Some thirty years afterwards, with all his powers in their strongest

training, and after the total change in his feelings and principles

which I have endeavored to describe, he undertook the series of "England

and Wales," and in that series introduced the subject of Llanthony

Abbey. And behold, he went back to his boy's sketch, and boy's thought.

He kept the very bushes in their places, but brought the fisherman to

the other side of the river, and put him, in somewhat less courtly

dress, under their shelter, instead of himself. And then he set all his

gained strength and new knowledge at work on the well-remembered shower

of rain, that had fallen thirty years before, to do it better. The

resultant drawing[103] is one of the very noblest of his second period.

Another of the drawings of the England series, Ulleswater, is the

repetition of one in Mr. Fawkes's collection, which, by the method of

its execution, I should conjecture to have been executed about the year

1808, or 1810: at all events, it is a very quiet drawing of the first

period. The lake is quite calm; the western hills in grey shadow, the

eastern massed in light. Helvellyn rising like a mist between them, all

being mirrored in the calm water. Some thin and slightly evanescent cows

are standing in the shallow water in front; a boat floats motionless

about a hundred yards from the shore: the foreground is of broken rocks,

with lovely pieces of copse on the right and left.

This was evidently Turner's record of a quiet evening by the shore of

Ulleswater, but it was a feeble one. He could not at that time render

the sunset colors: he went back to it therefore in the England series,

and painted it again with his new power. The same hills are there, the

same shadows, the same cows,--they had stood in his mind, on the same

spot, for twenty years,--the same boat, the same rocks, only the copse

is cut away--it interfered with the masses of his color: some figures

are introduced bathing, and what was grey, and feeble gold in the first

drawing, becomes purple, and burning rose-color in the last.

But perhaps one of the most curious examples is in the series of

subjects from Winchelsea. That in the Liber Studiorum, "Winchelsea,

Sussex," bears date 1812, and its figures consist of a soldier speaking

to a woman, who is resting on the bank beside the road. There is another

small subject, with Winchelsea in the distance, of which the engraving

bears date 1817. It has _two_ women with bundles, and _two_ soldiers

toiling along the embankment in the plain, and a baggage waggon in the

distance. Neither of these seems to have satisfied him, and at last he

did another for the England series, of which the engraving bears date

1830. There is now a regiment on the march; the baggage waggon is there,

having got no further on in the thirteen years, but one of the women is

tired, and has fainted on the bank; another is supporting her against

her bundle, and giving her drink; a third sympathetic woman is added,

and the two soldiers have stopped, and one is drinking from his canteen.

Nor is it merely of entire scenes, or of particular incidents, that

Turner's memory is thus tenacious. The slightest passages of color or

arrangement that have pleased him--the fork of a bough, the casting of a

shadow, the fracture of a stone--will be taken up again and again, and

strangely worked into new relations with other thoughts. There is a

single sketch from nature in one of the portfolios at Farnley, of a

common wood-walk on the estate, which has furnished passages to no fewer

than three of the most elaborate compositions in the Liber Studiorum.

I am thus tedious in dwelling on Turner's powers of memory, because I

wish it to be thoroughly seen how all his greatness, all his infinite

luxuriance of invention, depends on his taking possession of everything

that he sees,--on his grasping all, and losing hold of nothing,--on his

forgetting himself, and forgetting nothing else. I wish it to be

understood how every great man paints what he sees or did see, his

greatness being indeed little else than his intense sense of fact. And

thus Pre-Raphaelitism and Raphaelitism, and Turnerism, are all one and

the same, so far as education can influence them. They are different in

their choice, different in their faculties, but all the same in this,

that Raphael himself, so far as he was great, and all who preceded or

followed him who ever were great, became so by painting the truths

around them as they appeared to each man's own mind, not as he had been

taught to see them, except by the God who made both him and them.

There is, however, one more characteristic of Turner's second period, on

which I have still to dwell, especially with reference to what has been

above advanced respecting the fallacy of overtoil; namely, the

magnificent ease with which all is done when it is _successfully_ done.

For there are one or two drawings of this time which are _not_ done

easily. Turner had in these set himself to do a fine thing to exhibit

his powers; in the common phrase, to excel himself; so sure as he does

this, the work is a failure. The worst drawings that have ever come from

his hands are some of this second period, on which he has spent much

time and laborious thought; drawings filled with incident from one side

to the other, with skies stippled into morbid blue, and warm lights set

against them in violent contrast; one of Bamborough Castle, a large

water-color, may be named as an example. But the truly noble works are

those in which, without effort, he has expressed his thoughts as they

came, and forgotten himself; and in these the outpouring of invention is

not less miraculous than the swiftness and obedience of the mighty hand

that expresses it. Any one who examines the drawings may see the

evidence of this facility, in the strange freshness and sharpness of

every touch of color; but when the multitude of delicate touches, with

which all the aerial tones are worked, is taken into consideration, it

would still appear impossible that the drawing could have been completed

with _ease_, unless we had direct evidence in the matter: fortunately,

it is not wanting. There is a drawing in Mr. Fawkes's collection of a

man-of-war taking in stores: it is of the usual size of those of the

England series, about sixteen inches by eleven: it does not appear one

of the most highly finished, but is still farther removed from

slightness. The hull of a first-rate occupies nearly one-half of the

picture on the right, her bows towards the spectator, seen in sharp

perspective from stem to stern, with all her portholes, guns, anchors,

and lower rigging elaborately detailed; there are two other ships of the

line in the middle distance, drawn with equal precision; a noble breezy

sea dancing against their broad bows, full of delicate drawing in its

waves; a store-ship beneath the hull of the larger vessel, and several

other boats, and a complicated cloudy sky. It might appear no small

exertion of mind to draw the detail of all this shipping down to the

smallest ropes, from memory, in the drawing-room of a mansion in the

middle of Yorkshire, even if considerable time had been given for the

effort. But Mr. Fawkes sat beside the painter from the first stroke to

the last. Turner took a piece of blank paper one morning after

breakfast, outlined his ships, finished the drawing in three hours, and

went out to shoot.

Let this single fact be quietly meditated upon by our ordinary painters,

and they will see the truth of what was above asserted,--that if a great

thing can be done at all, it can be done easily; and let them not

torment themselves with twisting of compositions this way and that, and

repeating, and experimenting, and scene-shifting. If a man can compose

at all, he can compose at once, or rather he must compose in spite of

himself. And this is the reason of that silence which I have kept in

most of my works, on the subject of Composition. Many critics,

especially the architects, have found fault with me for not "teaching

people how to arrange masses;" for not "attributing sufficient

importance to composition." Alas! I attribute far more importance to it

than they do;--so much importance, that I should just as soon think of

sitting down to teach a man how to write a Divina Commedia, or King

Lear, as how to "compose," in the true sense, a single building or

picture. The marvellous stupidity of this age of lecturers is, that

they do not see that what they call "principles of composition," are

mere principles of common sense in everything, as well as in pictures

and buildings;--A picture is to have a principal light? Yes; and so a

dinner is to have a principal dish, and an oration a principal point,

and an air of music a principal note, and every man a principal object.

A picture is to have harmony of relation among its parts? Yes; and so is

a speech well uttered, and an action well ordered, and a company well

chosen, and a ragout well mixed. Composition! As if a man were not

composing every moment of his life, well or ill, and would not do it

instinctively in his picture as well as elsewhere, if he could.

Composition of this lower or common kind is of exactly the same

importance in a picture that it is in any thing else,--no more. It is

well that a man should say what he has to say in good order and

sequence, but the main thing is to say it truly. And yet we go on

preaching to our pupils as if to have a principal light was every thing,

and so cover our academy walls with Shacabac feasts, wherein the courses

are indeed well ordered, but the dishes empty.

It is not, however, only in invention that men over-work themselves, but

in execution also; and here I have a word to say to the Pre-Raphaelites

specially. They are working too hard. There is evidence in failing

portions of their pictures, showing that they have wrought so long upon

them that their very sight has failed for weariness, and that the hand

refused any more to obey the heart. And, besides this, there are certain

qualities of drawing which they miss from over-carefulness. For, let

them be assured, there is a great truth lurking in that common desire of

men to see things done in what they call a "masterly," or "bold," or

"broad," manner: a truth oppressed and abused, like almost every other

in this world, but an eternal one nevertheless; and whatever mischief

may have followed from men's looking for nothing else but this facility

of execution, and supposing that a picture was assuredly all right if

only it were done with broad dashes of the brush, still the truth

remains the same:--that because it is not intended that men shall

torment or weary themselves with any earthly labor, it is appointed

that the noblest results should only be attainable by a certain ease and

decision of manipulation. I only wish people understood this much of

sculpture, as well as of painting, and could see that the finely

finished statue is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a far more

vulgar work than that which shows rough signs of the right hand laid to

the workman's hammer: but at all events, in painting it is felt by all

men, and justly felt. The freedom of the lines of nature can only be

represented by a similar freedom in the hand that follows them; there

are curves in the flow of the hair, and in the form of the features, and

in the muscular outline of the body, which can in no wise be caught but

by a sympathetic freedom in the stroke of the pencil. I do not care what

example is taken, be it the most subtle and careful work of Leonardo

himself, there will be found a play and power and ease in the outlines,

which no _slow_ effort could ever imitate. And if the Pre-Raphaelites do

not understand how this kind of power, in its highest perfection, may be

united with the most severe rendering of all other orders of truth, and

especially of those with which they themselves have most sympathy, let

them look at the drawings of John Lewis.

These then are the principal lessons which we have to learn from Turner,

in his second or central period of labor. There is one more, however, to

be received; and that is a warning; for towards the close of it, what

with doing small conventional vignettes for publishers, making showy

drawings from sketches taken by other people of places he had never

seen, and touching up the bad engravings from his works submitted to him

almost every day,--engravings utterly destitute of animation, and which

had to be raised into a specious brilliancy by scratching them over with

white, spotty lights, he gradually got inured to many conventionalities,

and even falsities; and, having trusted for ten or twelve years almost

entirely to his memory and invention, living I believe mostly in London,

and receiving a new sensation only from the burning of the Houses of

Parliament, he painted many pictures between 1830 and 1840 altogether

unworthy of him. But he was not thus to close his career.

In the summer either of 1840 or 1841, he undertook another journey into

Switzerland. It was then at least forty years since he had first seen

the Alps; (the source of the Arveron, in Mr. Fawkes's collection, which

could not have been painted till he had seen the thing itself, bears

date 1800,) and the direction of his journey in 1840 marks his fond

memory of that earliest one; for, if we look over the Swiss studies and

drawings executed in his first period, we shall be struck with his

fondness for the pass of the St. Gothard; the most elaborate drawing in

the Farnley collection is one of the Lake of Lucerne from Fluelen; and,

counting the Liber Studiorum subjects, there are, to my knowledge, six

compositions taken at the same period from the pass of St. Gothard, and,

probably, several others are in existence. The valleys of Sallenche, and

Chamouni, and Lake of Geneva, are the only other Swiss scenes which seem

to have made very profound impressions on him.

He returned in 1841 to Lucerne; walked up Mont Pilate on foot, crossed

the St. Gothard, and returned by Lausanne and Geneva. He made a large

number of colored sketches on this journey, and realised several of them

on his return. The drawings thus produced are different from all that

had preceded them, and are the first which belong definitely to what I

shall henceforth call his Third period.

The perfect repose of his youth had returned to his mind, while the

faculties of imagination and execution appeared in renewed strength; all

conventionality being done away with by the force of the impression

which he had received from the Alps, after his long separation from

them. The drawings are marked by a peculiar largeness and simplicity of

thought: most of them by deep serenity, passing into melancholy; all by

a richness of color, such as he had never before conceived. They, and

the works done in following years, bear the same relation to those of

the rest of his life that the colors of sunset do to those of the day;

and will be recognised, in a few years more, as the noblest landscapes

ever yet conceived by human intellect.

Such has been the career of the greatest painter of this century. Many

a century may pass away before there rises such another; but what

greatness any among us may be capable of, will, at least, be best

attained by following in his path; by beginning in all quietness and

hopefulness to use whatever powers we may possess to represent the

things around us as we see and feel them; trusting to the close of life

to give the perfect crown to the course of its labors, and knowing

assuredly that the determination of the degree in which watchfulness is

to be exalted into invention, rests with a higher will than our own.

And, if not greatness, at least a certain good, is thus to be achieved;

for though I have above spoken of the mission of the more humble artist,

as if it were merely to be subservient to that of the antiquarian or the

man of science, there is an ulterior aspect in which it is not

subservient, but superior. Every archaeologist, every natural

philosopher, knows that there is a peculiar rigidity of mind brought on

by long devotion to logical and analytical inquiries. Weak men, giving

themselves to such studies, are utterly hardened by them, and become

incapable of understanding anything nobler, or even of feeling the value

of the results to which they lead. But even the best men are in a sort

injured by them, and pay a definite price, as in most other matters, for

definite advantages. They gain a peculiar strength, but lose in

tenderness, elasticity, and impressibility. The man who has gone, hammer

in hand, over the surface of a romantic country, feels no longer, in the

mountain ranges he has so laboriously explored, the sublimity or mystery

with which they were veiled when he first beheld them, and with which

they are adorned in the mind of the passing traveller. In his more

informed conception, they arrange themselves like a dissected model:

where another man would be awe-struck by the magnificence of the

precipice, he sees nothing but the emergence of a fossiliferous rock,

familiarised already to his imagination as extending in a shallow

stratum, over a perhaps uninteresting district; where the unlearned

spectator would be touched with strong emotion by the aspect of the

snowy summits which rise in the distance, he sees only the culminating

points of a metamorphic formation, with an uncomfortable web of

fan-like fissures radiating, in his imagination, through their

centres[104]. That in the grasp he has obtained of the inner relations

of all these things to the universe, and to man, that in the views which

have been opened to him of natural energies such as no human mind would

have ventured to conceive, and of past states of being, each in some new

way bearing witness to the unity of purpose and everlastingly consistent

providence of the Maker of all things, he has received reward well

worthy the sacrifice, I would not for an instant deny; but the sense of

the loss is not less painful to him if his mind be rightly constituted;

and it would be with infinite gratitude that he would regard the man,

who, retaining in his delineation of natural scenery a fidelity to the

facts of science so rigid as to make his work at once acceptable and

credible to the most sternly critical intellect, should yet invest its

features again with the sweet veil of their daily aspect; should make

them dazzling with the splendor of wandering light, and involve them in

the unsearchableness of stormy obscurity; should restore to the divided

anatomy its visible vitality of operation, clothe naked crags with soft

forests, enrich the mountain ruins with bright pastures, and lead the

thoughts from the monotonous recurrence of the phenomena of the physical

world, to the sweet interests and sorrows of human life and death.

THE END.

FOOTNOTES:

[97] It was not a little curious, that in the very number of the Art

Union which repeated this direct falsehood about the Pre-Raphaelite

rejection of "linear perspective" (by-the-bye, the next time J. B. takes

upon him to speak of any one connected with the Universities, he may as

well first ascertain the difference between a Graduate and an

Under-Graduate), the second plate given should have been of a picture of

Bonington's,--a professional landscape painter, observe,--for the want

of _aerial_ perspective in which the Art Union itself was obliged to

apologise, and in which the artist has committed nearly as many blunders

in _linear_ perspective as there are lines in the picture.

[98] These false statements may be reduced to three principal heads, and

directly contradicted in succession.

The first, the current fallacy of society as well as of the press, was,

that the Pre-Raphaelites imitated the _errors_ of early painters.

A falsehood of this kind could not have obtained credence anywhere but

in England, few English people, comparatively, having ever seen a

picture of early Italian Masters. If they had, they would have known

that the Pre-Raphaelite pictures are just as superior to the early

Italian in skill of manipulation, power of drawing, and knowledge of

effect, as inferior to them in grace of design; and that in a word,

there is not a shadow of resemblance between the two styles. The

Pre-Raphaelites imitate no pictures: they paint from nature only. But

they have opposed themselves as a body to that kind of teaching above

described, which only began after Raphael's time: and they have opposed

themselves as sternly to the entire feeling of the Renaissance schools;

a feeling compounded of indolence, infidelity, sensuality, and shallow

pride. Therefore they have called themselves Pre-Raphaelites. If they

adhere to their principles, and paint nature as it is around them, with

the help of modern science, with the earnestness of the men of the

thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they will, as I said, found a new

and noble school in England. If their sympathies with the early artists

lead them into mediaevalism or Romanism, they will of course come to

nothing. But I believe there is no danger of this, at least for the

strongest among them. There may be some weak ones, whom the Tractarian

heresies may touch; but if so, they will drop off like decayed branches

from a strong stem. I hope all things from the school.

The second falsehood was, that the Pre-Raphaelites did not draw well.

This was asserted, and could have been asserted only by persons who had

never looked at the pictures.

The third falsehood was, that they had no system of light and shade. To

which it may be simply replied that their system of light and shade is

exactly the same as the Sun's; which is, I believe, likely to outlast

that of the Renaissance, however brilliant.

[99] He did not use his full signature, J. M. W., until about the year

1800.

[100] I shall give a _catalogue raisonnee_ of all this in the third

volume of "Modern Painters."

[101] The plate was, however, never published.

[102] And the more probably because Turner was never fond of staying

long at any place, and was least of all likely to make a pause of two or

three days at the beginning of his journey.

[103] Vide Modern Painters, Part II. Sect. III. Chap. IV. Sec. 14.

[104] This state of mind appears to have been the only one which

Wordsworth had been able to discern in men of science; and in disdain of

which, he wrote that short-sighted passage in the Excursion, Book III.

l. 165-190, which is, I think, the only one in the whole range of his

works which his true friends would have desired to see blotted out. What

else has been found fault with as feeble or superfluous, is not so in

the intense distinctive relief which it gives to his character. But

these lines are written in mere ignorance of the matter they treat; in

mere want of sympathy with the men they describe; for, observe, though

the passage is put into the mouth of the Solitary, it is fully

confirmed, and even rendered more scornful, by the speech which follows.

ARATRA PENTELICI

SIX LECTURES

ON THE ELEMENTS OF

SCULPTURE

GIVEN BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD IN MICHAELMAS TERM, 1870

PREFACE.

I must pray the readers of the following Lectures to remember that the

duty at present laid on me at Oxford is of an exceptionally complex

character. Directly, it is to awaken the interest of my pupils in a

study which they have hitherto found unattractive, and imagined to be

useless; but more imperatively, it is to define the principles by which

the study itself should be guided; and to vindicate their security

against the doubts with which frequent discussion has lately encumbered

a subject which all think themselves competent to discuss. The

possibility of such vindication is, of course, implied in the original

consent of the universities to the establishment of Art Professorships.

Nothing can be made an element of education of which it is impossible to

determine whether it is ill done or well; and the clear assertion that

there is a canon law in formative Art is, at this time, a more important

function of each University than the instruction of its younger members

in any branch of practical skill. It matters comparatively little

whether few or many of our students learn to draw; but it matters much

that all who learn should be taught with accuracy. And the number who

may be justifiably advised to give any part of the time they spend at

college to the study of painting or sculpture ought to depend, and

finally _must_ depend, on their being certified that painting and

sculpture, no less than language or than reasoning, have grammar and

method,--that they permit a recognizable distinction between scholarship

and ignorance, and enforce a constant distinction between Right and

Wrong.

This opening course of Lectures on Sculpture is therefore restricted to

the statement, not only of first principles, but of those which were

illustrated by the practice of one school, and by that practice in its

simplest branch, the analysis of which could be certified by easily

accessible examples, and aided by the indisputable evidence of

photography.[105]

The exclusion of the terminal Lecture of the course from the series now

published, is in order to mark more definitely this limitation of my

subject; but in other respects the Lectures have been amplified in

arranging them for the press, and the portions of them trusted at the

time to extempore delivery, (not through indolence, but because

explanations of detail are always most intelligible when most familiar,)

have been in substance to the best of my power set down, and in what I

said too imperfectly, completed.

In one essential particular I have felt it necessary to write what I

would not have spoken. I had intended to make no reference, in my

University Lectures, to existing schools of Art, except in cases where

it might be necessary to point out some undervalued excellence. The

objects specified in the eleventh paragraph of my inaugural Lecture,

might, I hoped, have been accomplished without reference to any works

deserving of blame; but the Exhibition of the Royal Academy in the

present year showed me a necessity of departing from my original

intention. The task of impartial criticism[106] is now, unhappily, no

longer to rescue modest skill from neglect; but to withstand the errors

of insolent genius, and abate the influence of plausible mediocrity.

The Exhibition of 1871 was very notable in this important particular,

that it embraced some representation of the modern schools of nearly

every country in Europe; and I am well assured that looking back upon it

after the excitement of that singular interest has passed away, every

thoughtful judge of Art will confirm my assertion, that it contained not

a single picture of accomplished merit; while it contained many that

were disgraceful to Art, and some that were disgraceful to humanity.

It becomes, under such circumstances, my inevitable duty to speak of the

existing conditions of Art with plainness enough to guard the youths

whose judgments I am entrusted to form, from being misled, either by

their own naturally vivid interest in what represents, however

unworthily, the scenes and persons of their own day, or by the cunningly

devised, and, without doubt, powerful allurements of Art which has long

since confessed itself to have no other object than to allure. I have,

therefore, added to the second of these Lectures such illustration of

the motives and course of modern industry as naturally arose out of its

subject, and shall continue in future to make similar applications;

rarely, indeed, permitting myself, in the Lectures actually read before

the University, to introduce subjects of instant, and therefore too

exciting, interest; but completing the addresses which I prepare for

publication in these, and in any other particulars which may render them

more widely serviceable.

The present course of Lectures will be followed, if I am able to fulfil

the design of them, by one of a like elementary character on

Architecture; and that by a third series on Christian Sculpture: but, in

the meantime, my effort is to direct the attention of the resident

students to Natural History, and to the higher branches of ideal

Landscape: and it will be, I trust, accepted as sufficient reason for

the delay which has occurred in preparing the following sheets for the

press, that I have not only been interrupted by a dangerous illness, but

engaged, in what remained to me of the summer, in an endeavour to

deduce, from the overwhelming complexity of modern classification in the

Natural Sciences, some forms capable of easier reference by Art

students, to whom the anatomy of brutal and floral nature is often no

less important than that of the human body.

The preparation of examples for manual practice, and the arrangement of

standards for reference, both in Painting and Sculpture, had to be

carried on meanwhile, as I was able. For what has already been done, the

reader is referred to the _Catalogue of the Educational Series_,

published at the end of the Spring Term; of what remains to be done I

will make no anticipatory statement, being content to have ascribed to

me rather the fault of narrowness in design, than of extravagance in

expectation.

DENMARK HILL,

_25th November, 1871._

FOOTNOTES:

[105] Photography cannot exhibit the character of large and finished

sculpture; but its audacity of shadow is in perfect harmony with the

more roughly picturesque treatment necessary in coins. For the rendering

of all such frank relief, and for the better explanation of forms

disturbed by the lustre of metal or polished stone, the method employed

in the plates of this volume will be found, I believe, satisfactory.

Casts are first taken from the coins, in white plaster; these are

photographed, and the photograph printed by the heliotype process of

Messrs. Edwards and Kidd. Plate XII. is exceptional, being a pure

mezzotint engraving of the old school, excellently carried through by my

assistant, Mr. Allen, who was taught, as a personal favour to myself, by

my friend, and Turner's fellow-worker, Thomas Lupton. Plate IV. was

intended to be a photograph from the superb vase in the British Museum,

No. 564 in Mr. Newton's Catalogue; but its variety of colour defied

photography, and after the sheets had gone to press I was compelled to

reduce Le Normand's plate of it, which is unsatisfactory, but answers my

immediate purpose.

The enlarged photographs for use in the Lecture Room were made for me

with most successful skill by Sergeant Spackman, of South Kensington;

and the help throughout rendered to me by Mr. Burgess is acknowledged in

the course of the Lectures; though with thanks which must remain

inadequate lest they should become tedious; for Mr. Burgess drew the

subjects of Plates III., X., and XIII.; drew and engraved every woodcut

in the book; and printed all the plates with his own hand.

[106] A pamphlet by the Earl of Southesk, "_Britain's Art Paradise_,"

(Edmonston and Douglas, Edinburgh) contains an entirely admirable

criticism of the most faultful pictures of the 1871 Exhibition. It is to

be regretted that Lord Southesk speaks only to condemn; but indeed, in

my own three days' review of the rooms, I found nothing deserving of

notice otherwise, except Mr. Hook's always pleasant sketches from fisher

life, and Mr. Pettie's graceful and powerful, though too slightly

painted, study from _Henry VI_.

ARATRA PENTELICI.

LECTURE I.

OF THE DIVISION OF ARTS.

_November, 1870._

1. If, as is commonly believed, the subject of study which it is my

special function to bring before you had no relation to the great

interests of mankind, I should have less courage in asking for your

attention to-day, than when I first addressed you; though, even then, I

did not do so without painful diffidence. For at this moment, even

supposing that in other places it were possible for men to pursue their

ordinary avocations undisturbed by indignation or pity; here, at least,

in the midst of the deliberative and religious influences of England,

only one subject, I am well assured, can seriously occupy your

thoughts--the necessity, namely, of determining how it has come to pass,

that in these recent days, iniquity the most reckless and monstrous can

be committed unanimously, by men more generous than ever yet in the

world's history were deceived into deeds of cruelty; and that prolonged

agony of body and spirit, such as we should shrink from inflicting

wilfully on a single criminal, has become the appointed and accepted

portion of unnumbered multitudes of innocent persons, inhabiting the

districts of the world which, of all others, as it seemed, were best

instructed in the laws of civilization, and most richly invested with

the honour, and indulged in the felicity, of peace.

Believe me, however, the subject of Art--instead of being foreign to

these deep questions of social duty and peril,--is so vitally connected

with them, that it would be impossible for me now to pursue the line of

thought in which I began these lectures, because so ghastly an emphasis

would be given to every sentence by the force of passing events. It is

well, then, that in the plan I have laid down for your study, we shall

now be led into the examination of technical details, or abstract

conditions of sentiment; so that the hours you spend with me may be

times of repose from heavier thoughts. But it chances strangely that, in

this course of minutely detailed study, I have first to set before you

the most essential piece of human workmanship, the plough, at the very

moment when--(you may see the announcement in the journals either of

yesterday or the day before)--the swords of your soldiers have been sent

for _to be sharpened_, and not at all to be beaten into ploughshares. I

permit myself, therefore, to remind you of the watchword of all my

earnest writings--"Soldiers of the Ploughshare, instead of Soldiers of

the Sword"--and I know it my duty to assert to you that the work we

enter upon to-day is no trivial one, but full of solemn hope; the hope,

namely, that among you there may be found men wise enough to lead the

national passions towards the arts of peace, instead of the arts of war.

I say the work "we enter upon," because the first four lectures I gave

in the spring were wholly prefatory; and the following three only

defined for you methods of practice. To-day we begin the systematic

analysis and progressive study of our subject.

2. In general, the three great, or fine, Arts of Painting, Sculpture,

and Architecture, are thought of as distinct from the lower and more

mechanical formative arts, such as carpentry or pottery. But we cannot,

either verbally, or with any practical advantage, admit such

classification. How are we to distinguish painting on canvas from

painting on china?--or painting on china from painting on glass?--or

painting on glass from infusion of colour into any vitreous substance,

such as enamel?--or the infusion of colour into glass and enamel from

the infusion of colour into wool or silk, and weaving of pictures in

tapestry, or patterns in dress? You will find that although, in

ultimately accurate use of the word, painting must be held to mean only

the laying of a pigment on a surface with a soft instrument; yet, in

broad comparison of the functions of Art, we must conceive of one and

the same great artistic faculty, as governing _every mode of disposing

colours in a permanent relation on, or in, a solid substance_; whether

it be by tinting canvas, or dyeing stuffs; inlaying metals with fused

flint, or coating walls with coloured stone.

3. Similarly the word "Sculpture,"--though in ultimate accuracy it is to

be limited to the development of form in hard substances by cutting away

portions of their mass--in broad definition, must be held to signify

_the reduction of any shapeless mass of solid matter into an intended

shape_, whatever the consistence of the substance, or nature of the

instrument employed; whether we carve a granite mountain, or a piece of

box-wood, and whether we use, for our forming instrument axe, or hammer,

or chisel, or our own hands, or water to soften, or fire to

fuse;--whenever and however we bring a shapeless thing into shape, we do

so under the laws of the one great Art of Sculpture.

4. Having thus broadly defined painting and sculpture, we shall see that

there is, in the third place, a class of work separated from both, in a

specific manner, and including a great group of arts which neither, of

necessity, _tint_, nor for the sake of form merely, _shape_, the

substances they deal with; but construct or arrange them with a view to

the resistance of some external force. We construct, for instance, a

table with a flat top, and some support of prop, or leg, proportioned in

strength to such weights as the table is intended to carry. We construct

a ship out of planks, or plates of iron, with reference to certain

forces of impact to be sustained, and of inertia to be overcome; or we

construct a wall or roof with distinct reference to forces of pressure

and oscillation, to be sustained or guarded against; and therefore, in

every case, with especial consideration of the strength of our

materials, and the nature of that strength, elastic, tenacious, brittle,

and the like.

Now although this group of arts nearly always involves the putting of

two or more separate pieces together, we must not define it by that

accident. The blade of an oar is not less formed with reference to

external force than if it were made of many pieces; and the frame of a

boat, whether hollowed out of a tree-trunk, or constructed of planks

nailed together, is essentially the same piece of art; to be judged by

its buoyancy and capacity of progression. Still, from the most wonderful

piece of all architecture, the human skeleton, to this simple one,[107]

the ploughshare, on which it depends for its subsistence, _the putting

of two or more pieces together_ is curiously necessary to the

perfectness of every fine instrument; and the peculiar mechanical work

of Daedalus,--inlaying,--becomes all the more delightful to us in

external aspect, because, as in the jawbone of a Saurian, or the wood of

a bow, it is essential to the finest capacities of tension and

resistance.

5. And observe how unbroken the ascent from this, the simplest

architecture, to the loftiest. The placing of the timbers in a ship's

stem, and the laying of the stones in a bridge buttress, are similar in

art to the construction of the ploughshare, differing in no essential

point, either in that they deal with other materials, or because, of the

three things produced, one has to divide earth by advancing through it,

another to divide water by advancing through it, and the third to divide

water which advances against it. And again, the buttress of a bridge

differs only from that of a cathedral in having less weight to sustain,

and more to resist. We can find no term in the gradation, from the

ploughshare to the cathedral buttress, at which we can set a logical

distinction.

6. Thus then we have simply three divisions of Art--one, that of giving

colours to substance; another, that of giving form to it without

question of resistance to force; and the third, that of giving form or

position which will make it capable of such resistance. All the fine

arts are embraced under these three divisions. Do not think that it is

only a logical or scientific affectation to mass them together in this

manner; it is, on the contrary, of the first practical importance to

understand that the painter's faculty, or masterhood over colour, being

as subtle as a musician's over sound, must be looked to for the

government of every operation in which colour is employed; and that, in

the same manner, the appliance of any art whatsoever to minor objects

cannot be right, unless under the direction of a true master of that

art. Under the present system, you keep your Academician occupied only

in producing tinted pieces of canvas to be shown in frames, and smooth

pieces of marble to be placed in niches; while you expect your builder

or constructor to design coloured patterns in stone and brick, and your

china-ware merchant to keep a separate body of workwomen who can paint

china, but nothing else. By this division of labour, you ruin all the

arts at once. The work of the Academician becomes mean and effeminate,

because he is not used to treat colour on a grand scale and in rough

materials; and your manufactures become base because no well educated

person sets hand to them. And therefore it is necessary to understand,

not merely as a logical statement, but as a practical necessity, that

wherever beautiful colour is to be arranged, you need a Master of

Painting; and wherever noble form is to be given, a Master of Sculpture;

and wherever complex mechanical force is to be resisted, a Master of

Architecture.

7. But over this triple division there must rule another yet more

important. Any of these three arts may be either imitative of natural

objects or limited to useful appliance. You may either paint a picture

that represents a scene, or your street door, to keep it from rotting;

you may mould a statue, or a plate; build the resemblance of a cluster

of lotus stalks, or only a square pier. Generally speaking, Painting and

Sculpture will be imitative, and Architecture merely useful; but there

is a great deal of Sculpture--as this crystal ball[108] for instance,

which is not imitative, and a great deal of Architecture which, to some

extent is so, as the so called foils of Gothic apertures; and for many

other reasons you will find it necessary to keep distinction clear in

your minds between the arts--of whatever kind--which are imitative, and

produce a resemblance or image of something which is not present; and

those which are limited to the production of some useful reality, as the

blade of a knife, or the wall of a house. You will perceive also, as we

advance, that sculpture and painting are indeed in this respect only one

art; and that we shall have constantly to speak and think of them as

simply _graphic_, whether with chisel or colour, their principal

function being to make us, in the words of Aristotle, "[Greek:

theoretikoi tou peri ta somata kallous]" (Polit. 8, 3.), "having

capacity and habit of contemplation of the beauty that is in material

things;" while Architecture, and its co-relative arts, are to be

practised under quite other conditions of sentiment.

8. Now it is obvious that so far as the fine arts consist either in

imitation or mechanical construction, the right judgment of them must

depend on our knowledge of the things they imitate, and forces they

resist: and my function of teaching here would (for instance) so far

resolve itself, either into demonstration that this painting of a

peach,[109] does resemble a peach, or explanation of the way in which

this ploughshare (for instance) is shaped so as to throw the earth aside

with least force of thrust. And in both of these methods of study,

though of course your own diligence must be your chief master, to a

certain extent your Professor of Art can always guide you securely, and

can show you, either that the image does truly resemble what it attempts

to resemble, or that the structure is rightly prepared for the service

it has to perform. But there is yet another virtue of fine art which is,

perhaps, exactly that about which you will expect your Professor to

teach you most, and which, on the contrary, is exactly that about which

you must teach yourselves all that it is essential to learn.

9. I have here in my hand one of the simplest possible examples of the

union of the graphic and constructive powers,--one of my breakfast

plates. Since all the finely architectural arts, we said, began in the

shaping of the cup and the platter, we will begin, ourselves, with the

platter.

Why has it been made round? For two structural reasons: first, that the

greatest holding surface may be gathered into the smallest space; and

secondly, that in being pushed past other things on the table, it may

come into least contact with them.

[Illustration: FIG. 1.]

Next, why has it a rim? For two other structural reasons; first, that it

is convenient to put salt or mustard upon; but secondly and chiefly,

that the plate may be easily laid hold of. The rim is the simplest form

of continuous handle.

Farther, to keep it from soiling the cloth, it will be wise to put this

ridge beneath, round the bottom; for as the rim is the simplest possible

form of continuous handle, so this is the simplest form of continuous

leg. And we get the section given beneath the figure for the essential

one of a rightly made platter.

10. Thus far our art has been strictly utilitarian having respect to

conditions of collision, of carriage, and of support. But now, on the

surface of our piece of pottery, here are various bands and spots of

colour which are presumably set there to make it pleasanter to the eye.

Six of the spots, seen closely, you discover are intended to represent

flowers. These then have as distinctly a graphic purpose as the other

properties of the plate have an architectural one, and the first

critical question we have to ask about them is, whether they are like

roses or not. I will anticipate what I have to say in subsequent

lectures so far as to assure you that, if they are to be like roses at

all, the liker they can be, the better. Do not suppose, as many people

will tell you, that because this is a common manufactured article, your

roses on it are the better for being ill-painted, or half-painted. If

they had been painted by the same hand that did this peach, the plate

would have been all the better for it; but, as it chanced, there was no

hand such as William Hunt's to paint them, and their graphic power is

not distinguished. In any case, however, that graphic power must have

been subordinate to their effect as pink spots, while the band of

green-blue round the plate's edge, and the spots of gold, pretend to no

graphic power at all, but are meaningless spaces of colour or metal.

Still less have they any mechanical office: they add nowise to the

serviceableness of the plate; and their agreeableness, if they possess

any, depends, therefore, neither on any imitative, nor any structural,

character; but on some inherent pleasantness in themselves, either of

mere colours to the eye (as of taste to the tongue), or in the placing

of those colours in relations which obey some mental principle of order,

or physical principle of harmony.

11. These abstract relations and inherent pleasantnesses, whether in

space, number, or time, and whether of colours or sounds, form what we

may properly term the musical or harmonic element in every art; and the

study of them is an entirely separate science. It is the branch of

art-philosophy to which the word "aesthetics" should be strictly limited,

being the inquiry into the nature of things that in themselves are

pleasant to the human senses or instincts, though they represent

nothing, and serve for nothing, their only service _being_ their

pleasantness. Thus it is the province of aesthetics to tell you, (if you

did not know it before,) that the taste and colour of a peach are

pleasant, and to ascertain, if it be ascertainable, (and you have any

curiosity to know,) why they are so.

12. The information would, I presume, to most of you, be gratuitous. If

it were not, and you chanced to be in a sick state of body in which you

disliked peaches, it would be, for the time, to you false information,

and, so far as it was true of other people, to you useless. Nearly the

whole study of aesthetics is in like manner either gratuitous or useless.

Either you like the right things without being recommended to do so, or

if you dislike them, your mind cannot be changed by lectures on the laws

of taste. You recollect the story of Thackeray, provoked, as he was

helping himself to strawberries, by a young coxcomb's telling him that

"he never took fruit or sweets." "That" replied, or is said to have

replied, Thackeray, "is because you are a sot, and a glutton." And the

whole science of aesthetics is, in the depth of it, expressed by one

passage of Goethe's in the end of the 2nd part of Faust;--the notable

one that follows the song of the Lemures, when the angels enter to

dispute with the fiends for the soul of Faust. They enter

singing--"Pardon to sinners and life to the dust." Mephistopheles hears

them first, and exclaims to his troop, "Discord I hear, and filthy

jingling"--"Mistoene hoere ich; garstiges Geklimper." This, you see, is

the extreme of bad taste in music. Presently the angelic host begin

strewing roses, which discomfits the diabolic crowd altogether.

Mephistopheles in vain calls to them--"What do you duck and shrink

for--is that proper hellish behaviour? Stand fast, and let them

strew"--"Was duckt und zuckt ihr; ist das Hellen-brauch? So haltet

stand, und lasst sie streuen." There you have, also, the extreme of bad

taste in sight and smell. And in the whole passage is a brief embodiment

for you of the ultimate fact that all aesthetics depend on the health of

soul and body, and the proper exercise of both, not only through years,

but generations. Only by harmony of both collateral and successive

lives can the great doctrine of the Muses be received which enables men

"[Greek: chairein orthos]," "to have pleasures rightly;" and there is no

other definition of the beautiful, nor of any subject of delight to the

aesthetic faculty, than that it is what one noble spirit has created,

seen and felt by another of similar or equal nobility. So much as there

is in you of ox, or of swine, perceives no beauty, and creates none:

what is human in you, in exact proportion to the perfectness of its

humanity, can create it, and receive.

13. Returning now to the very elementary form in which the appeal to our

aesthetic virtue is made in our breakfast-plate, you notice that there

are two distinct kinds of pleasantness attempted. One by hues of colour;

the other by proportions of space. I have called these the musical

elements of the arts relating to sight; and there are indeed two

complete sciences, one of the combinations of colour, and the other of

the combinations of line and form, which might each of them separately

engage us in as intricate study as that of the science of music. But of

the two, the science of colour is, in the Greek sense, the more musical,

being one of the divisions of the Apolline power; and it is so

practically educational, that if we are not using the faculty for colour

to discipline nations, they will infallibly use it themselves as a means

of corruption. Both music and colour are naturally influences of peace;

but in the war trumpet, and the war shield, in the battle song and

battle standard, they have concentrated by beautiful imagination the

cruel passions of men; and there is nothing in all the Divina Commedia

of history more grotesque, yet more frightful, than the fact that, from

the almost fabulous period when the insanity and impiety of war wrote

themselves in the symbols of the shields of the Seven against Thebes,

colours have been the sign and stimulus of the most furious and fatal

passions that have rent the nations: blue against green, in the decline

of the Roman Empire; black against white, in that of Florence; red

against white, in the wars of the Royal houses in England; and at this

moment, red against white, in the contest of anarchy and loyalty, in all

the world.

14. On the other hand, the directly ethical influence of colour in the

sky, the trees, flowers, and coloured creatures round us, and in our own

various arts massed under the one name of painting, is so essential and

constant that we cease to recognize it, because we are never long enough

altogether deprived of it to feel our need; and the mental diseases

induced by the influence of corrupt colour are as little suspected, or

traced to their true source, as the bodily weaknesses resulting from

atmospheric miasmata.

15. The second musical science which belongs peculiarly to sculpture

(and to painting, so far as it represents form), consists in the

disposition of beautiful masses. That is to say, beautiful surfaces

limited by beautiful lines. Beautiful _surfaces_, observe; and remember

what is noted in my fourth lecture of the difference between a space and

a mass. If you have at any time examined carefully, or practised from,

the drawings of shells placed in your copying series, you cannot but

have felt the difference in the grace between the aspects of the same

line, when enclosing a rounded or unrounded space. The exact science of

sculpture is that of the relations between outline and the solid form it

limits; and it does not matter whether that relation be indicated by

drawing or carving, so long as the expression of solid form is the

mental purpose; it is the science always of the beauty of relation in

three dimensions. To take the simplest possible line of continuous

limit--the circle: the flat disc enclosed by it may indeed be made an

element of decoration, though a very meagre one but its relative mass,

the ball, being gradated in three dimensions, is always delightful.

Here[110] is at once the simplest, and in mere patient mechanism, the

most skilful, piece of sculpture I can possibly show you,--a piece of

the purest rock-crystal, chiselled, (I believe, by mere toil of hand,)

into a perfect sphere. Imitating nothing, constructing nothing;

sculpture for sculpture's sake, of purest natural substance into

simplest primary form.

16. Again. Out of the nacre of any mussel or oyster-shell you might cut,

at your pleasure, any quantity of small flat circular discs of the

prettiest colour and lustre. To some extent, such tinsel or foil of

shell _is_ used pleasantly for decoration. But the mussel or oyster

becoming itself an unwilling modeller, agglutinates its juice into three

dimensions, and the fact of the surface being now geometrically

gradated, together with the savage instinct of attributing value to what

is difficult to obtain, make the little boss so precious in men's sight

that wise eagerness of search for the kingdom of heaven can be likened

to their eagerness of search for _it_; and the gates of Paradise can be

no otherwise rendered so fair to their poor intelligence, as by telling

them that every several gate was of "one pearl."

17. But take note here. We have just seen that the sum of the perceptive

faculty is expressed in those words of Aristotle's "to take pleasure

rightly" or straightly--[Greek: chairein orthos]. Now, it is not

possible to do the direct opposite of that,--to take pleasure

iniquitously or obliquely--[Greek: chairein adikos] or [Greek:

skolios]--more than you do in enjoying a thing because your neighbour

cannot get it. You may enjoy a thing legitimately because it is rare,

and cannot be seen often, (as you do a fine aurora, or a sunset, or an

unusually lovely flower); that is Nature's way of stimulating your

attention. But if you enjoy it because your neighbour cannot have

it--and, remember, all value attached to pearls more than glass beads,

is merely and purely for that cause,--then you rejoice through the worst

of idolatries, covetousness; and neither arithmetic, nor writing, nor

any other so-called essential of education, is now so vitally necessary

to the population of Europe, as such acquaintance with the principles of

intrinsic value, as may result in the iconoclasm of jewellery; and in

the clear understanding that we are not in that instinct, civilized, but

yet remain wholly savage, so far as we care for display of this selfish

kind.

You think, perhaps, I am quitting my subject, and proceeding, as it is

too often with appearance of justice alleged against me, into irrelevant

matter. Pardon me; the end, not only of these lectures, but of my whole

professorship, would be accomplished,--and far more than that,--if only

the English nation could be made to understand that the beauty which is

indeed to be a joy for ever, must be a joy for all; and that though the

idolatry may not have been wholly divine which sculptured gods, the

idolatry is wholly diabolic, which, for vulgar display, sculptures

diamonds.

18. To go back to the point under discussion. A pearl, or a glass bead,

may owe its pleasantness in some degree to its lustre as well as to its

roundness. But a mere and simple ball of unpolished stone is enough for

sculpturesque value. You may have noticed that the quatrefoil used in

the Ducal Palace of Venice owes its complete loveliness in distant

effect to the finishing of its cusps. The extremity of the cusp is a

mere ball of Istrian marble; and consider how subtle the faculty of

sight must be, since it recognizes at any distance, and is gratified by,

the mystery of the termination of cusp obtained by the gradated light on

the ball.

In that Venetian tracery this simplest element of sculptured form is

used sparingly, as the most precious that can be employed to finish the

facade. But alike in our own, and the French, central Gothic, the

ball-flower is lavished on every line--and in your St. Mary's spire, and

the Salisbury spire, and the towers of Notre Dame of Paris, the rich

pleasantness of decoration,--indeed, their so-called "decorated

style,"--consists only in being daintily beset with stone balls. It is

true the balls are modified into dim likeness of flowers; but do you

trace the resemblance to the rose in their distant, which is their

intended effect?

19. But farther, let the ball have motion; then the form it generates

will be that of a cylinder. You have, perhaps, thought that pure Early

English Architecture depended for its charm on visibility of

construction. It depends for its charm altogether on the abstract

harmony of groups of cylinders,[111] arbitrarily bent into mouldings,

and arbitrarily associated as shafts, having no _real_ relation to

construction whatsoever, and a theoretical relation so subtle that none

of us had seen it, till Professor Willis worked it out for us.

20. And now, proceeding to analysis of higher sculpture, you may have

observed the importance I have attached to the porch of San Zenone, at

Verona, by making it, among your standards, the first of the group which

is to illustrate the system of sculpture and architecture founded on

faith in a future life. That porch, fortunately represented in the

photograph, from which Plate I. has been engraved, under a clear and

pleasant light, furnishes you with examples of sculpture of every kind

from the flattest incised bas-relief to solid statues, both in marble

and bronze. And the two points I have been pressing upon you are

conclusively exhibited here, namely,--(1). That sculpture is essentially

the production of a pleasant bossiness or roundness of surface; (2) that

the pleasantness of that bossy condition to the eye is irrespective of

imitation on one side, and of structure on the other.

21. (1.) Sculpture is essentially the production of a pleasant bossiness

or roundness of surface.

If you look from some distance at these two engravings of Greek coins,

(place the book open so that you can see the opposite plate three or

four yards off,) you will find the relief on each of them simplifies

itself into a pearl-like portion of a sphere, with exquisitely gradated

light on its surface. When you look at them nearer, you will see that

each smaller portion into which they are divided--cheek, or brow, or

leaf, or tress of hair--resolves itself also into a rounded or

undulated surface, pleasant by gradation of light. Every several surface

is delightful in itself, as a shell, or a tuft of rounded moss, or the

bossy masses of distant forest would be. That these intricately

modulated masses present some resemblance to a girl's face, such as the

Syracusans imagined that of the water-goddess Arethusa, is entirely a

secondary matter; the primary condition is that the masses shall be

beautifully rounded, and disposed with due discretion and order.

[Illustration: PLATE I.--PORCH OF SAN ZENONE. VERONA.]

22. (2.) It is difficult for you, at first, to feel this order and

beauty of surface, apart from the imitation. But you can see there is a

pretty disposition of, and relation between, the projections of a

fir-cone, though the studded spiral imitates nothing. Order exactly the

same in kind, only much more complex; and an abstract beauty of surface

rendered definite by increase and decline of light--(for every curve of

surface has its own luminous law, and the light and shade on a parabolic

solid differs, specifically, from that on an elliptical or spherical

one)--it is the essential business of the sculptor to obtain; as it is

the essential business of a painter to get good colour, whether he

imitates anything or not. At a distance from the picture, or carving,

where the things represented become absolutely unintelligible, we must

yet be able to say, at a glance, "That is good painting, or good

carving."

And you will be surprised to find, when you try the experiment, how much

the eye must instinctively judge in this manner. Take the front of San

Zenone for instance, Plate I. You will find it impossible without a

lens, to distinguish in the bronze gates, and in great part of the wall,

anything that their bosses represent. You cannot tell whether the

sculpture is of men, animals, or trees; only you feel it to be composed

of pleasant projecting masses; you acknowledge that both gates and wall

are, somehow, delightfully roughened; and only afterwards, by slow

degrees, can you make out what this roughness means; nay, though here

(Plate III.) I magnify[112] one of the bronze plates of the gate to a

scale, which gives you the same advantage as if you saw it quite close,

in the reality,--you may still be obliged to me for the information,

that _this_ boss represents the Madonna asleep in her little bed, and

this smaller boss, the Infant Christ in His; and this at the top, a

cloud with an angel coming out of it, and these jagged bosses, two of

the Three Kings, with their crowns on, looking up to the star, (which is

intelligible enough I admit); but what this straggling, three-legged

boss beneath signifies, I suppose neither you nor I can tell, unless it

be the shepherd's dog, who has come suddenly upon the Kings with their

crowns on, and is greatly startled at them.

23. Farther, and much more definitely, the pleasantness of the surface

decoration is independent of structure; that is to say, of any

architectural requirement of stability. The greater part of the

sculpture here is exclusively ornamentation of a flat wall, or of door

panelling; only a small portion of the church front is thus treated, and

the sculpture has no more to do with the form of the building than a

piece of a lace veil would have, suspended beside its gates on a festal

day; the proportions of shaft and arch might be altered in a hundred

different ways, without diminishing their stability; and the pillars

would stand more safely on the ground than on the backs of these carved

animals.

24. I wish you especially to notice these points, because the false

theory that ornamentation should be merely decorated structure is so

pretty and plausible, that it is likely to take away your attention from

the far more important abstract conditions of design. Structure should

never be contradicted, and in the best buildings it is pleasantly

exhibited and enforced; in this very porch the joints of every stone are

visible, and you will find me in the Fifth Lecture insisting on this

clearness of its anatomy as a merit; yet so independent is the

mechanical structure of the true design, that when I begin my Lectures

on Architecture, the first building I shall give you as a standard will

be one in which the structure is wholly concealed. It will be the

Baptistry of Florence, which is, in reality, as much a buttressed chapel

with a vaulted roof, as the Chapter House of York--but round it, in

order to conceal that buttressed structure, (not to decorate, observe,

but to _conceal_) a flat external wall is raised; simplifying the whole

to a mere hexagonal box, like a wooden piece of Tunbridge ware, on the

surface of which the eye and intellect are to be interested by the

relations of dimension and curve between pieces of encrusting marble of

different colours, which have no more to do with the real make of the

building than the diaper of a Harlequin's jacket has to do with his

bones.

[Illustration: PLATE II.--THE ARETHUSA OF SYRACUSE.]

[Illustration: PLATE III.--THE WARNING TO THE KINGS.

San Zenone. Verona.]

25. The sense of abstract proportion, on which the enjoyment of such a

piece of art entirely depends, is one of the aesthetic faculties which

nothing can develop but time and education. It belongs only to

highly-trained nations; and, among them, to their most strictly refined

classes, though the germs of it are found, as part of their innate

power, in every people capable of art. It has for the most part vanished

at present from the English mind, in consequence of our eager desire for

excitement, and for the kind of splendour that exhibits wealth, careless

of dignity; so that, I suppose, there are very few now even of our

best-trained Londoners who know the difference between the design of

Whitehall and that of any modern club-house in Pall-mall. The order and

harmony which, in his enthusiastic account of the Theatre of Epidaurus,

Pausanias insists on before beauty, can only be recognized by stern

order and harmony in our daily lives; and the perception of them is as

little to be compelled, or taught suddenly, as the laws of still finer

choice in the conception of dramatic incident which regulate poetic

sculpture.

26. And now, at last, I think, we can sketch out the subject before us

in a clear light. We have a structural art, divine, and human, of which

the investigation comes under the general term, Anatomy; whether the

junctions or joints be in mountains, or in branches of trees, or in

buildings, or in bones of animals. We have next a musical art, falling

into two distinct divisions--one using colours, the other masses, for

its elements of composition; lastly, we have an imitative art, concerned

with the representation of the outward appearances of things. And, for

many reasons, I think it best to begin with imitative Sculpture; that

being defined as _the art which, by the musical disposition of masses,

imitates anything of which the imitation is justly pleasant to us; and

does so in accordance with structural laws having due reference to the

materials employed_.

So that you see our task will involve the immediate inquiry what the

things are of which the imitation is justly pleasant to us: what, in few

words,--if we are to be occupied in the making of graven images--we

ought to like to make images _of_. Secondly, after having determined its

subject, what degree of imitation or likeness we ought to desire in our

graven image; and lastly, under what limitations demanded by structure

and material, such likeness may be obtained.

These inquiries I shall endeavour to pursue with you to some practical

conclusion, in my next four lectures, and in the sixth, I will briefly

sketch the actual facts that have taken place in the development of

sculpture by the two greatest schools of it that hitherto have existed

in the world.

27. The tenor of our next lecture then must be an inquiry into the real

nature of Idolatry; that is to say, the invention and service of Idols:

and, in the interval, may I commend to your own thoughts this question,

not wholly irrelevant, yet which I cannot pursue; namely, whether the

God to whom we have so habitually prayed for deliverance "from battle,

murder, and sudden death," _is_ indeed, seeing that the present state of

Christendom is the result of a thousand years' praying to that effect,

"as the gods of the heathen who were but idols;" or whether--(and

observe, one or other of these things _must_ be true)--whether our

prayers to Him have been, by this much, worse than Idolatry;--that

heathen prayer was true prayer to false gods; and our prayers have been

false prayers to the True One.

FOOTNOTES:

[107] I had a real ploughshare on my lecture table; but it would

interrupt the drift of the statements in the text too long if I

attempted here to illustrate by figures the relation of the coulter to

the share, and of the hard to the soft pieces of metal in the share

itself.

[108] A sphere of rock crystal, cut in Japan, enough imaginable by the

reader, without a figure.

[109] One of William Hunt's peaches; not, I am afraid, imaginable

altogether, but still less representable by figure.

[110] The crystal ball above mentioned.

[111] All grandest effects in mouldings may be, and for the most part

have been, obtained by rolls and cavettos of circular (segmental)

section. More refined sections, as that of the fluting of a Doric shaft,

are only of use near the eye and in beautiful stone; and the pursuit of

them was one of the many errors of later Gothic. The statement in the

text that the mouldings, even of best time, "have no real relation to

construction," is scarcely strong enough: they in fact contend with, and

deny the construction, their principal purpose seeming to be the

concealment of the joints of the voussoirs.

[112] Some of the most precious work done for me by my assistant Mr.

Burgess, during the course of these lectures, consisted in making

enlarged drawings from portions of photographs. Plate III. is engraved

from a drawing of his, enlarged from the original photograph of which

Plate I. is a reduction.

LECTURE II.

IDOLATRY.

_November, 1870._

28. Beginning with the simple conception of sculpture as the art of

fiction in solid substance, we are now to consider what its subjects

should be. What--having the gift of imagery--should we by preference

endeavour to image? A question which is, indeed, subordinate to the

deeper one--why we should wish to image anything at all.

29. Some years ago, having been always desirous that the education of

women should begin in learning how to cook, I got leave, one day, for a

little girl of eleven years old to exchange, much to her satisfaction,

her schoolroom for the kitchen. But as ill fortune would have it, there

was some pastry toward, and she was left unadvisedly in command of some

delicately rolled paste; whereof she made no pies, but an unlimited

quantity of cats and mice.

Now you may read the works of the gravest critics of art from end to

end; but you will find, at last, they can give you no other true account

of the spirit of sculpture than that it is an irresistible human

instinct for the making of cats and mice, and other imitable living

creatures, in such permanent form that one may play with the images at

leisure.

Play with them, or love them, or fear them, or worship them. The cat may

become the goddess Pasht, and the mouse, in the hand of the sculptured

king, enforce his enduring words "[Greek: es eme tis oreon eusebes

esto];" but the great mimetic instinct underlies all such purpose; and

is zooplastic,--life-shaping,--alike in the reverent and the impious.

30. Is, I say, and has been, hitherto; none of us dare say that it will

be. I shall have to show you hereafter that the greater part of the

technic energy of men, as yet, has indicated a kind of childhood; and

that the race becomes, if not more wise, at least more manly,[113] with

every gained century. I can fancy that all this sculpturing and painting

of ours may be looked back upon, in some distant time, as a kind of

doll-making, and that the words of Sir Isaac Newton may be smiled at no

more: only it will not be for stars that we desert our stone dolls, but

for men. When the day comes, as come it must, in which we no more deface

and defile God's image in living clay, I am not sure that we shall any

of us care so much for the images made of Him, in burnt clay.

31. But, hitherto, the energy of growth in any people may be almost

directly measured by their passion for imitative art; namely, for

sculpture, or for the drama, which is living and speaking sculpture, or,

as in Greece, for both; and in national as in actual childhood, it is

not merely the _making_, but the _making-believe_; not merely the acting

for the sake of the scene, but acting for the sake of acting, that is

delightful. And, of the two mimetic arts, the drama, being more

passionate, and involving conditions of greater excitement and luxury,

is usually in its excellence the sign of culminating strength in the

people; while fine sculpture, requiring always submission to severe law,

is an unfailing proof of their being in early and active progress.

_There is no instance of fine sculpture being produced by a nation

either torpid, weak, or in decadence._ Their drama may gain in grace and

wit; but their sculpture, in days of decline, is _always_ base.

32. If my little lady in the kitchen had been put in command of colours,

as well as of dough, and if the paste would have taken the colours, we

may be sure her mice would have been painted brown, and her cats

tortoise-shell; and this, partly indeed for the added delight and

prettiness of colour itself, but more for the sake of absolute

realization to her eyes and mind. Now all the early sculpture of the

most accomplished nations has been thus coloured, rudely or finely; and,

therefore, you see at once how necessary it is that we should keep the

term "graphic" for imitative art generally; since no separation can at

first be made between carving and painting, with reference to the mental

powers exerted in, or addressed by, them. In the earliest known art of

the world, a reindeer hunt may be scratched in outline on the flat side

of a clean-picked bone, and a reindeer's head carved out of the end of

it; both these are flint-knife work, and, strictly speaking, sculpture:

but the scratched outline is the beginning of drawing, and the carved

head of sculpture proper. When the spaces enclosed by the scratched

outline are filled with colour, the colouring soon becomes a principal

means of effect; so that, in the engraving of an Egyptian-colour

bas-relief (S. 101), Rosellini has been content to miss the outlining

incisions altogether, and represent it as a painting only. Its proper

definition is, "painting accented by sculpture;" on the other hand, in

solid coloured statues,--Dresden china figures, for example,--we have

pretty sculpture accented by painting; the mental purpose in both kinds

of art being to obtain the utmost degree of realization possible, and

the ocular impression being the same, whether the delineation is

obtained by engraving or painting. For, as I pointed out to you in my

fifth lecture, everything is seen by the eye as patches of colour, and

of colour only; a fact which the Greeks knew well; so that when it

becomes a question in the dialogue of Minos, "[Greek: tini onti te opsei

horatai ta hoomena]," the answer is "[Greek: aisthesei taute te dia ton

ophthalmon deloise hemin ta chromata]."--"What kind of power is the

sight with which we see things? It is that sense which, through the

eyes, can reveal _colours_ to us."

33. And now observe that while the graphic arts begin in the mere

mimetic effort, they proceed, as they obtain more perfect realization,

to act under the influence of a stronger and higher instinct. They begin

by scratching the reindeer, the most interesting object of sight. But

presently, as the human creature rises in scale of intellect, it

proceeds to scratch, not the most interesting object of sight only, but

the most interesting object of imagination; not the reindeer, but the

Maker and Giver of the reindeer. And the second great condition for the

advance of the art of sculpture is that the race should possess, in

addition to the mimetic instinct, the realistic or idolizing instinct;

the desire to see as substantial the powers that are unseen, and bring

near those that are far off, and to possess and cherish those that are

strange. To make in some way tangible and visible the nature of the

gods--to illustrate and explain it by symbols; to bring the immortals

out of the recesses of the clouds, and make them Penates; to bring back

the dead from darkness, and make them Lares.

34. Our conception of this tremendous and universal human passion has

been altogether narrowed by the current idea that Pagan religious art

consisted only, or chiefly, in giving personality to the gods. The

personality was never doubted; it was visibility, interpretation, and

possession that the hearts of men sought. Possession, first of all--the

getting hold of some hewn log of wild olive-wood that would fall on its

knees if it was pulled from its pedestal--and, afterwards, slowly

clearing manifestation; the exactly right expression is used in Lucian's

dream,--[Greek: Pheidias edeixe ton Dia]; "Showed[114] Zeus;" manifested

him, nay, in a certain sense, brought forth, or created, as you have it,

in Anacreon's ode to the Rose, of the birth of Athena herself--

[Greek: polemoklonon t' Athenen

koruphes edeiknye Zeus.]

But I will translate the passage from Lucian to you at length--it is in

every way profitable.

35. "There came to me, in the healing[115] night, a divine dream, so

clear that it missed nothing of the truth itself; yes, and still after

all this time, the shapes of what I saw remain in my sight, and the

sound of what I heard dwells in my ears"--note the lovely sense of

[Greek: enaulos]--the sound being as of a stream passing always by in

the same channel,--"so distinct was everything to me. Two women laid

hold of my hands and pulled me, each towards herself, so violently, that

I had like to have been pulled asunder; and they cried out against one

another,--the one, that she was resolved to have me to herself, being

indeed her own, and the other that it was vain for her to claim what

belonged to others;--and the one who first claimed me for her own was

like a hard worker, and had strength as a man's; and her hair was dusty,

and her hand full of horny places, and her dress fastened tight about

her, and the folds of it loaded with white marble-dust, so that she

looked just as my uncle used to look when he was filing stones: but the

other was pleasant in features, and delicate in form, and orderly in her

dress; and so in the end, they left it to me to decide, after hearing

what they had to say, with which of them I would go; and first the hard

featured and masculine one spoke:--

[Illustration: IV

THE NATIVITY OF ATHENA.]

36. "'Dear child, I am the Art of Image-sculpture, which yesterday you

began to learn; and I am as one of your own people, and of your house,

for your grandfather,' (and she named my mother's father) 'was a

stone-cutter; and both your uncles had good name through me: and if you

will keep yourself well clear of the sillinesses and fluent follies that

come from this creature,' (and she pointed to the other woman) 'and will

follow me, and live with me, first of all, you shall be brought up as a

man should be, and have strong shoulders; and, besides that, you shall

be kept well quit of all restless desires, and you shall never be

obliged to go away into any foreign places, leaving your own country and

the people of your house; _neither shall all men praise you for your

talk_.[116] And you must not despise this rude serviceableness of my

body, neither this meanness of my dusty dress; for, pushing on in their

strength from such things as these, that great Phidias revealed Zeus,

and Polyclitus wrought out Hera, and Myron was praised, and Praxiteles

marvelled at: therefore are these men worshipped with the gods.'"

37. There is a beautiful ambiguity in the use of the preposition with

the genitive in this last sentence. "Pushing on from these things" means

indeed, justly, that the sculptors rose from a mean state to a noble

one; but not as _leaving_ the mean state;--not as, from a hard life,

attaining to a soft one,--but as being helped and strengthened by the

rough life to do what was greatest. Again, "worshipped with the gods"

does not mean that they are thought of as in any sense equal to, or like

to, the gods, but as being on the side of the gods against what is base

and ungodly; and that the kind of worth which is in them is therefore

indeed worshipful, as having its source with the gods. Finally, observe

that every one of the expressions, used of the four sculptors, is

definitely the best that Lucian could have chosen. Phidias carved like

one who had seen Zeus, and had only to _reveal_ him; Polyclitus, in

labour of intellect, completed his sculpture by just law, and _wrought_

out Hera; Myron was of all most _praised_, because he did best what

pleased the vulgar; and Praxiteles, the most _wondered at_ or admired,

because he bestowed utmost exquisiteness of beauty.

38. I am sorry not to go on with the dream; the more refined lady, as

you may remember, is liberal or gentlemanly Education, and prevails at

last; so that Lucian becomes an author instead of a sculptor, I think to

his own regret, though to our present benefit. One more passage of his I

must refer you to, as illustrative of the point before us; the

description of the temple of the Syrian Hieropolis, where he explains

the absence of the images of the sun and moon. "In the temple itself,"

he says, "on the left hand as one goes in, there is set first the throne

of the sun; but no form of him is thereon, for of these two powers

alone, the sun and the moon, they show no carved images. And I also

learned why this is their law, for they say that it is permissible,

indeed, to make of the other gods, graven images, since the forms of

them are not visible to all men. But Helios and Selenaia are everywhere

clear-bright, and all men behold them; what need is there therefore for

sculptured work of these, who appear in the air?"

39. This, then, is the second instinct necessary to sculpture; the

desire for the manifestation, description, and companionship of unknown

powers; and for possession of a bodily substance--the "bronze

Strasbourg," which you can embrace, and hang immortelles on the head

of--instead of an abstract idea. But if you get nothing more in the

depth of the national mind than these two feelings, the mimetic and

idolizing instincts, there may be still no progress possible for the

arts except in delicacy of manipulation and accumulative caprice of

design. You must have not only the idolizing instinct, but an [Greek:

ethos] which chooses the right thing to idolize! Else, you will get

states of art like those in China or India, non-progressive, and in

great part diseased and frightful, being wrought under the influence of

foolish terror, or foolish admiration. So that a third condition,

completing and confirming both the others, must exist in order to the

development of the creative power.

40. This third condition is that the heart of the nation shall be set on

the discovery of just or equal law, and shall be from day to day

developing that law more perfectly. The Greek school of sculpture is

formed during, and in consequence of, the national effort to discover

the nature of justice; the Tuscan, during, and in consequence of, the

national effort to discover the nature of justification. I assert to you

at present briefly, what will, I hope, be the subject of prolonged

illustration hereafter.

41. Now when a nation with mimetic instinct and imaginative longing is

also thus occupied earnestly in the discovery of Ethic law, that effort

gradually brings precision and truth into all its manual acts; and the

physical progress of sculpture as in the Greek, so in the Tuscan,

school, consists in gradually _limiting_ what was before indefinite, in

_verifying_ what was inaccurate, and in _humanizing_ what was monstrous.

I might perhaps content you by showing these external phenomena, and by

dwelling simply on the increasing desire of naturalness, which compels,

in every successive decade of years, literally, in the sculptured

images, the mimicked bones to come together, bone to his bone; and the

flesh to come up upon them, until from a flattened and pinched handful

of clay, respecting which you may gravely question whether it was

intended for a human form at all;--by slow degrees, and added touch to

touch, in increasing consciousness of the bodily truth,--at last the

Aphrodite of Melos stands before you, a perfect woman. But all that

search for physical accuracy is merely the external operation, in the

arts, of the seeking for truth in the inner soul; it is impossible

without that higher effort, and the demonstration of it would be worse

than useless to you, unless I made you aware at the same time of its

spiritual cause.

42. Observe farther; the increasing truth in representation is

co-relative with increasing beauty in the thing to be represented. The

pursuit of justice which regulates the imitative effort, regulates also

the development of the race into dignity of person, as of mind; and

their culminating art-skill attains the grasp of entire truth at the

moment when the truth becomes most lovely. And then, ideal sculpture may

go on safely into portraiture. But I shall not touch on the subject of

portrait sculpture to-day; it introduces many questions of detail, and

must be a matter for subsequent consideration.

43. These then are the three great passions which are concerned in true

sculpture. I cannot find better, or, at least, more easily remembered,

names for them than "the Instincts of Mimicry, Idolatry, and

Discipline;" meaning, by the last, the desire of equity and wholesome

restraint, in all acts and works of life. Now of these, there is no

question but that the love of Mimicry is natural and right, and the love

of Discipline is natural and right. But it looks a grave question

whether the yearning for Idolatry, (the desire of companionship with

images,) is right. Whether, indeed, if such an instinct be essential to

good sculpture, the art founded on it can possibly be "fine" art.

44. I must now beg for your close attention, because I have to point out

distinctions in modes of conception which will appear trivial to you,

unless accurately understood; but of an importance in the history of art

which cannot be overrated.

When the populace of Paris adorned the statue of Strasbourg with

immortelles, none, even the simplest of the pious decorators, would

suppose that the city of Strasbourg itself, or any spirit or ghost of

the city, was actually there, sitting in the Place de la Concorde. The

figure was delightful to them as a visible nucleus for their fond

thoughts about Strasbourg; but never for a moment supposed to _be_

Strasbourg.

Similarly, they might have taken delight in a statue purporting to

represent a river instead of a city,--the Rhine, or Garonne,

suppose,--and have been touched with strong emotion in looking at it, if

the real river were dear to them, and yet never think for an instant

that the statue _was_ the river.

And yet again, similarly, but much more distinctly, they might take

delight in the beautiful image of a god, because it gathered and

perpetuated their thoughts about that god; and yet never suppose, nor be

capable of being deceived by any arguments into supposing, that the

statue _was_ the god.

On the other hand, if a meteoric stone fell from the sky in the sight of

a savage, and he picked it up hot, he would most probably lay it aside

in some, to him, sacred place, and believe _the stone itself_ to be a

kind of god, and offer prayer and sacrifice to it.

In like manner, any other strange or terrifying object, such, for

instance, as a powerfully noxious animal or plant, he would be apt to

regard in the same way; and very possibly also construct for himself

frightful idols of some kind, calculated to produce upon him a vague

impression of their being alive; whose imaginary anger he might

deprecate or avert with sacrifice, although incapable of conceiving in

them any one attribute of exalted intellectual or moral nature.

45. If you will now refer to Sec. 52-59 of my Introductory Lectures, you

will find this distinction between a resolute conception, recognized for

such, and an involuntary apprehension of spiritual existence, already

insisted on at some length. And you will see more and more clearly as we

proceed, that the deliberate and intellectually commanded conception is

not idolatrous in any evil sense whatever, but is one of the grandest

and wholesomest functions of the human soul; and that the essence of

evil idolatry begins only in the idea or belief of a real presence of

any kind, in a thing in which there is no such presence.

46. I need not say that the harm of the idolatry must depend on the

certainty of the negative. If there be a real presence in a pillar of

cloud, in an unconsuming flame, or in a still small voice, it is no sin

to bow down before these.

But, as matter of historical fact, the idea of such presence has

generally been both ignoble and false, and confined to nations of

inferior race, who are often condemned to remain for ages in conditions

of vile terror, destitute of thought. Nearly all Indian architecture and

Chinese design arise out of such a state: so also, though in a less

gross degree, Ninevite and Phoenician art, early Irish, and

Scandinavian; the latter, however, with vital elements of high intellect

mingled in it from the first.

But the greatest races are never grossly subject to such terror, even in

their childhood, and the course of their minds is broadly divisible into

three distinct stages.

47. (I.) In their infancy they begin to imitate the real animals about

them, as my little girl made the cats and mice, but with an undercurrent

of partial superstition--a sense that there must be more in the

creatures than they can see; also they catch up vividly any of the

fancies of the baser nations round them, and repeat these more or less

apishly, yet rapidly naturalizing and beautifying them. They then

connect all kinds of shapes together, compounding meanings out of the

old chimeras, and inventing new ones with the speed of a running

wild-fire; but always getting more of man into their images, and

admitting less of monster or brute; their own characters, meanwhile,

expanding and purging themselves, and shaking off the feverish fancy, as

springing flowers shake the earth off their stalks.

48. (II.) In the second stage, being now themselves perfect men and

women, they reach the conception of true and great gods as existent in

the universe; and absolutely cease to think of them as in any wise

present in statues or images; but they have now learned to make these

statues beautifully human, and to surround them with attributes that may

concentrate their thoughts of the gods. This is, in Greece, accurately

the Pindaric time, just a little preceding the Phidian; the Phidian is

already dimmed with a faint shadow of infidelity; still, the Olympic

Zeus may be taken as a sufficiently central type of a statue which was

no more supposed to _be_ Zeus, than the gold or elephants' tusks it was

made of; but in which the most splendid powers of human art were

exhausted in representing a believed and honoured God to the happy and

holy imagination of a sincerely religious people.

49. (III.) The third stage of national existence follows, in which, the

imagination having now done its utmost, and being partly restrained by

the sanctities of tradition, which permit no farther change in the

conceptions previously created, begins to be superseded by logical

deduction and scientific investigation. At the same moment, the elder

artists having done all that is possible in realizing the national

conceptions of the Gods, the younger ones, forbidden to change the

scheme of existing representations, and incapable of doing anything

better in that kind, betake themselves to refine and decorate the old

ideas with more attractive skill. Their aims are thus more and more

limited to manual dexterity, and their fancy paralyzed. Also, in the

course of centuries, the methods of every art continually improving, and

being made subjects of popular inquiry, praise is now to be got, for

eminence in these, from the whole mob of the nation; whereas

intellectual design can never be discerned but by the few. So that in

this third aera, we find every kind of imitative and vulgar dexterity

more and more cultivated; while design and imagination are every day

less cared for, and less possible.

50. Meanwhile, as I have just said, the leading minds in literature and

science become continually more logical and investigative; and, once

that they are established in the habit of testing facts accurately, a

very few years are enough to convince all the strongest thinkers that

the old imaginative religion is untenable, and cannot any longer be

honestly taught in its fixed traditional form, except by ignorant

persons. And at this point the fate of the people absolutely depends on

the degree of moral strength into which their hearts have been already

trained. If it be a strong, industrious, chaste, and honest race, the

taking its old gods, or at least the old forms of them, away from it,

will indeed make it deeply sorrowful and amazed; but will in no whit

shake its will, nor alter its practice. Exceptional persons, naturally

disposed to become drunkards, harlots, and cheats, but who had been

previously restrained from indulging these dispositions by their fear of

God, will, of course, break out into open vice, when that fear is

removed. But the heads of the families of the people, instructed in the

pure habits and perfect delights of an honest life, and to whom the

thought of a Father in heaven had been a comfort, not a restraint, will

assuredly not seek relief from the discomfort of their orphanage by

becoming uncharitable and vile. Also the high leaders of their thought

gather their whole strength together in the gloom; and at the first

entrance of this valley of the Shadow of Death, look their new enemy

full in the eyeless face of him, and subdue him, and his terror, under

their feet. "Metus omnes, et inexorabile fatum,... strepitumque

Acherontis avari." This is the condition of national soul expressed by

the art, and the words, of Holbein, Durer, Shakspeare, Pope, and Goethe.

51. But if the people, at the moment when the trial of darkness

approaches, be not confirmed in moral character, but are only

maintaining a superficial virtue by the aid of a spectral religion; the

moment the staff of their faith is broken, the character of the race

falls like a climbing plant cut from its hold: then all the earthliest

vices attack it as it lies in the dust; every form of sensual and insane

sin is developed, and half a century is sometimes enough to close, in

hopeless shame, the career of the nation in literature, art, and war.

52. Notably, within the last hundred years, all religion has perished

from the practically active national mind of France and England. No

statesman in the senate of either country would dare to use a sentence

out of their acceptedly divine Revelation, as having now a literal

authority over them for their guidance, or even a suggestive wisdom for

their contemplation. England, especially, has cast her Bible full in the

face of her former God; and proclaimed, with open challenge to Him, her

resolved worship of His declared enemy, Mammon. All the arts, therefore,

founded on religion, and sculpture chiefly, are here in England effete

and corrupt, to a degree which arts never were hitherto in the history

of mankind: and it is possible to show you the condition of sculpture

living, and sculpture dead, in accurate opposition, by simply comparing

the nascent Pisan school in Italy with the existing school in England.

53. You were perhaps surprised at my placing in your educational

series, as a type of original Italian sculpture, the pulpit by Niccola

Pisano in the Duomo of Siena. I would rather, had it been possible, have

given the pulpit by Giovanni Pisano in the Duomo of Pisa; but that

pulpit is dispersed in fragments through the upper galleries of the

Duomo, and the cloister of the Campo Santo; and the casts of its

fragments now put together at Kensington are too coarse to be of use to

you. You may partly judge, however, of the method of their execution by

the eagle's head, which I have sketched from the marble in the Campo

Santo (Edu., No. 113), and the lioness with her cubs, (Edu., No. 103,

more carefully studied at Siena); and I will get you other illustrations

in due time. Meanwhile, I want you to compare the main purpose of the

Cathedral of Pisa, and its associated Bell Tower, Baptistery, and Holy

Field, with the main purpose of the principal building lately raised for

the people of London. In these days, we indeed desire no cathedrals; but

we have constructed an enormous and costly edifice, which, in claiming

educational influence over the whole London populace, and middle class,

is verily the Metropolitan cathedral of this century,--the Crystal

Palace.

54. It was proclaimed, at its erection, an example of a newly discovered

style of architecture, greater than any hitherto known,--our best

popular writers, in their enthusiasm, describing it as an edifice of

Fairyland. You are nevertheless to observe that this novel production of

fairy enchantment is destitute of every kind of sculpture, except the

bosses produced by the heads of nails and rivets; while the Duomo of

Pisa, in the wreathen work of its doors, in the foliage of its capitals,

inlaid colour designs of its facade, embossed panels of its baptistery

font, and figure sculpture of its two pulpits, contained the germ of a

school of sculpture which was to maintain, through a subsequent period

of four hundred years, the greatest power yet reached by the arts of the

world in description of Form, and expression of Thought.

55. Now it is easy to show you the essential cause of the vast

discrepancy in the character of these two buildings.

In the vault of the apse of the Duomo of Pisa, was a colossal image of

Christ, in coloured mosaic, bearing to the temple, as nearly as

possible, the relation which the statue of Athena bore to the Parthenon;

and in the same manner, concentrating the imagination of the Pisan on

the attributes of the God in whom he believed.

In precisely the same position with respect to the nave of the building,

but of larger size, as proportioned to the three or four times greater

scale of the whole, a colossal piece of sculpture was placed by English

designers, at the extremity of the Crystal Palace, in preparation for

their solemnities in honour of the birthday of Christ, in December, 1867

or 1868.

That piece of sculpture was the face of the clown in a pantomime, some

twelve feet high from brow to chin, which face, being moved by the

mechanism which is our pride, every half minute opened its mouth from

ear to ear, showed its teeth, and revolved its eyes, the force of these

periodical seasons of expression being increased and explained by the

illuminated inscription underneath "Here we are again."

56. When it is assumed, and with too good reason, that the mind of the

English populace is to be addressed, in the principal Sacred Festival of

its year, by sculpture such as this, I need scarcely point out to you

that the hope is absolutely futile of advancing their intelligence by

collecting within this building, (itself devoid absolutely of every kind

of art, and so vilely constructed that those who traverse it are

continually in danger of falling over the cross-bars that bind it

together) examples of sculpture filched indiscriminately from the past

work, bad and good, of Turks, Greeks, Romans, Moors, and Christians,

miscoloured, misplaced, and misinterpreted;[117] here thrust into

unseemly corners, and there mortised together into mere confusion of

heterogeneous obstacle; pronouncing itself hourly more intolerable in

weariness, until any kind of relief is sought from it in steam

wheelbarrows or cheap toy-shops; and most of all in beer and meat, the

corks and the bones being dropped through the chinks in the damp deal

flooring of the English Fairy Palace.

57. But you will probably think me unjust in assuming that a building

prepared only for the amusement of the people can typically represent

the architecture or sculpture of modern England. You may urge, that I

ought rather to describe the qualities of the refined sculpture which is

executed in large quantities for private persons belonging to the upper

classes, and for sepulchral and memorial purposes. But I could not now

criticise that sculpture with any power of conviction to you, because I

have not yet stated to you the principles of good sculpture in general.

I will, however, in some points, tell you the facts by anticipation.

58. We have much excellent portrait sculpture; but portrait sculpture,

which is nothing more, is always third-rate work, even when produced by

men of genius;--nor does it in the least require men of genius to

produce it. To paint a portrait, indeed, implies the very highest gifts

of painting; but any man, of ordinary patience and artistic feeling, can

carve a satisfactory bust.

59. Of our powers in historical sculpture, I am, without question, just,

in taking for sufficient evidence the monuments we have erected to our

two greatest heroes by sea and land; namely, the Nelson Column, and the

statue of the Duke of Wellington opposite Apsley House. Nor will you, I

hope, think me severe,--certainly, whatever you may think me, I am using

only the most temperate language, in saying of both these monuments,

that they are absolutely devoid of high sculptural merit. But, consider

how much is involved in the fact thus dispassionately stated, respecting

the two monuments in the principal places of our capital, to our two

greatest heroes.

60. Remember that we have before our eyes, as subjects of perpetual

study and thought, the art of all the world for three thousand years

past: especially, we have the best sculpture of Greece, for example of

bodily perfection; the best of Rome, for example of character in

portraiture; the best of Florence, for example of romantic passion: we

have unlimited access to books and other sources of instruction; we have

the most perfect scientific illustrations of anatomy, both human and

comparative; and, we have bribes for the reward of success, large, in

the proportion of at least twenty to one, as compared with those offered

to the artists of any other period. And with all these advantages, and

the stimulus also of fame carried instantly by the press to the remotest

corners of Europe, the best efforts we can make, on the grandest of

occasions, result in work which it is impossible in any one particular

to praise.

Now consider for yourselves what an intensity of the negation of the

faculty of sculpture this implies in the national mind! What measures

can be assigned to the gulf of incapacity, which can deliberately

swallow up in the gorge of it the teaching and example of three thousand

years, and produce as the result of that instruction, what it is

courteous to call "nothing?"

61. That is the conclusion at which we arrive, on the evidence presented

by our historical sculpture. To complete the measure of ourselves, we

must endeavour to estimate the rank of the two opposite schools of

sculpture employed by us in the nominal service of religion, and in the

actual service of vice.

I am aware of no statue of Christ, nor of any apostle of Christ, nor of

any scene related in the New Testament, produced by us within the last

three hundred years, which has possessed even superficial merit enough

to attract public attention.

Whereas the steadily immoral effect of the formative art which we learn,

more or less apishly, from the French schools, and employ, but too

gladly, in manufacturing articles for the amusement of the luxurious

classes, must be ranked as one of the chief instruments used by joyful

fiends and angry fates, for the ruin of our civilization.

If, after I have set before you the nature and principles of true

sculpture, in Athens, Pisa, and Florence, you reconsider these

facts,--(which you will then at once recognize as such),--you will find

that they absolutely justify my assertion that the state of sculpture in

modern England, as compared with that of the great Ancients, is

literally one of corrupt and dishonourable death, as opposed to bright

and fameful life.

62. And now, will you bear with me, while I tell you finally why this is

so?

The cause with which you are personally concerned is your own frivolity;

though essentially this is not your fault, but that of the system of

your early training. But the fact remains the same, that here, in

Oxford, you, a chosen body of English youth, in no wise care for the

history of your country, for its present dangers, or its present duties.

You still, like children of seven or eight years old, are interested

only in bats, balls, and oars: nay, including with you the students of

Germany and France, it is certain that the general body of modern

European youth have their minds occupied more seriously by the sculpture

and painting of the bowls of their tobacco-pipes, than by all the

divinest workmanship and passionate imagination of Greece, Rome, and

Mediaeval Christendom.

63. But the elementary causes, both of this frivolity in you, and of

worse than frivolity in older persons, are the two forms of deadly

Idolatry which are now all but universal in England.

The first of these is the worship of the Eidolon, or Phantasm of Wealth;

worship of which you will find the nature partly examined in the 37th

paragraph of my _Munera Pulveris_; but which is briefly to be defined as

the servile apprehension of an active power in Money, and the submission

to it as the God of our life.

64. The second elementary cause of the loss of our nobly imaginative

faculty, is the worship of the Letter, instead of the Spirit, in what we

chiefly accept as the ordinance and teaching of Deity; and the

apprehension of a healing sacredness in the act of reading the Book

whose primal commands we refuse to obey.

No feather idol of Polynesia was ever a sign of a more shameful

idolatry, than the modern notion in the minds of certainly the majority

of English religious persons, that the Word of God, by which the heavens

were of old, and the earth, standing out of the water and in the

water,--the Word of God which came to the prophets, and comes still for

ever to all who will hear it, (and to many who will forbear); and which,

called Faithful and True, is to lead forth, in the judgment, the armies

of heaven,--that this "Word of God" may yet be bound at our pleasure in

morocco, and carried about in a young lady's pocket, with tasselled

ribands to mark the passages she most approves of.

65. Gentlemen, there has hitherto been seen no instance, and England is

little likely to give the unexampled spectacle, of a country successful

in the noble arts, yet in which the youths were frivolous, the maidens

falsely religious, the men, slaves of money, and the matrons, of vanity.

Not from all the marble of the hills of Luni will such a people ever

shape one statue that may stand nobly against the sky; not from all the

treasures bequeathed to them by the great dead, will they gather, for

their own descendants, any inheritance but shame.

FOOTNOTES:

[113] Glance forward at once to Sec. 75, read it, and return to this.

[114] There is a primary and vulgar sense of "exhibited" in Lucian's

mind; but the higher meaning is involved in it.

[115] In the Greek, "ambrosial." Recollect always that ambrosia, as food

of gods, is the continual restorer of strength; that all food is

ambrosial when it nourishes, and that the night is called "ambrosial"

because it restores strength to the soul through its peace, as, in the

23rd Psalm, the stillness of waters.

[116] I have italicised this final promise of blessedness, given by the

noble Spirit of Workmanship. Compare Carlyle's 5th Latter-day pamphlet,

throughout; but especially pp. 12-14, in the first edition.

[117] "Falsely represented," would be the better expression. In the cast

of the tomb of Queen Eleanor, for a single instance, the Gothic foliage

of which one essential virtue is its change over every shield, is

represented by a repetition of casts from one mould, of which the design

itself is entirely conjectural.

LECTURE III.

IMAGINATION.

_November, 1870._

66. The principal object of the preceding lecture (and I choose rather

to incur your blame for tediousness in repeating, than for obscurity in

defining it), was to enforce the distinction between the ignoble and

false phase of Idolatry, which consists in the attribution of a

spiritual power to a material thing; and the noble and truth-seeking

phase of it, to which I shall in these lectures[118] give the general

term of Imagination;--that is to say, the invention of material symbols

which may lead us to contemplate the character and nature of gods,

spirits, or abstract virtues and powers, without in the least implying

the actual presence of such Beings among us, or even their possession,

in reality, of the forms we attribute to them.

[Illustration: FIG. 2.]

67. For instance, in the ordinarily received Greek type of Athena, on

vases of the Phidian time (sufficiently represented in the opposite

woodcut), no Greek would have supposed the vase on which this was

painted to be itself Athena, nor to contain Athena inside of it, as the

Arabian fisherman's casket contained the genie; neither did he think

that this rude black painting, done at speed as the potter's fancy urged

his hand, represented anything like the form or aspect of the Goddess

herself. Nor would he have thought so, even had the image been ever so

beautifully wrought. The goddess might, indeed, visibly appear under the

form of an armed virgin, as she might under that of a hawk or a swallow,

when it pleased her to give such manifestation of her presence; but it

did not, therefore, follow that she was constantly invested with any of

these forms, or that the best which human skill could, even by her own

aid, picture of her, was, indeed, a likeness of her. The real use, at

all events, of this rude image, was only to signify to the eye and heart

the facts of the existence, in some manner, of a Spirit of wisdom,

perfect in gentleness, irresistible in anger; having also physical

dominion over the air which is the life and breadth of all creatures,

and clothed, to human eyes, with aegis of fiery cloud, and raiment of

falling dew.

68. In the yet more abstract conception of the Spirit of agriculture, in

which the wings of the chariot represent the winds of spring, and its

crested dragons are originally a mere type of the seed with its twisted

root piercing the ground, and sharp-edged leaves rising above it; we are

in still less danger of mistaking the symbol for the presumed form of an

actual Person. But I must, with persistence, beg of you to observe that

in all the noble actions of imagination in this kind, the distinction

from idolatry consists, not in the denial of the being, or presence of

the Spirit, but only in the due recognition of our human incapacity to

conceive the one, or compel the other.

[Illustration: FIG. 3.]

69. Farther--and for this statement I claim your attention still more

earnestly. As no nation has ever attained real greatness during periods

in which it was subject to any condition of Idolatry, so no nation has

ever attained or persevered in greatness, except in reaching and

maintaining a passionate Imagination of a spiritual estate higher than

that of men; and of spiritual creatures nobler than men, having a quite

real and personal existence, however imperfectly apprehended by us.

And all the arts of the present age deserving to be included under the

name of sculpture have been degraded by us, and all principles of just

policy have vanished from us,--and that totally,--for this double

reason; that we are on one side, given up to idolatries of the most

servile kind, as I showed you in the close of the last lecture,--while,

on the other hand, we have absolutely ceased from the exercise of

faithful imagination; and the only remnants of the desire of truth which

remain in us have been corrupted into a prurient itch to discover the

origin of life in the nature of the dust, and prove that the source of

the order of the universe is the accidental concurrence of its atoms.

70. Under these two calamities of our time, the art of sculpture has

perished more totally than any other, because the object of that art is

exclusively the representation of form as the exponent of life. It is

essentially concerned only with the human form, which is the exponent of

the highest life we know; and with all subordinate forms only as they

exhibit conditions of vital power which have some certain relation to

humanity. It deals with the "particula undique desecta" of the animal

nature, and itself contemplates, and brings forward for its disciples'

contemplation, all the energies of creation which transform the [Greek:

pelos], or lower still, the [Greek: borboros] of the _trivia_, by

Athena's help, into forms of power;--([Greek: to men holon architekton

autos en. syneirgazeto de toi kai e 'Athena empneousa ton pelon kai

empsycha poiousa einai ta plasmata];)[119]--but it has nothing whatever

to do with the representation of forms not living, however beautiful,

(as of clouds or waves); nor may it condescend to use its perfect skill,

except in expressing the noblest conditions of life.

These laws of sculpture, being wholly contrary to the practice of our

day, I cannot expect you to accept on my assertion, nor do I wish you to

do so. By placing definitely good and bad sculpture before you, I do not

doubt but that I shall gradually prove to you the nature of all

excelling and enduring qualities; but to-day I will only confirm my

assertions by laying before you the statement of the Greeks themselves

on the subject; given in their own noblest time, and assuredly

authoritative, in every point which it embraces, for all time to come.

71. If any of you have looked at the explanation I have given of the

myth of Athena in my _Queen of the Air_, you cannot but have been

surprised that I took scarcely any note of the story of her birth. I did

not, because that story is connected intimately with the Apolline myths;

and is told of Athena, not essentially as the goddess of the air, but as

the goddess of Art-Wisdom.

You have probably often smiled at the legend itself, or avoided thinking

of it, as revolting. It is indeed, one of the most painful and childish

of sacred myths; yet remember, ludicrous and ugly as it seems to us,

this story satisfied the fancy of the Athenian people in their highest

state; and if it did not satisfy--yet it was accepted by, all later

mythologists: you may also remember I told you to be prepared to find

that, given a certain degree of national intellect, the ruder the

symbol, the deeper would be its purpose. And this legend of the birth of

Athena is the central myth of all that the Greeks have left us

respecting the power of their arts; and in it they have expressed, as it

seemed good to them, the most important things they had to tell us on

these matters. We may read them wrongly; but we must read them here, if

anywhere.

72. There are so many threads to be gathered up in the legend, that I

cannot hope to put it before you in total clearness, but I will take

main points. Athena is born in the island of Rhodes; and that island is

raised out of the sea by Apollo, after he had been left without

inheritance among the gods. Zeus[120] would have cast the lot again, but

Apollo orders the golden-girdled Lachesis to stretch out her hands; and

not now by chance or lot, but by noble enchantment, the island rises out

of the sea.

Physically, this represents the action of heat and light on chaos,

especially on the deep sea. It is the "Fiat lux" of Genesis, the first

process in the conquest of Fate by Harmony. The island is dedicated to

the Nymph Rhodos, by whom Apollo has the seven sons who teach [Greek:

sophotata noemata]; because the rose is the most beautiful organism

existing in matter not vital, expressive of the direct action of light

on the earth, giving lovely form and colour at once; (compare the use of

it by Dante as the form of the sainted crowd in highest heaven) and

remember that, therefore, the rose is in the Greek mind, essentially a

Doric flower, expressing the worship of Light, as the Iris or Ion is an

Ionic one, expressing the worship of the Winds and Dew.

73. To understand the agency of Hephaestus at the birth of Athena, we

must again return to the founding of the arts on agriculture by the

hand. Before you can cultivate land you must clear it; and the

characteristic weapon of Hephaestus,--which is as much his attribute as

the trident is of Poseidon, and the rhabdos of Hermes, is not, as you

would have expected, the hammer, but the clearing-axe--the doubled-edged

[Greek: pelekys], the same that Calypso gives Ulysses with which to cut

down the trees for his home voyage; so that both the naval and

agricultural strength of the Athenians are expressed by this weapon,

with which they had to hew out their fortune. And you must keep in mind

this agriculturally laborious character of Hephaestus, even when he is

most distinctly the god of serviceable fire; thus Horace's perfect

epithet for him "avidus" expresses at once the devouring eagerness of

fire, and the zeal of progressive labour, for Horace gives it to him

when he is fighting against the giants. And this rude symbol of his

cleaving the forehead of Zeus with the axe, and giving birth to Athena

signifies, indeed, physically the thrilling power of heat in the

heavens, rending the clouds, and giving birth to the blue air; but far

more deeply it signifies the subduing of adverse Fate by true labour;

until, out of the chasm, cleft by resolute and industrious fortitude,

springs the Spirit of Wisdom.

74. Here (Fig. 4) is an early drawing of the myth, to which I shall have

to refer afterwards in illustration of the childishness of the Greek

mind at the time when its art-symbols were first fixed; but it is of

peculiar value, because the physical character of Vulcan, as fire, is

indicated by his wearing the [Greek: endromides] of Hermes, while the

antagonism of Zeus, as the adverse chaos, either of cloud or of fate, is

shown by his striking at Hephaestus with his thunderbolt. But Plate IV.

gives you (as far as the light on the rounded vase will allow it to be

deciphered) a characteristic representation of the scene, as conceived

in later art.

[Illustration: FIG. 4.]

75. I told you in a former lecture of this course that the entire Greek

intellect was in a childish phase as compared to that of modern times.

Observe, however, childishness does not necessarily imply universal

inferiority: there may be a vigorous, acute, pure, and solemn childhood,

and there may be a weak, foul, and ridiculous condition of advanced

life; but the one is still essentially the childish, and the other the

adult phase of existence.

76. You will find, then, that the Greeks were the first people that were

born into complete humanity. All nations before them had been, and all

around them still were, partly savage, bestial, clay-encumbered,

inhuman; still semi-goat, or semi-ant, or semi-stone, or semi-cloud. But

the power of a new spirit came upon the Greeks, and the stones were

filled with breath, and the clouds clothed with flesh; and then came the

great spiritual battle between the Centaurs and Lapithae; and the living

creatures became "Children of Men." Taught, yet, by the Centaur--sown,

as they knew, in the fang--from the dappled skin of the brute, from the

leprous scale of the serpent, their flesh came again as the flesh of a

little child, and they were clean.

Fix your mind on this as the very central character of the Greek

race--the being born pure and human out of the brutal misery of the

past, and looking abroad, for the first time, with their children's

eyes, wonderingly open, on the strange and divine world.

77. Make some effort to remember, so far as may be possible to you,

either what you felt in yourselves when you were young, or what you have

observed in other children, of the action of thought and fancy. Children

are continually represented as living in an ideal world of their own. So

far as I have myself observed, the distinctive character of a child is

to live always in the tangible present, having little pleasure in

memory, and being utterly impatient and tormented by anticipation: weak

alike in reflection and forethought, but having an intense possession of

the actual present, down to the shortest moments and least objects of

it; possessing it, indeed, so intensely that the sweet childish days are

as long as twenty days will be; and setting all the faculties of heart

and imagination on little things, so as to be able to make anything out

of them he chooses. Confined to a little garden, he does not imagine

himself somewhere else, but makes a great garden out of that; possessed

of an acorn-cup, he will not despise it and throw it away, and covet a

golden one in its stead: it is the adult who does so. The child keeps

his acorn-cup as a treasure, and makes a golden one out of it in his

mind; so that the wondering grown-up person standing beside him is

always tempted to ask concerning his treasures, not, "What would you

have more than these?" but "What possibly can you see _in_ these?" for,

to the bystander, there is a ludicrous and incomprehensible

inconsistency between the child's words and the reality. The little

thing tells him gravely, holding up the acorn-cup, that "this is a

queen's crown, or a fairy's boat," and, with beautiful effrontery,

expects him to believe the same. But observe--the acorn-cup must be

_there_, and in his own hand. "Give it me;" then I will make more of it

for myself. That is the child's one word, always.

[Illustration: FIG. 5.]

78. It is also the one word of the Greek--"Give it me." Give me _any_

thing definite here in my sight, then I will make more of it.

[Illustration: PLATE V.--TOMB OF THE DOGES JACOPO AND LORENZO TIEPOLO.]

I cannot easily express to you how strange it seems to me that I am

obliged, here in Oxford, to take the position of an apologist for Greek

art; that I find, in spite of all the devotion of the admirable scholars

who have so long maintained in our public schools the authority of Greek

literature, our younger students take no interest in the manual work of

the people upon whose thoughts the tone of their early intellectual life

has exclusively depended. But I am not surprised that the interest, if

awakened, should not at first take the form of admiration. The

inconsistency between an Homeric description of a piece of furniture or

armour, and the actual rudeness of any piece of art approximating within

even three or four centuries, to the Homeric period, is so great, that

we at first cannot recognize the art as elucidatory of, or in any way

related to, the poetic language.

79. You will find, however, exactly the same kind of discrepancy between

early sculpture, and the languages of deed and thought, in the second

birth, and childhood, of the world, under Christianity. The same fair

thoughts and bright imaginations arise again; and similarly, the fancy

is content with the rudest symbols by which they can be formalized to

the eyes. You cannot understand that the rigid figure (2) with chequers

or spots on its breast, and sharp lines of drapery to its feet, could

represent, to the Greek, the healing majesty of heaven: but can you any

better understand how a symbol so haggard as this (Fig. 5) could

represent to the noblest hearts of the Christian ages the power and

ministration of angels? Yet it not only did so, but retained in the rude

undulatory and linear ornamentation of its dress, record of the thoughts

intended to be conveyed by the spotted aegis and falling chiton of

Athena, eighteen hundred years before. Greek and Venetian alike, in

their noble childhood, knew with the same terror the coiling wind and

congealed hail in heaven--saw with the same thankfulness the dew shed

softly on the earth, and on its flowers; and both recognized, ruling

these, and symbolized by them, the great helpful spirit of Wisdom, which

leads the children of men to all knowledge, all courage, and all art.

80. Read the inscription written on the sarcophagus (Plate V.), at the

extremity of which this angel is sculptured. It stands in an open recess

in the rude brick wall of the west front of the church of St. John and

Paul at Venice, being the tomb of the two doges, father and son, Jacopo

and Lorenzo Tiepolo. This is the inscription:--

"Quos natura pares studiis, virtutibus, arte

Edidit, illustres genitor natusque, sepulti

Hac sub rupe Duces. Venetum charissima proles

Theupula collatis dedit hos celebranda triumphis.

Omnia presentis donavit predia templi

Dux Jacobus: valido fixit moderamine leges

Urbis, et ingratam redimens certamine Jadram

Dalmatiosque dedit patrie, post, Marte subactas

Graiorum pelago maculavit sanguine classes.

Suscipit oblatos princeps Laurentius Istros,

Et domuit rigidos, ingenti strage cadentes,

Bononie populos. Hinc subdita Cervia cessit.

Fundavere vias pacis; fortique relicta

Re, superos sacris petierunt mentibus ambo.

"Dominus Jachobus hobiit[121] M.CCLI.

Dominus Laurentius hobiit M.CCLXXVIII."

You see, therefore, this tomb is an invaluable example of thirteenth

century sculpture in Venice. In Plate VI., you have an example of the

(coin) sculpture of the date accurately corresponding in Greece to the

thirteenth century in Venice, when the meaning of symbols was everything

and the workmanship comparatively nothing. The upper head is an Athena,

of Athenian work in the seventh or sixth century--(the coin itself may

have been struck later, but the archaic type was retained). The two

smaller impressions below are the front and obverse of a coin of the

same age from Corinth, the head of Athena on one side, and Pegasus, with

the archaic Koppa, on the other. The smaller head is bare, the hair

being looped up at the back and closely bound with an olive branch. You

are to note this general outline of the head, already given in a more

finished type in Plate II., as a most important elementary form in the

finest sculpture, not of Greece only, but of all Christendom. In the

upper head the hair is restrained still more closely by a round helmet,

for the most part smooth, but embossed with a single flower tendril,

having one bud, one flower, and above it, two olive leaves. You have

thus the most absolutely restricted symbol possible to human thought of

the power of Athena over the flowers and trees of the earth. An olive

leaf by itself could not have stood for the sign of a tree, but the two

can, when set in position of growth.

[Illustration: PLATE VI.--ARCHAIC ATHENA OF ATHENS AND CORINTH.]

I would not give you the reverse of the coin on the same plate, because

you would have looked at it only, laughed at it, and not examined the

rest; but here it is, wonderfully engraved for you (Fig. 6): of it we

shall have more to say afterwards.

[Illustration: FIG. 6.]

81. And now as you look at these rude vestiges of the religion of

Greece, and at the vestiges, still ruder, on the Ducal tomb, of the

religion of Christendom, take warning against two opposite errors.

There is a school of teachers who will tell you that nothing but Greek

art is deserving of study, and that all our work at this day should be

an imitation of it.

Whenever you feel tempted to believe them, think of these portraits of

Athena and her owl, and be assured that Greek art is not in all respects

perfect, nor exclusively deserving of imitation.

There is another school of teachers who will tell you that Greek art is

good for nothing; that the soul of the Greek was outcast, and that

Christianity entirely superseded its faith, and excelled its works.