Chapter IV: Part 4

On any morning of the year, how many pious supplications, do you suppose, are uttered throughout educated Europe for "light"? How many lips at least pronounce the word, and, perhaps, in the plurality of instances, with some distinct idea attached to it? It is true the speakers employ it only as a metaphor. But why is their language thus metaphorical? If they mean merely to ask for spiritual knowledge or guidance, why not say so plainly, instead of using this jaded figure of speech? No boy goes to his father when he wants to be taught, or helped, and asks his father to give him 'light.' He asks what he wants, advice or protection. Why are not we also content to ask our Father for what we want, in plain English?

The metaphor, you will answer, is put into our mouths, and felt to be a beautiful and necessary one.

I admit it. In your educational series, first of all examples of modern art, is the best engraving I could find of the picture which, founded on that idea of Christ's being the Giver of Light, contains, I believe, the most true and useful piece of religious vision which realistic art has yet embodied. But why is the metaphor so necessary, or, rather, how far is it a metaphor at all? Do you think the words 'Light of the World' mean only 'Teacher or Guide of the World'? When the Sun of Justice is said to rise with health in its wings, do you suppose the image only means the correction of error? Or does it even mean so much? The Light of Heaven is needed to do that perfectly. But what we are to pray for is the Light of the _World_; nay, the Light "that lighteth _every man that cometh into the world_."

116. You will find that it is no metaphor--nor has it ever been so.

To the Persian, the Greek, and the Christian, the sense of the power of the God of Light has been one and the same. That power is not merely in teaching or protecting, but in the enforcement of purity of body, and of equity or justice in the heart; and this, observe, not heavenly purity, nor final justice; but, now, and here, actual purity in the midst of the world's foulness,--practical justice in the midst of the world's iniquity. And the physical strength of the organ of sight,--the physical purity of the flesh, the actual love of sweet light and stainless colour,--are the necessary signs, real, inevitable, and visible, of the prevailing presence, with any nation, or in any house, of the "Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world."

117. _Physical_ purity;--actual love of sweet light, and of fair colour. This is one palpable sign, and an entirely needful one, that we have got what we pretend to pray for every morning. That, you will find, is the meaning of Apollo's war with the Python--of your own St. George's war with the dragon. You have got that battle stamped again on every sovereign in your pockets, but do you think the sovereigns are helping, at this instant, St. George in his battle? Once, on your gold of the Henrys' times, you had St. Michael and the dragon, and called your coins 'angels.' How much have they done lately, of angelic work, think you, in purifying the earth?

118. Purifying, literally, purging and cleansing. That is the first "sacred art" all men have to learn. And the words I deferred to the close of this lecture, about the proposed improvements in Oxford, are very few. Oxford is, indeed, capable of much improvement, but only by undoing the greater part of what has been done to it within the last twenty years; and, at present, the one thing that I would say to well-meaning persons is, 'For Heaven's sake--literally for Heaven's sake--let the place alone, and clean it.' I walked last week to Iffley--not having been there for thirty years. I did not know the church inside; I found it pitch-dark with painted glass of barbarous manufacture, and the old woman who showed it infinitely proud of letting me in at the front door instead of the side one. But close by it, not fifty yards down the hill, there was a little well--a holy well it should have been; beautiful in the recess of it, and the lovely ivy and weeds above it, had it but been cared for in a human way; but so full of frogs that you could not have dipped a cup in it without catching one.

What is the use of pretty painted glass in your churches when you have the plagues of Egypt outside of them?

119. I walked back from Iffley to Oxford by what was once the most beautiful approach to an academical city of any in Europe. Now it is a wilderness of obscure and base buildings. You think it a fine thing to go into Iffley church by the front door;--and you build cheap lodging-houses over all the approach to the chief university of English literature! That, forsooth, is your luminous cloister, and porch of Polygnotus to your temple of Apollo. And in the centre of that temple, at the very foot of the dome of the Radclyffe, between two principal colleges, the lane by which I walked from my own college half an hour ago, to this place,--Brasen-nose Lane--is left in a state as loathsome as a back-alley in the East end of London.

120. These, I suppose, are the signs of extending liberality, and disseminated advantages of education.

Gentlemen, if, as was lately said by a leading member of your Government, the function of a university be only to examine, it may indeed examine the whole mob of England in the midst of a dunghill; but it cannot teach the gentlemen of England in the midst of a dunghill; no, nor even the people of England. How many of her people it _ought_ to teach is a question. We think, now-a-days, our philosophy is to light every man that cometh into the world, and to light every man equally. Well, when indeed you give up all other commerce in this island, and, as in Bacon's "New Atlantis," only buy and sell to get God's first creature, which was light, there may be some equality of gain for us in that possession. But until then,--and we are very far from such a time--the light cannot be given to all men equally. Nay, it is becoming questionable whether, instead of being equally distributed to all, it may not be equally withdrawn from us all: whether the ideas of purity and justice,--of loveliness which is to sanctify our peace,--and of justice which is to sanctify our battle, are not vanishing from the purpose of our policy, and even from the conception of our education.

The uses, and the desire, of seclusion, of meditation, of restraint, and of correction--are they not passing from us in the collision of worldly interests, and restless contests of mean hope, and meaner fear? What light, what health, what peace, or what security,--youths of England--do you come here now to seek? In what sense do you receive--with what sincerity do you adopt for yourselves--the ancient legend of your schools, "Dominus illuminatio mea, et salus mea; quem timebo"?

121. Remember that the ancient theory on which this university was founded,--not the theory of any one founder, observe, nor even the concluded or expressed issue of the wisdom of many; but the tacit feeling by which the work and hope of all were united and completed--was, that England should gather from among her children a certain number of purest and best, whom she might train to become, each in their day of strength, her teachers and patterns in religion, her declarers and doers of justice in law and her leaders in battle. Bred, it might be, by their parents, in the fond poverty of learning, or amidst the traditions and discipline of illustrious houses,--in either manner separate, from their youth up, to their glorious offices--they came here to be kindled into the lights that were to be set on the hills of England, brightest of the pious, the loyal, and the brave. Whatever corruption blighted, whatever worldliness buried, whatever sin polluted their endeavour, this conception of its meaning remained; and was indeed so fulfilled in faithfulness, that to the men whose passions were tempered, and whose hearts confirmed, in the calm of these holy places, you, now living, owe all that is left to you of hope in heaven, and all of safety or honour that you have to trust and defend on earth.

Their children have forfeited, some by guilt, and many in folly, the leadership they inherited; and every man in England now is to do and to learn what is right in his own eyes. How much need, therefore, that we should learn first of all what eyes are; and what vision they ought to possess--science of sight granted only to clearness of soul; but granted in its fulness even to mortal eyes: for though, after the skin, worms may destroy their body, happy the pure in heart, for they, yet in their flesh, shall see the Light of Heaven, and know the will of God.

LECTURE VII.

THE RELATION TO ART OF THE SCIENCES OF INORGANIC FORM.

_February 9th, 1872._

122. I did not wish in my last lecture, after I had directed your attention to the special bearing of some of the principles I pleaded for, to enforce upon you any farther general conclusions. But it is necessary now to collect the gist of what I endeavoured to show you respecting the organs of sight; namely, that in proportion to the physical perfectness or clearness of them is the degree in which they are raised from the perception of prey to the perception of beauty and of affection. The imperfect and brutal instrument of the eye may be vivid with malignity, or wild with hunger, or manifoldly detective with microscopic exaggeration, assisting the ingenuity of insects with a multiplied and permanent monstrosity of all things round them; but the noble human sight, careless of prey, disdainful of minuteness, and reluctant to anger, becomes clear in gentleness, proud in reverence, and joyful in love. And finally, the physical splendour of light and colour, so far from being the perception of a mechanical force by a mechanical instrument, is an entirely spiritual consciousness, accurately and absolutely proportioned to the purity of the moral nature, and to the force of its natural and wise affections.

123. That was the sum of what I wished to show you in my last lecture; and observe, that what remains to me doubtful in these things,--and it is much--I do not trouble you with. Only what I know that on experiment you can ascertain for yourselves, I tell you, and illustrate, for the time, as well as I can. Experiments in art are difficult, and take years to try; you may at first fail in them, as you might in a chemical analysis; but in all the matters which in this place I shall urge on your attention I can assure you of the final results.

That, then, being the sum of what I could tell you with certainty respecting the methods of sight, I have next to assure you that this faculty of sight, disciplined and pure, is the only proper faculty which the graphic artist is to use in his inquiries into nature. His office is to show her appearances; his duty is to know them. It is not his duty, though it may be sometimes for his convenience, while it is always at his peril, that he knows more;--knows the _causes_ of appearances, or the essence of the things that produce them.

124. Once again, therefore, I must limit my application of the word science with respect to art. I told you that I did not mean by 'science' such knowledge as that triangles on equal bases and between parallels are equal, but such knowledge as that the stars in Cassiopeia are in the form of a _W_. But, farther still, it is not to be considered as science, for an artist, that they are stars at all. What _he_ has to know is that they are luminous points which twinkle in a certain manner, and are pale yellow, or deep yellow, and may be quite deceptively imitated at a certain distance by brass-headed nails. This he ought to know, and to remember accurately, and his art knowledge--the science, that is to say--of which his art is to be the reflection, is the sum of knowledges of this sort; his memory of the look of the sun and moon at such and such times, through such and such clouds; his memory of the look of the mountains,--of the look of sea,--of the look of human faces.

125. Perhaps you would not call that 'science' at all. It is no matter what either you or I call it. It _is_ science of a certain order of facts. Two summers ago, looking from Verona at sunset, I saw the mountains beyond the Lago di Garda of a strange blue, vivid and rich like the bloom of a damson. I never saw a mountain-blue of that particular quality before or since. My science as an artist consists in my knowing that sort of blue from every other sort, and in my perfect recollection that this particular blue had such and such a green associated with it in the near fields. I have nothing whatever to do with the atmospheric causes of the colour: that knowledge would merely occupy my brains wastefully, and warp my artistic attention and energy from their point. Or to take a simpler instance yet: Turner, in his early life, was sometimes good-natured, and would show people what he was about. He was one day making a drawing of Plymouth harbour, with some ships at the distance of a mile or two, seen against the light. Having shown this drawing to a naval officer, the naval officer observed with surprise, and objected with very justifiable indignation, that the ships of the line had no port-holes. "No," said Turner, "certainly not. If you will walk up to Mount Edgecumbe, and look at the ships against the sunset, you will find you can't see the port-holes." "Well, but," said the naval officer, still indignant, "you know the port-holes are there." "Yes," said Turner, "I know that well enough; but my business is to draw what I see, and not what I know is there."

126. Now, that is the law of all fine artistic work whatsoever; and, more than that, it is, on the whole, perilous to you, and undesirable, that you _should_ know what is there. If, indeed, you have so perfectly disciplined your sight that it cannot be influenced by prejudice;--if you are sure that none of your knowledge of what is there will be allowed to assert itself; and that you can reflect the ship as simply as the sea beneath it does, though you may know it with the intelligence of a sailor,--then, indeed, you may allow yourself the pleasure, and what will sometimes be the safeguard from error, of learning what ships or stars, or mountains, are in reality; but the ordinary powers of human perception are almost certain to be disturbed by the knowledge of the real nature of what they draw: and, until you are quite fearless of your faithfulness to the appearances of things, the less you know of their reality the better.

127. And it is precisely in this passive and naïve simplicity that art becomes, not only greatest in herself, but most useful to science. If she _knew_ anything of what she was representing, she would exhibit that partial knowledge with complacency; and miss the points beside it, and beyond it. Two painters draw the same mountain; the one has got unluckily into his head some curiosity about glacier marking; and the other has a theory of cleavage. The one will scratch his mountain all over;--the other split it to pieces; and both drawings will be equally useless for the purposes of honest science.

128. Any of you who chance to know my books cannot but be surprised at my saying these things; for, of all writers on art, I suppose there is no one who appeals so often as I do to physical science. But observe, I appeal as a critic of art, never as a master of it. Turner made drawings of mountains and clouds which the public said were absurd. I said, on the contrary, they were the only true drawings of mountains and clouds ever made yet: and I proved this to be so, as only it could be proved, by steady test of physical science: but Turner had drawn his mountains rightly, long before their structure was known to any geologist in Europe; and has painted perfectly truths of anatomy in clouds which I challenge any meteorologist in Europe to explain at this day.

129. And indeed I was obliged to leave "Modern Painters" incomplete, or, rather, as a mere sketch of intention, in analysis of the forms of cloud and wave, because I had not scientific data enough to appeal to. Just reflect for an instant how absolutely whatever has been done in art to represent these most familiar, yet most spectral forms of cloud--utterly inorganic, yet, by spiritual ordinance, in their kindness fair, and in their anger frightful,--how all that has yet been done to represent them, from the undulating bands of blue and white which give to heraldry its nebule bearing, to the finished and deceptive skies of Turner, has been done without one syllable of help from the lips of science.[F]

[F] Rubens' rainbow, in the Loan Exhibition this year, was of dull
blue, _darker_ than the sky, in a scene lighted from the side of
the rainbow. Rubens is not to be blamed for ignorance of optics,
but for never having so much as looked at a rainbow carefully: and
I do not believe that my friend Mr. Alfred Hunt, whose study of
rainbow, in the rooms of the Water Colour Society last year, was
unrivalled, for vividness and truth, by any I know, learned how to
paint it by studying optics.

130. The rain which flooded our fields the Sunday before last, was followed, as you will remember, by bright days, of which Tuesday the 20th was, in London, notable for the splendour, towards the afternoon, of its white cumulus clouds. There has been so much black east wind lately, and so much fog and artificial gloom, besides, that I find it is actually some two years since I last saw a noble cumulus cloud under full light. I chanced to be standing under the Victoria Tower at Westminster, when the largest mass of them floated past, that day, from the north-west; and I was more impressed than ever yet by the awfulness of the cloud-form, and its unaccountableness, in the present state of our knowledge. The Victoria Tower, seen against it, had no magnitude: it was like looking at Mont Blanc over a lamp-post. The domes of cloud-snow were heaped as definitely; their broken flanks were as grey and firm as rocks, and the whole mountain, of a compass and height in heaven which only became more and more inconceivable as the eye strove to ascend it, was passing behind the tower with a steady march, whose swiftness must in reality have been that of a tempest: yet, along all the ravines of vapour, precipice kept pace with precipice, and not one thrust another.

131. What is it that hews them out? Why is the blue sky pure there,--cloud solid here; and edged like marble: and why does the state of the blue sky pass into the state of cloud, in that calm advance?

It is true that you can more or less imitate the forms of cloud with explosive vapour or steam; but the steam melts instantly, and the explosive vapour dissipates itself. The cloud, of perfect form, proceeds unchanged. It is not an explosion, but an enduring and advancing presence. The more you think of it, the less explicable it will become to you.

132. That this should yet be unexplained in the kingdom of the air is, however, no marvel, since aspects of a similar kind are unexplained in the earth, which we tread, and in the water which we drink and wash with. You seldom pass a day without receiving some pleasure from the cloudings in marble; can you explain how the stone was clouded? You certainly do not pass a day without washing your hands. Can you explain the frame of a soap-bubble?

133. I have allowed myself, by way of showing at once what I wanted to come to, to overlook the proper arrangement of my subject, and I must draw back a little.

For all his own purposes, merely graphic, we say, if an artist's eye is fine and faithful, the fewer points of science he has in his head, the better. But for purposes _more_ than graphic, in order that he may feel towards things as he should, and choose them as _we_ should, he ought to know something about them; and if he is quite sure that he can receive the science of them without letting himself become uncandid and narrow in observation, it is very desirable that he should be acquainted with a little of the alphabet of structure,--just as much as may quicken and certify his observation, without prejudicing it. Cautiously, therefore, and receiving it as a perilous indulgence, he may venture to learn, perhaps as much astronomy as may prevent his carelessly putting the new moon wrong side upwards; and as much botany as will prevent him from confusing, which I am sorry to say Turner did, too often, Scotch firs with stone pines. He may concede so much to geology as to choose, of two equally picturesque views, one that illustrates rather than conceals the structure of a crag: and perhaps, once or twice in his life, a portrait painter might advantageously observe how unlike a skull is to a face. And for you, who are to use your drawing as one element in general education, it is desirable that physical science should assist in the attainment of truth which a real painter seizes by practice of eye.

134. For this purpose I shall appeal to your masters in science to furnish us, as they have leisure, with some simple and readable accounts of the structure of things which we have to draw continually. Such scientific accounts will not usually much help us to draw them, but will make the drawing, when done, far more valuable to us.

I have told you, for instance, that nobody--at least, no painter--can at present explain the structure of a bubble. To know that structure will not help you to draw sea-foam, but it will make you look at sea-foam with greater interest.

I am not able now to watch the course of modern science, and may perhaps be in error in thinking that the frame of a bubble is still unexplained. But I have not yet met, by any chance, with an account of the forces which, under concussion, arrange the particles of a fluid into a globular film; though, from what I know of cohesion, gravity, and the nature of the atmosphere, I can make some shift to guess at the kind of action that takes place in forming a single bubble. But how one bubble absorbs another without breaking it; or what exact methods of tension prepare for the change of form, and establish it in an instant, I am utterly at a loss to conceive.

Here, I think, then, is one familiar matter which up to the possible point, science might condescendingly interpret for us. The exhaustion of the film in preparation for its change: the determination of the smaller bubble to yield itself up to the larger; the instantaneous flash into the new shape, and the swift adjustment of the rectangular lines of intersection in the marvellous vaulting--all this I want to be explained to us, so that, if we cannot understand it altogether, we may at least know exactly how far we do, and how far we do not.

135. And, next to the laws of the formation of a bubble, I want to see, in simple statement, those of the formation of a bottle. Namely, the laws of its resistance to fracture, from without and within, by concussion or explosion; and the due relations of form to thickness of material; so that, putting the problem in a constant form, we may know, out of a given quantity of material, how to make the strongest bottle under given limitations as to shape. For instance,--you have so much glass given you: your bottle is to hold two pints, to be flat-bottomed, and so narrow and long in the neck that you can grasp it with your hand. What will be its best ultimate form?

136. Probably, if you thought it courteous, you would laugh at me just now; and, at any rate, are thinking to yourselves that _this_ art problem at least needs no scientific investigation, having been practically solved, long ago, by the imperative human instinct for the preservation of bottled stout. But you are only feeling now, gentlemen, and recognizing in one instance, what I tell you of all. Every scientific investigation is, in the same sense as this would be, useless to the trained master of any art. To the soap-bubble blower, and glass-blower,--to the pot-maker and bottle-maker,--if dexterous craftsmen, your science is of no account; and the imp of their art may be imagined as always looking triumphantly and contemptuously, out of its successfully-produced bottle, on the vain analysis of centrifugal impulse and inflating breath.

137. Nevertheless, in the present confusion of instinct and opinion as to beautiful form, it is desirable to have these two questions more accurately dealt with. For observe what they branch into. The coloured segments of globe out of which foam is constituted, are portions of spherical vaults constructed of fluent particles. You cannot have the principles of spherical vaulting put in more abstract terms.

Then considering the arch as the section of a vault, the greater number of Gothic arches may be regarded as the intersections of two spherical vaults.

Simple Gothic foliation is merely the triple, quadruple, or variously multiple repetition of such intersection.

And the beauty--(observe this carefully)--the beauty of Gothic arches, and of their foliation, always involves reference to the strength of their structure; but only to their structure as _self-sustaining; not as sustaining superincumbent weight_. In the most literal of senses, "the earth hath bubbles as the water hath; and these are of them."

138. What do you think made Michael Angelo look back to the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, saying, "Like thee I will not build one, better than thee I cannot"? To you or to me there is nothing in that dome different from hundreds of others. Which of you, who have been at Florence, can tell me honestly he saw anything wonderful in it? But Michael Angelo knew the exact proportion of thickness to weight and curvature which enabled it to stand as securely as a mountain of adamant, though it was only a film of clay, as frail, in proportion to its bulk, as a sea shell. Over the massy war towers of the city it floated; fragile, yet without fear. "Better than thee I cannot."

139. Then think what the investigation of the bottle branches into, joined with that of its necessary companion, the cup. There is a sketch for you of the cup of cups, the pure Greek κάνθαρος, which is always in the hand of Dionusos, as the thunderbolt is in that of Zeus. Learn but to draw that thoroughly, and you won't have much more to learn of abstract form; for the investigation of the kinds of line that limit this will lead you into all the practical geometry of nature; the ellipses of her sea-bays in perspective; the parabolas of her waterfalls and fountains in profile; the catenary curves of their falling festoons in front; the infinite variety of accelerated or retarded curvature in every condition of mountain debris. But do you think mere science can measure for you any of these things? That book on the table is one of the four volumes of Sir William Hamilton's "Greek Vases." He has measured every important vase vertically and horizontally, with precision altogether admirable, and which may, I hope, induce you to have patience with me in the much less complex, though even more scrupulous, measurements which I shall require on my own examples. Yet English pottery remains precisely where it was, in spite of all this investigation. Do you fancy a Greek workman ever made a vase by measurement? He dashed it from his hand on the wheel, and it was beautiful: and a Venetian glass-blower swept you a curve of crystal from the end of his pipe; and Reynolds or Tintoret swept you a curve of colour from their pencils, as a musician the cadence of a note, unerring, and to be measured, if you please, afterwards, with the exactitude of Divine law.

140. But, if the truth and beauty of art are thus beyond attainment by help of science, how much more its invention? I must defer what I have chiefly to say on this head till next lecture; but to-day I can illustrate, simply, the position of invention with respect to science in one very important group of inorganic forms--those of drapery.

141. If you throw at random over a rod a piece of drapery of any material which will fall into graceful folds, you will get a series of sinuous folds in catenary curves: and any given disposition of these will be nearly as agreeable as any other; though, if you throw the stuff on the rod a thousand times, it will not fall twice alike.

142. But suppose, instead of a straight rod, you take a beautiful nude statue, and throw the piece of linen over that. You may encumber and conceal its form altogether; you may entirely conceal portions of the limbs, and show others; or you may leave indications, under the thin veil, of the contours which are hidden; but in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred you will wish the drapery taken off again; you will feel that the folds are in some sort discrepant and harmful, and eagerly snatch them away. However passive the material, however softly accommodated to the limbs, the wrinklings will always look foreign to the form, like the drip of a heavy shower of rain falling off it, and will load themselves in the hollows uncomfortably. You will have to pull them about; to stretch them one way, loosen them in another, and supply the quantity of government which a living person would have given to the dress, before it becomes at all pleasing to you.

143. Doing your best, you will still not succeed to your mind, provided you have, indeed, a mind worth pleasing. No adjustment that you can make, on the quiet figure, will give any approximation to the look of drapery which has previously accommodated itself to the action which brought the figure into the position in which it stays. On a really living person, gracefully dressed, and who has paused from graceful motion, you will get, again and again, arrangements of fold which you can admire: but they will not remain to be copied, the first following movement alters all. If you had your photographic plate ready and could photograph--I don't know if it has been tried--girls, like waves, as they move, you would get what was indeed lovely; and yet, when you compared even such results with fine sculpture, you would see that there was something wanting;--that, in the deepest sense, _all_ was yet wanting.

144. Yet this is the most that the plurality of artists can do, or think of doing. They draw the nude figure with careful anatomy; they put their model or their lay figure into the required position; they arrange draperies on it to their mind, and paint them from the reality. All such work is absolutely valueless,--worse than valueless in the end of it, blinding us to the qualities of fine work.

In true design it is in this matter of drapery as in all else. There is not a fold too much, and all that are given aid the expression, whether of movement or character. Here is a bit of Greek sculpture, with many folds; here is a bit of Christian sculpture with few. From the many, not one could be removed without harm, and to the few, not one could be added. This alone is art, and no science will ever enable you to do this, but the poetic and fabric instincts only.

145. Nevertheless, however far above science, your work must comply with all the requirements of science. The first thing you have to ask is, Is it scientifically right? That is still nothing, but it is essential. In modern imitations of Gothic work the artists think it religious to be wrong, and that Heaven will be propitious only to saints whose stoles or petticoats stand or fall into incredible angles.

All that nonsense I will soon get well out of your heads by enabling you to make accurate studies from real drapery, so that you may be able to detect in a moment whether the folds in any design are natural and true to the form, or artificial and ridiculous.

146. But this, which is the science of drapery, will never do more than guard you in your first attempts in the art of it. Nay, when once you have mastered the elements of such science, the most sickening of all work to you will be that in which the draperies are all right,--and nothing else is. In the present state of our schools one of the chief mean merits against which I shall have to warn you is the imitation of what milliners admire: nay, in many a piece of the best art I shall have to show you that the draperies are, to some extent, intentionally ill-done, _lest_ you should look at them. Yet, through every complexity of desirableness, and counter-peril, hold to the constant and simple law I have always given you--that the best work must be right in the beginning, and lovely in the end.

147. Finally, observe that what is true respecting these simple forms of drapery is true of all other inorganic form. It must become organic under the artist's hand by his invention. As there must not be a fold in a vestment too few or too many, there must not, in noble landscape, be a fold in a mountain, too few or too many. As you will never get from real linen cloth, by copying it ever so faithfully, the drapery of a noble statue, so you will never get from real mountains, copy them never so faithfully, the forms of noble landscape. Anything more beautiful than the photographs of the Valley of Chamouni, now in your print-sellers' windows, cannot be conceived. For geographical and geological purposes they are worth anything; for art purposes, worth--a good deal less than zero. You may learn much from them, and will mislearn more. But in Turner's "Valley of Chamouni" the mountains have not a fold too much, nor too little. There are no such mountains at Chamouni: they are the ghosts of eternal mountains, such as have been, and shall be, for evermore.

148. So now in sum, for I may have confused you by illustration,--

I. You are, in drawing, to try only to represent the appearances of things, never what you know the things to be.

II. Those appearances you are to test by the appliance of the scientific laws relating to aspect; and to learn, by accurate measurement, and the most fixed attention, to represent with absolute fidelity.

III. Having learned to represent actual appearances faithfully, if you have any human faculty of your own, visionary appearances will take place to you which will be nobler and more true than any actual or material appearances; and the realization of these is the function of every fine art, which is founded absolutely, therefore, in truth, and consists absolutely in imagination. And once more we may conclude with, but now using them in a deeper sense, the words of our master--"The best in this kind are but shadows."

* * * * *

It is to be our task, gentlemen, to endeavour that they may be at least so much.

LECTURE VIII.

THE RELATION TO ART OF THE SCIENCES OF ORGANIC FORM.

_March 2nd, 1872._

149. I have next in order to speak of the relation of art to science, in dealing with its own principal subject--organic form, as the expression of life. And, as in my former lecture, I will tell you at once what I wish chiefly to enforce upon you.

First,--but this I shall have no time to dwell upon,--That the true power of art must be founded on a general knowledge of organic nature, not of the human frame only.

Secondly.--That in representing this organic nature, quite as much as in representing inanimate things, Art has nothing to do with structures, causes, or absolute facts; but only with appearances.

Thirdly.--That in representing these appearances, she is more hindered than helped by the knowledge of things which do not externally appear; and therefore, that the study of anatomy generally, whether of plants, animals, or man, is an impediment to graphic art.

Fourthly.--That especially in the treatment and conception of the human form, the habit of contemplating its anatomical structure is not only a hindrance, but a degradation; and farther yet, that even the study of the external form of the human body, more exposed than it may be healthily and decently in daily life, has been essentially destructive to every school of art in which it has been practised.

150. These four statements I undertake, in the course of our future study, gradually to confirm to you. In a single lecture I, of course, have time to do little more than clearly state and explain them.

First, I tell you that art should take cognizance of all living things, and know them, so as to be able to name, that is to say, in the truest distinctive way, to describe them. The Creator daily brings, before the noblest of His creatures, every lower creature, that whatsoever Man calls it, may be the name thereof.

Secondly.--In representing, nay, in thinking of, and caring for, these beasts, man has to think of them essentially with their skins on them, and with their souls in them. He is to know how they are spotted, wrinkled, furred, and feathered: and what the look of them is, in the eyes; and what grasp, or cling, or trot, or pat, in their paws and claws. He is to take every sort of view of them, in fact, except one,--the Butcher's view. He is never to think of them as bones and meat.

Thirdly.--In the representation of their appearance, the knowledge of bones and meat, of joint and muscle, is more a hindrance than a help.

Lastly.--With regard to the human form, such knowledge is a degradation as well as a hindrance; and even the study of the nude is injurious, beyond the limits of honour and decency in daily life.

Those are my four positions. I will not detain you by dwelling on the first two--that we should know every sort of beast, and know it with its skin on it, and its soul within it. What you feel to be a paradox--perhaps you think an incredible and insolent paradox--is my telling you that you will be hindered from doing this by the study of anatomy. I address myself, therefore, only to the last two points.

151. Among your standard engravings, I have put that of the picture by Titian, in the Strozzi Palace, of a little Strozzi maiden feeding her dog. I am going to put in the Rudimentary Series, where you can always get at it (R. 125), this much more delightful, though not in all points standard, picture by Reynolds, of an infant daughter of George the Third's, with her Skye terrier.

I have no doubt these dogs are the authentic pets, given in as true portraiture as their mistresses; and that the little Princess of Florence and Princess of England were both shown in the company which, at that age, they best liked;--the elder feeding her favourite, and the baby with her arms about the neck of hers.

But the custom of putting either the dog, or some inferior animal, to be either in contrast, or modest companionship, with the nobleness of human form and thought, is a piece of what may be called mental comparative anatomy, which has its beginning very far back in art indeed. One of quite the most interesting Greek vases in the British Museum is that of which the painting long went under the title of "Anacreon and his Dog." It is a Greek lyric poet, singing with lifted head, in the action given to Orpheus and Philammon in their moments of highest inspiration; while, entirely unaffected by and superior to the music, there walks beside him a sharp-nosed and curly-tailed dog, painted in what the exclusive admirers of Greek art would, I suppose, call an ideal manner; that is to say, his tail is more like a display of fireworks than a tail; but the ideal evidently founded on the material existence of a charming, though supercilious, animal not unlike the one which is at present the chief solace of my labours in Oxford, Dr. Acland's dog Bustle. I might go much farther back than this; but at all events, from the time of the golden dog of Pandareos, the fawn of Diana, and the eagle, owl, and peacock of the great Greek gods, you find a succession of animal types--centralized in the Middle Ages, of course, by the hound and the falcon--used in art either to symbolize, or contrast with, dignity in human persons. In modern portraiture, the custom has become vulgarized by the anxiety of everybody who sends their picture, or their children's, to the Royal Academy, to have it demonstrated to the public by the exhibition of a pony, and a dog with a whip in its mouth, that they live, at the proper season, in a country house. But by the greater masters the thing is done always with a deep sense of the mystery of the comparative existences of living creatures, and of the methods of vice and virtue exhibited by them. Albert Dürer scarcely ever draws a scene in the life of the Virgin, without putting into the foreground some idle cherubs at play with rabbits or kittens; and sometimes lets his love of the grotesque get entirely the better of him, as in the engraving of the Madonna with the monkey. Veronese disturbs the interview of the queen of Sheba with Solomon, by the petulance of the queen of Sheba's Blenheim spaniel, whom Solomon had not treated with sufficient respect; and when Veronese is introduced himself, with all his family, to the Madonna, I am sorry to say that his own pet dog turns its back to the Madonna, and walks out of the room.

152. But among all these symbolic playfulnesses of the higher masters, there is not one more perfect than this study by Reynolds of the infant English Princess with her wire-haired terrier. He has put out his whole strength to show the infinite differences, yet the blessed harmonies, between the human and the lower nature. First, having a blue-eyed,[G] soft baby to paint, he gives its full face, as round as may be, and rounds its eyes to complete openness, because somebody is coming whom it does not know. But it opens its eyes in quiet wonder, and is not disturbed, but behaves as a princess should. Beside this soft, serenely-minded baby, Reynolds has put the roughest and roughest-minded dog he could think of. Instead of the full round eyes, you have only the dark places in the hair where you know the terrier's eyes must be--sharp enough, if you could see them--and very certainly seeing you, but not at all wondering at you, like the baby's. For the terrier has instantly made up his mind about you; and above all, that you have no business there; and is growling and snarling in his fiercest manner, though without moving from his mistress's side, or from under her arm. You have thus the full contrast between the grace and true charm of the child, who "thinketh no evil" of you, and the uncharitable narrowness of nature in the grown-up dog of the world, who thinks nothing but evil of you. But the dog's virtue and faithfulness are not told less clearly; the baby evidently uses the creature just as much for a pillow as a playmate;--buries its arm in the rough hair of it with a loving confidence, half already converting itself to protection: and baby will take care of dog, and dog of baby, through all chances of time and fortune.

[G] I have not seen the picture: in the engraving the tint of the
eyes would properly represent grey or blue.

153. Now the exquisiteness with which the painter has applied all his skill in composition, all his dexterity in touch of pencil, and all his experience of the sources of expression, to complete the rendering of his comparison, cannot, in any of the finest subtleties of it, be explained; but the first steps of its science may be easily traced; and with little pains you may see how a simple and large mass of white is opposed to a rugged one of grey; how the child's face is put in front light, that no shadow may detract from the brightness which makes her, as in Arabian legends, "a princess like to the full moon"--how, in this halo, the lips and eyes are brought out in deep and rich colour, while scarcely a gleam of reflection is allowed to disturb the quietness of the eyes;--(the terrier's, you feel, would glitter enough, if you could see them, and flash back in shallow fire; but the princess's eyes are thinking, and do not flash;)--how the quaint cap surrounds, with its not wholly painless formalism, the courtly and patient face, opposed to the rugged and undressed wild one; and how the easy grace of soft limb and rounded neck is cast, in repose, against the uneasily gathered up crouching of the short legs, and petulant shrug of the eager shoulders, in the ignobler creature.

154. Now, in his doing of all this, Sir Joshua was thinking of, and 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.