The Crown of Wild Olive
13. Returning now to the very elementary form in which the appeal to our
aesthetic virtue is made in our breakfast-plate, you notice that there
are two distinct kinds of pleasantness attempted. One by hues of colour;
the other by proportions of space. I have called these the musical
elements of the arts relating to sight; and there are indeed two
complete sciences, one of the combinations of colour, and the other of
the combinations of line and form, which might each of them separately
engage us in as intricate study as that of the science of music. But of
the two, the science of colour is, in the Greek sense, the more musical,
being one of the divisions of the Apolline power; and it is so
practically educational, that if we are not using the faculty for colour
to discipline nations, they will infallibly use it themselves as a means
of corruption. Both music and colour are naturally influences of peace;
but in the war trumpet, and the war shield, in the battle song and
battle standard, they have concentrated by beautiful imagination the
cruel passions of men; and there is nothing in all the Divina Commedia
of history more grotesque, yet more frightful, than the fact that, from
the almost fabulous period when the insanity and impiety of war wrote
themselves in the symbols of the shields of the Seven against Thebes,
colours have been the sign and stimulus of the most furious and fatal
passions that have rent the nations: blue against green, in the decline
of the Roman Empire; black against white, in that of Florence; red
against white, in the wars of the Royal houses in England; and at this
moment, red against white, in the contest of anarchy and loyalty, in all
the world.
14. On the other hand, the directly ethical influence of colour in the
sky, the trees, flowers, and coloured creatures round us, and in our own
various arts massed under the one name of painting, is so essential and
constant that we cease to recognize it, because we are never long enough
altogether deprived of it to feel our need; and the mental diseases
induced by the influence of corrupt colour are as little suspected, or
traced to their true source, as the bodily weaknesses resulting from
atmospheric miasmata.
15. The second musical science which belongs peculiarly to sculpture
(and to painting, so far as it represents form), consists in the
disposition of beautiful masses. That is to say, beautiful surfaces
limited by beautiful lines. Beautiful _surfaces_, observe; and remember
what is noted in my fourth lecture of the difference between a space and
a mass. If you have at any time examined carefully, or practised from,
the drawings of shells placed in your copying series, you cannot but
have felt the difference in the grace between the aspects of the same
line, when enclosing a rounded or unrounded space. The exact science of
sculpture is that of the relations between outline and the solid form it
limits; and it does not matter whether that relation be indicated by
drawing or carving, so long as the expression of solid form is the
mental purpose; it is the science always of the beauty of relation in
three dimensions. To take the simplest possible line of continuous
limit--the circle: the flat disc enclosed by it may indeed be made an
element of decoration, though a very meagre one but its relative mass,
the ball, being gradated in three dimensions, is always delightful.
Here[110] is at once the simplest, and in mere patient mechanism, the
most skilful, piece of sculpture I can possibly show you,--a piece of
the purest rock-crystal, chiselled, (I believe, by mere toil of hand,)
into a perfect sphere. Imitating nothing, constructing nothing;
sculpture for sculpture's sake, of purest natural substance into
simplest primary form.
16. Again. Out of the nacre of any mussel or oyster-shell you might cut,
at your pleasure, any quantity of small flat circular discs of the
prettiest colour and lustre. To some extent, such tinsel or foil of
shell _is_ used pleasantly for decoration. But the mussel or oyster
becoming itself an unwilling modeller, agglutinates its juice into three
dimensions, and the fact of the surface being now geometrically
gradated, together with the savage instinct of attributing value to what
is difficult to obtain, make the little boss so precious in men's sight
that wise eagerness of search for the kingdom of heaven can be likened
to their eagerness of search for _it_; and the gates of Paradise can be
no otherwise rendered so fair to their poor intelligence, as by telling
them that every several gate was of "one pearl."
17. But take note here. We have just seen that the sum of the perceptive
faculty is expressed in those words of Aristotle's "to take pleasure
rightly" or straightly--[Greek: chairein orthos]. Now, it is not
possible to do the direct opposite of that,--to take pleasure
iniquitously or obliquely--[Greek: chairein adikos] or [Greek:
skolios]--more than you do in enjoying a thing because your neighbour
cannot get it. You may enjoy a thing legitimately because it is rare,
and cannot be seen often, (as you do a fine aurora, or a sunset, or an
unusually lovely flower); that is Nature's way of stimulating your
attention. But if you enjoy it because your neighbour cannot have
it--and, remember, all value attached to pearls more than glass beads,
is merely and purely for that cause,--then you rejoice through the worst
of idolatries, covetousness; and neither arithmetic, nor writing, nor
any other so-called essential of education, is now so vitally necessary
to the population of Europe, as such acquaintance with the principles of
intrinsic value, as may result in the iconoclasm of jewellery; and in
the clear understanding that we are not in that instinct, civilized, but
yet remain wholly savage, so far as we care for display of this selfish
kind.
You think, perhaps, I am quitting my subject, and proceeding, as it is
too often with appearance of justice alleged against me, into irrelevant
matter. Pardon me; the end, not only of these lectures, but of my whole
professorship, would be accomplished,--and far more than that,--if only
the English nation could be made to understand that the beauty which is
indeed to be a joy for ever, must be a joy for all; and that though the
idolatry may not have been wholly divine which sculptured gods, the
idolatry is wholly diabolic, which, for vulgar display, sculptures
diamonds.
18. To go back to the point under discussion. A pearl, or a glass bead,
may owe its pleasantness in some degree to its lustre as well as to its
roundness. But a mere and simple ball of unpolished stone is enough for
sculpturesque value. You may have noticed that the quatrefoil used in
the Ducal Palace of Venice owes its complete loveliness in distant
effect to the finishing of its cusps. The extremity of the cusp is a
mere ball of Istrian marble; and consider how subtle the faculty of
sight must be, since it recognizes at any distance, and is gratified by,
the mystery of the termination of cusp obtained by the gradated light on
the ball.
In that Venetian tracery this simplest element of sculptured form is
used sparingly, as the most precious that can be employed to finish the
facade. But alike in our own, and the French, central Gothic, the
ball-flower is lavished on every line--and in your St. Mary's spire, and
the Salisbury spire, and the towers of Notre Dame of Paris, the rich
pleasantness of decoration,--indeed, their so-called "decorated
style,"--consists only in being daintily beset with stone balls. It is
true the balls are modified into dim likeness of flowers; but do you
trace the resemblance to the rose in their distant, which is their
intended effect?
19. But farther, let the ball have motion; then the form it generates
will be that of a cylinder. You have, perhaps, thought that pure Early
English Architecture depended for its charm on visibility of
construction. It depends for its charm altogether on the abstract
harmony of groups of cylinders,[111] arbitrarily bent into mouldings,
and arbitrarily associated as shafts, having no _real_ relation to
construction whatsoever, and a theoretical relation so subtle that none
of us had seen it, till Professor Willis worked it out for us.
20. And now, proceeding to analysis of higher sculpture, you may have
observed the importance I have attached to the porch of San Zenone, at
Verona, by making it, among your standards, the first of the group which
is to illustrate the system of sculpture and architecture founded on
faith in a future life. That porch, fortunately represented in the
photograph, from which Plate I. has been engraved, under a clear and
pleasant light, furnishes you with examples of sculpture of every kind
from the flattest incised bas-relief to solid statues, both in marble
and bronze. And the two points I have been pressing upon you are
conclusively exhibited here, namely,--(1). That sculpture is essentially
the production of a pleasant bossiness or roundness of surface; (2) that
the pleasantness of that bossy condition to the eye is irrespective of
imitation on one side, and of structure on the other.
21. (1.) Sculpture is essentially the production of a pleasant bossiness
or roundness of surface.
If you look from some distance at these two engravings of Greek coins,
(place the book open so that you can see the opposite plate three or
four yards off,) you will find the relief on each of them simplifies
itself into a pearl-like portion of a sphere, with exquisitely gradated
light on its surface. When you look at them nearer, you will see that
each smaller portion into which they are divided--cheek, or brow, or
leaf, or tress of hair--resolves itself also into a rounded or
undulated surface, pleasant by gradation of light. Every several surface
is delightful in itself, as a shell, or a tuft of rounded moss, or the
bossy masses of distant forest would be. That these intricately
modulated masses present some resemblance to a girl's face, such as the
Syracusans imagined that of the water-goddess Arethusa, is entirely a
secondary matter; the primary condition is that the masses shall be
beautifully rounded, and disposed with due discretion and order.
22. (2.) It is difficult for you, at first, to feel this order and
beauty of surface, apart from the imitation. But you can see there is a
pretty disposition of, and relation between, the projections of a
fir-cone, though the studded spiral imitates nothing. Order exactly the
same in kind, only much more complex; and an abstract beauty of surface
rendered definite by increase and decline of light--(for every curve of
surface has its own luminous law, and the light and shade on a parabolic
solid differs, specifically, from that on an elliptical or spherical
one)--it is the essential business of the sculptor to obtain; as it is
the essential business of a painter to get good colour, whether he
imitates anything or not. At a distance from the picture, or carving,
where the things represented become absolutely unintelligible, we must
yet be able to say, at a glance, "That is good painting, or good
carving."
And you will be surprised to find, when you try the experiment, how much
the eye must instinctively judge in this manner. Take the front of San
Zenone for instance, Plate I. You will find it impossible without a
lens, to distinguish in the bronze gates, and in great part of the wall,
anything that their bosses represent. You cannot tell whether the
sculpture is of men, animals, or trees; only you feel it to be composed
of pleasant projecting masses; you acknowledge that both gates and wall
are, somehow, delightfully roughened; and only afterwards, by slow