The Crown of Wild Olive
of insolent genius, and abate the influence of plausible mediocrity.
The Exhibition of 1871 was very notable in this important particular,
that it embraced some representation of the modern schools of nearly
every country in Europe; and I am well assured that looking back upon it
after the excitement of that singular interest has passed away, every
thoughtful judge of Art will confirm my assertion, that it contained not
a single picture of accomplished merit; while it contained many that
were disgraceful to Art, and some that were disgraceful to humanity.
It becomes, under such circumstances, my inevitable duty to speak of the
existing conditions of Art with plainness enough to guard the youths
whose judgments I am entrusted to form, from being misled, either by
their own naturally vivid interest in what represents, however
unworthily, the scenes and persons of their own day, or by the cunningly
devised, and, without doubt, powerful allurements of Art which has long
since confessed itself to have no other object than to allure. I have,
therefore, added to the second of these Lectures such illustration of
the motives and course of modern industry as naturally arose out of its
subject, and shall continue in future to make similar applications;
rarely, indeed, permitting myself, in the Lectures actually read before
the University, to introduce subjects of instant, and therefore too
exciting, interest; but completing the addresses which I prepare for
publication in these, and in any other particulars which may render them
more widely serviceable.
The present course of Lectures will be followed, if I am able to fulfil
the design of them, by one of a like elementary character on
Architecture; and that by a third series on Christian Sculpture: but, in
the meantime, my effort is to direct the attention of the resident
students to Natural History, and to the higher branches of ideal
Landscape: and it will be, I trust, accepted as sufficient reason for
the delay which has occurred in preparing the following sheets for the
press, that I have not only been interrupted by a dangerous illness, but
engaged, in what remained to me of the summer, in an endeavour to
deduce, from the overwhelming complexity of modern classification in the
Natural Sciences, some forms capable of easier reference by Art
students, to whom the anatomy of brutal and floral nature is often no
less important than that of the human body.
The preparation of examples for manual practice, and the arrangement of
standards for reference, both in Painting and Sculpture, had to be
carried on meanwhile, as I was able. For what has already been done, the
reader is referred to the _Catalogue of the Educational Series_,
published at the end of the Spring Term; of what remains to be done I
will make no anticipatory statement, being content to have ascribed to
me rather the fault of narrowness in design, than of extravagance in
expectation.
DENMARK HILL,
_25th November, 1871._
FOOTNOTES:
[105] Photography cannot exhibit the character of large and finished
sculpture; but its audacity of shadow is in perfect harmony with the
more roughly picturesque treatment necessary in coins. For the rendering
of all such frank relief, and for the better explanation of forms
disturbed by the lustre of metal or polished stone, the method employed
in the plates of this volume will be found, I believe, satisfactory.
Casts are first taken from the coins, in white plaster; these are
photographed, and the photograph printed by the heliotype process of
Messrs. Edwards and Kidd. Plate XII. is exceptional, being a pure
mezzotint engraving of the old school, excellently carried through by my
assistant, Mr. Allen, who was taught, as a personal favour to myself, by
my friend, and Turner's fellow-worker, Thomas Lupton. Plate IV. was
intended to be a photograph from the superb vase in the British Museum,
No. 564 in Mr. Newton's Catalogue; but its variety of colour defied
photography, and after the sheets had gone to press I was compelled to
reduce Le Normand's plate of it, which is unsatisfactory, but answers my
immediate purpose.
The enlarged photographs for use in the Lecture Room were made for me
with most successful skill by Sergeant Spackman, of South Kensington;
and the help throughout rendered to me by Mr. Burgess is acknowledged in
the course of the Lectures; though with thanks which must remain
inadequate lest they should become tedious; for Mr. Burgess drew the
subjects of Plates III., X., and XIII.; drew and engraved every woodcut
in the book; and printed all the plates with his own hand.
[106] A pamphlet by the Earl of Southesk, "_Britain's Art Paradise_,"
(Edmonston and Douglas, Edinburgh) contains an entirely admirable
criticism of the most faultful pictures of the 1871 Exhibition. It is to
be regretted that Lord Southesk speaks only to condemn; but indeed, in
my own three days' review of the rooms, I found nothing deserving of
notice otherwise, except Mr. Hook's always pleasant sketches from fisher
life, and Mr. Pettie's graceful and powerful, though too slightly
painted, study from _Henry VI_.
ARATRA PENTELICI.
LECTURE I.
OF THE DIVISION OF ARTS.
_November, 1870._
1. If, as is commonly believed, the subject of study which it is my
special function to bring before you had no relation to the great
interests of mankind, I should have less courage in asking for your
attention to-day, than when I first addressed you; though, even then, I
did not do so without painful diffidence. For at this moment, even
supposing that in other places it were possible for men to pursue their
ordinary avocations undisturbed by indignation or pity; here, at least,
in the midst of the deliberative and religious influences of England,
only one subject, I am well assured, can seriously occupy your
thoughts--the necessity, namely, of determining how it has come to pass,
that in these recent days, iniquity the most reckless and monstrous can
be committed unanimously, by men more generous than ever yet in the
world's history were deceived into deeds of cruelty; and that prolonged
agony of body and spirit, such as we should shrink from inflicting
wilfully on a single criminal, has become the appointed and accepted
portion of unnumbered multitudes of innocent persons, inhabiting the
districts of the world which, of all others, as it seemed, were best
instructed in the laws of civilization, and most richly invested with
the honour, and indulged in the felicity, of peace.
Believe me, however, the subject of Art--instead of being foreign to
these deep questions of social duty and peril,--is so vitally connected
with them, that it would be impossible for me now to pursue the line of
thought in which I began these lectures, because so ghastly an emphasis
would be given to every sentence by the force of passing events. It is
well, then, that in the plan I have laid down for your study, we shall
now be led into the examination of technical details, or abstract
conditions of sentiment; so that the hours you spend with me may be
times of repose from heavier thoughts. But it chances strangely that, in
this course of minutely detailed study, I have first to set before you
the most essential piece of human workmanship, the plough, at the very
moment when--(you may see the announcement in the journals either of
yesterday or the day before)--the swords of your soldiers have been sent
for _to be sharpened_, and not at all to be beaten into ploughshares. I
permit myself, therefore, to remind you of the watchword of all my
earnest writings--"Soldiers of the Ploughshare, instead of Soldiers of
the Sword"--and I know it my duty to assert to you that the work we
enter upon to-day is no trivial one, but full of solemn hope; the hope,
namely, that among you there may be found men wise enough to lead the
national passions towards the arts of peace, instead of the arts of war.
I say the work "we enter upon," because the first four lectures I gave
in the spring were wholly prefatory; and the following three only
defined for you methods of practice. To-day we begin the systematic
analysis and progressive study of our subject.
2. In general, the three great, or fine, Arts of Painting, Sculpture,
and Architecture, are thought of as distinct from the lower and more
mechanical formative arts, such as carpentry or pottery. But we cannot,
either verbally, or with any practical advantage, admit such
classification. How are we to distinguish painting on canvas from
painting on china?--or painting on china from painting on glass?--or
painting on glass from infusion of colour into any vitreous substance,
such as enamel?--or the infusion of colour into glass and enamel from
the infusion of colour into wool or silk, and weaving of pictures in
tapestry, or patterns in dress? You will find that although, in
ultimately accurate use of the word, painting must be held to mean only
the laying of a pigment on a surface with a soft instrument; yet, in
broad comparison of the functions of Art, we must conceive of one and
the same great artistic faculty, as governing _every mode of disposing
colours in a permanent relation on, or in, a solid substance_; whether
it be by tinting canvas, or dyeing stuffs; inlaying metals with fused
flint, or coating walls with coloured stone.
3. Similarly the word "Sculpture,"--though in ultimate accuracy it is to
be limited to the development of form in hard substances by cutting away
portions of their mass--in broad definition, must be held to signify
_the reduction of any shapeless mass of solid matter into an intended
shape_, whatever the consistence of the substance, or nature of the
instrument employed; whether we carve a granite mountain, or a piece of
box-wood, and whether we use, for our forming instrument axe, or hammer,
or chisel, or our own hands, or water to soften, or fire to
fuse;--whenever and however we bring a shapeless thing into shape, we do
so under the laws of the one great Art of Sculpture.
4. Having thus broadly defined painting and sculpture, we shall see that
there is, in the third place, a class of work separated from both, in a
specific manner, and including a great group of arts which neither, of
necessity, _tint_, nor for the sake of form merely, _shape_, the
substances they deal with; but construct or arrange them with a view to
the resistance of some external force. We construct, for instance, a
table with a flat top, and some support of prop, or leg, proportioned in
strength to such weights as the table is intended to carry. We construct
a ship out of planks, or plates of iron, with reference to certain
forces of impact to be sustained, and of inertia to be overcome; or we
construct a wall or roof with distinct reference to forces of pressure
and oscillation, to be sustained or guarded against; and therefore, in
every case, with especial consideration of the strength of our
materials, and the nature of that strength, elastic, tenacious, brittle,
and the like.
Now although this group of arts nearly always involves the putting of
two or more separate pieces together, we must not define it by that
accident. The blade of an oar is not less formed with reference to
external force than if it were made of many pieces; and the frame of a
boat, whether hollowed out of a tree-trunk, or constructed of planks
nailed together, is essentially the same piece of art; to be judged by
its buoyancy and capacity of progression. Still, from the most wonderful
piece of all architecture, the human skeleton, to this simple one,[107]
the ploughshare, on which it depends for its subsistence, _the putting
of two or more pieces together_ is curiously necessary to the
perfectness of every fine instrument; and the peculiar mechanical work