consummate art. In its practical methods there was another, the
fatallest of all. These great artists brought with them mystery,
despondency, domesticity, sensuality: of all these, good came, as well
as evil. One thing more they brought, of which nothing but evil ever
comes, or can come--LIBERTY.
By the discipline of five hundred years they had learned and inherited
such power, that whereas all former painters could be right only by
effort, they could be right with ease; and whereas all former painters
could be right only under restraint, they could be right, free.
Tintoret's touch, Luini's, Correggio's, Reynolds', and Velasquez's, are
all as free as the air, and yet right. "How very fine!" said everybody.
Unquestionably, very fine. Next, said everybody, "What a grand
discovery! Here is the finest work ever done, and it is quite free. Let
us all be free then, and what fine things shall we not do also!" With
what results we too well know.
Nevertheless, remember you are to delight in the freedom won by these
mighty men through obedience, though you are not to covet it. Obey, and
you also shall be free in time; but in these minor things, as well as in
great, it is only right service which is perfect freedom.
185. This, broadly, is the history of the early and late colour-schools.
The first of these I shall call generally, henceforward, the school of
crystal; the other that of clay: potter's clay, or human, are too
sorrowfully the same, as far as art is concerned. But remember, in
practice, you cannot follow both these schools; you must distinctly
adopt the principles of one or the other. I will put the means of
following either within your reach; and according to your dispositions
you will choose one or the other: all I have to guard you against is the
mistake of thinking you can unite the two. If you want to paint (even in
the most distant and feeble way) in the Greek School, the school of
Lionardo, Correggio, and Turner, you cannot design coloured windows, nor
Angelican paradises. If, on the other hand, you choose to live in the
peace of paradise, you cannot share in the gloomy triumphs of the earth.
186. And, incidentally note, as a practical matter of immediate
importance, that painted windows have nothing to do with
chiaroscuro.[14] The virtue of glass is to be transparent everywhere. If
you care to build a palace of jewels, painted glass is richer than all
the treasures of Aladdin's lamp; but if you like pictures better than
jewels, you must come into broad daylight to paint them. A picture in
coloured glass is one of the most vulgar of barbarisms, and only fit to
be ranked with the gauze transparencies and chemical illuminations of
the sensational stage.
[Footnote 14: There is noble chiaroscuro in the variations of their
colour, but not as representative of solid form.]
Also, put out of your minds at once all question about difficulty of
getting colour; in glass we have all the colours that are wanted, only
we do not know either how to choose, or how to connect them; and we are
always trying to get them bright, when their real virtues are to be
deep, mysterious, and subdued. We will have a thorough study of painted
glass soon: mean while I merely give you a type of its perfect style, in
two windows from Chalons-sur-Marne (S. 141).
187. But for my own part, with what poor gift and skill is in me, I
belong wholly to the chiaroscurist school; and shall teach you therefore
chiefly that which I am best able to teach: and the rather, that it is
only in this school that you can follow out the study either of natural
history or landscape. The form of a wild animal, or the wrath of a
mountain torrent, would both be revolting (or in a certain sense
invisible) to the calm fantasy of a painter in the schools of crystal.
He must lay his lion asleep in St. Jerome's study beside his tame
partridge and easy slippers; lead the appeased river by alternate azure
promontories, and restrain its courtly little streamlets with margins of
marble. But, on the other hand, your studies of mythology and literature
may best be connected with these schools of purest and calmest
imagination; and their discipline will be useful to you in yet another
direction, and that a very important one. It will teach you to take
delight in little things, and develop in you the joy which all men
should feel in purity and order, not only in pictures but in reality.
For, indeed, the best art of this school of fantasy may at last be in
reality, and the chiaroscurists, true in ideal, may be less helpful in
act. We cannot arrest sunsets nor carve mountains, but we may turn every
English homestead, if we choose, into a picture by Cima or John Bellini,
which shall be "no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life
indeed."
188. For the present, however, and yet for some little time during your
progress, you will not have to choose your school. For both, as we have
seen, begin in delineation, and both proceed by filling flat spaces
with an even tint. And therefore this following will be the course of
work for you, founded on all that we have seen.
Having learned to measure, and draw a pen line with some steadiness (the
geometrical exercises for this purpose being properly school, not
University work), you shall have a series of studies from the plants
which are of chief importance in the history of art; first from their
real forms, and then from the conventional and heraldic expressions of
them; then we will take examples of the filling of ornamental forms with
flat colour in Egyptian, Greek, and Gothic design; and then we will
advance to animal forms treated in the same severe way, and so to the
patterns and colour designs on animals themselves. And when we are sure
of our firmness of hand and accuracy of eye, we will go on into light
and shade.
189. In process of time, this series of exercises will, I hope, be
sufficiently complete and systematic to show its purpose at a glance.
But during the present year, I shall content myself with placing a few
examples of these different kinds of practice in your rooms for work,
explaining in the catalogue the position they will ultimately occupy,
and the technical points of process into which it is useless to enter in
a general lecture. After a little time spent in copying these, your own
predilections must determine your future course of study; only remember,
whatever school you follow, it must be only to learn method, not to
imitate result, and to acquaint yourself with the minds of other men,
but not to adopt them as your own. Be assured that no good can come of
our work but as it arises simply out of our own true natures, and the
necessities of the time around us, though in many respects an evil one.
We live in an age of base conceit and baser servility--an age whose
intellect is chiefly formed by pillage, and occupied in desecration; one
day mimicking, the next destroying, the works of all the noble persons
who made its intellectual or art life possible to it:--an age without
honest confidence enough in itself to carve a cherry-stone with an
original fancy, but with insolence enough to abolish the solar system,
if it were allowed to meddle with it.[15] In the midst of all this, you
have to become lowly and strong; to recognise the powers of others and
to fulfil your own. I shall try to bring before you every form of
ancient art, that you may read and profit by it, not imitate it. You
shall draw Egyptian kings dressed in colours like the rainbow, and Doric
gods, and Runic monsters, and Gothic monks--not that you may draw like
Egyptians or Norsemen, nor yield yourselves passively to be bound by the
devotion, or inspired by the passion of the past, but that you may know
truly what other men have felt during their poor span of life; and open
your own hearts to what the heavens and earth may have to tell you in
yours.
[Footnote 15: Every day these bitter words become more sorrowfully true
(September, 1887).]
190. In closing this first course of lectures, I have one word more to
say respecting the possible consequence of the introduction of art among
the studies of the University. What art may do for scholarship, I have
no right to conjecture; but what scholarship may do for art, I may in
all modesty tell you. Hitherto, great artists, though always gentlemen,
have yet been too exclusively craftsmen. Art has been less thoughtful
than we suppose; it has taught much, but erred much, also. Many of the
greatest pictures are enigmas; others, beautiful toys; others, harmful
and corrupting enchantments. In the loveliest, there is something weak;
in the greatest, there is something guilty. And this, gentlemen, if you
will, is the new thing that may come to pass,--that the scholars of
England may resolve to teach also with the silent power of the arts; and
that some among you may so learn and use them, that pictures may be
painted which shall not be enigmas any more, but open teachings of what
can no otherwise be so well shown;--which shall not be fevered or broken
visions any more, but filled with the indwelling light of self-possessed
imagination;--which shall not be stained or enfeebled any more by evil
passion, but glorious with the strength and chastity of noble human
love;--and which shall no more degrade or disguise the work of God in
heaven, but testify of Him as here dwelling with men, and walking with
them, not angry, in the garden of the earth.