not convinced that the one is solely dependent on the other. I find
a grace and a glory (even in the flowers of plants) which, on the
utilitarian theory, is not accounted for, is a residual phenomenon;
and that in such enormous proportions that the phenomenon explained
bears no perceptible proportion to the phenomenon left unexplained.
Whether this be so or not, it appears to me, for the reasons I have
already given, that we may still entertain the same notions about the
beauty of the world as before. Our souls may still rejoice in beauty
as of old. To some of us this glorious frame has not appeared a dead
mechanic mass, but a living whole, instinct with spiritual life; and
in the beauty which we see around us in Nature's face, we have felt
the smile of a spiritual Being, as we feel the smile of our friend
adding light and lustre to his countenance. I still indulge this
fancy, or, if you will, this superstition. Still, as of old, I feel
(to use the familiar language of our great poet of Nature)--
"A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth: of all the mighty world,
Of eye, and ear."
EDW. FRY.
[Footnote 1: Wisdom, xiii. 3-5.]
[Footnote 2: P. 200.]
[Footnote 3: "Origin of Species" (4th Ed.), p. 239.]
[Footnote 4: Wallace, "Tropical Nature," p. 232.]
[Footnote 5: _Ibid._ p. 232.]
[Footnote 6: _Ibid._ p. 237.]
[Footnote 7: "Flowers and their Unbidden Guests," by Kerner,
translated by Ogle. Prefatory Letter.]
[Footnote 8: Henslow, "On Self-Fertilization." Trans. Linn.
Society, 2nd series, "Botany," i. p. 325. _Query_: Is not this
the case with the _Tacsonia_ of our greenhouses?]
[Footnote 9: Henslow, _ubi sup._ 329.]
[Footnote 10: Kerner, p. 11. These statements appear to
me, though made by a very accomplished observer, to require
verification. My own observations on the _Colchicum_ (which
have been only very imperfect) would have led me to incline to
a different conclusion.]
[Footnote 11: Kerner, p. 12.]
[Footnote 12: Lubbock's "Wild Flowers in Relation to Insects,"
p. 56.]
[Footnote 13: Lindley, "Veg. King." 436.]
[Footnote 14: "Ueber die Bestaubungsvorrichtungen bei den
Fumariaceen," in Pringsheim's "Jahrbuch," vol. vii. part iv.
p. 423. 1870.]
[Footnote 15: Link, "Report on Progress of Botany during
1841," translated by Lankester (Ray Society, 1845), p. 65.]
[Footnote 16: Meehan, "On Fertilization by Insect Agency."
_Gardeners' Chronicle_, 11 Sept. 1875.]
[Footnote 17: For the whole subject of these most curious
flowers, see Mr. Darwin's book "On the Different Forms of
Flowers;" Rev. G. Henslow, Tr. Linn. Society, "Botany," 2nd
series, vol. i. p. 317; Mr. Bennett, Journal of Linn. Society,
"Botany," xiii. p. 147, xvii. p. 269.]
[Footnote 18: Bennett, Journal of Linn. Society, "Botany,"
xiii. p. 147.]
[Footnote 19: Meehan, "On Fertilization," _ubi supra_.]
[Footnote 20: Mr. Bennett, "On Cleistogamous Flowers," Linn.
Society's Journal, "Botany," xvii. p. 278, has shown that the
latter is probably the correct view.]
[Footnote 21: _Nature_, ix. 461.]
[Footnote 22: _Nature_, xx. p. 386.]
WHERE ARE WE IN ART?
"No doubt education is a fine thing!" said I, meditatively, laying
down my thirteenth newspaper. It was a rainy November day, and the
reading-room was nearly empty. I had been told the great fact over and
over again in some form or other in all the "Dailies" and "Weeklies."
It had been repeated in every variety of tone in the little pile of
"Monthlies" at my elbow, of which I had skimmed the cream (no one
in these days can be expected to go through the labour of a whole
article)! The "Quarterlies," in more ponderous fashion, had reiterated
the sentiment. We had got hold of the right thing; all that was wanted
was more and more of the same. Let everybody be served alike; what is
meat for the gander is meat also for the goose, repeated the advocates
of women's education, magniloquently (though not exactly in those
words). Let everybody learn the same thing that I am learning! How
much better and wiser we are than our forefathers! How beautiful for
us to be able to say, as in the old story of the French Minister of
Instruction when he pulls out his watch, "It is ten o'clock; all
the children in the schools in England are doing their sums. It is
half-past eleven, they are all writing their copies!"
"What everybody says must be true," thought I; "the schoolmaster has
got the better of the world, and rules the roast despotically; but
then how great is the result!" I repeated, with pride.
Such perfection was rather oppressive, and I could not help yawning a
little as I went upstairs, looking round as I went. The decorations
of the club were wonderfully fine, no doubt, but perhaps an Italian
of the "Cinque-cento" would not have thought them quite successful.
Probably, however, he would have been wrong. He was certainly much
less "instructed" in art than we are. I strolled to the window, and
looked out at a stucco palace on either hand and over the way, with
pillars and pilasters added _ad libitum_, and a glimpse of a long wall
with oblong openings cut in it, stretching the whole length of
the street. One of the abominable regiments of black statues which
disfigure London stood near the corner, the nicely-finished buttons of
whose paletôt, and the creases of whose boots (the originals of
which must have been made by Hoby), had often been my wonder, if not
admiration.
"Yes, there certainly is a lost art or two, which have somehow made
their escape from this best of all worlds, in spite of our drilling
and double-distilled training," I sighed.
There was a portfolio of photographs lying on the table, which I
turned over abstractedly. The Venus de Milo, and the Theseus of the
Parthenon; the Raphael frescoes of the great council of the gods in
the Farnesina Palace at Rome; a street in Venice; Durham Cathedral;
the decorations of the Certosa at Pavia; some specimens of old
Japanese porcelain; some coloured patterns of Persian shawls and
prayer-rugs and of Indian inlaid work. Each of them was good and
appropriate of its kind, expressing a national or individual taste and
feeling, or, best of all, a belief. And none of them were the results
of education, but of a kind of instinct of art which no instruction
hitherto has been able to give, of which it seems even sometimes to
deprive a race, as a savage generally loses his accurate perception
of details and his power of memory and artistic perceptions, with
his delicacy of hearing and smell, as a consequence of so-called
civilization.
The Hindoo arranges colours for a fabric with the same certainty of
intuition that a bird weaves his nest, or a spider its web. His blues
and greens are as harmonious in their combinations as those of Nature
herself; while the "educated" Englishman is now introducing every
species of atrocity in form and colour wherever he goes, ruining
the beautiful native manufactures by instructions from his superior
"standpoint;" forcing the workers to commit every blunder which
he does himself at home, in order to adapt their fabrics to
the abominable taste of the middle classes in England. Even the
missionaries, male and female, cannot hold their hands, and teach the
children in schools and hareems crochet and cross-stitch of the worst
designs and colours, instead of the exquisite native embroidery of
the past. Arsenic greens, magenta and gas-tar dyes, are introduced by
order of the merchants into carpets and cashmere shawls; vile colours
and forms in pottery and bad lacquer-work are growing up, by command,
in China and Japan. There seems to be no check or stay to the
irruption of bad taste which is swamping the whole world by our
influence. The Japanese have even been recommended to make a Museum
of their own beautiful old productions quickly, or the very memory of
their existence, and of the manner in which they were made, would be
lost.
It is commonly supposed that the taste of the French is better than
our own, and the pretty, the bizarre, the becoming, may indeed be
said to belong to their domain; but high art is not their vocation.
A certain harmony is obtained by quenching colour, as in the "Soupir
étouffé," the "Bismarck malade," the "rose dégradée," the "Celadon" of
the Sèvres china, all eighth and tenth degrees of dilution; but pure
colour, like that of Persia and of the East generally, they never now
dare to dip their hands into. The gorgeous effects of their own old
painted glass, the "rose windows" of the churches at Rouen and in many
other towns of Normandy, are far beyond their present reach.
The stained glass of all countries in Europe, indeed, belonging to
the good times, is a feast of colour which none of the modern work
can approach. There is a "Last Judgment," said to be from designs by
Albert Dürer, which was taken in a sea-fight on its road to Spain,
and put up in a little church at Fairford, in Gloucestershire, which
dazzles us with its splendour; and the scraps which are still to be
found all over England in village churches (many of which are now
believed to be of home manufacture) are as beautiful as the great
Flemish windows thirty feet high. At the present day the pigments
used, we are told, are finer; the glass is infinitely better rolled,
all the manufacturing processes have made wonderful progress, as
we proudly declare; only the results of it are utterly and simply
detestable--the colours of the great modern windows in Cologne
Cathedral and Westminster Abbey set one's very teeth on edge--the
temptation to use a stone (if it had come under one's hand) would be
frightfully great in front of that at the east end of Ripon.
There lies before me an old Persian rug, all out of shape and twisted
in the weaving, but full of subtle quantities in colour, perfect in
the proportions of its vivid brilliancy, and a grand new Axminster
carpet alongside, of faultless construction, with a design as hideous
as its colours are harsh.
It is not only now with productions destined for the English market,
but the degradation of art is beginning to spread all over the
world--the standards of "instructed" European taste are vitiating the
very well-springs of beautiful old work. The "mantilla" of Seville,
and the "tovaglia" of the Roman peasant, are supplanted by frightful
bonnets; the striking old costumes are disappearing alike in Brittany
and in Algiers; in Athens and in Turkey they are giving way to
the abominations of Parisian toilettes for the women, while the
chimney-pot hat is taking the place of the turban and the kalpac for
the men.
The picturesque quaintness of the narrow Egyptian streets dies away,
as under a frost, under the hand of Western architects; the delicate
pierced woodwork of their projecting balconies is changed for flat
windows with red and green "jalousies;" and the Khedive builds
minarets, it is true, but like enlarged Mordan pencil-cases. The
harmony of the lines in an ancient Arabian fountain or mosque at
Cairo, the interlacing patterns of fretwork in the Saracenic buildings
at Grenada, are marvellous in their exquisite variety; yet the secret
of their construction in their own land is nearly gone, the very
tradition of the old work seems to have perished in the race--they
cannot even imitate their own old creations. "Oh for a touch of a
vanished hand!" we say over the ruined tombs of the Memlook Sultans
in their desolate beauty, standing lonely in the desert near Cairo, or
the wonderful mosques of the deserted city of Beejapore in the Bombay
Presidency, whose photographs have lately been printed.
Each nation in the old time had an expression of its thoughts in
the buildings in which it housed its gods, its government, and its
individuals, which was as distinctive as its language: a tongue,
indeed, in stone, in colour and in form, as plain as, indeed plainer
than, ever words could frame.
The Egyptian, with the flat square lines of the gigantic slabs placed
across the forests of enormous rounded pillars closely packed, the
avenues of sphinxes and obelisks leading up (never at right angles,
curiously to our sense of conformity) to the temples--solemn, heavy,
magnificent, mysterious--with a sentiment of dignified repose, though
little of beauty or proportion, but full of symbolism and suggestion
and grandeur.
The exquisite Greek buildings, where proportion was almost like music
in its scientific harmony of parts, so exact, so modulated, so severe,
so lovely--with sculpture forming an almost necessary portion of the
architectural design when at its highest point of excellence.
The Saracenic, with its simple grace of construction and delicate
detail of ornament, with holy words and combinations of lines in place
of natural forms, and soaring beauty of domes, and pierced marble
work.
The Middle Age Italian, with its inlaid and decorated façades and
wealth of columns, and traceries of gay-coloured stones, and contrasts
of brilliant light and dark shadows in the deep-set windows and
doors,--bright and lovely like Giotto's Campanile at Florence, rising
like a flower over the city, or great churches like those of Orvieto
and St. Mark's,[1] with their rich profusion of mosaic and carved
stone and quaint modifications of brickwork.
Or the buildings of the Gothic nations (our own included), which
often, like those at Mont St. Michel, seem to have so grown out of
the situation--where the Art is so interwoven with Nature, that it is
hardly possible to discover where one begins and the other ends. There
is something also of the manner in which Nature works, in the feeling
with which the curves interlace, seeming almost to grow into each
other, in a Gothic cathedral. In the perspectives of heavy round
arches of Winchester and Durham, in the upward soaring of the
Salisbury spire, there is the same impression--they seem to have
"come" so. It is like a living organism, the parts of which are as
natural and necessary to the whole as is the growth of a tree: like
the recipe of old for a poet, they seem to have been "born, not made."
All these different races invented for themselves what is called a
"style;" that is to say, an original manner, peculiar and adapted to
their special idiosyncrasies, of fulfilling those wants which every
nation, as soon as it emerges from the savage state, must feel and
provide for in some fashion.
Even to descend to very inferior work--there is character and
expression in the old King William houses on the river-bank at
Chelsea, in the pretty little Queen Anne Square in Westminster; it
is too neat and pretty to be high art, with its unobtrusive moulded
brick, its shallow projections, and the carved shells over the
doorways; but it is not unlike the poetry of Pope in the delicate
finish and adaptation of its parts, while no one can deny that it has
an individuality which the smart new houses in Grosvenor Place are
totally without, where costly granite and excellent stone seem to have
been employed to show the moral lesson that the best materials are of
little service unless mixed "with brains, sir," as Opie advised. Every
capital of the columns is carved by hand, but of the poorest design
and all alike--it is hardly possible to conceive the poverty of
invention involved in making every house and every ornament an exact
copy of its neighbour, in a situation which invited picturesque
treatment--after too, it had been shown at the Oxford Museum that
carving was done both quicker and better when the workers exerted
their minds in such inventions as they possessed (and some of their
renderings of natural forms were beautiful) than when they merely
followed a stereotyped pattern.
At present we can as soon invent a new style for ourselves as a new
animal; we copy, we combine--that is, under the Georgian era we added
a Mahometan cupola to Roman columns in the Regent's Park; or, still
later, we made one pediment serve for the whole side of a Belgravian
square--_i.e._, a form intended for a nicely-calculated angle over the
front of a temple with a particular number of columns, is stretched as
on a rack over the roofs of an acre of houses; or we build a portico
designed as a shelter against the cloudless sunshine of the Greek
climate to darken a sunless English dwelling-house. Our last
achievement has been to make a "pasticcio" of the high "mansarde"
Parisian roofs, with hideous little debased Italian porticoes, a
quarter of a mile of which may be seen in the Grosvenor Gardens
district.
Also we can patch and imitate--that is, rebuild a sham antique--from
which, however ingeniously done, the ineffable charm of the original
has escaped like a gas. Why the portico of the capital at Washington,
or the monument on the Calton Hill at Edinburgh, whose columns
are said to be "an exact copy of those at Athens," are so utterly
uninteresting, it would take too long to explain; but no one will deny
that they are mere lumps of dead stone, while the Parthenon itself,
ruined and defaced, wrecked and ill-used, still stands like a glorious
poem in marble, which no evil treatment can deprive of its charm.
There is mind and soul worked into the material, and somehow
inextricably entangled into it, which no copy, however exact, can in
the least reproduce.
No doubt we have improved in our street architecture; there are
isolated specimens of red brick, a shop-front in South Audley Street,
and one in New Bond Street, several excellent buildings in the city,
&c, &c, legitimate adaptations of gables, dormers, and windows,
exceedingly good of their kind; but these are not original creations,
only developments of what already exists.
There is one point in which our present shallow, unintelligent
education has wrought irreparable mischief. We have learnt so much of
respect for art as to desire to preserve the works of our forefathers,
but not so far as to find out how this is to be done. We set to work
to "restore" them. Every inch of the surface of an old church is
historical as to the manner of the handiwork of the men of the
twelfth, thirteenth, or whatever may be the century, and we proceed
to put a new face on it, which, at the best, must certainly be that
of the nineteenth century; we find a defaced portrait statue on an
altar-tomb (as in a church in Devonshire), and we insert a smooth
mask out of our own heads; we find an Early English tower with walls
fourteen feet thick, and think a vestry would be "nicer" in its place,
and the tower is therefore pulled down and rebuilt at the other end of
the nave (as in a church in Bucks); or a curious monument to the fifth
son of Edward III., or a couple of kneeling figures, clad in ruffs and
farthingales, of an old rector and his wife, are within the communion
rails (as in two other churches in Bucks); the incumbents do not
approve of tombs in such "sacred places," and, regardless of
the curious historical fact shown by the very position itself in
pre-Reformation days, they are ruthlessly rooted up, and in the latter
case a flaming brass to the rector's own family substituted.
Even a little art education would show us that this is not
"restoration;" it may be a much finer and smarter kind of work, as
many people seem to consider it; but the cutting down an inch of the
splendid carved stone porches at Chartres to a new surface is
not "restoring" that which was there before--the face of the
fifteenth-century lady cannot be "restored" without a portrait which
no longer exists--the new tower may be very "pretty," but it is
certainly no longer a specimen of rare old Early English work. Like
the monks of old carefully scratching their invaluable parchment
manuscripts, to put in their own words and notes, we have at one fell
swoop scratched the history of English ecclesiastical art off
the land, and archæologists are inquiring sadly for instances of
unrestored churches, which, alas! now are scarcely to be found.
What may be the reason why architecture, sculpture, painting, and
even poetry--_i.e._, the combination of stone, brick, marble, metal,
colours, and, lastly, of metrical forms of words--should all suffer by
the advance of our (so-called) civilization and education, is still
a mystery; but few will be found to doubt the fact in detail, though
they may deny the general formula.
Perhaps our self-consciousness as to our great virtues, our
"progress," our knowledge, the learning of the reason of our work, the
introversion of our present moods of thought, check the development
of an idea, even if we may be fortunate enough to get hold of one.
Self-consciousness is fatal to art; there is a certain spontaneity
of utterance--singing, as the birds sing, because they cannot help
it--"composing," almost as the mountains and clouds "compose," by
reason of their existence itself, not because they want to make a
picture,--which produces natural work, grown out of the man and
the requirements of his nature, to which it seems, with very rare
exceptions, that we cannot now attain.
In sculpture, a modern R.A. has acquired ten times as much anatomy
as Phidias: dissection was unknown, and not permitted, by the Greeks.
Chemistry has produced for the painter colours which Raphael (luckily
for us) never dreamed of. Yet one cannot help wondering at the strange
daring which permits the honourable society at Burlington House to
hang yearly the works of the ancient masters of the craft on the same
walls where their own productions are to figure a few weeks later, as
if to inform the world most impressively and depressingly from how far
we have fallen in pictorial art; to string up our taste, as it were,
to concert pitch--to give the key-note of true excellence, in order to
mark the depth to which we have sunk.
We now teach drawing diligently in all European countries, and are
surprised that we get no Michelangelos. Did Masaccio go to a school of
design, or Giotto learn "free-hand" manipulation? Education, as it is
generally defined--meaning thereby a knowledge of the accumulation of
facts discovered by other people--is good for the general public, for
ordinary humanity, but not for original minds, except so far as it
saves them time and trouble by preventing them from reinventing
what has been already done by others. True, there can be but few
"inventors" (in the old Italian sense of creators) in the world at any
one moment, and training must, it will be said, be carried on for the
use of the many; but one might still plead for a certain elasticity in
our teaching, a margin left for free-will among the few who will ever
be able to use it. And, meantime, it is allowable to lament over the
number of arts we have lost, or are in danger of losing, which
can only be practised by the few--whose number seems ever to be
diminishing, under our generalizing processes of turning out as many
minds of the same pattern as if we wanted nail-heads or patent screws
by the million.
This is not education in its true and highest sense--_i.e._, the
bringing forth the best that is in a man; not simply putting knowledge
into him, but using the variety of gifts, which even the poorest in
endowment possess, to the best possible end. And this seems more and
more difficult as the stereotyped pattern is more and more enforced in
board-schools, endowed schools, public schools, universities; and each
bit of plastic material, while young, is forced as much as possible
into the same shape, the only contention being who shall have the
construction of the die which all alike are eager to apply to every
individual of the nation.
Of all races which have yet existed there can be no doubt that the
Greek was the one most highly endowed with artistic powers of all
kinds; yet the Greek was certainly not, in our sense of the term,
an educated man at all; his powers of every kind, however, were
cultivated indirectly by the very atmosphere he lived in. His
sensitive artistic nature found food in the forms and colours of
the mountains and the islands, the sea and the sky, by which he
was surrounded; by the human nature about him in its most perfect
development; by every building--his temples, his tombs, his
theatres--every pot and pan he used, every seat he sat upon; whereas
no man's eye can be other than degraded by the unspeakable ugliness of
an English manufacturing town, or, what is almost worse, by the sham
art where decoration of any kind is invented or attempted by the
richer middle class.