48. But it is provoking to me that the image of this child mingles itself now with Chaucer's; for I should like truly to know what Chaucer means by his sand-hill. Not but that this is just one of those enigmatical pieces of teaching which we have made up our minds not to be troubled with, since it may evidently mean just what we like. Sometimes I would fain have it to mean the ghostly sand of the horologe of the world: and I think that the pale figure is seated on the recording heap, which rises slowly, and ebbs in giddiness, and flows again, and rises, tottering; and still she sees, falling beside her, the never-ending stream of phantom sand. Sometimes I like to think that she is seated on the sand because she is herself the Spirit of Staying, and victor over all things that pass and change;—quicksand of the desert in moving pillar; quicksand of the sea in moving floor; roofless all, and unabiding, but she abiding;—to herself, her home. And sometimes I think, though I do not like to think (neither did Chaucer mean this, for he always meant the lovely thing first, not the low one), that she is seated on her sand-heap as the only treasure to be gained by human toil; and that the little ant-hill, where the best of us creep to and fro, bears to angelic eyes, in the patientest gathering of its galleries, only the aspect of a little heap of dust; while for the worst of us, the heap, still lower by the leveling of those winged surveyors, is high enough, nevertheless, to overhang, and at last to close in judgment, on the seventh day, over the journeyers to the fortunate Islands; while to their dying eyes, through the mirage, "the city sparkles like a grain of salt."

49. But of course it does not in the least matter what it means. All that matters specially to us in Chaucer's vision, is that, next to Patience (as the reader will find by looking at the context in the "Assembly of Foules"), were "Beheste" and "Art;"—Promise, that is, and Art: and that, although these visionary powers are here waiting only in one of the outer courts of Love, and the intended patience is here only the long-suffering of love; and the intended beheste, its promise; and the intended art, its cunning,—the same powers companion each other necessarily in the courts and antechamber of every triumphal home of man. I say triumphal home, for, indeed, triumphal arches which you pass under, are but foolish things, and may be nailed together any day, out of pasteboard and filched laurel; but triumphal doors, which you can enter in at, with living laurel crowning the Lares, are not so easy of access: and outside of them waits always this sad portress, Patience; that is to say, the submission to the eternal laws of Pain and Time, and acceptance of them as inevitable, smiling at the grief. So much pains you shall take—so much time you shall wait: that is the Law. Understand it, honor it; with peace of heart accept the pain, and attend the hours; and as the husbandman in his waiting, you shall see, first the blade, and then the ear, and then the laughing of the valleys. But refuse the Law, and seek to do your work in your own time, or by any serpentine way to evade the pain, and you shall have no harvest—nothing but apples of Sodom: dust shall be your meat, and dust in your throat—there is no singing in such harvest time.

50. And this is true for all things, little and great. There is a time and a way in which they can be done: none shorter—none smoother. For all noble things, the time is long and the way rude. You may fret and fume as you will; for every start and struggle of impatience there shall be so much attendant failure; if impatience become a habit, nothing but failure: until on the path you have chosen for your better swiftness, rather than the honest flinty one, there shall follow you, fast at hand, instead of Beheste and Art for companions, those two wicked hags,

"With hoary locks all loose, and visage grim; Their feet unshod, their bodies wrapt in rags, And both as swift on foot as chased stags; And yet the one her other legge had lame, Which with a staff all full of little snags She did support, and Impotence her name: But th' other was Impatience, armed with raging flame."

"Raging flame," note; unserviceable;—flame of the black grain. But the fire which Patience carries in her hand is that truly stolen from Heaven, in the pith of the rod—fire of the slow match; persistent Fire like it also in her own body,—fire in the marrow; unquenchable incense of life: though it may seem to the bystanders that there is no breath in her, and she holds herself like a statue, as Hermione, "the statue lady," or Griselda, "the stone lady;" unless indeed one looks close for the glance forward, in the eyes, which distinguishes such pillars from the pillars, not of flesh, but of salt, whose eyes are set backwards.

51. I cannot get to my work in this paper, somehow; the web of these old enigmas entangles me again and again. That rough syllable which begins the name of Griselda, "Gries," "the stone;" the roar of the long fall of the Toccia seems to mix with the sound of it, bringing thoughts of the great Alpine patience; mute snow wreathed by gray rock, till avalanche time comes—patience of mute tormented races till the time of the Gray league came; at last impatient. (Not that, hitherto, it has hewn its way to much: the Rhine-foam of the Via Mala seeming to have done its work better.) But it is a noble color that Grison Gray;—dawn color—graceful for a faded silk to ride in, and wonderful, in paper, for getting a glow upon, if you begin wisely, as you may some day perhaps see by those Turner sketches at Kensington, if ever anybody can see them.

52. But we will get to work now; the work being to understand, if we may, what tender creatures are indeed riding with us, the British public, in faded silk, and handing our plates for us with tender little thumbs, and never wearing, or doing, anything else (not always having much to put on their own plates). The loveliest arts, the arts of noblest descent, have been long doing this for us, and are still, and we have no idea of their being Princesses, but keep them ill-entreated and enslaved: vociferous as we are against Black slavery, while we are gladly acceptant of Gray; and fain to keep Aglaia and her sisters—Urania and hers,—serving us in faded silk, and taken for kitchen-wenches. We are mad Sanchos, not mad Quixotes: our eyes enchant Downwards.

53. For one instance only: has the reader ever reflected on the patience, and deliberate subtlety, and unostentatious will, involved in the ordinary process of steel engraving; that process of which engravers themselves now with doleful voices deplore the decline, and with sorrowful hearts expect the extinction, after their own days?

By the way—my friends of the field of steel,—you need fear nothing of the kind. What there is of mechanical in your work; of habitual and thoughtless, of vulgar or servile—for that, indeed, the time has come; the sun will burn it up for you, very ruthlessly; but what there is of human liberty, and of sanguine life, in finger and fancy, is kindred of the sun, and quite inextinguishable by him. He is the very last of divinities who would wish to extinguish it. With his red right hand, though full of lightning coruscation, he will faithfully and tenderly clasp yours, warm blooded; you will see the vermilion in the flesh-shadows all the clearer; but your hand will not be withered. I tell you—(dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well)—a square inch of man's engraving is worth all the photographs that ever were dipped in acid (or left half-washed afterwards, which is saying much)—only it must be man's engraving; not machine's engraving. You have founded a school on patience and labor—only. That school must soon be extinct. You will have to found one on thought, which is Phoenician in immortality and fears no fire. Believe me, photography can do against line engraving just what Madame Tussaud's wax-work can do against sculpture. That, and no more. You are too timid in this matter; you are like Isaac in that picture of Mr. Schnorr's in the last number of this Journal, and with Teutonically metaphysical precaution, shade your eyes from the sun with your back to it. Take courage; turn your eyes to it in an aquiline manner; put more sunshine on your steel, and less burr; and leave the photographers to their Phoebus of Magnesium wire.

54. Not that I mean to speak disrespectfully of magnesium. I honor it to its utmost fiery particle (though I think the soul a fierier one); and I wish the said magnesium all comfort and triumph; nightly-lodging in lighthouses, and utter victory over coal gas. Could Titian but have known what the gnomes who built his dolomite crags above Cadore had mixed in the make of them,—and that one day—one night, I mean—his blue distances would still be seen pure blue, by light got out of his own mountains!

Light out of limestone—color out of coal—and white wings out of hot water! It is a great age this of ours, for traction and extraction, if it only knew what to extract from itself, or where to drag itself to!

55. But in the meantime I want the public to admire this patience of yours, while they have it, and to understand what it has cost to give them even this, which has to pass away. We will not take instance in figure engraving, of which the complex skill and textural gradation by dot and checker must be wholly incomprehensible to amateurs; but we will take a piece of average landscape engraving, such as is sent out of any good workshop—the master who puts his name at the bottom of the plate being of course responsible only for the general method, for the sufficient skill of subordinate hands, and for the few finishing touches if necessary. We will take, for example, the plate of Turner's "Mercury and Argus," engraved in this Journal.[68]

56. I suppose most people, looking at such a plate, fancy it is produced by some simple mechanical artifice, which is to drawing only what printing is to writing. They conclude, at all events, that there is something complacent, sympathetic, and helpful in the nature of steel; so that while a pen-and-ink sketch may always be considered an achievement proving cleverness in the sketcher, a sketch on steel comes out by mere favor of the indulgent metal: or perhaps they think the plate is woven like a piece of pattern silk, and the pattern is developed by pasteboard cards punched full of holes. Not so. Look close at that engraving—imagine it to be a drawing in pen and ink, and yourself required similarly to produce its parallel! True, the steel point has the one advantage of not blotting, but it has tenfold or twentyfold disadvantage, in that you cannot slur, nor efface, except in a very resolute and laborious way, nor play with it, nor even see what you are doing with it at the moment, far less the effect that is to be. You must feel what you are doing with it, and know precisely what you have got to do; how deep—how broad—how far apart—your lines must be, etc. and etc. (a couple of lines of etc.'s would not be enough to imply all you must know). But suppose the plate were only a pen drawing: take your pen—your finest—and just try to copy the leaves that entangle the nearest cow's head and the head itself; remembering always that the kind of work required here is mere child's play compared to that of fine figure engraving. Nevertheless, take a strong magnifying glass to this—count the dots and lines that gradate the nostrils and the edges of the facial bone; notice how the light is left on the top of the head by the stopping at its outline of the coarse touches which form the shadows under the leaves; examine it well, and then—I humbly ask of you—try to do a piece of it yourself! You clever sketcher—you young lady or gentleman of genius—you eye-glassed dilettante—you current writer of criticism royally plural,—I beseech you—do it yourself; do the merely etched outline yourself, if no more. Look you,—you hold your etching needle this way, as you would a pencil, nearly; and then,—you scratch with it! it is as easy as lying. Or if you think that too difficult, take an easier piece;—take either of the light sprays of foliage that rise against the fortress on the right, put your glass over them—look how their fine outline is first drawn, leaf by leaf; then how the distant rock is put in between, with broken lines, mostly stopping before they touch the leaf outline, and—again, I pray you, do it yourself; if not on that scale, on a larger. Go on into the hollows of the distant rock—traverse its thickets—number its towers—count how many lines there are in a laurel bush—in an arch—in a casement: some hundred and fifty, or two hundred, deliberately drawn lines, you will find, in every square quarter of an inch;—say three thousand to the inch,—each with skillful intent put in its place! and then consider what the ordinary sketcher's work must appear to the men who have been trained to this!

57. "But might not more have been done by three thousand lines to a square inch?" you will perhaps ask. Well, possibly. It may be with lines as with soldiers: three hundred, knowing their work thoroughly, may be stronger than three thousand less sure of their game. We shall have to press close home this question about numbers and purpose presently;—it is not the question now. Supposing certain results required,—atmospheric effects, surface textures, transparencies of shade, confusions of light,—more could not be done with less. There are engravings of this modern school, of which, with respect to their particular aim, it may be said, most truly, they "cannot be better done."

58. Whether an engraving should aim at effects of atmosphere, may be disputable (just as also whether a sculptor should aim at effects of perspective); but I do not raise these points to-day. Admit the aim—let us note the patience; nor this in engraving only. I have taken an engraving for my instance, but I might have taken any form of Art. I call upon all good artists, painters, sculptors, metal-workers, to bear witness with me in what I now tell the public in their name,—that the same Fortitude, the same deliberation, the same perseverance in resolute act—is needed to do anything in Art that is worthy. And why is it, you workmen, that you are silent always concerning your toil; and mock at us in your hearts, within that shrine at Eleusis, to the gate of which you have hewn your way through so deadly thickets of thorn; and leave us, foolish children, outside, in our conceited thinking either that we can enter it in play, or that we are grander for not entering? Far more earnestly is it to be asked, why do you stoop to us as you mock us? If your secrecy were a noble one,—if, in that incommunicant contempt, you wrought your own work with majesty, whether we would receive it or not, it were kindly, though ungraciously, done; but now you make yourselves our toys, and do our childish will in servile silence. If engraving were to come to an end this day, and no guided point should press metal more, do you think it would be in a blaze of glory that your art would expire?—that those plates in the annuals, and black proofs in broad shop windows, are of a nobly monumental character,—"chalybe perennius"? I am afraid your patience has been too much like yonder poor Italian child's; and over that genius of yours, low laid by the Matin shore, if it expired so, the lament for Archytas would have to be sung again;—"pulveris exigui—munera." Suppose you were to shake off the dust again! cleanse your wings, like the morning bees on that Matin promontory; rise, in noble impatience, for there is such a thing: the Impatience of the Fourth Cornice.

"Cui buon voler, e giusto amor cavalca."

Shall we try, together, to think over the meaning of that Haste, when the May mornings come?

FOOTNOTES:

[67] A small portion of this chapter was read by Mr. Ruskin, at Oxford, in November 1884, as a by-lecture, during the delivery of the course on the "Pleasures of England."—ED.

[68] The rest of this and the whole of the succeeding paragraph is also reprinted in Ariadne Florentina, Sec. 115, and para. i. of 116.—ED.



CHAPTER IV.[69]

59. It is a wild March day,—the 20th; and very probably due course of English Spring will bring as wild a May-day by the time this writing meets anyone's eyes; but at all events, as yet the days are rough, and as I look out of my fitfully lighted window into the garden, everything seems in a singular hurry. The dead leaves; and yonder two living ones, on the same stalk, tumbling over and over each other on the lawn, like a quaint mechanical toy; and the fallen sticks from the rooks' nests, and the twisted straws out of the stable-yard—all going one way, in the hastiest manner! The puffs of steam, moreover, which pass under the wooded hills where what used to be my sweetest field-walk ends now, prematurely, in an abyss of blue clay; and which signify, in their silvery expiring between the successive trunks of wintry trees, that some human beings, thereabouts, are in a hurry as well as the sticks and straws, and, having fastened themselves to the tail of a manageable breeze, are being blown down to Folkestone.

60. In the general effect of these various passages and passengers, as seen from my quiet room, they look all very much alike. One begins seriously to question with one's self whether those passengers by the Folkestone train are in truth one whit more in a hurry than the dead leaves. The difference consists, of course, in the said passengers knowing where they are going to, and why; and having resolved to go there—which, indeed, as far as Folkestone, may, perhaps, properly distinguish them from the leaves: but will it distinguish them any farther? Do many of them know what they are going to Folkestone for?—what they are going anywhere for? and where, at last, by sum of all the days' journeys, of which this glittering transit is one, they are going for peace? For if they know not this, certainly they are no more making haste than the straws are. Perhaps swiftly going the wrong way; more likely going no way—any way, as the winds and their own wills, wilder than the winds, dictate; to find themselves at last at the end which would have come to them quickly enough without their seeking.

61. And, indeed, this is a very preliminary question to all measurement of the rate of going, this "where to?" or, even before that, "are we going on at all?"—"getting on" (as the world says) on any road whatever? Most men's eyes are so fixed on the mere swirl of the wheel of their fortunes, and their souls so vexed at the reversed cadences of it when they come, that they forget to ask if the curve they have been carried through on its circumference was circular or cycloidal; whether they have been bound to the ups and downs of a mill-wheel or of a chariot-wheel.

That phrase, of "getting on," so perpetually on our lips (as indeed it should be), do any of us take it to our hearts, and seriously ask where we can get on to? That instinct of hurry has surely good grounds. It is all very well for lazy and nervous people (like myself for instance) to retreat into tubs, and holes, and corners, anywhere out of the dust, and wonder within ourselves, "what all the fuss can be about?" The fussy people might have the best of it, if they know their end. Suppose they were to answer this March or May morning thus:—"Not bestir ourselves, indeed! and the spring sun up these four hours!—and this first of May, 1865, never to come back again; and of Firsts of May in perspective, supposing ourselves to be 'nel mezzo del cammin,' perhaps some twenty or twenty-five to be, not without presumption, hoped for, and by no means calculated upon. Say, twenty of them, with their following groups of summer days; and though they may be long, one cannot make much more than sixteen hours apiece out of them, poor sleepy wretches that we are; for even if we get up at four, we must go to bed while the red yet stays from the sunset: and half the time we are awake, we must be lying among haycocks, or playing at something, if we are wise; not to speak of eating, and previously earning whereof to eat, which takes time: and then, how much of us and of our day will be left for getting on? Shall we have a seventh, or even a tithe, of our twenty-four hours?—two hours and twenty-four minutes clear, a day, or, roughly, a thousand hours a year, and (violently presuming on fortune, as we said) twenty years of working life: twenty thousand hours to get on in, altogether? Many men would think it hard to be limited to an utmost twenty thousand pounds for their fortunes, but here is a sterner limitation; the Pactolus of time, sand, and gold together, would, with such a fortune, count us a pound an hour, through our real and serviceable life. If this time capital would reproduce itself! and for our twenty thousand hours we could get some rate of interest, if well spent? At all events, we will do something with them; not lie moping out of the way of the dust, as you do."

62. A sufficient answer, indeed; yet, friends, if you would make a little less dust, perhaps we should all see our way better. But I am ready to take the road with you, if you mean it so seriously—only let us at least consider where we are now, at starting.

Here, on a little spinning, askew-axised thing we call a planet—(impertinently enough, since we are far more planetary ourselves). A round, rusty, rough little metallic ball—very hard to live upon; most of it much too hot or too cold: a couple of narrow habitable belts about it, which, to wandering spirits, must look like the places where it has got damp, and green-moldy, with accompanying small activities of animal life in the midst of the lichen. Explosive gases, seemingly, inside it, and possibilities of very sudden dispersion.

63. This is where we are; and roundabout us, there seem to be more of such balls, variously heated and chilled, ringed and mooned, moved and comforted; the whole giddy group of us forming an atom in a milky mist, itself another atom in a shoreless phosphorescent sea of such Volvoces and Medusae.

Whereupon, I presume, one would first ask, have we any chance of getting off this ball of ours, and getting on to one of those finer ones? Wise people say we have, and that it is very wicked to think otherwise. So we will think no otherwise; but, with their permission, think nothing about the matter now, since it is certain that the more we make of our little rusty world, such as it is, the more chance we have of being one day promoted into a merrier one.

64. And even on this rusty and moldy Earth, there appear to be things which may be seen with pleasure, and things which might be done with advantage. The stones of it have strange shapes; the plants and the beasts of it strange ways. Its air is coinable into wonderful sounds; its light into manifold colors: the trees of it bring forth pippins, and the fields cheese (though both of these may be, in a finer sense, "to come"). There are bright eyes upon it which reflect the light of other eyes quite singularly; and foolish feelings to be cherished upon it; and gladdenings of dust by neighbor dust, not easily explained, but pleasant, and which take time to win. One would like to know something of all this, I suppose?—to divide one's score of thousand hours as shrewdly as might be. Ten minutes to every herb of the field is not much; yet we shall not know them all, so, before the time comes to be made grass of ourselves! Half an hour for every crystalline form of clay and flint, and we shall be near the need of shaping the gray flint stone that is to weigh upon our feet. And we would fain dance a measure or two before that cumber is laid upon them: there having been hitherto much piping to which we have not danced. And we must leave time for loving, if we are to take Marmontel's wise peasant's word for it, "Il n'y a de bon que c'a!" And if there should be fighting to do also? and weeping? and much burying? truly, we had better make haste.

65. Which means, simply, that we must lose neither strength nor moment. Hurry is not haste; but economy is, and rightness is. Whatever is rightly done stays with us, to support another right beyond, or higher up: whatever is wrongly done, vanishes; and by the blank, betrays what we would have built above. Wasting no word, no thought, no doing, we shall have speed enough; but then there is that farther question, what shall we do?—what we are fittest (worthiest, that is) to do, and what is best worth doing? Note that word "worthy," both of the man and the thing, for the two dignities go together. Is it worth the pains? Are we worth the task? The dignity of a man depends wholly upon this harmony. If his task is above him, he will be undignified in failure; if he is above it, he will be undignified in success. His own composure and nobleness must be according to the composure of his thought to his toil.

66. As I was dreaming over this, my eyes fell by chance on a page of my favorite thirteenth century psalter, just where two dragons, one with red legs, and another with green,—one with a blue tail on a purple ground, and the other with a rosy tail on a golden ground, follow the verse "Quis ascendet in montem Domini," and begin the solemn "Qui non accepit in vano animam suam." Who hath not lift up his soul unto vanity, we have it; and [Greek: elaben epi mataio], the Greeks (not that I know what that means accurately): broadly, they all mean, "who has not received nor given his soul in vain," this is the man who can make haste, even uphill, the only haste worth making; and it must be up the right hill, too: not that Corinthian Acropolis, of which, I suppose, the white specter stood eighteen hundred feet high, in Hades, for Sisyphus to roll his fantastic stone up—image, himself, forever of the greater part of our wise mortal work.

67. Now all this time, whatever the reader may think, I have never for a moment lost sight of that original black line with which is our own special business. The patience, the speed, the dignity, we can give to that, the choice to be made of subject for it, are the matters I want to get at. You think, perhaps, that an engraver's function is one of no very high dignity;—does not involve a serious choice of work. Consider a little of it. Here is a steel point, and 'tis like Job's "iron pen"—and you are going to cut into steel with it, in a most deliberate way, as into the rock forever. And this scratch or inscription of yours will be seen of a multitude of eyes. It is not like a single picture or a single wall painting; this multipliable work will pass through thousand thousand hands, strengthen and inform innumerable souls, if it be worthy; vivify the folly of thousands if unworthy. Remember, also, it will mix in the very closest manner in domestic life. This engraving will not be gossiped over and fluttered past at private views of academies; listlessly sauntered by in corners of great galleries. Ah, no! This will hang over parlor chimney-pieces—shed down its hourly influence on children's forenoon work. This will hang in little luminous corners by sick beds; mix with flickering dreams by candlelight, and catch the first rays from the window's "glimmering square." You had better put something good into it! I do not know a more solemn field of labor than that champ d'acier. From a pulpit, perhaps a man can only reach one or two people, for that time,—even your book, once carelessly read, probably goes into a bookcase catacomb, and is thought of no more. But this; taking the eye unawares again and again, and always again: persisting and inevitable! where will you look for a chance of saying something nobly, if it is not here?

68. And the choice is peculiarly free; to you of all men most free. An artist, at first invention, cannot always choose what shall come into his mind, nor know what it will eventually turn into. But you, professed copyists, unless you have mistaken your profession, have the power of governing your own thoughts, and of following and interpreting the thoughts of others. Also, you see the work to be done put plainly before you; you can deliberately choose what seems to you best, out of myriads of examples of perfect Art. You can count the cost accurately; saying, "It will take me a year—two years—five—a fourth or fifth, probably, of my remaining life, to do this." Is the thing worth it? There is no excuse for choosing wrongly; no other men whatever have data so full, and position so firm, for forecast of their labor.

69. I put my psalter aside (not, observe, vouching for its red and green dragons:—men lifted up their souls to vanity sometimes in the thirteenth as in the nineteenth century), and I take up, instead, a book of English verses, published—there is no occasion to say when. It is full of costliest engravings—large, skillful, appallingly laborious; dotted into textures like the dust on a lily leaf,—smoothed through gradations like clouds,—graved to surfaces like mother-of-pearl; and by all this toil there is set forth for the delight of Englishwomen, a series of the basest dreams that ungoverned feminine imagination can coin in sickliest indolence,—ball-room amours, combats of curled knights, pilgrimages of disguised girl-pages, romantic pieties, charities in costume,—a mass of disguised sensualism and feverish vanity—impotent, pestilent, prurient, scented with a venomous elixir, and rouged with a deadly dust of outward good; and all this done, as such things only can be done, in a boundless ignorance of all natural veracity; the faces falsely drawn—the lights falsely cast—the forms effaced or distorted, and all common human wit and sense extinguished in the vicious scum of lying sensation.

And this, I grieve to say, is only a characteristic type of a large mass of popular English work. This is what we spend our Teutonic lives in; engraving with an iron pen in the rock forever; this, the passion of the Teutonic woman (as opposed to Virgilia), just as foxhunting is the passion of the Teutonic man, as opposed to Valerius.

70. And while we deliberately spend all our strength, and all our tenderness, all our skill, and all our money, in doing, relishing, buying, this absolute Wrongness, of which nothing can ever come but disease in heart and brain, remember that all the mighty works of the great painters of the world, full of life, truth, and blessing, remain to this present hour of the year 1865 unengraved! There literally exists no earnestly studied and fully accomplished engraving of any very great work, except Leonardo's Cena. No large Venetian picture has ever been thoroughly engraved. Of Titian's Peter Martyr, there is even no worthy memorial transcript but Le Febre's. The Cartoons have been multiplied in false readings; never in faithful ones till lately by photography. Of the Disputa and the Parnassus, what can the English public know? of the thoughtful Florentines and Milanese, of Ghirlandajo, and Luini, and their accompanying hosts—what do they yet so much as care to know?

"The English public will not pay," you reply, "for engravings from the great masters. The English public will only pay for pictures of itself; of its races, its rifle-meetings, its rail stations, its parlor-passions, and kitchen interests; you must make your bread as you may, by holding the mirror to it."

71. Friends, there have been hard fighting and heavy sleeping, this many a day, on the other side of the Atlantic, in the cause, as you suppose, of Freedom against slavery; and you are all, open-mouthed, expecting the glories of Black Emancipation. Perhaps a little White Emancipation on this side of the water might be still more desirable, and more easily and guiltlessly won.

Do you know what slavery means? Suppose a gentleman taken by a Barbary corsair—set to field-work; chained and flogged to it from dawn to eve. Need he be a slave therefore? By no means; he is but a hardly-treated prisoner. There is some work which the Barbary corsair will not be able to make him do; such work as a Christian gentleman may not do, that he will not, though he die for it. Bound and scourged he may be, but he has heard of a Person's being bound and scourged before now, who was not therefore a slave. He is not a whit more slave for that. But suppose he take the pirate's pay, and stretch his back at piratical oars, for due salary, how then? Suppose for fitting price he betray his fellow prisoners, and take up the scourge instead of enduring it—become the smiter instead of the smitten, at the African's bidding—how then? Of all the sheepish notions in our English public "mind," I think the simplest is that slavery is neutralized when you are well paid for it! Whereas it is precisely that fact of its being paid for which makes it complete. A man who has been sold by another, may be but half a slave or none; but the man who has sold himself! He is the accurately Finished Bondsman.

72. And gravely I say that I know no captivity so sorrowful as that of an artist doing, consciously, bad work for pay. It is the serfdom of the finest gifts—of all that should lead and master men, offering itself to be spit upon, and that for a bribe. There is much serfdom, in Europe, of speakers and writers, but they only sell words; and their talk, even honestly uttered, might not have been worth much; it will not be thought of ten years hence; still less a hundred years hence. No one will buy our parliamentary speeches to keep in portfolios this time next century; and if people are weak enough now to pay for any special and flattering cadence of syllable, it is little matter. But you, with your painfully acquired power, your unwearied patience, your admirable and manifold gifts, your eloquence in black and white, which people will buy, if it is good (and has a broad margin), for fifty guineas a copy—in the year 2000; to sell it all, as Ananias his land, "yea, for so much," and hold yourselves at every fool's beck, with your ready points, polished and sharp, hasting to scratch what he wills! To bite permanent mischief in with acid; to spread an inked infection of evil all your days, and pass away at last from a life of the skillfulest industry—having done whatsoever your hand found (remuneratively) to do, with your might, and a great might, but with cause to thank God only for this—that the end of it all has at last come, and that "there is no device nor work in the Grave." One would get quit of this servitude, I think, though we reached the place of Rest a little sooner, and reached it fasting.

73. My English fellow-workmen, you have the name of liberty often on your lips; get the fact of it oftener into your business! talk of it less, and try to understand it better. You have given students many copy-books of free-hand outlines—give them a few of free heart outlines.

It appears, however, that you do not intend to help me with any utterance respecting these same outlines.[70] Be it so: I must make out what I can by myself. And under the influence of the Solstitial sign of June I will go backwards, or askance, to the practical part of the business, where I left it three months ago, and take up that question first, touching Liberty, and the relation of the loose swift line to the resolute slow one and of the etched line to the engraved one. It is a worthy question, for the open field afforded by illustrated works is tempting even to our best painters, and many an earnest hour and active fancy spend and speak themselves in the black line, vigorously enough, and dramatically, at all events: if wisely, may be considered. The French also are throwing great passion into their eaux fortes—working with a vivid haste and dark, brilliant freedom, which looked as if they etched with very energetic waters indeed—quite waters of life (it does not look so well, written in French). So we will take, with the reader's permission, for text next month, "Rembrandt, and strong waters."

FOOTNOTES:

[69] Art Journal, vol. iv., pp. 129-30. May 1865.—ED.

[70] I have received some interesting private letters, but cannot make use of them at present, because they enter into general discussion instead of answering the specific question I asked, respecting the power of the black line; and I must observe to correspondents that in future their letters should be addressed to the Editor of this Journal, not to me; as I do not wish to incur the responsibility of selection.



CHAPTER V.[71]

74. The work I have to do in this paper ought, rightly, to have been thrown into the form of an appendix to the last chapter; for it is no link of the cestus of Aglaia we have to examine, but one of the crests of canine passion in the cestus of Scylla. Nevertheless, the girdle of the Grace cannot be discerned in the full brightness of it, but by comparing it with the dark torment of that other; and (in what place or form matters little) the work has to be done.

"Rembrandt Van Rhyn"—it is said, in the last edition of a very valuable work[72] (for which, nevertheless, I could wish that greater lightness in the hand should be obtained by the publication of its information in one volume, and its criticism in another)—was "the most attractive and original of painters." It may be so; but there are attractions, and attractions. The sun attracts the planets—and a candle, night-moths; the one with perhaps somewhat of benefit to the planets;—but with what benefit the other to the moths, one would be glad to learn from those desert flies, of whom, one company having extinguished Mr. Kinglake's candle with their bodies, the remainder, "who had failed in obtaining this martyrdom, became suddenly serious, and clung despondingly to the canvas."

75. Also, there are originalities, and originalities. To invent a new thing, which is also a precious thing; to be struck by a divinely-guided Rod, and become a sudden fountain of life to thirsty multitudes—this is enviable. But to be distinct of men in an original Sin; elect for the initial letter of a Lie; the first apparent spot of an unknown plague; a Root of bitterness, and the first-born worm of a company, studying an original De-Composition,—this is perhaps not so enviable. And if we think of it, most human originality is apt to be of that kind. Goodness is one, and immortal; it may be received and communicated—not originated: but Evil is various and recurrent, and may be misbegotten in endlessly surprising ways.

76. But, that we may know better in what this originality consists, we find that our author, after expatiating on the vast area of the Pantheon, "illuminated solely by the small circular opening in the dome above," and on other similar conditions of luminous contraction, tells us that "to Rembrandt belongs the glory of having first embodied in Art, and perpetuated, these rare and beautiful effects of nature." Such effects are indeed rare in nature; but they are not rare, absolutely. The sky, with the sun in it, does not usually give the impression of being dimly lighted through a circular hole; but you may observe a very similar effect any day in your coal-cellar. The light is not Rembrandtesque on the current, or banks, of a river; but it is on those of a drain. Color is not Rembrandtesque, usually, in a clean house; but is presently obtainable of that quality in a dirty one. And without denying the pleasantness of the mode of progression which Mr. Hazlitt, perhaps too enthusiastically, describes as attainable in a background of Rembrandt's—"You stagger from one abyss of obscurity to another"—I cannot feel it an entirely glorious speciality to be distinguished, as Rembrandt was, from other great painters, chiefly by the liveliness of his darkness, and the dullness of his light. Glorious, or inglorious, the speciality itself is easily and accurately definable. It is the aim of the best painters to paint the noblest things they can see by sunlight. It was the aim of Rembrandt to paint the foulest things he could see—by rushlight.

77. By rushlight, observe: material and spiritual. As the sun for the outer world; so in the inner world of man, that which "[Greek: ereuna tameua koilias]"[73]—"the candle of God, searching the inmost parts." If that light within become but a more active kind of darkness;—if, abdicating the measuring reed of modesty for scepter, and ceasing to measure with it, we dip it in such unctuous and inflammable refuse as we can find, and make our soul's light into a tallow candle, and thenceforward take our guttering, sputtering, ill-smelling illumination about with us, holding it out in fetid fingers—encumbered with its lurid warmth of fungous wick, and drip of stalactitic grease—that we may see, when another man would have seen, or dreamed he saw, the flight of a divine Virgin—only the lamplight upon the hair of a costermonger's ass;—that, having to paint the good Samaritan, we may see only in distance the back of the good Samaritan, and in nearness the back of the good Samaritan's dog;—that having to paint the Annunciation to the Shepherds, we may turn the announcement of peace to men, into an announcement of mere panic to beasts; and, in an unsightly firework of unsightlier angels, see, as we see always, the feet instead of the head, and the shame instead of the honor;—and finally concentrate and rest the sum of our fame, as Titian on the Assumption of a spirit, so we on the dissection of a carcass,—perhaps by such fatuous fire, the less we walk, and by such phosphoric glow, the less we shine, the better it may be for us, and for all who would follow us.

78. Do not think I deny the greatness of Rembrandt. In mere technical power (none of his eulogists know that power better than I, nor declare it in more distinct terms) he might, if he had been educated in a true school, have taken rank with the Venetians themselves. But that type of distinction between Titian's Assumption, and Rembrandt's Dissection, will represent for you with sufficient significance the manner of choice in all their work; only it should be associated with another characteristic example of the same opposition (which I have dwelt upon elsewhere) between Veronese and Rembrandt, in their conception of domestic life. Rembrandt's picture, at Dresden, of himself, with his wife sitting on his knee, a roasted peacock on the table, and a glass of champagne in his hand, is the best work I know of all he has left; and it marks his speciality with entire decision. It is, of course, a dim candlelight; and the choice of the sensual passions as the things specially and forever to be described and immortalized out of his own private life and love, is exactly that "painting the foulest thing by rushlight" which I have stated to be the enduring purpose of his mind. And you will find this hold in all minor treatment; and that to the uttermost: for as by your broken rushlight you see little, and only corners and points of things, and those very corners and points ill and distortedly; so, although Rembrandt knows the human face and hand, and never fails in these, when they are ugly, and he chooses to take pains with them, he knows nothing else: the more pains he takes with even familiar animals, the worse they are (witness the horse in that plate of the Good Samaritan), and any attempts to finish the first scribbled energy of his imaginary lions and tigers, end always only in the loss of the fiendish power and rage which were all he could conceive in an animal.

79. His landscape, and foreground vegetation, I mean afterwards to examine in comparison with Duerer's; but the real caliber and nature of the man are best to be understood by comparing the puny, ill-drawn, terrorless, helpless, beggarly skeleton in his "Youth Surprised by Death," with the figure behind the tree in Duerer's plate (though it is quite one of Duerer's feeblest) of the same subject. Absolutely ignorant of all natural phenomena and law; absolutely careless of all lovely living form, or growth, or structure; able only to render with some approach to veracity, what alone he had looked at with some approach to attention,—the pawnbroker's festering heaps of old clothes, and caps, and shoes—Rembrandt's execution is one grand evasion, and his temper the grim contempt of a strong and sullen animal in its defiled den, for the humanity with which it is at war, for the flowers which it tramples, and the light which it fears.

80. Again, do not let it be thought that when I call his execution evasive, I ignore the difference between his touch, on brow or lip, and a common workman's; but the whole school of etching which he founded, (and of painting, so far as it differs from Venetian work) is inherently loose and experimental. Etching is the very refuge and mask of sentimental uncertainty, and of vigorous ignorance. If you know anything clearly, and have a firm hand, depend upon it, you will draw it clearly; you will not care to hide it among scratches and burrs. And herein is the first grand distinction between etching and engraving—that in the etching needle you have an almost irresistible temptation to a wanton speed. There is, however, no real necessity for such a distinction; an etched line may have been just as steadily drawn, and seriously meant, as an engraved one; and for the moment, waiving consideration of this distinction, and opposing Rembrandt's work, considered merely as work of the black line, to Holbein's and Duerer's, as work of the black line, I assert Rembrandt's to be inherently evasive. You cannot unite his manner with theirs; choice between them is sternly put to you, when first you touch the steel. Suppose, for instance, you have to engrave, or etch, or draw with pen and ink, a single head, and that the head is to be approximately half an inch in height more or less (there is a reason for assigning this condition respecting size, which we will examine in due time): you have it in your power to do it in one of two ways. You may lay down some twenty or thirty entirely firm and visible lines, of which every one shall be absolutely right, and do the utmost a line can do. By their curvature they shall render contour; by their thickness, shade; by their place and form, every truth of expression, and every condition of design. The head of the soldier drawing his sword, in Duerer's "Cannon," is about half an inch high, supposing the brow to be seen. The chin is drawn with three lines, the lower lip with two, the upper, including the shadow from the nose, with five. Three separate the cheek from the chin, giving the principal points of character. Six lines draw the cheek, and its incised traces of care; four are given to each of the eyes; one, with the outline, to the nose; three to the frown of the forehead. None of these touches could anywhere be altered—none removed, without instantly visible harm; and their result is a head as perfect in character as a portrait by Reynolds.

81. You may either do this—which, if you can, it will generally be very advisable to do—or, on the other hand, you may cover the face with innumerable scratches, and let your hand play with wanton freedom, until the graceful scrabble concentrates itself into shade. You may soften—efface—retouch—rebite—dot, and hatch, and redefine. If you are a great master, you will soon get your character, and probably keep it (Rembrandt often gets it at first, nearly as securely as Duerer); but the design of it will be necessarily seen through loose work, and modified by accident (as you think) fortunate. The accidents which occur to a practiced hand are always at first pleasing—the details which can be hinted, however falsely, through the gathering mystery, are always seducing. You will find yourself gradually dwelling more and more on little meannesses of form and texture, and lusters of surface: on cracks of skin, and films of fur and plume. You will lose your way, and then see two ways, and then many ways, and try to walk a little distance on all of them in turn, and so, back again. You will find yourself thinking of colors, and vexed because you cannot imitate them; next, struggling to render distances by indecision, which you cannot by tone. Presently you will be contending with finished pictures; laboring at the etching, as if it were a painting. You will leave off, after a whole day's work (after many days' work if you choose to give them), still unsatisfied. For final result—if you are as great as Rembrandt—you will have most likely a heavy, black, cloudy stain, with less character in it than the first ten lines had. If you are not as great as Rembrandt, you will have a stain by no means cloudy; but sandy and broken,—instead of a face, a speckled phantom of a face, patched, blotched, discomfited in every texture and form—ugly, assuredly; dull, probably; an unmanageable and manifold failure ill concealed by momentary, accidental, undelightful, ignoble success.

Undelightful; note this especially, for it is the peculiar character of etching that it cannot render beauty. You may hatch and scratch your way to picturesqueness or to deformity—never to beauty. You can etch an old woman, or an ill-conditioned fellow. But you cannot etch a girl—nor, unless in his old age, or with very partial rendering of him, a gentleman.

82. And thus, as farther belonging to, and partly causative of, their choice of means, there is always a tendency in etchers to fasten on unlovely objects; and the whole scheme of modern rapid work of this kind is connected with a peculiar gloom which results from the confinement of men, partially informed, and wholly untrained, in the midst of foul and vicious cities. A sensitive and imaginative youth, early driven to get his living by his art, has to lodge, we will say, somewhere in the by-streets of Paris, and is left there, tutorless, to his own devices. Suppose him also vicious or reckless, and there need be no talk of his work farther; he will certainly do nothing in a Duereresque manner. But suppose him self-denying, virtuous, full of gift and power—what are the elements of living study within his reach? All supreme beauty is confined to the higher salons. There are pretty faces in the streets, but no stateliness nor splendor of humanity; all pathos and grandeur is in suffering; no purity of nature is accessible, but only a terrible picturesqueness, mixed with ghastly, with ludicrous, with base concomitants. Huge walls and roofs, dark on the sunset sky, but plastered with advertisement bills, monstrous-figured, seen farther than ever Parthenon shaft, or spire of Sainte Chapelle. Interminable lines of massy streets, wearisome with repetition of commonest design, and degraded by their gilded shops, wide-fuming, flaunting, glittering, with apparatus of eating or of dress. Splendor of palace-flank and goodly quay, insulted by floating cumber of barge and bath, trivial, grotesque, indecent, as cleansing vessels in a royal reception room. Solemn avenues of blossomed trees, shading puppet-show and baby-play; glades of wild-wood, long withdrawn, purple with faded shadows of blood; sweet windings and reaches of river far among the brown vines and white orchards, checked here by the Ile Notre Dame, to receive their nightly sacrifice, and after playing with it among their eddies, to give it up again, in those quiet shapes that lie on the sloped slate tables of the square-built Temple of the Death-Sibyl, who presides here over spray of Seine, as yonder at Tiber over spray of Anio. Sibylline, indeed, in her secrecy, and her sealing of destinies, by the baptism of the quick water-drops which fall on each fading face, unrecognized, nameless in this Baptism forever. Wreathed thus throughout, that Paris town, with beauty, and with unseemly sin, unseemlier death, as a fiend-city with fair eyes; forever letting fall her silken raiment so far as that one may "behold her bosom and half her side." Under whose whispered teaching, and substitution of "Contes Drolatiques" for the tales of the wood fairy, her children of Imagination will do, what Gerome and Gustave Dore are doing, and her whole world of lesser Art will sink into shadows of the street and of the boudoir-curtain, wherein the etching point may disport itself with freedom enough.[74]

83. Nor are we slack in our companionship in these courses. Our imagination is slower and clumsier than the French—rarer also, by far, in the average English mind. The only man of power equal to Dore's whom we have had lately among us, was William Blake, whose temper fortunately took another turn. But in the calamity and vulgarity of daily circumstance, in the horror of our streets, in the discordance of our thoughts, in the laborious looseness and ostentatious cleverness of our work, we are alike. And to French faults we add a stupidity of our own; for which, so far as I may in modesty take blame for anything, as resulting from my own teaching, I am more answerable than most men. Having spoken earnestly against painting without thinking, I now find our exhibitions decorated with works of students who think without painting; and our books illustrated by scratched wood-cuts, representing very ordinary people, who are presumed to be interesting in the picture, because the text tells a story about them. Of this least lively form of modern sensational work, however, I shall have to speak on other grounds; meantime, I am concerned only with its manner; its incontinence of line and method, associated with the slightness of its real thought, and morbid acuteness of irregular sensation; ungoverned all, and one of the external and slight phases of that beautiful Liberty which we are proclaiming as essence of gospel to all the earth, and shall presently, I suppose, when we have had enough of it here, proclaim also to the stars, with invitation to them out of their courses.

84. "But you asked us for 'free-heart' outlines, and told us not to be slaves, only thirty days ago."[75]

Inconsistent that I am! so I did. But as there are attractions, and attractions; originalities, and originalities, there are liberties, and liberties. Yonder torrent, crystal-clear, and arrow-swift, with its spray leaping into the air like white troops of fawns, is free, I think. Lost, yonder, amidst bankless, boundless marsh—soaking in slow shallowness, as it will, hither and thither, listless, among the poisonous reeds and unresisting slime—it is free also. You may choose which liberty you will, and restraint of voiceful rock, or the dumb and edgeless shore of darkened sand. Of that evil liberty, which men are now glorifying,—and of its opposite continence—which is the clasp and [Greek: chrusee perone] of Aglaia's cestus—we will try to find out something in next chapter.[76]

FOOTNOTES:

[71] Art Journal, vol. iv., pp. 177-8. June 1865.—ED.

[72] Wornum's "Epochs of Painting." I have continual occasion to quarrel with my friend on these matters of critical question; but I have deep respect for his earnest and patient research, and we remain friends—on the condition that I am to learn much from him, and he (though it may be questionable whose fault that is) nothing from me.

[73] Prov. xx, 27.

[74] As I was preparing these sheets for press, I chanced on a passage in a novel of Champfleury's, in which one young student is encouraging another in his contest with these and other such evils;—the evils are in this passage accepted as necessities; the inevitable deadliness of the element is not seen, as it can hardly be except by those who live out of it. The encouragement, on such view, is good and right; the connection of the young etcher's power with his poverty is curiously illustrative of the statements in the text, and the whole passage, though long, is well worth such space as it will ask here, in our small print.

"Cependant," dit Thomas, "on a vu des peintres de talent qui etaient partis de Paris apres avoir expose de bons tableaux et qui s'en revenaient classiquement ennuyeux. C'est done la faute de l'enseignement de l'Academie."

"Bah!" dit Gerard, "rien n'arrete le developpement d'un homme puisqu'il comprend l'art, pourquoi ne fait-il pas d'art?"

"Parce qu'il gagne a peu pres sa vie en faisant du commerce."

"On dirait que tu ne veux pas me comprendre, toi qui as justement passe par la. Comment faisais-tu quand tu etais compositeur d'une imprimerie?"

"Le soir," dit Thomas, "et le matin en hiver, a partir de quatre heures, je faisais des etudes a la lampe pendant deux heures, jusqu'au moment ou j'allais a l'atelier."

"Et tu ne vivais pas de la peinture?"

"Je ne gagnais pas un sou."

"Bon!" dit Gerard; "tu vois bien que tu faisais du commerce en dehors de l'art et que cependant tu etudiais. Quand tu es sorti de l'imprimerie comment as-tu vecu?"

"Je faisais cinq ou six petites aquarelles par jour, que je vendais, sous les arcades de l'Institut, six sous piece."

"Et tu en vivais; c'est encore du commerce. Tu vois done que ni l'imprimerie, ni les petits dessins, a cinq sous, ni la privation, ni la misere ne t'ont empeche d'arriver."

"Je ne suis pas arrive."

"N'importe, tu arriveras certainement. . . . Si tu veux d'autres exemples qui prouvent que la misere et les autres pieges tendus sous nos pas ne doivent rien arreter, tu te rappelles bien ce pauvre garcon dont vous admiriez les eaux-fortes, que vous mettiez aussi haut que Rembrandt, et qui aurait ete lion, disiez-vous, s'il n'avait tant souffert de la faim. Qu'a-t-il fait le jour ou il lui est tombe un petit heritage du ciel?"

"Il est vrai," dit Thomas, embarrasse; "qu'il a perdu tout son sentiment."

"Ce n'etait pas cependant une de ces grosses fortunes qui tuent un homme, qui le rendent lourd, fier et insolent: il avait juste de quoi vivre, six cents francs de rentes, une fortune pour lui, qui vivait avec cinq francs par mois. Il a continue a travailler; mais ses eaux-fortes n'etaient plus supportables; tandis qu'avant, il vivait avec un morceau de pain et des legumes; alors il avait du talent. Cela, Thomas, doit te prouver que ni les mauvais enseignements, ni les influences, ni la misere, ni la faim, ni la maladie, ne peuvent corrompre une nature bien douee. Elle souffre; mais trouve moi un grand artiste qui n'ait pas souffert. Il n'y a pas un seul homme de denie heureux depuis que l'humanite existe."

"J'ai envie," dit Thomas, "de te faire cadeau d'une jolie cravate."

"Pourquoi?" dit Gerard.

"Parce que tu as bien parle."

[75] See ante, p. 343, Sec. 73.—ED.

[76] Chapter VI., which is here omitted, having been already reprinted in The Queen of the Air (Sec.Sec. 142-159), together with the last paragraph (somewhat altered) of the present chapter. After the publication of Chapter VI. the essays were discontinued until January 1866.—ED.

Transcriber's note: Chapter VI is missing from the original.



CHAPTER VII.[77]

85. In recommencing this series of papers, I may perhaps take permission briefly to remind the reader of the special purpose which my desultory way of writing, (of so vast a subject I find it impossible to write otherwise than desultorily), may cause him sometimes to lose sight of; the ascertainment, namely, of some laws for present practice of Art in our schools, which may be admitted, if not with absolute, at least with a sufficient consent, by leading artists.

There are indeed many principles on which different men must ever be at variance; others, respecting which it may be impossible to obtain any practical consent in certain phases of particular schools. But there are a few, which, I think, in all times of meritorious Art, the leading painters would admit; and others which, by discussion, might be arrived at, as, at all events, the best discoverable for the time.

86. One of those which I suppose great workmen would always admit, is, that, whatever material we use, the virtues of that material are to be exhibited, and its defects frankly admitted; no effort being made to conquer those defects by such skill as may make the material resemble another. For instance, in the dispute so frequently revived by the public, touching the relative merits of oil color and water color; I do not think a great painter would ever consider it a merit in a water color to have the "force of oil." He would like it to have the peculiar delicacy, paleness, and transparency belonging specially to its own material. On the other hand, I think he would not like an oil painting to have the deadness or paleness of a water color. He would like it to have the deep shadows, and the rich glow, and crumbling and bossy touches which are alone attainable in oil color. And if he painted in fresco, he would neither aim at the transparency of water color, nor the richness of oil; but at luminous bloom of surface, and dignity of clearly visible form. I do not think that this principle would be disputed by artists of great power at any time, or in any country; though, if by mischance they had been compelled to work in one material, while desiring the qualities only attainable in another, they might strive, and meritoriously strive, for those better results, with what they had under their hand. The change of manner in William Hunt's work, in the later part of his life, was an example of this. As his art became more developed, he perceived in his subjects qualities which it was impossible to express in a transparent medium; and employed opaque white to draw with, when the finer forms of relieved light could not be otherwise followed. It was out of his power to do more than this, since in later life any attempt to learn the manipulation of oil color would have been unadvisable; and he obtained results of singular beauty; though their preciousness and completion would never, in a well-founded school of Art, have been trusted to the frail substance of water color.

87. But although I do not suppose that the abstract principle of doing with each material what it is best fitted to do, would be, in terms, anywhere denied; the practical question is always, not what should be done with this, or that, if everything were in our power; but what can be, or ought to be, accomplished with the means at our disposal, and in the circumstances under which we must necessarily work. Thus, in the question immediately before us, of the proper use of the black line—it is easy to establish the proper virtue of Line work, as essentially "De-Lineation," the expressing by outline the true limits of forms, which distinguish and part them from other forms; just as the virtue of brush work is essentially breadth, softness, and blending of forms. And, in the abstract, the point ought not to be used where the aim is not that of definition, nor the brush to be used where the aim is not that of breadth. Every painting in which the aim is primarily that of drawing, and every drawing in which the aim is primarily that of painting, must alike be in a measure erroneous. But it is one thing to determine what should be done with the black line, in a period of highly disciplined and widely practiced art, and quite another thing to say what should be done with it, at this present time, in England. Especially, the increasing interest and usefulness of our illustrated books render this an inquiry of very great social and educational importance. On the one side, the skill and felicity of the work spent upon them, and the advantage which young readers, if not those of all ages, might derive from having examples of good drawing put familiarly before their eyes, cannot be overrated; yet, on the other side, neither the admirable skill nor free felicity of the work can ultimately be held a counterpoise for the want—if there be a want—of sterling excellence: while, farther, this increased power of obtaining examples of art for private possession, at an almost nominal price, has two accompanying evils: it prevents the proper use of what we have, by dividing the attention, and continually leading us restlessly to demand new subjects of interest, while the old are as yet not half exhausted; and it prevents us—satisfied with the multiplication of minor art in our own possession—from looking for a better satisfaction in great public works.

88. Observe, first, it prevents the proper use of what we have. I often endeavor, though with little success, to conceive what would have been the effect on my mind, when I was a boy, of having such a book given me as Watson's "Illustrated Robinson Crusoe."[78] The edition I had was a small octavo one, in two volumes, printed at the Chiswick Press in 1812. It has, in each volume, eight or ten very rude vignettes, about a couple of inches wide; cut in the simple, but legitimate, manner of Bewick, and, though wholly commonplace and devoid of beauty, yet, as far as they go, rightly done; and here and there sufficiently suggestive of plain facts. I am quite unable to say how far I wasted,—how far I spent to advantage,—the unaccountable hours during which I pored over these wood-cuts; receiving more real sensation of sympathetic terror from the drifting hair and fear-stricken face of Crusoe dashed against the rock, in the rude attempt at the representation of his escape from the wreck, than I can now from the highest art; though the rocks and water are alike cut only with a few twisted or curved lines, and there is not the slightest attempt at light and shade, or imitative resemblance. For one thing, I am quite sure that being forced to make all I could out of very little things, and to remain long contented with them, not only in great part formed the power of close analysis in my mind, and the habit of steady contemplation; but rendered the power of greater art over me, when I first saw it, as intense as that of magic; so that it appealed to me like a vision out of another world.

89. On the other hand this long contentment with inferior work, and the consequent acute enjoyment of whatever was the least suggestive of truth in a higher degree, rendered me long careless of the highest virtues of execution, and retarded by many years the maturing and balancing of the general power of judgment. And I am now, as I said, quite unable to imagine what would have been the result upon me, of being enabled to study, instead of these coarse vignettes, such lovely and expressive work as that of Watson; suppose, for instance, the vignette at p. 87, which would have been sure to have caught my fancy, because of the dog, with its head on Crusoe's knee, looking up and trying to understand what is the matter with his master. It remains to be seen, and can only be known by experience, what will actually be the effect of these treasures on the minds of children that possess them. The result must be in some sort different from anything yet known; no such art was ever yet attainable by the youth of any nation. Yet of this there can, as I have just said, be no reasonable doubt;—that it is not well to make the imagination indolent, or take its work out of its hands by supplying continual pictures of what might be sufficiently conceived without pictures.

90. Take, for instance, the preceding vignette, in the same book, "Crusoe looking at the first shoots of barley." Nothing can be more natural or successful as a representation; but, after all, whatever the importance of the moment in Crusoe's history, the picture can show us nothing more than a man in a white shirt and dark pantaloons, in an attitude of surprise; and the imagination ought to be able to compass so much as this without help. And if so laborious aid be given, much more ought to be given. The virtue of Art, as of life, is that no line shall be in vain. Now the number of lines in this vignette, applied with full intention of thought in every touch, as they would have been by Holbein or Duerer, are quite enough to have produced,—not a merely deceptive dash of local color, with evanescent background,—but an entirely perfect piece of chiaroscuro, with its lights all truly limited and gradated, and with every form of leaf and rock in the background entirely right, complete,—and full not of mere suggestion, but of accurate information, exactly such as the fancy by itself cannot furnish. A work so treated by any man of power and sentiment such as the designer of this vignette possesses, would be an eternal thing; ten in the volume, for real enduring and educational power, were worth two hundred in imperfect development, and would have been a perpetual possession to the reader; whereas one certain result of the multiplication of these lovely but imperfect drawings, is to increase the feverish thirst for excitement, and to weaken the power of attention by endless diversion and division. This volume, beautiful as it is, will be forgotten; the strength in it is, in final outcome, spent for naught; and others, and still others, following it, will "come like shadows, so depart."

91. There is, however, a quite different disadvantage, but no less grave, to be apprehended from this rich multiplication of private possession. The more we have of books, and cabinet pictures, and cabinet ornaments, and other such domestic objects of art, the less capable we shall become of understanding or enjoying the lofty character of work noble in scale, and intended for public service. The most practical and immediate distinction between the orders of "mean" and "high" Art, is that the first is private,—the second public; the first for the individual, the second for all. It may be that domestic Art is the only kind which is likely to flourish in a country of cold climate, and in the hands of a nation tempered as the English are; but it is necessary that we should at least understand the disadvantage under which we thus labor; and the duty of not allowing the untowardness of our circumstances, or the selfishness of our dispositions, to have unresisted and unchecked influence over the adopted style of our art. But this part of the subject requires to be examined at length, and I must therefore reserve it for the following paper.

FOOTNOTES:

[77] Art Journal, vol. v., pp. 9, 10. January 1866.—ED.

[78] Routledge, 1864. The engraving is all by Dalziel. I do not ask the reader's pardon for speaking of myself, with reference to the point at issue. It is perhaps quite as modest to relate personal experience as to offer personal opinion; and the accurate statement of such experience is, in questions of this sort, the only contribution at present possible towards their solution.



CHAPTER VIII.[79]

92. In pursuing the question put at the close of the last paper, it must be observed that there are essentially two conditions under which we have to examine the difference between the effects of public and private Art on national prosperity. The first in immediate influence is their Economical function, the second their Ethical. We have first to consider what class of persons they in each case support; and, secondly, what classes they teach or please.

Looking over the list of the gift-books of this year, perhaps the first circumstance which would naturally strike us would be the number of persons living by this industry; and, in any consideration of the probable effects of a transference of the public attention to other kinds of work, we ought first to contemplate the result on the interests of the workman. The guinea spent on one of our ordinary illustrated gift-books is divided among—

1. A number of second-rate or third-rate artists, producing designs as fast as they can, and realizing them up to the standard required by the public of that year. Men of consummate power may sometimes put their hands to the business; but exceptionally.

2. Engravers, trained to mechanical imitation of this second or third-rate work; of these engravers the inferior classes are usually much overworked.

3. Printers, paper-makers, ornamental binders, and other craftsmen.

4. Publishers and booksellers.

93. Let us suppose the book can be remuneratively produced if there is a sale of five thousand copies. Then L5000, contributed for it by the public, are divided among the different workers; it does not matter what actual rate of division we assume, for the mere object of comparison with other modes of employing the money; but let us say these L5000 are divided among five hundred persons, giving on an average L10 to each. And let us suppose these L10 to be a fortnight's maintenance to each. Then, to maintain them through the year, twenty-five such books must be published; or to keep certainly within the mark of the probable cost of our autumnal gift-books, suppose L100,000 are spent by the public, with resultant supply of 100,000 households with one illustrated book, of second or third-rate quality each (there being twenty different books thus supplied), and resultant maintenance of five hundred persons for the year, at severe work of a second or third-rate order, mostly mechanical.

94. Now, if the mind of the nation, instead of private, be set on public work, there is of course no expense incurred for multiplication, or mechanical copying of any kind, or for retail dealing. The L5000, instead of being given for five thousand copies of the work, and divided among five hundred persons, are given for one original work, and given to one person. This one person will of course employ assistants; but these will be chosen by himself, and will form a superior class of men, out of whom the future leading artists of the time will rise in succession. The broad difference will therefore be, that, in the one case, L5000 are divided among five hundred persons of different classes, doing second-rate or wholly mechanical work; and in the other case, the same sum is divided among a few chosen persons of the best material of mind producible by the state at the given epoch. It may seem an unfair assumption that work for the public will be more honestly and earnestly done than that for private possession. But every motive that can touch either conscience or ambition is brought to bear upon the artist who is employed on a public service, and only a few such motives in other modes of occupation. The greater permanence, scale, dignity of office, and fuller display of Art in a National building, combine to call forth the energies of the artist; and if a man will not do his best under such circumstances, there is no "best" in him.

95. It might also at first seem an unwarrantable assumption that fewer persons would be employed in the private than in the national work, since, at least in architecture, quite as many subordinate craftsmen are employed as in the production of a book. It is, however, necessary, for the purpose of clearly seeing the effect of the two forms of occupation, that we should oppose them where their contrast is most complete; and that we should compare, not merely bookbinding with bricklaying, but the presentation of Art in books, necessarily involving much subordinate employment, with its presentation in statues or wall-pictures, involving only the labor of the artist and of his immediate assistants. In the one case, then, I repeat, the sum set aside by the public for Art-purposes is divided among many persons, very indiscriminately chosen; in the other among few carefully chosen. But it does not, for that reason, support fewer persons. The few artists live on their larger incomes,[80] by expenditure among various tradesmen, who in no wise produce Art, but the means of pleasant life; so that the real economical question is, not how many men shall we maintain, but at what work shall they be kept?—shall they every one be set to produce Art for us, in which case they must all live poorly, and produce bad Art; or out of the whole number shall ten be chosen who can and will produce noble Art; and shall the others be employed in providing the means of pleasant life for these chosen ten? Will you have, that is to say, four hundred and ninety tradesmen, butchers, carpet-weavers, carpenters, and the like, and ten fine artists, or will you, under the vain hope of finding, for each of them within your realm, "five hundred good as he," have your full complement of bad draughtsmen, and retail distributors of their bad work?

96. It will be seen in a moment that this is no question of economy merely; but, as all economical questions become, when set on their true foundation, a dilemma relating to modes of discipline and education. It is only one instance of the perpetually recurring offer to our choice—shall we have one man educated perfectly, and others trained only to serve him, or shall we have all educated equally ill?—Which, when the outcries of mere tyranny and pride-defiant on one side, and of mere envy and pride-concupiscent on the other, excited by the peril and promise of a changeful time, shall be a little abated, will be found to be, in brief terms, the one social question of the day.

Without attempting an answer which would lead us far from the business in hand, I pass to the Ethical part of the inquiry; to examine, namely, the effect of this cheaply diffused Art on the public mind.

97. The first great principle we have to hold by in dealing with the matter is, that the end of Art is NOT to amuse; and that all Art which proposes amusement as its end, or which is sought for that end, must be of an inferior, and is probably of a harmful, class.

The end of Art is as serious as that of all other beautiful things—of the blue sky and the green grass, and the clouds and the dew. They are either useless, or they are of much deeper function than giving amusement. Whatever delight we take in them, be it less or more, is not the delight we take in play, or receive from momentary surprise. It might be a matter of some metaphysical difficulty to define the two kinds of pleasure, but it is perfectly easy for any of us to feel that there is generic difference between the delight we have in seeing a comedy and in watching a sunrise. Not but that there is a kind of Divina Commedia,—a dramatic change and power,—in all beautiful things: the joy of surprise and incident mingles in music, painting, architecture, and natural beauty itself, in an ennobled and enduring manner, with the perfectness of eternal hue and form. But whenever the desire of change becomes principal; whenever we care only for new tunes, and new pictures, and new scenes, all power of enjoying Nature or Art is so far perished from us: and a child's love of toys has taken its place. The continual advertisement of new music (as if novelty were its virtue) signifies, in the inner fact of it, that no one now cares for music. The continual desire for new exhibitions means that we do not care for pictures; the continual demand for new books means that nobody cares to read.

98. Not that it would necessarily, and at all times, mean this; for in a living school of Art there will always be an exceeding thirst for, and eager watching of freshly-developed thought. But it specially and sternly means this, when the interest is merely in the novelty; and great work in our possession is forgotten, while mean work, because strange and of some personal interest, is annually made the subject of eager observation and discussion. As long as (for one of many instances of such neglect) two great pictures of Tintoret's lie rolled up in an outhouse at Venice, all the exhibitions and schools in Europe mean nothing but promotion of costly commerce. Through that, we might indeed arrive at better things; but there is no proof, in the eager talk of the public about Art, that we are arriving at them. Portraiture of the said public's many faces, and tickling of its twice as many eyes, by changeful phantasm, are all that the patron-multitudes of the present day in reality seek; and this may be supplied to them in multiplying excess forever, yet no steps made to the formation of a school of Art now, or to the understanding of any that have hitherto existed.

99. It is the carrying of this annual Exhibition into the recesses of home which is especially to be dreaded in the multiplication of inferior Art for private possession. Public amusement or excitement may often be quite wholesomely sought, in gay spectacles, or enthusiastic festivals; but we must be careful to the uttermost how we allow the desire for any kind of excitement to mingle among the peaceful continuities of home happiness. The one stern condition of that happiness is that our possessions should be no more than we can thoroughly use; and that to this use they should be practically and continually put. Calculate the hours which, during the possible duration of life, can, under the most favorable circumstances, be employed in reading, and the number of books which it is possible to read in that utmost space of time;—it will be soon seen what a limited library is all that we need, and how careful we ought to be in choosing its volumes. Similarly, the time which most people have at their command for any observation of Art is not more than would be required for the just understanding of the works of one great master. How are we to estimate the futility of wasting this fragment of time on works from which nothing can be learned? For the only real pleasure, and the richest of all amusements, to be derived from either reading or looking, are in the steady progress of the mind and heart, which day by day are more deeply satisfied, and yet more divinely athirst.

100. As far as I know the homes of England of the present day, they show a grievous tendency to fall, in these important respects, into the two great classes of over-furnished and unfurnished:—of those in which the Greek marble in its niche, and the precious shelf-loads of the luxurious library, leave the inmates nevertheless dependent for all their true pastime on horse, gun, and croquet-ground;—and those in which Art, honored only by the presence of a couple of engravings from Landseer, and literature, represented by a few magazines and annuals arranged in a star on the drawing-room table, are felt to be entirely foreign to the daily business of life, and entirely unnecessary to its domestic pleasures.