earnest. In the most solemn earnest, I assure you; though such is the
strange course of our popular life that all the irrational arts of
destruction are at once felt to be earnest; while any plan for those of
instruction on a grand scale, sounds like a dream, or jest. Still, I do
not absolutely propose to decorate our public buildings with sculpture
wholly of this character; though beast, and fowl, and creeping things,
and fishes, might all find room on such a building as the Solomon's
House of a New Atlantis; and some of them might even become symbolic of
much to us again. Passing through the Strand, only the other day, for
instance, I saw four highly finished and delicately colored pictures of
cock-fighting, which, for imitative quality, were nearly all that could
be desired, going far beyond the Greek cock of Himera; and they would
have delighted a Greek's soul, if they had meant as much as a Greek
cock-fight; but they were only types of the "[Greek: endomachas
alektor]," and of the spirit of home contest, which has been so fatal
lately to the Bird of France; and not of the defense of one's own
barnyard, in thought of which the Olympians set the cock on the pillars
of their chariot course; and gave it goodly alliance in its battle, as
you may see here, in what is left of the angle of moldering marble in
the chair of the priest of Dionusos. The cast of it, from the center of
the theater under the Acropolis, is in the British Museum; and I wanted
its spiral for you, and this kneeling Angel of Victory;--it is late
Greek art, but nobly systematic flat bas-relief. So I set Mr. Burgess to
draw it; but neither he nor I, for a little while, could make out what
the Angel of Victory was kneeling for. His attitude is an ancient and
grandly conventional one among the Egyptians; and I was tracing it back
to a kneeling goddess of the greatest dynasty of the Pharaohs--a goddess
of Evening, or Death, laying down the sun out of her right hand;--when,
one bright day, the shadows came out clear on the Athenian throne, and I
saw that my Angel of Victory was only backing a cock at a cock-fight.
134. Still, as I have said, there is no reason why sculpture, even for
simplest persons, should confine itself to imagery of fish, or fowl, or
four-footed things.
We go back to our first principle: we ought to carve nothing but what is
honorable. And you are offended, at this moment, with my fish, (as I
believe, when the first sculptures appeared on the windows of this
museum, offense was taken at the unnecessary introduction of cats,)
these dissatisfactions being properly felt by your "[Greek: nous ton
timiotaton]." For indeed, in all cases, our right judgment must depend
on our wish to give honor only to things and creatures that deserve it.
135. And now I must state to you another principle of veracity, both in
sculpture, and all following arts, of wider scope than any hitherto
examined. We have seen that sculpture is to be a true representation of
true internal form. Much more is it to be a representation of true
internal emotion. You must carve only what you yourself see as you see
it; but, much more, you must carve only what you yourself feel, as you
feel it. You may no more endeavor to feel through other men's souls,
than to see with other men's eyes. Whereas generally now, in Europe and
America, every man's energy is bent upon acquiring some false emotion,
not his own, but belonging to the past, or to other persons, because he
has been taught that such and such a result of it will be fine. Every
attempted sentiment in relation to art is hypocritical; our notions of
sublimity, of grace, or pious serenity, are all secondhand: and we are
practically incapable of designing so much as a bell-handle or a
door-knocker, without borrowing the first notion of it from those who
are gone--where we shall not wake them with our knocking. I would we
could.
136. In the midst of this desolation we have nothing to count on for
real growth but what we can find of honest liking and longing, in
ourselves and in others. We must discover, if we would healthily
advance, what things are verily [Greek: timiotata] among us; and if we
delight to honor the dishonorable, consider how, in future, we may
better bestow our likings. Now it appears to me, from all our popular
declarations, that we, at present, honor nothing so much as liberty and
independence; and no person so much as the Free man and Self-made man,
who will be ruled by no one, and has been taught, or helped, by no one.
And the reason I chose a fish for you as the first subject of sculpture,
was that in men who are free and self-made, you have the nearest
approach, humanly possible, to the state of the fish, and finely
organized [Greek: herpeton]. You get the exact phrase in Habakkuk, if
you take the Septuagint text,--"[Greek: poieseis tous anthropous hos
tous ichthyas tes thalasses, kai hos ta herpeta ta ouk echonta
hegoumenon]." "Thou wilt make men as the fishes of the sea, and as the
reptile things, _that have no ruler over them_." And it chanced that as
I was preparing this Lecture, one of our most able and popular prints
gave me a wood-cut of the 'self-made man,' specified as such, so
vigorously drawn, and with so few touches, that Phidias or Turner
himself could scarcely have done it better; so that I had only to ask my
assistant to enlarge it with accuracy, and it became comparable with my
fish at once. Of course it is not given by the caricaturist as an
admirable face; only, I am enabled by his skill to set before you,
without any suspicion of unfairness on _my_ part, the expression to
which the life we profess to think most honorable, naturally leads. If
we were to take the hat off, you see how nearly the profile corresponds
with that of the typical fish.
137. Such, then, being the definition, by your best popular art, of the
ideal of feature at which we are gradually arriving by self-manufacture:
when I place opposite to it (in Plate VIII.) the profile of a man not in
anywise self-made, neither by the law of his own will, nor by the love
of his own interest--nor capable, for a moment, of any kind of
'Independence,' or of the idea of independence; but wholly dependent
upon, and subjected to, external influence of just law, wise teaching,
and trusted love and truth, in his fellow-spirits;--setting before you,
I say, this profile of a God-made, instead of a self-made, man, I know
that you will feel, on the instant, that you are brought into contact
with the vital elements of human art; and that this, the sculpture of
the good, is indeed the only permissible sculpture.
138. A God-made _man_, I say. The face, indeed, stands as a symbol of
more than man in its sculptor's mind. For as I gave you, to lead your
first effort in the form of leaves, the scepter of Apollo, so this,
which I give you as the first type of rightness in the form of flesh, is
the countenance of the holder of that scepter, the Sun-God of Syracuse.
But there is nothing in the face (nor did the Greek suppose there was)
more perfect than might be seen in the daily beauty of the creatures the
Sun-God shone upon, and whom his strength and honor animated. This is
not an ideal, but a quite literally true, face of a Greek youth; nay, I
will undertake to show you that it is not supremely beautiful, and even
to surpass it altogether with the literal portrait of an Italian one. It
is in verity no more than the form habitually taken by the features of a
well-educated young Athenian or Sicilian citizen; and the one
requirement for the sculptors of to-day is not, as it has been thought,
to invent the same ideal, but merely to see the same reality.
[Illustration: VIII.
THE APOLLO OF SYRACUSE, AND THE SELF-MADE MAN.]
[Illustration: IX.
APOLLO CHRYSOCOMES OF CLAZOMENAE.]
Now, you know I told you in my Fourth Lecture[28] that the beginning of
art was in getting our country clean and our people beautiful, and you
supposed that to be a statement irrelevant to my subject; just as, at
this moment, you perhaps think I am quitting the great subject of this
present Lecture--the method of likeness-making,--and letting myself
branch into the discussion of what things we are to make likeness of.
But you shall see hereafter that the method of imitating a beautiful
thing must be different from the method of imitating an ugly one; and
that, with the change in subject from what is dishonorable to what is
honorable, there will be involved a parallel change in the management of
tools, of lines, and of colors. So that before I can determine for you
_how_ you are to imitate, you must tell me what kind of face you wish to
imitate. The best draughtsman in the world could not draw this Apollo in
ten scratches, though he can draw the self-made man. Still less this
nobler Apollo of Ionian Greece (Plate IX.), in which the incisions are
softened into a harmony like that of Correggio's painting. So that you
see the method itself,--the choice between black incision or fine
sculpture, and perhaps, presently, the choice between color or no color,
will depend on what you have to represent. Color may be expedient for a
glistening dolphin or a spotted fawn;--perhaps inexpedient for white
Poseidon, and gleaming Dian. So that, before defining the laws of
sculpture, I am compelled to ask you, _what you mean to carve_; and
that, little as you think it, is asking you how you mean to live, and
what the laws of your State are to be, for _they_ determine those of
your statue. You can only have this kind of face to study from, in the
sort of state that produced it. And you will find that sort of state
described in the beginning of the fourth book of the laws of Plato; as
founded, for one thing, on the conviction that of all the evils that can
happen to a state, quantity of money is the greatest! [Greek: meizon
kakon, hos epos eipein, polei ouden an gignoita, eis gennaion kai
dikaion ethon ktesin], "for, to speak shortly, no greater evil, matching
each against each, can possibly happen to a city, as adverse to its
forming just or generous character," than its being full of silver and
gold.
139. Of course the Greek notion may be wrong, and ours right,
only--[Greek: hos epos eipein]--you can have Greek sculpture only on
that Greek theory: shortly expressed by the words put into the mouth of
Poverty herself, in the Plutus of Aristophanes, "[Greek: Tou ploutou
parecho beltionas andras, kai ten gnomen, kai ten idean]," "I deliver to
you better men than the God of Money can, both in imagination and
feature." So, on the other hand, this ichthyoid, reptilian, or
monochondyloid ideal of the self-made man can only be reached,
universally, by a nation which holds that poverty, either of purse or
spirit,--but especially the spiritual character of being [Greek: ptochoi
to pneumati],--is the lowest of degradations; and which believes that
the desire of wealth is the first of manly and moral sentiments. As I
have been able to get the popular ideal represented by its own living
art, so I can give you this popular faith in its own living words; but
in words meant seriously, and not at all as caricature, from one of our
leading journals, professedly aesthetic also in its very name, the
_Spectator_, of August 6, 1870.
"Mr. Ruskin's plan," it says, "would make England poor, in order that
she might be cultivated, and refined, and artistic. A wilder proposal
was never broached by a man of ability; and it might be regarded as a
proof that the assiduous study of art emasculates the intellect, _and
even the moral sense_. Such a theory almost warrants the contempt with
which art is often regarded by essentially intellectual natures, like
Proudhon" (sic). "Art is noble as the flower of life, and the creations
of a Titian are a great heritage of the race; but if England could
secure high art and Venetian glory of color only by the sacrifice of her
manufacturing supremacy, and _by the acceptance of national poverty_,
then the pursuit of such artistic achievements would imply that we had
ceased to possess natures of manly strength, _or to know the meaning of
moral aims_. If we must choose between a Titian and a Lancashire cotton
mill, then, in the name of manhood and of morality, give us the cotton
mill. Only the dilettanteism of the studio; that dilettanteism which
loosens the moral no less than the intellectual fiber, and which is as
fatal to rectitude of action as to correctness of reasoning power, would
make a different choice."
You see also, by this interesting and most memorable passage, how
completely the question is admitted to be one of ethics--the only real
point at issue being, whether this face or that is developed on the
truer moral principle.
140. I assume, however, for the present, that this Apolline type is the
kind of form you wish to reach and to represent. And now observe,
instantly, the whole question of manner of imitation is altered for us.
The fins of the fish, the plumes of the swan, and the flowing of the
Sun-God's hair are all represented by incisions--but the incisions do
sufficiently represent the fin and feather,--they _in_sufficiently
represent the hair. If I chose, with a little more care and labor, I
could absolutely get the surface of the scales and spines of the fish,
and the expression of its mouth; but no quantity of labor would obtain
the real surface of a tress of Apollo's hair, and the full expression of
his mouth. So that we are compelled at once to call the imagination to
help us, and say to it, _You_ know what the Apollo Chrysocomes must be
like; finish all this for yourself. Now, the law under which imagination
works, is just that of other good workers. "You must give me clear
orders; show me what I have to do, and where I am to begin, and let me
alone." And the orders can be given, quite clearly, up to a certain
point, in form; but they cannot be given clearly in color, now that the
subject is subtle. All beauty of this high kind depends on harmony; let
but the slightest discord come into it, and the finer the thing is, the
more fatal will be the flaw. Now, on a flat surface, I can command my
color to be precisely what and where I mean it to be; on a round one I
cannot. For all harmony depends, first, on the fixed proportion of the
color of the light to that of the relative shadow; and therefore if I
fasten my color, I must fasten my shade. But on a round surface the
shadow changes at every hour of the day; and therefore all coloring
which is expressive of form, is impossible; and if the form is fine,
(and here there is nothing but what is fine,) you may bid farewell to
color.
141. Farewell to color; that is to say, if the thing is to be seen
distinctly, and you have only wise people to show it to; but if it is to
be seen indistinctly, at a distance, color may become explanatory; and
if you have simple people to show it to, color may be necessary to
excite _their_ imaginations, though not to excite yours. And the art is
great always by meeting its conditions in the straightest way; and if it
is to please a multitude of innocent and bluntly-minded persons, must
express itself in the terms that will touch them; else it is not good.
And I have to trace for you through the history of the past, and
possibilities of the future, the expedients used by great sculptors to
obtain clearness, impressiveness, or splendor; and the manner of their
appeal to the people, under various light and shadow, and with reference
to different degrees of public intelligence: such investigation
resolving itself again and again, as we proceed, into questions
absolutely ethical; as, for instance, whether color is to be bright or
dull,--that is to say, for a populace cheerful or heartless;--whether it
is to be delicate or strong,--that is to say, for a populace attentive
or careless; whether it is to be a background like the sky, for a
procession of young men and maidens, because your populace revere
life--or the shadow of the vault behind a corpse stained with drops of
blackened blood, for a populace taught to worship Death. Every critical
determination of rightness depends on the obedience to some ethic law,
by the most rational and, therefore, simplest means. And you see how it
depends most, of all things, on whether you are working for chosen
persons, or for the mob; for the joy of the boudoir, or of the Borgo.
And if for the mob, whether the mob of Olympia, or of St. Antoine.
Phidias, showing his Jupiter for the first time, hides behind the temple
door to listen, resolved afterwards "[Greek: rhythmizein to agalma pros
to tois pleistois dokoun, ou gar hegeito mikran einai symboulen demou
tosoutou]," and truly, as your people is, in judgment, and in multitude,
so must your sculpture be, in glory. An elementary principle which has
been too long out of mind.
142. I leave you to consider it, since, for some time, we shall not
again be able to take up the inquiries to which it leads. But,
ultimately, I do not doubt that you will rest satisfied in these
following conclusions:
1. Not only sculpture, but all the other fine arts, must be for the
people.
2. They must be didactic to the people, and that as their chief end. The
structural arts, didactic in their manner; the graphic arts, in their
matter also.
3. And chiefly the great representative and imaginative arts--that is to
say, the drama and sculpture--are to teach what is noble in past
history, and lovely in existing human and organic life.
4. And the test of right manner of execution in these arts, is that they
strike, in the most emphatic manner, the rank of popular minds to which
they are addressed.
5. And the test of utmost fineness in execution in these arts, is that
they make themselves be forgotten in what they represent; and so fulfill
the words of their greatest Master,
"THE BEST, IN THIS KIND, ARE BUT SHADOWS."
FOOTNOTES:
[25] See date of delivery of Lecture. The picture was of a peasant girl
of eleven or twelve years old, peeling carrots by a cottage fire.
[26] In Duerer's 'Melancholia.'
[27] Turner's, in the Hakewill series.
[28] "Lectures on Art," Sec. 116.
LECTURE V.
STRUCTURE.
_December, 1870._
143. On previous occasions of addressing you, I have endeavored to show
you, first, how sculpture is distinguished from other arts; then its
proper subjects; then its proper method in the realization of these
subjects. To-day, we must, in the fourth place, consider the means at
its command for the accomplishment of these ends; the nature of its
materials; and the mechanical or other difficulties of their treatment.
And however doubtful we may have remained as to the justice of Greek
ideals, or propriety of Greek methods of representing them, we may be
certain that the example of the Greeks will be instructive in all
practical matters relating to this great art, peculiarly their own. I
think even the evidence I have already laid before you is enough to
convince you that it was by rightness and reality, not by idealism or
delightfulness only, that their minds were finally guided; and I am sure
that, before closing the present course, I shall be able so far to
complete that evidence, as to prove to you that the commonly received
notions of classic art are, not only unfounded, but even, in many
respects, directly contrary to the truth. You are constantly told that
Greece idealized whatever she contemplated. She did the exact contrary:
she realized and verified it. You are constantly told she sought only
the beautiful. She sought, indeed, with all her heart; but she found,
because she never doubted that the search was to be consistent with
propriety and common sense. And the first thing you will always discern
in Greek work is the first which you _ought_ to discern in all work;
namely, that the object of it has been rational, and has been obtained
by simple and unostentatious means.
144. "That the object of the work has been rational"! Consider how much
that implies. That it should be by all means seen to have been
determined upon, and carried through, with sense and discretion; these
being gifts of intellect far more precious than any knowledge of
mathematics, or of the mechanical resources of art. Therefore, also,
that it should be a modest and temperate work, a structure fitted to the
actual state of men; proportioned to their actual size, as animals,--to
their average strength,--to their true necessities,--and to the degree
of easy command they have over the forces and substances of nature.
145. You see how much this law excludes! All that is fondly magnificent,
insolently ambitious, or vainly difficult. There is, indeed, such a
thing as Magnanimity in design, but never unless it be joined also with
modesty, and _Equ_animity. Nothing extravagant, monstrous, strained, or
singular, can be structurally beautiful. No towers of Babel envious of
the skies; no pyramids in mimicry of the mountains of the earth; no
streets that are a weariness to traverse, nor temples that make pigmies
of the worshipers.
It is one of the primal merits and decencies of Greek work, that it was,
on the whole, singularly small in scale, and wholly within reach of
sight, to its finest details. And, indeed, the best buildings that I
know are thus modest; and some of the best are minute jewel cases for
sweet sculpture. The Parthenon would hardly attract notice, if it were
set by the Charing Cross Railway Station: the Church of the Miracoli, at
Venice, the Chapel of the Rose, at Lucca, and the Chapel of the Thorn,
at Pisa, would not, I suppose, all three together, fill the tenth part,
cube, of a transept of the Crystal Palace. And they are better so.
146. In the chapter on Power in the 'Seven Lamps of Architecture,' I
have stated what seems, at first, the reverse of what I am saying now;
namely, that it is better to have one grand building than any number of
mean ones. And that is true: but you cannot command grandeur by size
till you can command grace in minuteness; and least of all, remember,
will you so command it to-day, when magnitude has become the chief
exponent of folly and misery, coordinate in the fraternal enormities of
the Factory and Poorhouse,--the Barracks and Hospital. And the final law
in this matter is that, if you require edifices only for the grace and
health of mankind, and build them without pretense and without
chicanery, they will be sublime on a modest scale, and lovely with
little decoration.
147. From these principles of simplicity and temperance, two very
severely fixed laws of construction follow; namely, first, that our
structure, to be beautiful, must be produced with tools of men; and,
secondly, that it must be composed of natural substances. First, I say,
produced with tools of men. All fine art requires the application of the
whole strength and subtlety of the body, so that such art is not
possible to any sickly person, but involves the action and force of a
strong man's arm from the shoulder, as well as the delicatest touch of
his fingers: and it is the evidence that this full and fine strength has
been spent on it which makes the art executively noble; so that no
instrument must be used, habitually, which is either too heavy to be
delicately restrained, or too small and weak to transmit a vigorous
impulse; much less any mechanical aid, such as would render the
sensibility of the fingers ineffectual.[29]
148. Of course, any kind of work in glass, or in metal, on a large
scale, involves some painful endurance of heat; and working in clay,
some habitual endurance of cold; but the point beyond which the effort
must not be carried is marked by loss of power of manipulation. As long
as the eyes and fingers have complete command of the material, (as a
glass-blower has, for instance, in doing fine ornamental work,)--the law
is not violated; but all our great engine and furnace work, in
gun-making and the like, is degrading to the intellect; and no nation
can long persist in it without losing many of its human faculties. Nay,
even the use of machinery other than the common rope and pulley, for the
lifting of weights, is degrading to architecture; the invention of
expedients for the raising of enormous stones has always been a
characteristic of partly savage or corrupted races. A block of marble
not larger than a cart with a couple of oxen could carry, and a
cross-beam, with a couple of pulleys, raise, is as large as should
generally be used in any building. The employment of large masses is
sure to lead to vulgar exhibitions of geometrical arrangement,[30] and
to draw away the attention from the sculpture. In general, rocks
naturally break into such pieces as the human beings that have to build
with them can easily lift; and no larger should be sought for.
149. In this respect, and in many other subtle ways, the law that the
work is to be with tools of men is connected with the farther condition
of its modesty, that it is to be wrought in substance provided by
Nature, and to have a faithful respect to all the essential qualities of
such substance.