"It was resolved," said the morning paper, "to colour the borders of the
panels and other spaces of Portland stone with arabesques and other
patterns, but that no paint should be used, as paint would need renewing
from time to time. The colours, therefore,"--and here is the passage to
be noted--"are all mixed with wax liquefied with petroleum; and the wax
surface sets as hard as marble. . . The wax is left time to form an
imperishable surface of ornament, which would have to be cut out of the
stone with a chisel if it was desired to remove it." Not, apparently,
that a new surface is formed which, by much violence and perseverance,
could, years hence, be chipped off again; but that the "ornament" is
driven in and incorporate, burnt in and absorbed, so that there is
nothing possible to cut away by any industry. In this humorous form of
ornament we are beforehand with Posterity. Posterity is baffled.
Will this victory over our sons' sons be the last resolute tyranny
prepared by one age for the coercion, constraint, and defeat of the
future? To impose that compulsion has been hitherto one of the strongest
of human desires. It is one, doubtless, to be outgrown by the human
race; but how slowly that growth creeps onwards, let this success in the
stencilling of St Paul's teach us, to our confusion. There is evidently
a man--a group of men--happy at this moment because it has been possible,
by great ingenuity, to force our posterity to have their cupola of St
Paul's with the stone mouldings stencilled and "picked out" with niggling
colours, whether that undefended posterity like it or not. And this is a
survival of one of the obscure pleasures of man, attested by history.
It is impossible to read the Thirty-nine Articles, for example, and not
to recognize in those acts of final, all-resolute, eager, eternal
legislation one of the strongest of all recorded proofs of this former
human wish. If Galileo's Inquisitors put a check upon the earth, which
yet moved, a far bolder enterprise was the Reformers' who arrested the
moving man, and inhibited the moving God. The sixteenth century and a
certain part of the age immediately following seem to be times when the
desire had conspicuously become a passion. Say the middle of the
sixteenth century in Italy and the beginning of the seventeenth in
England--for in those days we were somewhat in the rear. _There_ is the
obstinate, confident, unreluctant, undoubting, and resolved seizure upon
power. _Then_ was Rome rebuilt, re-faced, marked with a single sign and
style. Then was many a human hand stretched forth to grasp the fate of
the unborn. The fortunes and the thoughts of the day to come were to be
as the day then present would have them, if the dead hand--the living
hand that was then to die, and was to keep its hold in death--could by
any means make them fast.
Obviously, to build at all is to impose something upon an age that may be
more than willing to build for itself. The day may soon come when no man
will do even so much without some impulse of apology. Posterity is not
compelled to keep our pictures or our books in existence, nor to read nor
to look at them; but it is more or less obliged to have a stone building
in view for an age or two. We can hardly avoid some of the forms of
tyranny over the future, but few, few are the living men who would
consent to share in this horrible ingenuity at St Paul's--this petroleum
and this wax.
In 1842 they were discussing the decoration of the Houses of Parliament,
and the efforts of all in council were directed upon the future. How the
frescoes then to be achieved by the artists of the day should be made
secure against all mischances--smoke, damp, "the risk of bulging," even
accidents attending the washing of upper floors--all was discussed in
confidence with the public. It was impossible for anyone who read the
papers then to escape from some at least of the responsibilities of
technical knowledge. From Genoa, from Rome, from Munich especially, all
kinds of expert and most deliberate schemes were gathered in order to
defeat the natural and not superfluous operation of efficient and
effacing time.
The academic little capital of Bavaria had, at about the same date,
decorated a vast quantity of wall space of more than one order of
architecture. Art revived and was encouraged at that time and place with
unparalleled obstinacy. They had not the malice of the petroleum that
does violence to St Paul's; but they had instead an indomitable patience.
Under the commands of the master Cornelius, they baffled time and all his
work--refused his pardons, his absolutions, his cancelling indulgences--by
a perseverance that nothing could discourage. Who has not known somewhat
indifferent painters mighty busy about their colours and varnishes?
Cornelius caused a pit to be dug for the preparation of the lime, and in
the case of the Ludwig Kirche this lime remained there for eight years,
with frequent stirrings. This was in order that the whole fresco, when
at last it was entrusted to its bed, should be set there for immortality.
Nor did the master fail to thwart time by those mechanical means that
should avert the risk of bulging already mentioned. He neglected no
detail. He was provident, and he lay in wait for more than one of the
laws of nature, to frustrate them. Gravitation found him prepared, and
so did the less majestic but not vain dispensation of accidents. Against
bulging he had an underplot of tiles set on end; against possible
trickling from an upper floor he had asphalt; it was all part of the
human conspiracy. In effect, the dull pictures at Munich seem to stand
well. It would have been more just--so the present age thinks of these
preserved walls--if the day that admired them had had them exclusively,
and our day had been exempt. The painted cathedrals of the Middle Ages
have undergone the natural correction; why not the Ludwig Kirche?
In 1842, then, the nations were standing, as it were, shoulder to
shoulder against the walk of time and against his gentle act and art.
They had just called iron into their cabal. Cornelius came from Munich
to London, looked at the walls at Westminster, and put a heart of
confidence into the breast of the Commission. The situation, he averred,
need not be too damp for immortality, with due care. What he had done in
the Glyptothek and in the Pinacothek might be done with the best results
in England, in defiance of the weather, of the river, of the mere days,
of the divine order of alteration, and, in a word, of heaven and earth.
Meanwhile, there was that good servant of the law of change, lime that
had not been kept quite long enough, ready to fulfil its mission; they
would have none of it. They evaded it, studied its ways, and put it to
the rout. "Many failures that might have been hastily attributed to damp
were really owing to the use of lime in too fresh a state. Of the
experimental works painted at Munich, those only have faded which are
known to have been done without due attention to the materials. _Thus,
a figure of Bavaria, painted by Kaulbach, which has faded considerably,
is known to have been executed with lime that was too fresh_." One
cannot refrain from italics: the way was so easy; it was only to take a
little less of this important care about the lime, to have a better
confidence, to be more impatient and eager, and all had been well:
_not_ to do--a virtue of omission.
This is not a matter of art-criticism. It is an ethical question
hitherto unstudied. The makers of laws have not always been obliged to
face it, inasmuch as their laws are made in part for the present, and in
part for that future whereof the present needs to be assured--that is,
the future is bound as a guaranty for present security of person or
property. Some such hold upon the time to come we are obliged to claim,
and to claim it for our own sakes--because of the reflex effect upon our
own affairs, and not for the pleasure of fettering the time to come.
Every maker of a will does at least this.
Were the men of the sixteenth century so moderate? Not they. They found
the present all too narrow for the imposition of their will. It did not
satisfy them to disinter and scatter the bones of the dead, nor to efface
the records of a past that offended them. It did not satisfy them to
bind the present to obedience by imperative menace and instant
compulsion. When they had burnt libraries and thrown down monuments and
pursued the rebels of the past into the other world, and had seen to it
that none living should evade them, then they outraged the future.
Whatever misgivings may have visited those dominant minds as to the
effectual and final success of their measures--would their writ run in
time as well as place, and were the nameless populations indeed their
subjects?--whatever questions may have peered in upon those rigid
counsels and upon those busy vigils of the keepers of the world, they
silenced by legislation and yet more legislation. They wrote in statute
books; they would have written their will across the skies. Their hearts
would have burnt for lack of records more inveterate, and of testimonials
that mankind should lack courage to question, if in truth they did ever
doubt lest posterity might try their lock. Perhaps they did never so
much as foresee the race of the unnumbered and emancipated for whom their
prohibitions and penalties are no more than documents of history.
If the tyrannous day of our fathers had but possessed the means of these
our more diffident times! They, who would have written their present and
actual will upon the skies, might certainly have written it in petroleum
and wax upon the stone. Fate did them wrong in withholding from their
hands this means of finality and violence. Into our hands it has been
given at a time when the student of the race thought, perhaps, that we
had been proved in the school of forbearance. Something, indeed, we may
have learnt therein, but not enough, as we now find.
We have not yet the natural respect for the certain knowledge and the
probable wisdom of our successors. A certain reverend official document,
not guiltless of some confusion of thought, lately recommended to the
veneration of the present times "those past ages with their store of
experience." Doubtless, as the posterity of their predecessors our
predecessors had experience, but, as our ancestors, none--none.
Therefore, if they were a little reverend our own posterity is right
reverend. It is a flippant and novelty-loving humour that so flatters
the unproved past and refuses the deference due to the burden of years
which is ours, which--grown still graver--will be our children's.