tomb of Jacopo Tiepolo; and remember, that Christianity, after it had
been twelve hundred years existent as an imaginative power on the earth,
could do no better work than this, though with all the former power of
Greece to help it; nor was able to engrave its triumph in having stained
its fleets in the seas of Greece with the blood of her people, but
between barbarous imitations of the pillars which that people had
invented.
82. Receiving these two warnings, receive also this lesson; In both
examples, childish though it be, this Heathen and Christian art is alike
sincere, and alike vividly imaginative: the actual work is that of
infancy; the thoughts, in their visionary simplicity, are also the
thoughts of infancy, but in their solemn virtue, they are the thoughts
of men.
We, on the contrary, are now, in all that we do, absolutely without
sincerity;--absolutely, therefore, without imagination, and without
virtue. Our hands are dexterous with the vile and deadly dexterity of
machines; our minds filled with incoherent fragments of faith, which we
cling to in cowardice, without believing, and make pictures of in
vanity, without loving. False and base alike, whether we admire or
imitate, we cannot learn from the Heathen's art, but only pilfer it; we
cannot revive the Christian's art, but only galvanize it; we are, in the
sum of us, not human artists at all, but mechanisms of conceited clay,
masked in the furs and feathers of living creatures, and convulsed with
voltaic spasms, in mockery of animation.
83. You think, perhaps, that I am using terms unjustifiable in violence.
They would, indeed, be unjustifiable, if, spoken from this chair, they
were violent at all. They are, unhappily, temperate and
accurate,--except in shortcoming of blame. For we are not only impotent
to restore, but strong to defile, the work of past ages. Of the
impotence, take but this one, utterly humiliatory, and, in the full
meaning of it, ghastly, example. We have lately been busy embanking, in
the capital of the country, the river which, of all its waters, the
imagination of our ancestors had made most sacred, and the bounty of
nature most useful. Of all architectural features of the metropolis,
that embankment will be, in future, the most conspicuous; and in its
position and purpose it was the most capable of noble adornment.
For that adornment, nevertheless, the utmost which our modern poetical
imagination has been able to invent, is a row of gas-lamps. It has,
indeed, farther suggested itself to our minds as appropriate to
gas-lamps set beside a river, that the gas should come out of fishes'
tails; but we have not ingenuity enough to cast so much as a smelt or a
sprat for ourselves; so we borrow the shape of a Neapolitan marble,
which has been the refuse of the plate and candlestick shops in every
capital of Europe for the last fifty years. We cast _that_ badly, and
give lustre to the ill-cast fish with lacquer in imitation of bronze. On
the base of their pedestals, towards the road, we put for
advertisement's sake, the initials of the casting firm; and, for farther
originality and Christianity's sake, the caduceus of Mercury; and to
adorn the front of the pedestals towards the river, being now wholly at
our wit's end, we can think of nothing better than to borrow the
door-knocker which--again for the last fifty years--has disturbed and
decorated two or three millions of London street-doors; and magnifying
the marvellous device of it, a lion's head with a ring in its mouth
(still borrowed from the Greek), we complete the embankment with a row
of heads and rings, on a scale which enables them to produce, at the
distance at which only they can be seen, the exact effect of a row of
sentry boxes.
84. Farther. In the very centre of the city, and at the point where the
Embankment commands a view of Westminster Abbey on one side and of St.
Paul's on the other--that is to say, at precisely the most important and
stately moment of its whole course--it has to pass under one of the
arches of Waterloo Bridge, which, in the sweep of its curve, is as
vast--it alone--as the Rialto at Venice, and scarcely less seemly in
proportions. But over the Rialto, though of late and debased Venetian
work, there still reigns some power of human imagination: on the two
flanks of it are carved the Virgin and the Angel of the Annunciation; on
the keystone the descending Dove. It is not, indeed, the fault of living
designers that the Waterloo arch is nothing more than a gloomy and
hollow heap of wedged blocks of blind granite. But just beyond the damp
shadow of it, the new Embankment is reached by a flight of stairs, which
are, in point of fact, the principal approach to it, a-foot, from
central London; the descent from the very midst of the metropolis of
England to the banks of the chief river of England; and for this
approach, living designers _are_ answerable.
85. The principal decoration of the descent is again a gas-lamp, but a
shattered one, with a brass crown on the top of it or, rather,
half-crown, and that turned the wrong way, the back of it to the river
and causeway, its flame supplied by a visible pipe far wandering along
the wall; the whole apparatus being supported by a rough cross-beam.
Fastened to the centre of the arch above is a large placard, stating
that the Royal Humane Society's drags are in constant readiness, and
that their office is at 4, Trafalgar Square. On each side of the arch
are temporary, but dismally old and battered boardings, across two
angles capable of unseemly use by the British public. Above one of these
is another placard, stating that this is the Victoria Embankment. The
steps themselves--some forty of them--descend under a tunnel, which the
shattered gas-lamp lights by night, and nothing by day. They are covered
with filthy dust, shaken off from infinitude of filthy feet; mixed up
with shreds of paper, orange-peel, foul straw, rags, and cigar ends, and
ashes; the whole agglutinated, more or less, by dry saliva into slippery
blotches and patches; or, when not so fastened, blown dismally by the
sooty wind hither and thither, or into the faces of those who ascend and
descend. The place is worth your visit, for you are not likely to find
elsewhere a spot which, either in costly and ponderous brutality of
building, or in the squalid and indecent accompaniment of it, is so far
separated from the peace and grace of nature, and so accurately
indicative of the methods of our national resistance to the Grace,
Mercy, and Peace of Heaven.
86. I am obliged always to use the English word "Grace" in two senses,
but remember that the Greek [Greek: charis] includes them both (the
bestowing, that is to say of Beauty and Mercy); and especially it
includes these in the passage of Pindar's first ode, which gives us the
key to the right interpretation of the power of sculpture in Greece. You
remember that I told you, in my Sixth Introductory Lecture (Sec. 151), that
the mythic accounts of Greek sculpture begin in the legends of the
family of Tantalus; and especially in the most grotesque legend of them
all, the inlaying of the ivory shoulder of Pelops. At that story Pindar
pauses--not, indeed, without admiration, nor alleging any impossibility
in the circumstances themselves, but doubting the careless hunger of
Demeter--and gives his own reading of the event, instead of the ancient
one. He justifies this to himself, and to his hearers, by the plea that
myths have, in some sort, or degree, ([Greek: pou ti]), led the mind of
mortals beyond the truth: and then he goes on:--
"Grace, which creates everything that is kindly and soothing for
mortals, adding honour, has often made things at first untrustworthy,
become trustworthy through Love."
87. I cannot, except in these lengthened terms, give you the complete
force of the passage; especially of the [Greek: apiston emesato
pioton]--"made it trustworthy by passionate desire that it should be
so"--which exactly describes the temper of religious persons at the
present day, who are kindly and sincere, in clinging to the forms of
faith which either have long been precious to themselves, or which they
feel to have been without question instrumental in advancing the dignity
of mankind. And it is part of the constitution of humanity--a part
which, above others, you are in danger of unwisely contemning under the
existing conditions of our knowledge, that the things thus sought for
belief with eager passion, do, indeed, become trustworthy to us; that,
to each of us, they verily become what we would have them; the force of
the [Greek: menis] and [Greek: mneme] with which we seek after them,
does, indeed, make them powerful to us for actual good or evil; and it
is thus granted to us to create not only with our hands things that
exalt or degrade our sight, but with our hearts also, things that exalt
or degrade our souls; giving true substance to all that we hoped for;
evidence to things that we have not seen, but have desired to see; and
calling, in the sense of creating, things that are not, as though they
were.
88. You remember that in distinguishing Imagination from Idolatry, I
referred you to the forms of passionate affection with which a noble
people commonly regards the rivers and springs of its native land. Some
conception of personality or of spiritual power in the stream, is almost
necessarily involved in such emotion; and prolonged [Greek: charis] in
the form of gratitude, the return of Love for benefits continually
bestowed, at last alike in all the highest and the simplest minds, when
they are honourable and pure, makes this untrue thing trustworthy;
[Greek: apiston emesato piston], until it becomes to them the safe basis
of some of the happiest impulses of their moral nature. Next to the
marbles of Verona, given you as a primal type of the sculpture of
Christianity, moved to its best energy in adorning the entrance of its
temples, I have not unwillingly placed, as your introduction to the best
sculpture of the religion of Greece, the forms under which it
represented the personality of the fountain Arethusa. But, without
restriction to those days of absolute devotion, let me simply point out
to you how this untrue thing, made true by Love, has intimate and
heavenly authority even over the minds of men of the most practical
sense, the most shrewd wit, and the most severe precision of moral
temper. The fair vision of Sabrina in _Comus_, the endearing and tender
promise, "Fies nobilium tu quoque fontium," and the joyful and proud
affection of the great Lombard's address to the lakes of his enchanted
land,--
Te, Lari maxume, teque
Fluctibus et fremitu assurgens, Benace, marino,
may surely be remembered by you with regretful piety, when you stand by
the blank stones which at once restrain and disgrace your native river,
as the final worship rendered to it by modern philosophy. But a little
incident which I saw last summer on its bridge at Wallingford, may put
the contrast of ancient and modern feeling before you still more
forcibly.
89. Those of you who have read with attention (none of us can read with
too much attention), Moliere's most perfect work, the _Misanthrope_,
must remember Celimene's description of her lovers, and her excellent
reason for being unable to regard with any favour, "notre grand flandrin
de vicomte,--depuis que je l'ai vu, trois quarts d'heure durant, cracher
dans un puits pour faire des ronds." That sentence is worth noting, both
in contrast to the reverence paid by the ancients to wells and springs,
and as one of the most interesting traces of the extension of the
loathsome habit among the upper classes of Europe and America, which now
renders all external grace, dignity, and decency, impossible in the
thoroughfares of their principal cities. In connection with that
sentence of Moliere's you may advisably also remember this fact, which I
chanced to notice on the bridge of Wallingford. I was walking from end
to end of it, and back again, one Sunday afternoon of last May, trying
to conjecture what had made this especial bend and ford of the Thames so
important in all the Anglo-Saxon wars. It was one of the few sunny
afternoons of the bitter spring, and I was very thankful for its light,
and happy in watching beneath it the flow and the glittering of the
classical river, when I noticed a well-dressed boy, apparently just out
of some orderly Sunday-school, leaning far over the parapet; watching,
as I conjectured, some bird or insect on the bridge-buttress. I went up
to him to see what he was looking at; but just as I got close to him, he
started over to the opposite parapet, and put himself there into the
same position, his object being, as I then perceived, to spit from both
sides upon the heads of a pleasure party who were passing in a boat
below.
90. The incident may seem to you too trivial to be noticed in this
place. To me, gentlemen, it was by no means trivial. It meant, in the
depth of it, such absence of all true [Greek: charis], reverence, and
intellect, as it is very dreadful to trace in the mind of any human
creature, much more in that of a child educated with apparently every
advantage of circumstance in a beautiful English country town, within
ten miles of our University. Most of all, is it terrific when we regard
it as the exponent (and this, in truth, it is), of the temper which, as
distinguished from former methods, either of discipline or recreation,
the present tenor of our general teaching fosters in the mind of
youth;--teaching which asserts liberty to be a right, and obedience a
degradation; and which, regardless alike of the fairness of nature and
the grace of behaviour, leaves the insolent spirit and degraded senses
to find their only occupation in malice, and their only satisfaction in
shame.
91. You will, I hope, proceed with me, not scornfully any more, to
trace, in the early art of a noble heathen nation, the feeling of what
was at least a better childishness than this of ours; and the efforts to
express, though with hands yet failing, and minds oppressed by ignorant
phantasy, the first truth by which they knew that they lived; the birth
of wisdom and of all her powers of help to man, as the reward of his
resolute labour.
92. "[Greek: Aphaistou technaisi]." Note that word of Pindar in the
Seventh Olympic. This axe-blow of Vulcan's was to the Greek mind truly
what Clytemnestra falsely asserts hers to have been "[Greek: tes de
dexias cheros ergon dikaias tektonos]"; physically, it meant the opening
of the blue through the rent clouds of heaven, by the action of local
terrestrial heat of Hephaestus as opposed to Apollo, who shines on the
surface of the upper clouds, but cannot pierce them; and, spiritually,
it meant the first birth of prudent thought out of rude labour, the
clearing-axe in the hand of the woodman being the practical elementary
sign of his difference from the wild animals of the wood. Then he goes
on, "From the high head of her Father, Athenaia rushing forth, cried
with her great and exceeding cry; and the Heaven trembled at her, and
the Earth Mother." The cry of Athena, I have before pointed out,
physically distinguishes her, as the spirit of the air, from silent
elemental powers; but in this grand passage of Pindar it is again the
mythic cry of which he thinks; that is to say, the giving articulate
words, by intelligence, to the silence of Fate. "Wisdom crieth aloud,
she uttereth her voice in the streets," and Heaven and Earth tremble at
her reproof.
93. Uttereth her voice in "the streets." For all men, that is to say;
but to what work did the Greeks think that her voice was to call them?
What was to be the impulse communicated by her prevailing presence; what
the sign of the people's obedience to her?
This was to be the sign--"But she, the goddess herself, gave to them to
prevail over the dwellers upon earth, _with best-labouring hands in
every art. And by their paths there were the likenesses of living and of
creeping things_; and the glory was deep. For to the cunning workman,
greater knowledge comes, undeceitful."
94. An infinitely pregnant passage, this, of which to-day you are to
note mainly these three things: First, that Athena is the goddess of
Doing, not at all of sentimental inaction. She is begotten, as it were,
of the woodman's axe; her purpose is never in a word only, but in a word
and a blow. She guides the hands that labour best, in every art.
95. Secondly. The victory given by Wisdom, the worker, to the hands that
labour best, is that the streets and ways, [Greek: keleuthoi], shall be
filled by likenesses of living and creeping things?
Things living, and creeping! Are the Reptile things not alive then? You
think Pindar wrote that carelessly? or that, if he had only known a
little modern anatomy, instead of "reptile" things, he would have said
"monochondylous" things? Be patient, and let us attend to the main
points first.
Sculpture, it thus appears, is the only work of wisdom that the Greeks
care to speak of; they think it involves and crowns every other.
Image-making art; _this_ is Athena's, as queenliest of the arts.
Literature, the order and the strength of word, of course belongs to
Apollo and the Muses; under Athena are the Substances and the Forms of
things.
96, Thirdly. By this forming of Images there is to be gained a
"deep"--that is to say--a weighty, and prevailing, glory; not a floating
nor fugitive one. For to the cunning workman, greater knowledge comes,
"undeceitful."
"[Greek: Daenti]" I am forced to use two English words to translate that
single Greek one. The "cunning" workman, thoughtful in experience,
touch, and vision of the thing to be done; no machine, witless, and of
necessary motion; yet not cunning only, but having perfect habitual
skill of hand also; the confirmed reward of truthful doing. Recollect,
in connection with this passage of Pindar, Homer's three verses about
getting the lines of ship-timber true, (_Il._ xv. 410)
[Greek:
"All' oste stathme dory neion exithynei
tektonos en palamesi daemonos, hos ra te pases
ed eide sophies, upothemosynesin Athenes,"]
and the beautiful epithet of Persephone, "[Greek: daeira]," as the Tryer
and Knower of good work; and remembering these, trust Pindar for the
truth of his saying, that to the cunning workman--(and let me solemnly
enforce the words by adding--that to him _only_,) knowledge comes
undeceitful.
97. You may have noticed, perhaps, and with a smile, as one of the
paradoxes you often hear me blamed for too fondly stating, what I told
you in the close of my Third Introductory Lecture, that "so far from
art's being immoral, little else except art is moral." I have now
farther to tell you, that little else, except art, is wise; that all
knowledge, unaccompanied by a habit of useful action, is too likely to
become deceitful, and that every habit of useful action must resolve
itself into some elementary practice of manual labour. And I would, in
all sober and direct earnestness advise you, whatever may be the aim,
predilection, or necessity of your lives, to resolve upon this one thing
at least, that you will enable yourselves daily to do actually with your
hands, something that is useful to mankind. To do anything well with
your hands, useful or not;--to be, even in trifling, [Greek: palamesi
daemon] is already much;--when we come to examine the art of the middle
ages I shall be able to show you that the strongest of all influences of
right then brought to bear upon character was the necessity for
exquisite manual dexterity in the management of the spear and bridle;
and in your own experience most of you will be able to recognize the
wholesome effect, alike on body and mind, of striving, within proper
limits of time, to become either good batsmen, or good oarsmen. But the
bat and the racer's oar are children's toys. Resolve that you will be
men in usefulness, as well as in strength; and you will find that then
also, but not till then, you can become men in understanding; and that
every fine vision and subtle theorem will present itself to you
thenceforward undeceitfully, [Greek: hypothemosynesin Athenes].
98. But there is more to be gathered yet from the words of Pindar. He is
thinking, in his brief, intense way, at once of Athena's work on the
soul, and of her literal power on the dust of the Earth. His "[Greek:
keleuthoi]" is a wide word meaning all the paths of sea and land.
Consider, therefore, what Athena's own work _actually is_--in the
literal fact of it. The blue, clear air _is_ the sculpturing power upon
the earth and sea. Where the surface of the earth is reached by that,
and its matter and substance inspired with, and filled by that, organic
form becomes possible. You must indeed have the sun, also, and moisture;
the kingdom of Apollo risen out of the sea: but the sculpturing of
living things, shape by shape, is Athena's, so that under the brooding
spirit of the air, what was without form, and void brings forth the
moving creature that hath life.
99. That is her work then--the giving of Form; then the separately
Apolline work is the giving of Light; or, more strictly, Sight: giving
that faculty to the retina to which we owe not merely the idea of light,
but the existence of it; for light is to be defined only as the
sensation produced in the eye of an animal, under given conditions;
those same conditions being, to a stone, only warmth or chemical
influence, but not light. And that power of seeing, and the other
various personalities and authorities of the animal body, in pleasure
and pain, have never, hitherto, been, I do not say, explained, but in
any wise touched or approached by scientific discovery. Some of the
conditions of mere external animal form and of muscular vitality have
been shown; but for the most part that is true, even of external form,
which I wrote six years ago. "You may always stand by Form against
Force. To a painter, the essential character of anything is the form of
it, and the philosophers cannot touch that. They come and tell you, for
instance, that there is as much heat, or motion, or calorific energy (or
whatever else they like to call it), in a tea-kettle, as in a
gier-eagle. Very good: that is so; and it is very interesting. It
requires just as much heat as will boil the kettle, to take the
gier-eagle up to his nest, and as much more to bring him down again on a
hare or a partridge. But we painters, acknowledging the equality and
similarity of the kettle and the bird in all scientific respects,
attach, for our part, our principal interest to the difference in their
forms. For us, the primarily cognisable facts, in the two things, are,
that the kettle has a spout, and the eagle a beak; the one a lid on its
back, the other a pair of wings; not to speak of the distinction also of
volition, which the philosophers may properly call merely a form or mode
of force--but, then to an artist, the form or mode is the gist of the
business."
100. As you will find that it is, not to the artist only, but to all of
us. The laws under which matter is collected and constructed are the
same throughout the universe: the substance so collected, whether for
the making of the eagle, or the worm, may be analyzed into gaseous
identity; a diffusive vital force, apparently so closely related to
mechanically measurable heat as to admit the conception of its being
itself mechanically measurable, and unchanging in total quantity, ebbs
and flows alike through the limbs of men, and the fibres of insects.
But, above all this, and ruling every grotesque or degraded accident of
this, are two laws of beauty in form, and of nobility in character,
which stand in the chaos of creation between the Living and the Dead, to
separate the things that have in them a sacred and helpful, from those
that have in them an accursed and destroying, nature; and the power of
Athena, first physically put forth in the sculpturing of these [Greek:
zoa and erpeta], these living and reptile things, is put forth, finally,
in enabling the hearts of men to discern the one from the other; to know
the unquenchable fires of the Spirit from the unquenchable fires of
Death; and to choose, not unaided, between submission to the Love that
cannot end, or to the Worm that cannot die.
101. The unconsciousness of their antagonism is the most notable
characteristic of the modern scientific mind; and I believe no credulity
or fallacy admitted by the weakness (or it may sometimes rather have
been the strength) of early imagination, indicates so strange a
depression beneath the due scale of human intellect, as the failure of
the sense of beauty in form, and loss of faith in heroism of conduct,
which have become the curses of recent science,[122] art, and policy.
102. That depression of intellect has been alike exhibited in the mean
consternation confessedly felt on one side, and the mean triumph
apparently felt on the other, during the course of the dispute now
pending as to the origin of man. Dispute for the present, not to be
decided, and of which the decision is to persons in the modern temper of
mind, wholly without significance: and I earnestly desire that you, my
pupils, may have firmness enough to disengage your energies from
investigation so premature and so fruitless, and sense enough to
perceive that it does not matter how you have been made, so long as you
are satisfied with being what you are. If you are dissatisfied with
yourselves, it ought not to console, but humiliate you, to imagine that
you were once seraphs; and if you are pleased with yourselves, it is not
any ground of reasonable shame to you if, by no fault of your own, you
have passed through the elementary condition of apes.
103. Remember, therefore, that it is of the very highest importance that
you should know what you _are_, and determine to be the best that you
may be; but it is of no importance whatever, except as it may contribute
to that end, to know what you have been. Whether your Creator shaped you
with fingers, or tools, as a sculptor would a lump of clay, or gradually
raised you to manhood through a series of inferior forms, is only of
moment to you in this respect--that in the one case you cannot expect
your children to be nobler creatures than you are yourselves--in the
other, every act and thought of your present life may be hastening the
advent of a race which will look back to you, their fathers (and you
ought at least to have attained the dignity of desiring that it may be
so), with incredulous disdain.
104. But that you _are_ yourselves capable of that disdain and dismay;
that you are ashamed of having been apes, if you ever were so; that you
acknowledge instinctively, a relation of better and worse, and a law
respecting what is noble and base, which makes it no question to you
that the man is worthier than the baboon--_this_ is a fact of infinite
significance. This law of preference in your hearts is the true essence
of your being, and the consciousness of that law is a more positive
existence than any dependent on the coherence or forms of matter.
105. Now, but a few words more of mythology, and I have done. Remember
that Athena holds the weaver's shuttle, not merely as an instrument of
_texture_, but as an instrument of _picture_; the ideas of clothing, and
of the warmth of life, being thus inseparably connected with those of
graphic beauty and the brightness of life. I have told you that no art
could be recovered among us without perfectness in dress, nor without
the elementary graphic art of women, in divers colours of needlework.
There has been no nation of any art-energy, but has strenuously occupied
and interested itself in this household picturing, from the web of
Penelope to the tapestry of Queen Matilda, and the meshes of Arras and
Gobelins.
106. We should then naturally ask what kind of embroidery Athena put on
her own robe; "[Greek: peplon heanon, poikilon hou r aute poiesato kai
kame chersin]."
The subject of that [Greek: poikilia] of hers, as you know, was the war
of the giants and gods. Now the real name of these giants, remember, is
that used by Hesiod, "[Greek: pelochonoi]," "mud-begotten," and the
meaning of the contest between these and Zeus, [Greek: pelogonon
elater], is, again, the inspiration of life into the clay, by the
goddess of breath; and the actual confusion going on visibly before you,
daily, of the earth, heaping itself into cumbrous war with the powers
above it.
107. Thus briefly, the entire material of Art, under Athena's hand, is
the contest of life with clay; and all my task in explaining to you the
early thought of both the Athenian and Tuscan schools will only be the
tracing of this battle of the giants into its full heroic form, when,
not in tapestry only--but in sculpture--and on the portal of the Temple
of Delphi itself, you have the "[Greek: klonos en teichesi lainoisi
giganton]," and their defeat hailed by the passionate cry of delight
from the Athenian maids, beholding Pallas in her full power, "[Greek:
leusso Pallad' eman theon]," my own goddess. All our work, I repeat,
will be nothing but the inquiry into the development of this the
subject, and the pressing fully home the question of Plato about that
embroidery--"And think you that there is verily war with each other
among the Gods? and dreadful enmities and battle, such as the poets have
told, and such as our painters set forth in graven scripture, to adorn
all our sacred rites and holy places; yes, and in the great Panathenaea
themselves, the Peplus, full of such wild picturing, is carried up into
the Acropolis--shall we say that these things are true, oh Euthuphron,
right-minded friend?"
108. Yes, we say, and know, that these things are true; and true for
ever: battles of the gods, not among themselves, but against the
earth-giants. Battle prevailing age by age, in nobler life and lovelier
imagery; creation, which no theory of mechanism, no definition of force,
can explain, the adoption and completing of individual form by
individual animation, breathed out of the lips of the Father of Spirits.
And to recognize the presence in every knitted shape of dust, by which
it lives and moves and has its being--to recognize it, revere, and show
it forth, is to be our eternal Idolatry.
"Thou shalt not bow down to them, nor worship them."
"Assuredly no," we answered once, in our pride; and through porch and
aisle, broke down the carved work thereof, with axes and hammers.
Who would have thought the day so near when we should bow down to
worship, not the creatures, but their atoms,--not the forces that form,
but those that dissolve them? Trust me, gentlemen, the command which is
stringent against adoration of brutality, is stringent no less against
adoration of chaos, nor is faith in an image fallen from heaven to be
reformed by a faith only in the phenomenon of decadence. We have ceased
from the making of monsters to be appeased by sacrifice;--it is
well,--if indeed we have also ceased from making them in our thoughts.
We have learned to distrust the adorning of fair phantasms, to which we
once sought for succour;--it is well, if we learn to distrust also the
adorning of those to which we seek, for temptation; but the verity of
gains like these can only be known by our confession of the divine seal
of strength and beauty upon the tempered frame, and honour in the
fervent heart, by which, increasing visibly, may yet be manifested to
us the holy presence, and the approving love, of the Loving God, who
visits the iniquities of the Fathers upon the Children, unto the third
and fourth generation of them that hate Him, and shows mercy unto
thousands in them that love Him, and keep His Commandments.
FOOTNOTES:
[118] I shall be obliged in future lectures, as hitherto in my other
writings, to use the terms, Idolatry and Imagination in a more
comprehensive sense; but here I use them for convenience sake,
limitedly, to avoid the continual occurrence of the terms, noble and
ignoble, or false and true, with reference to modes of conception.
[119] "And in sum, he himself (Prometheus) was the master-maker, and
Athena worked together with him, breathing into the clay, and caused the
moulded things to have soul (psyche) in them."--LUCIAN, PROMETHEUS.
[120] His relations with the two great Titans, Themis and Mnemosyne,
belong to another group of myths. The father of Athena is the lower and
nearer physical Zeus, from whom Metis, the mother of Athena, long
withdraws and disguises herself.
[121] The Latin verses are of later date; the contemporary plain prose
retains the Venetian gutturals and aspirates.
[122] The best modern illustrated scientific works show perfect faculty
of representing monkeys, lizards, and insects; absolute incapability of
representing either a man, a horse, or a lion.
LECTURE IV.
LIKENESS.
_November, 1870._
109. You were probably vexed, and tired, towards the close of my last
lecture, by the time it took us to arrive at the apparently simple
conclusion, that sculpture must only represent organic form, and the
strength of life in its contest with matter. But it is no small thing to
have that "[Greek: leusso Pallada]" fixed in your minds, as the one
necessary sign by which you are to recognize right sculpture, and
believe me you will find it the best of all things, if you can take for
yourselves the saying from the lips of the Athenian maids, in its
entirety, and say also--[Greek: leusso Pallad' eman theon]. I proceed
to-day into the practical appliance of this apparently speculative, but
in reality imperative, law.
110. You observe, I have hitherto spoken of the power of Athena, as over
painting no less than sculpture. But her rule over both arts is only so
far as they are zoographic;--representative, that is to say, of animal
life, or of such order and discipline among other elements, as may
invigorate and purify it. Now there is a speciality of the art of
painting beyond this, namely, the representation of phenomena of colour
and shadow, as such, without question of the nature of the things that
receive them. I am now accordingly obliged to speak of sculpture and
painting as distinct arts, but the laws which bind sculpture, bind no
less the painting of the higher schools which has, for its main purpose,
the showing beauty in human or animal form; and which is therefore
placed by the Greeks equally under the rule of Athena, as the Spirit,
first, of Life, and then of Wisdom in conduct.
111. First, I say, you are to "see Pallas" in all such work, as the
Queen of Life; and the practical law which follows from this, is one of
enormous range and importance, namely, that nothing must be represented
by sculpture, external to any living form, which does not help to
enforce or illustrate the conception of life. Both dress and armour may
be made to do this, by great sculptors, and are continually so used by
the greatest. One of the essential distinctions between the Athenian and
Florentine schools is dependent on their treatment of drapery in this
respect; an Athenian always sets it to exhibit the action of the body,
by flowing with it, or over it, or from it, so as to illustrate both its
form and gesture; a Florentine, on the contrary, always uses his drapery
to conceal or disguise the forms of the body, and exhibit mental
emotion: but both use it to enhance the life, either of the body or
soul; Donatello and Michael Angelo, no less than the sculptors of Gothic
chivalry, ennoble armour in the same way; but base sculptors carve
drapery and armour for the sake of their folds and picturesqueness only,
and forget the body beneath. The rule is so stern that all delight in
mere incidental beauty, which painting often triumphs in, is wholly
forbidden to sculpture;--for instance, in _painting_ the branch of a
tree, you may rightly represent and enjoy the lichens and moss on it,
but a sculptor must not touch one of them: they are inessential to the
tree's life,--he must give the flow and bending of the branch only, else
he does not enough "see Pallas" in it.
Or to take a higher instance, here is an exquisite little painted poem,
by Edward Frere; a cottage interior, one of the thousands which within
the last two months[123] have been laid desolate in unhappy France.
Every accessory in the painting is of value--the fireside, the tiled
floor, the vegetables lying upon it, and the basket hanging from the
roof. But not one of these accessories would have been admissible in
sculpture. You must carve nothing but what has life. "Why"? you probably
feel instantly inclined to ask me.--You see the principle we have got,
instead of being blunt or useless, is such an edged tool that you are
startled the moment I apply it. "Must we refuse every pleasant accessory
and picturesque detail, and petrify nothing but living creatures"?--Even
so: I would not assert it on my own authority. It is the Greeks who say
it, but whatever they say of sculpture, be assured, is true.
112. That then is the first law--you must see Pallas as the Lady of
Life--the second is, you must see her as the Lady of Wisdom; or [Greek:
sophia]--and this is the chief matter of all. I cannot but think, that
after the considerations into which we have now entered, you will find
more interest than hitherto in comparing the statements of Aristotle, in
the Ethics, with those of Plato in the Polity, which are authoritative
as Greek definitions of goodness in art, and which you may safely hold
authoritative as constant definitions of it. You remember, doubtless,
that the [Greek: sophia] or [Greek: arete technes], for the sake of
which Phidias is called [Greek: sophos] as a sculptor, and Polyclitus as
an image-maker, Eth. 6. 7. (the opposition is both between ideal and
portrait sculpture, and between working in stone and bronze) consists in
the "[Greek: nous ton timiotaton te physei]" "the mental apprehension of
the things that are most honourable in their nature." Therefore what is,
indeed, most lovely, the true image-maker will most love; and what is
most hateful, he will most hate, and in all things discern the best and
strongest part of them, and represent that essentially, or, if the
opposite of that, then with manifest detestation and horror. That is his
art wisdom; the knowledge of good and evil, and the love of good, so
that you may discern, even in his representation of the vilest thing,
his acknowledgment of what redemption is possible for it, or latent
power exists in it; and, contrariwise, his sense of its present misery.
But for the most part, he will idolize, and force us also to idolize,
whatever is living, and virtuous, and victoriously right; opposing to it
in some definite mode the image of the conquered [Greek: herpeton].
113. This is generally true of both the great arts; but in severity and
precision, true of sculpture. To return to our illustration: this poor
little girl was more interesting to Edward Frere, he being a painter,
because she was poorly dressed, and wore these clumsy shoes, and old red
cap, and patched gown. May we sculpture her so? No. We may sculpture her
naked, if we like; but not in rags.
But if we may not put her into marble in rags, may we give her a pretty
frock with ribands and flounces to it, and put her into marble in that?
No. We may put her simplest peasant's dress, so it be perfect and
orderly, into marble; anything finer than that would be more
dishonourable in the eyes of Athena than rags. If she were a French
princess, you might carve her embroidered robe and diadem; if she were
Joan of Arc you might carve her armour--for then these also would be
"[Greek: ton timiotaton]," not otherwise.
114. Is not this an edge-tool we have got hold of, unawares? and a
subtle one too; so delicate and scimitar-like in decision. For note,
that even Joan of Arc's armour must be only sculptured, _if she has it
on_; it is not the honourableness or beauty of it that are enough, but
the direct bearing of it by her body. You might be deeply, even
pathetically, interested by looking at a good knight's dinted coat of
mail, left in his desolate hall. May you sculpture it where it hangs?
No; the helmet for his pillow, if you will--no more.
You see we did not do our dull work for nothing in last lecture. I
define what we have gained once more, and then we will enter on our new
ground.
115. The proper subject of sculpture, we have determined, is the
spiritual power seen in the form of any living thing, and so represented
as to give evidence that the sculptor has loved the good of it and hated
the evil.
"_So_ represented," we say; but how is that to be done? Why should it
not be represented, if possible, just as it is seen? What mode or limit
of representation may we adopt? We are to carve things that have
life;--shall we try so to imitate them that they may indeed seem
living,--or only half living, and like stone instead of flesh?
It will simplify this question if I show you three examples of what the
Greeks actually did: three typical pieces of their sculpture, in order
of perfection.
116. And now, observe that in all our historical work, I will endeavour
to do, myself, what I have asked you to do in your drawing exercises;
namely, to outline firmly in the beginning, and then fill in the detail
more minutely. I will give you first, therefore, in a symmetrical form,
absolutely simple and easily remembered, the large chronology of the
Greek school; within that unforgettable scheme we will place, as we
discover them, the minor relations of arts and times.
I number the nine centuries before Christ thus, upwards, and divide them
into three groups of three each.
{ 9
A. ARCHAIC. { 8
{ 7
----
{ 6
B. BEST. { 5
{ 4
----
{ 3
C. CORRUPT. { 2
{ 1
Then the ninth, eighth, and seventh centuries are the period of Archaic
Greek Art, steadily progressive wherever it existed.
The sixth, fifth, and fourth are the period of central Greek Art; the
fifth, or central century producing the finest. That is easily
recollected by the battle of Marathon. And the third, second, and first
centuries are the period of steady decline.
[Illustration: PLATE VII.--ARCHAIC, CENTRAL AND DECLINING ART OF
GREECE.]
Learn this A B C thoroughly, and mark, for yourselves, what you, at
present, think the vital events in each century. As you know more, you
will think other events the vital ones; but the best historical
knowledge only approximates to true thought in that matter; only be sure
that what is truly vital in the character which governs events, is
always expressed by the art of the century; so that if you could
interpret that art rightly, the better part of your task in reading
history would be done to your hand.
117. It is generally impossible to date with precision art of the
archaic period--often difficult to date even that of the central three
hundred years. I will not weary you with futile minor divisions of time;
here are three coins (Plate VII.) roughly, but decisively,
characteristic of the three ages. The first is an early coin of
Tarentum. The city was founded as you know, by the Spartan Phalanthus,
late in the eighth century. I believe the head is meant for that of
Apollo Archegetes, it may however be Taras, the son of Poseidon; it is
no matter to us at present whom it is meant for, but the fact that we
cannot know, is itself of the greatest import. We cannot say, with any
certainty, unless by discovery of some collateral evidence, whether this
head is intended for that of a god, or demi-god, or a mortal warrior.
Ought not that to disturb some of your thoughts respecting Greek
idealism? Farther, if by investigation we discover that the head is
meant for that of Phalanthus, we shall know nothing of the character of
Phalanthus from the face; for there is no portraiture at this early
time.
118. The second coin is of AEnus in Macedonia; probably of the fifth or
early fourth century, and entirely characteristic of the central period.
This we know to represent the face of a god--Hermes. The third coin is a
king's, not a city's. I will not tell you, at this moment, what king's;
but only that it is a late coin of the third period, and that it is as
distinct in purpose as the coin of Tarentum is obscure. We know of this
coin, that it represents no god nor demi-god, but a mere mortal; and we
know precisely, from the portrait, what that mortal's face was like.
119. A glance at the three coins, as they are set side by side, will now
show you the main differences in the three great Greek styles. The
archaic coin is sharp and hard; every line decisive and numbered, set
unhesitatingly in its place; nothing is wrong, though everything
incomplete, and, to us who have seen finer art, ugly. The central coin
is as decisive and clear in arrangement of masses, but its contours are
completely rounded and finished. There is no character in its execution
so prominent that you can give an epithet to the style. It is not hard,
it is not soft, it is not delicate, it is not coarse, it is not
grotesque, it is not beautiful; and I am convinced, unless you had been
told that this is fine central Greek art, you would have seen nothing at
all in it to interest you. Do not let yourselves be anywise forced into
admiring it; there is, indeed, nothing more here, than an approximately
true rendering of a healthy youthful face, without the slightest attempt
to give an expression of activity, cunning, nobility, or any other
attribute of the Mercurial mind. Extreme simplicity, unpretending vigour
of work, which claims no admiration either for minuteness or dexterity,
and suggests no idea of effort at all; refusal of extraneous ornament,
and perfectly arranged disposition of counted masses in a sequent order,
whether in the beads, or the ringlets of hair; this is all you have to
be pleased with; neither will you ever find, in the best Greek Art,
more. You might at first suppose that the chain of beads round the cap
was an extraneous ornament; but I have little doubt that it is as
definitely the proper fillet for the head of Hermes, as the olive for
Zeus, or corn for Triptolemus. The cap or petasus cannot have expanded
edges, there is no room for them on the coin; these must be understood,
therefore; but the nature of the cloud-petasus is explained by edging it
with beads, representing either dew or hail. The shield of Athena often
bears white pellets for hail, in like manner.
120. The third coin will, I think, at once strike you by what we moderns
should call its "vigour of character." You may observe also that the
features are finished with great care and subtlety, but at the cost of
simplicity and breadth. But the _essential_ difference between it and
the central art, is its disorder in design--you see the locks of hair
cannot be counted any longer--they are entirely dishevelled and
irregular. Now the individual character may, or may not be, a sign of
decline; but the licentiousness, the casting loose of the masses in the
design, is an infallible one. The effort at portraiture is good for art
if the men to be portrayed are good men, not otherwise. In the instance
before you, the head is that of Mithridates VI. of Pontus, who had,
indeed, the good qualities of being a linguist and a patron of the arts;
but as you will remember, murdered, according to report, his mother,
certainly his brother, certainly his wives and sisters, I have not
counted how many of his children, and from a hundred to a hundred and
fifty thousand persons besides; these last in a single day's massacre.
The effort to represent this kind of person is not by any means a method
of study from life ultimately beneficial to art.
121. This however is not the point I have to urge to-day. What I want
you to observe is that, though the master of the great time does not
attempt portraiture, he _does_ attempt animation. And as far as his
means will admit, he succeeds in making the face--you might almost
think--vulgarly animated; as like a real face, literally, "as it can
stare." Yes: and its sculptor meant it to be so; and that was what
Phidias meant his Jupiter to be, if he could manage it. Not, indeed, to
be taken for Zeus himself; and yet, to be as like a living Zeus as art
could make it. Perhaps you think he tried to make it look living only
for the sake of the mob, and would not have tried to do so for
connoisseurs. Pardon me; for real connoisseurs, he would, and did; and
herein consists a truth which belongs to all the arts, and which I will
at once drive home in your minds, as firmly as I can.
122. All second-rate artists--(and remember, the second-rate ones are a
loquacious multitude, while the great come only one or two in a century;
and then, silently)--all second-rate artists will tell you that the
object of fine art is not resemblance, but some kind of abstraction more
refined than reality. Put that out of your heads at once. The object of
the great Resemblant Arts is, and always has been, to resemble; and to
resemble as closely as possible. It is the function of a good portrait
to set the man before you in habit as he lived, and I would we had a few
more that did so. It is the function of a good landscape to set the
scene before you in its reality, to make you, if it may be, think the
clouds are flying, and the streams foaming. It is the function of the
best sculptor--the true Daedalus--to make stillness look like breathing,
and marble look like flesh.
123. And in all great times of art, this purpose is as naively expressed
as it is steadily held. All the talk about abstraction belongs to
periods of decadence. In living times, people see something living that
pleases them; and they try to make it live for ever, or to make it
something as like it as possible, that will last for ever. They paint
their statues, and inlay the eyes with jewels, and set real crowns on
their heads; they finish, in their pictures, every thread of embroidery,
and would fain, if they could, draw every leaf upon the trees. And their
only verbal expression of conscious success is, that they have made
their work "look real."
124. You think all that very wrong. So did I, once; but it was I that
was wrong. A long time ago, before ever I had seen Oxford, I painted a
picture of the Lake of Como, for my father. It was not at all like the
Lake of Como; but I thought it rather the better for that. My father
differed with me; and objected particularly to a boat with a red and
yellow awning, which I had put into the most conspicuous corner of my
drawing. I declared this boat to be "necessary to the composition." My
father not the less objected, that he had never seen such a boat, either
at Como or elsewhere; and suggested that if I would make the lake look a
little more like water, I should be under no necessity of explaining its
nature by the presence of floating objects. I thought him at the time a
very simple person for his pains; but have since learned, and it is the
very gist of all practical matters, which, as professor of fine art, I
have now to tell you, that the great point in painting a lake is--to get
it to look like water.
125. So far, so good. We lay it down for a first principle, that our
graphic art, whether painting or sculpture, is to produce something
which shall look as like Nature as possible. But now we must go one step
farther, and say that it is to produce what shall look like Nature to
people who know what Nature is like! You see this is at once a great
restriction, as well as a great exaltation of our aim. Our business is
not to deceive the simple; but to deceive the wise! Here, for instance,
is a modern Italian print, representing, to the best of its power, St.
Cecilia, in a brilliantly realistic manner. And the fault of the work is
not in its earnest endeavour to show St. Cecilia in habit as she lived,
but in that the effort could only be successful with persons unaware of
the habit St. Cecilia lived in. And this condition of appeal only to the
wise increases the difficulty of imitative resemblance so greatly, that,
with only average skill or materials, we must surrender all hope of it,
and be content with an imperfect representation, true as far as it
reaches, and such as to excite the imagination of a wise beholder to
complete it; though falling very far short of what either he or we
should otherwise have desired. For instance, here is a suggestion, by
Sir Joshua Reynolds, of the general appearance of a British
Judge--requiring the imagination of a very wise beholder indeed, to fill
it up, or even at first to discover what it is meant for. Nevertheless,
it is better art than the Italian St. Cecilia, because the artist,
however little he may have done to represent his knowledge, does,
indeed, know altogether what a Judge is like, and appeals only to the
criticism of those who know also.
126. There must be, therefore, two degrees of truth to be looked for in
the good graphic arts; one, the commonest, which, by any partial or
imperfect sign conveys to you an idea which you must complete for
yourself; and the other, the finest, a representation so perfect as to
leave you nothing to be farther accomplished by this independent
exertion; but to give you the same feeling of possession and presence
which you would experience from the natural object itself. For instance
of the first, in this representation of a rainbow,[124] the artist has
no hope that, by the black lines of engraving, he can deceive you into
any belief of the rainbow's being there, but he gives indication enough
of what he intends, to enable you to supply the rest of the idea
yourself, providing always you know beforehand what a rainbow is like.
But in this drawing of the falls of Terni,[125] the painter has
strained his skill to the utmost to give an actually deceptive
resemblance of the iris, dawning and fading among the foam. So far as he
has not actually deceived you, it is not because he would not have done
so if he could; but only because his colours and science have fallen
short of his desire. They have fallen so little short that, in a good
light, you may all but believe the foam and the sunshine are drifting
and changing among the rocks.
127. And after looking a little while, you will begin to regret that
they are not so: you will feel that, lovely as the drawing is, you would
like far better to see the real place, and the goats skipping among the
rocks, and the spray floating above the fall. And this is the true sign
of the greatest art--to part voluntarily with its greatness;--to make
_itself_ poor and unnoticed; but so to exalt and set forth its theme
that you may be fain to see the theme instead of it. So that you have
never enough admired a great workman's doing till you have begun to
despise it. The best homage that could be paid to the Athena of Phidias
would be to desire rather to see the living goddess; and the loveliest
Madonnas of Christian art fall short of their due power, if they do not
make their beholders sick at heart to see the living Virgin.
128. We have then, for our requirement of the finest art (sculpture, or
anything else), that it shall be so like the thing it represents as to
please those who best know or can conceive the original; and, if
possible, please them deceptively--its final triumph being to deceive
even the wise; and (the Greeks thought) to please even the Immortals,
who were so wise as to be undeceivable. So that you get the Greek, thus
far entirely true, idea of perfectness in sculpture, expressed to you by
what Phalaris says, at first sight of the bull of Perilaus, "It only
wanted motion and bellowing to seem alive; and as soon as I saw it, I
cried out, it ought to be sent to the god." To Apollo, for only he, the
undeceivable, could thoroughly understand such sculpture, and perfectly
delight in it.
129. And with this expression of the Greek ideal of sculpture, I wish
you to join the early Italian, summed in a single line by Dante--"non
vide me' di me, chi vide 'l vero." Read the 12th canto of the
"Purgatory," and learn that whole passage by heart; and if ever you
chance to go to Pistoja, look at La Robbia's coloured porcelain
bas-reliefs of the seven works of Mercy on the front of the hospital
there; and note especially the faces of the two sick men--one at the
point of death, and the other in the first peace and long-drawn
breathing of health after fever--and you will know what Dante meant by
the preceding line, "Morti li morti, e i vivi paren vivi."
130. But now, may we not ask farther,--is it impossible for art such as
this, prepared for the wise, to please the simple also? Without entering
on the awkward questions of degree, how many the wise can be, or how
much men should know, in order to be rightly called wise, may we not
conceive an art to be possible, which would deceive _every_body, or
everybody worth deceiving? I showed you at my first lecture, a little
ringlet of Japan ivory, as a type of elementary bas-relief touched with
colour; and in your rudimentary series you have a drawing by Mr.
Burgess, of one of the little fishes enlarged, with every touch of the
chisel facsimiled on the more visible scale; and showing the little
black bead inlaid for the eye, which in the original is hardly to be
seen without a lens. You may, perhaps be surprised, when I tell you,
that (putting the question of _subject_ aside for the moment, and
speaking only of the mode of execution and aim at resemblance), you have
there a perfect example of the Greek ideal of method in sculpture. And
you will admit that, to the simplest person whom we could introduce as a
critic, that fish would be a satisfactory, nay, almost a deceptive fish;
while to any one caring for subtleties of art, I need not point out that
every touch of the chisel is applied with consummate knowledge, and that
it would be impossible to convey more truth and life with the given
quantity of workmanship.
[Illustration: FIG. 7.]
131. Here is, indeed, a drawing by Turner, (Edu. 131), in which with
some fifty times the quantity of labour, and far more highly educated
faculty of sight, the artist has expressed some qualities of lustre and
colour which only very wise persons indeed could perceive in a John
Dory; and this piece of paper contains, therefore, much more, and more
subtle, art, than the Japan ivory; but are we sure that it is therefore
_greater_ art? or that the painter was better employed in producing this
drawing, which only one person can possess, and only one in a hundred
enjoy, than he would have been in producing two or three pieces on a
larger scale, which should have been at once accessible to, and
enjoyable by, a number of simpler persons? Suppose for instance, that
Turner, instead of faintly touching this outline, on white paper, with
his camel's hair pencil, had struck the main forms of his fish into
marble, thus (Fig. 7): and instead of colouring the white paper so
delicately that, perhaps, only a few of the most keenly observant
artists in England can see it at all, had, with his strong hand, tinted
the marble with a few colours, deceptive to the people, and harmonious
to the initiated; suppose that he had even conceded so much to the
spirit of popular applause as to allow of a bright glass bead being
inlaid for the eye, in the Japanese manner; and that the enlarged,
deceptive, and popularly pleasing work had been carved on the outside of
a great building,--say Fishmongers' Hall,--where everybody commercially
connected with Billingsgate could have seen it, and ratified it with the
wisdom of the market;--might not the art have been greater, worthier,
and kinder in such use?
132. Perhaps the idea does not once approve itself to you of having your
public buildings covered with ornaments like this; but pray, remember
that the choice of _subject_ is an ethical question, not now before us.
All I ask you to decide is whether the method is right, and would be
pleasant in giving the distinctiveness to pretty things, which it has
here given to what, I suppose it may be assumed, you feel to be an ugly
thing. Of course, I must note parenthetically, such realistic work is
impossible in a country where the buildings are to be discoloured by
coal-smoke; but so is all fine sculpture, whatsoever; and the whiter,
the worse its chance. For that which is prepared for private persons, to
be kept under cover, will, of necessity, degenerate into the copyism of
past work, or merely sensational and sensual forms of present life,
unless there be a governing school addressing the populace, for their
instruction, on the outside of buildings. So that, as I partly warned
you in my third lecture, you can simply have _no_ sculpture in a coal
country. Whether you like coals or carvings best, is no business of
mine. I merely have to assure you of the fact that they are
incompatible.
But, assuming that we are again, some day, to become a civilized and
governing race, deputing ironmongery, coal-digging, and lucre-digging,
to our slaves in other countries, it is quite conceivable that, with an
increasing knowledge of natural history, and desire for such knowledge,
what is now done by careful, but inefficient, woodcuts, and in
ill-coloured engravings, might be put in quite permanent sculptures,
with inlay of variegated precious stones, on the outside of buildings,
where such pictures would be little costly to the people; and in a more
popular manner still, by Robbia ware and Palissy ware, and inlaid
majolica, which would differ from the housewives' present favourite
decoration of plates above her kitchen dresser, by being every piece of
it various, instructive, and universally visible.
133. You hardly know, I suppose, whether I am speaking in jest or
earnest. In the most solemn earnest, I assure you; though such is the
strange course of our popular life that all the irrational arts of
destruction are at once felt to be earnest; while any plan for those of
instruction on a grand scale, sounds like a dream or jest. Still, I do
not absolutely propose to decorate our public buildings with sculpture
wholly of this character; though beast, and fowl, and creeping things,
and fishes, might all find room on such a building as the Solomon's
House of a New Atlantis; and some of them might even become symbolic of
much to us again. Passing through the Strand, only the other day, for
instance, I saw four highly finished and delicately coloured pictures of
cock-fighting, which, for imitative quality, were nearly all that could
be desired, going far beyond the Greek cock of Himera; and they would
have delighted a Greek's soul, if they had meant as much as a Greek
cock-fight; but they were only types of the "[Greek: endomachas
alektor]," and of the spirit of home contest, which has been so fatal
lately to the Bird of France; and not of the defence of one's own
barnyard, in thought of which the Olympians set the cock on the pillars
of their chariot course; and gave it goodly alliance in its battle, as
you may see here, in what is left of the angle of mouldering marble in
the chair of the priest of Dionusos. The cast of it, from the centre of
the theatre under the Acropolis, is in the British Museum; and I wanted
its spiral for you, and this kneeling Angel of Victory;--it is late
Greek art, but nobly systematic flat bas-relief. So I set Mr. Burgess to
draw it; but neither he nor I for a little while, could make out what
the Angel of Victory was kneeling for. His attitude is an ancient and
grandly conventional one among the Egyptians; and I was tracing it back
to a kneeling goddess of the greatest dynasty of the Pharaohs--a goddess
of Evening, or Death, laying down the sun out of her right hand;--when,
one bright day, the shadows came out clear on the Athenian throne, and I
saw that my Angel of Victory was only backing a cock at a cock-fight.
134. Still, as I have said, there is no reason why sculpture, even for
simplest persons, should confine itself to imagery of fish, or fowl, or
four-footed things.
We go back to our first principle: we ought to carve nothing but what is
honourable. And you are offended, at this moment, with my fish, (as I
believe, when the first sculptures appeared on the windows of this
museum, offence was taken at the unnecessary introduction of cats),
these dissatisfactions being properly felt by your "[Greek: nous ton
timiotaton]." For indeed, in all cases, our right judgment must depend
on our wish to give honour only to things and creatures that deserve it.
135. And now I must state to you another principle of veracity, both in
sculpture, and all following arts, of wider scope than any hitherto
examined. We have seen that sculpture is to be a true representation of
true external form. Much more is it to be a representation of true
internal emotion. You must carve only what you yourself see as you see
it; but, much more, you must carve only what you yourself feel, as you
feel it. You may no more endeavour to feel through other men's souls,
than to see with other men's eyes. Whereas generally now in Europe and
America, every man's energy is bent upon acquiring some false emotion,
not his own, but belonging to the past, or to other persons, because he
has been taught that such and such a result of it will be fine. Every
attempted sentiment in relation to art is hypocritical; our notions of
sublimity, of grace, or pious serenity, are all second hand; and we are
practically incapable of designing so much as a bell-handle or a
door-knocker without borrowing the first notion of it from those who are
gone--where we shall not wake them with our knocking. I would we could.
136. In the midst of this desolation we have nothing to count on for
real growth, but what we can find of honest liking and longing, in
ourselves and in others. We must discover, if we would healthily
advance, what things are verily [Greek: timiotata] among us; and if we
delight to honour the dishonourable, consider how, in future, we may
better bestow our likings. Now it appears to me from all our popular
declarations, that we, at present, honour nothing so much as liberty and
independence; and no person so much as the Free man and Self-made man,
who will be ruled by no one, and has been taught, or helped, by no one.
And the reason I chose a fish for you as the first subject of sculpture,
was that in men who are free and self-made, you have the nearest
approach, humanly possible, to the state of the fish, and finely
organized [Greek: herpeton]. You get the exact phrase in Habakkuk, if
you take the Septuagint text.--"[Greek: poieseis tous anthropous hos
tous ichthyas tes thalasses, kai hos ta herpeta ta ouk echonta
hegoumenon."] "Thou wilt make men as the fishes of the sea, and as the
reptile things, _that have no ruler over them_." And it chanced that as
I was preparing this lecture, one of our most able and popular prints
gave me a woodcut of the "self-made man," specified as such, so
vigorously drawn, and with so few touches, that Phidias or Turner
himself could scarcely have done it better; so that I had only to ask my
assistant to enlarge it with accuracy, and it became comparable with my
fish at once. Of course it is not given by the caricaturist as an
admirable face; only, I am enabled by his skill to set before you,
without any suspicion of unfairness on _my_ part, the expression to
which the life we profess to think most honourable, naturally leads. If
we were to take the hat off, you see how nearly the profile corresponds
with that of the typical fish.
[Illustration: PLATE VIII.--THE APOLLO OF SYRACUSE AND THE SELF-MADE
MAN.]
137. Such, then, being the definition by your best popular art, of the
ideal of feature at which we are gradually arriving by self-manufacture;
when I place opposite to it (in Plate VIII.) the profile of a man not in
any wise self-made, neither by the law of his own will, nor by the love
of his own interest--nor capable, for a moment, of any kind of
"Independence," or of the idea of independence; but wholly dependent
upon, and subjected to, external influence of just law, wise teaching,
and trusted love and truth, in his fellow-spirits;--setting before you,
I say, this profile of a God-made instead of a self-made, man, I know
that you will feel, on the instant, that you are brought into contact
with the vital elements of human art; and that this, the sculpture of
the good, is indeed the only permissible sculpture.
138. A God-made _man_, I say. The face, indeed, stands as a symbol of
more than man in its sculptor's mind. For as I gave you, to lead your
first effort in the form of leaves, the sceptre of Apollo, so this,
which I give you as the first type of rightness in the form of flesh, is
the countenance of the holder of that sceptre, the Sun-God of Syracuse.
But there is nothing in the face (nor did the Greek suppose there was)
more perfect than might be seen in the daily beauty of the creatures the
Sun-God shone upon, and whom his strength and honour animated. This is
not an ideal, but a quite literally true, face of a Greek youth; nay, I
will undertake to show you that it is not supremely beautiful, and even
to surpass it altogether with the literal portrait of an Italian one. It
is in verity no more than the form habitually taken by the features of a
well educated young Athenian or Sicilian citizen; and the one
requirement for the sculptors of to-day is not, as it has been thought,
to invent the same ideal, but merely to see the same reality.
Now, you know I told you in my fourth lecture, that the beginning of art
was in getting our country clean and our people beautiful, and you
supposed that to be a statement irrelevant to my subject; just as, at
this moment, you perhaps think, I am quitting the great subject of this
present lecture--the method of likeness-making--and letting myself
branch into the discussion of what things we are to make likeness of.
But you shall see hereafter that the method of imitating a beautiful
thing must be different from the method of imitating an ugly one; and
that, with the change in subject from what is dishonourable to what is
honourable, there will be involved a parallel change in the management
of tools, of lines, and of colours. So that before I can determine for
you _how_ you are to imitate, you must tell me what kind of face you
wish to imitate. The best draughtsmen in the world could not draw this
Apollo in ten scratches, though he can draw the self-made man. Still
less this nobler Apollo of Ionian Greece, (Plate IX.) in which the
incisions are softened into a harmony like that of Correggio's painting.
So that you see the method itself,--the choice between black incision or
fine sculpture, and perhaps, presently, the choice between colour or no
colour, will depend on what you have to represent. Colour may be
expedient for a glistening dolphin or a spotted fawn;--perhaps
inexpedient for white Poseidon, and gleaming Dian. So that, before
defining the laws of sculpture, I am compelled to ask you, _what you
mean to carve_; and that, little as you think it, is asking you how you
mean to live, and what the laws of your State are to be, for _they_
determine those of your statue. You can only have this kind of face to
study from, in the sort of state that produced it. And you will find
that sort of state described in the beginning of the fourth book of the
laws of Plato; as founded, for one thing, on the conviction that of all
the evils that can happen to a state, quantity of money is the greatest!
[Greek: meizon kakon, os epos eipein, polei ouden an gignoito, eis
gennaion kai dikaion ethon ktesin], "for, to speak shortly, no greater
evil, matching each against each, can possibly happen to a city, as
adverse to its forming just or generous character," than its being full
of silver and gold.
139. Of course, the Greek notion may be wrong, and ours right,
only--[Greek: os epos eipein]--you can have Greek sculpture only on that
Greek theory: shortly expressed by the words put into the mouth of
Poverty herself, in the Plutus of Aristophanes "[Greek: Tou ploutou
parecho beltionas andras, kai ten gnomen, kai ten idean]," "I deliver to
you better men than the God of Money can, both in imagination and
feature." So on the other hand, this ichthyoid, reptilian, or
mono-chondyloid ideal of the self-made man can only be reached,
universally, by a nation which holds that poverty, either of purse or
spirit,--but especially the spiritual character of being [Greek: ptochoi
to pneumati], is the lowest of degradations; and which believes that the
desire of wealth is the first of manly and moral sentiments. As I have
been able to get the popular ideal represented by its own living art, so
I can give you this popular faith in its own living words; but in words
meant seriously and not at all as caricature, from one of our leading
journals, professedly aesthetic also in its very name, the _Spectator_,
of August 6th, 1870.
[Illustration: PLATE IX.--APOLLO CHRYSOCOMES OF CLAZOMENAE.]
"Mr. Ruskin's plan," it says, "would make England poor, in order that
she might be cultivated, and refined and artistic. A wilder proposal was
never broached by a man of ability; and it might be regarded as a proof
that the assiduous study of art emasculates the intellect, _and even the
moral sense_. Such a theory almost warrants the contempt with which art
is often regarded by essentially intellectual natures, like Proudhon"
(sic). "Art is noble as the flower of life, and the creations of a
Titian are a great heritage of the race; but if England could secure
high art and Venetian glory of colour only by the sacrifice of her
manufacturing supremacy, and _by the acceptance of national poverty_,
then the pursuit of such artistic achievements would imply that we had
ceased to possess natures of manly strength, _or to know the meaning of
moral aims_. If we must choose between a Titian and a Lancashire cotton
mill, then, in the name of manhood and of morality, give us the cotton
mill. Only the dilettantism of the studio; that dilettantism which
loosens the moral no less than the intellectual fibre, and which is as
fatal to rectitude of action as to correctness of reasoning power, would
make a different choice."
You see also, by this interesting and most memorable passage, how
completely the question is admitted to be one of ethics--the only real
point at issue being, whether this face or that is developed on the
truer moral principle.
140. I assume, however, for the present, that this Apolline type is the
kind of form you wish to reach and to represent. And now observe,
instantly, the whole question of manner of imitation is altered for us.
The fins of the fish, the plumes of the swan, and the flowing of the
Sun-God's hair are all represented by incisions--but the incisions do
sufficiently represent the fin and feather,--they _in_sufficiently
represent the hair. If I chose, with a little more care and labor, I
could absolutely get the surface of the scales and spines of the fish,
and the expression of its mouth; but no quantity of labor would obtain
the real surface of a tress of Apollo's hair, and the full expression of
his mouth. So that we are compelled at once to call the imagination to
help us, and say to it, _You_ know what the Apollo Chrysocomes must be
like; finish all this for yourself. Now, the law under which imagination
works, is just that of other good workers. "You must give me clear
orders; show me what I have to do, and where I am to begin, and let me
alone." And the orders can be given, quite clearly, up to a certain
point, in form; but they cannot be given clearly in color, now that the
subject is subtle. All beauty of this high kind depends on harmony; let
but the slightest discord come into it, and the finer the thing is, the
more fatal will be the flaw. Now, on a flat surface, I can command my
color to be precisely what and where I mean it to be; on a round one I
cannot. For all harmony depends, first, on the fixed proportion of the
color of the light to that of the relative shadow; and therefore if I
fasten my color, I must fasten my shade. But on a round surface the
shadow changes at every hour of the day; and therefore all coloring
which is expressive of form, is impossible; and if the form is fine,
(and here there is nothing but what is fine,) you may bid farewell to
color.
141. Farewell to color; that is to say, if the thing is to be seen
distinctly, and you have only wise people to show it to; but if it is to
be seen indistinctly, at a distance, color may become explanatory; and
if you have simple people to show it to, color may be necessary to
excite _their_ imaginations, though not to excite yours. And the art is
great always by meeting its conditions in the straightest way; and if it
is to please a multitude of innocent and bluntly-minded persons, must
express itself in the terms that will touch them; else it is not good.
And I have to trace for you through the history of the past, and
possibilities of the future, the expedients used by great sculptors to
obtain clearness, impressiveness, or splendor; and the manner of their
appeal to the people, under various light and shadow, and with reference
to different degrees of public intelligence: such investigation
resolving itself again and again, as we proceed, into questions
absolutely ethical; as, for instance, whether color is to be bright or
dull,--that is to say, for a populace cheerful or heartless;--whether it
is to be delicate or strong,--that is to say, for a populace attentive
or careless; whether it is to be a background like the sky, for a
procession of young men and maidens, because your populace revere
life--or the shadow of the vault behind a corpse stained with drops of
blackened blood, for a populace taught to worship Death. Every critical
determination of rightness depends on the obedience to some ethic law,
by the most rational and, therefore, simplest means. And you see how it
depends most, of all things, on whether you are working for chosen
persons, or for the mob; for the joy of the boudoir, or of the Borgo.
And if for the mob, whether the mob of Olympia, or of St. Antoine.
Phidias, showing his Jupiter for the first time, hides behind the temple
door to listen, resolved afterwards "[Greek: rhythmizein to agalma pros
to tois pleistois dokoun, ou gar hegeito mikran einai symboulen demou
tosoutou]," and truly, as your people is, in judgment, and in multitude,
so must your sculpture be, in glory. An elementary principle which has
been too long out of mind.
142. I leave you to consider it, since, for some time, we shall not
again be able to take up the inquiries to which it leads. But,
ultimately, I do not doubt that you will rest satisfied in these
following conclusions:
1. Not only sculpture, but all the other fine arts, must be for the
people.
2. They must be didactic to the people, and that as their chief end. The
structural arts, didactic in their manner; the graphic arts, in their
matter also.
3. And chiefly the great representative and imaginative arts--that is to
say, the drama and sculpture--are to teach what is noble in past
history, and lovely in existing human and organic life.
4. And the test of right manner of execution in these arts, is that
they strike, in the most emphatic manner, the rank of popular minds
to which they are addressed.
5. And the test of utmost fineness in execution in these arts, is that
they make themselves be forgotten in what they represent; and so fulfil
the words of their greatest Master,
"THE BEST, IN THIS KIND, ARE BUT SHADOWS."
FOOTNOTES:
[123] See date of delivery of Lecture. The picture was of a peasant girl
of eleven or twelve years old, peeling carrots by a cottage fire.
[124] In Durer's "Melencholia."
[125] Turner's, in the Hakewill series.
LECTURE V.
STRUCTURE.
_December, 1870._
143. On previous occasions of addressing you, I have endeavoured to show
you, first, how sculpture is distinguished from other arts; then its
proper subjects, then its proper method in the realization of these
subjects. To-day, we must, in the fourth place, consider the means at
its command for the accomplishment of these ends; the nature of its
materials; and the mechanical or other difficulties of their treatment.
And however doubtful we may have remained, as to the justice of Greek
ideals, or propriety of Greek methods of representing them, we may be
certain that the example of the Greeks will be instructive in all
practical matters relating to this great art, peculiarly their own. I
think even the evidence I have already laid before you is enough to
convince you, that it was by rightness and reality, not by idealism or
delightfulness only, that their minds were finally guided; and I am sure
that, before closing the present course, I shall be able so far to
complete that evidence, as to prove to you that the commonly received
notions of classic art are, not only unfounded, but even in many
respects, directly contrary to the truth. You are constantly told that
Greece idealized whatever she contemplated. She did the exact contrary:
she realized and verified it. You are constantly told she sought only
the beautiful. She sought, indeed, with all her heart; but she found,
because she never doubted that the search was to be consistent with
propriety and common sense. And the first thing you will always discern
in Greek work is the first which you _ought_ to discern in all work;
namely, that the object of it has been rational, and has been obtained
by simple and unostentatious means.
144. "That the object of the work has been rational!" Consider how much
that implies. That it should be by all means seen to have been
determined upon, and carried through, with sense and discretion; these
being gifts of intellect far more precious than any knowledge of
mathematics, or of the mechanical resources of art. Therefore, also,
that it should be a modest and temperate work, a structure fitted to the
actual state of men; proportioned to their actual size, as animals,--to
their average strength,--to their true necessities,--and to the degree
of easy command they have over the forces and substances of nature.
145. You see how much this law excludes! All that is fondly magnificent,
insolently ambitious, or vainly difficult. There is, indeed, such a
thing as Magnanimity in design, but never unless it be joined also with
modesty and _Equ_animity. Nothing extravagant, monstrous, strained, or
singular, can be structurally beautiful. No towers of Babel envious of
the skies; no pyramids in mimicry of the mountains of the earth; no
streets that are a weariness to traverse, nor temples that make pigmies
of the worshippers.
It is one of the primal merits and decencies of Greek work that it was,
on the whole, singularly small in scale, and wholly within reach of
sight, to its finest details. And, indeed, the best buildings that I
know are thus modest; and some of the best are minute jewel cases for
sweet sculpture. The Parthenon would hardly attract notice, if it were
set by the Charing Cross Railway Station: the Church of the Miracoli, at
Venice, the Chapel of the Rose, at Lucca, and the Chapel of the Thorn,
at Pisa, would not, I suppose, all three together, fill the tenth part,
cube, of a transept of the Crystal Palace. And they are better so.
146. In the chapter on Power in the "Seven Lamps of Architecture," I
have stated what seems, at first, the reverse of what I am saying now;
namely, that it is better to have one grand building than any number of
mean ones. And that is true, but you cannot command grandeur by size
till you can command grace in minuteness; and least of all, remember,
will you so command it to-day, when magnitude has become the chief
exponent of folly and misery, co-ordinate in the fraternal enormities of
the Factory and Poorhouse,--the Barracks and Hospital. And the final law
in this matter is, that if you require edifices only for the grace and
health of mankind, and build them without pretence and without
chicanery, they will be sublime on a modest scale, and lovely with
little decoration.
147. From these principles of simplicity and temperance, two very
severely fixed laws of construction follow; namely, first, that our
structure, to be beautiful, must be produced with tools of men; and
secondly, that it must be composed of natural substances. First, I say,
produced with tools of men. All fine art requires the application of the
whole strength and subtlety of the body, so that such art is not
possible to any sickly person, but involves the action and force of a
strong man's arm from the shoulder, as well as the delicatest touch of
his finger: and it is the evidence that this full and fine strength has
been spent on it which makes the art executively noble; so that no
instrument must be used, habitually, which is either too heavy to be
delicately restrained, or too small and weak to transmit a vigorous
impulse; much less any mechanical aid, such as would render the
sensibility of the fingers ineffectual.[126]
148. Of course, any kind of work in glass, or in metal, on a large
scale, involves some painful endurance of heat; and working in clay,
some habitual endurance of cold; but the point beyond which the effort
must not be carried is marked by loss of power of manipulation. As long
as the eyes and fingers have complete command of the material (as a
glass blower has, for instance, in doing fine ornamental work)--the law
is not violated; but all our great engine and furnace work, in
gun-making and the like, is degrading to the intellect; and no nation
can long persist in it without losing many of its human faculties. Nay,
even the use of machinery, other than the common rope and pully, for the
lifting of weights, is degrading to architecture; the invention of
expedients for the raising of enormous stones has always been a
characteristic of partly savage or corrupted races. A block of marble
not larger than a cart with a couple of oxen could carry, and a
cross-beam, with a couple of pulleys, raise, is as large as should
generally be used in any building. The employment of large masses is
sure to lead to vulgar exhibitions of geometrical arrangement,[127] and
to draw away the attention from the sculpture. In general, rocks
naturally break into such pieces as the human beings that have to build
with them can easily lift, and no larger should be sought for.
149. In this respect, and in many other subtle ways, the law that the
work is to be with tools of men is connected with the farther condition
of its modesty, that it is to be wrought in substance provided by
Nature, and to have a faithful respect to all the essential qualities of
such substance.
And here I must ask your attention to the idea, and, more than
idea,--the fact, involved in that infinitely misused term,
"Providentia," when applied to the Divine Power. In its truest sense and
scholarly use, it is a human virtue, [Greek: Prometheia]; the personal
type of it is in Prometheus, and all the first power of [Greek: techne],
is from him, as compared to the weakness of days when men without
foresight "[Greek: ephyron eike panta]." But, so far as we use the word
"Providence" as an attribute of the Maker and Giver of all things, it
does not mean that in a shipwreck He takes care of the passengers who
are to be saved and takes none of those who are to be drowned; but it
_does_ mean that every race of creatures is born into the world under
circumstances of approximate adaptation to its necessities; and, beyond
all others, the ingenious and observant race of man is surrounded with
elements naturally good for his food, pleasant to his sight, and
suitable for the subjects of his ingenuity;--the stone, metal, and clay
of the earth he walks upon lending themselves at once to his hand, for
all manner of workmanship.
150. Thus, his truest respect for the law of the entire creation is
shown by his making the most of what he can get most easily; and there
is no virtue of art, nor application of common sense, more sacredly
necessary than this respect to the beauty of natural substance, and the
ease of local use; neither are there any other precepts of construction
so vital as these--that you show all the strength of your material,
tempt none of its weaknesses, and do with it only what can be simply and
permanently done.
151. Thus, all good building will be with rocks, or pebbles, or burnt
clay, but with no artificial compound; all good painting, with common
oils and pigments on common canvas, paper, plaster, or wood,--admitting,
sometimes for precious work, precious things, but all applied in a
simple and visible way. The highest imitative art should not, indeed, at
first sight, call attention to the means of it; but even that, at
length, should do so distinctly, and provoke the observer to take
pleasure in seeing how completely the workman is master of the
particular material he has used, and how beautiful and desirable a
substance it was, for work of that kind. In oil painting its unctious
quality is to be delighted in; in fresco, its chalky quality; in glass,
its transparency; in wood, its grain; in marble, its softness; in
porphyry, its hardness; in iron, its toughness. In a flint country, one
should feel the delightfulness of having flints to pick up, and fasten
together into rugged walls. In a marble country one should be always
more and more astonished at the exquisite colour and structure of
marble; in a slate country one should feel as if every rock cleft itself
only for the sake of being built with conveniently.
[Illustration: PLATE X.--MARBLE MASONRY IN THE DUOMO OF VERONA.]
152. Now, for sculpture, there are, briefly, two materials--Clay, and
Stone; for glass is only a clay that gets clear and brittle as it cools,
and metal a clay that gets opaque and tough as it cools. Indeed, the
true use of gold in this world is only as a very pretty and very ductile
clay, which you can spread as flat as you like, spin as fine as you
like, and which will neither crack, nor tarnish.
All the arts of sculpture in clay may be summed up under the word
"Plastic," and all of those in stone, under the word "Glyptic."
153. Sculpture in clay will accordingly include all cast brick-work,
pottery, and tile-work[128]--a somewhat important branch of human skill.
Next to the potter's work, you have all the arts in porcelain, glass,
enamel, and metal; everything, that is to say, playful and familiar in
design, much of what is most felicitously inventive, and, in bronze or
gold, most precious and permanent.
154. Sculpture in stone, whether granite, gem, or marble, while we
accurately use the general term "glyptic" for it, may be thought of
with, perhaps, the most clear force under the English word "engraving."
For, from the mere angular incision which the Greek consecrated in the
triglyphs of his greatest order of architecture, grow forth all the arts
of bas-relief, and methods of localized groups of sculpture connected
with each other and with architecture: as, in another direction, the
arts of engraving and wood-cutting themselves.
155. Over all this vast field of human skill the laws which I have
enunciated to you rule with inevitable authority, embracing the
greatest, and consenting to the humblest, exertion; strong to repress
the ambition of nations, if fantastic and vain, but gentle to approve
the efforts of children, made in accordance with the visible intention
of the Maker of all flesh, and the Giver of all Intelligence. These
laws, therefore, I now repeat, and beg of you to observe them as
irrefragable.
1. That the work is to be with tools of men.
2. That it is to be in natural materials.
3. That it is to exhibit the virtues of those materials, and aim at no
quality inconsistent with them.
4. That its temper is to be quiet and gentle, in harmony with common
needs, and in consent to common intelligence.
We will now observe the bearing of these laws on the elementary
conditions of the art at present under discussion.
156. There is, first, work in baked clay, which contracts as it dries,
and is very easily frangible. Then you must put no work into it
requiring niceness in dimension, nor any so elaborate that it would be a
great loss if it were broken, but as the clay yields at once to the
hand, and the sculptor can do anything with it he likes, it is a
material for him to sketch with and play with,--to record his fancies
in, before they escape him--and to express roughly, for people who can
enjoy such sketches, what he has not time to complete in marble. The
clay, being ductile, lends itself to all softness of line; being easily
frangible, it would be ridiculous to give it sharp edges, so that a
blunt and massive rendering of graceful gesture will be its natural
function; but as it can be pinched, or pulled, or thrust in a moment
into projection which it would take hours of chiselling to get in stone,
it will also properly be used for all fantastic and grotesque form, not
involving sharp edges. Therefore, what is true of chalk and charcoal,
for painters, is equally true of clay, for sculptors; they are all most
precious materials for true masters, but tempt the false ones into fatal
license; and to judge rightly of terra-cotta work is a far higher reach
of skill in sculpture-criticism than to distinguish the merits of a
finished statue.
157. We have, secondly, work in bronze, iron, gold, and other metals; in
which the laws of structure are still more definite.
All kinds of twisted and wreathen work on every scale become delightful
when wrought in ductile or tenacious metal, but metal which is to be
_hammered_ into form separates itself into two great divisions--solid,
and flat.
[Illustration: PLATE XI.--THE FIRST ELEMENTS OF SCULPTURE.
Incised Outline and Opened Space.]
(A.) In solid metal work, _i. e._, metal cast thick enough to resist
bending, whether it be hollow or not, violent and various projection may
be admitted, which would be offensive in marble; but no sharp edges,
because it is difficult to produce them with the hammer. But since the
permanence of the material justifies exquisiteness of workmanship,
whatever delicate ornamentation can be wrought with rounded surfaces may
be advisedly introduced; and since the colour of bronze or any other
metal is not so pleasantly representative of flesh as that of marble, a
wise sculptor will depend less on flesh contour, and more on picturesque
accessories, which, though they would be vulgar if attempted in stone,
are rightly entertaining in bronze or silver. Verrochio's statue of
Colleone at Venice, Cellini's Perseus at Florence, and Ghiberti's gates
at Florence, are models of bronze treatment.
(B.) When metal is beaten thin, it becomes what is technically called
"plate," (the _flattened_ thing) and may be treated advisably in two
ways; one, by beating it out into bosses, the other by cutting it into
strips and ramifications. The vast schools of goldsmith's work and of
iron decoration, founded on these two principles, have had the most
powerful influences over general taste in all ages and countries. One of
the simplest and most interesting elementary examples of the treatment
of flat metal by cutting is the common branched iron bar, Fig. 8, used
to close small apertures in countries possessing any good primitive
style of iron-work, formed by alternate cuts on its sides, and the
bending down of the several portions. The ordinary domestic window
balcony of Verona is formed by mere ribands of iron, bent into curves as
studiously refined as those of a Greek vase, and decorated merely by
their own terminations in spiral volutes.
[Illustration: FIG. 8.]
All cast work in metal, unfinished by hand, is inadmissible in any
school of living art, since it cannot possess the perfection of form due
to a permanent substance; and the continual sight of it is destructive
of the faculty of taste: but metal stamped with precision, as in coins,
is to sculpture what engraving is to painting.
158. Thirdly. Stone-sculpture divides itself into three schools: one in
very hard material; one in very soft, and one in that of centrally
useful consistence.
A. The virtue of work in hard material is the expression of form in
shallow relief, or in broad contours; deep cutting in hard material is
inadmissible, and the art, at once pompous and trivial, of gem
engraving, has been in the last degree destructive of the honour and
service of sculpture.
B. The virtue of work in soft material is deep cutting, with studiously
graceful disposition of the masses of light and shade. The greater
number of flamboyant churches of France are cut out of an adhesive
chalk; and the fantasy of their latest decoration was, in great part,
induced by the facility of obtaining contrast of black space, undercut,
with white tracery easily left in sweeping and interwoven rods--the
lavish use of wood in domestic architecture materially increasing the
habit of delight in branched complexity of line. These points, however,
I must reserve for illustration in my lectures on architecture. To-day,
I shall limit myself to the illustration of elementary sculptural
structure in the best material;--that is to say, in crystalline marble,
neither soft enough to encourage the caprice of the workman, nor hard
enough to resist his will.
159. C. By the true "Providence" of Nature, the rock which is thus
submissive has been in some places stained with the fairest colours, and
in others blanched into the fairest absence of colour, that can be found
to give harmony to inlaying, or dignity to form. The possession by the
Greeks of their [Greek: leukos lithos] was indeed the first circumstance
regulating the development of their art; it enabled them at once to
express their passion for light by executing the faces, hands, and feet
of their dark wooden statues in white marble, so that what we look upon
only with pleasure for fineness of texture was to them an imitation of
the luminous body of the deity shining from behind its dark robes; and
ivory afterwards is employed in their best statues for its yet more soft
and flesh-like brightness, receptive also of the most delicate
colour--(therefore to this day the favourite ground of miniature
painters). In like manner, the existence of quarries of peach-coloured
marble within twelve miles of Verona, and of white marble and green
serpentine between Pisa and Genoa, defined the manner both of sculpture
and architecture for all the Gothic buildings of Italy. No subtlety of
education could have formed a high school of art without these
materials.
160. Next to the colour, the fineness of substance which will take a
perfectly sharp edge, is essential; and this not merely to admit fine
delineation in the sculpture itself, but to secure a delightful
precision in placing the blocks of which it is composed. For the
possession of too fine marble, as far as regards the work itself, is a
temptation instead of an advantage to an inferior sculptor; and the
abuse of the facility of undercutting, especially of undercutting so as
to leave profiles defined by an edge against shadow, is one of the chief
causes of decline of style in such encrusted bas-reliefs as those of the
Certosa of Pavia and its contemporary monuments. But no undue temptation
ever exists as to the fineness of block fitting; nothing contributes to
give so pure and healthy a tone to sculpture as the attention of the
builder to the jointing of his stones; and his having both the power to
make them fit so perfectly as not to admit of the slightest portion of
cement showing externally, and the skill to insure, if needful, and to
suggest always, their stability in cementless construction. Plate X.
represents a piece of entirely fine Lombardic building, the central
portion of the arch in the Duomo of Verona, which corresponds to that of
the porch of San Zenone, represented in Plate I. In both these pieces of
building, the only line that traces the architrave round the arch, is
that of the masonry joint; yet this line is drawn with extremest
subtlety, with intention of delighting the eye by its relation of varied
curvature to the arch itself; and it is just as much considered as the
finest pen-line of a Raphael drawing. Every joint of the stone is used,
in like manner, as a thin black line, which the slightest sign of cement
would spoil like a blot. And so proud is the builder of his fine
jointing, and so fearless of any distortion or strain spoiling the
adjustment afterwards, that in one place he runs his joint quite
gratuitously through a bas-relief, and gives the keystone its only sign
of pre-eminence by the minute inlaying of the head of the Lamb, into the
stone of the course above.
161. Proceeding from this fine jointing to fine draughtsmanship, you
have, in the very outset and earliest stage of sculpture, your flat
stone surface given you as a sheet of white paper, on which you are
required to produce the utmost effect you can with the simplest means,
cutting away as little of the stone as may be, to save both time and
trouble; and, above all, leaving the block itself, when shaped, as solid
as you can, that its surface may better resist weather, and the carved
parts be as much protected as possible by the masses left around them.
162. The first thing to be done is clearly to trace the outline of
subject with an incision approximating in section to that of the furrow
of a plough, only more equal-sided. A fine sculptor strikes it, as his
chisel leans, freely, on marble; an Egyptian, in hard rock, cuts it
sharp, as in cuneiform inscriptions. In any case, you have a result
somewhat like the upper figure, Plate XI., in which I show you the most
elementary indication of form possible, by cutting the outline of the
typical archaic Greek head with an incision like that of a Greek
triglyph, only not so precise in edge or slope, as it is to be modified
afterwards.
163. Now, the simplest thing we can do next, is to round off the flat
surface _within_ the incision, and put what form we can get into the
feebler projection of it thus obtained. The Egyptians do this, often
with exquisite skill, and then, as I showed you in a former lecture,
colour the whole--using the incision as an outline. Such a method of
treatment is capable of good service in representing, at little cost of
pains, subjects in distant effect, and common, or merely picturesque,
subjects even near. To show you what it is capable of, and what
coloured sculpture would be in its rudest type, I have prepared the
coloured relief of the John Dory[129] as a natural history drawing for
distant effect. You know, also, that I meant him to be ugly--as ugly as
any creature can well be. In time, I hope to show you prettier
things--peacocks and kingfishers,--butterflies and flowers, on grounds
of gold, and the like, as they were in Byzantine work. I shall expect
you, in right use of your aesthetic faculties, to like those better than
what I show you to-day. But it is now a question of method only; and if
you will look, after the lecture, first at the mere white relief, and
then see how much may be gained by a few dashes of colour, such as a
practised workman could lay in a quarter of an hour,--the whole forming,
if well done, almost a deceptive image--you will, at least, have the
range of power in Egyptian sculpture clearly expressed to you.
164. But for fine sculpture, we must advance by far other methods. If we
carve the subject with real delicacy, the cast shadow of the incision
will interfere with its outline, so that, for representation of
beautiful things, you must clear away the ground about it, at all events
for a little distance. As the law of work is to use the least pains
possible, you clear it only just as far back as you need, and then for
the sake of order and finish, you give the space a geometrical outline.
By taking, in this case, the simplest I can,--a circle,--I can clear the
head with little labor in the removal of surface round it; (see the
lower figure in Plate XI.)
165. Now, these are the first terms of all well-constructed bas-relief.
The mass you have to treat consists of a piece of stone, which, however
you afterwards carve it, can but, at its most projecting point, reach
the level of the external plane surface out of which it was mapped, and
defined by a depression round it; that depression being at first a mere
trench, then a moat of certain width, of which the outer sloping bank is
in contact, as a limiting geometrical line, with the laterally salient
portions of sculpture. This, I repeat, is the primal construction of
good bas-relief, implying, first, perfect protection to its surface from
any transverse blow, and a geometrically limited space to be occupied by
the design, into which it shall pleasantly (and as you shall ultimately
see, ingeniously,) contract itself: implying, secondly, a determined
depth of projection, which it shall rarely reach, and never exceed: and
implying, finally, the production of the whole piece with the least
possible labor of chisel and loss of stone.
166. And these, which are the first, are very nearly the last
constructive laws of sculpture. You will be surprised to find how much
they include, and how much of minor propriety in treatment their
observance involves.
In a very interesting essay on the architecture of the Parthenon, by the
professor of architecture of the Ecole Polytechnique, M. Emile Boutmy,
you will find it noticed that the Greeks do not usually weaken, by
carving, the constructive masses of their building; but put their chief
sculpture in the empty spaces between the triglyphs, or beneath the
roof. This is true; but in so doing, they merely build their panel
instead of carving it; they accept no less than the Goths, the laws of
recess and limitation, as being vital to the safety and dignity of their
design; and their noblest recumbent statues are, constructively, the
fillings of the acute extremity of a panel in the form of an obtusely
summitted triangle.
167. In gradual descent from that severest type, you will find that an
immense quantity of sculpture of all times and styles may be generally
embraced under the notion of a mass hewn out of, or, at least, placed
in, a panel or recess, deepening, it may be, into a niche; the sculpture
being always designed with reference to its position in such recess;
and, therefore, to the effect of the building out of which the recess is
hewn.
But, for the sake of simplifying our inquiry, I will at first suppose no
surrounding protective ledge to exist, and that the area of stone we
have to deal with is simply a flat slab, extant from a flat surface
depressed all round it.
168. A _flat_ slab, observe. The flatness of surface is essential to the
problem of bas-relief. The lateral limit of the panel may, or may not,
be required; but the vertical limit of surface _must_ be expressed; and
the art of bas-relief is to give the effect of true form on that
condition. For observe, if nothing more were needed than to make first a
cast of a solid form, then cut it in half, and apply the half of it to
the flat surface;--if, for instance, to carve a bas-relief of an apple,
all I had to do was to cut my sculpture of the whole apple in half, and
pin it to the wall, any ordinary trained sculptor, or even a mechanical
workman, could produce bas-relief; but the business is to carve a
_round_ thing out of _flat_ thing; to carve an apple out of a
biscuit!--to conquer, as a subtle Florentine has here conquered,[130]
his marble, so as not only to get motion into what is most rigidly
fixed, but to get boundlessness into what is most narrowly bounded; and
carve Madonna and Child, rolling clouds, flying angels, and space of
heavenly air behind all, out of a film of stone not the third of an inch
thick where it is thickest.
169. Carried, however, to such a degree of subtlety as this, and with so
ambitious and extravagant aim, bas-relief becomes a tour-de-force; and,
you know, I have just told you all tours-de-force are wrong. The true
law of bas-relief is to begin with a depth of incision proportioned
justly to the distance of the observer and the character of the subject,
and out of that rationally determined depth, neither increased for
ostentation of effect, nor diminished for ostentation of skill, to do
the utmost that will be easily visible to an observer, supposing him to
give an average human amount of attention, but not to peer into, or
critically scrutinize the work.
170. I cannot arrest you to-day by the statement of any of the laws of
sight and distance which determine the proper depth of bas-relief.
Suppose that depth fixed; then observe what a pretty problem, or,
rather, continually varying cluster of problems, will be offered to us.
You might, at first, imagine that, given what we may call our scale of
solidity, or scale of depth, the diminution from nature would be in
regular proportion, as for instance, if the real depth of your subject
be, suppose a foot, and the depth of your bas-relief an inch, then the
parts of the real subject which were six inches round the side of it
would be carved, you might imagine, at the depth of half-an-inch, and so
the whole thing mechanically reduced to scale. But not a bit of it. Here
is a Greek bas-relief of a chariot with two horses (upper figure, Plate
XXI). Your whole subject has therefore the depth of two horses side by
side, say six or eight feet. Your bas-relief has, on the scale,[131] say
the depth of the third of an inch. Now, if you gave only the sixth of an
inch for the depth of the off horse, and, dividing him again, only the
twelfth of an inch for that of each foreleg, you would make him look a
mile away from the other, and his own forelegs a mile apart. Actually,
the Greek has made the _near leg of the off horse project much beyond
the off leg of the near horse_; and has put nearly the whole depth and
power of his relief into the breast of the off horse, while for the
whole distance from the head of the nearest to the neck of the other, he
has allowed himself only a shallow line; knowing that, if he deepened
that, he would give the nearest horse the look of having a thick nose;
whereas, by keeping that line down, he has not only made the head itself
more delicate, but detached it from the other by giving no cast shadow,
and left the shadow below to serve for thickness of breast, cutting it
as sharp down as he possibly can, to make it bolder.
171. Here is a fine piece of business we have got into!--even supposing
that all this selection and adaptation were to be contrived under
constant laws, and related only to the expression of given forms. But
the Greek sculptor, all this while, is not only debating and deciding
how to show what he wants, but, much more, debating and deciding what,
as he can't show everything, he will choose to show at all. Thus, being
himself interested, and supposing that you will be, in the manner of
the driving, he takes great pains to carve the reins, to show you where
they are knotted, and how they are fastened round the driver's waist
(you recollect how Hippolytus was lost by doing that), but he does not
care the least bit about the chariot, and having rather more geometry
than he likes in the cross and circle of one wheel of it, entirely omits
the other!
172. I think you must see by this time that the sculptor's is not quite
a trade which you can teach like brickmaking; nor its produce an article
of which you can supply any quantity "demanded" for the next railroad
waiting-room. It may perhaps, indeed, seem to you that, in the
difficulties thus presented by it, bas-relief involves more direct
exertion of intellect than finished solid sculpture. It is not so,
however. The questions involved by bas-relief are of a more curious and
amusing kind, requiring great variety of expedients; though none except
such as a true workmanly instinct delights in inventing and invents
easily; but design in solid sculpture involves considerations of weight
in mass, of balance, of perspective and opposition, in projecting forms,
and of restraint for those which must not project, such as none but the
greatest masters have ever completely solved; and they, not always; the
difficulty of arranging the composition so as to be agreeable from
points of view on all sides of it, being, itself, arduous enough.
173. Thus far, I have been speaking only of the laws of structure
relating to the projection of the mass which becomes itself the
sculpture. Another most interesting group of constructive laws governs
its relation to the line that contains or defines it.
In your Standard Series I have placed a photograph of the south transept
of Rouen Cathedral. Strictly speaking, all standards of Gothic are of
the thirteenth century; but, in the fourteenth, certain qualities of
richness are obtained by the diminution of restraint; out of which we
must choose what is best in their kinds. The pedestals of the statues
which once occupied the lateral recesses are, as you see, covered with
groups of figures, enclosed each in a quatrefoil panel; the spaces
between this panel and the enclosing square being filled with sculptures
of animals.
You cannot anywhere find a more lovely piece of fancy, or more
illustrative of the quantity of result that may be obtained with low and
simple chiselling. The figures are all perfectly simple in drapery, the
story told by lines of action only in the main group, no accessories
being admitted. There is no undercutting anywhere, nor exhibition of
technical skill, but the fondest and tenderest appliance of it; and one
of the principal charms of the whole is the adaptation of every subject
to its quaint limit. The tale must be told within the four petals of the
quatrefoil, and the wildest and playfullest beasts must never come out
of their narrow corners. The attention with which spaces of this kind
are filled by the Gothic designers is not merely a beautiful compliance
with architectural requirements, but a definite assertion of their
delight in the restraint of law; for, in illuminating books, although,
if they chose it, they might have designed floral ornaments, as we now
usually do, rambling loosely over the leaves, and although, in later
works, such license is often taken by them, in all books of the fine
time the wandering tendrils are enclosed by limits approximately
rectilinear, and in gracefullest branching often detach themselves from
the right line only by curvature of extreme severity.
174 Since the darkness and extent of shadow by which the sculpture is
relieved necessarily vary with the depth of the recess, there arise a
series of problems, in deciding which the wholesome desire for emphasis
by means of shadow is too often exaggerated by the ambition of the
sculptor to show his skill in undercutting. The extreme of vulgarity is
usually reached when the entire bas-relief is cut hollow underneath, as
in much Indian and Chinese work, so as to relieve its forms against an
absolute darkness; but no formal law can ever be given; for exactly the
same thing may be beautifully done for a wise purpose, by one person,
which is basely done, and to no purpose, or to a bad one, by another.
Thus, the desire for emphasis itself may be the craving of a deadened
imagination, or the passion of a vigorous one; and relief against
shadow may be sought by one man only for sensation, and by another for
intelligibility. John of Pisa undercuts fiercely, in order to bring out
the vigour of life which no level contour could render; the Lombardi of
Venice undercut delicately, in order to obtain beautiful lines, and
edges of faultless precision; but the base Indian craftsmen undercut
only that people may wonder how the chiselling was done through the
holes, or that they may see every monster white against black.
175. Yet, here again we are met by another necessity for discrimination.
There may be a true delight in the inlaying of white on dark, as there
is a true delight in vigorous rounding. Nevertheless, the general law is
always, that, the lighter the incisions, and the broader the surface,
the grander, caeteris paribus, will be the work. Of the structural terms
of that work you now know enough to understand that the schools of good
sculpture, considered in relation to projection, divide themselves into
four entirely distinct groups:--
1st. Flat Relief, in which the surface is, in many places,
absolutely flat; and the expression depends greatly on the
lines of its outer contour, and on fine incisions within
them.
2nd. Round Relief, in which, as in the best coins, the
sculptured mass projects so as to be capable of complete
modulation into form, but is not anywhere undercut. The
formation of a coin by the blow of a die necessitates, of
course, the severest obedience to this law.
3rd. Edged Relief. Undercutting admitted, so as to throw out
the forms against a background of shadow.
4th. Full Relief. The statue completely solid in form, and
unreduced in retreating depth of it, yet connected locally
with some definite part of the building, so as to be still
dependent on the shadow of its background and direction of
protective line.
176. Let me recommend you at once to take what pains may be needful to
enable you to distinguish these four kinds of sculpture, for the
distinctions between them are not founded on mere differences in
gradation of depth. They are truly four species, or orders, of
sculpture, separated from each other by determined characters. I have
used, you may have noted, hitherto in my Lectures, the word "bas-relief"
almost indiscriminately for all, because the degree of lowness or
highness of relief is not the question, but the _method_ of relief.
Observe again, therefore--
A. If a portion of the surface is absolutely flat, you have the first
order--Flat Relief.
B. If every portion of the surface is rounded, but none undercut, you
have Round Relief--essentially that of seals and coins.
C. If any part of the edges be undercut, but the general projection of
solid form reduced, you have what I think you may conveniently call
Foliate Relief,--the parts of the design overlapping each other in
places, like edges of leaves.
D. If the undercutting is bold and deep, and the projection of solid
form unreduced, you have full relief.
Learn these four names at once by heart:--
Flat Relief.
Round Relief.
Foliate Relief.
Full Relief.
And whenever you look at any piece of sculpture, determine first to
which of these classes it belongs; and then consider how the sculptor
has treated it with reference to the necessary structure--that
reference, remember, being partly to the mechanical conditions of the
material, partly to the means of light and shade at his command.
[Illustration: PLATE XII.--BRANCH OF PHILLYREA. DARK PURPLE]
177. To take a single instance. You know, for these many years, I have
been telling our architects with all the force of voice I had in me,
that they could design nothing until they could carve natural forms
rightly. Many imagine that work was easy; but judge for yourselves
whether it be or not. In Plate XII., I have drawn, with approximate
accuracy, a cluster of Phillyrea leaves as they grow. Now, if we wanted
to cut them in bas-relief, the first thing we should have to consider
would be the position of their outline on the marble;--here it is, as
far down as the spring of the leaves. But do you suppose that is what an
ordinary sculptor could either lay for his first sketch, or contemplate
as a limit to be worked down to? Then consider how the interlacing and
springing of the leaves can be expressed within this outline. It must be
done by leaving such projection in the marble as will take the light in
the same proportion as the drawing does;--and a Florentine workman could
do it, for close sight, without driving one incision deeper, or raising
a single surface higher, than the eighth of an inch. Indeed, no sculptor
of the finest time would design such a complex cluster of leaves as
this, except for bronze or iron work; they would take simpler contours
for marble; but the laws of treatment would, under these conditions,
remain just as strict: and you may, perhaps, believe me now when I tell
you that, in any piece of fine structural sculpture by the great
masters, there is more subtlety and noble obedience to lovely laws than
could be explained to you if I took twenty lectures to do it in, instead
of one.
[Illustration: FIG. 9.]
178. There remains yet a point of mechanical treatment, on which I have
not yet touched at all; nor that the least important,--namely, the
actual method and style of handling. A great sculptor uses his tools
exactly as a painter his pencil, and you may recognize the decision of
his thought, and glow of his temper, no less in the workmanship than the
design. The modern system of modelling the work in clay, getting it into
form by machinery, and by the hands of subordinates, and touching it at
last, if indeed the (so called) sculptor touch it at all, only to
correct their inefficiencies, renders the production of good work in
marble a physical impossibility. The first result of it is that the
sculptor thinks in clay instead of marble, and loses his instinctive
sense of the proper treatment of a brittle substance. The second is that
neither he nor the public recognize the touch of the chisel as
expressive of personal feeling or power, and that nothing is looked for
except mechanical polish.
179. The perfectly simple piece of Greek relief represented in Plate
XIII., will enable you to understand at once,--examination of the
original, at your leisure, will prevent you, I trust, from ever
forgetting--what is meant by the virtue of handling in sculpture.
[Illustration: PLATE XIII.--GREEK FLAT RELIEF AND SCULPTURE BY EDGED
INCISION.]
The projection of the heads of the four horses, one behind the other, is
certainly not more, altogether, than three-quarters of an inch from the
flat ground, and the one in front does not in reality project more than
the one behind it, yet, by mere drawing,[132] you see the sculptor has
got them to appear to recede in due order, and by the soft rounding of
the flesh surfaces, and modulation of the veins, he has taken away all
look of flatness from the necks. He has drawn the eyes and nostrils with
dark incision, careful as the finest touches of a painter's pencil: and
then, at last, when he comes to the manes, he has let fly hand and
chisel with their full force, and where a base workman, (above all, if
he had modelled the thing in clay first,) would have lost himself in
laborious imitation of hair, the Greek has struck the tresses out with
angular incisions, deep driven, every one in appointed place and
deliberate curve, yet flowing so free under his noble hand that you
cannot alter, without harm, the bending of any single ridge, nor
contract, nor extend, a point of them. And if you will look back to
Plate IX. you will see the difference between this sharp incision, used
to express horse-hair, and the soft incision with intervening rounded
ridge, used to express the hair of Apollo Chrysocomes; and, beneath, the
obliquely ridged incision used to express the plumes of his swan; in
both these cases the handling being much more slow, because the
engraving is in metal; but the structural importance of incision, as the
means of effect, never lost sight of. Finally, here are two actual
examples of the work in marble of the two great schools of the world;
one, a little Fortune, standing tiptoe on the globe of the Earth, its
surface traced with lines in hexagons; not chaotic under Fortune's feet;
Greek, this, and by a trained workman;--dug up in the temple of Neptune
at Corfu;--and here, a Florentine portrait-marble, found in the recent
alterations, face downwards, under the pavement of St'a Maria
Novella;[133] both of them first-rate of their kind; and both of them,
while exquisitely finished at the telling points, showing, on all their
unregarded surfaces, the rough furrow of the fast-driven chisel, as
distinctly as the edge of a common paving-stone.
180. Let me suggest to you, in conclusion, one most interesting point of
mental expression in these necessary aspects of finely executed
sculpture. I have already again and again pressed on your attention the
beginning of the arts of men in the make and use of the ploughshare.
Read more carefully--you might indeed do well to learn at once by
heart,--the twenty-seven lines of the Fourth Pythian, which describe the
ploughing of Jason. There is nothing grander extant in human fancy, nor
set down in human words: but this great mythical expression of the
conquest of the earth-clay, and brute-force, by vital human energy, will
become yet more interesting to you when you reflect what enchantment has
been cut, on whiter clay, by the tracing of finer furrows;--what the
delicate and consummate arts of man have done by the ploughing of
marble, and granite, and iron. You will learn daily more and more, as
you advance in actual practice, how the primary manual art of engraving,
in the steadiness, clearness, and irrevocableness of it, is the best
art-discipline that can be given either to mind or hand;[134] you will
recognize one law of right, pronouncing itself in the well-resolved work
of every age; you will see the firmly traced and irrevocable incision
determining not only the forms, but, in great part, the moral temper, of
all vitally progressive art; you will trace the same principle and power
in the furrows which the oblique sun shows on the granite of his own
Egyptian city,--in the white scratch of the stylus through the colour on
a Greek vase--in the first delineation, on the wet wall, of the groups
of an Italian fresco; in the unerring and unalterable touch of the great
engraver of Nueremberg,--and in the deep driven and deep bitten ravines
of metal by which Turner closed, in embossed limits, the shadows of the
Liber Studiorum.
Learn, therefore, in its full extent, the force of the great Greek word,
[Greek: charasso];--and, give me pardon--if you think pardon needed,
that I ask you also to learn the full meaning of the English word
derived from it. Here, at the Ford of the Oxen of Jason, are other
furrows to be driven than these in the marble of Pentelicus. The
fruitfullest, or the fatallest of all ploughing is that by the thoughts
of your youth, on the white field of its imagination. For by these,
either down to the disturbed spirit, "[Greek: kekoptai kai charassetai
pedon];" or around the quiet spirit, and on all the laws of conduct that
hold it, as a fair vase its frankincense, are ordained the pure colours,
and engraved the just Characters, of AEonian life.
FOOTNOTES:
[126] Nothing is more wonderful, or more disgraceful among the forms of
ignorance engendered by modern vulgar occupations in pursuit of gain,
than the unconsciousness, now total, that fine art is essentially
Athletic. I received a letter from Birmingham, some little time since,
inviting me to see how much, in glass manufacture, "machinery excelled
rude hand work." The writer had not the remotest conception that he
might as well have asked me to come and see a mechanical boat-race rowed
by automata, and "how much machinery excelled rude arm-work."
[127] Such as the sculptureless arch of Waterloo Bridge, for instance,
referred to in the Third Lecture, Sec. 84.
[128] It is strange, at this day, to think of the relation of the
Athenian Ceramicus to the French Tile-fields, Tileries, or Tuileries;
and how these last may yet become--have already partly become--"the
Potter's field," blood-bought (December, 1870.)
[129] This relief is now among the other casts which I have placed in
the lower school in the University galleries.
[130] The reference is to a cast from a small and low relief of
Florentine work in the Kensington Museum.
[131] The actual bas-relief is on a coin, and the projection not above
the twentieth of an inch, but I magnified it in photograph, for this
Lecture, so as to represent a relief with about the third of an inch for
maximum projection.
[132] This plate has been executed from a drawing by Mr. Burgess, in
which he has followed the curves of incision with exquisite care, and
preserved the effect of the surface of the stone, where a photograph
would have lost it by exaggerating accidental stains.
[133] These two marbles will always, henceforward, be sufficiently
accessible for reference in my room at Corpus Christi College.