, ductile more than most. When you want
tenacity, therefore, and involved form, take iron. It is eminently made
for that. It is the material given to the sculptor as the companion of
marble, with a message, as plain as it can well be spoken, from the
lips of the earth-mother, "Here's for you to cut, and here's for you to
hammer. Shape this, and twist that. What is solid and simple, carve
out; what is thin and entangled, beat out. I give you all kinds of
forms to be delighted in;--fluttering leaves as well as fair bodies;
twisted branches as well as open brows. The leaf and the branch you may
beat and drag into their imagery: the body and brow you shall
reverently touch into their imagery. And if you choose rightly and work
rightly, what you do shall be safe afterwards. Your slender leaves
shall not break off in my tenacious iron, though they may be rusted a
little with an iron autumn. Your broad surfaces shall not be unsmoothed
in my pure crystalline marble--no decay shall touch them. But if you
carve in the marble what will break with a touch, or mould in the metal
what a stain of rust or verdigris will spoil, it is your fault--not
mine."
These are the main principles in this matter; which, like nearly all
other right principles in art, we moderns delight in contradicting as
directly and specially as may be. We continually look for, and praise,
in our exhibitions the sculpture of veils, and lace, and thin leaves,
and all kinds of impossible things pushed as far as possible in the
fragile stone, for the sake of showing the sculptor's dexterity.
[Footnote: I do not mean to attach any degree of blame to the effort to
represent leafage in marble for certain expressive purposes. The later
works of Mr. Munro have depended for some of their most tender thoughts
on a delicate and skilful use of such accessories. And in general, leaf
sculpture is good and admirable, if it renders, as in Gothic work, the
grace and lightness of the leaf by the arrangement of light and shadow
--supporting the masses well by strength of stone below; but all carving
is base which proposes to itself _slightness_ as an aim, and tries
to imitate the absolute thinness of thin or slight things, as much
modern wood carving does, I saw in Italy, a year or two ago, a marble
sculpture of birds' nests.] On the other hand, we _cast_ our iron
into bars--brittle, though an inch thick--sharpen them at the ends,
and consider fences, and other work, made of such materials,
decorative! I do not believe it would be easy to calculate the amount
of mischief done to our taste in England by that fence iron-work of
ours alone. If it were asked of us by a single characteristic, to
distinguish the dwellings of a country into two broad sections; and to
set, on one side, the places where people were, for the most part,
simple, happy, benevolent, and honest; and, on the other side, the
places where at least a great number of the people were sophisticated,
unkind, uncomfortable, and unprincipled, there is, I think, one feature
that you could fix upon as a positive test: the uncomfortable and
unprincipled parts of a country would be the parts where people lived
among iron railings, and the comfortable and principled parts where
they had none. A broad generalization, you will say! Perhaps a little
too broad; yet, in all sobriety, it will come truer than you think.
Consider every other kind of fence or defence, and you will find some
virtue in it; but in the iron railing none. There is, first, your
castle rampart of stone--somewhat too grand to be considered here among
our types of fencing; next, your garden or park wall of brick, which
has indeed often an unkind look on the outside, but there is more
modesty in it than unkindness. It generally means, not that the builder
of it wants to shut you out from the view of his garden, but from the
view of himself: it is a frank statement that as he needs a certain
portion of time to himself, so he needs a certain portion of ground to
himself, and must not be stared at when he digs there in his shirt-
sleeves, or plays at leapfrog with his boys from school, or talks over
old times with his wife, walking up and down in the evening sunshine.
Besides, the brick wall has good practical service in it, and shelters
you from the east wind, and ripens your peaches and nectarines, and
glows in autumn like a sunny bank. And, moreover, your brick wall, if
you build it properly, so that it shall stand long enough, is a
beautiful thing when it is old, and has assumed its grave purple red,
touched with mossy green.
Next to your lordly wall, in dignity of enclosure, comes your close-set
wooden paling, which is more objectionable, because it commonly means
enclosure on a larger scale than people want. Still it is significative
of pleasant parks, and well-kept field walks, and herds of deer, and
other such aristocratic pastoralisms, which have here and there their
proper place in a country, and may be passed without any discredit.
Next to your paling, comes your low stone dyke, your mountain fence,
indicative at a glance either of wild hill country, or of beds of stone
beneath the soil; the hedge of the mountains--delightful in all its
associations, and yet more in the varied and craggy forms of the loose
stones it is built of; and next to the low stone wall, your lowland
hedge, either in trim line of massive green, suggested of the
pleasances of old Elizabethan houses, and smooth alleys for aged feet,
and quaint labyrinths for young ones, or else in fair entanglement of
eglantine and virgin's bower, tossing its scented luxuriance along our
country waysides;--how many such you have here among your pretty hills,
fruitful with black clusters of the bramble for boys in autumn, and
crimson hawthorn berries for birds in winter. And then last, and most
difficult to class among fences, comes your handrail, expressive of all
sorts of things; sometimes having a knowing and vicious look, which it
learns at race-courses; sometimes an innocent and tender look, which it
learns at rustic bridges over cressy brooks; and sometimes a prudent
and protective look, which it learns on passes of the Alps, where it
has posts of granite and bars of pine, and guards the brows of cliffs
and the banks of torrents. So that in all these kinds of defence there
is some good, pleasant, or noble meaning. But what meaning has the iron
railing? Either, observe, that you are living in the midst of such bad
characters that you must keep them out by main force of bar, or that
you are yourself of a character requiring to be kept inside in the same
manner. Your iron railing always means thieves outside, or Bedlam
inside; it _can_ mean nothing else than that. If the people
outside were good for anything, a hint in the way of fence would be
enough for them; but because they are violent and at enmity with you,
you are forced to put the close bars and the spikes at the top.