seeing, whatever was best in the creatures, within and without. Whatever
was most perfectly doggish--perfectly childish--in soul and body. The
absolute truth of outer aspect, and of inner mind, he seizes infallibly;
but there is one part of the creatures which he never, for an instant,
thinks of, or cares for,--their bones. Do you suppose that, from first
to last, in painting such a picture, it would ever enter Sir Joshua's
mind to think what a dog's skull would look like, beside a baby's? The
quite essential facts to him are those of which the skull gives no
information--that the baby has a flattish pink nose, and the dog a bossy
black one. You might dissect all the dead dogs in the water supply of
London without finding out, what, as a painter, it is here your only
business precisely to know,--what sort of shininess there is on the end
of a terrier's nose; and for the position and action of the creatures,
all the four doctors together, who set Bustle's leg for him the other
day, when he jumped out of a two-pair-of-stairs window to bark at the
volunteers, could not have told Sir Joshua how to make his crouching
terrier look ready to snap, nor how to throw the child's arm over its
neck in complete, yet not languid, rest.
155. Sir Joshua, then, does not think of, or care for, anatomy, in this
picture; but if he had, would it have done him harm? You may easily see
that the child's limbs are not drawn with the precision that Mantegna,
Dürer, or Michael Angelo would have given them. Would some of their
science not have bettered the picture?
I can show you exactly the sort of influence their science would have
had.
In your Rudimentary Series, I have placed in sequence two of Dürer's
most celebrated plates (R. 65, R. 66), the coat of arms with the skull,
and the Madonna crowned by angels; and that you may see precisely what
qualities are, and are not, in this last, I have enlarged the head by
photography, and placed it in your Reference Series (117). You will find
the skull is perfectly understood, and exquisitely engraved, but the
face, imperfectly understood and coarsely engraved. No man who has
studied the skull as carefully as Dürer did, ever could engrave a face
beautifully, for the perception of the bones continually thrusts itself
upon him in wrong places, and in trying to conquer or modify it, he
distorts the flesh. Where the features are marked, and full of
character, he can quit himself of the impression; but in the rounded
contour of women's faces he is always forced to think of the skull; and
even in his ordinary work often draws more of bones and hair, than face.
156. I could easily give you more definite, but very disagreeable,
proofs of the evil of knowing the anatomy of the human face too
intimately: but will rather give you further evidence by examining the
skull and face of the creature who has taught us so much already,--the
eagle.
Here is a slight sketch of the skull of the golden eagle. It may be
interesting to you sometimes to make such drawings roughly for the sake
of the points of mechanical arrangement--as here in the circular bones
of the eye-socket; but don't suppose that drawing these a million of
times over will ever help you in the least to draw an eagle itself. On
the contrary, it would almost to a certainty hinder you from noticing
the essential point in an eagle's head--the projection of the brow. All
the main work of the eagle's eye is, as we saw, in looking down. To keep
the sunshine above from teasing it, the eye is put under a triangular
penthouse, which is precisely the most characteristic thing in the
bird's whole aspect. Its hooked beak does not materially distinguish it
from a cockatoo, but its hooded eye does. But that projection is not
accounted for in the skull; and so little does the anatomist care about
it, that you may hunt through the best modern works on ornithology, and
you will find eagles drawn with all manner of dissections of skulls,
claws, clavicles, sternums, and gizzards; but you won't find so much as
one poor falcon drawn with a falcon's eye.
157. But there is another quite essential point in an eagle's head, in
comprehending which, again, the skull will not help us. The skull in the
human creature fails in three essential points. It is eyeless, noseless,
and lipless. It fails only in an eagle in the two points of eye and lip;
for an eagle has no nose worth mentioning; his beak is only a
prolongation of his jaws. But he has lips very much worth mentioning,
and of which his skull gives no account. One misses them much from a
human skull:--"Here hung those lips that I have kissed, I know not how
oft,"--but from an eagle's you miss them more, for he is distinct from
other birds in having with his own eagle's eye, a dog's lips, or very
nearly such; an entirely fleshy and ringent mouth, bluish pink, with a
perpetual grin upon it.
So that if you look, not at his skull, but at him, attentively enough,
you will precisely get Æschylus's notion of him, essential in the Greek
mind--πτηνὸς κύων δαφοινὸς αἰετός--and then, if you want to see the use
of his beak or bill, as distinguished from a dog's teeth, take a drawing
from the falconry of the Middle Ages, and you will see how a piece of
flesh becomes a _rag_ to him, a thing to tear up,--διαρταμήσει σώματος
μέγα ῥάκος. There you have it precisely, in a falcon I got out of Mr.
Coxe's favourite fourteenth century missal.
Now look through your natural history books from end to end; see if you
can find one drawing, with all their anatomy, which shows you either the
eagle's eye, his lips, or this essential use of his beak, so as to
enable you thoroughly to understand those two lines of Æschylus: then,
look at this Greek eagle on a coin of Elis, R. 50, and this Pisan one,
in marble, Edu. 131, and you will not doubt any more that it is better
to look at the living birds, than to cut them to pieces.
158. Anatomy, then,--I will assume that you grant, for the moment, as I
will assuredly prove to you eventually,--will not help us to draw the
true appearances of things. But may it not add to our intelligent
conception of their nature?
So far from doing this, the anatomical study which has, to our much
degradation and misfortune, usurped the place, and taken the name, at
once of art and of natural history, has produced the most singularly
mischievous effect on the faculty of delineation with respect to
different races of animals. In all recent books on natural history, you
will find the ridiculous and ugly creatures clone well, the noble and
beautiful creatures done, I do not say merely ill, but in no wise. You
will find the law hold universally that apes, pigs, rats, weasels,
foxes, and the like,--but especially apes,--are drawn admirably; but not
a stag, not a lamb, not a horse, not a lion;--the nobler the creature,
the more stupidly it is always drawn, not from feebleness of art power,
but a far deadlier fault than that--a total want of sympathy with the
noble qualities of any creature, and a loathsome delight in their
disgusting qualities. And this law is so thoroughly carried out that the
great French historian of the mammalia, St. Hilaire, chooses, as his
single example of the highest of the race, the most nearly bestial type
he can find, human, in the world. Let no girl ever look at the book, nor
any youth who is willing to take my word; let those who doubt me, look
at the example he has given of womankind.
159. But admit that this is only French anatomy, or ill-studied anatomy,
and that, rightly studied, as Dr. Acland, for instance, would teach it
us, it might do us some kind of good.
I must reserve for my lectures on the school of Florence any analysis of
the effect of anatomical study on European art and character; you will
find some notice of it in my lecture on Michael Angelo; and in the
course of that analysis, it will be necessary for me to withdraw the
statement made in the "Stones of Venice," that anatomical science was
helpful to great men, though harmful to mean ones. I am now certain that
the greater the intellect, the more fatal are the forms of degradation
to which it becomes liable in the course of anatomical studies; and that
to Michael Angelo, of all men, the mischief was greatest, in destroying
his religious passion and imagination, and leading him to make every
spiritual conception subordinate to the display of his knowledge of the
body. To-day, however, I only wish to give you my reasons for
withdrawing anatomy from your course of study in these schools.
160. I do so, first, simply with reference to our time, convenience, and
systematic method. It has become a habit with drawing-masters to confuse
this particular science of anatomy with their own art of drawing, though
they confuse no other science with that art. Admit that, in order to
draw a tree, you should have a knowledge of botany: Do you expect me to
teach you botany here? Whatever I want you to know of it I shall send
you to your Professor of Botany and to the Botanic Gardens, to learn. I
may, perhaps, give you a rough sketch of the lines of timber in a bough,
but nothing more.
So again, admit that, to draw a stone, you need a knowledge of geology.
I have told you that you do not, but admit it. Do you expect me to teach
you, here, the relations between quartz and oxide of iron; or between
the Silurian and Permian systems? If you care about them, go to
Professor Phillips, and come back to me when you know them.
And, in like manner, admit that, to draw a man, you want the knowledge
of his bones:--you do not; but admit that you do. Why should you expect
me, here, to teach you the most difficult of all the sciences? If you
want to know it, go to an hospital, and cut dead bodies to pieces till
you are satisfied; then come to me, and I'll make a shift to teach you
to draw, even then--though your eyes and memory will be full of horrible
things which Heaven never meant you so much as a glance at. But don't
expect me to help you in that ghastly work: any more than among the
furnaces and retorts in Professor Maskelyne's laboratory.
161. Let us take one more step in the logical sequence. You do not, I
have told you, need either chemistry, botany, geology, or anatomy, to
enable you to understand art, or produce it. But there is one science
which you _must_ be acquainted with. You must very intensely and
thoroughly know--how to behave. You cannot so much as feel the
difference between two casts of drapery, between two tendencies of
line,--how much less between dignity and baseness of gesture,--but by
your own dignity of character. But, though this is an essential science,
and although I cannot teach you to lay one line beside another rightly,
unless you have this science, you don't expect me in these schools to
teach you how to behave, if you happen not to know it before!
162. Well, here is one reason, and a sufficiently logical one, as you
will find it on consideration, for the exclusion of anatomical study
from _all_ drawing schools. But there is a more cogent reason than this
for its exclusion, especially from elementary drawing-schools. It may be
sometimes desirable that a student should see, as I said, how very
unlike a face a skull is; and at a leisure moment he may, without much
harm, observe the equivocation between knees and ankles by which it is
contrived that his legs, if properly made at the joints, will only bend
backwards, but a crane's forwards. But that a young boy, or girl,
brought up fresh to the schools of art from the country, should be set
to stare, against every particle of wholesome grain in their natures, at
the Elgin marbles, and to draw them with dismal application, until they
imagine they like them, makes the whole youthful temper rotten with
affectation, and sickly with strained and ambitious fancy. It is still
worse for young persons to be compelled to endure the horror of the
dissecting-room, or to be made familiar with the conditions of actual
bodily form, in a climate where the restraints of dress must for ever
prevent the body from being perfect in contour, or regarded with
entirely simple feeling.
163. I have now, perhaps too often for your patience, told you that you
must always draw for the sake of your subject--never for the sake of
your picture. What you wish to see in reality, that you should make an
effort to show, in pictures and statues; what you do not wish to see in
reality, you should not try to draw.
But there is, I suppose, a very general impression on the mind of
persons interested in the arts, that because nations living in cold
climates are necessarily unfamiliar with the sight of the naked body,
therefore, art should take it upon herself to show it them; and that
they will be elevated in thought, and made more simple and grave in
temper, by seeing, at least in colour and marble, what the people of the
south saw in its verity.
164. I have neither time nor inclination to enter at present into
discussion of the various effects, on the morality of nations, of more
or less frank showing of the nude form. There is no question that if
shown at all, it should be shown fearlessly, and seen constantly; but I
do not care at present to debate the question: neither will I delay you
by any expression of my reasons for the rule I am about to give. Trust
me, I have many; and I can assert to you as a positive and perpetual
law, that so much of the nude body as in the daily life of the nation
may be shown with modesty, and seen with reverence and delight,--so
much, and no more, ought to be shown by the national arts, either of
painting or sculpture. What, more than this, either art exhibits, will,
assuredly, pervert taste, and, in all probability, morals.
165. It will, assuredly, pervert taste in this essential point, that the
polite ranks of the nation will come to think the _living_ creature and
its dress exempt from the highest laws of taste; and that while a man or
woman must, indeed, be seen dressed or undressed with dignity, in
marble, they may be dressed or undressed, if not with _in_dignity, at
least, with less than dignity, in the ball-room, and the street. Now the
law of all living art is that the man and woman must be more beautiful
than their pictures, and their pictures as decorous as the living man or
woman; and that real dress, and gesture, and behaviour, should be more
graceful than any marble or colour can effect similitude of.
166. Thus the idea of a different dress in art and reality, of which
that of art is to be the ideal one, perverts taste in dress; and the
study of the nude which is rarely seen, as much perverts taste in art.
Of all pieces of art that I know, skilful in execution, and not criminal
in intention;--without any exception, quite the most vulgar, and in the
solemn sense of the word, most abominable, are the life studies which
are said to be the best made in modern times,--those of Mulready,
exhibited as models in the Kensington Museum.
167. How far the study of the seldom-seen nude leads to perversion of
morals, I will not, to-day, inquire; but I beg you to observe that even
among the people where it was most frank and pure, it unquestionably led
to evil far greater than any good which demonstrably can be traced to
it. Scarcely any of the moral power of Greece depended on her admiration
of beauty, or strength in the body. The power of Greece depended on
practice in military exercise, involving severe and continual ascetic
discipline of the senses; on a perfect code of military heroism and
patriotic honour; on the desire to live by the laws of an admittedly
divine justice; and on the vivid conception of the presence of spiritual
beings. The mere admiration of physical beauty in the body, and the arts
which sought its expression, not only conduced greatly to the fall of
Greece, but were the cause of errors and crimes in her greatest time,
which must for ever sadden our happiest thoughts of her, and have
rendered her example almost useless to the future.
168. I have named four causes of her power; discipline of senses;
romantic ideal of heroic honour; respect for justice; and belief in God.
There was a fifth--the most precious of all--the belief in the purity
and force of life in man; and that true reverence for domestic
affection, which, in the strangest way, being the essential strength of
every nation under the sun, had yet been lost sight of as the chief
element of Greek virtue, though the Iliad itself is nothing but the
story of the punishment of the rape of Helen; and though every Greek
hero called himself chiefly by his paternal name,--Tydides, rather than
Diomed;--Pelides, rather than Achilles.
Among the new knowledges which the modern sirens tempt you to pursue,
the basest and darkest is the endeavour to trace the origin of life,
otherwise than in Love. Pardon me, therefore, if I give you a piece of
theology to-day: it is a science much closer to your art than anatomy.
169. All of you who have ever read your Gospels carefully must have
wondered, sometimes, what could be the meaning of those words,--"If any
speak against the Son of Man it shall be forgiven; but if against the
Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven, neither in this world nor in the
next."
The passage may have many meanings which I do not know; but one meaning
I know positively, and I tell you so just as frankly as I would that I
knew the meaning of a verse in Homer.
Those of you who still go to chapel say every day your creed; and, I
suppose, too often, less and less every day believing it. Now, you may
cease to believe two articles of it, and,--admitting Christianity to be
true,--still be forgiven. But I can tell you--you must _not_ cease to
believe the third!
You begin by saying that you believe in an Almighty Father. Well, you
may entirely lose the sense of that Fatherhood, and yet be forgiven.
You go on to say that you believe in a Saviour Son. You may entirely
lose the sense of that Sonship, and yet be forgiven.
But the third article--disbelieve if you dare!
"I believe in the Holy Ghost, _the Lord and Giver of life_."
Disbelieve that; and your own being is degraded into the state of dust
driven by the wind; and the elements of dissolution have entered your
very heart and soul.
All Nature, with one voice--with one glory,--is set to teach you
reverence for the life communicated to you from the Father of Spirits.
The song of birds, and their plumage; the scent of flowers, their
colour, their very existence, are in direct connection with the mystery
of that communicated life: and all the strength, and all the arts of
men, are measured by, and founded upon, their reverence for the passion,
and their guardianship of the purity, of Love.
170. Gentlemen,--the word by which I at this moment address you--by
which it is the first of all your duties through life, to permit all men
to address you with truth--that epithet of 'gentle,' as you well know,
indicates the intense respect for race and fatherhood--for family
dignity and chastity,--which was visibly the strength of Rome, as it had
been, more disguisedly, the strength of Greece. But have you enough
noticed that your Saxon word 'kindness' has exactly the same relation to
'kin,' and to the Chaucerian 'kind,' that 'gentle' has to 'gentilis'?
Think out that matter a little, and you will find that--much as it
looks like it--neither chemistry, nor anatomy, nor republicanism, are
going to have it all their own way--in the making of either beasts, or
gentlemen. They look sometimes, indeed, as if they had got as far as two
of the Mosaic plagues, and manufactured frogs in the ditches, and lice
on the land; but their highest boasters will not claim, yet, so much
even as that poor victory.
171. My friends, let me very strongly recommend you to give up that hope
of finding the principle of life in dead bodies; but to take all pains
to keep the life pure and holy in the living bodies you have got; and,
farther, not to seek your national amusement in the destruction of
animals, nor your national safety in the destruction of men; but to look
for all your joy to kindness, and for all your strength to domestic
faith, and law of ancestral honour. Perhaps you will not now any more
think it strange that in beginning your natural history studies in this
place, I mean to teach you heraldry, but not anatomy. For, as you learn
to read the shields, and remember the stories, of the great houses of
England, and find how all the arts that glorified them were founded on
the passions that inspired, you will learn assuredly, that the utmost
secret of national power is in living with honour, and the utmost
secrets of human art are in gentleness and truth.
LECTURE IX.
THE STORY OF THE HALCYON.
_March 10th, 1872._
172. I must to-day briefly recapitulate the purport of the preceding
lectures, as we are about now to enter on a new branch of our subject.
I stated, in the first two, that the wisdom of art and the wisdom of
science consisted in their being each devoted unselfishly to the service
of men; in the third, that art was only the shadow of our knowledge of
facts; and that the reality was always to be acknowledged as more
beautiful than the shadow. In the fourth lecture I endeavoured to show
that the wise modesty of art and science lay in attaching due value to
the power and knowledge of other people, when greater than our own; and
in the fifth, that the wise self-sufficiency of art and science lay in a
proper enjoyment of our own knowledge and power, after it was thus
modestly esteemed. The sixth lecture stated that sight was a distinctly
spiritual power, and that its kindness or tenderness was proportioned to
its clearness. Lastly, in the seventh and eighth lectures, I asserted
that this spiritual sight, concerned with external aspects of things,
was the source of all necessary knowledge in art; and that the artist
has no concern with invisible structures, organic or inorganic.
173. No concern with invisible structures. But much with invisible
things; with passion, and with historical association. And in these two
closing lectures, I hope partly to justify myself for pressing on your
attention some matters as little hitherto thought of in drawing-schools,
as the exact sciences have been highly, and, I believe, unjustly,
esteemed;--mythology, namely, and heraldry.
I can but in part justify myself now. Your experience of the interest
which may be found in these two despised sciences will be my best
justification. But to-day (as we are about to begin our exercises in
bird-drawing) I think it may interest you to review some of the fables
connected with the natural history of a single bird, and to consider
what effect the knowledge of such tradition is likely to have on our
mode of regarding the animated creation in general.
174. Let us take an instance of the feeling towards birds which is
especially characteristic of the English temper at this day, in its
entire freedom from superstition.
You will find in your Rudimentary Series (225), Mr. Gould's plate of the
lesser Egret,--the most beautiful, I suppose, of all birds that visit,
or, at least, once visited, our English shores. Perfectly delicate in
form, snow-white in plumage, the feathers like frost-work of dead
silver, exquisitely slender, separating in the wind like the streams of
a fountain, the creature looks a living cloud rather than a bird.
It may be seen often enough in South France and Italy. The last (or last
but one?) known of in England came thirty years ago, and this was its
reception, as related by the present happy possessor of its feathers and
bones:--
"The little Egret in my possession is a most beautiful specimen: it was
killed by a labourer with a stick, in Ake Carr, near Beverley, about
1840, and was brought to me, tied up in a pocket-handkerchief, covered
with black wet mud and blood, in which state it was sent to Mr. Reed,
of Doncaster, and restored by him in a most marvellous manner."
175. Now, you will feel at once that, while the peasant was beating this
bird into a piece of bloody flesh with his stick, he could not, in any
true sense, see the bird; that he had no pleasure either in the sight of
that, or of anything near it.
You feel that he would become capable of seeing it in exact proportion
to his desire not to kill it; but to watch it in its life.
Well, that is a quite general law: in the degree in which you delight in
the life of any creature, you can see it; no otherwise.
And you would feel, would you not, that if you could enable the peasant
rightly to see the bird, you had in great part educated him?
176. You would certainly have gone, at least, the third of the way
towards educating him. Then the next thing to be contrived would be that
he should be able to see a man rightly, as well as a bird; to understand
and love what was good in a man, so that supposing his master was a good
man, the sight of his master should be a joy to him. You would say that
he was therein better educated than if he wanted to put a gun through a
hedge and shoot his master.
Then the last part of education will be--whatever is meant by that
beatitude of the pure in heart--seeing God rightly, of which I shall not
speak to-day.