fine and faithful, the fewer points of science he has in his head, the
better. But for purposes _more_ than graphic, in order that he may feel
towards things as he should, and choose them as _we_ should, he ought to
know something about them; and if he is quite sure that he can receive
the science of them without letting himself become uncandid and narrow
in observation, it is very desirable that he should be acquainted with a
little of the alphabet of structure,--just as much as may quicken and
certify his observation, without prejudicing it. Cautiously, therefore,
and receiving it as a perilous indulgence, he may venture to learn,
perhaps as much astronomy as may prevent his carelessly putting the new
moon wrong side upwards; and as much botany as will prevent him from
confusing, which I am sorry to say Turner did, too often, Scotch firs
with stone pines. He may concede so much to geology as to choose, of two
equally picturesque views, one that illustrates rather than conceals the
structure of a crag: and perhaps, once or twice in his life, a portrait
painter might advantageously observe how unlike a skull is to a face.
And for you, who are to use your drawing as one element in general
education, it is desirable that physical science should assist in the
attainment of truth which a real painter seizes by practice of eye.
134. For this purpose I shall appeal to your masters in science to
furnish us, as they have leisure, with some simple and readable accounts
of the structure of things which we have to draw continually. Such
scientific accounts will not usually much help us to draw them, but will
make the drawing, when done, far more valuable to us.
I have told you, for instance, that nobody--at least, no painter--can at
present explain the structure of a bubble. To know that structure will
not help you to draw sea-foam, but it will make you look at sea-foam
with greater interest.
I am not able now to watch the course of modern science, and may perhaps
be in error in thinking that the frame of a bubble is still unexplained.
But I have not yet met, by any chance, with an account of the forces
which, under concussion, arrange the particles of a fluid into a
globular film; though, from what I know of cohesion, gravity, and the
nature of the atmosphere, I can make some shift to guess at the kind of
action that takes place in forming a single bubble. But how one bubble
absorbs another without breaking it; or what exact methods of tension
prepare for the change of form, and establish it in an instant, I am
utterly at a loss to conceive.
Here, I think, then, is one familiar matter which up to the possible
point, science might condescendingly interpret for us. The exhaustion of
the film in preparation for its change: the determination of the smaller
bubble to yield itself up to the larger; the instantaneous flash into
the new shape, and the swift adjustment of the rectangular lines of
intersection in the marvellous vaulting--all this I want to be
explained to us, so that, if we cannot understand it altogether, we may
at least know exactly how far we do, and how far we do not.
135. And, next to the laws of the formation of a bubble, I want to see,
in simple statement, those of the formation of a bottle. Namely, the
laws of its resistance to fracture, from without and within, by
concussion or explosion; and the due relations of form to thickness of
material; so that, putting the problem in a constant form, we may know,
out of a given quantity of material, how to make the strongest bottle
under given limitations as to shape. For instance,--you have so much
glass given you: your bottle is to hold two pints, to be flat-bottomed,
and so narrow and long in the neck that you can grasp it with your hand.
What will be its best ultimate form?
136. Probably, if you thought it courteous, you would laugh at me just
now; and, at any rate, are thinking to yourselves that _this_ art
problem at least needs no scientific investigation, having been
practically solved, long ago, by the imperative human instinct for the
preservation of bottled stout. But you are only feeling now, gentlemen,
and recognizing in one instance, what I tell you of all. Every
scientific investigation is, in the same sense as this would be, useless
to the trained master of any art. To the soap-bubble blower, and
glass-blower,--to the pot-maker and bottle-maker,--if dexterous
craftsmen, your science is of no account; and the imp of their art may
be imagined as always looking triumphantly and contemptuously, out of
its successfully-produced bottle, on the vain analysis of centrifugal
impulse and inflating breath.
137. Nevertheless, in the present confusion of instinct and opinion as
to beautiful form, it is desirable to have these two questions more
accurately dealt with. For observe what they branch into. The coloured
segments of globe out of which foam is constituted, are portions of
spherical vaults constructed of fluent particles. You cannot have the
principles of spherical vaulting put in more abstract terms.
Then considering the arch as the section of a vault, the greater number
of Gothic arches may be regarded as the intersections of two spherical
vaults.
Simple Gothic foliation is merely the triple, quadruple, or variously
multiple repetition of such intersection.
And the beauty--(observe this carefully)--the beauty of Gothic arches,
and of their foliation, always involves reference to the strength of
their structure; but only to their structure as _self-sustaining; not as
sustaining superincumbent weight_. In the most literal of senses, "the
earth hath bubbles as the water hath; and these are of them."
138. What do you think made Michael Angelo look back to the dome of
Santa Maria del Fiore, saying, "Like thee I will not build one, better
than thee I cannot"? To you or to me there is nothing in that dome
different from hundreds of others. Which of you, who have been at
Florence, can tell me honestly he saw anything wonderful in it? But
Michael Angelo knew the exact proportion of thickness to weight and
curvature which enabled it to stand as securely as a mountain of
adamant, though it was only a film of clay, as frail, in proportion to
its bulk, as a sea shell. Over the massy war towers of the city it
floated; fragile, yet without fear. "Better than thee I cannot."
139. Then think what the investigation of the bottle branches into,
joined with that of its necessary companion, the cup. There is a sketch
for you of the cup of cups, the pure Greek κάνθαρος, which is always in
the hand of Dionusos, as the thunderbolt is in that of Zeus. Learn but
to draw that thoroughly, and you won't have much more to learn of
abstract form; for the investigation of the kinds of line that limit
this will lead you into all the practical geometry of nature; the
ellipses of her sea-bays in perspective; the parabolas of her waterfalls
and fountains in profile; the catenary curves of their falling festoons
in front; the infinite variety of accelerated or retarded curvature in
every condition of mountain debris. But do you think mere science can
measure for you any of these things? That book on the table is one of
the four volumes of Sir William Hamilton's "Greek Vases." He has
measured every important vase vertically and horizontally, with
precision altogether admirable, and which may, I hope, induce you to
have patience with me in the much less complex, though even more
scrupulous, measurements which I shall require on my own examples. Yet
English pottery remains precisely where it was, in spite of all this
investigation. Do you fancy a Greek workman ever made a vase by
measurement? He dashed it from his hand on the wheel, and it was
beautiful: and a Venetian glass-blower swept you a curve of crystal from
the end of his pipe; and Reynolds or Tintoret swept you a curve of
colour from their pencils, as a musician the cadence of a note,
unerring, and to be measured, if you please, afterwards, with the
exactitude of Divine law.
140. But, if the truth and beauty of art are thus beyond attainment by
help of science, how much more its invention? I must defer what I have
chiefly to say on this head till next lecture; but to-day I can
illustrate, simply, the position of invention with respect to science in
one very important group of inorganic forms--those of drapery.
141. If you throw at random over a rod a piece of drapery of any
material which will fall into graceful folds, you will get a series of
sinuous folds in catenary curves: and any given disposition of these
will be nearly as agreeable as any other; though, if you throw the stuff
on the rod a thousand times, it will not fall twice alike.
142. But suppose, instead of a straight rod, you take a beautiful nude
statue, and throw the piece of linen over that. You may encumber and
conceal its form altogether; you may entirely conceal portions of the
limbs, and show others; or you may leave indications, under the thin
veil, of the contours which are hidden; but in ninety-nine cases out of
a hundred you will wish the drapery taken off again; you will feel that
the folds are in some sort discrepant and harmful, and eagerly snatch
them away. However passive the material, however softly accommodated to
the limbs, the wrinklings will always look foreign to the form, like the
drip of a heavy shower of rain falling off it, and will load themselves
in the hollows uncomfortably. You will have to pull them about; to
stretch them one way, loosen them in another, and supply the quantity of
government which a living person would have given to the dress, before
it becomes at all pleasing to you.
143. Doing your best, you will still not succeed to your mind, provided
you have, indeed, a mind worth pleasing. No adjustment that you can
make, on the quiet figure, will give any approximation to the look of
drapery which has previously accommodated itself to the action which
brought the figure into the position in which it stays. On a really
living person, gracefully dressed, and who has paused from graceful
motion, you will get, again and again, arrangements of fold which you
can admire: but they will not remain to be copied, the first following
movement alters all. If you had your photographic plate ready and could
photograph--I don't know if it has been tried--girls, like waves, as
they move, you would get what was indeed lovely; and yet, when you
compared even such results with fine sculpture, you would see that there
was something wanting;--that, in the deepest sense, _all_ was yet
wanting.
144. Yet this is the most that the plurality of artists can do, or think
of doing. They draw the nude figure with careful anatomy; they put their
model or their lay figure into the required position; they arrange
draperies on it to their mind, and paint them from the reality. All such
work is absolutely valueless,--worse than valueless in the end of it,
blinding us to the qualities of fine work.
In true design it is in this matter of drapery as in all else. There is
not a fold too much, and all that are given aid the expression, whether
of movement or character. Here is a bit of Greek sculpture, with many
folds; here is a bit of Christian sculpture with few. From the many,
not one could be removed without harm, and to the few, not one could be
added. This alone is art, and no science will ever enable you to do
this, but the poetic and fabric instincts only.
145. Nevertheless, however far above science, your work must comply with
all the requirements of science. The first thing you have to ask is, Is
it scientifically right? That is still nothing, but it is essential. In
modern imitations of Gothic work the artists think it religious to be
wrong, and that Heaven will be propitious only to saints whose stoles or
petticoats stand or fall into incredible angles.
All that nonsense I will soon get well out of your heads by enabling you
to make accurate studies from real drapery, so that you may be able to
detect in a moment whether the folds in any design are natural and true
to the form, or artificial and ridiculous.
146. But this, which is the science of drapery, will never do more than
guard you in your first attempts in the art of it. Nay, when once you
have mastered the elements of such science, the most sickening of all
work to you will be that in which the draperies are all right,--and
nothing else is. In the present state of our schools one of the chief
mean merits against which I shall have to warn you is the imitation of
what milliners admire: nay, in many a piece of the best art I shall have
to show you that the draperies are, to some extent, intentionally
ill-done, _lest_ you should look at them. Yet, through every complexity
of desirableness, and counter-peril, hold to the constant and simple law
I have always given you--that the best work must be right in the
beginning, and lovely in the end.
147. Finally, observe that what is true respecting these simple forms of
drapery is true of all other inorganic form. It must become organic
under the artist's hand by his invention. As there must not be a fold in
a vestment too few or too many, there must not, in noble landscape, be a
fold in a mountain, too few or too many. As you will never get from real
linen cloth, by copying it ever so faithfully, the drapery of a noble
statue, so you will never get from real mountains, copy them never so
faithfully, the forms of noble landscape. Anything more beautiful than
the photographs of the Valley of Chamouni, now in your print-sellers'
windows, cannot be conceived. For geographical and geological purposes
they are worth anything; for art purposes, worth--a good deal less than
zero. You may learn much from them, and will mislearn more. But in
Turner's "Valley of Chamouni" the mountains have not a fold too much,
nor too little. There are no such mountains at Chamouni: they are the
ghosts of eternal mountains, such as have been, and shall be, for
evermore.
148. So now in sum, for I may have confused you by illustration,--
I. You are, in drawing, to try only to represent the appearances of
things, never what you know the things to be.
II. Those appearances you are to test by the appliance of the scientific
laws relating to aspect; and to learn, by accurate measurement, and the
most fixed attention, to represent with absolute fidelity.
III. Having learned to represent actual appearances faithfully, if you
have any human faculty of your own, visionary appearances will take
place to you which will be nobler and more true than any actual or
material appearances; and the realization of these is the function of
every fine art, which is founded absolutely, therefore, in truth, and
consists absolutely in imagination. And once more we may conclude with,
but now using them in a deeper sense, the words of our master--"The best
in this kind are but shadows."
* * * * *
It is to be our task, gentlemen, to endeavour that they may be at least
so much.
LECTURE VIII.
THE RELATION TO ART OF THE SCIENCES OF ORGANIC FORM.
_March 2nd, 1872._
149. I have next in order to speak of the relation of art to science, in
dealing with its own principal subject--organic form, as the expression
of life. And, as in my former lecture, I will tell you at once what I
wish chiefly to enforce upon you.
First,--but this I shall have no time to dwell upon,--That the true
power of art must be founded on a general knowledge of organic nature,
not of the human frame only.
Secondly.--That in representing this organic nature, quite as much as in
representing inanimate things, Art has nothing to do with structures,
causes, or absolute facts; but only with appearances.
Thirdly.--That in representing these appearances, she is more hindered
than helped by the knowledge of things which do not externally appear;
and therefore, that the study of anatomy generally, whether of plants,
animals, or man, is an impediment to graphic art.
Fourthly.--That especially in the treatment and conception of the human
form, the habit of contemplating its anatomical structure is not only a
hindrance, but a degradation; and farther yet, that even the study of
the external form of the human body, more exposed than it may be
healthily and decently in daily life, has been essentially destructive
to every school of art in which it has been practised.
150. These four statements I undertake, in the course of our future
study, gradually to confirm to you. In a single lecture I, of course,
have time to do little more than clearly state and explain them.
First, I tell you that art should take cognizance of all living things,
and know them, so as to be able to name, that is to say, in the truest
distinctive way, to describe them. The Creator daily brings, before the
noblest of His creatures, every lower creature, that whatsoever Man
calls it, may be the name thereof.
Secondly.--In representing, nay, in thinking of, and caring for, these
beasts, man has to think of them essentially with their skins on them,
and with their souls in them. He is to know how they are spotted,
wrinkled, furred, and feathered: and what the look of them is, in the
eyes; and what grasp, or cling, or trot, or pat, in their paws and
claws. He is to take every sort of view of them, in fact, except
one,--the Butcher's view. He is never to think of them as bones and
meat.
Thirdly.--In the representation of their appearance, the knowledge of
bones and meat, of joint and muscle, is more a hindrance than a help.
Lastly.--With regard to the human form, such knowledge is a degradation
as well as a hindrance; and even the study of the nude is injurious,
beyond the limits of honour and decency in daily life.
Those are my four positions. I will not detain you by dwelling on the
first two--that we should know every sort of beast, and know it with its
skin on it, and its soul within it. What you feel to be a
paradox--perhaps you think an incredible and insolent paradox--is my
telling you that you will be hindered from doing this by the study of
anatomy. I address myself, therefore, only to the last two points.
151. Among your standard engravings, I have put that of the picture by
Titian, in the Strozzi Palace, of a little Strozzi maiden feeding her
dog. I am going to put in the Rudimentary Series, where you can always
get at it (R. 125), this much more delightful, though not in all points
standard, picture by Reynolds, of an infant daughter of George the
Third's, with her Skye terrier.
I have no doubt these dogs are the authentic pets, given in as true
portraiture as their mistresses; and that the little Princess of
Florence and Princess of England were both shown in the company which,
at that age, they best liked;--the elder feeding her favourite, and the
baby with her arms about the neck of hers.
But the custom of putting either the dog, or some inferior animal, to be
either in contrast, or modest companionship, with the nobleness of human
form and thought, is a piece of what may be called mental comparative
anatomy, which has its beginning very far back in art indeed. One of
quite the most interesting Greek vases in the British Museum is that of
which the painting long went under the title of "Anacreon and his Dog."
It is a Greek lyric poet, singing with lifted head, in the action given
to Orpheus and Philammon in their moments of highest inspiration; while,
entirely unaffected by and superior to the music, there walks beside him
a sharp-nosed and curly-tailed dog, painted in what the exclusive
admirers of Greek art would, I suppose, call an ideal manner; that is to
say, his tail is more like a display of fireworks than a tail; but the
ideal evidently founded on the material existence of a charming, though
supercilious, animal not unlike the one which is at present the chief
solace of my labours in Oxford, Dr. Acland's dog Bustle. I might go much
farther back than this; but at all events, from the time of the golden
dog of Pandareos, the fawn of Diana, and the eagle, owl, and peacock of
the great Greek gods, you find a succession of animal types--centralized
in the Middle Ages, of course, by the hound and the falcon--used in art
either to symbolize, or contrast with, dignity in human persons. In
modern portraiture, the custom has become vulgarized by the anxiety of
everybody who sends their picture, or their children's, to the Royal
Academy, to have it demonstrated to the public by the exhibition of a
pony, and a dog with a whip in its mouth, that they live, at the proper
season, in a country house. But by the greater masters the thing is done
always with a deep sense of the mystery of the comparative existences of
living creatures, and of the methods of vice and virtue exhibited by
them. Albert Dürer scarcely ever draws a scene in the life of the
Virgin, without putting into the foreground some idle cherubs at play
with rabbits or kittens; and sometimes lets his love of the grotesque
get entirely the better of him, as in the engraving of the Madonna with
the monkey. Veronese disturbs the interview of the queen of Sheba with
Solomon, by the petulance of the queen of Sheba's Blenheim spaniel, whom
Solomon had not treated with sufficient respect; and when Veronese is
introduced himself, with all his family, to the Madonna, I am sorry to
say that his own pet dog turns its back to the Madonna, and walks out of
the room.
152. But among all these symbolic playfulnesses of the higher masters,
there is not one more perfect than this study by Reynolds of the infant
English Princess with her wire-haired terrier. He has put out his whole
strength to show the infinite differences, yet the blessed harmonies,
between the human and the lower nature. First, having a blue-eyed,[G]
soft baby to paint, he gives its full face, as round as may be, and
rounds its eyes to complete openness, because somebody is coming whom it
does not know. But it opens its eyes in quiet wonder, and is not
disturbed, but behaves as a princess should. Beside this soft,
serenely-minded baby, Reynolds has put the roughest and roughest-minded
dog he could think of. Instead of the full round eyes, you have only the
dark places in the hair where you know the terrier's eyes must be--sharp
enough, if you could see them--and very certainly seeing you, but not at
all wondering at you, like the baby's. For the terrier has instantly
made up his mind about you; and above all, that you have no business
there; and is growling and snarling in his fiercest manner, though
without moving from his mistress's side, or from under her arm. You have
thus the full contrast between the grace and true charm of the child,
who "thinketh no evil" of you, and the uncharitable narrowness of
nature in the grown-up dog of the world, who thinks nothing but evil of
you. But the dog's virtue and faithfulness are not told less clearly;
the baby evidently uses the creature just as much for a pillow as a
playmate;--buries its arm in the rough hair of it with a loving
confidence, half already converting itself to protection: and baby will
take care of dog, and dog of baby, through all chances of time and
fortune.
[G] I have not seen the picture: in the engraving the tint of the
eyes would properly represent grey or blue.
153. Now the exquisiteness with which the painter has applied all his
skill in composition, all his dexterity in touch of pencil, and all his
experience of the sources of expression, to complete the rendering of
his comparison, cannot, in any of the finest subtleties of it, be
explained; but the first steps of its science may be easily traced; and
with little pains you may see how a simple and large mass of white is
opposed to a rugged one of grey; how the child's face is put in front
light, that no shadow may detract from the brightness which makes her,
as in Arabian legends, "a princess like to the full moon"--how, in this
halo, the lips and eyes are brought out in deep and rich colour, while
scarcely a gleam of reflection is allowed to disturb the quietness of
the eyes;--(the terrier's, you feel, would glitter enough, if you could
see them, and flash back in shallow fire; but the princess's eyes are
thinking, and do not flash;)--how the quaint cap surrounds, with its not
wholly painless formalism, the courtly and patient face, opposed to the
rugged and undressed wild one; and how the easy grace of soft limb and
rounded neck is cast, in repose, against the uneasily gathered up
crouching of the short legs, and petulant shrug of the eager shoulders,
in the ignobler creature.