The Crown of Wild Olive
which he had received from the Alps, after his long separation from
them. The drawings are marked by a peculiar largeness and simplicity of
thought: most of them by deep serenity, passing into melancholy; all by
a richness of color, such as he had never before conceived. They, and
the works done in following years, bear the same relation to those of
the rest of his life that the colors of sunset do to those of the day;
and will be recognised, in a few years more, as the noblest landscapes
ever yet conceived by human intellect.
Such has been the career of the greatest painter of this century. Many
a century may pass away before there rises such another; but what
greatness any among us may be capable of, will, at least, be best
attained by following in his path; by beginning in all quietness and
hopefulness to use whatever powers we may possess to represent the
things around us as we see and feel them; trusting to the close of life
to give the perfect crown to the course of its labors, and knowing
assuredly that the determination of the degree in which watchfulness is
to be exalted into invention, rests with a higher will than our own.
And, if not greatness, at least a certain good, is thus to be achieved;
for though I have above spoken of the mission of the more humble artist,
as if it were merely to be subservient to that of the antiquarian or the
man of science, there is an ulterior aspect in which it is not
subservient, but superior. Every archaeologist, every natural
philosopher, knows that there is a peculiar rigidity of mind brought on
by long devotion to logical and analytical inquiries. Weak men, giving
themselves to such studies, are utterly hardened by them, and become
incapable of understanding anything nobler, or even of feeling the value
of the results to which they lead. But even the best men are in a sort
injured by them, and pay a definite price, as in most other matters, for
definite advantages. They gain a peculiar strength, but lose in
tenderness, elasticity, and impressibility. The man who has gone, hammer
in hand, over the surface of a romantic country, feels no longer, in the
mountain ranges he has so laboriously explored, the sublimity or mystery
with which they were veiled when he first beheld them, and with which
they are adorned in the mind of the passing traveller. In his more
informed conception, they arrange themselves like a dissected model:
where another man would be awe-struck by the magnificence of the
precipice, he sees nothing but the emergence of a fossiliferous rock,
familiarised already to his imagination as extending in a shallow
stratum, over a perhaps uninteresting district; where the unlearned
spectator would be touched with strong emotion by the aspect of the
snowy summits which rise in the distance, he sees only the culminating
points of a metamorphic formation, with an uncomfortable web of
fan-like fissures radiating, in his imagination, through their
centres[104]. That in the grasp he has obtained of the inner relations
of all these things to the universe, and to man, that in the views which
have been opened to him of natural energies such as no human mind would
have ventured to conceive, and of past states of being, each in some new
way bearing witness to the unity of purpose and everlastingly consistent
providence of the Maker of all things, he has received reward well
worthy the sacrifice, I would not for an instant deny; but the sense of
the loss is not less painful to him if his mind be rightly constituted;
and it would be with infinite gratitude that he would regard the man,
who, retaining in his delineation of natural scenery a fidelity to the
facts of science so rigid as to make his work at once acceptable and
credible to the most sternly critical intellect, should yet invest its
features again with the sweet veil of their daily aspect; should make
them dazzling with the splendor of wandering light, and involve them in
the unsearchableness of stormy obscurity; should restore to the divided
anatomy its visible vitality of operation, clothe naked crags with soft
forests, enrich the mountain ruins with bright pastures, and lead the
thoughts from the monotonous recurrence of the phenomena of the physical
world, to the sweet interests and sorrows of human life and death.
THE END.
FOOTNOTES:
[97] It was not a little curious, that in the very number of the Art
Union which repeated this direct falsehood about the Pre-Raphaelite
rejection of "linear perspective" (by-the-bye, the next time J. B. takes
upon him to speak of any one connected with the Universities, he may as
well first ascertain the difference between a Graduate and an
Under-Graduate), the second plate given should have been of a picture of
Bonington's,--a professional landscape painter, observe,--for the want
of _aerial_ perspective in which the Art Union itself was obliged to
apologise, and in which the artist has committed nearly as many blunders
in _linear_ perspective as there are lines in the picture.
[98] These false statements may be reduced to three principal heads, and
directly contradicted in succession.
The first, the current fallacy of society as well as of the press, was,
that the Pre-Raphaelites imitated the _errors_ of early painters.
A falsehood of this kind could not have obtained credence anywhere but
in England, few English people, comparatively, having ever seen a
picture of early Italian Masters. If they had, they would have known
that the Pre-Raphaelite pictures are just as superior to the early
Italian in skill of manipulation, power of drawing, and knowledge of
effect, as inferior to them in grace of design; and that in a word,
there is not a shadow of resemblance between the two styles. The
Pre-Raphaelites imitate no pictures: they paint from nature only. But
they have opposed themselves as a body to that kind of teaching above
described, which only began after Raphael's time: and they have opposed
themselves as sternly to the entire feeling of the Renaissance schools;
a feeling compounded of indolence, infidelity, sensuality, and shallow
pride. Therefore they have called themselves Pre-Raphaelites. If they
adhere to their principles, and paint nature as it is around them, with
the help of modern science, with the earnestness of the men of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they will, as I said, found a new
and noble school in England. If their sympathies with the early artists
lead them into mediaevalism or Romanism, they will of course come to
nothing. But I believe there is no danger of this, at least for the
strongest among them. There may be some weak ones, whom the Tractarian
heresies may touch; but if so, they will drop off like decayed branches
from a strong stem. I hope all things from the school.
The second falsehood was, that the Pre-Raphaelites did not draw well.
This was asserted, and could have been asserted only by persons who had
never looked at the pictures.
The third falsehood was, that they had no system of light and shade. To
which it may be simply replied that their system of light and shade is
exactly the same as the Sun's; which is, I believe, likely to outlast
that of the Renaissance, however brilliant.
[99] He did not use his full signature, J. M. W., until about the year
1800.
[100] I shall give a _catalogue raisonnee_ of all this in the third
volume of "Modern Painters."
[101] The plate was, however, never published.
[102] And the more probably because Turner was never fond of staying
long at any place, and was least of all likely to make a pause of two or
three days at the beginning of his journey.
[103] Vide Modern Painters, Part II. Sect. III. Chap. IV. Sec. 14.
[104] This state of mind appears to have been the only one which
Wordsworth had been able to discern in men of science; and in disdain of
which, he wrote that short-sighted passage in the Excursion, Book III.
l. 165-190, which is, I think, the only one in the whole range of his
works which his true friends would have desired to see blotted out. What
else has been found fault with as feeble or superfluous, is not so in
the intense distinctive relief which it gives to his character. But
these lines are written in mere ignorance of the matter they treat; in
mere want of sympathy with the men they describe; for, observe, though
the passage is put into the mouth of the Solitary, it is fully
confirmed, and even rendered more scornful, by the speech which follows.
ARATRA PENTELICI
SIX LECTURES
ON THE ELEMENTS OF
SCULPTURE
GIVEN BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD IN MICHAELMAS TERM, 1870
PREFACE.
I must pray the readers of the following Lectures to remember that the
duty at present laid on me at Oxford is of an exceptionally complex
character. Directly, it is to awaken the interest of my pupils in a
study which they have hitherto found unattractive, and imagined to be
useless; but more imperatively, it is to define the principles by which
the study itself should be guided; and to vindicate their security
against the doubts with which frequent discussion has lately encumbered
a subject which all think themselves competent to discuss. The
possibility of such vindication is, of course, implied in the original
consent of the universities to the establishment of Art Professorships.
Nothing can be made an element of education of which it is impossible to
determine whether it is ill done or well; and the clear assertion that
there is a canon law in formative Art is, at this time, a more important
function of each University than the instruction of its younger members
in any branch of practical skill. It matters comparatively little
whether few or many of our students learn to draw; but it matters much
that all who learn should be taught with accuracy. And the number who
may be justifiably advised to give any part of the time they spend at
college to the study of painting or sculpture ought to depend, and
finally _must_ depend, on their being certified that painting and
sculpture, no less than language or than reasoning, have grammar and
method,--that they permit a recognizable distinction between scholarship
and ignorance, and enforce a constant distinction between Right and
Wrong.
This opening course of Lectures on Sculpture is therefore restricted to
the statement, not only of first principles, but of those which were
illustrated by the practice of one school, and by that practice in its
simplest branch, the analysis of which could be certified by easily
accessible examples, and aided by the indisputable evidence of
photography.[105]
The exclusion of the terminal Lecture of the course from the series now
published, is in order to mark more definitely this limitation of my
subject; but in other respects the Lectures have been amplified in
arranging them for the press, and the portions of them trusted at the
time to extempore delivery, (not through indolence, but because
explanations of detail are always most intelligible when most familiar,)
have been in substance to the best of my power set down, and in what I
said too imperfectly, completed.
In one essential particular I have felt it necessary to write what I
would not have spoken. I had intended to make no reference, in my
University Lectures, to existing schools of Art, except in cases where
it might be necessary to point out some undervalued excellence. The
objects specified in the eleventh paragraph of my inaugural Lecture,
might, I hoped, have been accomplished without reference to any works
deserving of blame; but the Exhibition of the Royal Academy in the
present year showed me a necessity of departing from my original
intention. The task of impartial criticism[106] is now, unhappily, no
longer to rescue modest skill from neglect; but to withstand the errors