OF VULGARITY.
§ 1. Two great errors, coloring, or rather discoloring, severally, the
minds of the higher and lower classes, have sown wide dissension, and
wider misfortune, through the society of modern days. These errors are
in our modes of interpreting the word "gentleman."
Its primal, literal, and perpetual meaning is "a man of pure race;" well
bred, in the sense that a horse or dog is well bred.
The so-called higher classes, being generally of purer race than the
lower, have retained the true idea, and the convictions associated with
it; but are afraid to speak it out, and equivocate about it in public;
this equivocation mainly proceeding from their desire to connect another
meaning with it, and a false one;--that of "a man living in idleness on
other people's labor;"--with which idea, the term has nothing whatever
to do.
The lower classes, denying vigorously, and with reason, the notion that
a gentleman means an idler, and rightly feeling that the more any one
works, the more of a gentleman he becomes, and is likely to
become,--have nevertheless got little of the good they otherwise might,
from the truth, because, with it, they wanted to hold a
falsehood,--namely, that race was of no consequence. It being precisely
of as much consequence in man as it is in any other animal.
§ 2. The nation cannot truly prosper till both these errors are finally
got quit of. Gentlemen have to learn that it is no part of their duty or
privilege to live on other people's toil. They have to learn that there
is no degradation in the hardest manual, or the humblest servile, labor,
when it is honest. But that there _is_ degradation, and that deep, in
extravagance, in bribery, in indolence, in pride, in taking places they
are not fit for, or in coining places for which there is no need. It
does not disgrace a gentleman to become an errand boy, or a day
laborer; but it disgraces him much to become a knave, or a thief. And
knavery is not the less knavery because it involves large interests, nor
theft the less theft because it is countenanced by usage, or accompanied
by failure in undertaken duty. It is an incomparably less guilty form of
robbery to cut a purse out of a man's pocket, than to take it out of his
hand on the understanding that you are to steer his ship up channel,
when you do not know the soundings.
§ 3. On the other hand, the lower orders, and all orders, have to learn
that every vicious habit and chronic disease communicates itself by
descent; and that by purity of birth the entire system of the human body
and soul may be gradually elevated, or by recklessness of birth,
degraded; until there shall be as much difference between the well-bred
and ill-bred human creature (whatever pains be taken with their
education) as between a wolf-hound and the vilest mongrel cur. And the
knowledge of this great fact ought to regulate the education of our
youth, and the entire conduct of the nation.[1]
§ 4. Gentlemanliness, however, in ordinary parlance, must be taken to
signify those qualities which are usually the evidence of high breeding,
and which, so far as they can be acquired, it should be every man's
effort to acquire; or, if he has them by nature, to preserve and exalt.
Vulgarity, on the other hand, will signify qualities usually
characteristic of ill-breeding, which, according to his power, it
becomes every person's duty to subdue. We have briefly to note what
these are.
§ 5. A gentleman's first characteristic is that fineness of structure in
the body, which renders it capable of the most delicate sensation; and
of structure in the mind which renders it capable of the most delicate
sympathies--one may say, simply, "fineness of nature." This is, of
course, compatible with heroic bodily strength and mental firmness; in
fact, heroic strength is not conceivable without such delicacy.
Elephantine strength may drive its way through a forest and feel no
touch of the boughs; but the white skin of Homer's Atrides would have
felt a bent rose-leaf, yet subdue its feeling in glow of battle, and
behave itself like iron. I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar
animal; but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his
non-vulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine
nature; not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot; but in the
way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his
sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique
on points of honor.
§ 6. And, though rightness of moral conduct is ultimately the great
purifier of race, the sign of nobleness is not in this rightness of
moral conduct, but in sensitiveness. When the make of the creature is
fine, its temptations are strong, as well as its perceptions; it is
liable to all kinds of impressions from without in their most violent
form; liable therefore to be abused and hurt by all kinds of rough
things which would do a coarser creature little harm, and thus to fall
into frightful wrong if its fate will have it so. Thus David, coming of
gentlest as well as royalest race, of Ruth as well as of Judah, is
sensitiveness through all flesh and spirit; not that his compassion will
restrain him from murder when his terror urges him to it; nay, he is
driven to the murder all the more by his sensitiveness to the shame
which otherwise threatens him. But when his own story is told him under
a disguise, though only a lamb is now concerned, his passion about it
leaves him no time for thought. "The man shall die"--note the
reason--"because he had no pity." He is so eager and indignant that it
never occurs to him as strange that Nathan hides the name. This is true
gentleman. A vulgar man would assuredly have been cautious, and asked
"who it was?"
§ 7. Hence it will follow that one of the probable signs of
high-breeding in men generally, will be their kindness and mercifulness;
these always indicating more or less fineness of make in the mind; and
miserliness and cruelty the contrary; hence that of Isaiah: "The vile
person shall no more be called liberal, nor the churl said to be
bountiful." But a thousand things may prevent this kindness from
displaying or continuing itself; the mind of the man may be warped so as
to bear mainly on his own interests, and then all his sensibilities will
take the form of pride, or fastidiousness, or revengefulness; and other
wicked, but not ungentlemanly tempers; or, farther, they may run into
utter sensuality and covetousness, if he is bent on pleasure,
accompanied with quite infinite cruelty when the pride is wounded, or
the passions thwarted;--until your gentleman becomes Ezzelin, and your
lady, the deadly Lucrece; yet still gentleman and lady, quite incapable
of making anything else of themselves, being so born.
§ 8. A truer sign of breeding than mere kindness is therefore sympathy;
a vulgar man may often be kind in a hard way, on principle, and because
he thinks he ought to be; whereas, a highly-bred man, even when cruel,
will be cruel in a softer way, understanding and feeling what he
inflicts, and pitying his victim. Only we must carefully remember that
the quantity of sympathy a gentleman feels can never be judged of by its
outward expression, for another of his chief characteristics is apparent
reserve. I say "apparent" reserve; for the sympathy is real, but the
reserve not: a perfect gentleman is never reserved, but sweetly and
entirely open, so far as it is good for others, or possible, that he
should be. In a great many respects it is impossible that he should be
open except to men of his own kind. To them, he can open himself, by a
word, or syllable, or a glance; but to men not of his kind he cannot
open himself, though he tried it through an eternity of clear
grammatical speech. By the very acuteness of his sympathy he knows how
much of himself he can give to anybody; and he gives that much
frankly;--would always be glad to give more if he could, but is obliged,
nevertheless, in his general intercourse with the world, to be a
somewhat silent person; silence is to most people, he finds, less
reserved than speech. Whatever he said, a vulgar man would misinterpret:
no words that he could use would bear the same sense to the vulgar man
that they do to him; if he used any, the vulgar man would go away
saying, "He had said so and so, and meant so and so" (something
assuredly he never meant); but he keeps silence, and the vulgar man goes
away saying, "He didn't know what to make of him." Which is precisely
the fact, and the only fact which he is anywise able to announce to the
vulgar man concerning himself.
§ 9. There is yet another quite as efficient cause of the apparent
reserve of a gentleman. His sensibility being constant and intelligent,
it will be seldom that a feeling touches him, however acutely, but it
has touched him in the same way often before, and in some sort is
touching him always. It is not that he feels little, but that he feels
habitually; a vulgar man having some heart at the bottom of him, if you
can by talk or by sight fairly force the pathos of anything down to his
heart, will be excited about it and demonstrative; the sensation of pity
being strange to him, and wonderful. But your gentleman has walked in
pity all day long; the tears have never been out of his eyes: you
thought the eyes were bright only; but they were wet. You tell him a
sorrowful story, and his countenance does not change; the eyes can but
be wet still; he does not speak neither, there being, in fact, nothing
to be said, only something to be done; some vulgar person, beside you
both, goes away saying, "How hard he is!" Next day he hears that the
hard person has put good end to the sorrow he said nothing about;--and
then he changes his wonder, and exclaims, "How reserved he is!"
§ 10. Self-command is often thought a characteristic of high-breeding:
and to a certain extent it is so, at least it is one of the means of
forming and strengthening character; but it is rather a way of imitating
a gentleman than a characteristic of him; a true gentleman has no need
of self-command; he simply feels rightly on all occasions: and desiring
to express only so much of his feeling as it is right to express, does
not need to command himself. Hence perfect ease is indeed characteristic
of him; but perfect ease is inconsistent with self-restraint.
Nevertheless gentlemen, so far as they fail of their own ideal, need to
command themselves, and do so; while, on the contrary, to feel unwisely,
and to be unable to restrain the expression of the unwise feeling, is
vulgarity; and yet even then, the vulgarity, at its root, is not in the
mistimed expression, but in the unseemly feeling; and when we find fault
with a vulgar person for "exposing himself," it is not his openness, but
clumsiness; and yet more the want of sensibility to his own failure,
which we blame; so that still the vulgarity resolves itself into want of
sensibility. Also, it is to be noted that great powers of self-restraint
may be attained by very vulgar persons, when it suits their purposes.
§ 11. Closely, but strangely, connected with this openness is that form
of truthfulness which is opposed to cunning, yet not opposed to falsity
absolute. And herein is a distinction of great importance.
Cunning signifies especially a habit or gift of over-reaching,
accompanied with enjoyment and a sense of superiority. It is associated
with small and dull conceit, and with an absolute want of sympathy or
affection. Its essential connection with vulgarity may be at once
exemplified by the expression of the butcher's dog in Landseer's "Low
Life." Cruikshank's "Noah Claypole," in the illustrations to Oliver
Twist, in the interview with the Jew, is, however, still more
characteristic. It is the intensest rendering of vulgarity absolute and
utter with which I am acquainted.[2]
The truthfulness which is opposed to cunning ought, perhaps, rather to
be called the desire of truthfulness; it consists more in unwillingness
to deceive than in not deceiving,--an unwillingness implying sympathy
with and respect for the person deceived; and a fond observance of truth
up to the possible point, as in a good soldier's mode of retaining his
honor through a _ruse-de-guerre_. A cunning person seeks for
opportunities to deceive; a gentleman shuns them. A cunning person
triumphs in deceiving; a gentleman is humiliated by his success, or at
least by so much of the success as is dependent merely on the falsehood,
and not on his intellectual superiority.
§ 12. The absolute disdain of all lying belongs rather to Christian
chivalry than to mere high breeding; as connected merely with this
latter, and with general refinement and courage, the exact relations of
truthfulness may be best studied in the well-trained Greek mind. The
Greeks believed that mercy and truth were co-relative virtues--cruelty
and falsehood co-relative vices. But they did not call necessary
severity, cruelty; nor necessary deception, falsehood. It was needful
sometimes to slay men, and sometimes to deceive them. When this had to
be done, it should be done well and thoroughly; so that to direct a
spear well to its mark, or a lie well to its end, was equally the
accomplishment of a perfect gentleman. Hence, in the pretty
diamond-cut-diamond scene between Pallas and Ulysses, when she receives
him on the coast of Ithaca, the goddess laughs delightedly at her hero's
good lying, and gives him her hand upon it; showing herself then in her
woman's form, as just a little more than his match. "Subtle would he be,
and stealthy, who should go beyond thee in deceit, even were he a god,
thou many-witted! What! here in thine own land, too, wilt thou not cease
from cheating? Knowest thou not me, Pallas Athena, maid of Jove, who am
with thee in all thy labors, and gave thee favor with the Phæacians, and
keep thee, and have come now to weave cunning with thee?" But how
completely this kind of cunning was looked upon as a part of a man's
power, and not as a diminution of faithfulness, is perhaps best shown by
the single line of praise in which the high qualities of his servant are
summed up by Chremulus in the Plutus--"Of all my house servants, I hold
you to be the faithfullest, and the greatest cheat (or thief)."
§ 13. Thus, the primal difference between honorable and base lying in
the Greek mind lay in honorable purpose. A man who used his strength
wantonly to hurt others was a monster; so, also, a man who used his
cunning wantonly to hurt others. Strength and cunning were to be used
only in self-defence, or to save the weak, and then were alike
admirable. This was their first idea. Then the second, and perhaps the
more essential, difference between noble and ignoble lying in the Greek
mind, was that the honorable lie--or, if we may use the strange, yet
just, expression, the true lie--knew and confessed itself for such--was
ready to take the full responsibility of what it did. As the sword
answered for its blow, so the lie for its snare. But what the Greeks
hated with all their heart was the false lie; the lie that did not know
itself, feared to confess itself, which slunk to its aim under a cloak
of truth, and sought to do liars' work, and yet not take liars' pay,
excusing itself to the conscience by quibble and quirk. Hence the great
expression of Jesuit principle by Euripides, "The tongue has sworn, but
not the heart," was a subject of execration throughout Greece, and the
satirists exhausted their arrows on it--no audience was ever tired
hearing ([Greek: to Euripideion ekeino]) "that Euripidean thing" brought
to shame.
§ 14. And this is especially to be insisted on in the early education of
young people. It should be pointed out to them with continual
earnestness that the essence of lying is in deception, not in words; a
lie may be told by silence, by equivocation, by the accent on a
syllable, by a glance of the eye attaching a peculiar significance to a
sentence; and all these kinds of lies are worse and baser by many
degrees than a lie plainly worded; so that no form of blinded conscience
is so far sunk as that which comforts itself for having deceived,
because the deception was by gesture or silence, instead of utterance;
and, finally, according to Tennyson's deep and trenchant line, "A lie
which is half a truth is ever the worst of lies."
§ 15. Although, however, ungenerous cunning is usually so distinct an
outward manifestation of vulgarity, that I name it separately from
insensibility, it is in truth only an effect of insensibility, producing
want of affection to others, and blindness to the beauty of truth. The
degree in which political subtlety in men such as Richelieu, Machiavel,
or Metternich, will efface the gentleman, depends on the selfishness of
political purpose to which the cunning is directed, and on the base
delight taken in its use. The command, "Be ye wise as serpents, harmless
as doves," is the ultimate expression of this principle, misunderstood
usually because the word "wise" is referred to the intellectual power
instead of the subtlety of the serpent. The serpent has very little
intellectual power, but according to that which it has, it is yet, as of
old, the subtlest of the beasts of the field.
§ 16. Another great sign of vulgarity is also, when traced to its root,
another phase of insensibility, namely, the undue regard to appearances
and manners, as in the households of vulgar persons, of all stations,
and the assumption of behavior, language, or dress unsuited to them, by
persons in inferior stations of life. I say "undue" regard to
appearances, because in the undueness consists, of course, the
vulgarity. It is due and wise in some sort to care for appearances, in
another sort undue and unwise. Wherein lies the difference?
At first one is apt to answer quickly: the vulgarity is simply in
pretending to be what you are not. But that answer will not stand. A
queen may dress like a waiting maid,--perhaps succeed, if she chooses,
in passing for one; but she will not, therefore, be vulgar; nay, a
waiting maid may dress like a queen, and pretend to be one, and yet need
not be vulgar, unless there is inherent vulgarity in her. In Scribe's
very absurd but very amusing _Reine d'un jour_, a milliner's girl
sustains the part of a queen for a day. She several times amazes and
disgusts her courtiers by her straightforwardness; and once or twice
very nearly betrays herself to her maids of honor by an unqueenly
knowledge of sewing; but she is not in the least vulgar, for she is
sensitive, simple, and generous, and a queen could be no more.
§ 17. Is the vulgarity, then, only in trying to play a part you cannot
play, so as to be continually detected? No; a bad amateur actor may be
continually detected in his part, but yet continually detected to be a
gentleman: a vulgar regard to appearances has nothing in it necessarily
of hypocrisy. You shall know a man not to be a gentleman by the perfect
and neat pronunciation of his words: but he does not pretend to
pronounce accurately; he _does_ pronounce accurately, the vulgarity is
in the real (not assumed) scrupulousness.
§ 18. It will be found on farther thought, that a vulgar regard for
appearances is, primarily, a selfish one, resulting, not out of a wish,
to give pleasure (as a wife's wish to make herself beautiful for her
husband), but out of an endeavor to mortify others, or attract for
pride's sake;--the common "keeping up appearances" of society, being a
mere selfish struggle of the vain with the vain. But the deepest stain
of the vulgarity depends on this being done, not selfishly only, but
stupidly, without understanding the impression which is really produced,
nor the relations of importance between oneself and others, so as to
suppose that their attention is fixed upon us, when we are in reality
ciphers in their eyes--all which comes of insensibility. Hence pride
simple is not vulgar (the looking down on others because of their true
inferiority to us), nor vanity simple (the desire of praise), but
conceit simple (the attribution to ourselves of qualities we have not),
is always so. In cases of over-studied pronunciation, &c., there is
insensibility, first, in the person's thinking more of himself than of
what he is saying; and, secondly, in his not having musical fineness of
ear enough to feel that his talking is uneasy and strained.
§ 19. Finally, vulgarity is indicated by coarseness of language or
manners, only so far as this coarseness has been contracted under
circumstances not necessarily producing it. The illiterateness of a
Spanish or Calabrian peasant is not vulgar, because they had never an
opportunity of acquiring letters; but the illiterateness of an English
school-boy is. So again, provincial dialect is not vulgar; but cockney
dialect, the corruption, by blunted sense, of a finer language
continually heard, is so in a deep degree; and again, of this corrupted
dialect, that is the worst which consists, not in the direct or
expressive alteration of the form of a word, but in an unmusical
destruction of it by dead utterance and bad or swollen formation of lip.
There is no vulgarity in--
"Blythe, blythe, blythe was she,
Blythe was she, but and ben,
And weel she liked a Hawick gill,
And leugh to see a tappit hen;"
but much in Mrs. Gamp's inarticulate "bottle on the chumley-piece, and
let me put my lips to it when I am so dispoged."
§ 20. So also of personal defects, those only are vulgar which imply
insensibility or dissipation.
There is no vulgarity in the emaciation of Don Quixote, the deformity of
the Black Dwarf, or the corpulence of Falstaff; but much in the same
personal characters, as they are seen in Uriah Heep, Quilp, and
Chadband.
§ 21. One of the most curious minor questions in this matter is
respecting the vulgarity of excessive neatness, complicating itself with
inquiries into the distinction between base neatness, and the
perfectness of good execution in the fine arts. It will be found on
final thought that precision and exquisiteness of arrangement are always
noble; but become vulgar only when they arise from an equality
(insensibility) of temperament, which is incapable of fine passion, and
is set ignobly, and with a dullard mechanism, on accuracy in vile
things. In the finest Greek coins, the letters of the inscriptions are
purposely coarse and rude, while the relievi are wrought with
inestimable care. But in an English coin, the letters are the best done,
and the whole is unredeemably vulgar. In a picture of Titian's, an
inserted inscription will be complete in the lettering, as all the rest
is; because it costs Titian very little more trouble to draw rightly
than wrongly, and in him, therefore, impatience with the letters would
be vulgar, as in the Greek sculptor of the coin, patience would have
been. For the engraving of a letter accurately[3] is difficult work,
and his time must have been unworthily thrown away.
§ 22. All the different impressions connected with negligence or
foulness depend, in like manner, on the degree of insensibility implied.
Disorder in a drawing-room is vulgar, in an antiquary's study, not; the
black battle-stain on a soldier's face is not vulgar, but the dirty face
of a housemaid is.
And lastly, courage, so far as it is a sign of race, is peculiarly the
mark of a gentleman or a lady: but it becomes vulgar if rude or
insensitive, while timidity is not vulgar, if it be a characteristic of
race or fineness of make. A fawn is not vulgar in being timid, nor a
crocodile "gentle" because courageous.
§ 23. Without following the inquiry into farther detail,[4] we may
conclude that vulgarity consists in a deadness of the heart and body,
resulting from prolonged, and especially from inherited conditions of
"degeneracy," or literally "un-racing;"--gentlemanliness, being another
word for an intense humanity. And vulgarity shows itself primarily in
dulness of heart, not in rage or cruelty, but in inability to feel or
conceive noble character or emotion. This is its essential, pure, and
most fatal form. Dulness of bodily sense and general stupidity, with
such forms of crime as peculiarly issue from stupidity, are its material
manifestation.
§ 24. Two years ago, when I was first beginning to work out the subject,
and chatting with one of my keenest-minded friends (Mr. Brett, the
painter of the Val d'Aosta in the Exhibition of 1859), I casually asked
him, "What is vulgarity?" merely to see what he would say, not supposing
it possible to get a sudden answer. He thought for about a minute, then
answered quietly, "It is merely one of the forms of Death." I did not
see the meaning of the reply at the time; but on testing it, found that
it met every phase of the difficulties connected with the inquiry, and
summed the true conclusion. Yet, in order to be complete, it ought to be
made a distinctive as well as conclusive definition; showing _what_
form of death vulgarity is; for death itself is not vulgar, but only
death mingled with life. I cannot, however, construct a short-worded
definition which will include all the minor conditions of bodily
degeneracy; but the term "deathful selfishness" will embrace all the
most fatal and essential forms of mental vulgarity.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] We ought always in pure English to use the term "good breeding"
literally; and to say "good nurture" for what we usually mean by good
breeding. Given the race and make of the animal, you may turn it to
good or bad account; you may spoil your good dog or colt, and make
him as vicious as you choose, or break his back at once by ill-usage;
and you may, on the other hand, make something serviceable and
respectable out of your poor cur or colt if you educate them
carefully; but ill bred they will both of them be to their lives'
end; and the best you will ever be able to say of them is, that they
are useful, and decently behaved ill-bred creatures. An error, which
is associated with the truth, and which makes it always look weak and
disputable, is the confusion of race with name; and the supposition
that the blood of a family must still be good, if its genealogy be
unbroken and its name not lost, though sire and son have been
indulging age after age in habits involving perpetual degeneracy of
race. Of course it is equally an error to suppose that, because a
man's name is common, his blood must be base; since his family may
have been ennobling it by pureness of moral habit for many
generations, and yet may not have got any title, or other sign of
nobleness attached to their names. Nevertheless, the probability is
always in favor of the race which has had acknowledged supremacy, and
in which every motive leads to the endeavor to preserve their true
nobility.
[2] Among the reckless losses of the right service of intellectual
power with which this century must be charged, very few are, to my
mind, more to be regretted than that which is involved in its having
turned to no higher purpose than the illustration of the career of
Jack Sheppard, and of the Irish Rebellion, the great, grave (I use
the words deliberately and with large meaning), and singular genius
of Cruikshank.
[3] There is this farther reason also: "Letters are always ugly
things"--(Seven Lamps, chap. iv. s. 9). Titian often wanted a certain
quantity of ugliness to oppose his beauty with, as a certain quantity
of black to oppose his color. He could regulate the size and quantity
of inscription as he liked; and, therefore, made it as neat--that is,
as effectively ugly--as possible. But the Greek sculptor could not
regulate either size or quantity of inscription. Legible it must be,
to common eyes, and contain an assigned group of words. He had more
ugliness than he wanted, or could endure. There was nothing for it
but to make the letters themselves rugged and picturesque; to give
them--that is, a certain quantity of organic variety.
I do not wonder at people sometimes thinking I contradict myself when
they come suddenly on any of the scattered passages, in which I am
forced to insist on the opposite practical applications of subtle
principles of this kind. It may amuse the reader, and be finally
serviceable to him in showing him how necessary it is to the right
handling of any subject, that these contrary statements should be
made, if I assemble here the principal ones I remember having brought
forward, bearing on this difficult point of precision in execution.
It would be well if you would first glance over the chapter on Finish
in the third volume; and if, coming to the fourth paragraph, about
gentlemen's carriages, you have time to turn to Sydney Smith's
Memoirs and read his account of the construction of the "Immortal,"
it will furnish you with an interesting illustration.
The general conclusion reached in that chapter being that finish, for
the sake of added truth, or utility, or beauty, is noble; but finish,
for the sake of workmanship, neatness, or polish, ignoble,--turn to
the fourth chapter of the Seven Lamps, where you will find the
Campanile of Giotto given as the model and mirror of perfect
architecture, just on account of its exquisite completion. Also, in
the next chapter, I expressly limit the delightfulness of rough and
imperfect work to developing and unformed schools (pp. 142-3, 1st
edition); then turn to the 170th page of the Stones of Venice, Vol.
III., and you will find this directly contrary statement:--
"No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection
is always a sign of the misunderstanding of the end of art." ... "The
first cause of the fall of the arts in Europe was a relentless
requirement of perfection" (p. 172). By reading the intermediate
text, you will be put in possession of many good reasons for this
opinion; and, comparing it with that just cited about the Campanile
of Giotto, will be brought, I hope, into a wholesome state of not
knowing what to think.
Then turn to p. 167, where the great law of finish is again
maintained as strongly as ever: "Perfect finish (finish, that is to
say, up to the point possible) is always desirable from the greatest
masters, and is always given by them."--§ 19.
And, lastly, if you look to § 19 of the chapter on the Early
Renaissance, you will find the profoundest respect paid to
completion; and, at the close of that chapter, § 38, the principle is
resumed very strongly. "As _ideals of executive perfection_, these
palaces are most notable among the architecture of Europe, and the
Rio façade of the Ducal palace, as an example of finished masonry in
a vast building, is one of the finest things, not only in Venice, but
in the world."
Now all these passages are perfectly true; and, as in much more
serious matters, the essential thing for the reader is to receive
their truth, however little he may be able to see their consistency.
If truths of apparent contrary character are candidly and rightly
received, they will fit themselves together in the mind without any
trouble. But no truth maliciously received will nourish you, or fit
with others. The clue of connection may in this case, however, be
given in a word. Absolute finish is always right; finish,
inconsistent with prudence and passion, wrong. The imperative demand
for finish is ruinous, because it refuses better things than finish.
The stopping short of the finish, which is honorably possible to
human energy, is destructive on the other side, and not in less
degree. Err, of the two, on the side of completion.
[4] In general illustration of the subject, the following extract
from my private diary possesses some interest. It refers to two
portraits which happened to be placed opposite to each other in the
arrangement of a gallery; one, modern, of a (foreign) general on
horseback at a review; the other, by Vandyck, also an equestrian
portrait, of an ancestor of his family, whom I shall here simply call
the "knight:"
"I have seldom seen so noble a Vandyck, chiefly because it is painted
with less flightiness and flimsiness than usual, with a grand
quietness and reserve--almost like Titian. The other is, on the
contrary, as vulgar and base a picture as I have ever seen, and it
becomes a matter of extreme interest to trace the cause of the
difference.
"In the first place, everything the general and his horse wear is
evidently just made. It has not only been cleaned that morning, but
has been sent home from the tailor's in a hurry last night. Horse
bridle, saddle housings, blue coat, stars and lace thereupon, cocked
hat, and sword hilt--all look as if they had just been taken from a
shopboard in Pall Mall; the irresistible sense of the coat having
been brushed to perfection is the first sentiment which the picture
summons. The horse has also been rubbed down all the morning, and
shines from head to tail.
"The knight rides in a suit of rusty armor. It has evidently been
polished also carefully, and gleams brightly here and there; but all
the polishing in the world will never take the battle-dints and
battle-darkness out of it. His horse is gray, not lustrous, but a
dark, lurid gray. Its mane is deep and soft: part of it shaken in
front over its forehead--the rest, in enormous masses of waving gold,
six feet long, falls streaming on its neck, and rises in currents of
softest light, rippled by the wind, over the rider's armor. The
saddle cloth is of a dim red, fading into leathern brown, gleaming
with sparkles of obscure gold. When, after looking a little while at
the soft mane of the Vandyck horse, we turn back to the general's, we
are shocked by the evident coarseness of its hair, which hangs,
indeed, in long locks over the bridle, but is stiff, crude, sharp
pointed, coarsely colored (a kind of buff); no fine drawing of
nostril or neck can give any look of nobleness to the animal which
carries such hair; it looks like a hobby-horse with tow glued to it,
which riotous children have half pulled out or scratched out. The
next point of difference is the isolation of Vandyck's figure,
compared with the modern painter's endeavor to ennoble his by
subduing others. The knight seems to be just going out of his castle
gates; his horse rears as he passes their pillars; there is nothing
behind but the sky. But the general is reviewing a regiment; the
ensign lowers its colors to him; he takes off his hat in return. All
which reviewing and bowing is in its very nature ignoble, wholly
unfit to be painted: a gentleman might as well be painted leaving his
card on somebody. And, in the next place, the modern painter has
thought to enhance his officer by putting the regiment some distance
back, and in the shade, so that the men look only about five feet
high, being besides very ill painted to keep them in better
subordination. One does not know whether most to despise the
feebleness of the painter who must have recourse to such an artifice,
or his vulgarity in being satisfied with it. I ought, by the way,
before leaving the point of dress, to have noted that the vulgarity
of the painter is considerably assisted by the vulgarity of the
costume itself. Not only is it base in being new, but base in that it
cannot last to be old. If one wanted a lesson on the ugliness of
modern costume, it could not be more sharply received than by turning
from one to the other horseman. The knight wears steel plate armor,
chased here and there with gold; the delicate, rich, pointed lace
collar falling on the embossed breastplate; his dark hair flowing
over his shoulders; a crimson silk scarf fastened round his waist,
and floating behind him; buff boots, deep folded at the instep, set
in silver stirrup. The general wears his hair cropped short; blue
coat, padded and buttoned; blue trowsers and red stripe; black shiny
boots; common saddler's stirrups; cocked hat in hand, suggestive of
absurd completion, when assumed.
"Another thing noticeable as giving nobleness to the Vandyck is its
feminineness: the rich, light silken scarf, the flowing hair, the
delicate, sharp, though sunburnt features, and the lace collar, do
not in the least diminish the manliness, but _add_ feminineness. One
sees that the knight is indeed a soldier, but not a soldier only;
that he is accomplished in all ways, and tender in all thoughts:
while the general is represented as nothing but a soldier--and it is
very doubtful if he is even that--one is sure, at a glance, that if
he can do anything but put his hat off and on, and give words of
command, the anything must, at all events, have something to do with
the barracks; that there is no grace, nor music, nor softness, nor
learnedness, in the man's soul; that he is made up of forms and
accoutrements.
"Lastly, the modern picture is as bad painting as it is wretched
conceiving, and one is struck, in looking from it to Vandyck's,
peculiarly by the fact that good work is always _enjoyed_ work. There
is not a touch of Vandyck's pencil but he seems to have revelled
in--not grossly, but delicately--tasting the color in every touch as
an epicure would wine. While the other goes on daub, daub, daub, like
a bricklayer spreading mortar--nay, with far less lightness of hand
or lightness of spirit than a good bricklayer's--covering his canvas
heavily and conceitedly at once, caring only but to catch the public
eye with his coarse, presumptuous, ponderous, illiterate work."
Thus far my diary. In case it should be discovered by any one where
these pictures are, it should be noted that the vulgarity of the
modern one is wholly the painter's fault. It implies none in the
general (except bad taste in pictures). The same painter would have
made an equally vulgar portrait of Bayard. And as for taste in
pictures, the general's was not singular. I used to spend much time
before the Vandyck; and among all the tourist visitors to the
gallery, who were numerous, I never saw one look at it twice, but all
paused in respectful admiration before the padded surtout. The reader
will find, farther, many interesting and most valuable notes on the
subject of nobleness and vulgarity in Emerson's Essays, and every
phase of nobleness illustrated in Sir Kenelm Digby's "Broad Stone of
Honor." The best help I have ever had--so far as help depended on the
sympathy or praise of others in work which, year after year, it was
necessary to pursue through the abuse of the brutal and the base--was
given me, when this author, from whom I had first learned to love
nobleness, introduced frequent reference to my own writings in his
"Children's Bower."