LECTURES ON ART
 
 LECTURES ON ART 
 
 DELIVERED 
 
 BEFORE THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD 
 
 IN HILARY TERM, 1870 
 
 JOHN RUSKIN, LL.D. 
 
 HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRIST ^CHURCH, AND HONORARY FELLOW 
 OF CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE. OXFORD 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 
 
 BRANTWOOD EDITION 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 Maynard, Merrill, & Co., Publishers, 
 
 43, 45 & 47 East Tenth St. 
 
 1893. 
 
 « > »
 
 SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT 
 
 Mr. George Allen begs to announce that Ruskin's Works 
 will hereafter be published in America by Messrs. Charles 
 E. Merrill & Co., of New York, who will issue the only 
 authorized editions. 
 
 Copyright 1890 
 Charles E. Merrill & Co. 
 
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 iff 93 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 WHEN the first volume of Modern 
 Painters was published in 1843, it 
 appeared without the author's name. The 
 title-page designated the book as " By a 
 Graduate of Oxford," and some time passed 
 before the name of the writer became known 
 to the public. It was not without pardon- 
 able pride that, twenty-seven years later, in 
 his Inaugural Lecture as the first Professor 
 of Art at his University, Mr. Ruskin referred 
 to the work of his youth, fancying that some 
 among his audience might recognise him by 
 an old name, that of " the author of Modern 
 Painters." 
 
 It was altogether becoming that he who, 
 of all the graduates of Oxford, had done 
 most to quicken the love of Art in England, 
 and to illustrate its principles, should be the 
 first chosen to speak, in the name of the 
 
 394783
 
 VI INTRODUCTION. 
 
 University, on the study of the Fine Arts 
 as an essential part of education, and to 
 assert their claims to be an indispensable 
 means for the training of the highest intel- 
 lectual faculties and moral qualities. 
 
 The present volume contains the seven 
 Lectures which he delivered during the first 
 term of his Professorship in 1870. The first 
 four of them, on the relation of Art to 
 society, to religion, to morals, and to use, 
 are of less practical interest than the last 
 three, which, limiting themselves to painting, 
 treat specifically of line, light, and colour. 
 None but a master practised in the art, and 
 with extraordinary gifts of perception and 
 expression, could have written these last 
 Lectures. The attention of the student is 
 not confined to technical detail, but is 
 directed to the broader aspects of the sub- 
 ject by general statements in regard to the 
 practice of the different schools of painting. 
 Some of these statements may seem to require 
 modification, but they all serve to illustrate 
 leading facts and principles, and to quicken 
 observation and reflection.
 
 INTRODUCTION. Vll 
 
 The general conception of the Fine Arts 
 presented in the opening Lectures, although 
 interesting and suggestive, seems to me to 
 be impaired by some vagueness and inade- 
 quacy of definition. In this respect Mr. 
 Ruskin is not singular among the writers 
 on the subject. He treats the Fine Arts as 
 if they were entities, possessed of an inde- 
 pendent existence. He speaks of them as 
 " having for their object either the support 
 or the exaltation of human life" (p. 41); as 
 " being appointed to relate truth " (p. 43) ; 
 he asserts that "they can have but three 
 directions of purpose" (p. 43); he says that 
 " we have to ask how far art may have 
 been literally directed by spiritual powers " 
 (p. 54) ; and that " art makes us believe 
 what we would not otherwise have believed " 
 (p. 61). Such assertions, though they may be 
 modified and explained as largely figurative 
 modes of speech, so as not to be inconsistent 
 with correct conceptions of the Fine Arts, 
 seem not unlikely to lead to confusion of 
 thought as to their true character. 
 
 " Painting, or art [fine art] generally . . .
 
 Vlll INTRODUCTION. 
 
 is nothing but a noble and expressive lan- 
 guage," Mr. Ruskin has said with truth in 
 the second chapter of Modern Painters. 
 There is, indeed, nothing mystical or meta- 
 physical in the Fine Arts. All of them are 
 simply arts of expression, and every mode 
 of expression, if directed by the artistic 
 method to giving the best form to idea, 
 sentiment, or emotion, is a fine art. Their 
 common bond is the aim, by means of this 
 method, at perfection of expression, in the 
 modes appropriate to each. From the Fine 
 Art of manners and conduct to that of 
 architecture, from poetry to music or to 
 painting, from dancing to oratory, all concur 
 in the effort of the intelligence to express 
 itself in forms of beauty adequate to con- 
 vey the thought or feeling that seeks for 
 expression. This effort can be achieved 
 only through the artistic method, or, in 
 other words, through the right use of the 
 means and material of expression belong- 
 ing to the special art. And this right 
 use depends on the poetic power of the 
 imagination. For it is this power that
 
 INTRODUCTION. IX 
 
 sees and determines the forms of beauty 
 which are the ends of the Fine Arts, 
 and directs the intelligence in the attainment 
 of that technical mastery which controls the 
 . resources of expression appropriate to each 
 special art. 
 
 Thus, in the Fine Arts the method is 
 the essential thing, the thing expressed is 
 secondary. And herein lies the distinction 
 between art and morals, for in morals it is 
 the thing done that is essential, and the 
 method of doing it is secondary. 
 
 Different as they are in this respect, there 
 is still an indissoluble connection between 
 the Fine Arts and morals. All the intel- 
 lectual faculties, including the imagination, 
 draw their motive force and take the direc- 
 tion of their use, unconsciously it may be, 
 but yet of necessity, from the moral cha- 
 racter. And the artistic method, even in its 
 technical execution, partakes of and reveals 
 the moral nature of the artist. The Fine 
 Arts, therefore, if their work be correctly 
 interpreted, arc the most faithful and literal, 
 because the unconscious and involuntary
 
 X INTRODUCTION. 
 
 exponents of the ethical, no less than of 
 the intellectual, conditions and character of 
 those by whom they are practised. They 
 are the ultimate expressions of the mental 
 state of individuals and of nations. 
 
 The significance of this truth has not yet 
 been fully recognised. Historians have failed 
 to apply it to the elucidation and interpreta- 
 tion of the past experiences and conditions 
 of man, while the votaries of art for art's 
 sake lose sight of the most intimate and 
 exquisite quality of art, neglecting a corre- 
 lation no less close and indissoluble than 
 that of the physical forces of the universe. 
 
 Mr. Ruskin's work, as Professor of Art at 
 Oxford, was not limited to the delivery of 
 lectures. He established a Drawing School; 
 he gave to the University an invaluable col- 
 lection of engravings, drawings, and paint- 
 ings, arranged for study in the University 
 galleries; and he prepared and published full 
 Catalogues of this collection under the heads 
 of the Standard or Reference, the Educa- 
 tional, and the Rudimentary Series. He
 
 INTRODUCTION. XI 
 
 also supplemented these Catalogues with 
 "Instructions in Elementary Drawing" with 
 relation to the use of the Rudimentary Series. 
 These Catalogues and Instructions are of 
 great interest, and contain much admirable 
 and important criticism and teaching, of 
 worth not only to students at Oxford, but 
 to those elsewhere who may desire to im- 
 prove themselves by learning what examples 
 the most accomplished master of the time 
 thought best deserving of the attention of 
 beginners in the practical study of the Arts, 
 and what elementary instruction he esteemed 
 most desirable for them. The Catalogues 
 can hardly be too highly recommended as 
 guides in the formation of useful collections 
 of exemplary work ; for, although it would 
 be impossible to duplicate a large portion of 
 the pieces described in them, as, for instance, 
 the great number of original drawings by 
 Turner, by Mr. Ruskin himself, and other 
 great masters, yet a considerable number 
 remain which might be duplicated, and would 
 serve as a nucleus, and as a standard by which 
 the worth of additions could be measured.
 
 Xll INTRODUCTION. 
 
 These collections are one of the most 
 important gifts ever made by an individual 
 to the University, and, rich as Oxford is, 
 form one of her most precious treasures. 
 
 C. E. N. 
 
 Cambridge, Massachusetts, 
 December 1890.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 TO 
 
 THE EDITION OF 1887. 
 
 The following lectures were the most important 
 piece of my literary work done with unabated 
 power, best motive, and happiest concurrence of 
 circumstance. They were written and delivered 
 while my mother yet lived, and had vividest 
 sympathy in all I was attempting ; — while also 
 my friends put unbroken trust in me, and the 
 course of study I had followed seemed to fit 
 me for the acceptance of noble tasks and graver 
 responsibilities than those only of a curious 
 traveller, or casual teacher. 
 
 Men of the present world may smile at the 
 sanguine utterances of the first four lectures ;
 
 XIV PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1 887. 
 
 but it has not been wholly my own fault that 
 they have remained unfulfilled ; nor do I retract 
 one word of hope for the success of other 
 masters, nor a single promise made to the sin- 
 cerity of the student's labour, on the lines here 
 indicated. It would have been necessary to my 
 success, that I should have accepted permanent 
 residence in Oxford, and scattered none of my 
 energy in other tasks. But I chose to spend 
 half my time at Coniston waterhead ; and to 
 use half my force in attempts to form a new 
 social organisation, — the St. George's Guild, — 
 which made all my Oxford colleagues distrust- 
 ful of me, and many of my Oxford hearers 
 contemptuous. My mother's death in 1871, 
 and that of a dear friend in 1875, took away 
 the personal joy I had in anything I wrote or 
 designed : and in 1876, feeling unable for 
 Oxford duty, I obtained a year's leave of rest, 
 and, by the kind and wise counsel of Prince 
 Leopold, went to Venice, to reconsider the
 
 PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1 887. XV 
 
 form into which I had cast her history in the 
 abstract of it given in the " Stones of Venice." 
 
 The more true and close view of that history, 
 begun in " St. Mark's Rest," and the fresh archi- 
 tectural drawings made under the stimulus of 
 it, led me forward into new fields of thought, 
 inconsistent with the daily attendance needed 
 by my Oxford classes ; and in my discontent 
 with the state I saw them in, and my inability 
 to return to their guidance without abandon- 
 ment of all my designs of Venetian and Italian 
 history, began the series of vexations which 
 ended in the very nearly mortal illness of 1878. 
 
 Since, therefore, the period of my effective 
 action in Oxford was only from 1870 to 1875, 
 it can scarcely be matter of surprise or reproof 
 that I could not in that time obtain general 
 trust in a system of teaching which, though 
 founded on that of Da Vinci and Reynolds, 
 was at variance with the practice of all recent 
 European academy schools ; nor establish — on
 
 xvi PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1 887. 
 
 the unassisted resources of the Slade Professor- 
 ship — the schools of Sculpture, Architecture, 
 Metalwork, and manuscript Illumination, of 
 which the design is confidently traced in the 
 four inaugural lectures. 
 
 In revising the book, I have indicated as 
 in the last edition of the "Seven Lamps," 
 passages which the student will find generally 
 applicable, and in all their bearings useful, as 
 distinguished from those regarding only their 
 immediate subject. The relative importance of 
 these broader statements, I again indicate by the 
 use of capitals or italics ; and if the reader 
 will index the sentences he finds useful for his 
 own work, in the blank pages left for that pur- 
 pose at the close of the volume, he will certainly 
 get more good of them than if they had been 
 grouped for him according to the author's 
 notion of their contents. 
 
 Sandgate, \Otli January, I
 
 CONTEN T S. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 PAGE 
 INAUGURAL ......... I 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 THE RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION . . . • 4 1 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 Illl RELATION i)l' AIM Ki MORALS . . . . 8o 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 THE RELATION OF ART TO USE . . . . . 115 
 
 I F.CTURE V. 
 line 15° 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 
 LIGHT 179 
 
 I ECTURE VII. 
 
 COLOUR . . . . . . . .. . .217
 
 ERRATA. 
 
 Page 72, last line but one, for " expiedency " read "expediency. ' 
 ,, 155, Line 2, for "mitata" read " imitata." 
 „ 163, line 4, for "standing- mentally their" read "standing 
 
 mentally for their." 
 ,, 187, line 6 from foot, for " Helen " read " Hellen." 
 ,, 199, line 8 from foot, for " Beside, I put " read " Beside it, I put."
 
 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 INAUGURAL. 
 
 r. The duty which is to-day laid on me, of 
 introducing, among the elements of education 
 appointed in this great University, one not only 
 new, but such as to involve in its possible re- 
 sults some modification of the rest, is, as you 
 well feel, so grave, that no man could under- 
 take it without laying himself open to the impu- 
 tation of a kind of insolence ; and no man could 
 undertake it rightly, without being in danger of 
 having his hands shortened by dread of his 
 task, and mistrust of himself. 
 
 And it has chanced to me, of late, to be so 
 little acquainted either with pride or hope, that 
 I can scarcely recover so much as I now need, 
 of the one for strength, and of the other for 
 
 I
 
 2 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 foresight, except by remembering that noble 
 persons, and friends of the high temper that 
 judges most clearly where it loves best, have 
 desired that this trust should be given me : and 
 by resting also in the conviction that the goodly 
 tree whose roots, by God's help, we set in earth 
 to-day, will not fail of its height because the 
 planting of it is under poor auspices, or the first 
 shoots of it enfeebled by ill gardening. 
 
 2. The munificence of the English gentleman 
 to whom we owe the founding of this Professor- 
 ship at once in our three great Universities, has 
 accomplished the first great group of a series 
 of changes now taking gradual effect in our sys- 
 tem of public education, which, as you well 
 know, are the sign of a vital change in the na- 
 tional mind, respecting both the principles on 
 which that education should be conducted, and 
 the ranks of society to which it should extend. 
 For, whereas it was formerly thought that the 
 discipline necessary to form the character of 
 youth was best given in the study of abstract 
 branches of literature and philosophy, it is now 
 thought that the same, or a better, discipline 
 may be given by informing men in early years of 
 the things it will be of chief practical advantage
 
 INAUGURAL. 
 
 to them afterwards to know ; and by permit- 
 ting to them the choice of any field of study 
 which they may feel to be best adapted to their 
 personal dispositions. I have always used what 
 poor influence I possessed in advancing this 
 change ; nor can any one rejoice more than 1 
 in its practical results. But the completion — I 
 will not venture to say, correction — of a system 
 established by the highest wisdom of noble an- 
 cestors, cannot be too reverently undertaken : 
 and it is necessary for the English people, who 
 are sometimes violent in change in proportion to 
 the reluctance with which they admit its neces- 
 sity, to be now, oftener than at other times, re- 
 minded that the object of instruction here is not 
 primarily attainment, but discipline; and that a 
 youth is sent to our Universities, not (hitherto 
 at least) to be apprenticed to a trade, nor even 
 always to be advanced in a profession ; but, al- 
 ways, to be made a gentleman and a scholar. 
 
 3. To be made these, — if there is in him the 
 making of either. The populaces of civilized 
 countries have lately been under a feverish im- 
 pression that it is possible for all men to be 
 both ; and that having once become, by pass- 
 ing through certain mechanical processes of
 
 4 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 instruction, gentle and learned, they are sure to 
 attain in the sequel the consummate beatitude 
 of being rich. 
 
 Rich, in the way and measure in which it is 
 well for them to be so, they may, without doubt, 
 all become. There is indeed a land of Havilah 
 open to them, of which the wonderful sentence 
 is literally true — • The gold of that land is good.' 
 But they must first understand, that education, 
 in its deepest sense, is not the equalizer, but 
 the discerner, of men ; * and that, so far from 
 being instruments for the collection of riches, 
 the first lesson of wisdom is to disdain them, 
 and of gentleness, to diffuse. 
 
 It is not therefore, as far as we can judge, 
 yet possible for all men to be gentlemen and 
 scholars. Even under the best training some 
 will remain too selfish to refuse wealth, and 
 some too dull to desire leisure. But many more 
 might be so than are now ; nay, perhaps all men 
 in England might one day be so, if England 
 
 * The full meaning of this sentence, and of that which 
 closes the paragraph, can only be understood by reference 
 to my more developed statements on the subject of Education 
 in ' Modern Painters' and in 'Time and Tide.' The follow- 
 ing fourth paragraph is the most pregnant summary of my 
 political and social principles I have ever been able to give.
 
 I. INAUGURAL. 5 
 
 truly desired her supremacy among the nations 
 to be in kindness and in learning. To which 
 good end, it will indeed contribute that we add 
 some practice of the lower arts to our scheme 
 of University education ; but the thing which 
 is vitally necessary is, that we should extend the 
 spirit of University education to the practice 
 of the lower arts. 
 
 4. And, above all, it is needful that we do 
 this by redeeming them from their present pain 
 of self-contempt, and by giving them rest. It 
 has been too long boasted as the pride of Eng- 
 land, that out of a vast multitude of men, con- 
 fessed to be in evil case, it was possible for 
 individuals, by strenuous effort, and rare good 
 fortune, occasionally to emerge into the light, 
 and look back with self-gratulatory scorn upon 
 the occupations of their parents, and the circum- 
 stances of their infancy. Ought we not rather 
 to aim at an ideal of national life, when, of the 
 employments of Englishmen, though each shall 
 be distinct, none shall be unhappy or ignoble ; 
 when mechanical operations, acknowledged to 
 be debasing in their tendency,* shall be deputed 
 to less fortunate and more covetous races ; when 
 
 * " r^xvai inlpprjTOi,'' compare page 143.
 
 6 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 advance from rank to rank, though possible to 
 all men, may be rather shunned than desired 
 by the best ; and the chief object in the mind 
 of every citizen may not be extrication from a 
 condition admitted to be disgraceful, but fulfil- 
 ment of a duty which shall be also a birthright ? 
 5. And then, the training of all these distinct 
 classes will not be by Universities of general 
 knowledge, but by distinct schools of such know- 
 ledge as shall be most useful for every class : 
 in which, first the principles of their special 
 business may be perfectly taught, and whatever 
 higher learning, and cultivation of the faculties 
 for receiving and giving pleasure, may be pro- 
 perly joined with that labour, taught in connec- 
 tion with it. Thus, I do not despair of seeing 
 a School of Agriculture, with its fully-endowed 
 institutes of zoology, botany, and chemistry ; 
 and a School of Mercantile Seamanship, with 
 iis institutes of astronomy, meteorology, and 
 natural history of the sea : and, to name only 
 one of the finer, I do not say higher, arts, we 
 shall, I hope, in a little time, have a perfect 
 school of Metal-work, at the head of which will 
 be, not the ironmasters, but the goldsmiths : 
 and therein, I believe, that artists, being taught
 
 I. INAUGURAL. 7 
 
 how to deal wisely with the most precious of 
 metals, will take into due government the uses 
 of all others. 
 
 But I must not permit myself to fail in the 
 estimate of my immediate duty, while I debate 
 what that duty may hereafter become in the 
 hands of others ; and 1 will therefore now, so 
 far as I am able, lay before you a brief general 
 view of the existing state of the arts in England, 
 and of the influence which her Universities, 
 through these newly-founded lectureships, may, 
 I hope, bring to bear upon it for good. 
 
 6. We have first to consider the impulse 
 which has been given to the practice of all the 
 arts by the extension of our commerce, and en- 
 larged means of intercourse with foreign na- 
 tions, by which we now become more familiarly 
 acquainted with their works in past and in 
 present times. The immediate result of these 
 new opportunities, I regret to say, has been to 
 make us more jealous of the genius of others, 
 than conscious of the limitations of our own ; 
 and to make us rather desire to enlarge our 
 wealth by the sale of art, than to elevate our 
 enjoyments by its acquisition. 
 
 Now, whatever efforts we make, with a true
 
 8 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 desire to produce, and possess, things that are 
 intrinsically beautiful, have in them at least 
 one of the essential elements of success. But 
 eiforts having origin only in the hope of enrich- 
 ing ourselves by the sale of our productions, are 
 assuredly condemned to dishonourable failure ; 
 not because, ultimately, a well-trained nation is 
 forbidden to profit by the exercise of its peculiar 
 art-skill ; but because that peculiar art-skill can 
 never be developed with a view to profit. The 
 right fulfilment of national power in art depends 
 always on the direction of its aim by the ex- 
 perience of ages. Self-knowledge is not less 
 difficult, nor less necessary for the direction of 
 its genius, to a people than to an individual ; 
 and it is neither to be acquired by the eagerness 
 of unpractised pride, nor during the anxieties of 
 improvident distress. No nation ever had, or 
 will have, the power of suddenly developing, 
 under the pressure of necessity, faculties it had 
 neglected when it was at ease ; nor of teaching 
 itself in poverty, the skill to produce, what it has 
 never, in opulence, had the sense to admire. 
 
 7. Connected also with some of the worst 
 parts of our social system, but capable of being 
 directed to better result than this commercial
 
 I. INAUGURAL. 9 
 
 endeavour, we see lately a most powerful im- 
 pulse given to the production of costly works 
 of art, by the various causes which promote the 
 sudden accumulation of wealth in the hands 
 of private persons. We have thus a vast and 
 new patronage, which, in its present agency, is 
 injurious to our schools ; but which is never- 
 theless in a great degree earnest and con- 
 scientious, and far from being influenced chiefly 
 by motives of ostentation. Most of our rich men 
 would be glad to promote the true interests 
 of art in this country : and even those who buy 
 for vanity, found their vanity on the possession 
 of what they suppose to be best. 
 
 It is therefore in a great measure the fault of 
 artists themselves if they suffer from this partly 
 unintelligent, but thoroughly well-intended, pa- 
 tronage. If they seek to attract it by eccentri- 
 city, to deceive it by superficial qualities, or take 
 advantage of it by thoughtless and facile pro- 
 duction, they necessarily degrade themselves 
 and it together, and have no right to complain 
 afterwards that it will not acknowledge better- 
 grounded claims. But if every painter of real 
 power would do only what he knew to be 
 worthy of himself, and refuse to be involved in
 
 10 LECTURES ON ART. ' 
 
 the contention for undeserved or accidental suc- 
 cess, there is indeed, whatever may have been 
 thought or said to the contrary, true instinct 
 enough in the public mind to follow such firm 
 guidance. It is one of the facts which the ex- 
 perience of thirty years enables me to assert 
 without qualification, that a really good picture 
 is ultimately always approved and bought, 
 unless it is wilfully rendered offensive to the 
 public by faults which the artist has been either 
 too proud to abandon or too weak to correct. 
 
 8. The development of whatever is healthful 
 and serviceable in the two modes of impulse 
 which we have been considering, depends how- 
 ever, ultimately, on the direction taken by the 
 true interest in art which has lately been aroused 
 by the great and active genius of many of our 
 living, or but lately lost, painters, sculptors, 
 and architects. It may perhaps surprise, but I 
 think it will please you to hear me, or (if you 
 will forgive me, in my own Oxford, the presump- 
 tion of fancying that some may recognise me 
 by an old name) to hear the author of ' Modern 
 Painters ' say, that his chief error in earlier 
 days was not in over estimating, but in too 
 slightly acknowledging the merit of living men.
 
 I. INAUGURAL. I I 
 
 The great painter whose power, while he was 
 yet among us, I was able to perceive, was the 
 first to reprove me for my disregard of the skill 
 of his fellow-artists; and, with this inauguration 
 of the study of the art of all time, — a study 
 which can only by true modesty end in wise 
 admiration, — it is surely well that I connect the 
 record of these words of his, spoken then too 
 truly to myself, and true always more or less 
 for all who are untrained in that toil, — ' You 
 don't know how difficult it is.' 
 
 You will not expect me, within the compass 
 of this lecture, to give you any analysis of the 
 many kinds of excellent art (in all the three 
 great divisions) which the complex demands of 
 modern life, and yet more varied instincts of 
 modern genius, have developed for pleasure or 
 service. It must be my endeavour, in conjunc- 
 tion with my colleagues in the other Universities, 
 hereafter to enable you to appreciate these 
 worthily ; in the hope that also the members of 
 the Royal Academy, and those of the Institute 
 of British Architects, may be induced to assist, 
 and guide, the efforts of the Universities, by 
 organising such a system of art-education for 
 their own students, as shall in future prevent
 
 12 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 the waste of genius in any mistaken endeavours; 
 especially removing doubt as to the proper sub- 
 stance and use of materials; and requiring com- 
 pliance with certain elementary principles of 
 right, in every picture and design exhibited with 
 their sanction. It is not indeed possible for talent 
 so varied as that of English artists to be com- 
 pelled into the formalities of a determined 
 school ; but it must certainly be the function of 
 every academical body to see that their younger 
 students are guarded from what must in every 
 school be error ; and that they are practised in 
 the best methods of work hitherto known, before 
 their ingenuity is directed to the invention of 
 others. 
 
 9. I need scarcely refer, except for the sake 
 of completeness in my statement, to one form of 
 demand for art which is wholly unenlightened, 
 and powerful only for evil; — namely, the demand 
 of the classes occupied solely in the pursuit of 
 pleasure, for objects and modes of art that can 
 amuse indolence or excite passion. There is no 
 need for any discussion of these requirements, 
 or of their forms of influence, though they are 
 very deadly at present in their operation on 
 sculpture, and on jewellers' work. They cannot
 
 I. INAUGURAL. 13 
 
 be checked by blame, nor guided by instruction ; 
 they are merely the necessary result of what- 
 ever defects exist in the temper and principles 
 of a luxurious society ; and it is only by moral 
 changes, not by art-criticism, that their action 
 can be modified. 
 
 io. Lastly, there is a continually increasing 
 demand for popular art, multipliable by the 
 printing-press, illustrative of daily events, of 
 general literature, and of natural science. Ad- 
 mirable skill, and some of the best talent of 
 modern times, are occupied in supplying this 
 want ; and there is no limit to the good which 
 may be effected by rightly taking advantage of 
 the powers we now possess of placing good and 
 lovely art within the reach of the poorest classes. 
 Much has been already accomplished ; but great 
 harm has been done also, — first, by forms of art 
 definitely addressed to depraved tastes ; and, 
 secondly, in a more subtle way, by really beau- 
 tiful and useful engravings which are yet not 
 good enough to retain their influence on the 
 public mind ; — which weary it by redundant 
 quantity of monotonous average excellence, and 
 diminish or destroy its power of accurate atten- 
 tion to work of a higher order.
 
 14 
 
 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 Especially this is to be regretted in the effect 
 produced on the schools of line engraving, which 
 had reached in England an executive skill of a 
 kind before unexampled, and which of late have 
 lost much of their more sterling and legitimate 
 methods. Still, I have seen plates produced 
 quite recently, more beautiful, I think, in some 
 qualities than anything ever before attained 
 by the burin : and I have not the slightest fear 
 that photography, or any other adverse or com- 
 petitive operation, will in the least ultimately 
 diminish, — I believe they will, on the contrary, 
 stimulate and exalt — the grand old powers of the 
 wood and the steel. 
 
 n. Such are, I think, briefly the present 
 conditions of art with which we have to deal ; 
 and I conceive it to be the function of this Pro- 
 fessorship, with respect to them, to establish 
 both a practical and critical school of fine art 
 for English gentlemen : practical, so that if they 
 draw at all, they may draw rightly ; and critical, 
 so that being first directed to such works of 
 existing art as will best reward their study, they 
 may afterwards make their patronage of living 
 artists delightful to themselves in their con- 
 sciousness of its justice, and, to the utmost,
 
 I. INAUGURAL. 1 5 
 
 beneficial to their country, by being given to 
 the men who deserve it ; in the early period of 
 their lives, when they both need it most, and 
 can be influenced by it to the best advantage. 
 
 12. And especially with reference to this 
 function of patronage, I believe myself justified 
 in taking into account future probabilities as 
 to the character and range of art in England : 
 and I shall endeavour at once to organize with 
 you a system of study calculated to develope 
 chiefly the knowledge of those branches in 
 which the English schools have shown, and are 
 likely to show, peculiar excellence. 
 
 Now, in asking your sanction both for the 
 nature of the general plans I wish to adopt, and 
 for what I conceive to be necessary limitations 
 of them, I wish you to be fully aware of my 
 reasons for both : and I will therefore risk the 
 burdening of your patience while I state the 
 directions of effort in which I think English 
 artists are liable to failure, and those also in 
 which past experience has shown they are 
 secure of success. 
 
 13. I referred, but now, to the effort we are 
 making to improve the designs of our manu- 
 factures. Within certain limits I believe this
 
 1 6 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 improvement may indeed take effect : so that we 
 may no more humour momentary fashions by 
 ugly results of chance instead of design ; and 
 may produce both good tissues, of harmonious 
 colours, and good forms and substance of pot- 
 tery and glass. But we shall never excel in 
 decorative design. Such design is usually pro- 
 duced by people of great natural powers of 
 mind, who have no variety of subjects to em- 
 ploy themselves on, no oppressive anxieties, and 
 are in circumstances either of natural scenery or 
 of daily life, which cause pleasurable excitement. 
 We cannot design, because we have too much 
 to think of, and we think of it too anxiously. 
 It has long been observed how little real anxiety 
 exists in the minds of the partly savage races 
 which excel in decorative art ; and we must not 
 suppose that the temper of the Middle Ages 
 was a troubled one, because every day brought 
 its danger or its change. The very eventfulness 
 of the life rendered it careless, as generally is 
 still the case with soldiers and sailors. Now, 
 when there are great powers of thought, and 
 little to think of, all the waste energy and fancy 
 are thrown into the manual work, and you have 
 so much intellect as would direct the affairs
 
 I. INAUGURAL. 1 7 
 
 of a large mercantile concern for a day, spent 
 all at once, quite unconsciously, in drawing an 
 ingenious spiral. 
 
 Also, powers of doing fine ornamental work 
 are only to be reached by a perpetual discipline 
 of the hand as well as of the fancy ; discipline 
 as attentive and painful as that which a juggler 
 has to put himself through, to overcome the more 
 palpable difficulties of his profession. The exe- 
 cution of the best artists is always a splendid 
 tour-de-force ; and much that in painting is 
 supposed to be dependent on material is indeed 
 only a lovely and quite inimitable legerdemain. 
 Now, when powers of fancy, stimulated by this 
 triumphant precision of manual dexterity, de- 
 scend uninterruptedly from generation to gene- 
 ration, you have at last, what is not so much a 
 trained artist, as a new species of animal, with 
 whose instinctive gifts you have no chance of 
 contending. And thus all our imitations of other 
 people's work are futile. We must learn first 
 to make honest English wares, and afterwards 
 to decorate them as may please the then ap- 
 proving Graces. 
 
 14. Secondly — and this is an incapacity of a 
 graver kind, yet having its own good in it also 
 
 2
 
 1 8 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 — we shall never be successful in the highest 
 fields of ideal or theological art. 
 
 For there is one strange, but quite essential, 
 character in us : ever since the Conquest, if not 
 earlier : — a delight in the forms of burlesque 
 which are connected in some degree with the 
 foulness of evil. I think the most perfect type 
 of a true English mind in its best possible tem- 
 per, is that of Chaucer ; and you will find that, 
 while it is for the most part full of thoughts 
 of beauty, pure and wild like that of an April 
 morning, there are even in the midst of this, 
 sometimes momentarily jesting passages which 
 stoop to play with evil — while the power of 
 listening to and enjoying the jesting of entirely 
 gross persons, whatever the feeling may be 
 which permits it, afterwards degenerates into 
 forms of humour which render some of quite 
 the greatest, wisest, and most moral of English 
 writers now almost useless for our youth. And 
 yet you will find that whenever Englishmen 
 are wholly without this instinct, their genius is 
 comparatively weak and restricted. 
 
 15. Now, the first necessity for the doing of 
 any great work in ideal art, is the looking upon 
 all foulness with horror, as a contemptible though
 
 I. INAUGURAL. 19 
 
 dreadful enemy. You may easily understand 
 what I mean, by comparing the feelings with 
 which Dante regards any form of obscenity or 
 of base jest, with the temper in which the same 
 things are regarded by Shakespeare. And this 
 strange earthly instinct of ours, coupled as it 
 is, in our good men, with great simplicity and 
 common sense, renders them shrewd and per- 
 fect observers and delineators of actual nature, 
 low or high ; but precludes them from that 
 speciality of art which is properly called sub- 
 lime. If ever we try anything in the manner of 
 Michael Angelo or of Dante, we catch a fall, 
 even in literature, as Milton in the battle of the 
 angels, spoiled from Hesiod ; while in art, every 
 attempt in this style has hitherto been the sign 
 either of the presumptuous egotism of persons 
 who had never really learned to be workmen, or 
 it has been connected with very tragic forms 
 of the contemplation of death,— it has always 
 been partly insane, and never once wholly suc- 
 cessful. 
 
 But we need not feel any discomfort in these 
 limitations of our capacity. We can do much 
 that others cannot, and more than we have ever 
 yet ourselves completely done. Our first great
 
 20 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 gift is in the portraiture of living people — a 
 power already so accomplished in both Reynolds 
 and Gainsborough that nothing is left for future 
 masters but to add the calm of perfect work- 
 manship to their vigour and felicity of percep- 
 tion. And of what value a true school of 
 portraiture may become in the future, when 
 worthy men will desire only to be known, and 
 others will not fear to know them, for what they 
 truly were, we cannot from any past records of 
 art influence yet conceive. But in my next 
 address it will be partly my endeavour to show 
 you how much more useful, because more hum- 
 ble, the labour of great masters might have 
 been, had they been content to bear record of 
 the souls that were dwelling with them on 
 earth, instead of striving to give a deceptive 
 glory to those they dreamed of in heaven. 
 
 1 6. Secondly, we have an intense power of 
 invention and expression in domestic drama ; 
 (King Lear and Hamlet being essentially do- 
 mestic in their strongest motives of interest). 
 There is a tendency at this moment towards 
 a noble development of our art in this direc- 
 tion, checked by many adverse conditions, which 
 may be summed in one, — the insufficiency of
 
 I. INAUGURAL. 21 
 
 generous civic or patriotic passion in the heart 
 of the English people ; a fault which makes its 
 domestic affection selfish, contracted, and, there 
 fore, frivolous. 
 
 17. Thirdly, in connection with our simplicity 
 and good-humour, and partly with that very love 
 of the grotesque which debases oui ideal, we 
 have a sympathy with the lower animals which 
 is peculiarly our own ; and which, though it has 
 already found some exquisite expression in the 
 works of Bewick and Landseer, is yet quite 
 undeveloped. This sympathy, with the aid of 
 our now authoritative science of physiology, and 
 in association with our British love of adventure, 
 will, I hope, enable us to give to the future in- 
 habitants of the globe an almost perfect record 
 of the present forms of animal life upon it, of 
 which many are on the point of being extin- 
 guished. 
 
 Lastly, but not as the least important of our 
 special powers, I have to note our skill in land- 
 scape, of which I will presently speak more 
 particularly. 
 
 18. Such I conceive to be the directions in 
 which, principally, we have the power to excel ; 
 and you must at once see how the consideration
 
 22 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 of them must modify the advisable methods of 
 our art study. For if our professional painters 
 were likely to produce pieces of art loftily ideal 
 in their character, it would be desirable to form 
 the taste of the students here by setting before 
 them only the purest examples of Greek, and 
 the mightiest of Italian, art. But I do not think 
 you will yet find a single instance of a school 
 directed exclusively to these higher branches of 
 study in England, which has strongly, or even 
 definitely, made impression on its younger 
 scholars. While, therefore, I shall endeavour 
 to point out clearly the characters to be looked 
 for and admired in the great masters of imagi- 
 native design, I shall make no special effort to 
 stimulate the imitation of them ; and above all 
 things, I shall try to probe in you, and to pre- 
 vent, the affectation into which it is easy to fall, 
 even through modesty, — of either endeavouring 
 to admire a grandeur with which we have no 
 natural sympathy, or losing the pleasure we 
 might take in the study of familiar things, by 
 considering it a sign of refinement to look for 
 what is of higher class, or rarer occurrence. 
 
 19. Again, if our artisans were likely to 
 attain any distinguished skill in ornamental
 
 I. INAUGURAL. 23 
 
 design, it would be incumbent upon me to make 
 my class here accurately acquainted with the 
 principles of earth and metal work, and to ac- 
 custom them to take pleasure in conventional 
 arrangements of colour and form. I hope, in- 
 deed, to do this, so far as to enable them to dis- 
 cern the real merit of many styles of art which 
 are at present neglected ; and, above all, to read 
 the minds of semi-barbaric nations in the only 
 language by which their feelings were capable 
 of expression ; and those members of my class 
 whose temper inclines them to take pleasure in 
 the interpretation of mythic symbols, will not 
 probably be induced to quit the profound fields 
 of investigation which early art, examined care- 
 fully, will open to them, and which belong to it 
 alone : for this is a general law, that supposing 
 the intellect of the workman the same, the more 
 imitatively complete his art, the less he will 
 mean by it ; and the ruder the symbol, the 
 deeper is its intention. Nevertheless, when I 
 have once sufficiently pointed out the nature 
 and value of this conventional work, and vindi- 
 cated it from the contempt with which it is too 
 generally regarded, I shall leave the student to 
 his own pleasure in its pursuit ; and even, so
 
 24 
 
 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 far as I may, discourage all admiration founded 
 on quaintness or peculiarity of style ; and re- 
 press any other modes of feeling which are 
 likely to lead rather to fastidious collection of 
 curiosities, than to the intelligent appreciation 
 of work which, being executed in compliance 
 with constant laws of right, cannot be singular, 
 and must be distinguished only by excellence 
 in what is always desirable. 
 
 20. While, therefore, in these and such other 
 directions, I shall endeavour to put every ade- 
 quate means of advance within reach of the 
 members of my class, I shall use my own best 
 energy to show them what is consummately 
 beautiful and well done, by men who have 
 passed through the symbolic or suggestive stage 
 of design, and have enabled themselves to com- 
 ply, by truth of representation, with the strictest 
 or most eager demands of accurate science, and 
 of disciplined passion. I shall therefore direct 
 your observation, during the greater part of the 
 time you may spare to me, to what is indis- 
 putably best, both in painting and sculpture; 
 trusting that you will afterwards recognise the 
 nascent and partial skill of former days both 
 with greater interest and greater respect, when
 
 I. INAUGURAL. 2$ 
 
 you kn v the full difficulty of what it attempted, 
 and the complete range of what it foretold. 
 
 21. And with this view, I shall at once en- 
 deavour to do what has for many years been 
 in my thoughts, and now, with the advice and 
 assistance of the curators of the University 
 Galleries, I do not doubt may be accomplished 
 here in Oxford, just where it will be pre- 
 eminently useful — namely, to arrange an edu- 
 cational series of examples of excellent art, 
 standards to which you may at once refer on 
 any questionable point, and by the study of 
 which }'ou may gradually attain an instinctive 
 sense of right, which will afterwards be liable 
 to no serious error. Such a collection may be 
 formed, both more perfectly, and more easily, 
 than would commonly be supposed. For the 
 real utility of the series will depend on its re- 
 stricted extent, — on the severe exclusion of aU 
 second-rate, superfluous, or even attractively 
 varied examples, — and on the confining the 
 students' attention to a few types of what is 
 insuperably good. More progress in power of 
 judgment may be made in a limited time by the 
 examination of one work, than by the review 
 of many; and a, certain degree of vitality is
 
 26 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 given to the impressiveness of every character- 
 istic, by its being exhibited in clear contrast, 
 and without repetition. 
 
 The greater number of the examples I shall 
 choose will be only engravings or photographs ; 
 they shall be arranged so as to be easily acces- 
 sible, and I will prepare a catalogue, pointing 
 out my purpose in the selection of each. But 
 in process of time, I have good hope that assist- 
 ance will be given me by the English public in 
 making the series here no less splendid than 
 serviceable ; and in placing minor collections, 
 arranged on a similar principle, at the command 
 also of the students in our public schools. 
 
 22. In the second place, I shall endeavour to 
 prevail upon all the younger members of the 
 University who wish to attend the art lectures, 
 to give at least so much time to manual practice 
 as may enabje them to understand the nature 
 and difficulty of executive skill. The time so 
 spent will not be lost, even as regards their 
 other studies at the University, for I will pre- 
 pare the practical exercises in a double series, 
 one illustrative of history, the other of natural 
 science. And whether you are drawing a piece 
 of Greek armour, or a hawk's beak, or a lion's
 
 I. INAUGURAL. 1J 
 
 paw, you will find that the mere necessity of 
 using the hand compels attention to circum- 
 stances which would otherwise have escaped 
 notice, and fastens them in the memory without 
 farther effort. But were it even otherwise, and 
 this practical training did really involve some 
 sacrifice of your time, I do not fear but that it 
 will be justified to you by its felt results : and 
 I think that general public feeling is also tend- 
 ing to the admission that accomplished educa- 
 tion must include, not only full command of 
 expression by language, but command of true 
 musical sound by the voice, and of true form 
 by the hand. 
 
 23. While I myself hold this professorship, 
 I shall direct you in these exercises very defi- 
 nitely to natural history, and to landscape; not 
 only because in these two branches I am pro- 
 bably able to show you truths which might be 
 despised by my successors ; but because I think 
 the vital and joyful study of natural history 
 quite the principal element requiring introduc- 
 tion, not only into University, but into national, 
 education, from highest to lowest ; and I even 
 will risk incurring your ridicule by confessing 
 one of my fondest dreams, that I may succeed
 
 28 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 in making some of you English youths like 
 better to look at a bird than to shoot it ; and 
 even desire to make wild creatures tame, instead 
 of tame creatures wild. And for the study of 
 landscape, it is, I think, now calculated to be 
 of use in deeper, if not more important modes, 
 than that of natural science, for reasons which 
 I will ask you to let me state at some length. 
 
 24. Observe first ; — no race of men which is 
 entirely bred in wild country, far from cities, 
 ever enjoys landscape. They may enjoy the 
 beauty of animals, but scarcely even that : a 
 true peasant cannot see the beauty of cattle . 
 but only qualities expressive of their service- 
 ableness. I waive discussion of this to-day ; 
 permit my assertion of it, under my confident 
 guarantee of future proof. Landscape can only 
 be enjoyed by cultivated persons ; and it is 
 only by music, literature, and painting, that 
 cultivation can be given. Also, the faculties 
 which are thus received are hereditary; so tha: 
 the child of an educated race has an innate 
 instinct for beauty, derived from arts practised 
 hundreds of years before its birth. Now farther 
 note this, one of the loveliest things in human 
 nature. In the children of noble races, trained
 
 I. INAUGURAL. 29 
 
 by surrounding art, and at the same time in 
 the practice of great deeds, there is an intense 
 delight in the landscape of their country as 
 memorial; a sense not taught to them, nor 
 teachable to any others ; but, in them, innate ; 
 and the seal and reward of persistence in great 
 national life ;— the obedience and the peace of 
 ages having extended gradually the glory of 
 the revered ancestors also to the ancestral land ; 
 until the Motherhood of the dust, the mystery 
 of the Demeter from whose bosom we came, 
 and to whose bosom we return, surrounds and 
 inspires, everywhere, the local awe of field and 
 fountain ; the sacredness of landmark that none 
 may remove, and of wave that none may pollute; 
 while records of proud days, and of dear persons, 
 make every rock monumental with ghostly in- 
 scription, and every path lovely with noble 
 desolateness. 
 
 25. Now, however checked by lightness of 
 temperament, the instinctive love of landscape 
 in us has this deep root, which, in your minds, 
 I will pray you to disencumber from whatever 
 may oppress or mortify it, and to strive to feel 
 with all the strength of your youth that a nation 
 is only worthy of the soil and the scenes that
 
 30 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 it has inherited, when, by all its acts and arts, 
 it is making them more lovely for its children. 
 
 And now, I trust, you will feel that it is not 
 in mere yielding to my own fancies that I have 
 chosen, for the first three subjects in your 
 educational series, landscape scenes ; — two in 
 England, and one in France,— the association of 
 these being not without purpose : — and for the 
 fourth Albert Diirer's dream of the Spirit of 
 Labour. And of the landscape subjects, I must 
 tell you this much. The first is an engraving 
 only ; the original drawing by Turner was de- 
 stroyed by fire twenty years ago. For which 
 loss I wish you to be sorry, and to remember, 
 in connection with this first example, that what- 
 ever remains to us of possession in the arts is, 
 compared to what we might have had if we had 
 cared for them, just what that engraving is to 
 the lost drawing. You will find also that its 
 subject has meaning in it which will not be 
 harmful to you. The second example is a real 
 drawing by Turner, in the same series, and 
 very nearly of the same place ; the two scenes 
 are within a quarter of a mile of each other. It 
 will show you the character of the work that 
 was destroyed. It will show you, in process of
 
 I. INAUGURAL. 3 1 
 
 time, much more ; but chiefly, and this is my 
 main reason for choosing both, it will be a 
 permanent expression to you of what English 
 landscape was once ; — and must, if we are to 
 remain a nation, be again. 
 
 I think it farther right to tell you, for other- 
 wise you might hardly pay regard enough to 
 work apparently so simple, that by a chance 
 which is not altogether displeasing to me, this 
 drawing, which it has become, for these reasons, 
 necessary for me to give you, is — not indeed 
 the best I have, (I have several as good, though 
 none better) — but, of all I have, the one I had 
 least mind to part with. 
 
 The third example is also a Turner drawing 
 — a scene on the Loire — never engraved. It 
 is an introduction to the series of the Loire, 
 which you have already ; it has in its present 
 place a due concurrence with the expressional 
 purpose of its companions ; and though small, 
 it is very precious, being a faultless, and, I 
 believe, unsurpassable example of water-colour 
 painting. 
 
 Chiefly, however, remember the object of 
 these three first examples is to give you an 
 index to your truest feelings about European,
 
 32 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 and especially about your native landscape, as 
 it is pensive and historical ; and so far as you 
 yourselves make any effort at its representation, 
 to give you a motive for fidelity in handwork 
 more animating than any connected with mere 
 success in the art itself. 
 
 26. With respect to actual methods of prac- 
 tice, I will not incur the responsibility of deter- 
 mining them for you. We will take Leonardo's 
 treatise on painting for our first text-book ; and 
 I think you need not fear being misled by me 
 if I ask you to do only what Lionardo bids, or 
 what will be necessary to enable you to do his 
 bidding. But you need not possess the book, 
 nor read it through. I will translate the pieces 
 to the authority of which I shall appeal ; and, 
 in process of time, by analysis of this frag- 
 mentary treatise, show you some characters 
 not usually understood of the simplicity as well 
 as subtlety common to most great workmen of 
 that age. Afterwards we will collect the instruc- 
 tions of other undisputed masters, till we hav* 
 obtained a code of laws clearly resting on the 
 consent of antiquity. 
 
 While, however, I thus in some measure limit 
 for the present the methods of your practice,
 
 I. INAUGURAL. 33 
 
 I shall endeavour to make the courses of my 
 University lectures as wide in their range as 
 my knowledge will permit. The range so con- 
 ceded will be narrow enough ; but I believe 
 that my proper function is not to acquaint you 
 with the general history, but with the essential 
 principles of art ; and with its history only 
 when it has been both great and good, or where 
 some special excellence of it requires examina- 
 tion of the causes to which it must be ascribed. 
 2J. But if either our work, or our enquiries, 
 are to be indeed successful in their own field, 
 they must be connected with others of a sterner 
 character. Now listen to me, if I have in these 
 past details lost or burdened your attention ; 
 for this is what I have chiefly to say to you. 
 The art of any country is the exponent of its 
 social and political virtues. I will show you that 
 it is so in some detail, in the second of my sub- 
 sequent course of lectures ; meantime accept 
 this as one of the things, and the most import- 
 ant of all things, I can positively declare to you. 
 The art, or general productive and formative 
 energy, of any country, is an exact exponent of 
 its ethical life. You can have noble art only 
 from noble persons, associated under laws fitted 
 
 3
 
 34 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 to their time and circumstances. And the best 
 skill that any teacher of art could spend here in 
 your help, would not end in enabling you even 
 so much as rightly to draw the water-lilies in 
 the Cherwell (and though it did, the work when 
 done would not be worth the lilies themselves) 
 unless both he and you were seeking, as I trust 
 we shall together seek, in the laws which regu- 
 late the finest industries, the clue to the laws 
 which regulate all industries, and in better obedi- 
 ence to which we shall actually have hencefor- 
 ward to live : not merely in compliance with 
 our own sense of what is right, but under the 
 weight of quite literal necessity. For the trades 
 by which the British people has believed it to 
 be the highest of destinies to maintain itself, can- 
 not now long remain undisputed in its hands ; 
 its unemployed poor are daily becoming more 
 violently criminal ; and a certain distress in the 
 middle classes, arising, partly from their vanity 
 in living always up to their incomes, and partly 
 from their folly in imagining that they can subsist 
 in idleness upon usury, will at last compel the 
 sons and daughters of English families to ac- 
 quaint themselves with the principles of provi- 
 dential economy; and to learn that food can
 
 I. INAUGURAL. 35 
 
 only be got out of the ground, and competence 
 only secured by frugality ; and that although it 
 is not possible for all to be occupied in the 
 highest arts, nor for any, guiltlessly, to pass 
 their days in a succession of pleasures, the 
 most perfect mental culture possible to men is 
 founded on their useful energies, and their best 
 arts and brightest happiness are consistent, and 
 consistent only, with their virtue. 
 
 28. This, I repeat, gentlemen, will soon be- 
 come manifest to those among us, and there 
 are yet many, who are honest-hearted. And 
 the future fate of England depends upon the 
 position they then take, and on their courage 
 in maintaining it. 
 
 There is a destiny now possible to us — the 
 highest ever set before a nation to be accepted 
 or refused. We are still undegenerate in race ; 
 a race mingled of the best northern blood. We 
 are not yet dissolute in temper, but still have 
 the firmness to govern, and the grace to obey. 
 We have been taught a religion of pure mercy, 
 which we must either now betray, or learn to 
 defend by fulfilling. And we are rich in an in- 
 heritance of honour, bequeathed to us through 
 a thousand years of noble history, which it
 
 36 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 should be our daily thirst to increase with splen- 
 did avarice, so that Englishmen, if it be a sin 
 to covet honour, should be the most offending 
 souls alive. Within the last few years we 
 have had the laws of natural science opened to 
 us with a rapidity which has been blinding by 
 its brightness ; and means of transit and com- 
 munication given to us, which have made but 
 one kingdom of the habitable globe. One king- 
 dom ; — but who is to be its king ? Is there to 
 be no king in it, think you, and every man to 
 do that which is right in his own eyes ? Or 
 only kings of terror, and the obscene empires 
 of Mammon and Belial ? Or will you, youths 
 of England, make your country again a royal 
 throne of kings ; a sceptred isle, for all the 
 world a source of light, a centre of peace ; mis- 
 tress of Learning and of the Arts; — faithful 
 guardian of great memories in the midst of 
 irreverent and ephemeral visions; — faithful ser- 
 vant of time-tried principles, under temptation 
 from fond experiments and licentious desires ; 
 and amidst the cruel and clamorous jealousies 
 of the nations, worshipped in her strange valour 
 of goodwill towards men ? 
 
 29. 'Vexilla regis prodeunt.' Yes, but of
 
 I. INAUGURAL. 37 
 
 which king ? There are the two oriflammes ; 
 which shall we plant on the farthest islands, 
 — the one that floats in heavenly fire, or that 
 hangs heavy with foul tissue of terrestrial gold ? 
 There is indeed a course of beneficent glory 
 open to us, such as never was yet offered to 
 any poor group of mortal souls. But it must 
 be— it w" with us, now, ' Reign or Die.' And if 
 it shall be said of this country, ' Fece per vil- 
 tate, il gran rifiuto ; ' that refusal of the crown 
 will be, of all yet recorded in history, the shame- 
 fullest and most untimely. 
 
 And this is what she must either do, or 
 perish : she must found colonies as fast and as 
 far as she is able, formed of her most energetic 
 and worthiest men ; — seizing every piece of 
 fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on, 
 and there teaching these her colonists that their 
 chief virtue is to be fidelity to their country, 
 and that their first aim is to be to advance the 
 power of England by land and sea : and that, 
 though they live on a distant plot of ground, 
 they are no more to consider themselves there- 
 fore disfranchised from their native land, than 
 the sailors of her fleets do, because they float on 
 distant waves. So that literally, these colonies 
 
 394783
 
 38 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 must be fastened fleets; and every man of them 
 must be under authority of captains and officers, 
 whose better command is to be over fields and 
 streets instead of ships of the line ; and Eng- 
 land, in these her motionless navies (or, in the 
 true and mightiest sense, motionless churches, 
 ruled by pilots on the Galilean lake of all the 
 world), is to 'expect every man to do his duty;' 
 recognising that duty is indeed possible no less 
 in peace than war ; and that if we can get men, 
 for little pay, to cast themselves against cannon- 
 mouths for love of England, we may find men 
 also who will plough and sow for her, who will 
 behave kindly and righteously for her, who will 
 bring up their children to love her, and who 
 will gladden themselves in the brightness of her 
 glory, more than in all the light of tropic skies. 
 But that they may be able to do this, she 
 must make her own majesty stainless ; she must 
 give them thoughts of their home of which they 
 can be proud. The England who is to be mis- 
 tress of half the earth, cannot remain herself 
 a heap of cinders, trampled by contending and 
 miserable crowds ; she must yet again become 
 the England she was once, and in all beautiful 
 ways, — more : so happy, so secluded, and so
 
 I. INAUGURAL. 39 
 
 pure, that in her sky — polluted by no unholy 
 clouds — she may be able to spell rightly of every 
 star that heaven doth show ; and in her fields, 
 ordered and wide and fair, of every herb that 
 sips the dew ; and under the green avenues 
 of her enchanted garden, a sacred Circe, true 
 Daughter of the Sun, she must guide the human 
 arts, and gather the divine knowledge, of distant 
 nations, transformed from savageness to man- 
 hood, and redeemed from despairing into peace. 
 30. You think that an impossible ideal. Be 
 it so ; refuse to accept it if you will ; but see 
 that you form your own in its stead. All that I 
 ask of you is to have a fixed purpose of some 
 kind for your country and yourselves ; no matter 
 how restricted, so that it be fixed and unselfish. 
 I know what stout hearts are in you, to answer 
 acknowledged need : but it is the fatallest form 
 of error in English youths to hide their hardi- 
 hood till it fades for lack of sunshine, and to 
 act in disdain of purpose, till all purpose is vain. 
 It is not by deliberate, but by careless selfish- 
 ness ; not by compromise with evil, but by dull 
 following of good, that the weight of national 
 evil increases upon us daily. Break through 
 at least this pretence of existence ; determine
 
 40 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 what you will be, and what you would win. 
 You will not decide wrongly if you will resolve 
 to decide at all. Were even the choice between 
 lawless pleasure and loyal suffering, you would 
 not, I believe, choose basely. But your trial is 
 not so sharp. It is between drifting in confused 
 wreck among the castaways of Fortune, who 
 condemns to assured ruin those who know not 
 either how to resist her, or obey ; between this, 
 I say, and the taking of your appointed part in 
 the heroism of Rest ; the resolving to share in 
 the victory which is to the weak rather than 
 the strong ; and the binding yourselves by that 
 law, which, thought on through lingering night 
 and labouring day, makes a man's life to be as 
 a tree planted by the water-side, that bringeth 
 forth his fruit in his season ; — 
 
 ET FOLIUM EJUS NON DEFLUET, 
 ET OMNIA, QU^ECUNQUE FACIET, PROSPERA- 
 BUNTUR.'
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 THE RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 
 
 31. It was stated, and I trust partly with your 
 acceptance, in my opening lecture, that the 
 study on which we are about to enter cannot be 
 rightly undertaken except in furtherance of the 
 grave purposes of life with respect to which the 
 rest of the scheme of your education here is 
 designed. But you can scarcely have at once felt 
 all that I intended in saying so ; — you cannot 
 but be still partly under the impression that the 
 so-called fine arts are merely modes of graceful 
 recreation, and a new resource for your times of 
 rest. Let me ask you, forthwith, so far as you 
 can trust me, to change your thoughts in this 
 matter. All the great arts have for their object 
 either the support or exaltation of human life, — 
 usually both ; and their dignity, and ultimately 
 their very existence, depend on their being ' /xera 
 \6yov aXrjdovs,' that is to say, apprehending,
 
 42 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 with right reason, the nature of the materials 
 they work with, of the things they relate or re- 
 present, and of the faculties to which they are 
 addressed. And farther, they form one united 
 system from which it is impossible to remove 
 any part without harm to the rest. They are 
 founded first in mastery, by strength of arm, 
 of the earth and sea, in agriculture and sea- 
 manship ; then their inventive power begins, 
 with the clay in the hand of the potter, whose 
 art is the humblest but truest type of the form- 
 ing of the human body and spirit ; and in the 
 carpenter's work, which probably was the early 
 employment of the Founder of our religion. And 
 until men have perfectly learned the laws of art 
 in clay and wood, they can consummately know 
 no others. Nor is it without the strange signifi- 
 cance which you will find in what at first seems 
 chance, in all noble histories, as soon as you can 
 read them rightly, — that the statue of Athena 
 Polias was of olive-wood, and that the Greek 
 temple and Gothic spire are both merely the per- 
 manent representations of useful wooden struc- 
 tures. On these two first arts follow building in 
 stone, — sculpture, — metal work, — and painting; 
 every art being properly called ' fine ' which
 
 II. THE RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 43 
 
 demands the exercise of the full faculties of heart 
 and intellect. For though the fine arts are not 
 necessarily imitative or representative, for their 
 essence is in being irepl <yeve<nv — occupied in 
 the actual production of beautiful form or colour, 
 — still, the highest of them are appointed also 
 to relate to us the utmost ascertainable truth 
 respecting visible things and mora,l feelings : 
 and this pursuit of fact is the vital element of 
 the art power ; — that in which alone it can 
 develope itself to its utmost. And I will antici- 
 pate by an assertion which you will at present 
 think too bold, but which I am willing that you 
 should think so, in order that you may well 
 remember it, — the highest thing that art 
 
 CAN DO IS TO SET BEFORE YOU THE TRUE IMAGE 
 OF THE PRESENCE OF A NOBLE HUMAN BEING. It 
 HAS NEVER DONE MORE THAN THIS, AND IT OUGHT 
 NOT TO DO LESS. 
 
 32. The great arts — forming thus one perfect 
 scheme of human skill, of which it is not right 
 to call one division more honourable, though it 
 may be more subtle, than another — have had, 
 and can have, but three principal directions of 
 purpose : — first, that of enforcing the religion of 
 men ; secondly, that of perfecting their ethical
 
 44 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 state ; thirdly, that of doing them material 
 service. 
 
 33. I do not doubt but that you are surprised 
 at my saying the arts can in their second func- 
 tion only be directed to the perfecting of ethical 
 state, it being our usual impression that they 
 are often destructive of morality. But it is 
 impossible to direct fine art to an immoral 
 end, except by giving it characters unconnected 
 with its fineness, or by addressing it to persons 
 who cannot perceive it to be fine. Whosoever 
 recognises it is exalted by it. On the other 
 hand, it has been commonly thought that art 
 was a most fitting means for the enforcement 
 of religious doctrines and emotions ; whereas 
 there is, as I must presently try to show you, 
 room for grave doubt whether it has not in 
 this function hitherto done evil rather than 
 good. 
 
 34. In this and the two next following lec- 
 tures, I shall endeavour therefore to show you 
 the grave relations of human art, in these three 
 functions, to human life. I can do this but 
 roughly, as you may well suppose — since each of 
 these subjects would require for its right treat- 
 ment years instead of hours. Only, remember,
 
 II. THE RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 45 
 
 / have already given years, not a few, to each 
 of them ; and what I try to tell you now will 
 be only so much as is absolutely necessary to 
 set our work on a clear foundation. You may 
 not, at present, see the necessity for any foun- 
 dation, and may think that I ought to put pencil 
 and paper in your hands at once. On that 
 point I must simply answer, ' Trust me a little 
 while/ asking you however also to remember, 
 that — irrespectively of any consideration of last 
 or first — my true function here is not that of 
 your master in painting, or sculpture, or pottery; 
 but to show you what it is that makes any of 
 these arts fine, or the contrary of fine: essen- 
 tially good, or essentially base. You need not 
 fear my not being practical enough for you ; all 
 the industry you choose to give me, I will take ; 
 but far the better part of what you may gain 
 by such industry would be lost, if I did not 
 first lead you to see what every form of art- 
 industry intends, and why some of it is justly 
 called right, and some wrong. 
 
 35. It would be well if you were to look 
 over, with respect to this matter, the end of 
 the second, and what interests you of the third, 
 book of Plato's Republic ; noting therein these
 
 \<6 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 two principal things, of which I have to speak 
 in this and my next lecture : first, the power 
 which Plato so frankly, and quite justly, attri- 
 butes to art, of falsifying our conceptions of 
 Deity : which power he by fatal error partly im- 
 plies may be used wisely for good, and that the 
 feigning is only wrong when it is of evil, ' idv 
 rt? jjur) /ca\co? yj/eu8r]Tai ; ' and you may trace 
 through all that follows the beginning of the 
 change of Greek ideal art into a beautiful expe- 
 diency, instead of what it was in the days of 
 Pindar, the statement of what ' could not be 
 otherwise than so.' But, in the second place, 
 you will find in those books of the Polity, stated 
 with far greater accuracy of expression than our 
 English language admits, the essential relations 
 of art to morality ; the sum of these being given 
 in one lovely sentence, which, considering that 
 we have to-day grace done us by fair com- 
 panionship,* you will pardon me for translating. 
 Must it be then only with our poets that we in- 
 sist they shall either create for us the image of a 
 noble morality, or among us create none ? or shall 
 we not also keep guard over all other workers 
 
 * There were, in fact, a great many more girls than 
 University men at the lectures.
 
 II. THE RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 47 
 
 for the people, and forbid them to make what is 
 ill-customed } and unrestrained, and ungentle, 
 and without order or shape, either in likeness of 
 living things, or in buildings, or in any other thing 
 whatsoever that is made for the people ? and 
 shall we not rather seek for workers who can 
 
 TRACK THE INNER NATURE OF ALL THAT MAY BE 
 
 sweetly schemed ; so that the young men, as liv- 
 ing in a wholesome place, may be profited by every- 
 thing that, in work fairly wrought, may touch 
 them through hearing or sight — as if it were a 
 breeze bringing health to them from places strong 
 for life ? ' 
 
 36. And now — but one word, before we enter 
 on our task, as to the way you must understand 
 what I may endeavour to tell you. 
 
 Let me beg you— now and always — not to 
 think that I mean more than I say. In all pro- 
 bability, I mean just what I say, and only that. 
 At all events I do fully mean that; and if there 
 is anything reserved in my mind, it will be 
 probably different from what you would guess. 
 You are perfectly welcome to know all that I 
 think, as soon as I have put before you all my 
 grounds for thinking it ; but by the time I have 
 done so, you will be able to form an opinion of
 
 48 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 your own ; and mine will then be of no conse- 
 quence to you. 
 
 2,7. I use then to-day, as I shall in future use, 
 the word ' Religion ' as signifying the feelings 
 of love, reverence, or dread with which the 
 human mind is affected by its conceptions of 
 "spiritual being ; and you know well how neces- 
 sary it is, both to the Tightness of our own life, 
 and to the understanding the lives of others, 
 that we should always keep clearly distinguished 
 our ideas of Religion, as thus defined, and of 
 Morality, as the law of Tightness in human con- 
 duct. For there are many religions, but there 
 is only one morality. There are moral and im- 
 moral religions, which differ as much in precept 
 as in emotion; but there is only one morality, 
 
 WHICH HAS BEEN, IS, AND MUST BE FOR EVER, 
 AN INSTINCT IN THE HEARTS OF ALL CIVILIZED 
 MEN, AS CERTAIN AND UNALTERABLE AS THEIR OUT- 
 WARD BODILY FORM, AND WHICH RECEIVES FROM 
 RELIGION NEITHER LAW, NOR PLACE J BUT ONLY 
 HOPE, AND FELICITY. 
 
 38. The pure forms or states of religion 
 hitherto known, are those in which a healthy hu- 
 manity, finding in itself many foibles and sins, 
 has imagined, or been made conscious of, the
 
 II. THE RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 49, 
 
 existence of higher spiritual personality, liable 
 to no such fault or stain ; and has been assisted 
 in effort, and consoled in pain, by reference to 
 the will or sympathy of such purer spirits, 
 whether imagined or real. I am compelled to 
 use these painful latitudes of expression, because 
 no analysis has hitherto sufficed to distinguish 
 accurately, in historical narrative, the difference 
 between impressions resulting from the imagina- 
 tion of the worshipper, and those made, if any, 
 by the actually local and temporary presence 
 of another spirit. For instance, take the vision, 
 which of all others has been since made most 
 frequently the subject of physical representa- 
 tion — the appearance to Ezekiel and St. John 
 of the four living creatures, which throughout 
 Christendom have been used to symbolize the 
 Evangelists.* Supposing such interpretation 
 just, one of those figures was either the mere 
 symbol to St. John of himself, or it was the 
 power which inspired him, manifesting itself in 
 an independent form. Which of these it w r as, 
 or whether neither of these, but a vision of other 
 powers, or a dream, of which neither the pro- 
 phet himself knew, nor can any other person 
 
 * Only the Gospels, ' IV Evangelia,' according to St. Jerome. 
 
 4
 
 50 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 yet know, the interpretation, — I suppose no 
 modestly-minded and accurate thinker would 
 now take upon himself to decide. Nor is it 
 therefore anywise necessary for you to decide 
 on that, or any other such question ; but it is 
 necessary that you should be bold enough to 
 look every opposing question steadily in its 
 face ; and modest enough, having done so, to 
 know when it is too hard for you. But above 
 all things, see that you be modest in your 
 thoughts, for of this one thing we may be abso- 
 lutely sure, that all our thoughts are but de- 
 grees of darkness. And in these days you 
 have to guard against the fatallest darkness of 
 the two opposite Prides ; — the Pride of Faith, 
 which imagines that the nature of the Deity can 
 be defined by its convictions ; and the Pride 
 of Science, which imagines that the energy of 
 Deity can be explained by its analysis. 
 
 39. Of these, the first, the Pride of Faith, is 
 now, as it has been always, the most deadly, 
 because the most complacent and subtle ; — be- 
 cause it invests every evil passion of our nature 
 with the aspect of an angel of light, and en- 
 ables the self-love, which might otherwise have 
 been put to wholesome shame, and the cruel
 
 II. THE RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 5 1 
 
 carelessness of the ruin of our fellow-men, which 
 might otherwise have been warmed into human 
 love, or at least checked by human intelligence, 
 to congeal themselves into the mortal intel- 
 lectual disease of imagining that myriads of the 
 inhabitants of the world for four thousand years 
 have been left to wander and perish, many of 
 them everlastingly, in order that, in fulness of 
 time, divine truth might be preached sufficiently 
 to ourselves : with this farther ineffable mis- 
 chief for direct result, that multitudes of kindly- 
 disposed, gentle, and submissive persons, who 
 might else by their true patience have alloyed 
 the hardness of the common crowd, and by 
 their activity for good balanced its misdoing, 
 are withdrawn from all such true services of 
 man, that they may pass the best part of their 
 lives in what they are told is the service of 
 God ; namely, desiring what they cannot obtain, 
 lamenting what they cannot avoid, and reflecting 
 on what they cannot understand* 
 
 40. This, I repeat, is the deadliest, but for 
 you, under existing circumstances, it is becom- 
 ing daily, almost hourly, the least probable form 
 
 * This concentrated definition of monastic life is of course 
 to be understood only of its more enthusiastic forms.
 
 $2 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 of Pride. That which you have chiefly to guard 
 against consists in the overvaluing of minute 
 though correct discovery ; the groundless denial 
 of all that seems to you to have been ground- 
 lessly affirmed ; and the interesting yourselves 
 too curiously in the progress of some scientific 
 minds, which in their judgment of the universe 
 can be compared to nothing so accurately as to 
 the woodworms in the panel of a picture by some 
 great painter, if we may conceive them as tasting 
 with discrimination of the wood, and with re- 
 pugnance of the colour, and declaring that even 
 this unlooked-for and undesirable combination 
 is a normal result of the action of molecular 
 Forces. 
 
 41. Now, I must very earnestly warn you, 
 in the beginning of my work with you here, 
 against allowing either of these forms of egotism 
 to interfere with your judgment or practice of 
 art. On the one hand, you must not allow the 
 expression of your own favourite religious feel- 
 ings by any particular form of art to modify 
 your judgment of its absolute merit ; nor allow 
 the art itself to become an illegitimate means of 
 deepening and confirming your convictions, by 
 realizing to your eyes what you dimly conceive
 
 II. THE RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 53 
 
 with the brain ; as if the greater clearness of 
 the image were a stronger proof of its truth. 
 On the other hand, you must not allow your 
 scientific habit of trusting nothing but what 
 you have ascertained, to prevent you from ap- 
 preciating, or at least endeavouring to qualify 
 yourselves to appreciate, the work of the high- 
 est faculty of the human mind, — its imagination, 
 — when it is toiling in the presence of things 
 that cannot be dealt with by any other power. 
 
 42. These are both vital conditions of your 
 healthy progress. On the one hand, observe 
 that you do not wilfully use the realistic power 
 of art to convince yourselves of historical or 
 theological statements which you cannot other- 
 wise prove ; and which you wish to prove : — 
 on the other hand, that you do not check your 
 imagination and conscience while seizing the 
 truths of which they alone are cognizant, be- 
 cause you value too highly the scientific interest 
 which attaches to the investigation of second 
 causes. 
 
 For instance, it may be quite possible to show 
 the conditions in water and electricity which 
 necessarily produce the craggy outline, the 
 apparently self-contained silvery light, and the
 
 54 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 sulphurous blue shadow of a thunder-cloud, 
 and which separate these from the depth of the 
 golden peace in the dawn of a summer morning. 
 Similarly, it may be possible to show the neces- 
 sities of structure which groove the fangs and 
 depress the brow of the asp, and which dis- 
 tinguish the character of its head from that of 
 the face of a young girl. But it is the function 
 of the rightly-trained imagination to recognise, 
 in these, and such other relative aspects, the 
 unity of teaching which impresses, alike on our 
 senses and our conscience, the eternal difference 
 between good and evil : and the rule, over the 
 clouds of heaven and over the creatures in the 
 earth, of the same Spirit which teaches to our 
 own hearts the bitterness of death, and strength 
 of love. 
 
 43. Now, therefore, approaching our subject 
 in this balanced temper, which will neither re- 
 solve to see only what it would desire, nor expect 
 to see only what it can explain, we shall find 
 our enquiry into the relation of Art to Religion 
 is distinctly threefold : first, we have to ask 
 how far art may have been literally directed 
 by spiritual powers ; secondly, how far, if not 
 inspired, it may have been exalted by them;
 
 II. THE RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 55 
 
 lastly, how far, in any of its agencies, it has ad- 
 vanced the cause of the creeds it has been used 
 to recommend. 
 
 44. First : What ground have we for think- 
 ing that art has ever been inspired as a message 
 or revelation ? What internal evidence is there 
 in the work of great artists of their having been 
 under the authoritative guidance of supernatural 
 powers ? 
 
 It is true that the answer to so mysterious a 
 question cannot rest alone upon internal evi- 
 dence ; but it is well that you should know 
 what might, from that evidence alone, be con- 
 cluded. And the more impartially you examine 
 the phenomena of imagination, the more firmly 
 you will be led to conclude that they are the 
 result of the influence of the common and vital, 
 but not, therefore, less Divine, spirit, of which 
 some portion is given to all living creatures in 
 such manner as may be adapted to their rank 
 in creation ; and that everything which men 
 rightly accomplish is indeed done by Divine 
 help, but under a consistent law which is never 
 departed from. 
 
 The strength of this spiritual life within us 
 may be increased or lessened by our own
 
 56 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 conduct ; it varies, from time to time, as physical 
 strength varies ; it is summoned on different 
 occasions by our will, and dejected by our 
 distress, or our sin ; but it is always equally 
 human, and equally Divine. We are men, and 
 not mere animals, because a special form of it 
 is with us always ; we are nobler and baser 
 men, as it is with us more or less ; but it is 
 never given to us in any degree which can make 
 us more than men. 
 
 45. Observe : — -I give you this general state- 
 ment doubtfully, and only as that towards which 
 an impartial reasoner will, I think, be inclined 
 by existing data. But I shall be able to show 
 you, without any doubt, in the course of our 
 studies, that the achievements of art which 
 have been usually looked upon as the results of 
 peculiar inspiration have been arrived at only 
 through long courses of wisely directed labour, 
 and under the influence of feelings which are 
 common to all humanity. 
 
 But of these feelings and powers which in 
 different degrees are common to humanity, 
 you are to note that there are three principal 
 divisions : first, the instincts of construction 
 or melody, which we share with lower animals,
 
 II. THE RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 57 
 
 and which are in us as native as the instinct 
 of the bee or nightingale ; secondly, the faculty 
 of vision, or of dreaming, whether in sleep or 
 in conscious trance, or by voluntarily exerted 
 fancy ; and lastly, the power of rational infer- 
 ence and collection, of both the laws and forms 
 of beauty. 
 
 46. Now the faculty of vision, being closely 
 associated with the innermost spiritual nature, 
 is the one which has by most reasoners been 
 held for the peculiar channel of Divine teaching : 
 and it is a fact that great part of purely didactic 
 art has been the record, whether in language, 
 or by linear representation, of actual vision in- 
 voluntarily received at the moment, though cast 
 on a mental retina blanched by the past course 
 of faithful life. But it is also true that these 
 visions, where most distinctly received, are al- 
 ways — I speak deliberately — always, the sign 
 of some mental limitation or derangement ; and 
 that the persons who most clearly recognise 
 their value, exaggeratedly estimate it, choosing 
 what they find to be useful, and calling that 
 " inspired," and disregarding what they perceive 
 to be useless, though presented to the visionary 
 by an equal authority.
 
 58 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 47. Thus it is probable that no work of art 
 has been more widely didactic than Albert 
 Diirer's engraving, known as the ' Knight and 
 Death.' * But that is only one of a series of 
 works representing similarly vivid dreams, of 
 which some are uninteresting, except for the 
 manner of their representation, as the ' St. 
 Hubert,' and others are unintelligible ; some, 
 frightful, and wholly unprofitable ; so that we 
 find the visionary faculty in that great painter, 
 when accurately examined, to be a morbid in- 
 fluence, abasing his skill more frequently than 
 encouraging it, and sacrificing the greater part 
 of his energies upon vain subjects, two only 
 being produced, in the course of a long life* 
 which are of high didactic value, and both of 
 these capable only of giving sad courage. f 
 Whatever the value of these two, it bears more 
 the aspect of a treasure obtained at great cost 
 of suffering, than of a directly granted gift from 
 heaven. 
 
 48. On the contrary, not only the highest, 
 but the most consistent results have been 
 
 * Standard Series, No. 9. 
 
 f The meaning of the ' Knight and Death,' even in this 
 rrspect, has lately been questioned on good grounds.
 
 II. THE RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 5Q 
 
 attained in art by men in whom the faculty of 
 vision, however strong, was subordinate to that 
 of deliberative design, and tranquillised by a 
 measured, continual, not feverish, but affection- 
 ate, observance of the quite unvisionary facts 
 of the surrounding world. 
 
 And so far as we can trace the connection of 
 their powers with the moral character of their 
 lives, we shall find that the best art is the work 
 of good, but of not distinctively religious men, 
 who, at least, are conscious of no inspiration, 
 and often so unconscious of their superiority 
 to others, that one of the greatest of them, 
 Reynolds, deceived by his modesty, has as- 
 serted that 'all things are possible to well- 
 directed labour.' 
 
 49. The second question, namely, how far 
 art, if not inspired, has yet been ennobled by 
 religion, I shall not touch upon to-day ; for it 
 both requires technical criticism, and would 
 divert you too long from the main question of 
 all,— How far religion has been helped by art ? 
 
 You will find that the operation of formative 
 art— (I will not speak to-day of music) — the 
 operation of formative art on religious creed is 
 essentially twofold ; the realisation, to the eyes,
 
 60 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 of imagined spiritual persons ; and the limita- 
 tion of their imagined presence to certain places. 
 We will examine these two functions of it suc- 
 cessively. 
 
 50. And first, consider accurately what the 
 agency of art is, in realising, to the sight, our 
 conceptions of spiritual persons. 
 
 For instance. Assume that we believe that 
 the Madonna is always present to hear and 
 answer our prayers. Assume also that this is 
 true. 1 think that persons in a perfectly honest, 
 faithful, and humble temper, would in that case 
 desire only to feel so much of the Divine pre- 
 sence as the spiritual Power herself chose to 
 make felt ; and, above all things, not to think 
 they saw, or knew, anything except what might 
 be truly perceived or known. 
 
 But a mind imperfectly faithful, and impatient 
 in its distress, or craving in its dulness for a 
 more distinct and convincing sense of the Divi- 
 nity, would endeavour to complete, or perhaps 
 we should rather say to contract, its conception, 
 into the definite figure of a woman wearing a 
 blue or crimson dress, and having fair features, 
 dark eyes, and gracefully arranged hair. 
 
 Suppose, after forming such a conception,
 
 II. THE RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 6 1 
 
 that we have the power to realise and preserve 
 it, this image of a beautiful figure with a plea- 
 sant expression cannot but have the tendency 
 of afterwards leading us to think of the Virgin 
 as present, when she is not actually present ; 
 or as pleased with us, when she is not actually 
 pleased ; or if we resolutely prevent ourselves 
 from such imagination, nevertheless the exist- 
 ence of the image beside us will often turn 
 our thoughts towards subjects of religion, when 
 otherwise they would have been differently oc- 
 cupied ; and, in the midst of other occupations, 
 will familiarise more or less, and even mechani- 
 cally associate with common or faultful states 
 of mind, the appearance of the supposed Divine 
 person. 
 
 51. There are thus two distinct operations 
 upon our mind : first, the art makes us believe 
 what we would not otherwise have believed ; 
 and secondly, it makes us think of subjects we 
 should not otherwise have thought of, intruding 
 them amidst our ordinary thoughts in a con- 
 fusing and familiar manner. We cannot with 
 any certainty affirm the advantage or the harm 
 of such accidental pieties, for their effect will 
 be very different on different characters : but,
 
 62 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 without any question, the art, which makes us 
 believe what we would not have otherwise be- 
 lieved, is misapplied, and in most instances very 
 dangerously so. Our duty is to believe in the 
 existence of Divine, or any other, persons, only 
 upon rational proofs of their existence; and not 
 because we have seen pictures of them.* 
 
 52. But now observe, it is here necessary 
 to draw a distinction, so subtle that in dealing 
 with facts it is continually impossible to mark 
 it with precision, yet so vital, that not only 
 your understanding of the power of art, but the 
 working of your minds in matters of primal 
 moment to you, depends on the effort you make 
 to affirm this distinction strongly. The art 
 which realises a creature of the imagination is 
 only mischievous when that realisation is con- 
 ceived to imply, or does practically induce a 
 belief in, the real existence of the imagined per- 
 sonage, contrary to, or unjustified by the other 
 evidence of its existence. But if the art only 
 
 * I have expunged a sentence insisting farther on this 
 point, having come to reverence more, as I grew older, every 
 simple means of stimulating all religious belief and affection. 
 It is the lower and realistic world which is fullest of false 
 beliefs and vain loves.
 
 II. THE RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 6$ 
 
 represents the personage on the understanding 
 that its form is imaginary, then the effort at 
 realisation is healthful and beneficial. 
 
 For instance, the Greek design of Apollo 
 crossing the sea to Delphi, which is one of the 
 most interesting of Le Normand's series, so far 
 as it is only an expression, under the symbol 
 of a human form, of what may be rightly ima- 
 gined respecting the solar power, is right and 
 ennobling ; but so far as it conveyed to the 
 Greek the idea of there being a real Apollo, it 
 was mischievous, whether there be, or be not, 
 a real Apollo. If there is no real Apollo, then 
 the art was mischievous because it deceived ; 
 but if there is a real Apollo, then it was still 
 more mischievous,* for it not only began the 
 degradation of the image of that true god into 
 a decoration for niches, and a device for seals ; 
 but prevented any true witness being borne 
 to his existence. For if the Greeks, instead of 
 multiplying representations of what they ima- 
 gined to be the figure of the god, had given 
 us accurate drawings of the heroes and battles 
 of Marathon and Salamis, and had simply told 
 
 * I am again doubtful, here. The most important part of 
 the chapter is from § 60 to end.
 
 64 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 us in plain Greek what evidence they had of 
 the power of Apollo, either through his oracles, 
 his help or chastisement, or by immediate vision, 
 they would have served their religion more truly 
 than by all the vase-paintings and fine statues 
 that ever were buried or adored. 
 
 53. Now in this particular instance, and in 
 many other examples of fine Greek art, the two 
 conditions of thought, symbolic and realistic, 
 are mingled ; and the art is helpful, as I will 
 hereafter show you, in one function, and in the 
 other so deadly, that I think no degradation of 
 conception of Deity has ever been quite so base 
 as that implied by the designs of Greek vases 
 in the period of decline, say about 250 b.c. 
 
 But though among the Greeks it is thus 
 nearly always difficult to say what is symbolic 
 and what realistic, in the range of Christian art 
 the distinction is clear. In that, a vast divi- 
 sion of imaginative work is occupied in the 
 symbolism of virtues, vices, or natural powers 
 or passions ; and in the representation of per- 
 sonages who, though nominally real, become in 
 conception symbolic. In the greater part of 
 this work there is no intention of implying the 
 existence of the represented creature ; Diirer's
 
 II. THE RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 65 
 
 Melencolia and Giotto's Justice are accurately 
 characteristic examples. Now all such art is 
 wholly good and useful when it is the work of 
 good men. 
 
 54. Again, there is another division of Chris- 
 tian work in which the persons represented, 
 though nominally real, are treated as dramatis- 
 personae of a poem, and so presented confessedly 
 as subjects of imagination. All this poetic art 
 is also good when it is the work of good men. 
 
 55. There remains only therefore to be con- 
 sidered, as truly religious, the work which defi- 
 nitely implies and modifies the conception of 
 the existence of a real person. There is hardly 
 any great art which entirely belongs to this 
 class ; but Raphael's Madonna della Seggiola 
 is as accurate a type of it as I can give you ; 
 Holbein's Madonna at Dresden, the Madonna 
 di San Sisto, and the Madonna of Titian's As- 
 sumption, all belong mainly to this class, but 
 are removed somewhat from it (as, I repeat, 
 nearly all great art is) into the poetical one. 
 It is only the bloody crucifixes and gilded vir- 
 gins and other such lower forms of imagery (by 
 which, to the honour of the English Church, it 
 has been truly claimed for her, that ' she has 
 
 5 •
 
 66 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 never appealed to the madness or dulness of 
 her people,') which belong to the realistic class 
 in strict limitation, and which properly consti- 
 tute the type of it. 
 
 There is indeed an important school of sculp- 
 ture in Spain, directed to the same objects, but 
 not demanding at present any special attention. 
 And finally, there is the vigorous and most in- 
 teresting realistic school of our own, in modern 
 times, mainly known to the public by Holman 
 Hunt's picture of the Light of the World, 
 though, I believe, deriving its first origin from 
 the genius of the painter to whom you owe also 
 the revival of interest, first here in Oxford, and 
 then universally, in the cycle of early English 
 legend. — Dante Rossetti. 
 
 56. The effect of this realistic art on the reli- 
 gious mind of Europe varies in scope more than 
 any other art power ; for in its higher branches 
 it touches the most sincere religious minds, af- 
 fecting an earnest class of persons who cannot 
 be reached by merely poetical design ; while, 
 in its lowest, it addresses itself not only to the 
 most vulgar desires for religious excitement, 
 but to the mere thirst for sensation of horror 
 which characterises the uneducated orders of
 
 II. THE RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 6y 
 
 partially civilised countries ; nor merely to the 
 thirst for horror, but to the strange love of 
 death, as such, which has sometimes in Catholic 
 countries showed itself peculiarly by the en- 
 deavour to paint the images in the chapels of 
 the Sepulchre so as to look deceptively like 
 corpses. The same morbid instinct has also 
 affected the minds of many among the more 
 imaginative and powerful artists with a feverish 
 gloom which distorts their finest work ; and 
 lastly — and this is the worst of all its effects — it 
 has occupied the sensibility of Christian women, 
 universally, in lamenting the sufferings of Christ, 
 instead of preventing those of His people. 
 
 57. When any of you next go abroad, ob- 
 serve, and consider the meaning of, the sculp- 
 tures and paintings, which of every rank in art, 
 and in every chapel and cathedral, and by every 
 mountain path, recall the hours, and represent 
 the agonies, of the Passion of Christ : and try 
 to form some estimate of the efforts that have 
 been made by the four arts of eloquence, music, 
 painting, and sculpture, since the twelfth cen- 
 tury, to wring out of the hearts of women the 
 last drops of pity that could be excited for this 
 merely physical agony : for the art nearly always
 
 68 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 dwells on the physical wounds or exhaustion 
 chiefly, and degrades, far more than it animates, 
 the conception of pain. 
 
 Then try to conceive the quantity of time, 
 and of excited and thrilling emotion, which have 
 been wasted by the tender and delicate women 
 of Christendom during these last six hundred 
 years, in thus picturing to themselves, under 
 the influence of such imagery, the bodily pain, 
 long since passed, of One Person : — which, so 
 far as they indeed conceived it to be sustained 
 by a Divine Nature, could not for that reason 
 have been less endurable than the agonies of 
 any simple human death by torture : and then 
 try to estimate what might have been the better 
 result, for the righteousness and felicity of man- 
 kind, if these same women had been taught the 
 deep meaning of the last words that were ever 
 spoken by their Master to those who had mini- 
 stered to Him of their substance : ' Daughters 
 of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for 
 yourselves, and for your children.' If they had 
 but been taught to measure with their pitiful 
 thoughts the tortures of battle-fields — the slowly 
 consuming plagues of death in the starving 
 children, and wasted age, of the innumerable
 
 II. THE RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 69 
 
 desolate those battles left ; — nay, in our own life 
 of peace, the agony of unnurtured, untaught, 
 unhelped creatures, awaking at the grave's edge 
 to know how they should have lived ; and the 
 worse pain of those whose existence, not the 
 ceasing of it, is death ; those to whom the cradle 
 was a curse, and for whom the words they can- 
 not hear, ' ashes to ashes,' are all that they have 
 ever received of benediction. These, — you who 
 would fain have wept at His feet, or stood by 
 His cross, — these you have always with you ! 
 Him, you have not always. 
 
 58. The wretched in death you have always 
 with you. Yes, and the brave and good in 
 life you have always ; — these also needing help, 
 though you supposed they had only to help 
 others; these also claiming to be thought for, 
 and remembered. And you will find, if you 
 look into history with this clue, that one of quite 
 the chief reasons for the continual misery of 
 mankind is that they are always divided in 
 their worship between angels or saints, who 
 are out of their sight, and need no help, and 
 proud and evil-minded men, who are too de- 
 finitely in their sight, and ought not to have 
 their help. And consider how the arts have thus
 
 JO LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 followed the worship of the crowd. You have 
 paintings of saints and angels, innumerable ; — 
 of petty courtiers, and contemptible or cruel 
 kings, innumerable. Few, how few you have, 
 (but these, observe, almost always by great 
 painters) of the best men, or of their actions. 
 But think for yourselves, — I have no time now 
 to enter upon the mighty field, nor imagination 
 enough to guide me beyond the threshold of it, 
 — think, what history might have been to us 
 now ; — nay, what a different history that of all 
 Europe might have become, if it had but been 
 the object both of the people to discern, and of 
 their arts to honour and bear record of, the 
 great deeds of their worthiest men. And if, 
 instead of living, as they have always hitherto 
 done, in a hellish cloud of contention and re- 
 venge, lighted by fantastic dreams of cloudy 
 sanctities, they had sought to reward and punish 
 justly, wherever reward and punishment were 
 due, but chiefly to reward ; and at least rather 
 to bear testimony to the human acts which 
 deserved God's anger or His blessing, than 
 only, in presumptuous imagination, to display 
 the secrets of Judgment, or the beatitudes of 
 Eternity.
 
 II. THE RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 7 1 
 
 59. Such I conceive generally, though indeed 
 with good arising out of it, for every great evil 
 brings some good in its backward eddies — 
 such I conceive to have been the deadly func- 
 tion of art in its ministry to what, whether in 
 heathen or Christian lands, and whether in the 
 pageantry of words, or colours, or fair forms, 
 is truly, and in the deep sense, to be called 
 (idolatry) — the serving with the best of our 
 hearts and minds, some dear or sad fantasy 
 which we have made for ourselves, while we 
 disobey the present call of the Master, who is 
 not dead, and who is not now fainting under 
 His cross, but requiring us to take up ours. 
 
 60. I pass to the second great function of 
 religious art, the limitation of the idea of Divine 
 presence to particular localities. It is of course 
 impossible within my present limits to touch 
 upon this power of art, as employed on the 
 temples of the gods of various religions ; we 
 will examine that on future occasions. To-day, 
 I want only to map out main ideas, and I can 
 do this best by speaking exclusively of this 
 localising influence as it affects our own faith. 
 
 Observe first, that the localisation is almost 
 entirely dependent upon human art. You must
 
 72 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 at least take a stone and set it up for a pillar, 
 if you are to mark the place, so as to know it 
 again, where a vision appeared. A persecuted 
 people, needing to conceal their places of wor- 
 ship, may perform every religious ceremony first 
 under one crag of the hill-side, and then under 
 another, without invalidating the sacredness of 
 the rites or sacraments thus administered. It 
 is, therefore, we all acknowledge, inessential, 
 that a particular spot should be surrounded with 
 a ring of stones, or enclosed within walls of a 
 certain style of architecture, and so set apart as 
 the only place where such ceremonies may be 
 properly performed ; and it is thus less by any 
 direct appeal to experience or to reason, but in 
 consequence of the effect upon our senses pro- 
 duced by the architecture, that we receive the 
 first strong impressions of what we afterwards 
 contend for as absolute truth. I particularly 
 wish you to notice how it is always by help of 
 human art that such a result is attained, because, 
 remember always, I am neither disputing nor 
 asserting the truth of any theological doctrine ; 
 —that is not my province ; — I am only question- 
 ing the expiedency of enforcing that doctrine by 
 the help of architecture. Put a rough stone
 
 II. THE RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION, "j '3 
 
 for an altar under the hawthorn on a village 
 green ; — separate a portion of the green itself 
 with an ordinary paling from the rest ; — then 
 consecrate, with whatever form you choose, the 
 space of grass you have enclosed, and meet 
 within the wooden fence as often as you desire 
 to pray or preach ; yet you will not easily fasten 
 an impression in the minds of the villagers, that 
 God inhabits the space of grass inside the fence, 
 and does not extend His presence to the common 
 beyond it : and that the daisies and violets on 
 one side of the railing are holy, — on the other, 
 profane. But, instead of a wooden fence, build 
 a wall, pave the interior space ; roof it over, so 
 as to make it comparatively dark ; — and you 
 may persuade the villagers with ease that you 
 have built a house which Deity inhabits, or that 
 you have become, in the old French phrase, a 
 ' logeur du Bon Dieu.' 
 
 61. And farther, though I have no desire to 
 introduce any question as to the truth of what 
 we thus architecturally teach, I would desire 
 you most strictly to determine what is intended 
 to be taught. 
 
 Do not think I underrate — I am among the 
 last men living who would underrate,— the
 
 74 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 importance of the sentiments connected with 
 their church to the population of a pastoral vil- 
 lage. I admit, in its fullest extent, the moral 
 value of the scene, which is almost always one 
 of perfect purity and peace ; and of the sense of 
 supernatural love and protection, which fills and 
 surrounds the low aisles and homely porch. But 
 the question I desire earnestly to leave with you 
 is, whether all the earth ought not to be peace- 
 ful and pure, and the acknowledgment of the 
 Divine protection, as universal as its reality ? 
 That in a mysterious way the presence of Deity 
 is vouchsafed where it is sought, and withdrawn 
 where it is forgotten, must of course be granted 
 as the first postulate in the enquiry : but the 
 point for our decision is just this, whether it 
 ought always to be sought in one place only, 
 and forgotten in every other. 
 
 It may be replied, that since it is impossible 
 to consecrate the entire space of the earth, it is 
 better thus to secure a portion of it than none : 
 but surely, if so, we ought to make some effort 
 to enlarge the favoured ground, and even look 
 forward to a time when in English villages there 
 may be a God's acre tenanted by the living, not 
 the dead ; and when we shall rather look with
 
 II. THE RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 75 
 
 aversion and fear to the remnant of ground that 
 is set apart as profane, than with reverence to a 
 narrow portion of it enclosed as holy. 
 
 62. But now, farther. Suppose it be ad- 
 mitted that by enclosing ground with walls, and 
 performing certain ceremonies there habitually, 
 some kind of sanctity is indeed secured within 
 that space, — still the question remains open 
 whether it be advisable for religious purposes 
 to decorate the enclosure. For separation the 
 mere walls would be enough. What is the 
 purpose of your decoration ? 
 
 Let us take an instance — the most noble 
 with which I am acquainted, the Cathedral of 
 Chartres. You have there the most splendid 
 coloured glass, and the richest sculpture, and 
 the grandest proportions of building, united to 
 produce a sensation of pleasure and awe. We 
 profess that this is to honour the Deity ; or, in 
 other words, that it is pleasing to Him that we 
 should delight our eyes with blue and golden 
 colours, and solemnise our spirits by the sight 
 of large stones laid one on another, and in- 
 geniously carved. 
 
 63. I do not think it can be doubted that it 
 is pleasing to Him when we do this ; for He
 
 ?6 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 has Himself prepared for us, nearly every morn- 
 ing and evening, windows painted with Divine 
 art, in blue and gold and vermilion : windows 
 lighted from within by the lustre of that heaven 
 which we may assume, at least with more cer- 
 tainty than any consecrated ground, to be one 
 of His dwelling-places. Again, in every moun- 
 tain side, and cliff of rude sea shore, He has 
 heaped stones one upon another of greater 
 magnitude than those of Chartres Cathedral, 
 and sculptured them with floral ornament, — 
 surely not less sacred because living ? 
 
 64. Must it not then be only because we love 
 our own work better than His, that we respect 
 the lucent glass, but not the lucent clouds; that 
 we weave embroidered robes with ingenious 
 fingers, and make bright the gilded vaults we 
 have beautifully ordained — while yet we have 
 not considered the heavens, the work of His 
 fingers, nor the stars of the strange vault which 
 He has ordained ? And do we dream that by 
 carving fonts and lifting pillars in His honour, 
 who cuts the way of the rivers among the rocks, 
 and at whose reproof the pillars of the earth 
 are astonished, we shall obtain pardon for the 
 dishonour done to the hills and streams by
 
 II. THE RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. JJ 
 
 which He has appointed our dwelling-place ; — 
 for the infection of their sweet air with poison ; 
 — for the burning up of their tender grass and 
 flowers with fire, and for spreading such a 
 shame of mixed luxury and misery over our 
 native land, as if we laboured only that, at least 
 here in England, we might be able to give the 
 lie to the song, whether of the Cherubim above, 
 or Church beneath — ' Holy, holy, Lord God of 
 all creatures; Heaven — and Earth — are full of 
 Thy glory ' ? 
 
 65. And how much more there is that I long 
 to say to you ; and how much, I hope, that you 
 would like to answer to me, or to question me 
 of! But I can say no more to-day. We are 
 not, I trust, at the end of our talks or thoughts 
 together ; but, if it were so, and I never spoke 
 to you more, this that I have said to you I 
 should have been glad to have been permitted 
 to say; and this, farther, which is the sum of 
 it, — That we may have splendour of art again, 
 and with that, we may truly praise and honour 
 our Maker, and with that set forth the beauty 
 and holiness of all that He has made : but only 
 after we have striven with our whole hearts 
 first to sanctify the temple of the body and spirit
 
 ?8 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 of every child that has no roof to cover its head 
 from the cold, and no walls to guard its soul 
 from corruption, in this our English land. 
 
 One word more. 
 
 What I have suggested hitherto, respecting 
 the relations of Art to Religion, you must re- 
 ceive throughout as merely motive of thought ; 
 though you must have well seen that my own 
 convictions were established finally on some of 
 the points in question. But I must, in conclu- 
 sion, tell you something that I know; — which, 
 if you truly labour, you will one day know also ; 
 and which I trust some of you will believe, now. 
 
 During the minutes in which you have been 
 listening to me, I suppose that almost at every 
 other sentence those whose habit of mind has 
 been one of veneration for established forms 
 and faiths, must have been in dread that I was 
 about to say, or in pang of regret at my having 
 said, what seemed to them an irreverent or reck- 
 less word touching vitally important things. 
 
 So far from this being the fact, it is just be- 
 cause the feelings that I most desire to cultivate 
 in your minds are those of reverence and ad- 
 miration, that I am so earnest to prevent you 
 from being moved to either by trivial or false
 
 II. THE RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION. 79 
 
 semblances. This is the thing which I know — 
 and which, if you labour faithfully, you shall 
 know also, — that in Reverence is the chief joy 
 and power of life ; — Reverence, for what is pure 
 and bright in your own youth; for what is true 
 and tried in the age of others; for all that is 
 gracious among the living, — great among the 
 dead,^-and marvellous, in the Powers that 
 cannot die.
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 THE RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 
 
 66. You probably recollect that, in the begin- 
 ning of my last lecture, it was stated that fine 
 art had, and could have, but three functions : 
 the enforcing of the religious sentiments of men, 
 the perfecting their ethical state, and the doing 
 them material service. We have to-day to ex- 
 amine, the mode of its action in the second 
 power — that of perfecting the morality, or 
 ethical state, of men. 
 
 Perfecting, observe — not producing. 
 
 You must have the right moral state first, or 
 you cannot have the art. But when the art is 
 once obtained, its reflected action enhances and 
 completes the moral state out of which it arose, 
 and, above all, communicates the exultation to 
 other minds which are already morally capable 
 of the like. 
 
 67. For instance, take the art of singing, and
 
 III. THE RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 8 1 
 
 the simplest perfect master of it (up to the limits 
 of his nature) whom you can find ; — a skylark. 
 From him you may learn what it is to ' sing for 
 joy.' You must get the moral state first, the 
 pure gladness, then give it finished expression ; 
 and it is perfected in itself, and made commu- 
 nicable to other creatures capable of such joy. 
 But it is incommunicable to those who are not 
 prepared to receive it. 
 
 Now, all right human song is, similarly, the 
 finished expression, by art, of the joy or grief of 
 noble persons, for right causes. And accurately 
 in proportion to the Tightness of the cause, and 
 purity of the emotion, is the possibility of the 
 fine art. A maiden may sing of her lost love, 
 but a miser cannot sing of his lost money. And 
 with absolute precision, from highest to lowest, 
 the fineness of the possible art is an index of 
 the moral purity and majesty of the emotion it ex- 
 presses. You may test it practically at any 
 instant. Question with yourselves respecting 
 any feeling that has taken strong possession of 
 your mind, ' Could this be sung by a master, and 
 sung nobly, with a true melody and art ? ' Then 
 it is a right feeling. Could it not be sung at 
 all, or only sung ludicrously ? It is a base one. 
 
 6
 
 82 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 And that is so in all the arts; so that with 
 mathematical precision, subject to no error or 
 exception, the art of a nation, so far as it exists, 
 is an exponent of its ethical state. 
 
 68. An exponent, observe, and exalting influ- 
 ence ; but not the root or cause. You cannot 
 paint or sing yourselves into being good men ; 
 you must be good men before you can either 
 paint or sing, and then the colour and sound 
 will complete in you all that is best. 
 
 And this it was that I called upon you to 
 hear, saying, ' listen to me at least now,' in the 
 first lecture, namely, that no art-teaching could 
 be of use to you, but would rather be harmful, 
 unless it was grafted on something deeper than 
 all art. For indeed not only with this, of which 
 it is my function to show you the laws, but 
 much more with the art of all men, which you 
 came here chiefly to learn, that of language, 
 the chief vices of education have arisen from 
 the one great fallacy of supposing that noble 
 language is a communicable trick of grammar 
 and accent, instead of simply the careful ex- 
 pression of right thought. All the virtues of 
 language are, in their roots, moral ; it becomes 
 accurate if the speaker desires to be true ; clear,
 
 III. THE RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 8$ 
 
 if he speaks with sympathy and a desire to be 
 intelligible ; powerful, if he has earnestness ; 
 pleasant, if he has sense of rhythm and order. 
 There are no other virtues of language produ- 
 cible by art than these : but let me mark more 
 deeply for an instant the significance of one of 
 them. Language, I said, is only clear when it 
 is sympathetic. You can, in truth, understand a 
 man's word only by understanding his temper. 
 Your own word is also as of an unknown tongue 
 to him unless he understands yours. And it is 
 this which makes the art of language, if any one 
 is to be chosen separately from the rest, that 
 which is fittest for the instrument of a gentle- 
 man's education. To teach the meaning of a 
 word thoroughly, is to teach the nature of the 
 spirit that coined it ; the secret of language is 
 the secret of sympathy, and its full charm is 
 possible only to the gentle. And thus the prin- 
 ciples of beautiful speech have all been fixed by 
 sincere and kindly speech. On the laws which 
 have been determined by sincerity, false speech, 
 apparently beautiful, may afterwards be con- 
 structed ; but all such utterance, whether in 
 oration or poetry, is not only without permanent 
 power, but it is destructive of the principles it 
 
 )
 
 84 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 has usurped. So long as no words are uttered 
 but in faithfulness, so long the art of language 
 goes on exalting itself; but the moment it is 
 shaped and chiselled on external principles, it 
 falls into frivolity, and perishes. And this truth 
 would have been long ago manifest, had it not 
 been that in periods of advanced academical 
 science there is always a tendency to deny the 
 sincerity of the first masters of language. Once 
 learn to write gracefully in the manner of an 
 ancient author, and we are apt to think that he 
 also wrote in the manner of some one else. But 
 no noble nor right style was ever yet founded 
 but out of a sincere heart. 
 
 No man is worth reading to form your style, 
 who does not mean what he says ; nor was any 
 great style ever invented but by some man who 
 meant what he said. Find out the beginner of 
 a great manner of writing, and you have also 
 found the declarer of some true facts or sincere 
 passions : and your whole method of reading 
 will thus be quickened, for, being sure that your 
 author really meant what he said, you will be 
 much more careful to ascertain what it is that 
 he means. 
 
 69. And of yet greater importance is it deeply
 
 III. THE RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 85 
 
 to know that every beauty possessed by the 
 language of a nation is significant of the inner- 
 most laws of its being. Keep the temper of the 
 people stern and manly ; make their associa- 
 tions grave, courteous, and for worthy objects ; 
 occupy them in just deeds; and their tongue 
 must needs be a grand one. Nor is it possible, 
 therefore — observe the necessary reflected ac- 
 tion — that any tongue should be a noble one, 
 of which the words are not so many trumpet- 
 calls to action. All great languages invariably 
 utter great things, and command them ; they 
 cannot be mimicked but by obedience ; the 
 breath of them is inspiration because it is not 
 only vocal, but vital; and you can only learn to 
 speak as these men spoke, by becoming what 
 these men were. 
 
 70. Now for direct confirmation of this, I 
 want you to think over the relation of expression 
 to character in two great masters of the absolute 
 art of language, Virgil and Pope. You are per- 
 haps surprised at the last name ; and indeed you 
 have in English much higher grasp and melody 
 of language from more passionate minds, but 
 you have nothing else, in its range, so perfect. 
 I name, therefore, these two men, because they
 
 86 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 are the two most accomplished Artists, merely 
 as such, whom I know in literature ; and because 
 I think you will be afterwards interested in in- 
 vestigating how the infinite grace in the words 
 of the one, and the severity in those of the other, 
 and the precision in those of both, arise wholly 
 out of the moral elements of their minds : — out 
 of the deep tenderness in Virgil which enabled 
 him to write the stories of Nisus and Lausus ; 
 and the serene and just benevolence which 
 placed Pope, in his theology, two centuries in 
 advance of his time, and enabled him to sum 
 the law of noble life in two lines which, so far 
 as I know, are the most complete, the most 
 concise, and the most lofty expression of moral 
 temper existing in English words : — 
 
 ' Never elated, while one man's oppressed ; 
 Never dejected, while another's bless 'd.' 
 
 I wish you also to remember these lines of 
 Pope, and to make yourselves entirely masters 
 of his system of ethics ; because, putting Shake- 
 speare aside as rather the world's than ours, 1 
 hold Pope to be the most perfect representative 
 we have, since Chaucer, of the true English 
 mind ; and I think the Dunciad is the most
 
 III. 
 
 THE RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 8? 
 
 absolutely chiselled and monumental work 
 ' exacted ' in our country. You will find, as 
 you study Pope, that he has expressed for you, 
 in the strictest language and within the briefest 
 limits, every law of art, of criticism, of economy, 
 of policy, and, finally, of a benevolence, humble, 
 rational, and resigned, contented with its allotted 
 share of life, and trusting the problem of its 
 salvation to Him in whose hand lies that of the 
 universe. 
 
 7 1 . And now I pass to the arts with which I 
 have special concern, in which, though the facts 
 are exactly the same, I shall have more difficulty 
 in proving my assertion, because very few of 
 us are as cognizant of the merit of painting 
 as we are of that of language ; and I can only 
 show you whence that merit springs, after 
 having thoroughly shown you in what it con- 
 sists. But, in the meantime, I have simply to 
 tell you, that the manual arts are as accurate 
 exponents of ethical state, as other modes of 
 expression ; first, with absolute precision, of 
 that of the workman ; and then with precision, 
 disguised by many distorting influences, of 
 that of the nation to which it belongs. 
 
 And, first, they are a perfect exponent of the
 
 88 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 mind of the workman : but, being so, remember, 
 if the mind be great or complex, the art is not 
 an easy book to read ; for we must ourselves 
 possess all the mental characters of which we 
 are to read the signs. No man can read the 
 evidence of labour who is not himself laborious, 
 for he does not know what the work cost : nor 
 can he read the evidence of true passion if he 
 is not passionate ; nor of gentleness if he is 
 not gentle : and the most subtle signs of fault 
 and weakness of character he can only judge 
 by having had the same faults to fight with. 
 I myself, for instance, know impatient work, and 
 tired work, better than most critics, because I 
 am myself always impatient, and often tired : — 
 so also, the patient and indefatigable touch of 
 a mighty master becomes more wonderful to 
 me than to others. Yet, wonderful in no mean 
 measure it will be to you all, when I make it 
 manifest, — and as soon as we begin our real 
 work, and you have learned what it is to draw 
 a true line, I shall be able to make manifest 
 to you, — and indisputably so, — that the day's 
 work of a man like Mantegna or Paul Veronese 
 consists of an unfaltering, uninterrupted suc- 
 cession of movements of the hand more precise
 
 III. THE RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 89 
 
 than those of the finest fencer : the pencil leav- 
 ing one point and arriving at another, not only 
 with unerring precision at the extremity of the 
 line, but with an unerring and yet varied course 
 — sometimes over spaces a foot or more in 
 extent — yet a course so determined everywhere, 
 that either of these men could, and Veronese 
 often does, draw a finished profile, or any 
 other portion of the contour of the face, with 
 one line, not afterwards changed. Try, first, 
 to realise to yourselves the muscular precision 
 of that action, and the intellectual strain of it ; 
 for the movement of a fencer is perfect in 
 practised monotony ; but the movement of the 
 hand of a great painter is at every instant 
 governed by a direct and new intention. Then 
 imagine that muscular firmness and subtlety, 
 and the instantaneously selective and ordinant 
 energy of the brain, sustained all day long, not 
 only without fatigue, but with a visible joy in 
 the exertion, like that which an eagle seems to 
 take in the wave of his wings ; and this all life 
 long, and through long life, not only without 
 failure of power, but with visible increase of it, 
 until the actually organic changes of old age. 
 And then consider, so far as you know anything
 
 90 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 of physiology, what sort of an ethical state of 
 body and mind that means ! ethic through ages 
 past ! what fineness of race there must be to get 
 it, what exquisite balance and symmetry of the 
 vital powers ! And then, finally, determine for 
 yourselves whether a manhood like that is con- 
 sistent with any viciousness of soul, with any 
 mean anxiety, any gnawing lust, any wretched- 
 ness of spite or remorse, any consciousness 
 of rebellion against law of God or man, or any 
 actual, though unconscious violation of even the 
 least law to which obedience is essential for 
 the glory of life and the pleasing of its Giver. 
 72. It is, of course, true that many of the 
 strong masters had deep faults of character, but 
 their faults always show in their work. It is 
 true that some could not govern their passions ; 
 if so, they died young, or they painted ill when 
 old. But the greater part of our misapprehen- 
 sion in the whole matter is from our not having 
 well known who the great painters were, and 
 taking delight in the petty skill that was bred 
 in the fumes of the taverns of the North, in- 
 stead of theirs who breathed empyreal air, sons 
 of the morning, under the woods of Assisi and 
 the crags of Cadore.
 
 III. THE RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 9 1 
 
 73. It is true however also, as I have pointed 
 out long ago, that the strong masters fall into 
 two great divisions, one leading simple and 
 natural lives, the other restrained in a Puritan- 
 ism of the worship of beauty ; and these two 
 manners of life you may recognise in a moment 
 by their work. Generally the naturalists are 
 the strongest ; but there are two of the Puritans, 
 whose work if I can succeed in making clearly 
 understandable to you during my three years 
 here, it is all I need care to do. But of these 
 two Puritans one I cannot name to you, and 
 the other I at present will not. One I cannot, 
 for no one knows his name, except the baptismal 
 one, Bernard, or 'dear little Bernard' — Ber- 
 nardino, called from his birthplace, (Luino, on 
 the Lago Maggiore,) Bernard of Luino. The 
 other is a Venetian, of whom many of you pro- 
 bably have never heard, and of whom, through 
 me, you shall not hear, until I have tried to get 
 some picture by him over to England. 
 
 74. Observe then, this Puritanism in the 
 worship of beauty, though sometimes weak, is 
 always honourable and amiable, and the exact 
 reverse of the false Puritanism, which consists 
 in the dread or disdain of beauty. And in order
 
 92 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 to treat my subject rightly, I ought to proceed 
 from the skill of art to the choice of its subject, 
 and show you how the moral temper of the 
 workman is shown by his seeking lovely forms 
 and thoughts to express, as well as by the force 
 of his hand in expression. But I need not now 
 urge this part of the proof on you, because you 
 are already, I believe, sufficiently conscious of 
 the truth in this matter, and also I have already 
 said enough of it in my writings ; whereas I 
 have not at all said enough of the infallibleness 
 of fine technical work as a proof of every other 
 good power. And indeed it was long before I 
 myself understood the true meaning of the pride 
 of the greatest men in their mere execution, 
 shown for a permanent lesson to us, in the 
 stories which, whether true or not, indicate with 
 absolute accuracy the general conviction of great 
 artists ; — the stories of the contest of Apelles 
 and Protogenes in a line only, (of which I can 
 promise you, you shall know the meaning to 
 some purpose in a little while),— the story of 
 the circle of Giotto, and especially, which you 
 may perhaps not have observed, the expression 
 of Diirer in his inscription on the drawings 
 sent him by Raphael. These figures, he says,
 
 III. THE RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 93 
 
 'Raphael drew and sent to Albert Diirer in 
 N urn berg, to show him ' — What ? Not his in- 
 vention, nor his beauty of expression, but ' sein 
 Hand zu weisen,' ' To show him his hand.' 
 And you will find, as you examine farther, that 
 all inferior artists are continually trying to escape 
 from the necessity of sound work, and either 
 indulging themselves in their delights in subject, 
 or pluming themselves on their noble motives 
 for attempting what they cannot perform ; (and 
 observe, by the way, that a great deal of what 
 is mistaken for conscientious motive is nothing 
 but a very pestilent, because very subtle, con- 
 dition of vanity) ; whereas the great men always 
 understand at once that the first morality of 
 a painter, as of everybody else, is to know his 
 business-; and so earnest are they in this, that 
 many, whose lives you would think, by the re- 
 sults of their work, had been passed in strong 
 emotion, have in reality subdued themselves, 
 though capable of the very strongest passions, 
 into a calm as absolute as that of a deeply shel- 
 tered mountain lake, which reflects every agita- 
 tion of the clouds in the sky, and every change of 
 the shadows on the hills, but is itself motionless. 
 75. Finally, you must remember that great
 
 94 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 obscurity has been brought upon the truth in 
 this matter by the want of integrity and simpli- 
 city in our modern life. I mean integrity in the 
 Latin sense, wholeness. Everything is broken 
 up, and mingled in confusion, both in our habits 
 and thoughts ; besides being in great part imi- 
 tative : so that you not only cannot tell what a 
 man is, but sometimes you cannot tell whether 
 he t's, at all ! — whether you have indeed to do 
 with a spirit, or only with an echo. And thus 
 the same inconsistencies appear -now, between 
 the work of artists of merit and their personal 
 characters, as those which you find continually 
 disappointing expectation in the lives of men 
 of modern literary power ; the same conditions 
 of society having obscured or misdirected the 
 best qualities of the imagination, both in our 
 literature and art. Thus there is no serious 
 question with any of us as to the personal cha- 
 racter of Dante and Giotto, of Shakespeare and 
 Holbein ; but we pause timidly in the attempt 
 to analyse the moral laws of the art skill in 
 recent poets, novelists, and painters. 
 
 j6. Let me assure you once for all, that as 
 you grow older, if you enable yourselves to dis- 
 tinguish, by the truth of your own lives, what
 
 III. THE RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 95 
 
 is true in those of other men, you will gradually 
 perceive that all good has its origin in good, 
 never in evil ; that the fact of either literature 
 or painting being truly fine of their kind, what- 
 ever their mistaken aim, or partial error, is 
 proof of their noble origin : and that, if there 
 is indeed sterling value in the thing done, it has 
 come of a sterling worth in the soul that did it, 
 however alloyed or defiled by conditions of sin 
 which are sometimes more appalling or more 
 strange than those which all may detect in their 
 own hearts, because they are part of a person- 
 ality altogether larger than ours, and as far be- 
 yond our judgment in its darkness as beyond 
 our following in its light. And it is sufficient 
 warning against what some might dread as the 
 probable effect of such a conviction on your own 
 minds, namely, that you might permit yourselves 
 in the weaknesses which you imagined to be 
 allied to genius, when they took the form of 
 personal temptations ; — it is surely, I say, suffi- 
 cient warning against so mean a folly, to dis- 
 cern, as you may with little pains, that, of all 
 human existences, the lives of men of that 
 distorted and tainted nobility of intellect are 
 probably the most miserable.
 
 g6 lectures on art. 
 
 77. I pass to the second, and for us the more 
 practically important question, What is the 
 effect of noble art upon other men ; what has it 
 done for national morality in time past : and 
 what effect is the extended knowledge or pos- 
 session of it likely to have upon us now ? And 
 here we are at once met by the facts, which 
 are as gloomy as indisputable, that, while many 
 peasant populations, among whom scarcely the 
 rudest practice of art has ever been attempted, 
 have lived in comparative innocence, honour and 
 happiness, the worst foulness and cruelty of 
 savage tribes have been frequently associated 
 with fine ingenuities of decorative design ; also, 
 that no people has ever attained the higher 
 stages of art skill, except at a period of its civili- 
 sation which was sullied by frequent, violent 
 and even monstrous crime ; and, lastly, that the 
 attaining of perfection in art power has been 
 hitherto, in every nation, the accurate signal of 
 the beginning of its ruin. 
 
 78. Respecting which phenomena, observe 
 first, that although good never springs out of 
 evil, it is developed to its highest by contention 
 with evil. There are some groups of peasantry, 
 in far-away nooks of Christian countries, who
 
 III. THE RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. t'7 
 
 are nearly as innocent as lambs ; but the mora- 
 lity which gives power to art is the morality of 
 men, not of cattle. 
 
 Secondly, the virtues of the inhabitants of 
 many country districts are apparent, not real ; 
 their lives are indeed artless, but not inno- 
 cent ; and it is only the monotony of circum- 
 stances, and the absence of temptation, which 
 prevent the exhibition of evil passions not 
 less real because often dormant, nor less foul 
 because shown only in petty faults, or inactive 
 malignities. 
 
 79. But you will observe also that absolute 
 artlessness, to men in any kind of moral health, 
 is impossible ; they have always, at least, the 
 art by which they live — agriculture or seaman- 
 ship ; and in these industries, skilfully practised, 
 you will find the law of their moral training ; 
 while, whatever the adversity of circumstances, 
 every rightly-minded peasantry, such as that 
 of Sweden, Denmark, Bavaria, or Switzerland, 
 has associated with its needful industry a quite 
 studied school of pleasurable art in dress ; and 
 generally also in song, and simple domestic 
 architecture. 
 
 80. Again, I need not repeat to you here what 
 
 7
 
 98 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 I endeavoured to explain in the first lecture in 
 the book I called " The Two Paths," respect- 
 ing the arts of savage races : but I may now 
 note briefly that such arts are the result of an 
 intellectual activity which has found no room to 
 expand, and which the tyranny of nature or of 
 man has condemned to disease through arrested 
 growth. And where neither Christianity, nor 
 any other religion conveying some moral help, 
 has reached, the animal energy of such races 
 necessarily flames into ghastly conditions of 
 evil, and the grotesque or frightful forms as- 
 sumed by their art are precisely indicative of 
 their distorted moral nature. 
 
 8 1. But the truly great nations nearly always 
 begin from a race possessing this imaginative 
 power ; and for some time their progress is 
 very slow, and their state not one of innocence, 
 but of feverish and faultful animal energy. This 
 is gradually subdued and exalted into bright 
 human life ; the art instinct purifying itself with 
 the rest of the nature, until social perfectness is 
 nearly reached ; and then comes the period when 
 conscience and intellect are so highly developed, 
 that new forms of error begin in the inability to 
 fulfil the demands of the one, or to answer the
 
 III. THE RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 99 
 
 doubts of the other. Then the wholeness of 
 the people is lost ; all kinds of hypocrisies and 
 oppositions of science develop themselves ; their 
 faith is questioned on one side, and compromised 
 with on the other ; wealth commonly increases 
 at the same period to a destructive extent ; lux- 
 ury follows ; and the ruin of the nation is then 
 certain : while the arts, all this time, are simply, 
 as I said at first, the exponents of each phase of 
 its moral state, and no more control it in its 
 political career than the gleam of the firefly 
 guides its oscillation. It is true that their most 
 splendid results are usually obtained in the 
 swiftness of the power which is hurrying to the 
 precipice ; but to lay the charge of the catas- 
 trophe to the art by which it is illumined, is to 
 find a cause for the cataract in the hues of its iris. 
 It is true that the colossal vices belonging to 
 periods of great national wealth (for wealth, you 
 will find, is the real root of all evil) can turn 
 every good gift and skill of nature or of man to 
 evil purpose. If, in such times, fair pictures 
 have been misused, how much more fair reali- 
 ties ? And if Miranda is immoral to Caliban, 
 is that Miranda's fault ? 
 
 82. And I could easily go on to trace for you
 
 100 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 what at the moment I speak, is signified, in our 
 own national character, by the forms of art, and 
 unhappily also by the forms of what is not art, 
 but arexyia, that exist among us. But the more 
 important question is, What will be signified by 
 them ; what is there in us now of worth and 
 strength, which under our new and partly acci- 
 dental impulse towards formative labour, may 
 be by that expressed, and by that fortified ? 
 
 Would it not be well to know this ? Nay, 
 irrespective of all future work, is it not the first 
 thing we should want to know, what stuff we 
 are made of — how far we are ar/aOol or /ca/coi 
 —good, or good for nothing ? We may all 
 know that, each of ourselves, easily enough, if 
 we like to put one grave question well home. 
 
 83. Supposing it were told any of you by a 
 physician whose word you could not but trust, 
 that you had not more than seven days to live. 
 And suppose also that, by the manner of your 
 education it had happened to you, as it has hap- 
 pened to many, never to have heard of any future 
 state, or not to have credited what you heard ; 
 and therefore that you had to face this fact of 
 the approach of death in its simplicity : fearing 
 no punishment for any sin that you might have
 
 III. THE RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. IOI 
 
 before committed, or in the coming days might 
 determine to commit ; and having similarly no 
 hope of reward for past, or yet possible, virtue ; 
 nor even of any consciousness whatever to be 
 left to you, after the seventh day had ended, 
 either of the results of your acts to those whom 
 you loved, or of the feelings of any survivors 
 towards you. Then the manner in which you 
 would spend the seven days is an exact mea- 
 sure of the morality of your nature. 
 
 84. I know that some of you, and I believe 
 the greater number of you, would, in such a 
 case, spend the granted days entirely as you 
 ought. Neither in numbering the errors, or de- 
 ploring the pleasures of the past; nor in grasp- 
 ing at vile good in the present, nor vainly 
 lamenting the darkness of the future; but in 
 an instant and earnest execution of whatever it 
 might be possible for you to accomplish in the 
 time, in setting your affairs in order, and in pro- 
 viding for the future comfort, and — so far as 
 you might by any message or record of yourself, 
 -for the consolation, of those whom you loved, 
 and by whom you desired to be remembered, 
 not for your good, but for theirs. How far you 
 might fail through human weakness, in shame
 
 102 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 for the past, despair at the little that could in 
 the remnant of life be accomplished, or the in- 
 tolerable pain of broken affection, would depend 
 wholly on the degree in which your nature had 
 been depressed or fortified by the manner of 
 your past life. But I think there are few of you 
 who would not spend those last days better than 
 all that had preceded them. 
 
 85. If you look accurately through the records 
 of the lives that have been most useful to 
 humanity, you will find that all that has been 
 done best, has been done so ; — that to the clear- 
 est intellects and highest souls, — to the true 
 children of the Father, with whom a thousand 
 years are as one day, their poor seventy years 
 are but as seven days. The removal of the sha- 
 dow of death from them to an uncertain, but 
 always narrow, distance, never takes away from 
 them their intuition of its approach; the extend- 
 ing to them of a few hours more or less of light 
 abates not their acknowledgment of the infini- 
 tude that must remain to be known beyond their 
 knowledge, — done beyond their deeds : the un- 
 profitableness of their momentary service is 
 wrought in a magnificent despair, and their very 
 honour is bequeathed by them for the joy of
 
 III. THE RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. IO3 
 
 others, as they lie down to their rest, regarding 
 for themselves the voice of men no more. 
 
 86. The best things, I repeat to you, have 
 been done thus, and therefore, sorrowfully. But 
 the greatest part of the good work of the world 
 is done either in pure and unvexed instinct of 
 duty, 'I have stubbed Thornaby waste,' or else, 
 and better, it is cheerful and helpful doing of 
 what the hand finds to do, in surety that at 
 evening time, whatsoever is right the Master 
 will give. And that it be worthily done, de- 
 pends wholly on that ultimate quantity of worth 
 which you can measure, each in himself, by the 
 test I have just given you. For that test, ob- 
 serve, will mark to you the precise force, first of 
 your absolute courage, and then of the energy 
 in you for the right ordering of things, and 
 the kindly dealing with persons. You have cut 
 away from these two instincts every selfish or 
 common motive, and left nothing but the ener- 
 gies of Order and of Love. 
 
 87. Now, where those two roots are set, all 
 the other powers and desires find right nourish- 
 ment, and become to their own utmost, helpful 
 to others and pleasurable to ourselves. And so 
 far as those two springs of action are not in us,
 
 104 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 all other powers become corrupt or dead ; even 
 the love of truth, apart from these, hardens into 
 an insolent and cold avarice of knowledge, which 
 unused, is more vain than unused gold. 
 
 88. These, then, are the two essential instincts 
 of humanity: the love of Order and the love 
 of Kindness. By the love of order the moral 
 energy is to deal with the earth, and to dress it, 
 and keep it; and with all rebellious and dis- 
 solute forces in lower creatures, or in ourselves. 
 By the love of doing kindness it is to deal 
 rightly with all surrounding life. And then, 
 grafted on these, we are to make every other 
 passion perfect ; so that they may every one 
 have full strength and yet be absolutely under 
 control. 
 
 89. Every one must be strong, every one per- 
 fect, every one obedient as a war horse. And 
 it is among the most beautiful pieces of mystic- 
 ism to which eternal truth is attached, that the 
 chariot race, which Plato uses as an image of 
 moral government, and which is indeed the most 
 perfect type of it in any visible skill of men, 
 should have been made by the Greeks the con- 
 tinual subject of their best poetry and best art. 
 Nevertheless Plato's use of it is not altogether
 
 III. THE RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 105 
 
 true. There is no black horse in the chariot of 
 the soul. One of the driver's worst faults is in 
 starving his horses ; another, in not breaking 
 them early enough ; but they are all good. 
 Take, for example, one usually thought of as 
 wholly evil — that of Anger, leading to venge- 
 ance. I believe it to be quite one of the crown- 
 ing wickednesses of this age that we have starved 
 and chilled our faculty of indignation, and nei- 
 ther desire nor dare to punish crimes justly. 
 We have taken up the benevolent idea, forsooth, 
 that justice is to be preventive instead of vin- 
 dictive; and we imagine that we are to punish, 
 not in anger, but in expediency ; not that we 
 may give deserved pain to the person in fault, 
 but that we may frighten other people from 
 committing the same fault. The beautiful theory 
 of this non- vindictive justice is, that having 
 convicted a man of a crime worthy of death, we 
 entirely pardon the criminal, restore him to his 
 place in our affection and esteem, and then 
 hang him, not as a malefactor, but as a scare- 
 crow. That is the theory. And the practice is, 
 that we send a child to prison for a month for 
 stealing a handful of walnuts, for fear that other 
 children should come to steal more of our
 
 106 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 walnuts. And we do not punish a swindler for 
 ruining a thousand families, because we think 
 swindling is a wholesome excitement to trade. 
 
 90. But all true justice is vindictive to vice, 
 as it is rewarding to virtue. Only — and herein 
 it is distinguished from personal revenge — it is 
 vindictive of the wrong done; — not of the wrong 
 done to us. It is the national expression of de- 
 liberate anger, as of deliberate gratitude; it is 
 not exemplary, or even corrective, but essen- 
 tially retributive ; it is the absolute art of mea- 
 sured recompense, giving honour where honour 
 is due, and shame where shame is due, and joy 
 where joy is due, and pain where pain is due. 
 It is neither educational, for men are to be edu- 
 cated by wholesome habit, not by rewards and 
 punishments ; nor is it preventive, for it is to be 
 executed without regard to any consequences ; 
 but only for righteousness' sake, a righteous 
 nation does judgment and justice. But in this, 
 as in all other instances, the Tightness of the 
 secondary passion depends on its being grafted 
 on those two primary instincts, the love of order 
 and of kindness, so that indignation itself is 
 against the wounding of love. Do you think 
 the /jifjvis M^iX^os came of a hard heart in
 
 III. THE RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 107 
 
 Achilles, or the ' Pallas te hoc vulnere, Pallas/ 
 of a hard heart in Anchises' son ? 
 
 91. And now, if with this clue through the 
 labyrinth of them, you remember the course of 
 the arts of great nations, you will perceive that 
 whatever has prospered, and become lovely, 
 had its beginning — for no other was possible — 
 in the love of order in material things associated 
 with true SiKaiocrvvr) : and the desire of beauty 
 in material things, which is associated with true 
 affection, c/iaritas, and with the innumerable 
 conditions of gentleness expressed by the dif- 
 ferent uses of the words %a/?t<> and gratia. You 
 will find that this love of beauty is an essential 
 part of all healthy human nature, and though 
 it can long co-exist with states of life in many 
 other respects unvirtuous, it is itself wholly 
 good ; — the direct adversary of envy, avarice, 
 mean worldly care, and especially of cruelty. 
 It entirely perishes when these are wilfully in- 
 dulged ; and the men in whom it has been most 
 strong have always been compassionate, and 
 lovers of justice, and the earliest discerners 
 and declarers of things conducive to the happi- 
 ness of mankind. 
 
 92. Nearly every important truth respecting
 
 108 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 the love of beauty in its familiar relations to 
 human life was mythically expressed by the 
 Greeks in their various accounts of the parentage 
 and offices of the Graces. But one fact, the 
 most vital of all, they could not in its fulness 
 perceive, namely, that the intensity of other 
 perceptions of beauty is exactly commensurate 
 with the imaginative purity of the passion of 
 love, and with the singleness of its devotion. 
 They were not fully conscious of, and could 
 not therefore either mythically or philosophi- 
 cally express, the deep relation within them- 
 selves between their power of perceiving beauty, 
 and the honour of domestic affection which found 
 their sternest themes of tragedy in the infringe- 
 ment of its laws ; — which made the rape of 
 Helen the chief subject of their epic poetry, 
 and which fastened their clearest symbolism 
 of resurrection on the story of Alcestis. Un- 
 happily, the subordinate position of their most 
 revered women, and the partial corruption of 
 feeling towards them by the presence of certain 
 other singular states of inferior passion which 
 it is as difficult as grievous to analyse, arrested 
 the ethical as well as the formative progress of 
 the Greek mind ; and it was not until after an
 
 III. THE RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 109 
 
 interval of nearly two thousand years of various 
 error and pain, that, partly as the true reward 
 of Christian warfare nobly sustained through 
 centuries of trial, and partly as the visionary 
 culmination of the faith which saw in a maiden's 
 purity the link between God and her race, the 
 highest and holiest strength of mortal love was 
 reached ; and, together with it, in the song of 
 Dante, and the painting of Bernard of Luino 
 and his fellows, the perception, and embodi- 
 ment for ever of whatsoever things are pure, 
 whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things 
 are of good report ; — that, if there be any virtue, 
 and if there be any praise, men might think on 
 those things. 
 
 93. You probably observed the expression I 
 used a moment ago, the imaginative purity of 
 the passion of love. I have not yet spoken, 
 nor is it possible for me to-day, to speak ade- 
 quately, of the moral power of the imagination : 
 but you may for yourselves enough discern its 
 nature merely by comparing the dignity of the 
 relations between the sexes, from their lowest 
 level in moths or mollusca, through the higher 
 creatures in whom they become a domestic in- 
 fluence and law, up to the love of pure men
 
 I IO LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 and women ; and, finally, to the ideal love which 
 animated chivalry. Throughout this vast ascent 
 it is the gradual increase of the imaginative 
 faculty which exalts and enlarges the authority 
 of the passion, until, at its height, it is the 
 bulwark of patience, the tutor of honour, and 
 the perfectness of praise. 
 
 94. You will find farther, that as of love, so 
 of all the other passions, the right government 
 and exaltation begins in that of the Imagination, 
 which is lord over them. For to subdue the 
 passions, which is thought so often to be the 
 sum of duty respecting them, is possible enough 
 to a proud dulness ; but to excite them rightly, 
 and make them strong for good, is the work of 
 the unselfish imagination. It is constantly said 
 that human nature is heartless. Do not believe 
 it. Human nature is kind and generous ; but 
 it is narrow and blind ; and can only with diffi- 
 culty conceive anything but what it immediately 
 sees and feels. People would instantly care 
 for others as well as themselves if only they 
 could imagine others as well as themselves. 
 Let a child fall into the river before the rough- 
 est man's eyes ; — he will usually do what he 
 can to get it out, even at some risk to himself;
 
 III. THE RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. I I I 
 
 and all the town will triumph in the saving of 
 one little life. Let the same man be shown 
 that hundreds of children are dying of fever for 
 want of some sanitary measure which it will 
 cost him trouble to urge, and he will make no 
 effort ; and probably all the town would resist 
 him if he did. So, also, the lives of many de- 
 serving women are passed in a succession of 
 petty anxieties about themselves, and gleaning 
 of minute interests and mean pleasures in their 
 immediate circle, because they are never taught 
 to make any effort to look beyond it; or to know 
 anything about the mighty world in which their 
 lives are fading, like blades of bitter grass in 
 fruitless fields. 
 
 95. I had intended to enlarge on this — and 
 yet more on the kingdom which every man holds 
 in his conceptive faculty, to be peopled with 
 active thoughts and lovely presences, or left 
 waste for the springing up of those dark desires 
 and dreams of which it is written that 'every 
 imagination of the thoughts of man's heart is 
 evil continually.' True, and a thousand times 
 true it is, that, here at least, ' greater is he 
 that ruleth his spirit, than he that taketh a city.' 
 But this you can partly follow out for yourselves
 
 112 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 without help, partly we must leave it for future 
 enquiry. I press to the conclusion which I wish 
 to leave with you, that all you can rightly do, 
 or honourably become, depends on the govern- 
 ment of these two instincts of order and kind- 
 ness, by this great Imaginative faculty, which 
 gives you inheritance of the past, grasp of the 
 present, authority over the future. Map out the 
 spaces of your possible lives by its help ; mea- 
 sure the range of their possible agency ! On 
 the wails and towers of this your fair city, there 
 is not an ornament of which the first origin may 
 not be traced back to the thoughts of men who 
 died two thousand years ago. Whom will you 
 be governing by your thoughts, two thousand 
 years hence ? Think of it, and you will find 
 that so far from art being immoral, little else ex- 
 cept art is moral ; that life without industry is 
 guilt, and industry without art is brutality : and 
 for the words ' good ' and ' wicked/ used of men, 
 you may almost substitute the words ' Makers ' 
 and ' Destroyers.' Far the greater part of the 
 seeming prosperity of the world is, so far as our 
 present knowledge extends, vain : wholly use- 
 less for any kind of good, but having assigned 
 to it a certain inevitable sequence of destruction
 
 III. THE RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 113 
 
 and of sorrow. Its stress is only the stress of 
 wandering storm ; its beauty the hectic of plague : 
 and what is called the history of mankind is too 
 often the record of the whirlwind, and the map 
 of the spreading of the leprosy. But underneath 
 all that, or in narrow spaces of dominion in the 
 midst of it, the work of every man, ' qui non 
 accepit in vanitatem animam suam,' endures and 
 prospers ; a small remnant or green bud of it 
 prevailing at last over evil. And though faint 
 with sickness, and encumbered in ruin, the true 
 workers redeem inch by inch the wilderness 
 into garden ground ; by the help of their joined 
 hands the order of all things is surely sustained 
 and vitally expanded, and although with strange 
 vacillation, in the eyes of the watcher, the morn- 
 ing cometh, and also the night, there is no hour 
 of human existence that does not draw on to- 
 wards the perfect day. 
 
 96. And perfect the day shall be, when it is of 
 all men understood that the beauty of Holiness 
 must be in labour as well as in rest. Nay ! 
 more, if it may be, in labour ; in our strength, 
 rather than in our weakness ; and in the choice 
 of what we shall work for through the six days, 
 and may know to be good at their evening time, 
 
 8
 
 114 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 than in the choice of what we pray for on the 
 seventh, of reward or repose. With the multi- 
 tude that keep holiday, we may perhaps some- 
 times vainly have gone up to the house of the 
 Lord, and vainly there asked for what we fancied 
 would be mercy ; but for the few who labour as 
 their Lord would have them, the mercy needs 
 no seeking, and their wide home no hallowing. 
 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow them, all 
 the days of their life ; and they shall dwell in 
 the house of the Lord — for ever.
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 THE RELATION OF ART TO USE. 
 
 97. Our subject of enquiry to-day, you will re- 
 member, is the mode in which fine art is founded 
 upon, or may contribute to, the practical re- 
 quirements of human life. 
 
 Its offices in this respect are mainly twofold : 
 it gives Form to knowledge, and Grace to utility ; 
 that is to say, it makes permanently visible to 
 us things which otherwise could neither be 
 described by our science, nor retained by our 
 memory ; and it gives delightfulness and worth 
 to the implements of daily use, and materials 
 of dress, furniture and lodging. In the first of 
 these offices it gives precision and charm to 
 truth ; in the second it gives precision and charm 
 to service. For, the moment we make anything 
 useful thoroughly, it is a law of nature that we 
 shall be pleased with ourselves, and with the
 
 tlS LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 thing we have made; and become desirous there- 
 fore to adorn or complete it, in some dainty way, 
 with finer art expressive of our pleasure. 
 
 And the point I wish chiefly to bring before 
 you to-day is this close and healthy connection 
 of the fine arts with material use ; but I must 
 first try briefly to put in clear light the function 
 of art in giving Form to truth. 
 
 98. Much that I have hitherto tried to teach 
 has been disputed on the ground that I have 
 attached too much importance to art as repre- 
 senting natural facts, and too little to it as a 
 source of pleasure. And I wish, in the close of 
 these four prefatory lectures, strongly to assert 
 to you, and, so far as I can in the time, con- 
 vince you, that the entire vitality of art depends 
 upon its being either full of truth, or full of use ; 
 and that, however pleasant, wonderful or im- 
 pressive it may be in itself, it must yet be of 
 inferior kind, and tend to deeper inferiority, un- 
 less it has clearly one of these main objects, — 
 either to state a true thing, or to adorn a service- 
 able one. It must never exist alone — never for 
 itself ; it exists rightly only when it is the means 
 of knowledge, or the grace of agency for life. 
 
 99. Now., I pray }'ou to observe — for though
 
 IV. THE RELATION OF ART TO USE. II7 
 
 I have said this often before, I have never yet 
 said it clearly enough — every good piece of art, 
 to whichever of these ends it may be directed, 
 involves first essentially the evidence of human 
 skill, and the formation of an actually beautiful 
 thing by it. 
 
 Skill, and beauty, always then ; and, beyond 
 these, the formative arts have always one or 
 other of the two objects which I have just de- 
 fined to you — truth, or serviceableness ; and 
 without these aims neither the skill nor their 
 beauty will avail ; only by these can either 
 legitimately reign. All the graphic arts rjegin 
 in keeping the outline of shadow that we have 
 loved, and they end in giving to it the aspect 
 of life ; and all the architectural arts begin in 
 the shaping of the cup and the platter, and 
 they end in a glorified roof. 
 
 Therefore, you see, in the graphic arts you 
 have Skill, Beauty, and Likeness ; and in the 
 architectural arts, Skill, Beauty, and Use ; and 
 you must have the three in each group, balanced 
 and co-ordinate ; and all the chief errors of art 
 consist in losing or exaggerating one of these 
 elements. 
 
 100. For instance, almost the whole system
 
 I l8 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 and hope of modern life are founded on the 
 notion that you may substitute mechanism for 
 skill, photograph for picture, cast-iron for sculp- 
 ture. That is your main nineteenth-century 
 faith, or infidelity. You think you can get every- 
 thing by grinding — music, literature, and paint- 
 ing. You will find it grievously not so ; you can 
 get nothing but dust by mere grinding. Even 
 to have the barley-meal out of it, you must have 
 the barley first ; and that comes by growth, not 
 grinding. But essentially, we have lost our de- 
 light in Skill ; in that majesty of it which I was 
 trying to make clear to you in my last address, 
 and which long ago I tried to express, under the 
 head of ideas of power. The entire sense of 
 that, we have lost, because we ourselves do not 
 take pains enough to do right, and have no con- 
 ception of what the right costs ; so that all the 
 joy and reverence we ought to feel in looking at 
 a strong man's work have ceased in us. We 
 keep them yet a little in looking at a honeycomb 
 or a bird's-nest ; we understand that these differ, 
 by divinity of skill, from a lump of wax or a 
 cluster of sticks. But a picture, which is a much 
 more wonderful thing than a honeycomb or a 
 bird's-nest, — have we not known people, and
 
 IV. THE RELATION OF ART TO USE. I IO, 
 
 sensible people too, who expected to be taught 
 to produce that, in six lessons ? 
 
 101. Well, you must have the skill, you must 
 have the beauty, which is the highest moral 
 element ; and then, lastly, you must have the 
 verity or utility, which is not the moral, but the 
 vital element ; and this desire for verity and use 
 is the one aim of the three that always leads in 
 great schools, and in the minds of great masters, 
 without any exception. They will permit them- 
 selves in awkwardness, they will permit them- 
 selves in ugliness ; but they will never permit 
 themselves in uselessness or in unveracity. 
 
 102. And farther, as their skill increases, and 
 as their grace, so much more, their desire for 
 truth. It is impossible to find the three motives 
 in fairer balance and harmony than in our own 
 Reynolds. He rejoices in showing you his 
 skill ; and those of you who succeed in learning 
 what painter's work really is, will one day re- 
 joice also, even to laughter — that highest laugh- 
 ter which springs of pure delight, in watching 
 the fortitude and the fire of a hand which strikes 
 forth its will upon the canvas as easily as the 
 wind strikes it on the sea. He rejoices in all 
 abstract beauty and rhythm and melody of
 
 120 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 design ; he will never give you a colour that is 
 not lovely, nor a shade that is unnecessary, nor 
 aline that is ungraceful. But all his power and 
 all his invention are held by him subordinate, — 
 and the more obediently because of their noble- 
 ness, — to his true leading purpose of setting be- 
 fore you such likeness of the living presence 
 of an English gentleman or an English lady, as 
 shall be worthy of being looked upon for ever. 
 
 103. But farther, you remember, I hope — for 
 I said it in a way that I thought would shock 
 you a little, that you might remember it — my 
 statement, that art had never done more than 
 this, never more than given the likeness of a 
 noble human being. Not only so, but it very 
 seldom does so much as this ; and the best 
 pictures that exist of the great schools are all 
 portraits, or groups of portraits, often of very 
 simple and no wise noble persons. You may 
 have much more brilliant and impressive quali- 
 ties in imaginative pictures; you may have 
 figures scattered like clouds, or garlanded like 
 flowers ; you may have light and shade, as of 
 a tempest, and colour, as of the rainbow ; but 
 all that is child's play to the great men, though 
 it is astonishment to us. Their real strength is
 
 IV. THE RELATION OF ART TO USE. 121 
 
 tried to the utmost, and as far as I know, it is 
 never elsewhere brought out so thoroughly, as 
 in painting one man or woman, and the soul 
 that was in them ; nor that always the highest 
 soul, but often only a thwarted one that was 
 capable of height ; or perhaps not even that, but 
 faultful and poor, yet seen through, to the poor 
 best of it, by the masterful sight. So that in 
 order to put before you in your Standard series, 
 the best art possible, I am obliged, even from 
 the very strongest men, to take portraits, before 
 I take the idealism. Na}^, whatever is best in 
 the great compositions themselves has depended 
 on portraiture ; and the study necessary to en- 
 able you to understand invention will also con- 
 vince you that the mind of man never invented 
 a greater thing than the form of man, animated 
 by faithful life. Every attempt to refine or exalt 
 such healthy humanity has weakened or cari- 
 catured it ; or else consists only in giving it, to 
 please our fancy, the wings of birds, or the eyes 
 of antelopes. Whatever is truly great in either 
 Greek or Christian art, is also restrictedly 
 human ; and even the raptures of the redeemed 
 souls who enter, ' celestemente ballando,' the 
 gate of Angelico's Paradise, were seen first in the
 
 122 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 terrestrial, yet most pure, mirth of Florentine 
 maidens. 
 
 104. I am aware that this cannot but at 
 present appear gravely questionable to those of 
 my audience who are strictly cognisant of the 
 phases of Greek art ; for they know that the 
 moment of its decline is accurately marked, by 
 its turning from abstract form to portraiture. 
 But the reason of this is simple. The progres- 
 sive course of Greek art was in subduing mon- 
 strous conceptions to natural ones ; it did this 
 by general laws; it reached absolute truth of 
 generic human form, and if this ethical force 
 had remained, would have advanced into healthy 
 portraiture. But at the moment of change the 
 national life ended in Greece ; and portraiture, 
 there, meant insult to her religion, and flattery 
 to her tyrants. And her skill perished, not be- 
 cause she became true in sight, but because she 
 became vile at heart. 
 
 105. And now let us think of our own work, 
 and ask how that may become, in its own poor 
 measure, active in some verity of representation. 
 We certainly cannot begin by drawing kings or 
 queens ; but we must try, even in our earliest 
 work, if it is to prosper, to draw something that
 
 IV. THE RELATION OF ART TO USE. 123 
 
 will convey true knowledge both to ourselves 
 and others. And I think you will find greatest 
 advantage in the endeavour to give more life 
 and educational power to the simpler branches 
 of natural science : for the great scientific men 
 are all so eager in advance that they have no 
 time to popularise their discoveries, and if we 
 can glean after them a little, and make pictures 
 of the things which science describes, we shall 
 find the service a worthy one. Not only so, 
 but we may even be helpful to science herself; 
 for she has suffered by her proud severance from 
 the arts ; and having made too little effort to 
 realise her discoveries to vulgar eyes, has her- 
 self lost true measure of what was chiefly pre- 
 cious in them. 
 
 1 06. Take Botany, for instance. Our scien- 
 tific botanists are, I think, chiefly at present 
 occupied in distinguishing species, which perfect 
 methods of distinction will probably in the future 
 show to be indistinct ; — in inventing descriptive 
 names of which a more advanced science and 
 more fastidious scholarship will show some to 
 be unnecessary, and others inadmissible ; — and 
 in microscopic investigations of structure, which 
 through many alternate links of triumphant
 
 124 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 discovery that tissue is composed of vessels, and 
 that vessels are composed of tissue, have not 
 hitherto completely explained to us either the 
 origin, the energy, or the course of the sap ; and 
 which however subtle or successful, bear to the 
 real natural history of plants only the relation 
 that anatomy and organic chemistry bear to the 
 history of men. In the meantime, our artists 
 are so generally convinced of the truth of the 
 Darwinian theory that they do not always think 
 it necessary to show any difference between the 
 foliage of an elm and an oak ; and the gift-books 
 of Christmas have every page surrounded with 
 laboriously engraved garlands of rose, shamrock, 
 thistle, and forget-me-not, without its being 
 thought proper by the draughtsman, or desir- 
 able by the public, even in the case of those 
 uncommon flowers, to observe the real shape 
 of the petals of any one of them. 
 
 107. Now what we especially need at present 
 for educational purposes is to know, not the 
 anatomy of plants, but their biography — how 
 and where they live and die, their tempers, be- 
 nevolences, malignities, distresses, and virtues. 
 We want them drawn from their youth to their 
 age, from bud to fruit. We ought to see the
 
 IV. THE RELATION OF ART TO USE. 125 
 
 various formsr of their diminished but hardy 
 growth in cold climates, or poor soils ; and their 
 rank or wild luxuriance, when full-fed, and 
 warmly nursed. And all this we ought to have 
 drawn so accurately, that we might at once com- 
 pare any given part of a plant with the same 
 part of any other, drawn on the like conditions. 
 Now, is not this a work which we may set about 
 here in Oxford, with good hope and much plea- 
 sure ? I think it is so important, that the first 
 exercise in drawing I shall put before you will 
 be an outline of a laurel leaf. You will find in 
 the opening sentence of Leonardo's treatise, our 
 present text-book, that you must not at first 
 draw from nature, but from a good master's 
 work, ' per assuefarsi a buone membra,' to ac- 
 custom yourselves, that is, to entirely good 
 representative organic forms. So your first 
 exercise shall be the top of the laurel sceptre 
 of Apollo, drawn by an Italian engraver of 
 Leonardo's own time ; then we will draw a 
 laurel leaf itself ; and little by little, I think we 
 may both learn ourselves, and teach to many 
 besides, somewhat more than we know yet, of 
 the wild olives of Greece, and the wild roses 
 of England.
 
 126 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 108. Next, in Geology, which I will take leave 
 to consider as an entirely separate science from 
 the zoology of the past, which has lately usurped 
 its name and interest. In geology itself we 
 find the strength of many able men occupied in 
 debating questions of which there are yet no 
 data even for the clear statement ; and in seiz- 
 ing advanced theoretical positions on the mere 
 contingency of their being afterwards tenable ; 
 while, in the meantime, no simple person, taking 
 a holiday in Cumberland, can get an intelligible 
 section of Skiddaw, or a clear account of the 
 origin of the Skiddaw slates ; and while, though 
 half the educated society of London travel every 
 summer over the great plain of Switzerland, 
 none know, or care to know, why that is a plain, 
 and the Alps to the south of it are Alps ; and 
 whether or not the gravel of the one has any- 
 thing to do with the rocks of the other. And 
 though every palace in Europe owes part of 
 its decoration to variegated marbles, and nearly 
 every woman in Europe part of her decoration to 
 pieces of jasper or chalcedony, I do not think any 
 geologist could at this moment with authority 
 tell us either how a piece of marble is stained, 
 or what causes the streaks in a Scotch pebble.
 
 IV. THE RELATION OF ART TO USE. 127 
 
 109. Now, as soon as you have obtained the 
 power of drawing, I do not say a mountain, but 
 even a stone, accurately, every question of this 
 kind will become to you at once attractive and 
 definite ; you will find that in the grain, the 
 lustre, and the cleavage-lines of the smallest 
 fragment of rock, there are recorded forces of 
 every order and magnitude, from those which 
 raise a continent by one volcanic effort, to those 
 which at every instant are polishing the appa- 
 rently complete crystal in its nest, and conduct- 
 ing the apparently motionless metal in its vein ; 
 and that only by the art of your own hand, and 
 fidelity of sight which it developes, you can 
 obtain true perception of these invincible and 
 inimitable arts of the earth herself; while the 
 comparatively slight effort necessary to obtain 
 so much skill as may serviceably draw moun- 
 tains in distant effect will be instantly rewarded 
 by what is almost equivalent to a new sense 
 of the conditions of their structure. 
 
 I IO. And, because it is well at once to know 
 some direction in which our work may be defi- 
 nite, let me suggest to those of you who may 
 intend passing their vacation in Switzerland, 
 and who care about mountains, that if they will
 
 128 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 first qualify themselves to take angles of position 
 and elevation with correctness, and to draw out- 
 lines with approximate fidelity, there are a series 
 of problems of the highest interest to be worked 
 out on the southern edge of the Swiss plain, in 
 the study of the relations of its molasse beds to 
 the rocks which are characteristically developed 
 in the chain of the Stockhorn, Beatenberg, 
 Pilate, Mythen above Schwytz, and High Sentis 
 of Appenzell ; the pursuit of which may lead 
 them into many pleasant, as well as creditably 
 dangerous, walks, and curious discoveries ; and 
 will be good for the discipline of their fingers 
 in the pencilling of crag form. 
 
 in. I wish I could ask you to draw, instead 
 of the Alps, the crests of Parnassus and Olym- 
 pus, and the ravines of Delphi and of Tempe. 
 I have not loved the arts of Greece as others 
 have ; yet I love them, and her, so much, that it 
 is to me simply a standing marvel how scholars 
 can endure for all these centuries, during which 
 their chief education has been in the language 
 and policy of Greece, to have only the names of 
 her hills and rivers upon their lips, and never 
 one line of conception of them in their mind's 
 sight. Which of us knows what the valley
 
 IV. THE RELATION OF ART TO USE. 129 
 
 of Sparta is like, or the great mountain vase 
 of Arcadia ? which of us, except in mere airy 
 syllabling of names, knows aught of ' sandy 
 Ladon's lilied banks, or old Lycaeus, or Cyllene 
 hoar ' ? ' You cannot travel in Greece ? ' — I 
 know it ; nor in Magna Graecia. But, gentle- 
 men of England, you had better find out why 
 you cannot, and put an end to that horror of 
 European shame, before you hope to learn 
 Greek art. 
 
 1 1 2. I scarcely know whether to place among 
 the things useful to art, or to science, the syste- 
 matic record, by drawing, of phenomena of the 
 sky. But I am quite sure that your work can- 
 not in any direction be more useful to yourselves, 
 than in enabling you to perceive the quite un- 
 paralleled subtilties of colour and inorganic 
 form, which occur on any ordinarily fine morn- 
 ing or evening horizon ; and I will even confess 
 to you another of my perhaps too sanguine 
 expectations, that in some far distant time it 
 may come to pass, that young Englishmen and 
 Englishwomen may think the breath of the 
 morning sky pleasanter than that of midnight, 
 and its light prettier than that of candles. 
 
 113. Lastly, in Zoology. What the Greeks 
 
 9
 
 130 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 did for the horse, and what, as far as regards 
 domestic and expressional character, Landseer 
 has done for the dog and the deer, remains to 
 be done by art for nearly all other animals of 
 high organization. There are few birds or beasts 
 that have not a range of character which, if not 
 equal to that of the horse or dog, is yet as 
 interesting within narrower limits, and often in 
 grotesqueness, intensity, or wild and timid pa- 
 thos, more singular and mysterious. Whatever 
 love of humour you have, — whatever sympathy 
 with imperfect, but most subtle, feeling, — what- 
 ever perception of sublimity in conditions of 
 fatal power, may here find fullest occupation : 
 all these being joined, in the strong animal races, 
 to a variable and fantastic beauty far beyond 
 anything that merely formative art has yet 
 conceived. I have placed in your Educational 
 series a wing by Albert Durer, which goes as 
 far as art yet has reached in delineation of 
 plumage ; while for the simple action of the 
 pinion it is impossible to go beyond what has 
 been done already by Titian and Tintoret ; but 
 you cannot so much as once look at the rufflings 
 of the plumes of a pelican pluming itself after 
 it has been in the water, or carefully draw the
 
 IV. THE RELATION OF ART TO USE. 1 3 1 
 
 contours of the wing either of a vulture or a 
 common swift, or paint the rose and vermilion 
 on that of a flamingo, without receiving almost 
 a new conception of the meaning of form and 
 colour in creation. 
 
 114. Lastly. Your work, in all directions I 
 have hitherto indicated, may be as deliberate as 
 you choose ; there is no immediate fear of the 
 extinction of many species of flowers or animals ; 
 and the Alps, and valley of Sparta, will wait 
 your leisure, I fear too long. But the feudal 
 and monastic buildings of Europe, and still more 
 the streets of her ancient cities, are vanishing 
 like dreams : and it is difficult to imagine the 
 mingled envy and contempt with which future 
 generations will look back to us, who still 
 possessed such things, yet made no effort to 
 preserve, and scarcely any to delineate them : 
 for when used as material of landscape by the 
 modern artist, they are nearly always super- 
 ficially or flatteringly represented, without zeal 
 enough to penetrate their character, or patience 
 enough to render it in modest harmony. As 
 for places of traditional interest, I do not know 
 an entirely faithful drawing of any historical 
 site, except one or two studies made by
 
 132 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 enthusiastic young painters in Palestine and 
 Egypt : for which, thanks to them always : but 
 we want work nearer home. 
 
 115. Now it is quite probable that some of 
 you, who will not care to go through the labour 
 necessary to draw flowers or animals, may yet 
 have pleasure in attaining some moderately ac- 
 curate skill of sketching architecture, and greater 
 pleasure still in directing it usefully. Suppose, 
 for instance, we were to take up the historical 
 scenery in Carlyle's ' Frederick.' Too justly 
 the historian accuses the genius of past art, 
 in that, types of too many such elsewhere, the 
 galleries of Berlin — ' are made up, like other 
 galleries, of goat-footed Pan, Europa's Bull, 
 Romulus's She-Wolf, and the Correggiosity of 
 Correggio, and contain, for instance, no portrait 
 of Friedrich the Great, — no likeness at all, or 
 next to none at all, of the noble series of Human 
 Realities, or any part of them, who have sprung, 
 not from the idle brains of dreaming dilettanti, 
 but from the head of God Almighty, to make 
 this poor authentic earth a little memorable for 
 us, and to do a little work that may be eternal 
 there.' So Carlyle tells us — too truly ! We 
 cannot now draw Friedrich for him, but we can
 
 IV. THE RELATION OF ART TO USE. 1 33 
 
 draw some of the old castles and cities that 
 were the cradles of German life — Hohenzollern, 
 Hapsburg, Marburg, and such others ; — we may 
 keep some authentic likeness of these for the 
 future. Suppose we were to take up that first 
 volume of ' Friedrich,' and put outlines to it : 
 shall we begin by looking for Henry the Fowler's 
 tomb — Carlyle himself asks if he has any — at 
 Quedlinburgh, and so downwards, rescuing what 
 we can ? That would certainly be making our 
 work of some true use. 
 
 1 1 6. But I have told you enough, it seems to 
 me, at least to-day, of this function of art in 
 recording fact ; let me now finally, and with all 
 distinctness possible to me, state to you its 
 main business of all ; — its service in the actual 
 uses of daily life. 
 
 You are surprised, perhaps, to hear me call 
 this its main business. That is indeed so, how- 
 ever. The giving brightness to picture is much, 
 but the giving brightness to life more. And 
 remember, were it as patterns only, you cannot, 
 without the realities, have the pictures. You 
 cannot have a landscape by Turner, without a 
 country for him to paint; you cannot have a por- 
 trait by Titian, without a man to be pourtrayed.
 
 134 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 I need not prove that to you, I suppose, in these 
 short terms ; but in the outcome I can get no 
 soul to believe that the beginning of art is in 
 getting our country clean , and our people beautiful. 
 I have been ten years trying to get this very 
 plain certainty — I do not say believed — but 
 even thought of, as anything but a monstrous 
 proposition. To get your country clean, and 
 your people lovely ; — I assure you that is a 
 necessary work of art to begin with ! There 
 has indeed been art in countries where people 
 lived in dirt to serve God, but never in coun- 
 tries where they lived in dirt to serve the devil. 
 There has indeed been art where the people 
 were not all lovely — where even their lips were 
 thick — and their skins black, because the sun 
 had looked upon them ; but never in a country 
 where the people were pale with miserable toil 
 and deadly shade, and where the lips of youth, 
 instead of being full with blood, were pinched 
 by famine, or warped with poison. And now, 
 therefore, note this well, the gist of all these 
 long prefatory talks. I said that the two great 
 moral instincts were those of Order and Kind- 
 ness. Now, all the arts are founded on agricul- 
 ture by the hand, and on the graces, and kindness
 
 IV. THE RELATION OF ART TO USE. 1 35 
 
 of feeding, and dressing, and lodging your peo- 
 ple. Greek art begins in the gardens of Alcinous 
 — perfect order, leeks in beds, and fountains 
 in pipes. And Christian art, as it arose out of 
 chivalry, was only possible so far as chivalry 
 compelled both kings and knights to care for 
 the right personal training of their people ; it 
 perished utterly when those kings and knights 
 became St]/bio/36poi, devourers of the people. 
 And it will become possible again only, when, 
 literally, the sword is beaten into the plough- 
 share, when your St. George of England shall 
 justify his name, and Christian art shall be 
 known as its Master was, in breaking of bread. 
 117. Now look at the working out of this 
 broad principle in minor detail ; observe how, 
 from highest to lowest, health of art has first 
 depended on reference to industrial use. There 
 is first the need of cup and platter, especially 
 of cup ; for you can put your meat on the 
 Harpies',* or on any other, tables ; but you 
 must have your cup to drink from. And to 
 hold it conveniently, you must put a handle to 
 it ; and to fill it when it is empty you must 
 have a large pitcher of some sort ; and to carry 
 
 * Virg., jEii., iii. 209 srqq.
 
 I36 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 the pitcher you may most advisably have two 
 handles. Modify the forms of these needful 
 possessions according to the various require- 
 ments of drinking largely and drinking deli- 
 cately ; of pouring easily out, or of keeping for 
 years the perfume in ; of storing in cellars, or 
 bearing from fountains ; of sacrificial libation, 
 of Panathenaic treasure of oil, and sepulchral 
 treasure of ashes, — and you have a resultant 
 series of beautiful form and decoration, from 
 the rude amphora of red earth up to Cellini's 
 vases of gems and crystal, in which series, but 
 especially in the more simple conditions of it, 
 are developed the most beautiful lines and most 
 perfect types of severe composition which have 
 yet been attained by art. 
 
 118. But again, that you may fill your cup 
 with pure water, you must go to the well or 
 spring ; you need a fence round the well ; you 
 need some tube or trough, or other means of 
 confining the stream at the spring. For the 
 conveyance of the current to any distance you 
 must build either enclosed or open aqueduct ; 
 and in the hot square of the city where you set 
 it free, you find it good for health and pleasant- 
 ness to let it leap into a fountain. On these
 
 IV. THE RELATION OF ART TO USE. 1 37 
 
 several needs you have a school of sculpture 
 founded ; in the decoration of the walls of wells 
 in level countries, and of the sources of springs 
 in mountainous ones, and chiefly of all, where 
 the women of household or market meet at the 
 city fountain. 
 
 There is, however, a farther reason for the 
 use of art here than in any other material service, 
 so far as we may, by art, express our reverence 
 or thankfulness. Whenever a nation is in its 
 right mind, it always has a deep sense of divinity 
 in the gift of rain from heaven, filling its heart 
 with food and gladness ; and all the more when 
 that gift becomes gentle and perennial in the 
 flowing of springs. It literally is not possible 
 that any fruitful power of the Muses should be 
 put forth upon a people which disdains their 
 Helicon; still less is it possible that any Chris- 
 tian nation should grow up ' tanquam lignum 
 quod plantatum est secus decursus aquarum,' 
 which cannot recognise the lesson meant in 
 their being told of the places where Rebekah 
 was met ; — where Rachel, — where Zipporah, — 
 and she who was asked for water under Mount 
 Gerizim by a Stranger, weary, who had nothing 
 to draw with.
 
 I38 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 119. And truly, when our mountain springs 
 are set apart in vale or craggy glen, or glade of 
 wood green through the drought of summer, far 
 from cities, then it is best to let them stay in 
 their own happy peace ; but if near towns, and 
 liable therefore to be defiled by common usage, 
 we could not use the loveliest art more worthily 
 than by sheltering the spring and its first pools 
 with precious marbles : nor ought anything to 
 be esteemed more important, as a means of 
 healthy education, than the care to keep the 
 streams of it afterwards, to as great a distance 
 as possible, pure, full of fish, and easily acces- 
 sible to children. There used to be, thirty years 
 ago, a little rivulet of the Wandel, about an 
 inch deep, which ran over the carriage-road 
 and under a foot-bridge just under the last chalk 
 hill near Croydon. Alas ! men came and went ; 
 and it — did not go on for ever. It has long 
 since been bricked over by the parish autho- 
 rities; but there was more education in that 
 stream with its minnows than you could get 
 out of a thousand pounds spent yearly in the 
 parish schools, even though you were to spend 
 every farthing of it in teaching the nature of 
 oxygen and hydrogen, and the names, and
 
 IV. THE RELATION OF AR1 TC USE. 1 39 
 
 rate per minute, of all the rivers in Asia and 
 America. 
 
 120. Well, the gist of this matter lies here 
 then. Suppose we want a school of pottery 
 again in England, all we poor artists are ready 
 to do the best we can, to show you how pretty 
 a line may be that is twisted first to one side, 
 and then to the other ; and how a plain house- 
 hold-blue will make a pattern on white ; and 
 how ideal art may be got out of the spaniel's 
 colours of black and tan. But I tell you before- 
 hand, all that we can do will be utterly useless, 
 unless you teach your peasant to say grace, not 
 only before meat, but before drink ; and having 
 provided him with Greek cups and platters, 
 provide him also with something that is not 
 poisoned to put into them. 
 
 121. There cannot be any need that I should 
 trace for you the conditions of art that are 
 directly founded on serviceableness of dress, 
 and of armour ; but it is my duty to affirm to 
 you, in the most positive manner, that after re- 
 covering, for the poor, wholesomeness of food, 
 your next step towards founding schools of 
 art in England must be in recovering, for the 
 poor, decency and wholesomeness of dress;
 
 I4O LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 thoroughly good in substance, fitted for their 
 daily work, becoming to their rank in life, and 
 worn with order and dignity. And this order 
 and dignity must be taught them by the women 
 of the upper and middle classes, whose minds 
 can be in nothing right, as long as they are so 
 wrong in this matter as to endure the squalor 
 of the poor, while they themselves dress gaily. 
 And on the proper pride and comfort of both 
 poor and rich in dress, must be founded the 
 true arts of dress ; carried on by masters of 
 manufacture no less careful of the perfectness 
 and beauty of their tissues, and of all that in 
 substance and in design can be bestowed upon 
 them, than ever the armourers of Milan and 
 Damascus were careful of their steel. 
 
 122. Then, in the third place, having recov- 
 ered some wholesome habits of life as to food 
 and dress, we must recover them as to lodging. 
 I said just now that the best architecture was 
 but a glorified roof. Think of it. The dome 
 of the Vatican, the porches of Rheims or 
 Chartres, the vaults and arches of their aisles, 
 the canopy of the tomb, and the spire of the 
 belfry, are all forms resulting from the mere re- 
 quirement that a certain space shall be strongly
 
 IV. THE RELATION OF ART TO USE. I4I 
 
 covered from heat and rain. More than that — 
 as I have tried all through ' The Stones of 
 Venice' to show, — the lovely forms of these 
 were every one of them developed in civil and 
 domestic building, and only after their inven- 
 tion, employed ecclesiastically on the grandest 
 scale. I think you cannot but have noticed 
 here in Oxford, as elsewhere, that our modern 
 architects never seem to know what to do with 
 their roofs. Be assured, until the roofs are 
 right, nothing else will be ; and there are just 
 two ways of keeping them right. Never build 
 them of iron, but only of wood or stone ; and 
 secondly, take care that in every town the little 
 roofs are built before the large ones, and that 
 everybody who wants one has got one. And 
 we must try also to make everybody want one. 
 That is to say, at some not very advanced 
 period of life, men should desire to have a 
 home, which they do not wish to quit any 
 more, suited to their habits of life, and likely to 
 be more and more suitable to them until their 
 death. And men must desire to have these 
 their dwelling-places built as strongly as pos- 
 sible, and furnished and decorated daintily, and 
 set in pleasant places, in bright light, and good
 
 142 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 air, being able to choose for themselves that 
 at least as well as swallows. And when the 
 houses are grouped together in cities, men 
 must have so much civic fellowship as to sub- 
 ject their architecture to a common law, and so 
 much civic pride as to desire that the whole 
 gathered group of human dwellings should be 
 a lovely thing, not a frightful one, on the face 
 of the earth. Not many weeks ago an English 
 clergyman,* a master of this University, a man 
 not given to sentiment, but of middle age, and 
 great practical sense, told me, by accident, and 
 wholly without reference to the subject now 
 before us, that he never could enter London 
 from his country parsonage but with closed 
 eyes, lest the sight of the blocks of houses 
 which the railroad intersected in the suburbs 
 should unfit him, by the horror of it, for his 
 day's work. 
 
 123. Now, it is not possible — and I repeat 
 to you, only in more deliberate assertion, what 
 I wrote just twenty-two years ago in the last 
 chapter of the ' Seven Lamps of Architecture ' 
 — it is not possible to have any right morality, 
 happiness, or art, in any country where the 
 * Osborne Gordon.
 
 IV. THE RELATION OF ART TO USE. 1 43 
 
 cities are thus built, or thus, let me rather say, 
 clotted and coagulated ; spots of a dreadful mil- 
 dew, spreading by patches and blotches over 
 the country they consume. You must have 
 lovely cities, crystallised, not coagulated, into 
 form ; limited in size, and not casting out the 
 scum and scurf of them into an encircling erup- 
 tion of shame, but girded each with its sacred 
 pomcerium, and with garlands of gardens full of 
 blossoming trees and softly guided streams. 
 
 That is impossible, you say ! it may be so. 
 I have nothing to do with its possibility, but 
 only with its indispensability. More than that 
 must be possible, however, before you can have 
 a school of art ; namely, that you find places 
 elsewhere than in England, or at least in other- 
 wise unserviceable parts of England, for the 
 establishment of manufactories needing the help 
 of fire, that is to say, of all the rkyyat fiavavcn/cal 
 and iiripprjjoi, of which it was long ago known 
 to be the constant nature that ' daxoXias /xaXicrTa 
 eyovai kcli (p[\(ov icai 7ro'X.eo><> avveTTCfxeXelaOac,' 
 and to reduce such manufactures to their lowest 
 limit, so that nothing may ever be made of iron 
 that can as effectually be made of wood or 
 stone ; and nothing moved by steam that can
 
 144 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 be as effectually moved by natural forces. And 
 observe, that for all mechanical effort required 
 in social life and in cities, water power is in- 
 finitely more than enough ; for anchored mills 
 on the large rivers, and mills moved by sluices 
 from reservoirs filled by the tide, will give you 
 command of any quantity of constant motive 
 power you need. 
 
 Agriculture by the hand, then, and absolute 
 refusal or banishment of unnecessary igneous 
 force, are the first conditions of a school of art 
 in any country. And until you do this, be it 
 soon or late, things will continue in that triumph- 
 ant state to which, for want of finer art, your 
 mechanism has brought them ; — that, though 
 England is deafened with spinning wheels, her 
 people have not clothes — though she is black 
 with digging of fuel, they die of cold — and 
 though she has sold her soul for gain, they 
 die of hunger. Stay in that triumph, if you 
 choose ; but be assured of this, it is not one 
 which the fine arts will ever share with you. 
 
 124. Now,-I have given you my message, con- 
 taining, as I know, offence enough, and itself, 
 it may seem to many, unnecessary enough. But 
 just in proportion to its apparent non-necessity,
 
 IV. THE RELATION OF ART TO USE. 1 45 
 
 and to its certain offence, was its real need, and 
 my real duty to speak it. The study of the 
 fine arts could not be rightly associated with 
 the grave work of English Universities, with- 
 out due and clear protest against the misdirec- 
 tion of national energy, which for the present 
 renders all good results of such study on a 
 great scale, impossible. I can easily teach you, 
 as any other moderately good draughtsman 
 could, how to hold your pencils, and how to 
 lay your colours ; but it is little use my doing 
 that, while the nation is spending millions of 
 money in the destruction of all that pencil or 
 colour has to represent, and in the promotion 
 of false forms of art, which are only the cost- 
 liest and the least enjoyable of follies. And 
 therefore these are the things that I have first 
 and last to tell you in this place ; — that the 
 fine arts are not to be learned by Locomotion, 
 but by making the homes we live in lovely, 
 and by staying in them ; — that the fine arts are 
 not to be learned by Competition, but by doing 
 our quiet best in our own way ; — that the fine 
 arts are not to be learned by Exhibition, but 
 by doing what is right, and making what is 
 honest, whether it be exhibited or not ; — and, 
 
 IO
 
 1 46 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 for the sum of all, that men must paint and build 
 neither for pride nor for money, but for love ; 
 for love of their art, for love of their neighbour, 
 and whatever better love may be than these, 
 founded on these. I know that I gave some 
 pain, which I was most unwilling to give, in 
 speaking of the possible abuses of religious art ; 
 but there can be no danger of any, so long as 
 we remember that God inhabits cottages as well 
 as churches, and ought to be well lodged there 
 also. Begin with wooden floors ; the tesselated 
 ones will take care of themselves ; begin with 
 thatching roofs, and you shall end by splendidly 
 vaulting them ; begin by taking care that no 
 old eyes fail over their Bibles, nor young ones 
 over their needles, for want of rushlight, and 
 then you may have whatever true good is to be 
 got out of coloured glass or wax candles. And 
 in thus putting the arts to universal use, you 
 will find also their universal inspiration, their 
 universal benediction. I told you there was no 
 evidence of a special Divineness in any applica- 
 tion of them ; that they were always equally 
 human and equally Divine ; and in closing this 
 inaugural series of lectures, into which I have 
 endeavoured to compress the principles that
 
 IV. THE RELATION OF ART TO USE. \dfi 
 
 are to be the foundations of your future work, 
 it is my last duty to say some positive words 
 as to the Divinity of all art, when it is truly 
 fair, or truly serviceable. 
 
 125. Every seventh day, if not oftener, the 
 greater number of well-meaning persons in 
 England thankfully receive from their teachers 
 a benediction, couched in those terms: — 'The 
 grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Love 
 of God, and the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost, 
 be with you.' Now I do not know precisely 
 what sense is attached in the English public 
 mind to those expressions. But what I have 
 to tell you positively is that the three things do 
 actually exist, and can be known if you care to 
 know them, and possessed if you care to possess 
 them ; and that another thing exists, besides 
 these, of which we already know too much. 
 
 First, by simply obeying the orders of the 
 Founder of your religion, all grace, graciousness, 
 or beauty and favour of gentle life, will be 
 given to you in mind and body, in work and in 
 rest. The Grace of Christ exists, and can be 
 had if you will. Secondly, as you know more 
 and more of the created world, you will find that 
 the true will of its Maker is that its creatures
 
 I48 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 should be happy ; — that He has made every- 
 thing beautiful in its time and its place, and 
 that it is chiefly by the fault of men, when 
 they are allowed the liberty of thwarting His 
 laws, that Creation groans or travails in pain. 
 The Love of God exists, and you may see it, 
 and live in it if you will. Lastly, a Spirit does 
 actually exist which teaches the ant her path, 
 the bird her building, and men, in an instinctive 
 and marvellous way, whatever lovely arts and 
 noble deeds are possible to them. Without it 
 you can do no good thing. To the grief of it 
 you can do many bad ones. In the possession 
 of it is your peace and your power. 
 
 And there is a fourth thing, of which we al- 
 ready know too much. There is an evil spirit 
 whose dominion is in blindness and in cowardice, 
 as the dominion of the Spirit of wisdom is in 
 clear sight and in courage. 
 
 And this blind and cowardly spirit is for ever 
 telling you that evil things are pardonable, and 
 you shall not die for them, and that good things 
 are impossible, and you need not live for them ; 
 and that gospel of his is now the loudest that 
 is preached in your Saxon tongue. You will 
 find some day, to your cost, if you believe the
 
 IV. THE RELATION OF ART TO USE. 1 49 
 
 first part of it, that it is not true ; but you may 
 never, if you believe the second part of it, find, 
 to your gain, that also, untrue ; and therefore 
 I pray you with all earnestness to prove, and 
 know within your hearts, that all things lovely 
 and righteous are possible for those who believe 
 in their possibility, and who determine that, for 
 their part, they will make every day's work con- 
 tribute to them. Let every dawn of morning 
 be to you as the beginning of life, and every 
 setting sun be to you as its close : — then let 
 every one of these short lives leave its sure 
 record of some kindly thing done for others — 
 some goodly strength or knowledge gained for 
 yourselves ; so, from day to day, and strength 
 to strength, you shall build up indeed, by Art, 
 by Thought, and by Just Will, an Ecclesia of 
 England, of which it shall not be said, ' See 
 what manner of stones are here,' but, ' See what 
 manner of men.'
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 LINE. 
 
 1 26. You will, I doubt not, willingly permit me 
 to begin your lessons in real practice of art in 
 the words of the greatest of English painters : 
 one also, than whom there is indeed no greater, 
 among those of any nation, or any time, — our 
 own gentle Reynolds. 
 
 He says in his first discourse : — ' The Direc- 
 tors ' (of the Academy) ' ought more particularly 
 to watch over the genius of those students, who 
 being more advanced, are arrived at that critical 
 period of study, on the nice management of 
 which their future turn of taste depends. At 
 that age it is natural for them to be more 
 captivated with what is brilliant, than with 
 what is solid, and to prefer splendid negligence 
 to painful and humiliating exactness.' 
 
 ' A facility in composing, — a lively and, what
 
 V. LINE. 151 
 
 is called, a " masterly " handling of the chalk 
 or pencil, are, it must be confessed, captivating 
 qualities to young minds, and become of course 
 the objects of their ambition. They endeavour 
 to imitate these dazzling excellences, which they 
 will find no great labour in attaining. After 
 much time spent in these frivolous pursuits, the 
 difficulty will be to retreat ; but it will then be 
 too late ; and there is scarce an instance of re- 
 turn to scrupulous labour, after the mind has 
 been debauched and deceived by this fallacious 
 mastery.' 
 
 127. I read you these words, chiefly that Sir 
 Joshua, who founded, as first President, the 
 Academical schools of English painting, in these 
 well-known discourses, may also begin, as he 
 has truest right to do, our system of instruction 
 in this University. But secondly, I read them 
 that I may press on your attention these singu- 
 lar words, ' painful and humiliating exactness.' 
 Singular, as expressing the first conditions of 
 the study required from his pupils by the master, 
 who, of all men except Velasquez, seems to have 
 painted with the greatest ease. It is true that 
 he asks this pain, this humiliation, only from 
 youths who intend to follow the profession of
 
 152 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 artists. But if you wish yourselves to know 
 anything of the practice of art, you must not 
 suppose that because your study will be more 
 desultory than that of Academy students, it 
 may therefore be less accurate. The shorter the 
 time you have to give, the more careful you 
 should be to spend it profitably ; and I would 
 not wish you to devote one hour to the practice 
 of drawing, unless you are resolved to be in- 
 formed in it of all that in an hour can be 
 taught. 
 
 128. I speak of the practice of drawing only ; 
 though elementary study of modelling may per- 
 haps some day be advisably connected with it ; 
 but I do not wish to disturb, or amuse, you with 
 a formal statement of the manifold expectations 
 I have formed respecting your future work. You 
 will not, I am sure, imagine that I have begun 
 without a plan, nor blame my reticence as to the 
 parts of it which cannot yet be put into execution, 
 and which there may occur reason afterwards 
 to modify. My first task must unquestionably 
 be to lay before you right and simple methods 
 of drawing and colouring. 
 
 I use the word ' colouring ' without reference 
 to any particular vehicle of colour, for the laws
 
 V. LINE. 153 
 
 of good painting are the same, whatever liquid 
 is employed to dissolve the pigments. But the 
 technical management of oil is more difficult 
 than that of water-colour, and the impossibility 
 of using it with safety among books or prints, 
 and its unavailableness for note-book sketches 
 and memoranda, are sufficient reasons for not 
 introducing it in a course of practice intended 
 chiefly for students of literature. On the con- 
 trary, in the exercises of artists, oil should be 
 the vehicle of colour employed from the first. 
 The extended practice of water-colour painting, 
 as a separate skill, is in every way harmful to 
 the arts : its pleasant slightness and plausible 
 dexterity divert the genius of the painter from 
 its proper aims, and withdraw the attention of 
 the public from excellence of higher claim ; nor 
 ought any man, who has the consciousness of 
 ability for good work, to be ignorant of, or indo- 
 lent in employing, the methods of making its 
 results permanent as long as the laws of Nature 
 allow. It is surely a severe lesson to us in this 
 matter, that the best works of Turner could not 
 be shown to the public for six months without 
 being destroyed, — and that his most ambitious 
 ones for the most part perished, even before
 
 154 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 they could be shown. I will break through my 
 law of reticence, however, so far as to tell you 
 that I have hope of one day interesting you 
 greatly (with the help of the Florentine masters), 
 in the study of the arts of moulding and paint- 
 ing porcelain ; and to induce some of you to use 
 your future power of patronage in encouraging 
 the various branches of this art, and turning 
 the attention of the workmen of Italy from the 
 vulgar tricks of minute and perishable mosaic 
 to the exquisite subtilties of form and colour 
 possible in the perfectly ductile, afterwards un- 
 alterable clay. And one of the ultimate results 
 of such craftsmanship might be the production 
 of pictures as brilliant as painted glass, — as 
 delicate as the most subtle water-colours, and 
 more permanent than the Pyramids. 
 
 129. And now to begin our own work. In 
 order that we may know how rightly to learn to 
 draw and to paint, it will be necessary, will it 
 not, that we know first what we are to aim at 
 doing ; — what kind of representation of nature 
 is best ? 
 
 I will tell you in the words of Lionardo. 'That 
 is the most praiseworthy painting which has 
 most, conformity with the thing represented,'
 
 V. LINE. 155 
 
 ' quella pittura e piu laudabile, la quale ha piu 
 conformita con la cosa mitata,' (ch. 276). In 
 plain terms, ' the painting which is likest nature 
 is the best' And you will find by referring 
 to the preceding chapter, ' come lo specchio e 
 maestro de' pittori,' how absolutely Lionardo 
 means what he says. Let the living thing, (he 
 tells us,) be reflected in a mirror, then put your 
 picture beside the reflection, and match the 
 one with the other. And indeed, the very best 
 painting is unquestionably so like the mirrored 
 truth, that all the world admits its excellence. 
 Entirely first-rate work is so quiet and natural 
 that there can be no dispute over it ; you may 
 not particularly admire it, but you will find no 
 fault with it. Second-rate painting pleases one 
 person much, and displeases another ; but first- 
 rate painting pleases all a little, and intensely 
 pleases those who can recognise its unostenta- 
 tious skill. 
 
 130. This, then, is what we have first got to 
 do — to make our drawing look as like the thing 
 we have to draw as we can. 
 
 Now, all objects are seen by the eye as patches 
 of colour of a certain shape, with gradations of 
 colour within them. And, unless their colours
 
 156 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 be actually luminous, as those of the sun, or of 
 fire, these patches of different hues are suffi- 
 ciently imitable, except so far as they are seen 
 stereoscopically. You will find Lionardo again 
 and again insisting on the stereoscopic power 
 of the double sight : but do not let that trouble 
 you ; you can only paint what you can see from 
 one point of sight, but that is quite enough. 
 So seen, then, all objects appear to the human 
 eye simply as masses of colour of variable depth, 
 texture, and outline. The outline of any object 
 is the limit of its mass, as relieved against 
 another mass. Take a crocus, and lay it on a 
 green cloth. You will see it detach itself as a 
 mere space of yellow from the green behind it, 
 as it does from the grass. Hold it up against 
 the window — you will see it detach itselt as a 
 dark space against the white or blue behind it. 
 In either case its outline is the limit of the 
 space of light or dark colour by which it ex- 
 presses itself to your sight. That outline is 
 therefore infinitely subtle — not even a line, but 
 the place of a line, and that, also, made soft 
 by texture. In the finest painting it is there- 
 fore slightly softened ; but it is necessary to be 
 able to draw it with absolute sharpness and
 
 V. LINE. 157 
 
 precision. The art of doing this is to be obtained 
 by drawing it as an actual line, which art is to 
 be the subject of our immediate enquiry ; but I 
 must first lay the divisions of the entire subject 
 completely before you. 
 
 131. I have said that all objects detach them- 
 selves as masses of colour. Usually, light and 
 shade are thought of as separate from colour ; 
 but the fact is that all nature is seen as a mosaic 
 composed of gradated portions of different co- 
 lours, dark or light. There is no difference in 
 the quality of these colours, except as affected 
 by texture. You will constantly hear lights and 
 shades spoken of as if these were different in 
 their nature, and to be painted in different 
 ways. But every light is a shadow compared 
 to higher lights, till we reach the brightness of 
 the sun ; and every shadow is a light compared 
 to lower shadows, till we reach the darkness 
 of night. 
 
 Every colour used in painting, except pure 
 white and black, is therefore a light and shade 
 at the same time. It is a light with reference 
 to all below it, and a shade with reference to 
 all above it. 
 
 132. The solid forms of an object, that is to
 
 158 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 say, the projections or recessions of its surface 
 within the outline, are, for the most part, ren- 
 dered visible by variations in the intensity or 
 quantity of light falling on them. The study 
 of the relations between the quantities of this 
 light, irrespectively of its colour, is the second 
 division of the regulated science of painting. 
 
 133. Finally, the qualities and relations of 
 natural colours, the means of imitating them, 
 and the laws by which they become separately 
 beautiful, and in association harmonious, are the 
 subjects of the third and final division of the 
 painter's study. I shall endeavour at once to 
 state to you what is most immediately desirable 
 for you to know on each of these topics, in this 
 and the two following lectures. 
 
 134. What we have to do, then, from begin- 
 ning to end, is, I repeat once more, simply to 
 draw spaces of their true shape, and to fill them 
 with colours which shall match their colours ; 
 quite a simple thing in the definition of it, not 
 quite so easy in the doing of it. 
 
 But it is something to get this simple defini- 
 tion ; and I wish you to notice that the terms 
 of it are complete, though I do not introduce 
 the term "light," or "shadow." Painters who
 
 V. LINE. 159 
 
 have no eye for colour have greatly confused and 
 falsified the practice of art by the theory that 
 shadow is an absence of colour. Shadow is, on 
 the contrary, necessary to the full presence of 
 colour; for every colour is a diminished quantity 
 or energy of light ; and, practically, it follows 
 from what I have just told you — (that every 
 light in painting is a shadow to higher lights, 
 and every shadow a light to lower shadows) — 
 that also every colour in painting must be a 
 shadow to some brighter colour, and a light to 
 some darker one — all the while being a positive 
 colour itself. And the great splendour of the 
 Venetian school arises from their having seen 
 and held from the beginning tnis great fact — 
 that shadow is as much colour as light, often 
 much more. In Titian's fullest red the lights 
 are pale rose-colour, passing into white — the 
 shadows warm deep crimson. In Veronese's 
 most splendid orange, the lights are pale, the 
 shadows crocus colour ; and so on. In nature, 
 dark sides if seen by reflected lights, are almost 
 always fuller or warmer in colour than the lights; 
 and the practice of the Bolognese and Roman 
 schools, in drawing their shadows always dark 
 and cold, is false from the beginning, and renders
 
 l60 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 perfect painting for ever impossible in those 
 schools, and to all who follow them. 
 
 135. Every visible space, then, be it dark or 
 light, is a space of colour of some kind, or of • 
 black or white. And you have to enclose it 
 with a true outline, and to paint it with its true 
 colour. 
 
 But before considering how we are to draw 
 this enclosing line, I must state to you some- 
 thing about the use of lines in general, by 
 different schools. 
 
 I said just now that there was no difference 
 between the masses of colour of which all visible 
 nature is composed, except in texture. Now tex- 
 tures are principally of three kinds : — 
 
 (1) Lustrous, as of water and glass. 
 
 (2) Bloomy, or velvety, as of a rose-leaf 
 
 or peach. 
 
 (3) Linear, produced by filaments or 
 
 threads, as in feathers, fur, hair, 
 and woven or reticulated tissues. 
 
 All these three sources of pleasure to the eye 
 in texture are united in the best ornamental 
 work. A fine picture by Fra Angelico, or a 
 fine illuminated page of missal, has large spaces
 
 V. LINE. l6l 
 
 of gold, partly burnished and lustrous, partly 
 dead ; — some of it chased and enriched with 
 linear texture, and mingled with imposed or 
 inlaid colours, soft in bloom like that of the 
 rose-leaf. But many schools of art affect for 
 the most part one kind of texture only, and a 
 vast quantity of the art of all ages depends for 
 great part of its power on texture produced by 
 multitudinous lines. Thus, wood engraving, 
 line engraving properly so called, and countless 
 varieties of sculpture, metal work, and textile 
 fabric, depend for great part of the effect, for the 
 mystery, softness, and clearness of their colours, 
 or shades, on modification of the surfaces by 
 lines or threads. Even in advanced oil painting, 
 the work often depends for some part of its 
 effect on the texture of the canvas. 
 
 136. Again, the .arts of etching and mezzotint 
 engraving depend principally for their effect on 
 the velvety, or bloomy texture of their darkness, 
 and the best of all painting is the fresco work of 
 great colourists, in which the colours are what 
 is usually called dead; but they are anything 
 but dead, they glow with the luminous bloom 
 of life. The frescoes of Correggio, when not 
 repainted, are supreme in this quality.
 
 1 62 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 137. While, however, in all periods of art 
 these different textures are thus used in va- 
 rious styles, and for various purposes, you will 
 find that there is a broad historical division of 
 schools, which will materially assist you in un- 
 derstanding them. The earliest art in most 
 countries is linear, consisting of interwoven, or 
 richly spiral and otherwise involved arrange- 
 ments of sculptured or painted lines, on stone, 
 wood, metal or clay. It is generally character- 
 istic of savage life, and of feverish energy of 
 imagination. I shall examine these schools with 
 you hereafter, under the general head of the 
 ' Schools of Line.'* 
 
 Secondly, even in the earliest periods, among 
 powerful nations, this linear decoration is more 
 or less filled with chequered or barred shade, and 
 begins at once to represent animal or floral form, 
 by filling its outlines with flat shadow, or with 
 flat colour. And here we instantly find two great 
 divisions of temper and thought. The Greeks 
 look upon all colour first as light ; they are, as 
 compared with other races, insensitive to hue, 
 exquisitely sensitive to phenomena of light. And 
 their linear school passes into one of flat masses 
 * See 'Ariadne Florentina,' § 5.
 
 V. LINE. 163 
 
 of light and darkness, represented in the main 
 by four tints, —white, black, and two reds, one 
 brick colour, more or less vivid, the other dark 
 purple; these two standing mentally their fa- 
 vourite Tropfyvpeos colour, in its light and dark 
 powers. On the other hand, many of the 
 Northern nations are at first entirely insensible 
 to light and shade, but exquisitely sensitive to 
 colour, and their linear decoration is filled with 
 flat tints, infinitely varied, but with no expres- 
 sion of light and shade. Both these schools 
 have a limited but absolute perfection of their 
 own, and their peculiar successes can in no 
 wise be imitated, except by the strictest observ- 
 ance of the same limitations. 
 
 138. You have then, Line for the earliest art, 
 branching into — 
 
 (1) Greek, Line with Light. 
 
 (2) Gothic, Line with Colour. 
 
 Now, as art completes itself, each of these 
 schools retain their separate characters, but they 
 cease to depend on lines, and learn to represent 
 masses instead, becoming more refined at the 
 same time in all modes of perception and exe- 
 cution. 
 
 And thus there arise the two vast mediaeval
 
 164 lectures on art. 
 
 schools ; one of flat and infinitely varied colour, 
 with exquisite character and sentiment added, in 
 the forms represented ; but little perception of 
 shadow. The other, of light and shade, with 
 exquisite drawing of solid form, and little percep- 
 tion of colour: sometimes as little of sentiment. 
 Of these, the school of flat colour is the more 
 vital one ; it is always natural and simple, if not 
 great ; — and when it is great, it is very great. 
 
 The school of light and shade associates itself 
 with that of engraving ; it is essentially an aca- 
 demical school, broadly dividing light from dark- 
 ness, and begins by assuming that the light side 
 of all objects shall be represented by white, and 
 the extreme shadow by black. On this conven- 
 tional principle it reaches a limited excellence of 
 its own, in which the best existing types of en- 
 graving are executed, and ultimately, the most 
 regular expressions of organic form in painting. 
 
 Then, lastly, — the schools of colour advance 
 steadily, till they adopt from those of light and 
 shade whatever is compatible with their own 
 power, — and then you have perfect art, repre- 
 sented centrally by that of the great Venetians. 
 
 The schools of light and shade, on the other 
 hand, are partly, in their academical formulas,
 
 V. LINE. 165 
 
 too haughty, and partly, in their narrowness 
 of imagination, too weak, to learn much from 
 the schools of colour ; and pass into a state of 
 decadence, consisting partly in proud endea- 
 vours to give painting the qualities of sculp- 
 ture, and partly in the pursuit of effects of light 
 and shade, carried at last tcextreme sensational 
 subtlety by the Dutch school. In their fall, they 
 drag the schools of colour down with them ; 
 and the recent history of art is one of confused 
 effort to find lost roads, and resume allegiance 
 to violated principles. 
 
 139. That, briefly, is the map of the great 
 schools, easily remembered in this hexagonal 
 
 form : — 
 
 1. 
 
 Line. 
 Early schools. 
 2 - 3- 
 
 Line and Light. Line and Colour. 
 
 Greek clay. Gothic glass. 
 
 4- 5- 
 
 Mass and Light. Mass and Colour. 
 
 (Represented by Lionardo, (Represented by (Jiorgione, 
 and his schools.) and his schools.) 
 
 6. 
 
 Mass, Light, and Colour. 
 
 (Represented by Titian, 
 
 and his schools.)
 
 1 66 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 And I wish you with your own eyes and fingers 
 to trace, and in your own progress follow, the 
 method of advance exemplified by these great 
 schools. I wish you to begin by getting com- 
 mand of line, that is to say, by learning to draw 
 a steady line, limiting with absolute correctness 
 the form or space you intend it to limit ; to 
 proceed by getting command over flat tints, so 
 that you may be able to fill the spaces you have 
 enclosed, evenly, either with shade or colour 
 according to the school you adopt ; and finally 
 to obtain the power of adding such fineness of 
 gradation within the masses, as shall express 
 their roundings, and their characters of texture. 
 140. Those who are familiar with the me- 
 thods of existing schools must be aware that 
 I thus nearly invert their practice of teaching. 
 Students at present learn to draw details first, 
 and to colour and mass them afterwards. I shall 
 endeavour to teach you to arrange broad masses 
 and colours first ; and you shall put the details 
 into them afterwards. I have several reasons 
 for this audacity, of which you may justly re- 
 quire me to state the principal ones. The first 
 is that, as I have shown you, this method I wish 
 you to follow, is the natural one. All great
 
 V. LINE. I67 
 
 artist nations have actually learned to work in 
 this way, and I believe it therefore the right, 
 as the hitherto successful one. Secondly, you 
 will find it less irksome than the reverse me- 
 thod, and more definite. When a beginner is 
 set at once to draw details, and make finished 
 studies in light and shade, no master can cor- 
 rect his innumerable errors, or rescue him out 
 of his endless difficulties. But in the natural 
 method, he can correct, if he will, his own 
 errors. You will have positive lines to draw, pre- 
 senting no more difficulty, except in requiring 
 greater steadiness of hand, than the outlines of 
 a map. They will be generally sweeping and 
 simple, instead of being jagged into promon- 
 tories and bays ; but assuredly, they may be 
 drawn rightly (with patience), and their Tight- 
 ness tested with mathematical accuracy. You 
 have only to follow your own line with trac- 
 ing paper, and apply it to your own copy. If 
 they do not correspond, you are wrong, and you 
 need no master to show you where. Again ; in 
 washing in a flat tone of colour or shade, you 
 can always see yourself if it is flat, and kept well 
 within the edges ; and you can set a piece of 
 your colour side by side with that of the copy ;
 
 1 68 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 if it does not match, you are wrong ; and, again, 
 you need no one to tell you so, if your eye for 
 colour is true. It happens, indeed, more fre- 
 quently than would be supposed, that there is 
 real want of power in the eye to distinguish 
 colours ; and this I even suspect to be a con- 
 dition which has been sometimes attendant on 
 high degrees of cerebral sensitiveness in other 
 directions ; but such want of faculty would be 
 detected in your first two or three exercises 
 by this simple method, while, otherwise, you 
 might go on for years endeavouring to colour 
 from nature in vain. Lastly, and this is a 
 very weighty collateral reason, such a method 
 enables me to show you many things, besides 
 the art of drawing. Every exercise that I pre- 
 pare for you will be either a portion of some 
 important example of ancient art, or of some 
 natural object. However rudely or unsuccess- 
 fully you may draw it, (though I anticipate from 
 you neither want of care nor success,) you will 
 nevertheless have learned what no words could 
 have so forcibly or completely taught you, either 
 respecting early art or organic structure ; and I 
 am thus certain that not a moment you spend 
 attentively will be altogether wasted, and that,
 
 V. LINE. 169 
 
 generally, you will be twice gainers by every 
 effort. 
 
 141. There is, however, yet another point in 
 which I think a change of existing methods will 
 be advisable. You have here in Oxford one of 
 the finest collections in Europe of drawings in 
 pen, and chalk, by Michael Angelo and Raphael. 
 Of the whole number, you cannot but have 
 noticed that not one is weak or studentlike — 
 all are evidently master's work. 
 
 You may look the galleries of Europe through, 
 and so far as I know, or as it is possible to 
 make with safety any so wide generalization, 
 you will not find in them a childish or feeble 
 drawing, by these, or by any other great master. 
 
 And farther : — by the greatest men — by 
 Titian, Velasquez, or Veronese — you will hardly 
 find an authentic drawing, at all. For the fact 
 is, that while we moderns have always learned, 
 or tried to learn, to paint by drawing, the ancients 
 learned to draw by painting — or by engraving, 
 more difficult still. The brush was put into 
 their hands when they were children, and they 
 were forced to draw with that, until, if they used 
 the pen or crayon, they used it either with the 
 lightness of a brush or the decision of a graver.
 
 Ij70 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 Michael Angelo uses his pen like a chisel ; but 
 all of them seem to use it only when they are 
 in the height of their power, and then for rapid 
 notation of thought or for study of models ; 
 but never as a practice helping them to paint. 
 Probably exercises of the severest kind were 
 gone through in minute drawing by the appren- 
 tices of the goldsmiths, of which we hear and 
 know little, and which were entirely matters of 
 course. To these, and to the exquisiteness of 
 care and touch developed in working precious 
 metals, may probably be attributed the final 
 triumph of Italian sculpture. Michael Angelo, 
 when a boy, is said to have copied engravings 
 by Schongauer and others, with his pen, in 
 facsimile so true that he could pass his draw- 
 ings as the originals. But I should only dis- 
 courage you from all farther attempts in art, 
 if I asked you to imitate any of these accom- 
 plished drawings of the gem-artificers. You 
 have, fortunately, a most interesting collection 
 of them already in your galleries, and may try 
 your hands on them if you will. But I desire 
 rather that you should attempt nothing except 
 what can by determination be absolutely accom- 
 plished, and be known and felt by you to be
 
 V. LINE. I 7 I 
 
 accomplished when it is so. Now, therefore, I am 
 going at once to comply with that popular 
 instinct which, I hope, so far as you care for 
 drawing at all, you are still boys enough to feel, 
 the desire to paint. Paint you shall; but remem- 
 ber, I understand by painting what you will not 
 find easy. Paint you shall ; but daub or blot 
 you shall not : and there will be even more care 
 required, though care of a pleasanter kind, to 
 follow the lines traced for you with the point 
 of the brush than if they had been drawn with 
 that of a crayon. But from the very beginning 
 (though carrying on at the same time an inci- 
 dental practice with crayon and lead pencil), 
 you shall try to draw a line of absolute correct- 
 ness with the point, not of pen or crayon, but 
 of the brush, as Apelles did, and as all coloured 
 lines are drawn on Greek vases. A line of 
 absolute correctness, observe. I do not care 
 how slowly you do it, or with how many altera- 
 tions, junctions, or retouchings ; the one thing 
 I ask of you is, that the line shall be right, and 
 right by measurement, to the same minuteness 
 which you would have to give in a Government 
 chart to the map of a dangerous shoal. 
 
 142. This question of measurement is, as
 
 172 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 you are probably aware, one much vexed in art 
 schools ; but it is determined indisputably by 
 the very first words written by Lionardo : ' II 
 giovane deve prima imparare prospettiva, per le 
 misure d'ogni cosa.' 
 
 Without absolute precision of measurement, 
 it is certainly impossible for you to learn per- 
 spective rightly ; and, as far as I can judge, im- 
 possible to learn anything else rightly. And in 
 my past experience of teaching, I have found 
 that such precision is of all things the most 
 difficult to enforce on the pupils. It is easy to 
 persuade to diligence, or provoke to enthusiasm ; 
 but I have found it hitherto impossible to humi- 
 liate one clever student into perfect accuracy. 
 
 It is, therefore, necessary, in beginning a 
 system of drawing for the University, that no 
 opening should be left for failure in this essential 
 matter. I hope you will trust the words of the 
 most accomplished draughtsman of Italy, and 
 the painter of the great sacred picture which, 
 perhaps beyond all others, has influenced the 
 mind of Europe, when he tells you that your 
 first duty is ' to learn perspective by the measures 
 of everything.' For perspective, I will under- 
 take that it shall be made, practically, quite
 
 V. LINE. I73 
 
 easy to you ; if you care to master the mathe- 
 matics of it, they are carried as far as is neces- 
 sary for you in my treatise written in 1859, of 
 which copies shall be placed at your disposal in 
 your working room. But the habit and dexter- 
 ity of measurement you must acquire at once, 
 and that with engineer's accuracy. I hope that 
 in our now gradually developing system of 
 education, elementary architectural or military 
 drawing will be required at all public schools ; 
 so that when youths come to the University, 
 it may be no more necessary for them to pass 
 through the preliminary exercises of perspective 
 than of grammar : for the present, I will place 
 in your series examples simple and severe 
 enough for all necessary practice. 
 
 143. And while you are learning to measure, 
 and to draw, and lay flat tints, with the brush, 
 you must also get easy command of the pen ; 
 for that is not only the great instrument for the 
 first sketching, but its right use is the foun- 
 dation of the art of illumination. In nothing 
 is fine art more directly founded on utility than 
 in the close dependence of decorative illumina- 
 tion on good writing. Perfect illumination is 
 only writing made lovely ; the moment it passes
 
 174 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 into picture-making it has lost its dignity and 
 function. For pictures, small or great, if beauti- 
 ful, ought not to be painted on leaves of books, 
 to be worn with service ; and pictures, small 
 or great, not beautiful, should be painted no- 
 where. But to make writing itself beautiful, 
 — to make the sweep of the pen lovely, — is the 
 true art of illumination ; and I particularly wish 
 you to note this, because it happens continually 
 that young girls who are incapable of tracing 
 a single curve with steadiness, much more of 
 delineating any ornamental or organic form 
 with correctness, think that work, which would 
 be intolerable in ordinary drawing, becomes 
 tolerable when it is employed for the decoration 
 of texts ; and thus they render all healthy pro- 
 gress impossible, by protecting themselves in 
 inefficiency under the shield of good motive. 
 Whereas the right way of setting to work is to 
 make themselves first mistresses of the art of 
 writing beautifully ; and then to apply that art in 
 its proper degrees of development to whatever 
 they desire permanently to write. And it is 
 indeed a much more truly religious duty for 
 girls to acquire a habit of deliberate, legible, 
 and lovely penmanship in their daily use of the
 
 V. LINE. 175 
 
 pen, than to illuminate any quantity of texts. 
 Having done so, they may next discipline their 
 hands into the control of lines of any length, 
 and, finally, add the beauty of colour and form 
 to the flowing of these perfect lines. But it is 
 only after years of practice that they will be 
 able to illuminate noble words rightly for the 
 eyes, as it is only after years of practice that 
 they can make them melodious rightly, with 
 the voice. 
 
 144. I shall not attempt, in this lecture, to 
 give you any account of the use of the pen as 
 a drawing instrument. That use is connected 
 in many ways with principles both of shading 
 and of engraving, hereafter to be examined at 
 length. But I may generally state to you that 
 its best employment is in giving determination 
 to the forms in drawings washed with neutral 
 tint ; and that, in this use of it, Holbein is quite 
 without a rival. I have therefore placed many 
 examples of his work among your copies. It 
 is employed for rapid study by Raphael and 
 other masters of delineation, who, in such cases, 
 give with it also partial indications of shadow ; 
 but it is not a proper instrument for shading, 
 when drawings are intended to be deliberate
 
 I76 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 and complete, nor do the great masters so em- 
 ploy it. Its virtue is the power of producing a 
 perfectly delicate, equal, and decisive line with 
 great rapidity ; and the temptation allied with 
 that virtue is the licentious haste, and chance- 
 swept, instead of strictly-commanded, curvature. 
 In the hands of very great painters it obtains, 
 like the etching needle, qualities of exquisite 
 charm in this free use ; but all attempts at imi- 
 tation of these confused and suggestive sketches 
 must be absolutely denied to yourselves while 
 students. You may fancy you have produced 
 something like them with little trouble ; but, 
 be assured, it is in reality as unlike them as 
 nonsense is unlike sense ; and that, if you per- 
 sist in such work, you will not only prevent 
 your own executive progress, but you will never 
 understand in all your lives what good painting 
 means. Whenever you take a pen in your hand, 
 if you cannot count every line you lay with 
 it, and say why you make it so long and no 
 longer, and why you drew it in that direction 
 and no other, your work is bad. The only man 
 who can put his pen to full speed, and yet re- 
 tain command over every separate line of it, is 
 Diirer. He has done this in the illustrations
 
 V. LINE. 177 
 
 of a missal preserved at Munich, which have 
 been fairly facsimiled ; and of these I have 
 placed several in your copying series, with some 
 of Turner's landscape etchings, and other ex- 
 amples of deliberate pen work, such as will 
 advantage you in early study. The proper use 
 of them you will find explained in the catalogue. 
 145. And, now, but one word more to-day. 
 Do not impute to me the impertinence of setting 
 before you what is new in this system of prac- 
 tice as being certainly the best method. No 
 English artists are yet agreed entirely on early 
 methods ; and even Reynolds expresses with 
 some hesitation his conviction of the expediency 
 of learning to draw with the brush. But this 
 method that I show you rests in all essential 
 points on his authority, on Leonardo's, or on 
 the evident as well as recorded practice of the 
 most splendid Greek and Italian draughtsmen ; 
 and you may be assured it will lead you, how- 
 ever slowly, to great and certain skill. To 
 what degree of skill, must depend greatly on 
 yourselves ; but I know that in practice of this 
 kind you cannot spend an hour without defi- 
 nitely gaining, both in true knowledge of art, 
 and in useful power of hand; and for what 
 
 12
 
 I78 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 may appear in it too difficult, I must shelter or 
 support myself, as in beginning, so in closing 
 this first lecture on practice, by the words of 
 Reynolds : ' The impetuosity of youth is dis- 
 gusted at the slow approaches of a regular siege, 
 and desires, from mere impatience of labour, to 
 take the citadel by storm. They must there- 
 fore be told again and again that labour is the 
 only price of solid fame ; and that, whatever 
 their force of genius may be, there is no easy 
 method of becoming a good painter."
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 
 LIGHT. 
 
 146. The plan of the divisions of art-schools 
 which I gave you in the last lecture is of course 
 only a first germ of classification, on which we 
 are to found farther and more defined state- 
 ment ; but for this very reason it is necessary 
 that every term of it should be very clear in 
 your minds. 
 
 And especially I must explain, and ask you to 
 note the sense in which I use the word 'mass.' 
 Artists usually employ that work to express the 
 spaces of light and darkness, or of colour, into 
 which a picture is divided. But this habit of 
 theirs arises partly from their always speaking 
 of pictures in which the lights represent solid 
 form. If they had instead been speaking of flat 
 tints, as, for instance, of the gold and blue in 
 this missal page, they would not have called 
 them ' masses,' but ' spaces ' of colour. Now
 
 180 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 both for accuracy and convenience' sake, you 
 will find it well to observe this distinction, and 
 to call a simple flat tint a space of colour ; and 
 only the representation of solid or projecting 
 form a mass. 
 
 I use, however, the word ' line ' rather than 
 1 space ' in the second and third heads of our 
 general scheme, at p. 165, because you cannot 
 limit a flat tint but by a line, or the locus of 
 a line: whereas a gradated tint, expressive of 
 mass, may be lost at its edges in another, with- 
 out any fixed limit ; and practically is so, in the 
 works of the greatest masters. 
 
 147. You have thus, in your hexagonal 
 scheme, the expression of the universal manner 
 of advance in painting : Line first ; then line 
 enclosing flat spaces coloured or shaded ; then 
 the lines vanish, and the solid forms are seen 
 within the spaces. That is the universal law of 
 advance : — I, line ; 2, flat space ; 3, massed or 
 solid space. But as you see, this advance may 
 be made, and has been made, by two different 
 roads ; one advancing always through colour, 
 the other through light and shade. And these 
 two roads are taken by two entirely different 
 kinds of men. The way by colour is taken by
 
 VI. LIGHT. l8l 
 
 men of cheerful, natural, and entirely sane dis- 
 position in body and mind, much resembling, 
 even at its strongest, the temper of well-brought- 
 up children : — too happy to think deeply, yet 
 with powers of imagination by which they can 
 live other lives than their actual ones : make- 
 believe lives, while yet they remain conscious 
 all the while that they are making believe — 
 therefore entirely sane. They are also abso- 
 lutely contented ; they ask for no more light 
 than is immediately around them, and cannot 
 see anything like darkness, but only green and 
 blue, in the earth and sea. 
 
 148. The way by light and shade is, on the 
 contrary, taken by men of the highest powers 
 of thought, and most earnest desire for truth ; 
 they long for light, and for knowledge of all 
 that light can show. But seeking for light, they 
 perceive also darkness ; seeking for truth and 
 substance, they find vanity. They look for form 
 in the earth, — for dawn in the sky ; and seeking 
 these, they find formlessness in the earth, and 
 night in the sky. 
 
 Now remember, in these introductory lectures 
 I am putting before you the roots of things, 
 which are strange, and dark, and often, it may
 
 1 82 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 seem, unconnected with the branches. You may 
 not at present think these metaphysical state- 
 ments necessary ; but as you go on, you will 
 find that having hold of the clue to methods 
 of work through their springs in human cha- 
 racter, you may perceive unerringly where they 
 lead, and what constitutes their wrongness and 
 rightness ; and when we have the main princi- 
 ples laid down, all others will develope them- 
 selves in due succession, and everything will 
 become more clearly intelligible to you in the 
 end, for having been apparently vague in the 
 beginning. You know when one is laying the 
 foundation of a house, it does not show directly 
 where the rooms are to be. 
 
 149. You have then these two great divisions 
 of human mind : one, content with the colours 
 of things, whether they are dark or light ; the 
 other seeking light pure, as such, and dreading 
 darkness as such. One, also, content with the 
 coloured aspects and visionary shapes of things ; 
 the other seeking their form and substance. 
 And, as I said, the school of knowledge, seeking 
 light, perceives, and has to accept and deal with 
 obscurity : and seeking form, it has to accept 
 and deal with formlessness, or death.
 
 VI. LIGHT. I83 
 
 Farther, the school of colour in Europe, using 
 the word Gothic in its broadest sense, is essen- 
 tially Gothic Christian; and full of comfort and 
 peace. Again, the school of light is essentially 
 Greek, and full of sorrow. I cannot tell you 
 which is right, or least wrong. I tell you only 
 what I know — this vital distinction between 
 them : the Gothic or colour school is always 
 cheerful, the Greek always oppressed by the 
 shadow of death ; and the stronger its masters 
 are, the closer that body of death grips them. 
 The strongest whose work I can show you in 
 recent periods is Holbein ; next to him is Leon- 
 ardo ; and then Diirer : but of the three Holbein 
 is the strongest, and with his help I will put the 
 two schools in their full character before you in 
 a moment. 
 
 150. Here is, first, the photograph of an en- 
 tirely characteristic piece of the great colour 
 school. It is by Cima of Conegliano, a moun- 
 taineer, like Luini, born under the Alps of Friuli. 
 His Christian name was John Baptist : he is 
 here painting his name-Saint ; the whole picture 
 full of peace, and intense faith and hope, and 
 deep joy in light of sky, and fruit and flower and 
 weed of earth. It was painted for the church of
 
 184 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 Our Lady of the Garden at Venice, La Madonna 
 dell' Orto (properly Madonna of the Kitchen 
 Garden), and it is full of simple flowers, and has 
 the wild strawberry of Cima's native mountains 
 gleaming through the grass. 
 
 Beside it I will put a piece of the strongest 
 work of the school of light and shade — strongest 
 because Holbein was a colourist also ; but he 
 belongs, nevertheless, essentially to the chiaro- 
 scuro school. You know that his name is con- 
 nected, in ideal work, chiefly with his ' Dance 
 of Death.' I will not show you any of the 
 terror of that ; only a photograph of his well- 
 known 'Dead Christ.' It will at once show 
 you how completely the Christian art of this 
 school is oppressed by its veracity, and forced 
 to see what is fearful, even in what it most 
 trusts. 
 
 You may think I am showing you contrasts 
 merely to fit my theories. But there is Diirer's 
 ' Knight and Death,' his greatest plate ; and 
 if I had Lionardo's ' Medusa ' here, which he 
 painted when only a boy, you would have 
 seen how he was held by the same chain. 
 And you cannot but wonder why, this being 
 the melancholy temper of the great Greek
 
 VI. LIGHT. I85 
 
 or naturalistic school, I should have called it 
 the school of light. I call it so because it is 
 through its intense love of light that the dark- 
 ness becomes apparent to it, and through its 
 intense love of truth and form that all mystery 
 becomes attractive to it. And when, having 
 learned these things, it is joined to the school 
 of colour, you have the perfect, though always, 
 as I will show you, pensive, art of Titian and 
 his followers. 
 
 151. But remember, its first development, 
 and all its final power, depend on Greek sorrow, 
 and Greek religion. 
 
 The school of light is founded in the Doric 
 worship of Apollo, and the Ionic worship of 
 Athena, as the spirits of life in the light, and 
 of life in the air, opposed each to their own 
 contrary deity of death — Apollo to the Python, 
 Athena to the Gorgon — Apollo as life in light. 
 to the earth spirit of corruption in darkness ; — 
 Athena, as life by motion, to the Gorgon spirit 
 of death by pause, freezing or turning to stone : 
 both of the great divinities taking their glory 
 from the evil they have conquered ; both of 
 them, when angry, taking to men the form of 
 the evil which is their opposite — Apollo slaying
 
 1 86 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 by poisoned arrow, by pestilence ; Athena by 
 cold, the black aegis on her breast. 
 
 These are the definite and direct expressions 
 of the Greek thoughts respecting death and 
 life. But underlying both these, and far more 
 mysterious, dreadful, and yet beautiful, there 
 is the Greek conception of spiritual darkness ; 
 of the anger of fate, whether foredoomed or 
 avenging ; the root and theme of all Greek tra- 
 gedy ; the anger of the Erinnyes, and Demeter 
 Erinnys, compared to which the anger either 
 of Apollo or Athena is temporary and partial : 
 — and also, while Apollo or Athena only slay, 
 the power of Demeter and the Eumenides 
 is over the whole life ; so that in the stories 
 of Bellerophon, of Hippolytus, of Orestes, of 
 (Edipus, you have an incomparably deeper 
 shadow than any that was possible to the 
 thought of later ages, when the hope of the 
 Resurrection had become definite. And if you 
 keep this in mind, you will find every name 
 and legend of the oldest history become full of 
 meaning to you. All the mythic accounts of 
 Greek sculpture begin in the legends of the 
 family of Tantalus. The main one is the mak- 
 ing of the ivory shoulder of Pelops after Demeter
 
 VI. LIGHT. 187 
 
 has eaten the shoulder of flesh. With that you 
 have Broteas, the brother of Pelops, carving 
 the first statue of the mother of the gods ; 
 and you have his sister, Niobe, weeping her- 
 self to stone under the anger of the deities of 
 light. Then Pelops himself, the dark-faced, 
 gives name to the Peloponnesus, which you may 
 therefore read as the ' isle of darkness ; ' but 
 its central city, Sparta, the ' sown city,' is 
 connected with all the ideas of the earth as 
 life-giving. And from her you have Helen, 
 the representative of light in beauty, and the 
 Fratres Helenae — 'lucida sidera ; ' and, on the 
 other side of the hills, the brightness of Argos, 
 with its correlative darkness over the Atreidte, 
 marked to you by Helios turning away his face 
 from the feast of Thyestes. 
 
 152. Then join with these the Northern le- 
 gends connected with the air. It does not 
 matter whether you take Dorus as the son of 
 Apollo or the son of Helen ; he equally sym- 
 bolizes the power of light : while his brother, 
 iEolus, through all his descendants, chiefly in 
 Sisyphus, is confused or associated with the 
 real god of the winds, and represents to you the 
 power of the air. And then, as this conception
 
 1 88 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 enters into art, you have the myths of Daedalus, 
 the flight of Icarus, and the story of Phrixus and 
 Helle, giving you continual associations of the 
 physical air and light, ending in the power of 
 Athena over Corinth as well as over Athens. 
 
 Now, once having the clue, you can work 
 out the sequels for yourselves better than I can 
 for you ; and you will soon find even the earli- 
 est or slightest grotesques of Greek art become 
 full of interest. For nothing is more wonder- 
 ful than the depth of meaning which nations 
 in their first days of thought, like children, can 
 attach to the rudest symbols ; and what to us 
 is grotesque or ugly, like a little child's doll, 
 can speak to them the loveliest things. I have 
 brought you to-day a few more examples of 
 early Greek vase painting, respecting which 
 remember generally that its finest development 
 is for the most part sepulchral. You have, in 
 the first period, always energy in the figures, 
 light in the sky or upon the figures ; * in the 
 second period, while the conception of the di- 
 vine power remains the same, it is thought of 
 as in repose, and the light is in the god, not 
 in the sky ; in the time of decline, the divine 
 * See Note in the Catalogue on No. 201.
 
 VI. LIGHT. 189 
 
 power is gradually disbelieved, and all form 
 and light are lost together. With that period 
 I wish you to have nothing to do. You shall 
 not have a single example of it set before you, 
 but shall rather learn to recognise afterwards 
 what is base by its strangeness. These, which 
 are to come early in the third group of your 
 Standard series, will enough represent to you 
 the elements of early and late conception in the 
 Greek mind of the deities of light. 
 
 153. First (S. 204), you have Apollo ascend- 
 ing from the sea ; thought of as the physical 
 sunrise : only a circle of light for his head ; his 
 chariot horses, seen foreshortened, black against 
 the day-break, their feet not yet risen above 
 the horizon. Underneath is the painting from 
 the opposite side of the same vase : Athena as 
 the morning breeze, and Hermes as the morn- 
 ing cloud, flying across the waves before the 
 sunrise. At the distance I now hold them 
 from you, it is scarcely possible for you to see 
 that they are figures at all, so like are they 
 to broken fragments of flying mist ; and when 
 you look close, you will see that as Apollo's 
 face is invisible in the circle of light, Mercury's 
 is invisible in the broken form of cloud : but
 
 I90 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 I can tell you that it is conceived as reverted, 
 looking back to Athena ; the grotesque appear- 
 ance of feature in the front is the outline of his 
 hair. 
 
 These two paintings are excessively rude, 
 and of the archaic period ; the deities being 
 yet thought of chiefly as physical powers in 
 violent agency. 
 
 Underneath these two are Athena and Her- 
 mes, in the types attained about the time of 
 Phidias; but, of course, rudely drawn on the 
 vase, and still more rudely in this print from 
 Le Normant and De Witte. For it is impos- 
 sible (as you will soon find if you try for your- 
 self) to give on a plane surface the grace of 
 figures drawn on one of solid curvature, and 
 adapted to all its curves : and among other 
 minor differences, Athena's lance is in the ori- 
 ginal nearly twice as tall as herself, and has 
 to be cut short to come into the print at all. 
 Still, there is enough here to show you what 
 I want you to see — the repose, and entirely 
 realized personality, of the deities as conceived 
 in the Phidian period. The relation of the two 
 deities is, I believe, the same as in the paint- 
 ing above, though probably there is another
 
 VI. LIGHT. 191 
 
 added of more definite kind. But the physical 
 meaning still remains — Athena unhelmeted, as 
 the gentle morning wind, commanding the cloud 
 Hermes to slow flight. His petasus is slung 
 at his back, meaning that the clouds are not 
 yet opened or expanded in the sky. 
 
 154. Next (S. 205), you have Athena, again 
 unhelmeted and crowned with leaves, walking 
 between two nymphs, who are crowned also 
 with leaves ; and all the three hold flowers in 
 their hands, and there is a fawn walking at 
 Athena's feet. 
 
 This is still Athena as the morning air, but 
 upon the earth instead of in the sky, with the 
 nymphs of the dew beside her ; the flowers 
 and leaves opening as they breathe upon them. 
 Note the white gleam of light on the fawn's 
 breast ; and compare it with the next following 
 examples : — (underneath this one is the contest 
 of Athena and Poseidon, which does not bear 
 on our present subject). 
 
 Next (S. 206), Artemis as the moon of 
 morning, walking low on the hills, and sing- 
 ing to her lyre ; the fawn beside her, with the 
 gleam of light and sunrise on its ear and 
 breast. Those of you who are often out in
 
 192 LECTURES ON ART, 
 
 the dawntime know that there is no moon so 
 glorious as that gleaming crescent, though in 
 its wane, ascending before the sun. 
 
 Underneath, Artemis, and Apollo, of Phidian 
 time. 
 
 Next (S. 207), Apollo walking on the earth, 
 god of the morning, singing to his lyre ; the 
 fawn beside him, again with the gleam of light 
 on its breast. And underneath, Apollo, cross- 
 ing the sea to Delphi, of the Phidian time. 
 
 155. Now you cannot but be struck in these 
 three examples with the similarity of action in 
 Athena, Apollo, and Artemis, drawn as deities 
 of the morning ; and with the association in 
 every case of the fawn with them. It has been 
 said (I will not interrupt you with authorities) 
 that the fawn belongs to Apollo and Diana be- 
 cause stags are sensitive to music ; (are they ?). 
 But you see the fawn is here with Athena of 
 the dew, though she has no lyre ; and I have 
 myself no doubt that in this particular relation 
 to the gods of morning it always stands as the 
 symbol of wavering and glancing motion on the 
 ground, as well as of the light and shadow 
 through the leaves, chequering the ground as 
 the fawn is dappled. Similarly the spots on
 
 VI. LIGHT. 193 
 
 the nebris of Dionysus, thought of sometimes 
 as stars (airo t?}<? tcov aaTpoiv ttolklXuis, Dio- 
 dorus, I. Il), as well as those of his panthers, 
 and the cloudings of the tortoise-shell of Her- 
 mes, are all significant of this light of the sky 
 broken by cloud-shadow. 
 
 156. You observe also that in all the three 
 examples the fawn has light on its ears, and 
 face, as well as its breast. In the earliest 
 Greek drawings of animals, bars of white are 
 used as one means of detaching the figures 
 from the ground ; ordinarily on the under side 
 of them, marking the lighter colour of the hair 
 in wild animals. But the placing of this bar 
 of white, or the direction of the face in deities 
 of light, (the faces and flesh of women being 
 always represented as white,) may become ex- 
 pressive of the direction of the light, when 
 that direction is important. Thus we are en- 
 abled at once to read the intention of this 
 Greek symbol of the course of a day (in the 
 centre-piece of S. 208, which gives you the 
 types of Hermes). At the top you have an 
 archaic representation of Hermes stealing 
 Io from Argus. Argus is here the Night ; 
 his grotesque features monstrous; his hair 
 
 13
 
 194 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 overshadowing his shoulders ; Hermes on tip- 
 toe, stealing upon him, and taking the cord which 
 is fastened to the horn of Io out of his hand 
 without his feeling it. Then, underneath, you 
 have the course of an entire day. Apollo first, 
 on the left, dark, entering his chariot, the sun 
 not yet risen. In front of him Artemis, as 
 the moon, ascending before him, playing on 
 her lyre, and looking back to the sun. In 
 the centre, behind the horses, Hermes, as the 
 cumulus cloud at mid-day, wearing his petasus 
 heightened to a cone, and holding a flower in 
 his right hand; indicating the nourishment of 
 the flowers by the rain from the heat cloud. 
 Finally, on the right, Latona, going down as 
 the evening, lighted from the right by the sun, 
 now sunk ; and with her feet reverted, signi- 
 fying the reluctance of the departing day. 
 
 Finally, underneath, you have Hermes of the 
 Phidian period, as the floating cumulus cloud, 
 almost shapeless (as you see him at this dis- 
 tance) ; with the tortoise-shell lyre in his hand, 
 barred with black, and a fleece of white cloud, 
 not level but oblique, under his feet. (Compare 
 the ' 8ia twv kolXqjv — TrXdyiai, and the rela- 
 tions of the ' alyiSo? fyloxos 'A0dva,' with the
 
 VI. LIGHT. 195 
 
 clouds as the moon's messengers, in Aristoph- 
 anes ; and note of Hermes generally, that you 
 never find him flying as a Victory flies, but 
 always, if moving fast at all, clambering along, 
 as it were, as a cloud gathers and heaps itself: 
 the Gorgons stretch and stride in their flight, 
 half kneeling, for the same reason, running or 
 gliding shapelessly along in this stealthy way.) 
 
 157. And now take this last illustration, of 
 a very different kind. Here is an effect of 
 morning light by Turner (S. 301), on the rocks 
 of Otley-hill, near Leeds, drawn long ago, when 
 Apollo, and Artemis, and Athena, still some- 
 times were seen, and felt, even near Leeds. The 
 original drawing is one of the great Farnley 
 series, and entirely beautiful. I have shown, in 
 the last volume of ' Modern Painters/ how well 
 Turner knew the meaning of Greek legends: 
 — he was not thinking of them, however, when 
 he made this design ; but, unintentionally, has 
 given us the very effect of morning light we 
 want : the glittering of the sunshine on dewy 
 grass, half dark ; and the narrow gleam of it 
 on the sides and head of the stag and hind. 
 
 158. These few instances will be enough to 
 show you how we may read in the early art
 
 196 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 of the Greeks their strong impressions of the 
 power of light. You will find the subject en- 
 tered into at somewhat greater length in my 
 ' Queen of the Air ; ' and if you will look at 
 the beginning of the 7th book of Plato's 
 ' Polity/ and read carefully the passages in the 
 context respecting the sun and intellectual sight, 
 you will see how intimately this physical love 
 of light was connected with their philosophy, 
 in its search, as blind and captive, for better 
 knowledge. I shall not attempt to define for 
 you to-day the more complex but much shal- 
 lower forms which this love of light, and the 
 philosophy that accompanies it, take in the 
 mediaeval mind ; only remember that in future, 
 when I briefly speak of the Greek school of 
 art with reference to questions of delineation, 
 I mean the entire range of the schools, from 
 Homer's days to our own, which concern them- 
 selves with the representation of light, and the 
 effects it produces on material form — beginning 
 practically for us with these Greek vase paint- 
 ings, and closing practically for us with Turner's 
 sunset on the Temeraire ; being throughout a 
 school of captivity and sadness, but of intense 
 power ; and which in its technical method of
 
 VI. LIGHT. 197 
 
 shadow on material form, as well as in its 
 
 essential temper, is centrally represented to you 
 
 by Diirer's two great engravings of the ' Melen- 
 
 colia ' and the ' Knight and Death.' On the 
 
 other hand, when I briefly speak to you of the 
 
 Gothic school, with reference to delineation, I 
 
 mean the entire and much more extensive range 
 
 of schools extending from the earliest art in 
 
 Central Asia and Egypt down to our own day 
 
 in India and China : — schools which have been 
 
 content to obtain beautiful harmonies of colour 
 
 without any representation of light ; and which 
 
 have, many of them, rested in such imperfect 
 
 expressions of form as could be so obtained ; 
 
 schools usually in some measure childish, or 
 
 restricted in intellect, and similarly childish or 
 
 restricted in their philosophies or faiths : but 
 
 contented in the restriction ; and in the more 
 
 powerful races, capable of advance to nobler 
 
 development than the Greek schools, though 
 
 the consummate art of Europe has only been 
 
 accomplished by the union of both. How that 
 
 union was effected, I will endeavour to show 
 
 you in my next lecture ; to-day I shall take note 
 
 only of the points bearing on our immediate 
 
 practice.
 
 198 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 159. A certain number of you, by faculty 
 and natural disposition, — and all, so far as you 
 are interested in modern art, — will necessarily 
 have to put yourselves under the discipline 
 of the Greek or chiaroscuro school, which is 
 directed primarily to the attainment of the 
 power of representing form by pure contrast of 
 light and shade. I say, the ' discipline ' of the 
 Greek school, both because, followed faithfully, 
 it is indeed a severe one, and because to follow 
 it at all is, for persons fond of colour, often a 
 course of painful self-denial, from which young 
 students are eager to escape. And yet, when 
 the laws of both schools are rightly obeyed, 
 the most perfect discipline is that of the colour- 
 ists ; for they see and draw everything, while 
 the chiaroscurists must leave much indeter- 
 minate in mystery, or invisible in gloom : and 
 there are therefore many licentious and vulgar 
 forms of art connected with the chiaroscuro 
 school, both in painting and etching, which 
 have no parallel among the colourists. But 
 both schools, rightly followed, require first of 
 all absolute accuracy of delineation. This you 
 need not hope to escape. Whether you fill 
 your spaces with colours, or with shadows, they
 
 VI. LIGHT. 199 
 
 must equally be of the true outline and in true 
 gradations. I have been thirty years telling 
 modern students of art this in vain. I mean 
 to say it to you only once, for the statement is 
 too important to be weakened by repetition. 
 
 Without perfect delineation of form and 
 perfect gradation of space, neither noble 
 colour is possible, nor noble light. 
 
 160. It may make this more believable to you 
 if I put beside each other a piece of detail from 
 each school. I gave you the St. John of Cima 
 da Conegliano for a type of the colour school. 
 Here is my own study of the sprays of oak 
 which rise against the sky of it in the distance, 
 enlarged to about its real size (Edu. 12). I 
 hope to draw it better for you at Venice ; but 
 this will show you with what perfect care the 
 colourist has followed the outline of every leaf 
 in the sky. Beside, I put a chiaroscurist draw- 
 ing (at least, a photograph of one), Diirer's, 
 from nature, of the common wild wall-cabbage 
 (Edu. 32). It is the most perfect piece of 
 delineation by flat tint I have ever seen, in its 
 mastery of the perspective of every leaf, and 
 its attainment almost of the bloom of texture, 
 merely by its exquisitely tender and decisive
 
 200 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 laying of the colour. These two examples 
 ought, I think, to satisfy you as to the precision 
 of outline of both schools, and the power of 
 expression which may be obtained by flat tints 
 laid within such outline. 
 
 161. Next, here are two examples of the gra- 
 dated shading expressive of the forms within 
 the outline, by two masters of the chiaroscuro 
 school. The first (S. 1 2) shows you Lionardo's 
 method of work, both with chalk and the silver 
 point. The second (S. 302), Turner's work 
 in mezzotint; both masters doing their best. 
 Observe that this plate of Turner's, which he 
 worked on so long that it was never published, 
 is of a subject peculiarly depending on effects 
 of mystery and concealment, the fall of the Reuss 
 under the Devil's Bridge on the St. Gothard ; 
 (the old bridge ; you may still see it under the 
 existing one, which was built since Turner's 
 drawing was made). If ever outline could be 
 dispensed with, you would think it might be so 
 in this confusion of cloud, foam, and darkness. 
 But here is Turner's own etching on the plate 
 (Edu. 35F), made under the mezzotint ; and of 
 all the studies of rock outline made by his hand, 
 it is the most decisive and quietly complete.
 
 VI. LIGHT. 20 1 
 
 162. Again ; in the Lionardo sketches, many 
 parts are lost in obscurity, or are left intention- 
 ally uncertain and mysterious, even in the light 
 and you might at first imagine some permission 
 of escape had been here given you from the 
 terrible law of delineation. But the slightest 
 attempts to copy them will show you that the 
 terminal lines are inimitably subtle, unaccusably 
 true, and filled by gradations of shade so deter- 
 mined and measured that the addition of a grain 
 of the lead or chalk as large as the filament of 
 a moth's wing, would make an appreciable differ- 
 ence in them. 
 
 This is grievous, you think, and hopeless ? 
 No, it is delightful and full of hope : delightful, 
 to see what marvellous things can be done by 
 men ; and full of hope, if your hope is the right 
 one, of being one day able to rejoice more in 
 what others have done, than in what you can 
 yourself do, and more in the strength that is 
 for ever above you, than in that you can ever 
 attain. 
 
 163. But you can attain much, if you will 
 work reverently and patiently, and hope for no 
 success through ill-regulated effort. It is, how- 
 ever, most assuredly at this point of your study
 
 202 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 that the full strain on your patience will begin. 
 The exercises in line-drawing and flat laying 
 of colour are irksome ; but they are definite, 
 and within certain limits, sure to be successful 
 if practised with moderate care. But the expres- 
 sion of form by shadow requires more subtle 
 patience, and involves the necessity of frequent 
 and mortifying failure, not to speak of the self- 
 denial which I said was needful in persons fond 
 of colour, to draw in mere light and shade. If, 
 indeed, you were going to be artists, or could 
 give any great length of time to study, it might 
 be possible for you to learn wholly in the Vene- 
 tian school, and to reach form through colour. 
 But without the most intense application this is 
 not possible ; and practically, it will be neces- 
 sary for you, as soon as you have gained the 
 power of outlining accurately, and of laying flat 
 colour, to learn to express solid form as shown 
 by light and shade only. And there is this 
 great advantage in doing so, that many forms 
 are more or less disguised by colour, and that we 
 can only represent them completely to others, 
 or rapidly and easily record them for ourselves, 
 by the use of shade alone. A single instance 
 will show you what I mean. Perhaps there are
 
 VI. LIGHT. 203 
 
 few flowers of which the impression on the 
 eye is more definitely of flat colour, than the 
 scarlet geranium. But you would find, if you 
 were to try to paint it, — first, that no pigment 
 could approach the beauty of its scarlet ; and 
 secondly, that the brightness of the hue dazzled 
 the eye, and prevented its following the real 
 arrangement of the cluster of flowers. I have 
 drawn for you here (at least this is a mezzotint 
 from my drawing), a single cluster of the scarlet 
 geranium, in mere light and shade (Edu. 32 B.), 
 and I think you will feel that its domed form, 
 and the flat lying of the petals one over the 
 other, in the vaulted roof of it, can be seen 
 better thus than if they had been painted 
 scarlet. 
 
 164. Also this study will be useful to you, 
 in showing how entirely effects of light depend 
 on delineation, and gradation of spaces, and 
 not on methods of shading. And this is the 
 second great practical matter I want you to 
 remember to-day. All effects of light and shade 
 depend not on the method or execution of 
 shadows, but on their Tightness of place, form, 
 and depth. There is indeed a loveliness of 
 execution added to the rightness, by the great
 
 204 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 masters, but you cannot obtain that unless you 
 become one of them. Shadow cannot be laid 
 thoroughly well, any more than lines can be 
 drawn steadily, but by a long practised hand, 
 and the attempts to imitate the shading of fine 
 draughtsmen, by dotting and hatching, are just 
 as ridiculous as it would be to endeavour to 
 imitate their instantaneous lines by a series 
 of re-touchings. You will often indeed see 
 in Leonardo's work, and in Michael Angelo's, 
 shadow wrought laboriously to an extreme of 
 fineness ; but when you look into it, you will find 
 that they have always been drawing more and 
 more form within the space, and never finish- 
 ing for the sake of added texture, but of added 
 fact. And all those effects of transparency and 
 reflected light, aimed at in common chalk draw- 
 ings, are wholly spurious. For since, as I told 
 you, all lights are shades compared to higher 
 lights, and lights only as compared to lower 
 ones, it follows that there can be no difference 
 in their quality as such ; but that light is opaque 
 when it expresses substance, and transparent 
 when it expresses space ; and shade is also 
 opaque when it expresses substance, and trans- 
 parent when it expresses space. But it is not,
 
 VI. LIGHT. 205 
 
 even then, transparent in the common sense of 
 that word ; nor is its appearance to be obtained 
 by dotting or cross hatching, but by touches so 
 tender as to look like mist. And now we find 
 the use of having Lionardo for our guide. He 
 is supreme in all questions of execution, and in 
 his 28th chapter, you will find that shadows 
 are to be 'dolce e sfumose,' to be tender, and 
 look as if they were exhaled, or breathed on the 
 paper. Then, look at any of Michael Angelo's 
 finished drawings, or of Correggio's sketches, 
 and you will see that the true nurse of light 
 is in art, as in nature, the cloud ; a misty and 
 tender darkness, made lovely by gradation. 
 
 165. And how absolutely independent it is 
 of material or method of production, how ab- 
 solutely dependent on Tightness of place and 
 depth, — there are now before you instances 
 enough to prove. Here is Diirer's work in flat 
 colour, represented by the photograph in its 
 smoky brown ; Turner's, in washed sepia, and 
 in mezzotint ; Lionardo' s, in pencil and in chalk; 
 on the screen in front of you a large study in 
 charcoal. In every one of these drawings, the 
 material of shadow is absolutely opaque. But 
 photograph-stain, chalk, lead, ink, or charcoal, —
 
 206 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 every one of them, laid by the master's hand, 
 becomes full of light by gradation only. Here 
 is a moonlight (Edu. 31 B.), in which you 
 would think the moon shone through every 
 cloud ; yet the clouds are mere single dashes 
 of sepia, imitated by the brown stain of a photo- 
 graph ; similarly, in these plates from the Liber 
 Studiorum the white paper becomes transparent 
 or opaque, exactly as the master chooses. Here, 
 on the granite rock of the St. Gothard (S. 302), 
 in white paper made opaque, every light re- 
 presents solid bosses of rock, or balls of foam. 
 But in this study of twilight (S. 303), the same 
 white paper (coarse old stuff it is, too !) is made 
 as transparent as crystal, and every fragment 
 of it represents clear and far away light in the 
 sky of evening in Italy. 
 
 From all which the practical conclusion for 
 you is, that you are never to trouble yourselves 
 with any questions as to the means of shade 
 or light, but only with the right government 
 of the means at your disposal. And it is a 
 most grave error in the system of many of our 
 public drawing-schools, that the students are 
 permitted to spend weeks of labour in giving 
 attractive appearance, by delicacy of texture, to
 
 VI. LIGHT. 207 
 
 chiaroscuro drawings in which every form is 
 false, and every relation of depth, untrue. A 
 most unhappy form of error ; for it not only 
 delays, and often wholly arrests, their advance 
 in their own art ; but it prevents what ought 
 to take place correlatively with their executive 
 practice, the formation of their taste by the 
 accurate study of the models from which they 
 draw. And I must so far anticipate what we 
 shall discover when we come to the subject of 
 sculpture, as to tell you the two main principles 
 of good sculpture ; first, that its masters think 
 before all other matters of the right placing of 
 masses ; secondly, that they give life by flexure 
 of surface, not by quantity of detail ; for sculp- 
 ture is indeed only light and shade drawing in 
 stone. 
 
 166. Much that I have endeavoured to teach 
 on this subject has been gravely misunderstood, 
 by both young painters and sculptors, especially 
 by the latter. Because I am always urging them 
 to imitate organic forms, they think if they carve 
 quantities of flowers and leaves, and copy them 
 from the life, they have done all that is needed. 
 But the difficulty is not to carve quantities of 
 leaves. Anybody can do that. The difficulty
 
 208 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 is, never anywhere to have an unnecessary 
 leaf. Over the arch on the right, you see there is 
 a cluster of seven, with their short stalks spring- 
 ing from a thick stem. Now, you could not turn 
 one of those leaves a hair's-breadth Out of its 
 place, nor thicken one of their stems, nor alter 
 the angle at which each slips over the next one, 
 without spoiling the whole as much as you would 
 a piece of melody by missing a note. That is 
 disposition of masses. Again, in the group on 
 the left, while the placing of every leaf is just 
 as skilful, they are made more interesting yet 
 by the lovely undulation of their surfaces, so 
 that not one of them is in equal light with 
 another. And that is so in all good sculpture, 
 without exception. From the Elgin marbles 
 down to the lightest tendril that curls round a 
 capital in the thirteenth century, every piece of 
 stone that has been touched by the hand of 
 a master, becomes soft with under-life, not 
 resembling nature merely in skin-texture, nor 
 in fibres of leaf, or veins of flesh ; but in the 
 broad, tender, unspeakably subtle undulation 
 of its organic form. 
 
 167. Returning then to the question of our 
 own practice, I believe that all difficulties in
 
 VI. LIGHT. 209 
 
 method will vanish, it only you cultivate with 
 care enough the habit of accurate observation, 
 and if you think only of making your light and 
 shade true, whether it be delicate or not. But 
 there are three divisions or degrees of truth to be 
 sought for, in light and shade, by three several 
 modes of study, which I must ask you to dis- 
 tinguish carefully. 
 
 I. When objects are lighted by the direct rays 
 of the sun, or by direct light entering from a 
 window, one side of them is of course in light, 
 the other in shade, and the forms in the mass 
 are exhibited systematically by the force of the 
 rays falling on it ; (those having most power 
 of illumination which strike most vertically ;) 
 and note that there is, therefore, to every solid 
 curvature of surface, a necessarily proportioned 
 gradation of light, the gradation on a parabolic 
 solid being different from the gradation on an 
 elliptical or spherical one. Now, when your 
 purpose is to represent and learn the anatomy, 
 or otherwise characteristic forms, of any object, 
 it is best to place it in this kind of direct light, 
 and to draw it as it is seen when we look at it 
 in a direction at right angles to that of the ray. 
 This is the ordinary academical way of studying 
 
 14
 
 210 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 form. Lionardo seldom practises any other in 
 his real work, though he directs many others in 
 his treatise. 
 
 1 68. The great importance of anatomical 
 knowledge to the painters of the sixteenth cen- 
 tury rendered this method of study very frequent 
 with them ; it almost wholly regulated their 
 schools of engraving, and has been the most 
 frequent system of drawing in art-schools since 
 (to the very inexpedient exclusion of others). 
 When you study objects in this way, — and it 
 will indeed be well to do so often, though not 
 exclusively, — observe always one main principle. 
 Divide the light from the darkness frankly at 
 first: all over the subject let there be no doubt 
 which is which. Separate them one from the 
 other as they are separated in the moon, or on 
 the world itself, in day and night. Then gradate 
 /our lights with the utmost subtilty possible to 
 you ; but let your shadows alone, until near the 
 termination of the drawing : then put quickly 
 into them what farther energy they need, thus 
 gaining the reflected lights out of their original 
 flat gloom ; but generally not looking much for 
 reflected lights. Nearly all young students 
 (and too many advanced masters) exaggerate
 
 VI. LIGHT. 2 I I 
 
 them. It is good to see a drawing come out of 
 its ground like a vision of light only ; the sha- 
 dows lost, or disregarded in the vague of space. 
 In vulgar chiaroscuro the shades are so full of 
 reflection that they look as if some one had been 
 walking round the object with a candle, and the 
 student, by that help, peering into its crannies. 
 169. II. But, in the reality of nature, very 
 few objects are seen in this accurately lateral 
 manner, or lighted by unconfused direct rays. 
 Some are all in shadow, some all in light, some 
 near, and vigorously defined ; others dim and 
 faint in aerial distance. The study of these 
 various effects and forces of light, which we may 
 call aerial chiaroscuro, is a far more subtle one 
 than that of the rays exhibiting organic form 
 (which for distinction's sake we may call 'formal' 
 chiaroscuro), since the degrees of light from the 
 sun itself to the blackness of night, are far 
 beyond any literal imitation. In order to pro- 
 duce a mental impression of the facts, two 
 distinct methods may be followed : — the first, to 
 shade downwards from the lights, making every- 
 thing darker in due proportion, until the scale 
 of our power being ended, the mass of the pic- 
 ture is lost in shade. The second, to assume the
 
 2 12 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 points of extreme darkness for a basis, and to 
 light everything above these in due proportion, 
 till the mass of the picture is lost in light. 
 
 170. Thus, in Turner's sepia drawing ' Isis ' 
 (Edu. 31), he begins with the extreme light in 
 the sky, and shades down from that till he is 
 forced to represent the near trees and pool as 
 one mass of blackness. In his drawing of the 
 Greta (S. 2), he begins with the dark brown 
 shadow of the bank on the left, and illuminates 
 up from that, till, in his distance, trees, hills, 
 sky, and clouds, are all lost in broad light, so 
 that you can hardly see the distinction between 
 hills and sky. The second of these methods 
 is in general the best for colour, though great 
 painters unite both in their practice, according 
 to the character of their subject. The first 
 method is never pursued in colour but by in- 
 ferior painters. It is, nevertheless, of great 
 importance to make studies of chiaroscuro in 
 this first manner for some time, as a prepara- 
 tion for colouring ; and this for many reasons, 
 which it would take too long to state now. I 
 shall expect you to have confidence in me when 
 I assure you of the necessity of this study, and 
 ask you to make good use of the examples from
 
 VI. LIGHT. 213 
 
 the Liber Studiorum which I have placed in 
 your Educational series. 
 
 171. III. Whether in formal or aerial chiaro- 
 scuro, it is optional with the student to make 
 the local colour of objects a part of his shadow, 
 or to consider the high lights of every colour 
 as white. For instance, a chiaroscurist of Leon- 
 ardo's school, drawing a leopard, would take no 
 notice whatever of the spots, but only give the 
 shadows which expressed the anatomy. And 
 it is indeed necessary to be able to do. this, and 
 to make drawings of the forms of things as if 
 they were sculptured, and had no colour. But 
 in general, and more especially in the practice 
 which is to guide you to colour, it is better to 
 regard the local colour as part of the general 
 dark and light to be imitated ; and, as I told 
 you at first, to consider all nature merely as a 
 mosaic of different colours, to be imitated one 
 by one in simplicity. But good artists vary 
 their methods according to their subject and 
 material. In general, Diirer takes little account 
 of local colour ; but in woodcuts of armorial 
 bearings (one with peacock's feathers I shall 
 get for you some day) takes great delight in 
 it ; while one of the chief merits of Bewick is
 
 214 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 the ease and vigour with which he uses his 
 black and white for the colours of plumes. Also, 
 every great artist looks for, and expresses, that 
 character of his subject which is best to be 
 rendered by the instrument in his hand, and the 
 material he works on. Give Velasquez or Vero- 
 nese a leopard to paint, the first thing they think 
 of will be its spots ; give it to Durer to engrave, 
 and he will set himself at the fur and whiskers ; 
 give it a Greek to carve, and he will only think 
 of its jaws and limbs ; each doing what is abso- 
 lutely best with the means at his disposal. 
 
 172. The details of practice in these various 
 methods I will endeavour to explain to you by 
 distinct examples in your Educational series, as 
 we proceed in our work ; for the present, let me, 
 in closing, recommend to you once more with 
 great earnestness the patient endeavour to ren- 
 der the chiaroscuro of landscape in the manner 
 of the Liber Studiorum ; and this the rather, 
 because you might easily suppose that the facil- 
 ity of obtaining photographs which render such 
 effects, as it seems, with absolute truth and with 
 unapproachable subtilty, superseded the neces- 
 sity of study, and the use of sketching. Let me 
 assure you, once for all, that photographs super-
 
 VI. LIGHT. 215 
 
 sede no single quality nor use of fine art, and 
 have so much in common with Nature, that they 
 even share her temper of parsimony, and will 
 themselves give you nothing valuable that you 
 do not work for. They supersede no good art, 
 for the definition of art is ' human labour regu- 
 lated by human design/ and this design, or 
 evidence of active intellect in choice and arrange- 
 ment, is the essential part of the work ; which 
 so long as you cannot perceive, you perceive no 
 art whatsoever ; which when once you do per- 
 ceive, you will perceive also to be replaceable 
 by no mechanism. But, farther, photographs 
 will give you nothing you do not work for. They 
 are invaluable for record of some kinds of facts, 
 and for giving transcripts of drawings by great 
 masters ; but neither in the photographed scene, 
 nor photographed drawing, will you see any true 
 good, more than in the things themselves, until 
 you have given the appointed price in your own 
 attention and toil. And when once you have 
 paid this price, you will not care for photographs 
 of landscape. They are not true, though they 
 seem so. They are merely spoiled nature. If 
 it is not human design you are looking for, there 
 is more beauty in the next wayside bank than in
 
 2l6 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 all the sun-blackened paper you could collect in 
 a lifetime. Go and look at the real landscape, 
 and take care of it ; do not think you can get 
 the good of it in a black stain portable in a folio. 
 But if you care for human thought and passion, 
 then learn yourselves to watch the course and 
 fall of the light by whose influence you live, and 
 to share in the joy of human spirits in the 
 heavenly gifts of sunbeam and shade. For I 
 tell you truly, that to a quiet heart, and healthy 
 brain, and industrious hand, there is more de- 
 light, and use, in the dappling of one wood-glade 
 with flowers and sunshine, than to the restless, 
 heartless, and idle could be brought by a pano- 
 rama of a belt of the world, photographed round 
 the equator.
 
 LECTURE VII. 
 
 COLOUR. 
 
 173.. To-day I must try to complete our elemen- 
 tary sketch of schools of art, by tracing the 
 course of those which were distinguished by 
 faculty of colour, and afterwards to deduce from 
 the entire scheme advisable methods of imme- 
 diate practice. 
 
 You remember that, for the type of the early 
 schools of colour, I chose their work in glass ; 
 as for that of the early schools of chiaroscuro, 
 I chose their work in clay. 
 
 I had two reasons for this. First, that the 
 peculiar skill of colourists is seen most intel- 
 ligibly in their work in glass or in enamel ; 
 secondly, that Nature herself produces all her 
 loveliest colours in some kind of solid or liquid 
 glass or crystal. The rainbow is painted on a 
 shower of melted glass, and the colours of the 
 opal are produced in vitreous flint mixed with 
 water ; the green and blue, and golden or amber
 
 2l8 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 brown of flowing water is in surface glassy, and 
 in motion ' splendidior vitro.' And the loveliest 
 colours ever granted to human sight — those of 
 morning and evening clouds before or after rain 
 — are produced on minute particles of finely- 
 divided water, or perhaps sometimes ice. But 
 more than this. If you examine with a lens some 
 of the richest colours of flowers, as, for instance, 
 those of the gentian and dianthus, you will find 
 their texture is produced by a crystalline or 
 sugary frost-work upon them. In the lychnis 
 of the high Alps, the red and white have a kind 
 of sugary bloom, as rich as it is delicate. It is 
 indescribable ; but if you can fancy very powdery 
 and crystalline snow mixed with the softest 
 cream, and then dashed with carmine, it may 
 give you some idea of the look of it. There are 
 no colours, either in the nacre of shells, or the 
 plumes of birds and insects, which are so pure 
 as those of clouds, opal, or flowers ; but the force 
 of purple and blue in some butterflies, and the 
 methods of clouding, and strength of burnished 
 lustre, in plumage like the peacock's, give them 
 more universal interest ; in some birds, also, as 
 in our own kingfisher, the colour nearly reaches 
 a floral preciousness. The lustre in most,
 
 VII. COLOUR. 219 
 
 however, is metallic rather than vitreous; and the 
 vitreous always gives the purest hue. Entirely 
 common and vulgar compared with these, yet 
 to be noticed as completing the crystalline or 
 vitreous system, we have the colours of gems. 
 The green of the emerald is the best of these ; 
 but at its best is as vulgar as house-painting 
 beside the green of birds' plumage or of clear 
 water. No diamond shows colour so pure as a 
 dewdrop ; the ruby is like the pink of an ill-dyed 
 and half-washed-out print, compared to the dian- 
 thus ; and the carbuncle is usually quite dead 
 unless set with a foil, and even then is not 
 prettier than the seed of a pomegranate. The 
 opal is, however, an exception. When pure and 
 uncut in its native rock, it presents the most 
 lovely colours that can be seen in the world, 
 except those of clouds. 
 
 We have thus in nature, chiefly obtained by 
 crystalline conditions, a series of groups of en- 
 tirely delicious hues ; and it is one of the best 
 signs that the bodily system is in a healthy state 
 when we can see these clearly in their most 
 delicate tints, and enjoy them fully and simply, 
 with the kind of enjoyment that children have 
 in eating sweet things.
 
 220 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 174. Now, the course of our main colour 
 schools is briefly this : — First we have, return- 
 ing to our hexagonal scheme, line ; then spaces 
 filled with pure colour; and then masses ex- 
 pressed or rounded with pure colour. And 
 during these two stages the masters of colour 
 delight in the purest tints, and endeavour as far 
 as possible to rival those of opals and flowers. 
 In saying ' the purest tints,' I do not mean the 
 simplest types of red, blue, and yellow, but the 
 most pure tints obtainable by their combina- 
 tions. 
 
 175. You remember I told you, when the 
 colourists painted masses or projecting spaces, 
 they, aiming always at colour, perceived from 
 the first and held to the last the fact that 
 shadows, though of course darker than the 
 lights with reference to which they are shadows 
 are not therefore necessarily less vigorous col- 
 ours, but perhaps more vigorous. Some of 
 the most beautiful blues and purples in nature, 
 for instance, are those of mountains in shadow 
 against amber sky ; and the darkness of the hol- 
 low in the centre of a wild rose is one glow of 
 orange fire, owing to the quantity of its yellow 
 stamens. Well, the Venetians always saw this,
 
 VII. COLOUR. 221 
 
 and all great colourists see it, and are thus sepa- 
 rated from the non-colourists or schools of mere 
 chiaroscuro, not by difference in style merely, 
 but by being right while the others are wrong. 
 It is an absolute fact that shadows are as much 
 colours as lights are ; and whoever represents 
 them by merely the subdued or darkened tint 
 of the light, represents them falsely. I parti- 
 cularly want you to observe that this is no 
 matter of taste, but fact. If you are especially 
 sober-minded, you may indeed choose sober 
 colours where Venetians would have chosen gay 
 ones ; that is a matter of taste ; you may think 
 it proper for a hero to wear a dress without 
 patterns on it, rather than an embroidered one ; 
 that is similarly a matter of taste : but, though 
 you may also think it would be dignified for a 
 hero's limbs to be all black, or brown, on the 
 shaded side of them, yet, if you are using col- 
 our at all, you cannot so have him to your mind, 
 except by falsehood ; he never, under any cir- 
 cumstances, could be entirely black or brown 
 on one side of him. 
 
 176. In this, then, the Venetians are separate 
 from other schools by Tightness, and they are 
 so to their last days. Venetian painting is in
 
 222 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 this matter always right. But also, in their 
 early days, the colourists are separated from 
 other schools by their contentment with tran- 
 quil cheerfulness of light ; by their never want- 
 ing to be dazzled. None of their lights are 
 flashing or blinding ; they are soft, winning, 
 precious ; lights of pearl, not of lime : only, you 
 know, on this condition they cannot have sun- 
 shine : their day is the day of Paradise ; they 
 need no candle, neither light of the sun, in their 
 cities ; and everything is seen clear, as through 
 crystal, far or near. 
 
 This holds to the end of the fifteenth century. 
 Then they begin to see that this, beautiful as it 
 may be, is still a make-believe light ; that we do 
 not live in the inside of a pearl; but in an 
 atmosphere through which a burning sun shines 
 thwartedly, and over which a sorrowful night 
 must far prevail. And then the chiaroscurists 
 succeed in persuading them of the fact that there 
 is a mystery in the day as in the night, and 
 show them how constantly to see truly, is to see 
 dimly. And also they teach them the brilliancy 
 of light, and the degree in which it is raised 
 from the darkness ; and instead of their sweet 
 and pearly peace, tempt them to look for the
 
 VII. COLOUR. 223 
 
 strength of flame and coruscation of lightning, 
 and flash of sunshine on armour and on points 
 of spears. 
 
 177. The noble painters take the lesson 
 nobly, alike for gloom or flame. Titian with 
 deliberate strength, Tintoret with stormy pas- 
 sion, read it, side by side. Titian deepens the 
 hues of his Assumption, as of his Entombment, 
 into a solemn twilight ; Tintoret involves his 
 earth in coils of volcanic cloud, and withdraws, 
 through circle flaming above circle, the distant 
 light of Paradise. Both of them, becoming 
 naturalist and human, add the veracity of Hol- 
 bein's intense portraiture to the glow and dig- 
 nity they had themselves inherited from the 
 Masters of Peace : at the same moment another, 
 as strong as they, and in pure felicity of art- 
 faculty, even greater than they, but trained 
 in a lower school, — Velasquez, — produced the 
 miracles of colour and shadow-painting, which 
 made Reynolds say of him, ' What we all do 
 with labour, he does with ease ; ' and one more, 
 Correggio, uniting the sensual element of the 
 Greek schools with their gloom, and their light 
 with their beauty, and all these with the Lom- 
 bardic colour, became, as since I think it has
 
 224 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 been admitted without question, the captain of 
 the painter's art as such. Other men have 
 nobler or more numerous gifts, but as a painter, 
 master of the art of laying colour so as to be 
 lovely, Correggio is alone. 
 
 178. I said the noble men learned their les- 
 son nobly. The base men also, and necessarily, 
 learn it basely. The great men rise from colour 
 to sunlight. The base ones fall from colour to 
 candlelight. To-day, ' non ragioniam di lor,' 
 but let us see what this great change which 
 perfects the art of painting mainly consists in, 
 and means. For though we are only at present 
 speaking of technical matters, every one of them, 
 I can scarcely too often repeat, is the outcome 
 and sign of a mental character, and you can 
 only understand the folds of the veil, by those 
 of the form it veils. 
 
 179. The complete painters, we find, have 
 brought dimness and mystery into their method 
 of colouring. That means that the world all 
 round them has resolved to dream, or to believe, 
 no more; but to know, and to see. And instantly 
 all knowledge and sight are given, no more 
 as in the Gothic times, through a window of 
 glass, brightly, but as through a telescope-glass,
 
 VII. COLOUR. 225 
 
 darkly. Your cathedral window shut you 
 from the true sky, and illumined you with a 
 vision ; your telescope leads you to the sky, but 
 darkens its light, and reveals nebula beyond 
 nebula, far and farther, and to no conceivable 
 farthest — unresolvable. That is what the mys- 
 tery means. 
 
 180. Next, what does that Greek opposition 
 of black and white mean ? 
 
 In the sweet crystalline time of colour, the 
 painters, whether on glass or canvas, employed 
 intricate patterns, in order to mingle hues beau- 
 tifully with each other, and make one perfect 
 melody of them all. But in the great naturalist 
 school, they like their patterns to come in the 
 Greek way, dashed dark on light,— gleaming 
 lisrht out of dark. That means also that the 
 world round them has again returned to the 
 Greek conviction, that all nature, especially 
 human nature, is not entirely melodious nor 
 luminous ; but a barred and broken thing : that 
 saints have their foibles, sinners their forces ; 
 that the most luminous virtue is often only a 
 flash, and the blackest-looking fault is sometimes 
 only a stain : and, without confusing in the least 
 black with white, they can forgive, or even 
 
 15
 
 226 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 take delight in things that are like the vefipk, 
 dappled. 
 
 1 8 1. You have then — first, mystery. Se- 
 condly, opposition of dark and light. Then, 
 lastly, whatever truth of form the dark and light 
 can show. 
 
 That is to say, truth altogether, and resigna- 
 tion to it, and quiet resolve to make the best of 
 it. And therefore portraiture of living men, 
 women, and children, — no more of saints, 
 cherubs, or demons. So here I have brought 
 for your standards of perfect art, a little maiden 
 of the Strozzi family, with her dog, by Titian ; 
 and a little princess of the house of Savoy, 
 by Vandyke ; and Charles the Fifth, by Titian ; 
 and a queen, by Velasquez ; and an English 
 girl in a brocaded gown, by Reynolds ; and an 
 English physician in his plain coat, and wig, by 
 Reynolds : and if you do not like them, I can- 
 not help myself, for I can find nothing better 
 for you. 
 
 182. Better? — I must pause at the word. 
 Nothing stronger, certainly, nor so strong. No- 
 thing so wonderful, so inimitable, so keen in 
 unprejudiced and unbiassed sight. 
 
 Yet better, perhaps, the sight that was guided
 
 VII. COLOUR. 227 
 
 by a sacred will ; the power that could be taught 
 to weaker hands ; the work that was faultless, 
 though not inimitable, bright with felicity of 
 heart, and consummate in a disciplined and 
 companionable skill. You will find, when I can 
 place in your hands the notes on Verona, which 
 I read at the Royal Institution, that I have ven- 
 tured to call the aera of painting represented by 
 John Bellini, the time ' of the Masters.' Truly 
 they deserved the name, who did nothing but 
 what was lovely, and taught only what was 
 right. These mightier, who succeeded them, 
 crowned, but closed, the dynasties of art, and 
 since their day, painting has never flourished 
 more. 
 
 183. There were many reasons for this, with- 
 out fault of theirs. They were exponents, in 
 the first place, of the change in all men's minds 
 from civil and religious to merely domestic pas- 
 sion ; the love of their gods and their country 
 had contracted itself now into that of their do- 
 mestic circle, which was little more than the 
 halo of themselves. You will see the reflection 
 of this change in painting at once by comparing 
 the two Madonnas (S. 37, John Bellini's, and 
 Raphael's, called ' della Seggiola '). Bellini's
 
 228 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 Madonna cares for all creatures through her 
 child ; Raphael's, for her child only. 
 
 Again, the world round these painters had 
 become sad and proud, instead of happy and 
 humble ; — its domestic peace was darkened by 
 irreligion, its national action fevered by pride. 
 And for sign of its Love, the Hymen, whose sta- 
 tue this fair English girl, according to Reynolds' 
 thought, has to decorate (S. 43), is blind, and 
 holds a coronet. 
 
 Again, in the splendid power of realization, 
 which these greatest of artists had reached, there- 
 was the latent possibility of amusement by de- 
 ception, and of excitement by sensualism. And 
 Dutch trickeries of base resemblance, and French 
 fancies of insidious beauty, soon occupied the 
 eyes of the populace of Europe, too restless and 
 wretched now to care for the sweet earth-berries 
 and Madonna's ivy of Cima, and too ignoble to 
 perceive Titian's colour, or Correggio's shade. 
 
 184. Enough sources of evil were here, in the 
 temper and power of the consummate art. In 
 its practical methods there was another, the 
 fatallest of all. These great artists brought with 
 them mystery, despondency, domesticity, sensu- 
 ality : of all these, good came, as well as eviL
 
 VII. COLOUR. 229 
 
 One thing more they brought, of which nothing 
 but evil ever comes, or can come — Liberty. 
 
 By the discipline of five hundred years they 
 had learned and inherited such power, that 
 whereas all former painters could be right only 
 by effort, they could be right with ease ; and 
 whereas all former painters could be right only 
 under restraint, they could be right, free. Tin- 
 toret's touch, Luini's, Correggio's, Reynolds', 
 and Velasquez's, are all as free as the air, and 
 yet right. ' How very fine ! ' said everybody. 
 Unquestionably, very fine. Next, said every- 
 body, ' What a grand discovery ! Here is the 
 finest work ever done, and it is quite free. Let 
 us all be free then, and what fine things shall 
 we not do also ! ' With what results we too 
 well know. 
 
 Nevertheless, remember you are to delight in 
 the freedom won by these mighty men through 
 obedience, though you are not to covet it. Obey, 
 and you also shall be free in time ; but in these 
 minor things, as well as in great, it is only righ' 
 service which is perfect freedom. 
 
 185. This, broadly, is the history of the early 
 and late colour-schools. The first of these I 
 shall call generally, henceforward, the school of
 
 230 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 crystal ; the other that of clay : potter's clay, or 
 human, are' too sorrowfully the same, as far as 
 art is concerned. But remember, in practice, 
 you cannot follow both these schools ; you must 
 distinctly adopt the principles of one or the other 
 I will put the means of following either within 
 your reach ; and according to your dispositions 
 you will choose one or the other : all I have to 
 guard you against is the mistake of thinking 
 you can unite the two. If you want to paint 
 (even in the most distant and feeble way) in the 
 Greek School, the school of Lionardo, Correggio, 
 and Turner, you cannot design coloured win- 
 dows, nor Angelican paradises. If, on the other 
 hand, you choose to live in the peace of paradise, 
 you cannot share in the gloomy triumphs of the 
 earth. 
 
 186. And, incidentally note, as a practical 
 matter of immediate importance, that painted 
 windows have nothing to do with chiaroscuro.* 
 The virtue of glass is to be transparent every- 
 where. If you care to build a palace of jewels, 
 painted glass is richer than all the treasures of 
 Aladdin's lamp ; but if you like pictures better 
 
 * There is noble chiaroscuro in the variations of their 
 colour, but not as representative of solid form.
 
 VII. COLOUR. 231 
 
 than jewels, you must come into broad daylight 
 to paint them. A picture in coloured glass is 
 one of the most vulgar of barbarisms, and only 
 fit to be ranked with the gauze transparencies 
 and chemical illuminations of the sensational 
 stage. 
 
 Also, put out of your minds at once all ques- 
 tion about difficulty of getting colour ; in glass 
 we have all the colours that are wanted, only 
 we do not know either how to choose, or how 
 to connect them ; and we are always trying to 
 get them bright, when their real virtues are to 
 be deep, mysterious, and subdued. We will 
 have a thorough study of painted glass soon : 
 meanwhile I merely give you a type of its perfect 
 style, in two windows from Chalons-sur-Marne 
 (S. 141). 
 
 187. But for my own part, with what poor 
 gift and skill is in me, I belong wholly to the 
 chiaroscurist school ; and shall teach you there- 
 fore chiefly that which I am best able to teach : 
 and the rather, that it is only in this school that 
 you can follow out the study either of natural 
 history or landscape. The form of a wild 
 animal, or the wrath of a mountain torrent, 
 would both be revolting (or in a certain sense
 
 232 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 invisible) to the calm fantasy of a painter in 
 the schools of crystal. He must lay his lion 
 asleep in St. Jerome's study beside his tame 
 partridge and easy slippers ; lead the appeased 
 river by alternate azure promontories, and re- 
 strain its courtly little streamlets with margins 
 of marble. But, on the other hand, your studies 
 of mythology and literature may best be con- 
 nected with these schools of purest and calmest 
 imagination ; and their discipline will be useful 
 to you in yet another direction, and that a very 
 important one. It will teach you to take delight 
 in little things, and develope in you the joy 
 which all men should feel in purity and order, 
 not only in pictures but in reality. For, indeed, 
 the best art of this school of fantasy may at 
 last be in reality, and the chiaroscurists, true in 
 ideal, may be less helpful in act. We cannot 
 arrest sunsets nor carve mountains, but we may 
 turn every English homestead, if we choose, into 
 a picture by Cima or John Bellini, which shall be 
 ' no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image 
 of life indeed.' 
 
 188. For the present, however, and yet for 
 some little time during your progress, you will 
 not have to choose your school. For both, as
 
 VII. COLOUR. 233 
 
 we have seen, begin in delineation, and both 
 proceed by filling flat spaces with an even tint. 
 And therefore this following will be the course of 
 work for you, founded on all that we have seen. 
 
 Having learned to measure, and draw a pen 
 line with some steadiness (the geometrical exer- 
 cises for this purpose being properly school, not 
 University work), you shall have a series of 
 studies from the plants which are of chief import- 
 ance in the history of art ; first from their real 
 forms, and then from the conventional and her- 
 aldic expressions of them ; then we will take 
 examples of the filling of ornamental forms with 
 flat colour in Egyptian, Greek, and Gothic de- 
 sign ; and then we will advance to animal forms 
 treated in the same severe way, and so to the 
 patterns and colour designs on animals them- 
 selves. And when we are sure of our firmness 
 of hand and accuracy of eye, we will go on into 
 light and shade. 
 
 189. In process of time, this series of exer- 
 cises will, I hope, be sufficiently complete and 
 systematic to show its purpose at a glance. But 
 during the present year, I shall content myself 
 with placing a few examples of these different 
 kinds of practice in your rooms for work,
 
 234 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 explaining in the catalogue the position they 
 will ultimately occupy, and the technical points 
 of process into which it is useless to enter in 
 a general lecture. After a little time spent in 
 copying these, your own predilections must 
 determine your future course of study ; only 
 remember, whatever school you follow, it must 
 be only to learn method, not to imitate result, 
 and to acquaint yourself with the minds of other 
 men, but not to adopt them as your own. Be 
 assured that no good can come of our work but 
 as it arises simply out of our own true natures, 
 and the necessities of the time around us, 
 though in many respects an evil one. We live 
 in an age of base conceit and baser servility 
 — an age whose intellect is chiefly formed by 
 pillage, and occupied in desecration ; one day 
 mimicking, the next destroying, the works of 
 all the noble persons who made its intellectual 
 or art life possible to it : — an age without honest 
 confidence enough in itself to carve a cherry- 
 stone with an original fancy, but with insolence 
 enough to abolish the solar system, if it were 
 allowed to meddle with it.* In the midst of all 
 
 * Every day these bitter words become more sorrow- 
 fully true (September, 18S7).
 
 VII. COLOUR. 235 
 
 this, you have to become lowly and strong ; to 
 recognise the powers of others and to fulfil your 
 own. I shall try to bring before you every form 
 of ancient art, that you may read and profit by 
 it, not imitate it. You shall draw Egyptian 
 kings dressed in colours like the rainbow, and 
 Doric gods, and Runic monsters, and Gothic 
 monks — not that you may draw like Egyptians 
 or Norsemen, nor yield yourselves passively to 
 be bound by the devotion, or inspired by the 
 passion of the past, but that you may know 
 truly what other men have felt during their poor 
 span of life ; and open your own hearts to what 
 the heavens and earth may have to tell you in 
 yours. 
 
 190. In closing this first course of lectures, 
 I have one word more to say respecting the 
 possible consequence of the introduction of art 
 among the studies of the University. What 
 art may do for scholarship, I have no right to 
 conjecture ; but what scholarship may do for 
 art, I may in all modesty tell you. Hitherto, 
 great artists, though always gentlemen, have 
 yet been too exclusively craftsmen. Art has 
 been less thoughtful than we suppose ; it has 
 taught much, but erred much, also. Many
 
 2 $6 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 of the greatest pictures are enigmas; others, 
 beautiful toys ; others, harmful and corrupting 
 enchantments. In the loveliest, there is some- 
 thing weak ; in the greatest, there is something 
 guilty. And this, gentlemen, if you will, is the 
 new thing that may come to pass, — that the 
 scholars of England may resolve to teach also 
 with the silent power of the arts ; and that 
 some among you may so learn and use them, 
 that pictures may be painted which shall not be 
 enigmas any more, but open teachings of what 
 can no otherwise be so well shown ; — which 
 shall not be fevered or broken visions any more, 
 but filled with the indwelling light of self- 
 possessed imagination ; — which shall not be 
 stained or enfeebled any more by evil passion, 
 but glorious with the strength and chastity of 
 noble human love; — and which shall no more 
 degrade or disguise the work of God in heaven, 
 but testify of Him as here dwelling with men, 
 and walking with them, not angry, in the 
 garden of the earth. 
 
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