ADDRESS TO THE STUDENTS OF THE ART SCHOOL OF SOUTH LAMBERT, MARCH 15,
1869.
161. Among the photographers of Greek coins which present so many
admirable subjects for your study, I must speak for the present of one
only: the Hercules of Camarina. You have, represented by a Greek
workman, in that coin, the face of a man and the skin of a lion's head.
And the man's face is like a man's face, but the lion's skin is not like
a lion's skin.
162. Now there are some people who will tell you that Greek art is fine,
because it is true; and because it carves men's faces as like men's as it
can.
And there are other people who will tell you that Greek art is fine,
because it is not true; and carves a lion's skin so as to look not at all
like a lion's skin.
And you fancy that one or the other of these sets of people must be
wrong, and are perhaps much puzzled to find out which you should believe.
But neither of them are wrong, and you will have eventually to believe,
or rather to understand and know, in reconciliation, the truths taught by
each; but for the present, the teachers of the first group are those you
must follow.
It is they who tell you the deepest and usefullest truth, which involves
all others in time. Greek art, and all other art, is fine when it makes
a man's face as like a man's face as it can. Hold to that. All kinds of
nonsense are talked to you, nowadays, ingeniously and irrelevantly about
art. Therefore, for the most part of the day, shut your ears, and keep
your eyes open: and understand primarily, what you may, I fancy, easily
understand, that the greatest masters of all greatest schools--Phidias,
Donatello, Titian, Velasquez, or Sir Joshua Reynolds--all tried to make
human creatures as like human creatures as they could; and that anything
less like humanity than their work, is not so good as theirs.
Get that well driven into your heads; and don't let it out again, at your
peril.
163. Having got it well in, you may then further understand, safely,
that three is a great deal of secondary work in pots, and pans, and
floors, and carpets, and shawls, and architectural ornament, which ought
essentially, to be unlike reality, and to depend for its charm on quite
other qualities than imitative ones. But all such art is inferior and
secondary--much of it more or less instinctive and animal, and a
civilized human creature can only learn those principles rightly, by
knowing those of great civilized art first--which is always the
representation, to the utmost of its power, of whatever it has got to
show--made to look as like the thing as possible. Go into the National
Gallery, and look at the foot of Correggio's Venus there. Correggio
made it as like a foot as he could, and you won't easily find anything
liker. Now, you will find on any Greek vase something meant for a foot,
or a hand, which is not at all like one. The Greek vase is a good thing
in its way, but Correggio's picture is the best work.
164. So, again, go into the Turner room of the National Gallery, and
look at Turner's drawing of "Ivy Bridge." You will find the water in it
is like real water, and the ducks in it are like real ducks. Then go
into the British Museum, and look for an Egyptian landscape, and you will
find the water in that constituted of blue zigzags, not at all like
water; and ducks in the middle of it made of blue lines, looking not in
the least as if they could stand stuffing with sage and onions. They are
very good in their way, but Turner's are better.
165. I will not pause to fence my general principle against what you
perfectly well know of the due contradiction,--that a thing may be
painted very like, yet painted ill. Rest content with knowing that it
must be like, if it is painted well; and take this further general law:
Imitation is like charity. When it is done for love it is lovely; when
it is done for show, hateful.
166. Well, then, this Greek coin is fine, first because the face is like
a face. Perhaps you think there is something particularly handsome in
the face, which you can't see in the photograph, or can't at present
appreciate. But there is nothing of the kind. It is a very regular,
quiet, commonplace sort of face; and any average English gentleman's, of
good descent, would be far handsomer.
167. Fix that in your heads also, therefore, that Greek faces are not
particularly beautiful. Of that much nonsense against which you are to
keep your ears shut, that which is talked to you of the Greek ideal of
beauty is the absolutest. There is not a single instance of a very
beautiful head left by the highest school of Greek art. On coins, there
is even no approximately beautiful one. The Juno of Argos is a virago;
the Athena of Athens grotesque, the Athena of Corinth is insipid; and of
Thurium, sensual. The Siren Ligeia, and fountain of Arethusa, on the
coins of Terina and Syracuse, are prettier, but totally without
expression, and chiefly set off by their well-curled hair. You might
have expected something subtle in Mercuries; but the Mercury of Ænus is
a very stupid-looking fellow, in a cap like a bowl, with a knob on the
top of it. The Bacchus of Thasos is a drayman with his hair pomatum'd.
The Jupiter of Syracurse is, however, calm and refined; and the Apollo
of Clazomenæ would have been impressive, if he had not come down to us,
much flattened by friction. But on the whole, the merit of Greek coins
does not primarily depend on beauty of features, nor even, in the period
of highest art, that of the statues. You make take the Venus of Melos as
a standard of beauty of the central Greek type. She has tranquil,
regular, and lofty features; but could not hold her own for a moment
against the beauty of a simple English girl, of pure race and kind heart.
168. And the reason that Greek art, on the whole, bores you (and you
know it does), is that you are always forced to look in it for something
that is not there; but which may be seen every day, in real life, all
round you; and which you are naturally disposed to delight in, and ought
to delight in. For the Greek race was not at all one of exalted beauty,
but only of general and healthy completeness of form. They were only,
and could be only, beautiful in body to the degree that they were
beautiful in soul (for you will find, when you read deeply into the
matter, that the body is only the soul made visible). And the Greeks
were indeed very good people, much better people than most of us think,
or than many of us are; but there are better people alive now than the
best of them, and lovelier people to be seen now than the loveliest of
them.
169. Then what are the merits of this Greek art, which make it so
exemplary for you? Well, not that it is beautiful, but that it is
Right.* All that it desires to do, it does, and all that it does, does
well. You will find, as you advance in the knowledge of art, that its
laws of self-restraint are very marvelous; that its peace of heart, and
contentment in doing a simple thing, with only one or two qualities,
restrictedly desired, and sufficiently attained, are a most wholesome
element of education for you, as opposed to the wild writhing, and
wrestling, and longing for the moon, and tilting at windmills, and agony
of eyes, and torturing of fingers, and general spinning out of one's
soul into fiddle-strings, which constitute the ideal life of a modern
artist.
* Compare above, §101.
Also observe, there is an entire masterhood of its business up to the
required point. A Greek does not reach after other people's strength,
nor outreach his own. He never tries to paint before he can draw; he
never tries to lay on flesh where there are no bones; and he never
expects to find the bones of anything in his inner consciousness. Those
are his first merits--sincere and innocent purpose, strong common-sense
and principle, and all the strength that follows on that strength.
170. But, secondly, Greek art is always exemplary in disposition of
masses, which is a thing that in modern days students rarely look for,
artists not enough, and the public never. But, whatever else Greek work
may fail of, you may always be sure its masses are well placed, and their
placing has been the object of the most subtle care. Look, for instance,
at the inscription in front of this Hercules of the name of the town--
Camarina. You can't read it, even though you may know Greek, without
some pains; for the sculptor knew well enough that it mattered very
little whether you read it or not, for the Camarina Hercules could tell
his own story; but what did above all things matter was, that no K or A
or M should come in a wrong place with respect to the outline of the
head, and divert the eye from it, or spoil any of its lines. So the
whole inscription is thrown into a sweeping curve of gradually
diminishing size, continuing from the lion's paws, round the neck, up to
the forehead, and answering a decorative purpose as completely as the
curls of the mane opposite. Of these, again, you cannot change or
displace one without mischief; they are almost as even in reticulation as
a piece of basket-work; but each has a different form and a due relation
to the rest, and if you set to work to draw that mane rightly, you will
find that, whatever time you give to it, you can't get the tresses quite
into their places, and that every tress out of its place does an injury.
If you want to test your powers of accurate drawing, you may make that
lion's mane your pons asinorum, I have never yet met with a student who
didn't make an ass in a lion's skin of himself when he tried it.
171. Granted, however, that these tresses may be finely placed, still
they are not like a lion's mane. So we come back to the question,--if
the face is to be like a man's face, why is not the lion's mane to be
like a lion's mane? Well, because it can't be like a lion's mane without
too much trouble,--and inconvenience after that, and poor success, after
all. Too much trouble, in cutting the die into fine fringes and jags;
inconvenience after that,--because, though you can easily stamp cheeks
and foreheads smooth at a blow, you can't stamp projecting tresses fine
at a blow, whatever pains you take with your die.
So your Greek uses his common sense, wastes no time, uses no skill, and
says to you, "Here is beautifully set tresses, which I have carefully
designed and easily stamped. Enjoy them, and if you cannot understand
that they mean lion's mane, heaven mend your wits."
172. See, then, you have in this work well-founded knowledge, simple and
right aims, thorough mastery of handicraft, splendid invention in
arrangement, unerring common sense in treatment,--merits, these, I think,
exemplary enough to justify our tormenting you a little with Greek art.
But it has one merit more than these, the greatest of all. It always
means something worth saying. Not merely worth saying for that time
only, but for all time. What do you think this helmet of lion's hide is
always given to Hercules for? You can't suppose it means only that he
once killed a lion, and always carried its skin afterwards to show that
he had, as Indian sportsmen sent home stuffed rugs, with claws at the
corners, and a lump in the middle which one tumbles over every time one
stirs the fire. What was this Nemean Lion, whose spoils were evermore to
cover Hercules from the cold? Not merely a large specimen of Felis Leo,
ranging the fields of Nemea, be sure of that. This Nemean cub was one of
a bad litter. Born of Typhon and Echidna,--of the whirlwind and the
snake,--Cerberus his brother, the Hydra of Lerna his sister,--it must
have been difficult to get his hide off him. He had to be found in
darkness, too, and dealt upon without weapons, by grip at the throat--
arrows and club of no avail against him. What does all that mean?
173. It means that the Nemean Lion is the first great adversary of life,
whatever that may be--to Hercules, or to any of us, then or now. The
first monster we have to strangle, or be destroyed by, fighting in the
dark, and with none to help us, only Athena standing by to encourage with
her smile. Every man's Nemean Lion lies in wait for him somewhere. The
slothful man says, There is a lion in the path. He says well. The quiet
unslothful man says the same, and knows it too. But they differ in their
further reading of the text. The slothful man says, I shall be slain,
and the unslothful, IT shall be. It is the first ugly and strong enemy
that rises against us, all future victory depending on victory over that.
Kill it; and through all the rest of your life, what was once dreadful is
your armor, and you are clothed with that conquest for every other, and
helmed with its crest of fortitude for evermore.
Alas, we have most of us to walk bare-headed; but that is the meaning of
the story of Nemea,--worth laying to heart and thinking of sometimes,
when you see a dish garnished with parsley, which was the crown at the
Nemean games.
174. How far, then, have we got in our list of the merits of Greek art
now?
Sound knowledge.
Simple aims.
Mastered craft.
Vivid invention.
Strong common sense.
And eternally true and wise meaning.
Are these not enough? Here is one more, then, which will find favor, I
should think, with the British Lion. Greek art is never frightened at
anything; it is always cool.
175. It differs essentially from all other art, past or present, in this
incapability of being frightened. Half the power and imagination of
every other school depend on a certain feverish terror mingling with
their sense of beauty,--the feeling that a child has in a dark room, or
a sick person in seeing ugly dreams. But the Greeks never have ugly
dreams. They cannot draw anything ugly when they try. Sometimes they
put themselves to their wits'-end to draw an ugly thing,--the Medusa's
head, for instance,--but they can't do it, not they, because nothing
frightens them. They widen the mouth, and grind the teeth, and puff the
cheeks, and set the eyes a goggling; and the thing is only ridiculous
after all, not the least dreadful, for there is no dread in their hearts.
Pensiveness; amazement; often deepest grief and desolateness. All these;
but terror never. Everlasting calm in the presence of all fate; and joy
such as they could win, not indeed in a perfect beauty, but in beauty at
perfect rest! A kind of art this, surely, to be looked at, and thought
upon sometimes with profit, even in these latter days.
176. To be looked at sometimes. Not continually, and never as a model
for imitation. For you are not Greeks; but, for better or worse, English
creatures; and cannot do, even if it were a thousand times better worth
doing, anything well, except what your English hearts shall prompt, and
your English skies teach you. For all good art is the natural utterance
of its own people in its own day.
But also, your own art is a better and brighter one than ever this Greek
art was. Many motives, powers, and insights have been added to those
elder ones. The very corruptions into which we have fallen are signs of
a subtle life, higher than theirs was, and therefore more fearful in its
faults and death. Christianity has neither superceded, nor, by itself,
excelled heathenism; but it has added its own good, won also by many a
Nemean contest in dark valleys, to all that was good and noble in
heathenism; and our present thoughts and work, when they are right, are
nobler than the heathen's. And we are not reverent enough to them,
because we possess too much of them. That sketch of four cherub heads
from and English girl, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, at Kensington, is an
incomparably finer thing than ever the Greeks did. Ineffably tender in
the touch, yet Herculean in power; innocent, yet exalted in feeling; pure
in color as a pearl; reserved and decisive in design, as this Lion crest,
--if it alone existed of such,--if it were a picture by Zeuxis, the only
one left in the world, and you build a shrine for it, and were allowed to
see it only seven days in a year, it alone would teach you all of art
that you ever needed to know. But you do not learn from this or any
other such work, because you have not reverence enough for them, and are
trying to learn from all at once, and from a hundred other masters
besides.
177. Here, then, is the practical advice which I would venture to deduce
from what I have tried to show you. Use Greek art as a first, not a
final, teacher. Learn to draw carefully from Greek work; above all, to
place forms correctly, and to use light and shade tenderly. Never allow
yourselves black shadows. It is easy to make things look round and
projecting; but the things to exercise yourselves in are the placing of
the masses, and the modelling of the lights. It is an admirable exercise
to take a pale wash of color for all the shadows, never reinforcing it
everywhere, but drawing the statue as if it were in far distance, making
all the darks one flat pale tint. Then model from those into the lights,
rounding as well as you can, on those subtle conditions. In your chalk
drawings, separate the lights from the darks at once all over; then
reinforce the darks slightly where absolutely necessary, and put your
whole strength on the lights and their limits. Then, when you have
learned to draw thoroughly, take one master for your painting, as you
would have done necessarily in old times by being put into his school
(were I to choose for you, it should be among six men only--Titian,
Correggio, Paul Veronese, Velasquez, Reynolds, or Holbein). If you are a
landscapist, Turner must be your only guide (for no other great landscape
painter has yet lived); and having chosen, do your best to understand
your own chosen master, and obey him, and no one else, till you have
strength to deal with the nature itself round you, and then, be your own
master, and see with your own eyes. If you have got masterhood or sight
in you, that is the way to make the most of them; and if you have
neither, you will at least be sound in your work, prevented from immodest
and useless effort, and protected from vulgar and fantastic error.
And so I wish you all, good speed, and the favor of Hercules and of the
Muses; and to those who shall best deserve them, the crown of Parsley
first and then of the Laurel.