Our subject of inquiry to-day, you will remember, is the mode in
which fine art is founded upon, or may contribute to, the practical
requirements of human life.
Its offices in this respect are mainly twofold: it gives Form to
knowledge, and Grace to utility; that is to say, it makes permanently
visible to us things which otherwise could neither be described by
our science, nor retained by our memory; and it gives delightfulness
and worth to the implements of daily use, and materials of dress,
furniture and lodging. In the first of these offices it gives
precision and charm to truth; in the second it gives precision and
charm to service. For, the moment we make anything useful thoroughly,
it is a law of nature that we shall be pleased with ourselves, and
with the thing we have made; and become desirous therefore to adorn
or complete it, in some dainty way, with finer art expressive of our
pleasure.
And the point I wish chiefly to bring before you today is this close
and healthy connection of the fine arts with material use; but I must
first try briefly to put in clear light the function of art in giving
Form to truth.
Much that I have hitherto tried to teach has been disputed on the
ground that I have attached too much importance to art as representing
natural facts, and too little to it as a source of pleasure. And I
wish, in the close of these four prefatory lectures, strongly to
assert to you, and, so far as I can in the time, convince you, that
the entire vitality of art depends upon its being either full of
truth, or full of use; and that, however pleasant, wonderful, or
impressive it may be in itself, it must yet be of inferior kind, and
tend to deeper inferiority, unless it has clearly one of these main
objects,--either to _state a true thing_, or to _adorn a serviceable
one_. It must never exist alone,--never for itself; it exists rightly
only when it is the means of knowledge, or the grace of agency for
life.
Now, I pray you to observe--for though I have said this often before,
I have never yet said it clearly enough--every good piece of art, to
whichever of these ends it may be directed, involves first essentially
the evidence of human skill, and the formation of an actually
beautiful thing by it.
Skill and beauty, always, then; and, beyond these, the formative arts
have always one or other of the two objects which I have just defined
to you--truth, or serviceableness; and without these aims neither
the skill nor their beauty will avail; only by these can either
legitimately reign. All the graphic arts begin in keeping the outline
of shadow that we have loved, and they end in giving to it the aspect
of life; and all the architectural arts begin in the shaping of the
cup and the platter, and they end in a glorified roof.
Therefore, you see, in the graphic arts you have Skill, Beauty, and
Likeness; and in the architectural arts Skill, Beauty, and Use: and
you _must_ have the three in each group, balanced and co-ordinate; and
all the chief errors of art consist in losing or exaggerating one of
these elements.
For instance, almost the whole system and hope of modern life are
founded on the notion that you may substitute mechanism for skill,
photograph for picture, cast-iron for sculpture. That is your main
nineteenth-century faith, or infidelity. You think you can get
everything by grinding--music, literature, and painting. You will find
it grievously not so; you can get nothing but dust by mere grinding.
Even to have the barley-meal out of it, you must have the barley
first; and that comes by growth, not grinding. But essentially, we
have lost our delight in Skill; in that majesty of it which I was
trying to make clear to you in my last address, and which long
ago[187] I tried to express, under the head of ideas of power. The
entire sense of that, we have lost, because we ourselves do not take
pains enough to do right, and have no conception of what the right
costs; so that all the joy and reverence we ought to feel in looking
at a strong man's work have ceased in us. We keep them yet a little in
looking at a honeycomb or a bird's-nest; we understand that these
differ, by divinity of skill, from a lump of wax or a cluster of
sticks. But a picture, which is a much more wonderful thing than a
honeycomb or a bird's-nest,--have we not known people, and sensible
people too, who expected to be taught to produce that, in six lessons?
Well, you must have the skill, you must have the beauty, which is the
highest moral element; and then, lastly, you must have the verity or
utility, which is not the moral, but the vital element; and this
desire for verity and use is the one aim of the three that always
leads in great schools, and in the minds of great masters, without any
exception. They will permit themselves in awkwardness, they will
permit themselves in ugliness;--but they will never permit themselves
in uselessness or in unveracity.
And farther, as their skill increases, and as their grace, so much
more their desire for truth. It is impossible to find the three
motives in fairer balance and harmony than in our own Reynolds. He
rejoices in showing you his skill; and those of you who succeed in
learning what painters' work really is, will one day rejoice also,
even to laughter--that highest laughter which springs of pure delight,
in watching the fortitude and the fire of a hand which strikes forth
its will upon the canvas as easily as the wind strikes it on the sea.
He rejoices in all abstract beauty and rhythm and melody of design; he
will never give you a colour that is not lovely, nor a shade that is
unnecessary, nor a line that is ungraceful. But all his power and all
his invention are held by him subordinate,--and the more obediently
because of their nobleness,-to his true leading purpose of setting
before you such likeness of the living presence of an English
gentleman or an English lady, as shall be worthy of being looked upon
for ever.
But farther, you remember, I hope--for I said it in a way that I
thought would shock you a little, that you might remember it--my
statement, that art had never done more than this, never more than
given the likeness of a noble human being. Not only so, but it very
seldom does so much as this, and the best pictures that exist of the
great schools are all portraits, or groups of portraits, often of very
simple and nowise noble persons. You may have much more brilliant and
impressive qualities in imaginative pictures; you may have figures
scattered like clouds, or garlanded like flowers; you may have light
and shade as of a tempest, and colour, as of the rainbow; but all that
is child's play to the great men, though it is astonishment to us.
Their real strength is tried to the utmost, and as far as I know, it
is never elsewhere brought out so thoroughly, as in painting one man
or woman, and the soul that was in them; nor that always the highest
soul, but often only a thwarted one that was capable of height; or
perhaps not even that, but faultful and poor, yet seen through, to the
poor best of it, by the masterful sight. So that in order to put
before you in your Standard series the best art possible, I am
obliged, even from the very strongest men, to take the portraits,
before I take the idealism. Nay, whatever is best in the great
compositions themselves has depended on portraiture; and the study
necessary to enable you to understand invention will also convince you
that the mind of man never invented a greater thing than the form of
man, animated by faithful life. Every attempt to refine or exalt such
healthy humanity has weakened or caricatured it; or else consists only
in giving it, to please our fancy, the wings of birds, or the eyes of
antelopes. Whatever is truly great in either Greek or Christian art,
is also restrictedly human; and even the raptures of the redeemed
souls who enter "celestemente ballando,"[188] the gate of Angelico's
Paradise, were seen first in the terrestrial, yet most pure, mirth of
Florentine maidens.
I am aware that this cannot but at present appear gravely questionable
to those of my audience who are strictly cognizant of the phases of
Greek art; for they know that the moment of its decline is accurately
marked, by its turning from abstract form to portraiture. But the
reason of this is simple. The progressive course of Greek art was in
subduing monstrous conceptions to natural ones; it did this by general
laws; it reached absolute truth of generic human form, and if its
ethical force had remained, would have advanced into healthy
portraiture. But at the moment of change the national life ended in
Greece; and portraiture, there, meant insult to her religion, and
flattery to her tyrants. And her skill perished, not because she
became true in sight, but because she became vile in heart....
But I have told you enough, it seems to me, at least to-day, of this
function of art in recording fact; let me now finally, and with all
distinctness possible to me, state to you its main business of
all;--its service in the actual uses of daily life.
You are surprised, perhaps, to hear me call this its main business.
That is indeed so, however. The giving brightness to picture is much,
but the giving brightness to life more. And remember, were it as
patterns only, you cannot, without the realities, have the pictures.
_You cannot have a landscape by Turner without a country for him to
paint; you cannot have a portrait by Titian, without a man to be
pourtrayed_. I need not prove that to you, I suppose, in these short
terms; but in the outcome I can get no soul to believe that the
beginning of art _is in getting our country clean, and our people
beautiful_. I have been ten years trying to get this very plain
certainty--I do not say believed--but even thought of, as anything but
a monstrous proposition. To get your country clean, and your people
lovely;--I assure you that is a necessary work of art to begin with!
There has indeed been art in countries where people lived in dirt to
serve God, but never in countries where they lived in dirt to serve
the devil. There has indeed been art where the people were not all
lovely,--where even their lips were thick--and their skins black,
because the sun had looked upon them;[189] but never in a country
where the people were pale with miserable toil and deadly shade, and
where the lips of youth, instead of being full with blood, were
pinched by famine, or warped with poison. And now, therefore, note
this well, the gist of all these long prefatory talks. I said that the
two great moral instincts were those of Order and Kindness. Now, all
the arts are founded on agriculture by the hand, and on the graces and
kindness of feeding, and dressing, and lodging your people. Greek art
begins in the gardens of Alcinous--perfect order, leeks in beds, and
fountains in pipes.[190] And Christian art, as it arose out of
chivalry, was only possible so far as chivalry compelled both kings
and knights to care for the right personal training of their people;
it perished utterly when those kings and knights became [Greek:
daemoboroi], devourers of the people. And it will become possible
again only, when, literally, the sword is beaten into the
ploughshare,[191] when your St. George of England shall justify his
name,[192] and Christian art shall be known as its Master was, in
breaking of bread.[193]
Now look at the working out of this broad principle in minor detail;
observe how, from highest to lowest, health of art has first depended
on reference to industrial use. There is first the need of cup and
platter, especially of cup; for you can put your meat on the
Harpies',[194] or any other, tables; but you must have your cup to
drink from. And to hold it conveniently, you must put a handle to it;
and to fill it when it is empty you must have a large pitcher of some
sort; and to carry the pitcher you may most advisably have two
handles. Modify the forms of these needful possessions according to
the various requirements of drinking largely and drinking delicately;
of pouring easily out, or of keeping for years the perfume in; of
storing in cellars, or bearing from fountains; of sacrificial
libation, of Pan-athenaic treasure of oil, and sepulchral treasure of
ashes,--and you have a resultant series of beautiful form and
decoration, from the rude amphora of red earth up to Cellini's vases
of gems and crystal, in which series, but especially in the more
simple conditions of it, are developed the most beautiful lines and
most perfect types of severe composition which have yet been attained
by art.
But again, that you may fill your cup with pure water, you must go to
the well or spring; you need a fence round the well; you need some
tube or trough, or other means of confining the stream at the spring.
For the conveyance of the current to any distance you must build
either enclosed or open aqueduct; and in the hot square of the city
where you set it free, you find it good for health and pleasantness to
let it leap into a fountain. On these several needs you have a school
of sculpture founded; in the decoration of the walls of wells in level
countries, and of the sources of springs in mountainous ones, and
chiefly of all, where the women of household or market meet at the
city fountain.
There is, however, a farther reason for the use of art here than in
any other material service, so far as we may, by art, express our
reverence or thankfulness. Whenever a nation is in its right mind, it
always has a deep sense of divinity in the gift of rain from heaven,
filling its heart with food and gladness;[195] and all the more when
that gift becomes gentle and perennial in the flowing of springs. It
literally is not possible that any fruitful power of the Muses should
be put forth upon a people which disdains their Helicon; still less is
it possible that any Christian nation should grow up "tanquam lignum
quod plantatum est secus decursus aquarum,"[196] which cannot recognize
the lesson meant in their being told of the places where Rebekah was
met;--where Rachel,--where Zipporah,--and she who was asked for water
under Mount Gerizim by a Stranger, weary, who had nothing to draw
with.[197]
And truly, when our mountain springs are set apart in vale or craggy
glen, or glade of wood green through the drought of summer, far from
cities, then, it is best let them stay in their own happy peace; but
if near towns, and liable therefore to be defiled by common usage, we
could not use the loveliest art more worthily than by sheltering the
spring and its first pools with precious marbles: nor ought anything
to be esteemed more important, as a means of healthy education, than
the care to keep the streams of it afterwards, to as great a distance
as possible, pure, full of fish, and easily accessible to children.
There used to be, thirty years ago, a little rivulet of the Wandel,
about an inch deep, which ran over the carriage-road and under a
footbridge just under the last chalk hill near Croydon. Alas! men came
and went; and it--did _not_ go on for ever. It has long since been
bricked over by the parish authorities; but there was more education
in that stream with its minnows than you could get out of a thousand
pounds spent yearly in the parish schools, even though you were to
spend every farthing of it in teaching the nature of oxygen and
hydrogen, and the names, and rate per minute, of all the rivers in
Asia and America.
Well, the gist of this matter lies here then. Suppose we want a school
of pottery again in England, all we poor artists are ready to do the
best we can, to show you how pretty a line may be that is twisted first
to one side, and then to the other; and how a plain household-blue will
make a pattern on white; and how ideal art may be got out of the
spaniel's colours of black and tan. But I tell you beforehand, all that
we can do will be utterly useless, unless you teach your peasant to say
grace, not only before meat, but before drink; and having provided him
with Greek cups and platters, provide him also with something that is
not poisoned to put into them.
There cannot be any need that I should trace for you the conditions of
art that are directly founded on serviceableness of dress, and of
armour; but it is my duty to affirm to you, in the most positive
manner, that after recovering, for the poor, wholesomeness of food,
your next step toward founding schools of art in England must be in
recovering, for the poor, decency and wholesomeness of dress;
thoroughly good in substance, fitted for their daily work, becoming to
their rank in life, and worn with order and dignity. And this order
and dignity must be taught them by the women of the upper and middle
classes, whose minds can be in nothing right, as long as they are so
wrong in this matter us to endure the squalor of the poor, while they
themselves dress gaily. And on the proper pride and comfort of both
poor and rich in dress, must be founded the true arts of dress;
carried on by masters of manufacture no less careful of the
perfectness and beauty of their tissues, and of all that in substance
and in design can be bestowed upon them, than ever the armourers of
Milan and Damascus were careful of their steel.
Then, in the third place, having recovered some wholesome habits of
life as to food and dress, we must recover them as to lodging. I said
just now that the best architecture was but a glorified roof. Think of
it. The dome of the Vatican, the porches of Rheims or Chartres, the
vaults and arches of their aisles, the canopy of the tomb, and the
spire of the belfry, are all forms resulting from the mere requirement
that a certain space shall be strongly covered from heat and rain.
More than that--as I have tried all through _The Stones of Venice_ to
show--the lovely forms of these were every one of them developed in
civil and domestic building, and only after their invention employed
ecclesiastically on the grandest scale. I think you cannot but have
noticed here in Oxford, as elsewhere, that our modern architects never
seem to know what to do with their roofs. Be assured, until the roofs
are right, nothing else will be; and there are just two ways of
keeping them right. Never build them of iron, but only of wood or
stone; and secondly, take care that in every town the little roofs are
built before the large ones, and that everybody who wants one has got
one. And we must try also to make everybody want one. That is to say,
at some not very advanced period of life, men should desire to have a
home, which they do not wish to quit any more, suited to their habits
of life, and likely to be more and more suitable to them until their
death. And men must desire to have these their dwelling-places built
as strongly as possible, and furnished and decorated daintily, and set
in pleasant places, in bright light, and good air, being able to
choose for themselves that at least as well as swallows. And when the
houses are grouped together in cities, men must have so much civic
fellowship as to subject their architecture to a common law, and so
much civic pride as to desire that the whole gathered group of human
dwellings should be a lovely thing, not a frightful one, on the face
of the earth. Not many weeks ago an English clergyman,[198] a master of
this University, a man not given to sentiment, but of middle age, and
great practical sense, told me, by accident, and wholly without
reference to the subject now before us, that he never could enter
London from his country parsonage but with closed eyes, lest the sight
of the blocks of houses which the railroad intersected in the suburbs
should unfit him, by the horror of it, for his day's work.
Now, it is not possible--and I repeat to you, only in more deliberate
assertion, what I wrote just twenty-two years ago in the last chapter
of the _Seven Lamps of Architecture_--it is not possible to have any
right morality, happiness, or art, in any country where the cities are
thus built, or thus, let me rather say, clotted and coagulated; spots
of a dreadful mildew, spreading by patches and blotches over the
country they consume. You must have lovely cities, crystallized, not
coagulated, into form; limited in size, and not casting out the scum
and scurf of them into an encircling eruption of shame, but girded
each with its sacred pomoerium, and with garlands of gardens full of
blossoming trees and softly guided streams.
[187] In _Modern Painters_, vol. 1.
[188] The quotation is from Vasari's account of Angelico's Last
Judgment (now in the Accademia at Florence). [Cook and Wedderbum.]
[189] _Song of Solomon_ i, 6.
[190] Cf. _Classical Landscape_, pp. 92-93.
[191] _Isaiah_, ii, 4; _Micah_ iv, 3; _Joel_ iii, 10.
[192] The name of St. George, the "Earthworker," or "Husbandman."
[Ruskin.]
[193] _Luke_ xxiv, 35.
[194] Virgil, _Æneid_, 3, 209. _seqq_. [Ruskin.]
[195] _Acts_ xiv, 17.
[196] _Psalms_ i, 3.
[197] _Genesis_ xxiv, 15, 16 and xxix, 10; _Exodus_ ii, 16; _John_
iv, 11.
[198] Osborne Gordon. [Ruskin.]