The Crown of Wild Olive
degrees, can you make out what this roughness means; nay, though here
(Plate III.) I magnify[112] one of the bronze plates of the gate to a
scale, which gives you the same advantage as if you saw it quite close,
in the reality,--you may still be obliged to me for the information,
that _this_ boss represents the Madonna asleep in her little bed, and
this smaller boss, the Infant Christ in His; and this at the top, a
cloud with an angel coming out of it, and these jagged bosses, two of
the Three Kings, with their crowns on, looking up to the star, (which is
intelligible enough I admit); but what this straggling, three-legged
boss beneath signifies, I suppose neither you nor I can tell, unless it
be the shepherd's dog, who has come suddenly upon the Kings with their
crowns on, and is greatly startled at them.
23. Farther, and much more definitely, the pleasantness of the surface
decoration is independent of structure; that is to say, of any
architectural requirement of stability. The greater part of the
sculpture here is exclusively ornamentation of a flat wall, or of door
panelling; only a small portion of the church front is thus treated, and
the sculpture has no more to do with the form of the building than a
piece of a lace veil would have, suspended beside its gates on a festal
day; the proportions of shaft and arch might be altered in a hundred
different ways, without diminishing their stability; and the pillars
would stand more safely on the ground than on the backs of these carved
animals.
24. I wish you especially to notice these points, because the false
theory that ornamentation should be merely decorated structure is so
pretty and plausible, that it is likely to take away your attention from
the far more important abstract conditions of design. Structure should
never be contradicted, and in the best buildings it is pleasantly
exhibited and enforced; in this very porch the joints of every stone are
visible, and you will find me in the Fifth Lecture insisting on this
clearness of its anatomy as a merit; yet so independent is the
mechanical structure of the true design, that when I begin my Lectures
on Architecture, the first building I shall give you as a standard will
be one in which the structure is wholly concealed. It will be the
Baptistry of Florence, which is, in reality, as much a buttressed chapel
with a vaulted roof, as the Chapter House of York--but round it, in
order to conceal that buttressed structure, (not to decorate, observe,
but to _conceal_) a flat external wall is raised; simplifying the whole
to a mere hexagonal box, like a wooden piece of Tunbridge ware, on the
surface of which the eye and intellect are to be interested by the
relations of dimension and curve between pieces of encrusting marble of
different colours, which have no more to do with the real make of the
building than the diaper of a Harlequin's jacket has to do with his
bones.
25. The sense of abstract proportion, on which the enjoyment of such a
piece of art entirely depends, is one of the aesthetic faculties which
nothing can develop but time and education. It belongs only to
highly-trained nations; and, among them, to their most strictly refined
classes, though the germs of it are found, as part of their innate
power, in every people capable of art. It has for the most part vanished
at present from the English mind, in consequence of our eager desire for
excitement, and for the kind of splendour that exhibits wealth, careless
of dignity; so that, I suppose, there are very few now even of our
best-trained Londoners who know the difference between the design of
Whitehall and that of any modern club-house in Pall-mall. The order and
harmony which, in his enthusiastic account of the Theatre of Epidaurus,
Pausanias insists on before beauty, can only be recognized by stern
order and harmony in our daily lives; and the perception of them is as
little to be compelled, or taught suddenly, as the laws of still finer
choice in the conception of dramatic incident which regulate poetic
sculpture.
26. And now, at last, I think, we can sketch out the subject before us
in a clear light. We have a structural art, divine, and human, of which
the investigation comes under the general term, Anatomy; whether the
junctions or joints be in mountains, or in branches of trees, or in
buildings, or in bones of animals. We have next a musical art, falling
into two distinct divisions--one using colours, the other masses, for
its elements of composition; lastly, we have an imitative art, concerned
with the representation of the outward appearances of things. And, for
many reasons, I think it best to begin with imitative Sculpture; that
being defined as _the art which, by the musical disposition of masses,
imitates anything of which the imitation is justly pleasant to us; and
does so in accordance with structural laws having due reference to the
materials employed_.
So that you see our task will involve the immediate inquiry what the
things are of which the imitation is justly pleasant to us: what, in few
words,--if we are to be occupied in the making of graven images--we
ought to like to make images _of_. Secondly, after having determined its
subject, what degree of imitation or likeness we ought to desire in our
graven image; and lastly, under what limitations demanded by structure
and material, such likeness may be obtained.
These inquiries I shall endeavour to pursue with you to some practical
conclusion, in my next four lectures, and in the sixth, I will briefly
sketch the actual facts that have taken place in the development of
sculpture by the two greatest schools of it that hitherto have existed
in the world.
27. The tenor of our next lecture then must be an inquiry into the real
nature of Idolatry; that is to say, the invention and service of Idols:
and, in the interval, may I commend to your own thoughts this question,
not wholly irrelevant, yet which I cannot pursue; namely, whether the
God to whom we have so habitually prayed for deliverance "from battle,
murder, and sudden death," _is_ indeed, seeing that the present state of
Christendom is the result of a thousand years' praying to that effect,
"as the gods of the heathen who were but idols;" or whether--(and
observe, one or other of these things _must_ be true)--whether our
prayers to Him have been, by this much, worse than Idolatry;--that
heathen prayer was true prayer to false gods; and our prayers have been
false prayers to the True One.
FOOTNOTES:
[107] I had a real ploughshare on my lecture table; but it would
interrupt the drift of the statements in the text too long if I
attempted here to illustrate by figures the relation of the coulter to
the share, and of the hard to the soft pieces of metal in the share
itself.
[108] A sphere of rock crystal, cut in Japan, enough imaginable by the
reader, without a figure.
[109] One of William Hunt's peaches; not, I am afraid, imaginable
altogether, but still less representable by figure.
[110] The crystal ball above mentioned.
[111] All grandest effects in mouldings may be, and for the most part
have been, obtained by rolls and cavettos of circular (segmental)
section. More refined sections, as that of the fluting of a Doric shaft,
are only of use near the eye and in beautiful stone; and the pursuit of
them was one of the many errors of later Gothic. The statement in the
text that the mouldings, even of best time, "have no real relation to
construction," is scarcely strong enough: they in fact contend with, and
deny the construction, their principal purpose seeming to be the
concealment of the joints of the voussoirs.
[112] Some of the most precious work done for me by my assistant Mr.
Burgess, during the course of these lectures, consisted in making
enlarged drawings from portions of photographs. Plate III. is engraved
from a drawing of his, enlarged from the original photograph of which
Plate I. is a reduction.
LECTURE II.
IDOLATRY.
_November, 1870._
28. Beginning with the simple conception of sculpture as the art of
fiction in solid substance, we are now to consider what its subjects
should be. What--having the gift of imagery--should we by preference
endeavour to image? A question which is, indeed, subordinate to the
deeper one--why we should wish to image anything at all.
29. Some years ago, having been always desirous that the education of
women should begin in learning how to cook, I got leave, one day, for a
little girl of eleven years old to exchange, much to her satisfaction,
her schoolroom for the kitchen. But as ill fortune would have it, there
was some pastry toward, and she was left unadvisedly in command of some
delicately rolled paste; whereof she made no pies, but an unlimited
quantity of cats and mice.
Now you may read the works of the gravest critics of art from end to
end; but you will find, at last, they can give you no other true account
of the spirit of sculpture than that it is an irresistible human
instinct for the making of cats and mice, and other imitable living
creatures, in such permanent form that one may play with the images at
leisure.
Play with them, or love them, or fear them, or worship them. The cat may
become the goddess Pasht, and the mouse, in the hand of the sculptured
king, enforce his enduring words "[Greek: es eme tis oreon eusebes
esto];" but the great mimetic instinct underlies all such purpose; and
is zooplastic,--life-shaping,--alike in the reverent and the impious.
30. Is, I say, and has been, hitherto; none of us dare say that it will
be. I shall have to show you hereafter that the greater part of the
technic energy of men, as yet, has indicated a kind of childhood; and
that the race becomes, if not more wise, at least more manly,[113] with
every gained century. I can fancy that all this sculpturing and painting
of ours may be looked back upon, in some distant time, as a kind of
doll-making, and that the words of Sir Isaac Newton may be smiled at no
more: only it will not be for stars that we desert our stone dolls, but
for men. When the day comes, as come it must, in which we no more deface
and defile God's image in living clay, I am not sure that we shall any
of us care so much for the images made of Him, in burnt clay.
31. But, hitherto, the energy of growth in any people may be almost
directly measured by their passion for imitative art; namely, for
sculpture, or for the drama, which is living and speaking sculpture, or,
as in Greece, for both; and in national as in actual childhood, it is
not merely the _making_, but the _making-believe_; not merely the acting
for the sake of the scene, but acting for the sake of acting, that is
delightful. And, of the two mimetic arts, the drama, being more
passionate, and involving conditions of greater excitement and luxury,
is usually in its excellence the sign of culminating strength in the
people; while fine sculpture, requiring always submission to severe law,
is an unfailing proof of their being in early and active progress.
_There is no instance of fine sculpture being produced by a nation
either torpid, weak, or in decadence._ Their drama may gain in grace and
wit; but their sculpture, in days of decline, is _always_ base.
32. If my little lady in the kitchen had been put in command of colours,
as well as of dough, and if the paste would have taken the colours, we
may be sure her mice would have been painted brown, and her cats
tortoise-shell; and this, partly indeed for the added delight and
prettiness of colour itself, but more for the sake of absolute
realization to her eyes and mind. Now all the early sculpture of the