'Art/ a: THE' 
 
 'FOFLNflTlON' 
 "OF'T A 5TE' 
 
 'UUCY'CR.ANE- 
 
 
 
ANt> THE F0R.MAT10N/ OF "TASTE 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2014 
 
 https://archive.org/details/artformationoftaOOcran 
 
ARJT, 
 
 /!»NfD THE FOR-MATION OF TASTE 
 SIX J.ECTUieE^ 
 
 By 
 
 L.UCV CR.AtsI£: 
 
 THOMAS ^ WALTER. CRAME. 
 
 LO (SJDOW 
 MACMlt-LAsJ ^Co 
 
ART 
 
 AND 
 
 THE FORMATION OF TASTE 
 
 SIX LECTURES 
 
 BY 
 
 LUCY CRANE 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 DRAWN BY 
 
 THOMAS AND WALTER CRANE 
 
 HonUon 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 1882 
 
iHEGEHY mm 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Memoir . , ix 
 
 I. Introductory i 
 
 II. Decorative Art — Form .... 50 
 
 III. Decorative Art — Colour, Dress, and 
 
 Needlework 97 
 
 IV. Fine Arts 152 
 
 V. Fine Art — Sculpture and Architecture 197 
 
 VI. Fine Art — Painting 242 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 PAGE DRAWN BY 
 
 Frontispiece — Portrait . . Walter Cram. 
 vii Memorial Card . . ,, 
 I. Prehistoric Bone Drawing . ,, 
 /1 6. Part of Parthenon Frieze . ,, 
 
 49. Stone Hammer and Cyprus Vase Thomas Crane. 
 
 50. Objects of Metal, Glass, and 
 
 Pottery 
 
 76. A Fireplace in Summer 
 
 96. A China Plate 
 
 97. Pattern for Chair-Back 
 142. Oriental Embroidery 
 151. Pattern for Chair-Back 
 152. 
 
 Group from Raphael's Dispute 
 OF THE Sacrament 
 
 Walter Crane. 
 
viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 PAGE DRAWN BY 
 
 1 88. Venus of Milos . . . Walter Crane, 
 
 196. Titian's Flora .... 
 
 197, Temple of Poseidon ... ,, 
 230. St. Mark's, Venice ... 
 
 241. Amiens Cathedral ... 
 
 242. Leonardo's Last Supper . . 
 264. Michael Angelo's Creation . 
 
 292. Burne Jones — Hope ... „ 
 
Lucy Crane, the eldest daughter of the 
 late Thomas and Marie (Kearsley) Crane of 
 Chester, was born in Liverpool, September 
 22, 1842. Her father was an artist of 
 some repute in his day, more especially for 
 the grace and charm of his portraits and 
 miniatures. He was a student and a medal- 
 list at the Royal Academy, and afterwards 
 exhibited there, and some time secretary and 
 treasurer of the Liverpool Academy. Owing 
 to his ill-health the family went in 1845 to 
 live at Torquay, where Lucy Crane passed 
 
X 
 
 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 her early years, and from here went to school 
 in London. 
 
 In 1857 the family left Torquay and 
 took up their abode in the western suburbs 
 of London, where in 1859 Thomas Crane, 
 the father, died. 
 
 From an early age Lucy Crane showed 
 considerable taste and skill in drawing and 
 colouring. Circumstances, however, turned 
 her attention to general educational work, 
 the field of her labours being confined to a 
 few private families, where her high qualities 
 were known and appreciated. Perhaps the 
 best tribute to her success is the fact that 
 some of her most attached and valued friends 
 in after life had been her early pupils. 
 
 Music had always been especially studied 
 and practised by her, and she was remark- 
 able as an executant for her delicacy of 
 touch, as well as for the classical refinement 
 of her taste and her knowledge of the earlier 
 Italian and English masters. 
 
 She cultivated herself, too, in literature, 
 and practised, both in prose and verse ; but 
 
IN MEMORIAM. 
 
 xi 
 
 her fastidious taste and devotion to her pro- 
 fessional work prevented her from completing 
 very much in this direction. Among her 
 early work, however, may be mentioned an 
 essay, and a poem with the burden from 
 Chaucer — 
 
 Si douce est la Marguerite," 
 
 contributed to "The Argosy" some years 
 ago. She also wrote the original verses, 
 and rhymed versions of well-known nursery 
 legends for her brother's (Walter Crane's) 
 coloured toy-books. Among the original 
 verses may be named " How Jessie was 
 Lost," " The Adventures of Puffy," " Annie 
 and Jack in London," which severally ap- 
 peared in the series. The selection and 
 arrangement of the accompaniments to the 
 nursery songs in " The Baby's Opera " and 
 the " Baby's Bouquet " are also due to her ; 
 and a new translation by her of the Haus- 
 marchen of the Brothers Grimm, illustrated 
 by her brother Walter Crane, is published 
 by Messrs. Macmillan. 
 
 Of late years Lucy Crane had been 
 
xii 
 
 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 engaged in preparing and delivering the 
 Lectures on " Art, and the Formation of 
 Taste " which are given in this book. These 
 Lectures had their origin in some discourses 
 given by her in the classrooms of her friend 
 Miss Janion. The interest aroused in these 
 induced her to elaborate her scheme, and to 
 appeal to larger audiences. The Lectures 
 in their present form were delivered with 
 much success in London, at Eastbourne, and 
 at the house of Mr. and Mrs. Craik, Short- 
 lands, Beckenham ; and their author had 
 only just completed the delivery of the 
 course in the North of England — at Leeds, 
 Harrogate, Halifax, Southport, Wakefield, 
 and Bolton, — where she met with many 
 friends and much sympathy, when the 
 illness, culminating in an attack of heart- 
 disease, came on, which ended so suddenly 
 and fatally, on the 31st of March 1882, 
 at the house of a friend at Bolton le Moors. 
 She had written earlier in the month in the 
 best of health and spirits, and was looking 
 forward to a tour in Italy, but it is to be 
 
IN MEMORIAM. 
 
 feared she had overtasked her strength ; and 
 though the interest and excitement of the 
 work carried her on, and sustained her until 
 it was completed, she had not sufficient 
 reserve to support the reaction and fatigue 
 which followed. Her health was never very 
 strong, and her courage and energy were 
 always greater than her powers of endur- 
 ance. 
 
 It is thought that this volume may serve 
 as a memorial of her to her personal friends, 
 and to those who heard the Lectures, inde- 
 pendently of the value and service the book 
 may bear for that now large public interested 
 in its special subject, on which it must be 
 left to speak for itself The illustrations, 
 for the most part, have been drawn from 
 photographs and objects used to illustrate 
 the Lectures. The mammoth carving has 
 been added as an illustration of the art of 
 the cavemen referred to in the text, so that 
 the book opens with a specimen of pre- 
 historic design, and ends with one from the 
 work of a contemporary artist. 
 
LECTURES ON ART, 
 
 AND THE 
 
 FORMATION OF TASTE. 
 
 L_INTRODUCTORY, 
 
 I AM sensible that the title of my Lectures 
 
 will have been likely to produce a variety of 
 
 expectations in the minds of my intending 
 
 hearers, and perhaps will lead in the end to 
 
 a corresponding number of disappointments ; 
 
 for the lavish use of the word Art in these 
 
 days has given rise to such a number of false 
 
 impressions, that the word seems to need de- 
 B 
 
2 LECTURES ON ART. [i. 
 
 fining afresh — its functions and proper appli- 
 cation to need marking out all over again — 
 that we may know to what we are committing 
 ourselves when we talk of " Art-decoration," 
 " Art - colours," " Art - fabrics," " Art - needle- 
 work," and so on ; and, moreover, what is 
 exactly meant, when people say — as I most 
 earnestly wish they would not — that they 
 " go in for High Art." The word seems 
 really to have lost the power of express- 
 ing what those who care for it in its right 
 meaning would have it express. Let us 
 try to get at that right meaning, and learn 
 to use it properly. " Art-decoration," " Art- 
 embroidery," and the like, are tautological 
 expressions. If such things exist at all, they 
 must of necessity be Art^ and belong to it, 
 just as geography and chemistry must of 
 necessity be Science, and belong to it. The 
 distinction which has somehow arisen between 
 " Colour " and " Art - colour " is a quite 
 unreasonable one, and based on false ideas. 
 If a colour is of such a nature as to be inad- 
 missible in Art, it is no colour at all, properly 
 
I.] INTRODUCTORY. 3 
 
 speaking ; it is a stain, a dye, a pigment. 
 It is easy to trace these expressions back to 
 their origin. They were invented by shop- 
 keepers, to characterise a kind of goods got 
 up in a certain style to please that part of 
 the public that cares for fashion and novelty 
 alone ; and has no higher aims or desires, 
 and wishes to have none. So let us leave 
 such expressions to their inventors, who, by 
 bad imitations of the good work of our time, 
 seek to catch our fancy, careless or idle, as 
 we most of us are, or else too busy to pay 
 any regard to such matters. There is, how- 
 ever, no sort of lasting satisfaction in merely 
 following blindly the fashion of the day, 
 whether it be in house decoration, or in 
 colouring, or in dress, or in pictures ; for it 
 seems there is a fashion even in these. Ideas 
 hastily caught up, and adopted without 
 reason and consideration, must be shallow 
 and worthless ones. The love of novelty 
 is opposed to the production of good art 
 which is in its nature and constitution 
 lasting, living, and in a sense immortal : 
 
4 LECTURES ON ART. [i. 
 
 in the race for novelty, the last new thing 
 runs down the one before it, only to 
 perish in its turn, because it deserves no 
 better fate. But for those of us who care 
 for something more in our lives than 
 fashion and novelty, it is worth while to 
 examine into the real nature and true 
 meaning of Art, so as to possess ourselves 
 of all the various knowledge and pleasure 
 it is capable of giving. 
 
 So, to guard against any misconception 
 from the beginning, let me attempt to define 
 what Art is. The word in its original sense 
 meant force or strength, and it was applied 
 to mechanical work ; and is so still. We 
 speak of the art of weaving, the art of print- 
 ing, the florist's art, the art of cooking, and 
 so on ; and in these we mean to express the 
 result of man's putting forth his hand and 
 operating on Nature ; and Art in its widest 
 sense has come to be " Human labour regu- 
 lated by human design." But within this 
 wide sense are other senses in which the 
 word may be, and often is, taken, such as 
 
I.] INTRODUCTORY. 5 
 
 Art as opposed to Science — that is, the 
 doing of a thing as opposed to the knowing 
 of it, practice as distinguished from theory 
 — and then Art as opposed to Nature ; and 
 with this we shall have something to do. But 
 it is in none of these senses we want to con- 
 sider it to-day. We have to consider Art as 
 a world of itself, created out of Nature by 
 the hand of the artist-workman. Art has 
 been called the "flowering of man's moral 
 nature," — it is a natural growth out of, and 
 beyond mere material necessities ; to it we 
 owe everything in the whole range of human 
 productions which appeals to the sense of 
 beauty, and the thoughts awakened in us by 
 beauty. The Artistic sense by which we 
 appreciate these things may be counted as 
 a sixth sense ; it may be possessed in a 
 greater or less degree by the individual, 
 but it exists in every one, and may be 
 developed by training and cultivation like 
 the other senses. To cultivate and exercise 
 judiciously the Artistic sense, is to be a 
 person of Taste. To possess it and to 
 
6 LECTURES ON ART. [i. 
 
 cultivate it in an extraordinary degree, is to 
 be an Artist. 
 
 I said that to understand the real nature 
 of Art is to possess ourselves of the various 
 pleasures it is capable of giving. For I 
 must premise that the end and aim of Art, 
 and, therefore, of the cultivation of the 
 Artistic sense, is to give pleasure in the 
 common things of life by giving to them 
 beauty of form, pattern, colour ; and next, 
 pleasure of a still higher order by translating 
 and transforming the things of Nature into 
 the beauty of picture, statue, or building. 
 Nor let us be offended at having to recognise 
 that in studying Art, we are merely^ as we 
 should say, seeking after pleasure. It is the 
 sort of pleasure that is in all elevated things, 
 and appeals to the purest and most intel- 
 lectual side of our nature ; there can be no 
 degradation, no intemperance in the cultiva- 
 tion, the indulgence of the Artistic sense. 
 The pleasure it subserves lies at the root, 
 and is the inspiration of music and poetry, 
 as well as of painting, and sculpture, and 
 
I.] INTRODUCTORY. 7 
 
 architecture. It is Beauty that is sought for 
 in all these ; Beauty is the source of the 
 pleasure we find in them, and, without 
 Beauty, any manifestation of these great arts 
 is nothing worth. We ask of a musical 
 composition, not only that it shall be in 
 strict accordance with all technical rules, 
 but also that it shall enchant us with the 
 beauty of its melody or the sublimity of its 
 form ; we ask not only that a poem shall 
 be written in faultless language and rhythm, 
 but that it shall appeal with a higher beauty 
 to the mind and the heart : so it would not 
 be enough for a picture to be designed 
 according to the strictest laws of composi- 
 tion and perspective, or for a statue to obey 
 every rule of anatomy, or for a building to 
 have every proportional and geometric per- 
 fection — there must be a soul of beauty and 
 sublimity in the picture, the statue, the 
 building, as well as in the musical composi- 
 tion and the poem ; and then by them we 
 shall be made to feel the highest pleasure of 
 which our nature is capable — a pleasure 
 
8 LECTURES ON ART. [i. 
 
 which nourishes the intellect in delighting 
 the senses, and, through them, the heart. 
 At the head of these greater Arts, the Fine 
 Arts properly so called — Poetry, Music, 
 Painting, Sculpture, Architecture — at the 
 head of each of these stand great names 
 with which we are all familiar ; of their 
 minds and works we know something, and 
 that something is usually the basis of our 
 knowledge of those Arts themselves. Our 
 admiration of the music of Handel, and 
 Bach, and Beethoven, grows deeper as our 
 theoretical understanding and practical ex- 
 perience of the Art of Music increases; the 
 more we learn about the nature and powers 
 of language, and the larger our experience 
 of life, the more we appreciate and admire 
 Shakespeare, and Dante, and Goethe ; and 
 with inquiry into a study of the nature and 
 history of the Arts, joined with as much 
 practical knowledge of them as may be 
 possible, we shall enter the more fully into 
 the minds and works of the Great Masters 
 of Sculpture and Painting — Pheidias and 
 
I.] INTRODUCTORY. 9 
 
 Michael Angelo, Leonardo and Raphael 
 and Titian, — so that they may be something 
 more to us than merely great names, and 
 their high reputation may be justified to us. 
 So, too, is there much to be learned and 
 enjoyed in the marvels of the architecture of 
 all ages^ — that the Greek, the Romanesque, 
 the Gothic, shall be more than barren 
 names ; and following in the train of these 
 great men and periods of Fine Art come a 
 crowd of lesser arts, such as the arts of the 
 potter, the carver in wood, in stone, in ivory, 
 of the metal-worker, the weaver, the em- 
 broiderer, and many others — arts which lend 
 beauty of form, and pattern, and colour, to 
 the common things of life, — each of which 
 has laws and a character of its own to be 
 studied, in accordance with which Beauty 
 is fitly joined with Use ; the one furthering 
 rather than interfering with the functions of 
 the other. 
 
 All this opens a very large prospect. But 
 everything must have a beginning ; and it 
 is this little beginning that I want to make 
 
lo LECTURES ON ART. [i. 
 
 in the minds of those for whom it has not 
 already been made — a little gate into that 
 great field, that vast kingdom of Art, which 
 contains within it things small and great, 
 and of infinite diversity, from the pattern 
 on the door-knob to the sculptures of the 
 Parthenon. 
 
 And in this great kingdom Nature and 
 History must be our guides. As a first step, 
 I propose to consider the Art of man in three 
 conditions or stages, and to offer to your 
 observation an example of each. 
 
 1. Art, in its original stage, purely neces- 
 sary and useful. 
 
 2. Art decorative. 
 
 3. Fine Art. 
 
 In the first place — to consider Art purely 
 necessary and useful — we are led back to the 
 earliest ages of the world, and we must look 
 for a moment at Primitive Man, in order to 
 find how, out of the purely necessary and 
 useful, grew the germs of that love of beauty 
 which governs the kingdom we are about to 
 explore. From the time of his first existence 
 
I.] INTRODUCTORY. ii 
 
 Man has to defend himself against Nature 
 and against his own kind — against weather, 
 scarcity, sickness, and times of war ; so he 
 must provide for himself food, clothing, shelter, 
 weapons. And so do the first arts arise ; he 
 tills the ground, he navigates the sea and 
 rivers, he exercises various kinds of industries, 
 he establishes families, states, and some sort 
 of law and government, — with all this he is a 
 mere animal, only somewhat better provided 
 than the rest of the animals. 
 
 We have been told of bees, and ants, and 
 beavers, and the like, that have reached, or 
 almost reached, this point — this stage of pro- 
 ficiency in the Arts of pure use and neces- 
 sity ; but the difference between them and 
 us is this, that here they stop, while man 
 goes on. The cell of the bee, the home of 
 the ant, reached their perfection ages ago, 
 and their makers and inhabiters are content; 
 but the powers, and necessities, and inclina- 
 tions, of man, go on ever developing and 
 multiplying, and then there comes a time 
 when, having supplied his bodily necessities. 
 
12 LECTURES ON ART. [i. 
 
 he ceases to care only for them — he ceases 
 to care merely for Use, he begins to have 
 notions of Beauty. . 
 
 And so we come to the second stage — Art 
 decorative. " The first spiritual want of a 
 barbarous man," says Carlyle, " is decoration." 
 That want began to develop itself ages before 
 the time of which we have any certain record ; 
 and the same thing is still to be observed 
 among tribes of savage men at the present 
 day. He — the savage, the barbarous man — 
 scratches patterns on his weapons, his paddles, 
 his tools and utensils of all sorts, and on his 
 own body as well ; next he begins to weave 
 stuffs for his wearing, and to trace in their 
 texture, patterns — first geometric, then imita- 
 tions of animal and vegetable life — in short, 
 he learns to decorate whatever he wears or 
 uses, and to find a pleasure in the object 
 beyond its use, a pleasure of the eye, a de- 
 light in Beauty ; and so he gradually creates 
 a new and wonderful thing — the Artistic 
 Sense. There have been ages of which there 
 is no historical record other than geology 
 
I.] INTRODUCTORY. 13 
 
 can furnish, and to which she has given the 
 names of the Stone and the Bronze Ages, 
 from the material of the implements and 
 objects found in different strata of the earth's 
 crust. 
 
 To the earliest of all, the Stone Age, 
 belong only roughly -fashioned flints, labori- 
 ously wrought by other flints into some 
 semblance of a tool ; and one feels that the 
 difficulty of barely living, must have been 
 enough to occupy the whole faculties and 
 powers of man as they were then. But to 
 the later Bronze Period quite beautifully- 
 shaped and decorated vessels belong, and 
 even personal ornaments ; but still there is 
 no attempt to reproduce, or in any wise to 
 imitate, the human form. So the Stone Age 
 may represent to us the first stage, which 
 I have attempted to describe, when Art is 
 purely necessary and useful ; and the Bronze 
 Age the second stage, when Art has become 
 decorative, and fulfils needs both of Use and 
 Beauty. 
 
 As an example of the first, the Stone 
 
14 LECTURES ON ART. [i. 
 
 Age, I will ask you to notice one of those 
 roughly- fashioned stone hammers which are 
 found everywhere all over the world in those 
 parts of its strata which correspond to the 
 Stone Age (see tailpiece). This thing is pre- 
 historic ; it has served some primitive man as 
 his earliest tool or weapon, before he had suffi- 
 cient knowledge or skill to invent or imagine 
 anything better. Such things are found in 
 Britain, in Asia, in the Arctic regions, and 
 among the ancient lake and cave dwellings 
 — this the rudimentary phase of the Art 
 of Man. 
 
 And next, as an example of the second, 
 the decorative stage, here is a vase found in 
 Cyprus {see tailpiece), of ancient rough -clay 
 pottery. You see its reddish-brown concentric 
 lines, resembling very closely the sort of orna- 
 ment still bestowed on vessels made from 
 gourds in the East, and there is even a rudely- 
 drawn bird on the space beneath the spout. 
 This form of vase and its decoration having 
 been invented in very early times, was adhered 
 to for centuries with but little change. Mr. 
 
I.] INTRODUCTORY. 15 
 
 Murray, the keeper of the vase-room at the 
 British Museum, tells me the date of this vase 
 may be 600 B.C., or it may be four centuries 
 later. At all events it exemplifies the need 
 and taste for ornament at a time, and in a 
 state of civilisation, when appliances and tools 
 were rude, and skill in dealing with them had 
 not advanced very far. Still here is the orna- 
 ment — the desire for beauty. 
 
 Both of these stages the highly- civilised 
 nations of the past as well as of the present 
 day have gone through and left far behind. 
 For no sooner has Decorative Art been in- 
 vented than more advanced necessities arise, 
 mental sensibilities grow, and need to be 
 gratified. Man learns to look before and 
 after, concerning the things of the mind, as 
 well as those of the body. Memory, imagina- 
 tion, reflection, with an extended sense of 
 beauty derived from and fed by these, lead 
 him to produce writings, paintings, images — - 
 things that supply no bodily need or pleasure 
 whatever, but needs and pleasures of the 
 intellect and the heart. This stage must be 
 
i6 LECTURES ON ART. [i. 
 
 reached before any records of the past, any 
 legend, story, or song, any monuments or 
 noble buildings, any representations of gods 
 or heroes, any rites of religion, can be con- 
 ceived or produced ; and thus time brings 
 about the birth of the Fine Arts (our third 
 stage) Music and Poetry, as well as those 
 which belong directly to my subject. Painting, 
 Sculpture, and Architecture. 
 
 The intimate connection which subsists 
 between all these Arts, however, will be more 
 particularly dwelt upon in my fourth Lecture. 
 Of these five Fine Arts, only Architecture is 
 founded on any material use or necessity. I 
 say founded on merely, because very plain 
 and commonplace buildings of various sizes 
 and degrees of strength would give us all we 
 actually need for dwellings and defences and 
 places of public assembly ; but from the days 
 of the Tower of Babel men have wanted more. 
 So we have had the Egyptian Pyramid, the 
 Greek Temple, the Roman Arches of Triumph, 
 the Byzantine Churches and Mosques, the 
 Gothic Cathedrals of the Middle Ages, and 
 
I.] INTRODUCTORY. 17 
 
 the Splendid buildings of the Renaissance. 
 These, and such as these, enriched and 
 adorned with the best Sculpture and Painting 
 of their various periods, are the very head 
 and crown of all that man has ever achieved ; 
 he has invented these glorious means of 
 expressing the boundless faith and hope 
 and love which are his eternal heritage. To 
 such a culmination have risen the blind 
 instincts, the vague imaginings of man, — the 
 savage. 
 
 And this, a reduced copy of part of the 
 
 frieze of the Parthenon — the triumph and 
 
 perfection of Athenian Art — is my example 
 
 of the third stage. I shall have to consider 
 
 more particularly, in my fifth Lecture, the 
 
 causes and the nature of this perfection ; for 
 
 the present it is enough to say, that as the 
 
 stone-hammer is the rudest and lowest type 
 
 of human workmanship, this Sculpture from 
 
 the hand of Pheidias is the best and highest 
 
 — never likely, or even possible, to be excelled 
 
 in any future age of the world. 
 
 I have now roughly sketched the three 
 C 
 
i8 LECTURES ON ART. [i. 
 
 stages by which Art has reached so great a 
 place in the life of man, — how, from the 
 mechanical Arts of pure use and necessity, 
 arose the desire and practice of ornamenting 
 the objects formed by these Arts, and how, 
 rising higher yet, came the desire for embody- 
 ing loftier thoughts in things more beautiful 
 still — the statue, the picture, the noble build- 
 ing. If all this is made clear to you, you 
 will see the scope of my subject, and what in 
 future lectures I shall attempt to set before 
 you. 
 
 Setting aside the first stage as already 
 passed and done with, we shall have to con- 
 sider those Decorative Arts that, still resting 
 on Use and Necessity, seek to add beauty to 
 the things of common life, such as the paint- 
 ing of the vase, the modelling of the glass 
 vessel, and the colouring and pattern of wear- 
 ing -stuffs, and many more. Then we shall 
 come to the consideration of the greater ideal 
 Arts that have Beauty alone for their end and 
 aim — the Arts of Painting, Sculpture, and 
 Architecture. I shall try to point out how. 
 
I.] INTRODUCTORY. 19 
 
 with the growth and development of these 
 greater Arts, the Decorative Arts have grown 
 and developed too, through the ages, — that 
 there have been periods when the Art of some 
 great nation has seemed to reach ideal per- 
 fection for one charmed moment, and then 
 has sunk to decay and almost death. Such 
 have been the great period of Greek Sculp- 
 ture in the fifth century before Christ, the 
 great period of Italian Painting in the fifteenth 
 and sixteenth centuries. I shall try to describe 
 these to you, and their fruits, and to show 
 you how, unlike these, Architecture has had 
 various periods and styles of equal excellence. 
 In leading you to see how the common world 
 fared in respect of Art at those great periods, 
 I shall ask you to consider how it is faring 
 at the present day. 
 
 But now to proceed with the more general 
 remarks that belong to this, my introductory 
 Lecture ; and before quite setting aside the 
 Arts of pure use, let us see for a moment to 
 what an extent they are carried in the present 
 day — Arts subservient to life, that supply 
 
20 LECTURES ON ART. [i. 
 
 our needs apart from considerations of Beauty 
 or Taste. From the earliest times these Arts 
 have been increasing, improving, developing ; 
 new necessities are still arising every day, 
 and new, contrivances for supplying them ; 
 and the primitive needs of food, clothing, 
 shelter, weapons, have grown rather more 
 comprehensive ! Think of the thousands of 
 Arts that are comprised under each one of 
 these four heads — animal, vegetable, mineral 
 substances manipulated in a million different 
 ways. I suppose it would be impossible to 
 find anywhere within present reach a material 
 substance that has not been modified in some 
 way by the hand of man for his convenience 
 — wood is cut and carved, turned, polished, 
 painted ; stone is polished, cut, and carved ; 
 metals are melted, mingled, moulded, chased ; 
 animals are tamed, trained, and modified by 
 breeding; the very flowers are made to assume 
 shapes double or single, and to vary their 
 hues at the will of the gardener — the whole 
 creation bears the signs of man's labour or 
 training, and look where we will in this 
 
I.] INTRODUCTORY. 21 
 
 country and in these times, we can see 
 nothing untouched but the sky and the sea ; 
 and perhaps we must not even except the 
 sky, at least in London — and I may say 
 in Lancashire as well — for it often looks, 
 through the smoke which seems to form it, 
 but another kind of manufacture, and a very 
 disagreeable kind of manufacture too ! 
 
 And in these manifold labours of the world 
 there is no hand, howsoever idle, but bears 
 its part. We all have a degree of practical 
 knowledge of some purely useful art — some 
 mechanical dexterity at least in managing 
 the hammer or the knife, the needle or the 
 spade — some skill in sewing, in cookery, in 
 gardening, in carpentry ; so that at need some 
 of us could play the part of Robinson Crusoe 
 not quite ungracefully. 
 
 Practice in these things helps to educate 
 the eye and hand, and gives competence of 
 judging as to the fitness for practical purposes 
 of tools and material, and of the quality of 
 any kind of workmanship ; and this com- 
 petence of judgment is not without import- 
 
22 LECTURES ON ART. [i. 
 
 ance for my present purpose, as I shall show 
 you presently. 
 
 We have seen that as Man extracts a use 
 from every material substance, and makes it 
 serve his purpose in some way, so hand in 
 hand with every use comes also a desire for 
 beauty, so that every useful object has its 
 appropriate, or what should be its appropriate, 
 ornament. But suppose that Man, in thus put- 
 ting forth his hand and operating on Nature, 
 changing her raw material into Art — suppose 
 he produces, instead of Use and Beauty, 
 worthlessness and hideousness ; out of good 
 stone, and clay, and wood, making bad houses 
 and bad furniture ; out of good coal, making 
 bad magenta dye ; causing good sound wood 
 or metal to put on some false varnished face 
 to imitate other woods and metals ; using his 
 own wonderful mechanical skill and dexterity 
 in carving nets and scales of fish out of wood, 
 and feathers out of metal, and fringes out of 
 stone ; spending his valuable time and brains 
 in contriving how to make cotton look like 
 silk, and paper look like leather, and leather 
 
I.] INTRODUCTORY. 23 
 
 look like wood, and wood look like stone ; 
 till we gaze round us and wonder if anything 
 is what it ought to be. 
 
 I will read in this place an extract 
 from a lecture of Mr. William Morris's, as 
 he expresses what I next want to say so 
 much better than I could possibly do. He 
 is speaking of the Decorative Arts, "by 
 means of which," he says, " men have at all 
 times more or less striven to beautify the 
 familiar matters of everyday life : a wide 
 subject, a great industry ; both a great part 
 of the history of the world and a most help- 
 ful instrument to the study of that history. 
 A very great industry indeed, comprising the 
 trades of housebuilding, painting, joinery and 
 carpentry, smith's work, pottery and glass- 
 making, weaving, and many others : a body 
 of art most important to the public in general, 
 but still more so to us handicraftsmen ; since 
 there is scarce anything that they use and 
 that we fashion, but it has always been 
 thought to be unfinished till it has had some 
 touch or other of decoration about it. True 
 
24 LECTURES ON ART. [i. 
 
 it IS, that in many or most cases we have got 
 so used to this ornament that we look upon 
 it as if it had grown of itself, and note it no 
 more than the mosses on the dry sticks with 
 which we light our fires. So much the 
 worse ! for there is the decoration or some 
 pretence of it, and it has or ought to have 
 a use and a meaning. For, and this is at the 
 root of the whole matter, everything made 
 by man's hand has a form which must be 
 either beautiful or ugly — beautiful if it is in 
 accord with Nature and helps her ; ugly if it 
 is discordant with Nature and thwarts her. 
 It cannot be indifferent ; we for our part are 
 busy or sluggish, eager or unhappy, and our 
 eyes are apt to get dulled to this eventful- 
 ness of form in those things which we are 
 always looking at. Now it is one of the 
 chief uses of decoration, the chief part of its 
 alliance with Nature, that it has to sharpen 
 our dulled senses in this matter ; for this end 
 are those wonders of intricate patterns inter- 
 woven, those strange forms invented, that men 
 have so long delighted in, — forms and intri- 
 
I.] INTRODUCTORY. 25 
 
 cades that do not necessarily imitate Nature, 
 but in which the hand . of the craftsman is 
 guided to work in the way that she does ; till 
 the web, the cup, or the knife, look as natural, 
 nay as lovely, as the green field, the river- 
 bank, or the mountain flint." 
 
 " To give people pleasure in the things 
 they must perforce use^ that is one great 
 office of decoration : to give people pleasure 
 in the things they must perforce make^ that 
 is the other use of it." 
 
 We have indeed only to look round us 
 for a moment in order to verify this — to 
 become aware that as every material sub- 
 stance we see has been modified in some 
 way or other by the hand of man for his use, 
 so there is no finding any place or object 
 without that " touch of decoration " of which 
 Mr. Morris speaks. Only to grow accus- 
 tomed to noticing this decoration is, for my 
 purpose, a step in the right direction. For 
 instance, no door, even of the very humblest, 
 is satisfied with being merely a means of 
 ingress and egress ; it must seek to please the 
 
26 LECTURES ON ART. [i. 
 
 eye in some way, — the lintel, the side-posts, 
 and the door itself, have some pretence of 
 panelling and moulding or grooving, and it 
 is stained, or painted, or gilded, or grained and 
 varnished, in a more or less pretentious style 
 — scarcely any two doors are alike — and its 
 necessary furniture of latch and handle, and 
 key and finger-plate, is made ornamental in 
 some way with the intention of pleasing some 
 one. Originally it pleased both the maker and 
 the user ; but now it is made and used as a 
 matter of course, and, ceasing to notice it, we 
 have lost the pleasure. The railway carriage, 
 too, has its mouldings, and groovings, and 
 gildings, its bits of coloured glass — the very 
 letters of the name of the company and the 
 number of the class are woven into ciphers 
 and monograms, and gilded and shaded, and 
 are the result of somebody's taste. It would 
 be tedious to spend more time in pointing 
 out what is so obvious to everybody if they 
 only use their eyes. Still it adds an interest 
 to life to notice these things, and to ascer- 
 tain for ourselves by continued observation 
 
I.] INTRODUCTORY. 27 
 
 that there is no object, for whatever use 
 intended, but has something bestowed on it 
 — either colour or pattern laid on, or form 
 added, not conducing to its use in any way — 
 that something being Decoration. I said 
 not conducing to its use. I am sorry to 
 say that in these later days of civilisation we 
 often see ornament distinctly hindering use. 
 See to what a pass civilisation has brought 
 our fire-irons, things of everyday use and 
 necessity. A century or so ago they were 
 lightly made, of a size and shape to be held 
 and used easily, and they did their work well ; 
 then, as luxury and ostentation increased, 
 the poker, and the shovel, and the tongs 
 became larger and heavier, so as to look 
 massive and handsome, and as if a good deal 
 of money had been spent upon them ; their 
 shape was altered to suit new and unreason- 
 able notions of elegance — they began to be 
 made of burnished steel and lacquer -work 
 of a lustre easily tarnished and laboriously 
 renewed ; and finally they left off work alto- 
 gether, being too fine for it, and were obliged 
 
28 LECTURES ON ART. [i. 
 
 to be provided with a humble deputy to do 
 it for them. Of the same kind are candle- 
 sticks that must be preserved like exotics 
 under a glass shade, or call it extinguisher ; 
 curtain -poles so gilded that the real work 
 must be done by iron ones hidden behind ; 
 and cushions and footstools meant for repose, 
 and to that end studded with hard cold 
 beads. Now such ornament as thatjis clear 
 waste and folly, and wrong from the very 
 beginning. The instinct for ornament in 
 earlier stages of civilisation is never found to 
 lead to such a sacrifice. The savage does 
 not so over-decorate his paddle, his knife, his 
 tomahawk, as to render it useless, and a real 
 and capable workman or workwoman has 
 the same true instinct ; and to recur to what 
 I said just now, here should come in the 
 practical knowledge, that I suppose we all 
 of us possess in some direction and in some 
 degree, and which we should be proud of 
 possessing. 
 
 An accomplished needlewoman rejects 
 the highly ornamented and tasselled work- 
 
I.] INTRODUCTORY. 29 
 
 basket with its tinselled implements ; a 
 practised writer objects to a gilded and 
 elaborate inkstand and a gimcrack pen- 
 holder ; and a really clever amateur cook is 
 not over-anxious about the trimming of her 
 apron, so that it is of stout material and the 
 shape that will best protect her dress. To 
 expend labour in disguising use and falsify- 
 ing material, shows an utter misconception 
 of Art and ignorance of Beauty. Ornament 
 has come to be, in these days, a thing of 
 itself, whereas, as such, it has no real reason 
 for existing. I am not speaking now of 
 anything of the nature of a picture or statue. 
 The idea has somehow arisen that a thing, if 
 called an ornament, — however useless, cum- 
 brous, and troublesome, — must be prized and 
 taken care of. Now Mr. Morris says "nothing 
 is ornamental unless it is also really useful." 
 This you will think at the first glance con- 
 demns all or most ornamental objects ; but 
 on examination it is not so. It condemns 
 groups of wax flowers under glass shades ; 
 it condemns vast crochet antimacassars ; it 
 
30 LECTURES ON ART. [i. 
 
 condemns glass fuchsias at the end of curtain- 
 poles ; it condemns huge china pugs and 
 parrots ; it condemns all china and glass 
 objects which will not hold at need flowers, 
 or fruit, or other and more substantial things 
 for which china and glass objects were ori- 
 ginally intended. I do not mean that we 
 may not use china, and glass, and metal, and 
 wooden objects exclusively as ornaments, — as 
 their peculiar beauty or rarity may lead us so 
 to preserve them as merely to be looked at, — 
 but they should have been originally capable 
 of fulfilling perfectly some function or other, 
 or they cannot be truly beautiful ; and the 
 aimlessness of their structure would give a 
 feeble worthless appearance, no matter how 
 much painting and gilding or carving they 
 have received, or how much skill of hand 
 had been expended on them. 
 
 In former times, or earlier stages of civili- 
 sation, that axiom " nothing is ornamental 
 unless it is also at the same time really use- 
 ful " was never lost sight of ; but there was 
 no necessity to put it into words, it was 
 
I.] INTRODUCTORY. 31 
 
 acted upon unconsciously. Regard was had 
 to the appropriateness of the ornament, to 
 the use and material of the object it was 
 intended to beautify; and the forms of nature 
 were studied until the design was invented — 
 found out, that is — exactly suited to the 
 purpose. And man's eye, accustomed only 
 to natural objects, had learned no false taste 
 for glaring colours and exaggerated form ; so 
 his handiwork had real fitness and beauty. 
 I believe much of the decoration so often 
 bad and mistaken in these days, is a survival 
 from those better times. By degrees, delight 
 in ornament — delight once felt both by the 
 maker and the user — ceased to be spon- 
 taneous : still people expected to have it, 
 and to make it. So patterns, and mouldings, 
 and carvings have been borrowed and copied 
 and reproduced over and over again, like a 
 tale repeated from mouth to mouth until it 
 has lost all point and meaning. An example 
 of this is the familiar Greek key or fret 
 pattern — a simple combination of horizontal 
 and perpendicular lines arranged so as to 
 
32 LECTURES ON ART. [i. 
 
 form a continuous running pattern : we see 
 this now used in all sorts of inappropriate 
 ways and places — fitted into the rounded 
 border of a plate, running up a muslin curtain, 
 worked in shaded wools on a table-cloth, 
 chopped into little pieces for brooches and 
 earrings. So is the artistic sense in modern 
 days confused and darkened in us by finding 
 ourselves the inheritors of all the work of 
 the past — ornament of all ages and countries 
 — which we mix up together, and apply in 
 all sorts of incongruous ways, not under- 
 standing the original motive, or not caring 
 to apply it properly. 
 
 Now to inquire into the reason of all this. 
 
 We are accustomed to recognise the 
 necessity for intelligence and knowledge in 
 every other department of life but that 
 which belongs to Beauty of Decoration, of 
 form and colour ; taste in these things is left 
 to take care of itself. We all readily allow 
 that education and study go to form the 
 literary taste, the musical taste, and even 
 taste in food or wine ; but the artistic taste is 
 
I.] INTRODUCTORY. 33 
 
 left to form itself. Choice in form or colour 
 is usually quite unguided by any principle, 
 and is by many supposed to be unworthy of 
 serious thought. We do not ask the book- 
 seller to guide our taste in reading, or the 
 music-seller to form our taste in music ; still 
 less do we allow the cook and the wine- 
 merchant the uncontrolled management of 
 our tables. Yet the furnishing of a house 
 in many, if not in all, important particulars 
 is commonly left to the upholsterer, or 
 decorator as he prefers to be called ; and as 
 he, not working with his own hands, takes 
 no pleasure in the work, but has gain for his 
 first object, so his only idea is to carry out 
 what he supposes to be the prevailing style, 
 so as to produce the most show for the 
 money ; and the result of this is likely to be 
 a most unhappy one ; still people are content 
 with it — educated and refined people too — 
 and they live out their lives complacently, 
 surrounded by evidences of vulgarity and 
 bad taste, at which they would be horrified, 
 
 if they had ever learned to appreciate them. 
 D 
 
34 LECTURES ON ART. [i. 
 
 It is instructive, in this connection, to 
 remark the tastes of children and unedu- 
 cated people. Their senses, being immature 
 and undeveloped, require to be strongly- 
 appealed to in order to receive an impres- 
 sion. They like a multitude of gaudy- 
 colours, glitter of tinsel and gaslight, loud 
 and clanging sounds ; and to these the un- 
 educated vulgar add a taste for powerful 
 flavours, strong odours, unrestrained emo- 
 tions, and circumstantial accounts of horrors. 
 
 Let me assure you that, in the region of 
 Art, nothing is more common than to meet 
 with, in otherwise cultivated people, tastes 
 analogous to these. Over - trimmed and 
 befringed and gilded furniture, intense and 
 ill-combined colouring, violent and ungrace- 
 ful form, and accumulations of useless costly 
 trifles ; all these and more are to be found 
 in many a household, and in the shops that 
 supply them. And until the last few years, 
 nothing else was found — in the shops I 
 mean, for in houses there were almost always 
 some more graceful relics of a better time — 
 
I.] INTRODUCTORY. 35 
 
 and now at last there has come a great 
 change. It is now about fifteen or twenty 
 years ago that a small circle of highly-cul- 
 tured persons, of whom Mr. William Morris 
 was one, and Mr. Burne Jones another, turned 
 their minds to the consideration of how to 
 improve the construction, and furnishing, and 
 decoration, of dwelling-houses. First, they 
 set to work with their own hands, and 
 made drawings and plans and patterns, and 
 learned to weave and dye stuffs for their 
 own use ; they sought out intelligent honest 
 workmen to work under their direction, and 
 to carry out their designs in solid material 
 and good workmanship ; and as by these 
 means, things of new and strange beauty 
 were produced, as well as copies and adapt- 
 ations of good work of past time, they 
 became known and sought after, first by 
 those specially interested in and connected 
 with Art, and afterwards by the shopkeepers 
 and the general public, who set themselves 
 to catch a superficial idea of the general 
 effect of these things, and to imitate and 
 
36 LECTURES ON ART. [i. 
 
 reproduce them in coarser and cheaper forms. 
 Some, no doubt, being really enlightened 
 by the new ideas, produced good work in 
 accordance with them, and so began the 
 present fashion of "Art-furniture," "Art-deco- 
 ration," " Art-colours," and so forth ; and all 
 those other useless terms. 
 
 But it is not the terms alone that I con- 
 sider to be in fault, it is the blind adop- 
 tion of mere passing fashion that I would 
 deprecate. The clothing of walls with dull 
 and dismal papers and hangings, the filling 
 our rooms with black-wood furniture, and 
 the purchase of any article merely because 
 it happens to be called Early English or 
 Japanese. There has been a great deal of 
 satire lavished in Punch and elsewhere on a 
 supposed group of aesthetically -minded people, 
 who are described as living only for Art, and 
 expressing themselves in a highly foolish, 
 affected, and melancholy manner. Many 
 people think that " High Art," as they call 
 it, is inseparably associated with affectation, 
 and melancholy, and dull colours, and gen- 
 
I.] INTRODUCTORY. 37 
 
 eral darkness, and dirt, and discomfort ; this 
 is certainly not the sort of thing I wish to 
 advocate : the art that those first teachers 
 originated, is an art of simplicity, of cheer- 
 fulness and brightness, of comfort, cleanli- 
 ness, and hospitality, and is a help to good 
 and healthy living, and not a hindrance to 
 it. What I want to show is that there is a 
 difference between good and bad, between 
 beauty and ugliness, in all the furniture and 
 appliances of life, as in other things ; that, 
 while twenty years ago it was almost impos- 
 sible to get a well-shaped article of furniture, 
 or a stuff, or a wall-paper, of graceful pattern 
 and harmonious colour ; now, things are in a 
 more hopeful condition, for the good things 
 are to be had. What is necessary now, is to 
 know what is good, to take the trouble to 
 learn the difference between good workman- 
 ship and bad; delicate ornament and coarse; 
 good colour and inharmonious and tawdry 
 colour, — this knowledge, widely spread among 
 the cultivated classes, would cause the decline 
 and gradual disappearance of bad art, if for 
 
38 LECTURES ON ART. [i. 
 
 no better reason, that it could no longer be 
 made to pay. It is part of my undertaking 
 to lay down a few plain principles as a guide 
 in these things. 
 
 One word about those minor decorative 
 arts in the practice of which we are accus- 
 tomed to employ our own individual skill, 
 taste, and patience. 
 
 I have heard in my time of such arts as 
 Decalcomanie, Potichomanie, Vitromanie, of 
 leather -work imitating carved oak, of wax- 
 paper, shell-flower, making, and many other 
 futile industries, of which I can only say 
 that they seem to be some of the mischief 
 specially provided for idle hands to do. 
 These particular embodiments of bad taste 
 are, however, somewhat out of date, yet 
 some of the more fashionable fancy-work is 
 not less mischievous, for some of the same 
 reasons that make the workman's art bad. 
 The love of novelty and of ostentation leads 
 to a misconception of the end and aim of 
 ornament, and hinders wholesome interest 
 and pleasure in the work. How often do 
 
I.] INTRODUCTORY. 39 
 
 we hear sighs of weariness and distaste from 
 some luckless worker of a huge piece of 
 fancy-work, whose only longing is to get it 
 finished and done with ; and the secret of 
 this weariness and distaste is the absolute 
 lack of good qualities, not in the worker, 
 but in the work itself, probably both useless 
 and expensive, and neither chosen, planned, 
 nor prepared, by the worker. To originate 
 and carry out an idea of one's own, were it 
 of the very simplest, would afford more 
 satisfaction, and be likely to lead to a far 
 better result, than the more gorgeous and 
 elaborate prepared work of the fancy shops. 
 
 My remarks on Dress will tend the same 
 way. Not indeed to ignore fashion and to go 
 about to construct strange garments of our 
 own invention, — I am of opinion that more 
 is lost than gained by eccentricity in these 
 matters, — but as there is generally some 
 reasonable idea at the foundation of the 
 prevailing style, it seems a better choice 
 to seek for it and carry it out, instead of 
 exaggerating and helping to spread abroad 
 
40 LECTURES ON ART. [i. 
 
 its worst features ; at the same time avoid- 
 ing a too great uniformity by cultivating 
 individuality of style. 
 
 Now, to briefly review the part that the 
 Fine Arts play in our lives. Music and 
 Poetry are^ indeed part of our true inherit- 
 ance, and I think we all know something of 
 their just value, because some of the best of 
 both has been produced in our time, and 
 because the study of them, according to 
 right principles, is indispensable — no system 
 of education would be complete without 
 them. Not so with the rest, — Painting, and 
 Sculpture, and Architecture. The real study 
 of these things is not considered an indis- 
 pensable part of education. School routine 
 generally includes a little drawing ; but of a 
 mechanical kind, involving no taste and but 
 little principle. Nevertheless, every person, 
 whether arrived at years of discretion or not, 
 thinks himself qualified to judge of a paint- 
 ing or a statue. The most modest say, " I 
 know nothing about it, but I know what I 
 like and then proceed to admire all sorts of 
 
I.] INTRODUCTORY. 41 
 
 incompatible and incongruous things. In 
 all other human productions, an enlightened 
 and reasonable person sees at once, that it is 
 not enough to know what he likes, but what 
 is worth liking ; but respecting questions of 
 taste in Art, he thinks himself born com- 
 petent to judge, — no matter though he has 
 never given an hour's patient consideration 
 to the subject, or looked carefully at a good 
 statue or picture, or taken a modelling-tool 
 or a drawing-pencil into his hand so as to 
 form an experimental notion of what it really 
 means, to translate natural forms into pictured 
 or sculptured ones ; with all this he is quite 
 ready to pronounce criticisms and opinions 
 on any work of Art that comes within his 
 reach. The only way to form a just judg- 
 ment about these things is to learn, by the 
 study of the masterpieces of Art that have 
 come down to us from former times, what 
 constitutes the greatest and best. How can 
 a man who knows nothing of Shakespeare, 
 Milton, and Dante, pretend to judge of the 
 poets of our day ? What sort of a musical 
 
42 LECTURES ON ART. [i. 
 
 critic would he be who was unacquainted 
 with Handel, and Bach, and Beethoven ? So 
 neither can there be real criticism and enjoy- 
 ment of Painting and Sculpture, without some 
 amount of knowledge and appreciation of 
 the great masters in those Arts. There is, I 
 know, a generally accepted opinion that the 
 works of the old masters of Painting are 
 worthy of a great but distant respect, chiefly 
 because they cost great sums of money, and 
 a vague credit is reflected on their possessors, 
 whether nations or individuals ; but I do not 
 think I am wrong in saying that though the 
 names of Raphael, Titian, and Michael Angelo 
 are as well known as those of the poets and 
 musicians just mentioned, yet few of those 
 who love and study the great poets have cared 
 to inform themselves of even the broadest 
 distinctions between the great painters. So 
 with Sculpture. We have often been told of, 
 and in some sort believe in, the pre-eminence 
 of the Greek ideal, and that in the Elgin 
 Marbles we possess examples of the greatest 
 Sculpture the world has ever seen ; yet very 
 
I.] INTRODUCTORY. 43 
 
 few people, even of those who live in 
 London, ever go to see them or try to enter 
 into their beauty, — very few, who would not 
 think spending an hour or two at the British 
 Museum, but a dull way of passing the time. 
 And Architecture, which, rightly applied to 
 the construction of public and private build- 
 ings, should be a source of healthfulness to 
 the mind and body too, the general ignor- 
 ance respecting it has led to sad results in 
 our time, such as the defacement and so- 
 called restoration of ancient buildings, by 
 which so much of their beauty and historical 
 value has been swept away ; while the only 
 thing to console us in most modern buildings 
 is their instability and poverty of construc- 
 tion — which we will hope will soon lead to 
 a substitution for them of more lasting and 
 beautiful structures in the present revival 
 of Taste. 
 
 The two great teachers of Art in our 
 day, Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Morris, though 
 they agree as to their view of the past and 
 the present, and as to eternal principles of 
 
44 LECTURES ON ART. [i. 
 
 right and wrong, and good and bad, in Art, 
 differ completely in the temper with which 
 they regard the future. The one is full of 
 despair, the other of hope. And it seems to 
 me that unless we cling with Mr. Morris to 
 the hopeful side, our own private efforts to 
 combat ugliness, and clumsiness, and preten- 
 sion, will be lifeless and melancholy, we shall 
 allow our sense of beauty to dwindle from 
 scarcity of nourishment, and Art will decline 
 more and more until it becomes a dead 
 letter. But let us, with Mr. Morris, hope for 
 better things : he says, " To what side, then, 
 shall those turn for help who really under- 
 stand the gain of a great Art in the world, 
 and the loss of peace and good life that 
 must follow from the lack of it? I think 
 that they must begin by acknowledging that 
 the ancient art, the art of unconscious intel- 
 ligence, as one should call it, which began 
 without a date — at least so long ago as those 
 strange and masterly scratchings on mam- 
 moth bones ^ and the like found but the other 
 
 ^ See heading of chapter. 
 
I.] INTRODUCTORY. 45 
 
 day in the drift — that this art of unconscious 
 intelligence is all but dead ; that what little 
 of it is left lingers among half- civilised 
 nations, and is grown coarser, feebler, less 
 intelligent, year by year. . . . This they 
 must recognise, and must hope to see in 
 time its place filled by a new art of conscious 
 intelligence — the birth of wiser, simpler, freer 
 ways of life than the world leads now, than 
 the world has ever led." 
 
 We have been so long accustomed to the 
 sight of ugliness, and exaggeration, and de- 
 formity, in the common appliances of life, 
 that it is a hard task, and one requiring a 
 good deal of thought and study, to recon- 
 struct our notions. The first step is to give 
 up old prejudices, and to substitute for them, 
 principles. Unless we are content to let the 
 good things of Art remain a sealed book to 
 us, we must take some pains about them. 
 Man has long passed the early, intuitive 
 stage of good taste — "the Art of unconscious 
 intelligence," as Mr. Morris calls it — and it is 
 now only by pains and study, that we can 
 
46 LECTURES ON ART. [i. 
 
 arrive at the cultured, conscious, possession 
 of taste, that, according to fixed principles 
 and for just reasons, accepts and chooses the 
 good and beautiful, and rejects the bad and 
 unworthy. " Happy is he," says Goethe, 
 "who, at an early age, knows what Art 
 is ; " but it is never too late to learn. And 
 when a start is once made on the right 
 road, every new experience is a lesson, a 
 confirmation. 
 
 It may be thought that I am in danger 
 of taking all this too seriously, and making 
 my subject of too great importance, seeing 
 that, as I have acknowledged, Art can after 
 all be but a source of pleasure, — an educated 
 and refined pleasure it is true, but of no 
 practical use. I can only say that the love 
 of Art is, to those who understand it, closely 
 connected in the world's history with all that 
 is noble, and sincere, and temperate, and 
 great ; and it has been said very truly that 
 if one learns nothing from Art, one becomes 
 something by studying it. 
 
 Then, as I have tried to show you, our 
 
I.] INTRODUCTORY. 47 
 
 lives in every direction, every occupation, 
 are filled with the presence and influence of 
 Art ; and as, every day of our lives, we are 
 called upon to exercise a choice, or to ex- 
 press an opinion bearing on the subject, does 
 it not become a sort of moral obligation to 
 exercise a wise choice, to express a just 
 opinion ? and, since there is a good and bad, 
 a true and false in Art, to learn to distinguish 
 between them ? as, in the moral world, the 
 power of choice brings with it the obligation 
 to choose well ! 
 
 And now to gather together the scattered 
 meaning of all I have been saying. 
 
 I began by pointing out that from the 
 Arts of pure use and necessity arose the Arts 
 of ornament and decoration — not to hinder 
 or take away from them, but to add Beauty 
 without destroying Use. And that above 
 and beyond these rise the Fine Arts, existing 
 for Beauty only — Sculpture, Painting, Archi- 
 tecture. 
 
 Then let me remind you of a few points 
 of general application. 
 
48 LECTURES ON ART. [i. 
 
 1. That the general aim of Art is Beauty, 
 and the appreciation of that Beauty and the 
 true enjoyment of it is Taste. 
 
 2. That there are certain principles by 
 which Taste may be formed and guided. 
 
 3. That these principles are worthy to be 
 studied, since we cannot escape from the 
 necessity of exercising a choice. 
 
 This will form the ground-work of all I 
 have to say on future occasions, and I will 
 beg my audience to help me in the clear 
 expression of my meaning by taking note of 
 anything I may seem to leave obscure or 
 otherwise unsatisfactory ; and I hope very 
 much to have some questions, if not objec- 
 tions, to answer, as by that means I may 
 amend the shortcomings to which I must 
 needs be liable in dealing with so large and 
 difficult a subject. 
 
 Goethe says somewhere that one should 
 contrive every day to hear some good music, 
 to look at a beautiful picture, and, if possible, 
 to speak a few sensible words. The first 
 two should be easy enough here, and in the 
 
I.] INTRODUCTORY. 49 
 
 world of to-day ; and I, for one, should like 
 to be allowed to think I had fulfilled the last 
 requirement also. At all events, I beg you 
 to believe that any deficiencies in sense and 
 reason are not due to the ideas and principles 
 belonging to my subject, but rather to my 
 imperfect expression of them. 
 
IL— DECORATIVE ART— FORM. 
 
 In the last Lecture I attempted to describe 
 to you the origin and nature of the Useful 
 Arts, — "operations of the hand and the in- 
 telligence of man together," the intention 
 of which is to supply his wants and neces- 
 sities ; and I showed you that in almost 
 every object produced by these Arts there 
 is something added over and above its Use ; 
 that something being Ornament — Man's ex- 
 pression of pleasure in Beauty ; and in this 
 way have the Decorative Arts arisen. 
 
 I propose to consider to-day the various 
 forms in which we are chiefly familiar with 
 
II.] DECORATIVE ART— FORM. 51 
 
 these Arts, how they are rightly applied, to 
 what extent they are rightly carried, and 
 what kind and degree of satisfaction and of 
 pleasure we are to expect from each of them. 
 
 I am going to speak of the various objects 
 of everyday use by which we are surrounded 
 — productions of the Arts of pottery, glass- 
 making, metal, stone, and wood work, and 
 others. These Arts, as I have said, began to 
 exist ages before the beginnings of History, 
 and in those earlier times the word and thing 
 Manufacture in the modern sense had no 
 existence ; every article of use, as well as the 
 ornament belonging to it, proceeded directly 
 from the hand of man ; but he has since 
 invented thousands of mechanical means of 
 saving the work of his hand by pressing the 
 other forces of nature into his service : he 
 has not shortened the hours of his labour, 
 but increased the amount of work done in 
 them ; and continual new inventions promise 
 to increase it still further ; but yet, in spite 
 of wonder - working machines, the human 
 hand remains "the most perfect agent of 
 
52 LECTURES ON ART. [ii. 
 
 material power existing in the universe/' and 
 the more delicate and yielding the substance 
 it works on, the higher the execution. " All 
 Art," says Mr. Ruskin, " worthy the name, is 
 the energy, neither of the human body alone, 
 nor of the human soul alone, but of both 
 united, one guiding the other : good crafts- 
 manship and work of the fingers, joined with 
 good emotion and work of the heart." 
 
 So that this lies at the root of all good 
 decorative work, that it must not be a so- 
 called manufacture merely, it must be a direct 
 product of the human hand ; and of course 
 that was the original meaning of the word 
 manufacture. We all recognise — the very 
 shopkeepers recognise — the superiority of 
 hand-work to machine-work in all kinds of 
 things. If a garment made by the hand is 
 better and more valuable than one made by 
 the sewing-machine — and in the matter of 
 lace, we carry this feeling so far as to call 
 the hand-made lace real, and the machine- 
 made lace sham — should we not all the 
 more be able to appreciate the superiority of 
 
II.] DECORATIVE ART— FORM. 53 
 
 hand-carving over machine-carving, of hand- 
 painting over machine colour-printing ? And 
 yet not everybody has learned to know the 
 difference. You will think, perhaps, that I 
 want to bring back the days of black-letter 
 manuscripts and hand -loom weaving; and 
 though I do certainly think these are more 
 interesting now, and were more thought of 
 in their own day than the power-loom weav- 
 ing and cheaply-printed books of this, yet 
 I know that the world cannot stand still, and 
 that there is much advantage in the cheap- 
 ness and rapid production of these things ; 
 and that, as far as the preparation for use of 
 the raw material is concerned, manufacture 
 must needs have it all her own way, and 
 also as concerns decoration, in so far as when 
 a design for dress or furniture stuffs, carpets, 
 and wall-papers has been made, it must be 
 reproduced and repeated by machinery to 
 make it available : these things are very 
 properly woven or printed, and then sold by 
 the yard, because they have to be used in 
 quantities and masses. Not so with things 
 
54 LECTURES ON ART. [ii. 
 
 of which quantity is not required : wood- 
 carving for instance, — which is not a necessity 
 in the same sense that those others are — 
 which loses all beauty, and with it all reason 
 for existing, when it is turned out by the 
 machine at so much a yard. So with 
 machine-painted pottery and china, machine- 
 woven crewel-work, chromolithographs, cast, 
 instead of wrought metal-work, and machine- 
 made jewellery. These things are to real 
 decoration what a barrel-organ is to music. 
 Let machines be used for hard drudgery and 
 necessary toil, but let us at least have our 
 ornament done by hand. 
 
 One difficulty about hand-work is its high 
 price, and of course machine-work has the 
 corresponding advantage of cheapness ; but 
 I have to say once for all that you cannot 
 get good Art cheap. Mr. Ruskin says, " Of 
 one thing you may be sure ; that Art which 
 is produced hastily will also perish hastily, 
 and that what is cheapest to you now is 
 likely to be dearest in the end. . . [As to the 
 cheap work of the day] We don't like and 
 
II.] DECORATIVE ART— FORM. 55 
 
 can't like that long ; but when we are tired of 
 one bad cheap thing, we throw it aside, and 
 buy another bad cheap thing, and so keep 
 looking at bad things all our lives. Now 
 the very men who do that quick, bad work 
 for us are capable of doing perfect work. 
 Only, perfect work can't be hurried, and 
 therefore it can't be cheap, beyond a certain 
 point." 
 
 If we ourselves, any of us, possess natural 
 capabilities for the Arts, and know something 
 of the delicacy of hand, the accuracy of eye, 
 the trained understanding and insight, that 
 go to invent, arrange, and carry out satisfac- 
 torily the smallest piece of original work (I 
 am not speaking of a copy or an imitation), 
 whether it be carving, or china-painting, or 
 embroidery, we should not grudge to pay a 
 fair price for these things, when we have 
 occasion to buy them ; and we should con- 
 sent not to have them at all, rather than take 
 imitations in machine-work — ^just as, rather 
 than wear sham jewellery, we would go with- 
 out it altogether. I do not mean to say that 
 
56 LECTURES ON ART. [ii. 
 
 all hand-work in decoration is necessarily 
 good^ but that all good work is hand-work. 
 
 One defect in mechanical work is its over- 
 finish. The gloss on cloth, which is a beauty 
 to the eye of the draper, is an abomination 
 to the eye of the artist. Marble will take 
 a' high polish, but the sculptor leaves this 
 quality to the mantelpiece manufacturer. 
 Lines may be' too sharp and forms too 
 distinct. This over- finish is mainly due 
 to division of labour. Division of labour 
 is good for pins, but bad for works of art. 
 " The ornament " (I quote from a long-since 
 printed magazine article) "which begins with 
 the mere draughtsman and ends with the 
 mere salesman, deteriorates at every stage, 
 in its change of hands from the original de- 
 sign." According to the ordinary system of 
 producing jewellery, the design has been 
 made by one man, the dies sunk by another, 
 the striking up by a third, some foliage and 
 filigree work added by a fourth, and some 
 shallow, scratchy engraving to complete the 
 pattern by a fifth, and it becomes what the 
 
II.] DECORATIVE ART— FORM. 57 
 
 accomplished shopman who sells it calls " a 
 truly sweet thing in bracelets of the newest 
 and most original design." In days when 
 goldsmithery was an art, the artist sat in his 
 stall and took his orders himself. And in 
 these days if those who use would take the 
 trouble to find out those who make^ and deal 
 at first hand with them, not only would they 
 get much better and cheaper articles than 
 through the medium of the shopman, but 
 they would get much more pleasure out of 
 the things they buy, as the workman would 
 get more pleasure out of the things he makes. 
 It is often possible to deal directly with the 
 workman, particularly about country neigh- 
 bourhoods, in such things as carpenter's work, 
 for instance. In London, indeed, it is hardly 
 ever possible to get at the working carpenter, 
 the working jeweller, the working dressmaker; 
 there is always some very smiling and oblig- 
 ing shopman or woman between us and the 
 worker, the person whom I, for one, the most 
 want to see. It is a great pity that those 
 who can give intelligible instructions and 
 
58 LECTURES ON ART. [ii. 
 
 designs should not insist on seeing in the 
 flesh the very person who is to carry them 
 out 
 
 Since the importation of so much Japanese 
 Art into England we have had many oppor- 
 tunities of admiring the delicacy, the grace, 
 of the construction of all sorts of objects, of 
 bamboo, of wood, of china. Setting aside 
 for the present all mention of the Japanese 
 sense of colour (so exquisite before they set 
 themselves to please the European taste), 
 the form of all things of their manufacture 
 is so varied, so light, and still each so fully 
 answering its different use, that it puts to 
 shame our heavy and solid, often less service- 
 able, constructions. Sir Edward Reed, in his 
 book on Japan, puts his finger on the inner 
 cause of this excellence : he says, " I have 
 watched the poor artisan labouring at his 
 work with an earnestness and love such as 
 I never beheld out of Japan, and the very 
 features of the workmen testify to their happi- 
 ness, and to the love with which they perform 
 their painstaking labour. No thought of 
 
II.] DECORATIVE ART— FORM. 59 
 
 gain appears to enter their minds, and no 
 touch is spared which will make the work 
 more lovely." And this is the great secret 
 of excellence in decoration, in everything 
 that pertains to Art, that the artist workman 
 should take delight in his work. About how 
 many of the common decorations of a room 
 can this be said ? 
 
 When I observe the thousands of name- 
 less trifles that crowd the shops where they 
 sell " fancy articles," especially about Christ- 
 mas-time — the useless tawdry bits of glass, 
 china, and metal -work, vases that will hold 
 nothing, candlesticks that won't carry candles, 
 lamps that won't burn, pen -wipers that 
 refuse to wipe your pen, baskets that will 
 hold nothing, besides numbers of articles 
 that do not even pretend to have a use — I 
 cannot help thinking of the misery and 
 grinding poverty that alone could drive in- 
 telligent human creatures to get their living 
 by making them — anything worth calling a 
 living they cannot possibly get. The things 
 grow cheaper year by year, and that can be 
 
6o LECTURES ON ART. [ii. 
 
 the only reason why people buy them ; else 
 if they thought about the matter, or even 
 cared for the things themselves, how could 
 they bear, as Mr. Morris says, " to pay a 
 price for a piece of goods that will help to 
 trouble one man, to ruin another, and to 
 starve a third ?" In always wanting novelty 
 in these things we do indeed obey some 
 better instinct. It is because the thing is bad 
 that it is so soon got rid of — we must have 
 a change from bad, even if it be only to 
 newer bad. 
 
 Some details of the manufacture of a 
 fancy article came under my knowledge 
 lately in London : the evening occupation of 
 some educated girls, to whom it was a neces- 
 sity to earn money, was to paint on pieces of 
 looking-glass, cut ready and sent them by 
 the manufacturer, little groups of figures or 
 flowers in oil-colour ; they received for each 
 group fourpence each, and would do two or 
 three in an evening. These were returned 
 to the manufacturer, who surrounded them 
 with a gilt or lacquered frame, and they were 
 
II.] DECORATIVE ART— FORM. 6i 
 
 sold to the public as decorative objects to 
 hang against a wall. Being on looking-glass, 
 of course if you tried to look at your own 
 reflection it was obscured by the painting, 
 and if you looked at the painting, it was 
 confused by the reflection ; and so, from any 
 point of view, entirely worthless. 
 
 "For," says Mr. Morris, "whereas all 
 works of craftsmanship were once beautiful, 
 unwittingly or not, they are now divided into 
 two kinds — works of art, and non-works of 
 art. Now nothing made by man's hand can 
 be indifferent ; it must be either beautiful and 
 elevating, or ugly and degrading." Can we 
 not carry about us in the world ; can we not 
 be guided in our purchases by some such 
 thoughts as these ? and take care never to 
 buy a cheap, ill-made, useless article, merely 
 because it catches our fancy. Let us consider 
 if there is good work in it, — honest material, 
 actual use, — and if so, let us pay for it a fair 
 price, and we shall be doing what we can to 
 help on the good cause of promoting happy 
 toil and successful labour; in short, of making 
 
62 LECTURES ON ART. [ii. 
 
 Decorative Art to be again what it once was, 
 An Art made by the people and for the 
 people, a joy to the maker and user," 
 
 In Mr. Ruskin's " Two Paths I find a 
 principle laid down that I am convinced is 
 perfectly sound, and easy of application in 
 these matters. 
 
 " The true forms of conventional orna- 
 ment consist in the bestowal of as much 
 beauty on the object as shall be consistent 
 with its Material, its Place, and its Office." 
 
 Every object, then, that we admit into 
 our houses should be able to sustain with 
 credit the following inquiries : 
 
 Does it appear to be made of the Material 
 of which it really is, or ought to be made ? 
 
 Is it appropriate to the Place for which 
 it is intended ? 
 
 Does it declare its Use or Office, and 
 seem fit for it ? 
 
 Let us examine a little into the appli- 
 cation of each separate requirement. The 
 first, you see, condemns all imitations of a 
 substance, especially when the object is not 
 
II.] DECORATIVE ART— FORM. 63 
 
 likely to have been made of that substance. 
 Such are doors painted in bronze, sham 
 jewellery, paper flowers, glass coloured to 
 look like china, plaster to look like iron 
 and bronze, and many more. It seems a 
 very strange thing, when one reflects, that it 
 should be supposed that we all take pleasure 
 in a thing that pretends to be something 
 else than it appears, and that the deception 
 should be pointed out to us as a recommend- 
 ation. The advertisement that assures us 
 that Paris diamonds and Abyssinian jewel- 
 lery cannot be distinguished from the real 
 thing, the shopkeeper who tells us that some 
 stuff of mixed material has quite the appear- 
 ance of silk, and that a silk-finished velveteen 
 could easily be mistaken for velvet ; all this 
 is intended to appeal, and really does appeal, 
 to the tastes and wants of a large class. But 
 how much better and more honest is it to 
 know what the especial article we want ought 
 to be made of, and to see that we get it — 
 silk honestly silk, and woollen honestly wool- 
 len, and cotton honestly cotton, and linen 
 
64 LECTURES ON ART. [ii. 
 
 really and truly linen ; and when the manu- 
 facturers find what is expected of them they 
 will supply it accordingly. It must have 
 been inappropriate and perishable material 
 that first put it into the careful housewife's 
 mind to provide an extra case or cover for 
 various household objects — oil-cloth or drug- 
 get to cover the stair-carpeting, hoUand covers 
 for the furniture, and antimacassars over 
 them again, oil-cloth to cover tables, and 
 table-covers to cover the oil-cloth, and mats 
 to save the table-cloth, and much more 
 of the same kind. In the first place, the 
 materials used should be appropriate and 
 serviceable, and in the second, people should 
 not be ashamed of the signs of honest wear 
 in them. Still, for my part, if I must cover 
 things up at all, I would cover them when 
 they were really shabby than while they 
 were fresh. And when this system of covers 
 extends itself to paper-covers for flower-pots, 
 china-cases and covers for sardine-boxes, 
 silvered perforated cardboard cases for match- 
 boxes, and such like, it seems to express a 
 
II.] DECORATIVE ART— FORM. 65 
 
 dislike to the honest plainness and simplicity, 
 really right and appropriate, of the things 
 themselves, and a false refinement and love 
 of disguise. It is the same feeling that 
 leads people to call shops repositories and 
 emporiums, and florists to call themselves 
 " horticultural furnishers." Simplicity and 
 plain dealing in the material of household 
 goods and appliances will lead us a long 
 way in the direction of taste. And we have 
 high authority for feeling the dignity and 
 admirableness of even a very humble function 
 well performed. Does not George Herbert 
 say : 
 
 Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws 
 Makes that and the action fine." 
 
 Now as to the second requirement. The 
 
 various rooms in our houses are intended for 
 
 various uses and occasions, and natural 
 
 instinct for convenience leads us to furnish 
 
 them in accordance with these uses and 
 
 occasions — the dining-room solid and severe, 
 
 with large and steady furniture adapted to 
 
 serious needs ; the kitchen, full of useful 
 F 
 
66 LECTURES ON ART. [ii. 
 
 homely appliances, kept bright and clean ; 
 and the drawing-room, with its books and 
 pictures and elegancies, suited for leisure and 
 social purposes, and therefore rightly the 
 most decorated room in the house. So 
 bearing the different functions of each room 
 in mind, and furnishing them in accord- 
 ance with each, we get a general sense of 
 order and appropriateness. All this is 
 obvious enough, and is generally sufficiently 
 well carried out. Only very often in minor 
 appliances, the want of the feeling for 
 appropriateness makes itself felt. A coal- 
 scuttle is an excellent and useful thing in its 
 way, and in its appropriate place ; but why 
 have it in miniature on our tables, and scoop 
 salt or sugar out of it ? Wheel-barrows and 
 buckets, rink-skates and perambulators, used 
 for similar purposes are really less conven- 
 ient than a small dish or bowl really designed 
 for use, without any ulterior notion of 
 ingenuity or conceit. A tea-kettle in the 
 form of a drum, with the sticks for handles ; 
 a toast -rack formed of wreaths of ivy 
 
II.] DECORATIVE ART— FORM. 67 
 
 (what has ivy to do with toast ?), or rifles 
 piled in a very unmilitary manner ; a biscuit- 
 box in the shape of a coal-box ; gilt chain 
 cables for holding back curtains ; are ex- 
 amples of the same thing that occur to me, 
 but a large and very astonishing list could 
 very soon be collected. It is true, as Mr. 
 Morris says, that the best designed and con- 
 structed things in a house are generally 
 found in the kitchen ; but that is because 
 they fulfil their use, and are appropriate to 
 their place, both of which qualities they lose 
 when transported to the drawing-room. 
 
 Now, as to the third requirement, which 
 in its application is closely connected with 
 the second. All things of common use have 
 their appropriate form, which, when once 
 discovered, should be used and repeated 
 without disguise. Thus a salt-cellar is most 
 really convenient when made of glass, of 
 a simple oblong shape, so as not to be 
 easily upset, that the spoon may comfort- 
 ably rest in it, and the salt be easily renewed ; 
 and there are many modifications of form, 
 
68 LECTURES ON ART. [ii. 
 
 and even colour, that might be introduced 
 without hindering use in any way, or making 
 the thing seem other than it is ; and so 
 may this principle be carried out indefinitely; 
 and I cannot see, except for the love of 
 novelty and pretentious conceit, why any- 
 thing more should be wanted. It cannot be 
 a very lasting pleasure to shake pepper out 
 of an owFs head, or help yourself to butter 
 out of a beehive ; but it is a lasting pleasure 
 to have a thoroughly useful and soundly- 
 constructed thing made out of a right and 
 good material, appearing in its appropriate 
 place, and declaring and fulfilling its proper 
 use and office. Without directly referring to 
 these three conditions at every moment, I 
 would be understood as keeping them in 
 mind as I go on. 
 
 The chief materials of which our house- 
 hold goods are made — wood, stone, metals, 
 glass, china — differ widely in qualities, of 
 texture, and substance ; each requiring a 
 different process of manufacture, different 
 handling, different tools ; so the kind and 
 
II.] DECORATIVE ART— FORM. 69 
 
 degree of ornament, as well as of use, must 
 be different in each — differently conceived 
 of, differently applied, and with largely 
 different results ; and we are not to expect 
 from paper the qualities and appearance of 
 leather, nor from leather those of wood, nor 
 from wood those of stone ; each, having its 
 separate and appropriate use and place^ is 
 capable of receiving a separate and appro- 
 priate beauty. Just a few words on each in 
 its turn. 
 
 The principal articles of furniture in our 
 rooms — tables, sideboards, pianos, ward- 
 robes, etc., — are usually made of some wood, 
 though solid and durable enough for the 
 purpose, yet considered to be in itself of 
 insufficient beauty ; so it is overlaid with thin 
 slices of a more valuable and beautiful wood, 
 so that every part of the surface that is 
 visible is covered with it, and it looks as if it 
 were made throughout of rosewood, walnut, 
 or mahogany, as the case may be. I think 
 this process of veneering must be allowed as 
 an exception to our first requirement — that 
 
70 LECTURES ON ART. [ii. 
 
 a thing should seem to be made of that 
 material of which it really is made. The 
 wood is laid on by a recognised process 
 which deceives nobody, it economises valuable 
 material, and the result is agreeable to the 
 eye. The thick coat of French polish, how- 
 ever, which is finally laid on it, is to be con- 
 demned ; its unnatural lustre interferes with 
 the colour and real beauty of the wood, which, 
 though it should be smooth and finished, 
 need not be so to such an extent as to 
 resemble a looking-glass. Gilding, again, as 
 applied to the frames of pictures and mirrors, 
 is a method of decorating wood surfaces that 
 may be allowed ; its value in decorative 
 effect is good, if not too lavishly used, and 
 it must form another exception to the rule, 
 as no one is expected to be deceived into 
 thinking that all that is gilded must be gold. 
 But with wooden chimney-pieces, pillars, 
 slabs, painted to imitate marble, the case is 
 very different ; the better the imitation, the 
 greater waste of the painter's time and powers ; 
 the appearance is intended to deceive, but 
 
II.] DECORATIVE ART— FORM. 71 
 
 a touch destroys the illusion ; one sense 
 is contradicted by another, and some other 
 mode of painting — not imitative — would 
 have a really better effect if the object were 
 of good design and delicate workmanship, 
 and of this last, wood is especially capable. 
 Delicate panelling and wainscoting, turning 
 and carving, used to be much more common 
 than they are now, and, in houses of a hun- 
 dred years ago, there was much to interest, 
 where now all is dull enough — what pan- 
 elling there is being most commonly cut 
 into lengths, and fastened on afterwards. 
 The same with the decorative carving of 
 furniture, which, instead of being part of 
 the construction, is made separately, chopped 
 into portions and glued on ; no wonder that 
 it is so often clumsy and protuberant and 
 excessive. So many heavy and clumsy things 
 are made of wood, that we are in danger of 
 forgetting of what light and delicate work it 
 is capable ; handles are made many times 
 larger than is necessary ; legs of tables and 
 pianos more thick and bulging ; and curtain - 
 
72 LECTURES ON ART. [ii. 
 
 poles, when they are meant to be visible, 
 too large and ponderous ; from a liking, I 
 suppose, for an appearance of strength and 
 massiveness often greatly belied by the actual 
 fact. 
 
 The graining of wood to imitate another 
 different kind of wood has something to 
 be said for it, especially when the graining 
 imitates some kind of wood likely to have 
 been used, as it wears well and looks clean 
 a long time ; still the plain deal, or whatever 
 it may be, had much better be stained a 
 useful tint, and polished but not too highly. 
 I have seen front doors painted to look like 
 bronze — not a likely material for a front 
 door ; this, too, seems a great waste of human 
 time and ingenuity, without a proportionate 
 amount of satisfaction. Ebonized wood, as it 
 is called, has been very fashionable lately ; 
 but, as we usually see it, not often good — the 
 polish being too high, and the incised gilded 
 lines on it being so soon dimmed and filled 
 with dust. Wood, stained black, is appropriate 
 for the framework of chairs with slender 
 
II.] DECORATIVE ART— FORM. 73 
 
 rails and legs, or with thicker ones turned ; 
 but it is dull and blank in a large surface. 
 I can only thus hint at some of the uses to 
 which wood is applied in our houses, and how 
 it is fashioned and treated ; but in all cases it 
 is good to remember that unnecessarily large 
 and heavy construction, high polish, coarse 
 carving, imitative painting, should be avoided ; 
 so will use and convenience be furthered 
 rather than hindered, and grace and beauty 
 be helped and promoted as well. 
 
 The one indispensable stone in every 
 room of the house — the hearthstone — is, in 
 most old-fashioned houses, of marble, easily 
 kept clean by washing ; when it came to be 
 made of inferior stone, whitening was used 
 at the edge, and black-lead under and about 
 the grate. In fireplaces of this kind, instead 
 of these, I would recommend reddening, which 
 has an excellent effect with brass fender and 
 fire-irons, and the red ochre for the purpose 
 can be got everywhere and applied just as 
 easily as whitening or black lead. As all 
 the interest and home feelings of a house 
 
74 LECTURES ON ART. [ii. 
 
 collect about the fireside, in our climate, in 
 which winter holds us half the year, — a 
 fire being, as Dr. Johnson said, " a living 
 thing in a dead room," — it will be worth 
 while to consider it in other respects care- 
 fully. The earlier household fires were 
 made on an open hearth of logs of wood 
 piled on iron supports called dogs, which, 
 at their ends fronting the room, were orna- 
 mented with figures and devices of wrought 
 metal. As coal became more commonly 
 used, — being found capable of containing 
 greater heat in a smaller compass, — a sort of 
 basket grate was made to contain it, of 
 slender upright bars crossed by horizontal 
 ones. By degrees the thing was made thicker 
 and more clumsy, and being found incapable 
 of easy removal, was firmly fixed in its 
 place ; the upright bars were discontinued, 
 but the knobs finishing them at the top 
 remained, and still remain, having grown 
 bigger and bigger, absorbing heat, interfering 
 with the arrangement of the fire, — a perfect 
 monument of stupidity and superfluousness. 
 
II.] DECORATIVE ART— FORM. 75 
 
 In most cases the open fireplace is a great 
 black hole in our rooms, only tolerable when 
 there is a fire burning in it, and anything 
 we can do to moderate the blackness is a 
 benefit, such as to redden the hearth in the 
 way I have mentioned, or, still better, to pave 
 the hearth with red tiles — not tiles with 
 patterns on them, as the ashes obscure and 
 spoil the effect of the design. In summer, 
 great and wonderful efforts are in these days 
 made to do away with that blackness. I 
 cannot think painted and gilded paper, or 
 lace bibs and aprons, or a heap of shavings 
 garlanded with artificial flowers, or even 
 curtains or a Japanese umbrella, really com- 
 fortable and appropriate. The fireplace 
 itself is the root of the difficulty, which will 
 last until there is a general reform. A wide 
 fireplace lined with patterned and coloured 
 tiles, — the hearth of plain ones, red or brown 
 or green, — and the grate itself a separate and 
 detached object, capable of being removed, 
 and its place in the summer filled with plants ; 
 like the hearth in The Deserted Village^ 
 
76. LECTURES ON ART. [ii. 
 
 With aspen boughs, and flowers, and fennel, gay." 
 
 This would be a great improvement. I have 
 before touched upon the uselessness, in every 
 way, of the long -admired bright steel fire- 
 irons ; but now it is common to find these 
 things made of more satisfactory material 
 and shape, and I think there is little 
 doubt that brass is the most beautiful and 
 convenient metal for them, and for the fender 
 and the coal-box as well ; it is easily kept 
 bright, and has a cheerful effect, always 
 supposing these things to be not too large 
 and heavy, and to have as much elegant 
 shape and delicate detail as are consistent 
 with their use and material. 
 
 And so we come to a short considera- 
 tion of metals. Brass candlesticks, inkstands, 
 chandeliers, and sconces are now to be had 
 of simple and elegant shapes, many being 
 reproductions of some of the old good work ; 
 and if, in the same room with these, the 
 door-plates, and handles, and bell-pulls, are 
 of wrought brass -work too, the general 
 effect is so much the better, as the eye is 
 
To face page j6. 
 
II.] DECORATIVE ART— FORM. 77 
 
 pleased with the repetition of the brightness 
 in various forms. 
 
 There has been lately a taste for old- 
 fashioned plate, so that the 'specimens of it 
 we still possess have now a chance of being 
 taken care of, instead, as I can remember, 
 of being sold merely for their value in 
 weight, or exchanged for modern and worse, 
 only to be melted down and re-made into 
 new and hideous shapes. The beauty of 
 antique household plate consisted in no 
 undue massiveness of appearance and highly 
 polished and chased surfaces, frosted and 
 encrusted with ornament, only betokening a 
 restless desire of the silversmith to show off 
 his dexterity, and extort admiration and 
 surprise at any cost. In the sixteenth cen- 
 tury, — the time of Benvenuto Cellini, — the 
 worker in silver and gold was an artist, 
 goldsmith^s work was on a level with statuary, 
 and as such is now a lost art. 
 
 Within the present century the ordinary 
 silver table utensils were of more slender and 
 elegant make than now, and more delicately 
 
78 LECTURES ON ART. [ii. 
 
 and appropriately chased, — the spoons, the 
 salt-cellars, the rosewater dishes, of thin 
 repousse work, were of varied and elegant 
 shapes, — so that once to have seen and 
 admired these things, gives a distaste for 
 the heavy spoons and forks loaded with the 
 meaningless bulgings of the Queen's pattern, 
 the tea-pots with coarse chasing, the candel- 
 abra and epergnes, all ferns and palm-trees, 
 and camels, and figures in the style of ad- 
 vertisements of the insurance offices. Metal- 
 work is indeed a study and an interest in 
 itself alone. There must be a right form and a 
 right ornament for every piece of railing, every 
 door-knocker, every fire-grate, every piece of 
 table-service and jewellery — of right form 
 when it fulfils and suggests use, right ornament 
 when the pleasure there has been in making 
 it is communicated to the user and purchaser. 
 
 As the beauty of glass consists in its 
 transparency and lightness, and its capa- 
 bility of being twisted, or blown, or moulded 
 into a multitude of delicate forms, it early 
 occurred to the manufacturing mind that, if 
 
II.] DECORATIVE ART— FORM. 79 
 
 made thick and solid and cut into facets, it 
 would resemble crystal ; and thus it has come 
 to be a fixed idea that hard glitter is its 
 most valuable quality, and so it is made 
 inches thick, and pounds heavy, to enhance 
 its brilliancy ; and, being one of the most 
 fragile of substances, it must be engraved 
 with people's crests and monograms, as if it 
 were intended to carry down the name of 
 the family for generations to come ! Being 
 of its nature transparent, it must be rendered 
 opaque of set intention by colouring matter, 
 and then painted and gilded ! Since, at 
 its strongest, glass can never be anything 
 but fragile, at least let it keep the beauty 
 belonging to fragility ; since it is naturally 
 transparent, let the light be seen streaming 
 through it, sometimes delicately tinted, some- 
 times iridescent ; and, instead of being cut, let 
 it be blown and twisted into the thousand 
 delicate shapes to which it easily lends itself, 
 and of which, in the Venetian glass of a 
 bygone day, and in its present revival, there 
 are such delightful examples. 
 
8o LECTURES ON ART. [ii. 
 
 In the word pottery is included every 
 species of earthenware, from the rudest 
 unglazed cup of burnt or baked clay, such 
 as was made a thousand years before the 
 Christian era, to the finest Oriental and 
 Sevres of to-day. 
 
 The first thing to be desired in pottery 
 is beauty of form, combined with a perfect 
 adaptation to use. Then, whatever adorn- 
 ment of pattern and colour be added, it 
 must in no way interfere with the effect of 
 that form, or divert the attention from it. 
 The decoration, the pattern upon it, should 
 be flat ; any appearance of projection, where 
 none exists in reality, is wrong. Landscapes 
 and groups of flowers in shading and per- 
 spective are entirely out of place in pottery, 
 however well the painting may be executed. 
 For household use, pottery must generally 
 be glazed ; it may be coloured in one agree- 
 able tint, throughout, and if painted, the 
 pattern should be laid on it flatly and sym- 
 metrically, and without shadow. The search 
 for novelty has produced in our day many 
 
II.] DECORATIVE ART— FORM. 8i 
 
 strange things in the potter's art. It is 
 not uncommon to see toilet ware fashioned 
 and coloured to imitate rustic woodwork; 
 flower-vases in the shape of a hand coming 
 apparently straight up out of the table, 
 and holding a cup ; shapes of boats, pails, 
 baskets, and hosts of other incongruities, in 
 which the form is generally fatal to the 
 comfort of the flowers in some way. I 
 found the other day a striking instance of 
 incongruity of idea, and the struggle to 
 produce a novelty, quite regardless of any 
 sort of appropriateness or fitness, in the 
 description in an American magazine of a 
 toilet water-jug. I will read the extract. 
 " More original, and decidedly American 
 in suggestion and design, is a toilet called 
 the * Bullion ' ^in a fine satiny-glazed semi- 
 china ; the wide-mouthed ewer, with neck 
 and handle powdered in gold, seems to issue 
 from a bag, shirred and tied up with a care- 
 lessly knotted string ; the leather-colour of 
 the bag and the scattered gold favour the 
 
 conceit (!) of the pitcher issuing from a bag 
 G 
 
82 LECTURES ON ART. [ii. 
 
 of the precious metal." I am glad to be 
 assured that this is decidedly American — 
 and really, bad as English ideas sometimes 
 are, I think this is a length to which we could 
 scarcely go. 
 
 The taste for blue -and -white china, so 
 great a feature in modern decoration, has 
 much to excuse it within due limits. I have 
 never been able to see the fitness of hang- 
 ing detached plates — however unique and 
 valuable — on walls, as if they were pictures ; 
 .* but on a shelf or ledge where plates can be 
 arranged in a row, the cool clean colour 
 of the older Oriental, or even Delf, is very 
 refreshing and pleasant to the eye. Without 
 pretending to connoisseurship in marks, and 
 periods, and processes, we may easily learn 
 to distinguish between poor imitations, and 
 original and good objects in pottery — be- 
 tween Chinese and Japanese, between early 
 and late work in both, and among the most 
 marked English kinds. Wedge wood, Worcester, 
 Chelsea, Derby, and so on, so as to choose 
 the most decorative. As to the shapes of 
 
II.] DECORATIVE ART— FORM. 83 
 
 the various manufactures, if they are good, 
 they will certainly tell you at a glance for 
 what purpose they were originally intended, 
 — and they may still fulfil that purpose ; but 
 if we prefer not to run the risk of losing 
 them by breakage, and to keep them withi^vV 
 sight, using them merely for the pleasure of" 
 the eye, it is perfectly reasonable to range 
 them on shelves or in open cupboards in our 
 own sitting-rooms. I saw a house lately 
 where the dining - room was lined with 
 dressers, on which all the china and glasrf^' 
 of the household was arranged — this was, I 
 suppose, by way of returning to the sim- 
 plicity of earlier times ; but it seemed rather 
 far-fetched and inconvenient. One would 
 choose only the rarest, and least used, and 
 most beautiful of the family possessions of 
 this kind for constant exhibition in the 
 dining-room, unless we introduce also the 
 pots and pans, and kitchen ware generally, 
 because of our inability to make better things. 
 
 Often, in the present enthusiasm for the 
 things and manners of old times, people are 
 
84 LECTURES ON ART. [ii. 
 
 apt to be carried away, and, out of disgust 
 at the falseness and artificiality of later civili- 
 sation, forget the good things it has brought 
 as well. At any rate, we cannot return in 
 any genuine sense to primitive ways, nor 
 should we try to do so ; only, by discovering 
 the mistakes over -sophistication and refine- 
 ment have led us into by comparison with 
 the simpler old fashion, we may correct 
 them, — not losing what we have gained, but 
 merely putting it to a better use. All manu- 
 factures and processes have reached in these 
 days a mechanical perfection hitherto un- 
 dreamed of; and, in our pride in this per- 
 fection, qualities of appropriateness, delicacy, 
 beauty, are often lost sight of 
 
 The texture of a carpet is often exqui- 
 site in softness, thickness, evenness, while the 
 pattern on it is detestable in its gaudiness 
 and ugliness ; a piece of metal-work is often 
 faultless in finish and polish, but wrong 
 as to every consideration of taste and of 
 use. I need not multiply instances ; but 
 it seems as if this modern characteristic 
 
II.] DECORATIVE ART— FORM. 85 
 
 of pride in mechanical perfection, over- 
 coming original pleasure in beauty, is to 
 be found in almost everything ; so that, 
 even in music, a singer's power of faultlessly 
 executing bravura passages and shakes, of 
 dwelling on a note for an unprecedented and 
 intolerable length of time, and, in the player 
 of any instrument, the power of executing 
 the sort of effect least properly belonging to 
 that instrument, and the most impossible ; 
 these things are more admired than the 
 uttering, with sympathetic expression, of 
 a simple melody, only intended to reach 
 the heart, and not to excite surprise and 
 astonishment at all. 
 
 One day, after I had been making some 
 such remarks as these, an old lady said to 
 me — " I have been furnishing my house for 
 the last thirty years ; you do not expect me 
 to begin all over again." I assured her in- 
 deed that I did not. I think the fact of her 
 having kept alive her interest in it for so 
 long, proved that there must have been a 
 great deal in it both beautiful and useful. I 
 
86 LECTURES ON ART. [ii. 
 
 find it IS generally thought that such ideas 
 as these of mine are meant to bring about 
 wholesale destruction of household goods, 
 and immediate purchase of new ones of a 
 different kind. Nothing would be further 
 from my wishes. The greatest sacrifice I 
 would desire is the carrying out of the 
 axiom, " Keep nothing in your house but 
 what you know to be useful, or believe to be 
 beautiful." This done, and then in every 
 future purchase the principles exercised that 
 I have suggested, I should feel that much 
 will have been gained — much simplicity, 
 much comfort, much beauty. And there is 
 a way of arranging a house and its furniture, 
 with regard to natural function and habit 
 and convenience, so that it produces a certain 
 charm and harmony of effect, and the com- 
 fort and hospitality of a home. Houses have 
 their character, their physiognomy, as well as 
 people ; it is by studying their peculiarities, 
 suppressing this or that defect, and bringing 
 out this or that good quality, that we can 
 inhabit and enjoy them to the best advan- 
 
II.] DECORATIVE ART— FORM. 87 
 
 tage. In this way can they be brought into 
 harmony with the divine order of nature, 
 instead of being, as they often are, discordant 
 with her simplicity and economy. 
 
 To any one who has begun to feel the 
 wish, nay, the necessity for some change, 
 some relief from the dead level of household 
 ugliness that has prevailed for so long, the 
 first discouragement, the first difficulty to be 
 encountered lies in the house itself It is 
 given to comparatively few to have the 
 advantage of living either in beautiful old 
 houses, or in new ones planned and built 
 after the intelligent thoughtful designs of 
 good modern architects. The house we most 
 of us have to inhabit, is a more or less ill or 
 well constructed specimen of the ordinary 
 builder's house, intended to provide its in- 
 dwellers with a certain amount of shelter, 
 comfort, convenience, as little of these as is 
 decently necessary, and as much of preten- 
 sion, ostentation, insecure workmanship, and 
 inadequate material, as can be got into the 
 contract. So our efforts to make these 
 
88 LECTURES ON ART. [ii. 
 
 houses more beautiful and inhabitable are 
 hindered at every turn by some radical 
 defect, and our utmost success results from a 
 constant struggle merely to make the best of 
 it. We begin to want to make our floors 
 more comely, clean, and convenient ; but the 
 planks are so uneven, so badly joined, that 
 they do not admit of the staining and polish- 
 ing we would desire, and the only means of 
 dealing with them is to cover them up to the 
 walls with matting or carpet, collecting daily 
 accumulations of dust, and leading to the 
 ceaseless labour of the housemaid ; then the 
 walls are only too likely to be dreary wastes 
 of height and breadth, ill proportioned and 
 difficult to deal with ; the windows too large, 
 too low, and ill-placed, so that they look, 
 from both inside and outside, like large holes 
 made only to be filled up again in some 
 way, veiled in large muslin curtains, and 
 within these again larger and heavier ones, 
 wire or wicker blinds also perhaps, and linen 
 or else Venetian ones as well, and tables 
 with plants. By all these things we express 
 
II.] DECORATIVE ART— FORM. 89 
 
 our need of mitigating the glare of light 
 which would, without them, seem to make 
 the rooms uninhabitable. 
 
 Then there are the ugly and meaningless 
 cornices and centre-pieces of the ceiling, 
 looking like the ornaments off a wedding- 
 cake, the clumsily - formed and obtrusive 
 marble mantelpieces,. lending a' gloom as of 
 tombstones to the room, and the ill-con- 
 trived and extravagant fire-grate. All this 
 is very discouraging, and is apt to lead to im- 
 provements that are after all merely make- 
 shifts. Still, this is very often all we can do — 
 people with moderate means in these days. 
 There is a Lecture by Mr. William Morris, 
 called " Making the Best of it," which should 
 afford much instruction, much help, and 
 some encouragement, to those of us who 
 have the matter really at heart ; but I fear 
 we are still so much in the minority that the 
 time for a general reform is still far off; and 
 it is difficult to feel very sanguine about it. 
 
 It has often been said that one reason of 
 the neglect of the principles of Art in modern 
 
90 LECTURES ON ART. [ii. 
 
 days is the general admiration and devotion 
 to science. " Men run to and fro, and know- 
 ledge is increased." I know that we owe a 
 great debt to science ; but there is one good 
 ojfifice we have a right to expect from her, 
 and to which she has only latterly apparently 
 turned her attention, and that office is the 
 teaching us how to get rid of our smoke. 
 Smoke is bad enough in towns where the 
 chimneys of houses used for living only give 
 forth their store of blacks ; but in manufactur- 
 ing towns, and especially, as it seems to me, 
 those of the north, the plague is intolerable, 
 if one comes to think of it. These towns 
 are mostly built in beautiful situations in the 
 midst of fine natural features ; but the face of 
 the country is blackened as by some great 
 conflagration. The smoke, and gases, and 
 noisome vapours, destroy every green thing, 
 like the locusts in King Pharaoh's time, and 
 no one seems to care. I see fine houses 
 filled with costly and delicate hangings and 
 fittings, and of course they must suffer. But 
 the great thing of all to point out is, that 
 
II.] DECORATIVE ART— FORM. 91 
 
 there can be no real care for Nature or love of 
 Art where this plague of smoke prevails. I 
 am told that the Smoke Act is in many- 
 places a dead letter ; so it is impossible not 
 to ask how the rich men of these places can 
 really care for beautiful pictures while they 
 allow their chimneys to blot out and spoil 
 the natural beauty of the hills, and vales, and 
 gardens around them. No doubt there are 
 other and perhaps more important things to 
 attend to ; but it is impossible not to feel 
 that, as regards the general love of beauty 
 and care for Art, the abolition of smoke is to 
 be earnestly desired and promoted, as far as 
 the influence of each one of us extends. 
 
 These remarks of mine on the subject of 
 house-decoration would be incomplete at the 
 present moment were I to say nothing about 
 the phase of taste, mockingly called Esthetic, 
 through which we are passing, not the least 
 curious of the features belonging to it being 
 that the satirical comments it has called 
 forth, and the numerous travesties that have 
 been founded on it, have acquired far larger 
 
92 LECTURES ON ART. [ii. 
 
 proportions and obtained much more notoriety 
 than the reality they profess to ridicule. It 
 is certain, however, that those in whom the 
 love and pursuit of Art is enlightened and 
 genuine, have nothing to fear from this ridi- 
 cule. All that is unreal, affected, morbid, 
 professedly eccentric and discordant with 
 nature, in the present revival of taste is sure 
 to disappear in time, and no harm if it be 
 driven away by satire and derision ; but the 
 sounder part that is founded on true prin- 
 ciples and just reasons will certainly last and 
 serve as a good foundation for a wider and 
 better diffused knowledge of Art than has 
 yet been seen in our day. Those of us 
 who have learned in house-decoration and 
 dress to find how much more becoming and 
 agreeable, delicate and soft colouring is 
 than glaring metallic dyes ; how much more 
 delightful and serviceable are softly-falling 
 and clinging silks and stuffs, than stiff and 
 rustling ones ; and how much better and more 
 elegant are simplicity and delicacy in form 
 than massiveness and cumbrousness ; those, I 
 
II.] DECORATIVE ART— FORM. 93 
 
 say, who have learned all this are never 
 likely to return to mauve and magenta, to 
 crinolines, to yards of gilt cornices and acres 
 of costly looking-glass. 
 
 Many people in these days, having their 
 natural sense of beauty revived by the sight 
 and the possession of the good things that are 
 now as easily to be had as ugly things, buy 
 them at first because they are the fashion, 
 and then dimly begin to be aware that some 
 principles, some reasons, must exist by which 
 the beauty of some things and the ugliness 
 of others can be proved, demonstrated, 
 accounted for — and in some measure to do 
 this has been my aim. In spite of all that 
 is written and spoken in these days about 
 Taste and Art, there is very little authorita- 
 tive teaching on the subject, and this must 
 be my apology for so constantly quoting 
 from Mr. Morris and Mr. Ruskin. We indeed 
 owe everything we learn and know about Art 
 to them — the one being by original genius 
 and long practical experience, the other by 
 splendid gifts of imagination and expression, 
 
94 LECTURES ON ART. [ii. 
 
 joined to a life-long study, qualified to tell 
 us what the Arts really are, and how we 
 ought to think and feel about them. The 
 opinions and views of each on the points we 
 have been considering are, however, not very 
 accessible. Until the other day, of Mr. 
 Morris's few lectures only one has been 
 printed under his superintendence (though 
 a book of them is shortly to be published), 
 and Mr. Ruskin's writings can never appeal 
 to the world at large, their real worth and ex- 
 cellence being, at least for the majority of 
 readers, obscured by much that is visionary 
 and unpractical. In the works of both, many 
 ideas and principles are dwelt upon and 
 enforced that I can only hint at now ; but, in 
 thus making quotations from the writings of 
 these teachers, I seem to be helping to clear 
 up their meaning, and at the same time to 
 enforce my own. 
 
 For details, the little books of the " Art 
 at Home " series, — and especially one by 
 Mrs. Orrinsmith, " The Drawing-room," — 
 have been found really suggestive and useful ; 
 
II ] DECORATIVE ART— FORM. 95 
 
 especially so, as being the results of actual 
 practice and experience. And only practice 
 and experience can thoroughly teach us what 
 we want to know in such matters. In these 
 rapid, and, I fear, very disjointed remarks, 
 though I may have chanced on little or 
 nothing very new or suggestive, still I have 
 a belief that it is not quite useless to reiterate 
 the desire for simplicity and sincerity, and, 
 by means of these, beauty, in our houses, and 
 therefore in the lives that we spend in them ; 
 and I would wish to end for to-day with 
 these words of Mr. Morris's, for I think 
 there is hope and encouragement in them : 
 " We who think and can enjoy the feast 
 that Nature has spread for us, is it not both 
 our right and our duty to rebel against that 
 slavery of the waste of life's joys, which 
 people, thoughtless and joyless by no fault 
 of their own, have wrapped the world in ? 
 From our own selves we can tell that there 
 is hope of victory in our rebellion, since we 
 have Art enough in our lives, not to content 
 us, but to make us long for more, and that 
 
96 LECTURES ON ART. [ii. 
 
 longing drives us into trying to spread Art 
 and the longing for Art ; and as it is with us, 
 so it will be with those that we win over ; 
 little by little, we may well hope, will do its 
 work, till at last a great many men will have 
 enough of Art to see how little they have, 
 and how much they might better their lives, 
 if every man had his due share of Art, — 
 that is, just so much as he could use if a fair 
 chance were given him." 
 
Ill— DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, 
 DRESS, AND NEEDLEWORK. 
 
 The great and peculiar difficulties belonging 
 to this part of my subject make me feel a 
 little diffident in approaching it. Seeing that 
 colour is of so fluctuating, so variable, so 
 indefinite a nature, the words I use in speak- 
 ing of it must needs partake of the same 
 nature, and will be apt to be rather vague 
 and meaningless, unless they appeal to a 
 vivid natural perception. No one of our 
 faculties is capable of greater or more varied 
 pleasure than the colour-sense ; we find that 
 
 pleasure in all the most beauiful things of 
 
 H 
 
98 LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 Nature — the sky, the sea, the fields, the 
 woods, the flowers, the birds, the insects ; 
 and, in the things of Art, colour is the most 
 valuable quality in paintings ; and in decora- 
 tion, while harmonious colouring may in some 
 degree atone for faulty design, a good design 
 may be spoilt by discordant colouring. 
 
 You will see what I mean by the diffi- 
 culties of the subject, when I remind you 
 that no two people see colour alike — witness 
 the eternal disputes about matching ; that a 
 colour may seem one thing when placed by 
 itself, and be quite different beside other 
 colours ; that colours alter with the ever- 
 shifting quality of the atmosphere ; that 
 sunlight, moonlight, candle-light, lamp-light, 
 gas-light, electric -light, with their thousand 
 degrees of purity and intensity, make colours 
 seen by them partake of their variations ; 
 that when two people differ about the proper 
 name or nature of a colour, neither can be 
 proved to be wrong ; that most people, 
 except a very few with a highly cultivated 
 natural gift, are in some degree colour-blind ; 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, ETC. 99 
 
 else how do we account for the common 
 differences of opinion that are always arising 
 — one person calling a colour green, while 
 another calls it blue, one speaking of a tint 
 as red when another would call it brown, one 
 saying a colour is purple what another would 
 call dark blue ? Every assertion respecting 
 the form of a thing is capable of proof or of 
 disproof ; a square object can be mathemati- 
 cally proved to be square, a round object to be 
 round ; if one person says a line is crooked, 
 and another says it is straight, one must be 
 wrong, and can be shown to be so. Not so 
 with colour ; there is no absolute standard, 
 no fixed means of judgment ; all is approxi- 
 mative merely. It is a scientific fact that 
 each colour produces its impression on the 
 eye by a certain number of vibrations ; but, 
 as the sensitiveness to these vibrations varies 
 in each individual, that fact does not seem to 
 help us much. I believe there are Tables for 
 the Examination of the Colour Sense ; but I 
 cannot suppose the knowledge so gained 
 would be readily available in ordinary matters. 
 
loo LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 It is not easy to avoid the conclusion that 
 most people are insensible to delicate varia- 
 tions of colour. Think, for instance, of the 
 number of tints that " red " has to do duty 
 for. Red brick, red currants, red wine, red- 
 breast, red hair, red faces, red coats, a red 
 Indian, red sandstone, red ink, red ochre, 
 red tape. That vermilion, coral, carnations, 
 cochineal, carmine, rubies, carbuncles, garnets, 
 cherries, poppies, roses, blushes, are all called 
 red. We say as red as fire, as red as blood, 
 as red as a turkey-cock. " The whole hill- 
 side was redder than a fox," says Tennyson. 
 These things cannot really all be red, and 
 the fact is that none of them are absolutely 
 red ; no one's hair is really red, just as no 
 one's eyes are absolutely blue. Poverty of 
 language and coarseness of perception must 
 have originally given all these colours but 
 one name. 
 
 Again — snow, chalk, ivory, lilies, orange- 
 flowers, ermine, swansdown, are all called 
 white ; but what differences among them ! 
 Their differences are differences of texture 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, ETC. loi 
 
 and substance ; white being no colour, but 
 the reflection of all ; the whiteness of snow 
 being caused by the transmission of light 
 through every one of the infinite transparent 
 particles of frozen moisture, and the white- 
 ness of chalk by the reflection of light from 
 opaque calcareous particles — the result of 
 each, and its effect on the eye, being very 
 different. So with the rest. 
 
 I suppose that young children notice 
 colours as soon as they notice anything that 
 is not good to eat. Bright colours, it is said, 
 as a rule attract children, savages, dogs, birds, 
 fishes, and insects. We have often been told 
 of the bower-birds who ornament their nests 
 with different coloured shells, and feathers, 
 and the petals of flowers. The monkey who 
 plucks the splendid tropical flower only to 
 tear it to pieces, and reaches out his long 
 arms to clutch at the bright trailing feathers 
 of an unsuspecting bird, or darts after a bril- 
 liant butterfly, is really showing an aesthetic 
 appreciation of colour and delight in it for its 
 own sake. Such is the liking for brilliancy 
 
102 . LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 in undeveloped natures. It is said that red 
 most strongly attracts the uneducated sense, 
 and that it needs high training and refine- 
 ment to properly enjoy green. How far this 
 is true I do not know ; but it seems to afford 
 some sort of explanation of the present taste 
 for sage-green in dress and house decoration ; 
 and children, in whom the colour sense is 
 undeveloped, make up bunches of flowers 
 without any leaves. 
 
 It certainly takes a highly cultivated sense 
 to appreciate the more delicate hues and com- 
 binations. But, before we proceed to these, 
 some sort of classification of the ordinary 
 colours must be made. In the prismatic spec- 
 trum, the original type of colour, or the rain- 
 bow, are found what are called the three primary 
 colours — yellow, red, blue. Between these, 
 and composed of them, are the three second- 
 ary colours — orange, made of yellow and 
 red ; purple, of red and blue ; green, of blue 
 and yellow. Of the three primary colours, 
 in various proportions, every hue in nature is 
 composed — black, in which all colours are 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, ETC. 103 
 
 absorbed, being at one end of the scale, and 
 white, in which all are reflected, at the other 
 end of it. Between the two, the variations 
 may be considered infinite. Some scientific 
 calculation numbers 30,000 ; but I could 
 easily believe them to be twice as many. 
 
 Of the three primaries, blue is said to be 
 cold, yellow warm, and red neither. By this 
 is meant that an admixture of blue with any 
 other colour chills and impoverishes it. A 
 bluish tone in white muslin, or silk, or other 
 white stuff, is at once felt to be poor in effect 
 and unbecoming : we know what is thought 
 of milk when it is bluish. A blue-purple, and a 
 purplish-red are felt to be colder than a red- 
 purple and a brick-red. Blue, in its highest 
 conditions, is perhaps the most beautiful of 
 all colours ; but we do not admire it for its 
 coldness, but for its purity. Blue is the only 
 colour that can be obtained in a perfectly 
 pure form. Ultramarine — the type of purity, 
 the colour of the Virgin Mary. 
 
 Now, as blue is called cold, so is yellow 
 said to be warm. It is the colour of the 
 
104 LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 intensest heat we can imagine — white-heat ; 
 and as blue cools and chills, yellow warms 
 any colour with which it is mixed. Ivory- 
 white, cream -white, may be called warm 
 white ; and, of course, stuffs of such tints 
 harmonise much better with the warm tones 
 of hair and complexion than the snow 
 and ice-cold stuffs of a few years ago. 
 Rich materials, lace and satin and silk, look 
 all the richer in the warm white, and poor 
 materials look less poor. So a yellow olive- 
 green is more soft and harmonious than a 
 cold blue-green, and a brick-red having an 
 admixture of yellow is much softer and more 
 becoming than a magenta -red, which has 
 some proportion of blue in it. And lastly, 
 red being neutral, is incapable of imparting 
 either cold or warm effects to a colour to 
 which it is added in any proportion. 
 
 The most striking effect of the modern 
 revival of taste is the change of public 
 opinion it has effected with regard to colour 
 — a change from coldness and rawness to 
 tone and warmth. And if we compare the 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART-COLOUR, ETC. 105 
 
 magenta, the mauve, the emerald-green of a 
 dozen years ago, with the tints that are now 
 the mode, we shall see that the wide differ- 
 ence between their effect on the colour sense 
 is owing to the adoption in the latter of 
 warm yellow tones instead of cold blue ones, 
 such as I have described them. 
 
 It is a very common objection to what 
 are called artistic colours to say that they 
 are gloomy, dismal, and unbecoming. If 
 this is true of any particular shade, the fact 
 would merely go to prove that it is not 
 a colour properly so-called, but some muddy 
 confusion of tints, mistaken for an artistic 
 colour for want of a right apprehension — 
 and it owes its existence to a foregone con- 
 clusion that everything heavy and dull must 
 be artistic. People often nowadays grow- 
 ing tired of their white-and-gold drawing- 
 rooms, in which, though the colouring might 
 be cold, it was at least clean, let loose into 
 them the house -painter, who daubs all the 
 wood-work with his muddy and foggy tints, 
 dirty browns, or purplish -chocolates, and 
 
io6 LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 cockroach colour, under the impression he 
 is doing it in true high Art style. Indeed, 
 the Andaman Islander, with his red-ochre and 
 white chalk, has a much better and more 
 refined perception. Suppose, however, we 
 see if we can reach a higher standard than 
 that, by considering first the effects of colour 
 in Nature, before thinking of colour in Art. 
 
 The defenders of bright aniline dyes say, 
 that since there is brilliant colour in Nature, 
 in flowers, in the sunset, in birds, in tropical 
 foliage, that it is quite natural and right to 
 prefer them (the aniline dyes), and to use 
 them in dress and in household decoration. 
 But let us see in what the brilliant hues of 
 Nature consist, and then, if we can reproduce 
 them, let us by all means do so. 
 
 In the first place all brilliant combined 
 natural effects of colour are transitory — the 
 clouds of the sunset sky, crimson and purple, 
 and green and gold, are gone in half-an-hour, 
 and would be a sad fatigue to the eye if they 
 lasted all day. The hues of the rainbow 
 melt into thin air as we gaze, they have no 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, ETC. 107 
 
 time to dazzle us ; the brilliant tropical flower 
 fades in a day ; the most glowing assemblage 
 of autumn tints burns itself out and turns to 
 dull ashen brown. Suppose, then, we were 
 able to procure stuffs to match some of the 
 hues of the flowers, the rainbow, the sunset, in 
 brilliancy, suppose we hung our rooms with 
 them, they would be always appealing to the 
 colour sense so strongly that they would be 
 as fatiguing as a perpetual succession of loud 
 screams to the ear — and, their first freshness 
 worn off, they would soon look shabby, and 
 with a worse sort of shabbiness than hues of 
 less pretension. 
 
 And not only are these natural effects of 
 colour evanescent, but they are variable as 
 well ; the hues of the sunset changing every 
 moment, our senses have no time to pall, to 
 be dazed by too much unchanging loveliness. 
 The glancing hues of butterflies are made 
 up of minutest, delicate plumes, and the 
 almost imperceptible soft tints of each, when 
 they are blended together on the wings, give 
 a tremulously flashing brightness that no 
 
io8 LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 evenly laid or stippled tint of ours could 
 produce. 
 
 So brilliancy of colour is often owing to 
 texture, — texture by us not to be imitated, — 
 such as the floating vaporousness of clouds, 
 the lustre of water and precious crystals, 
 and the bloom of a peach or a rose-leaf. 
 Not our most perfect manufacturers can 
 reach these. Take a poppy and place it beside 
 the richest and finest silk of the brightest red 
 that can be dyed, and the silk will be coarsened 
 and deadened by the contact. The rose, the 
 ideal perfection of a flower in form, colour, 
 and perfume, owes its glowing hues to the 
 translucent texture of its manifold petals, lying 
 each over each in loveliest curves and involu- 
 tions, their transmitted colour growing fuller 
 and fuller in exquisite gradations, for their very 
 shadows are colour, till the innermost folds 
 close at last over the fragrant heart of the 
 flower. " Solomon in all his glory was not 
 arrayed like one of these." But we think 
 we may probably succeed better than Solomon, 
 and we have a muslin rose made with plenty 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, ETC. 109 
 
 of carmine, a cotton-wool middle, and a wire 
 stem, and we pay a price for it and bear it 
 about with satisfaction. 
 
 Consider the blue of the sky ; it is not a 
 bright flat shallow even tint, but it seems to 
 palpitate, lighten, darken as we gaze, and the 
 sunset clouds (I am obliged to recur to the 
 sunset, as one is apt to be a little out of 
 practice as regards the sunm^), besides never 
 remaining of the same hue for two minutes 
 together, are of such an impalpable substance, 
 such an ethereal spiritual quality, that it 
 seems as if we should scarcely dare describe, 
 much less imitate them. 
 
 These, then, are a few of Nature's qualities 
 of colour ; evanescence, translucence, con- 
 stant variation and extreme delicacy of 
 texture — these go to produce her brilliant 
 effects of colour, which, as I think, we must 
 give up all thoughts of imitating, as we work 
 under such different conditions. In dyeing, 
 embroidering, painting, it is of no use trying 
 for that brightness ; in the attempt, generally, 
 every other desirable quality must be sacri- 
 
no LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 ficed, and the brightness, even if we do in 
 some measure succeed, must be in a degree 
 faded and sullied the first time the manufac- 
 ture is worn or used. The infinite powers of 
 Nature supply the place of the faded flower 
 every day with a fresh one, and the sunlight 
 is ever fresh and new, while our dresses and 
 carpets and curtains must last a certain 
 time, as they do not grow spontaneously to 
 the hand. Seeing that this is the case, let us 
 give up from the first intense brightness of 
 colour, as being in goods of our own manu- 
 facture unserviceable, unlasting (the dye 
 injuring the solid qualities of the fabric), 
 fatiguing to the eye, needing frequent re- 
 newal, and of doubtful beauty from the first. 
 
 When the mode of extracting dyes from 
 coal-tar was invented, the common admira- 
 tion for gaudy colours was raised to its 
 utmost by the intensity, the hard ungradated 
 glaring metallic brilliancy of the magentas, 
 the mauves, the emerald greens, the unmiti- 
 gated blues that were then produced ; it was 
 as if they had thrown people off their 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, ETC. iii 
 
 balance as regards colour, and had aroused 
 all the worst tastes of our nature. I find 
 that they bore, besides those I have men- 
 tioned, the euphonious names of Violine, 
 Roseine, Fuchsine, Solferino, Emeraldine, 
 Azuline ; there is something cloying and 
 sticky about the very names. 
 
 It seems to me that dyeing the hair 
 bright yellow, and other arts besides, must 
 have been invented at the same time, for 
 how should delicate natural tints of hair and 
 complexion bear the juxtaposition of such 
 intense forced brilliancy without a little arti- 
 ficial heightening to help them ? 
 
 But those intense dyes have had their 
 day ; we are no longer called upon to 
 admire, and seldom even to see them. I 
 trust they will never reappear. They were 
 bad enough in rich material ; the silky 
 shimmer and soft folds mitigated their glare; 
 but I cannot remember without a shudder 
 the sickly purplish hue that overspread 
 magenta ribbons after they had seen the sun 
 a few times ; and into what a greenish 
 
112 LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 pallor mauve stuffs feebly relapsed after a 
 little wear. 
 
 These aniline colours are the result of 
 aiming at brightness as the first object ; but 
 in spite of their brightness they are raw and 
 cold — they have no affinity with the natural 
 tints of complexion and hair — so they 
 offend against every principle of harmony. 
 In nature "all this innumerous- coloured 
 scene of things " — colours are never raw — 
 there is always some admixture, softening, 
 gradating. If, as we have seen, natural 
 colours in strong effects of light surpass in 
 brilliancy any dyes of ours, they have their 
 soberer effects as well, and other qualities 
 that we can avail ourselves of. And as the 
 luminous transparency of sea-water, the melt- 
 ing dewy tints of the sky, the tender bloom of 
 fruit, the exquisite texture of flowers, are im- 
 possible to be imitated by any processes of 
 ours, let us acknowledge at once that all this 
 is of no use trying at, but let us at the same 
 time consider what it is that we can do, and 
 try and establish some principles to go upon 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, ETC. 113 
 
 — principles of harmony in colour. We have 
 only to think of what harmony means in 
 music to understand what the expression is 
 intended to convey when it is applied to 
 colour. It consists, in music, of the unity, 
 connection, similarity, and agreement of 
 tones so as to produce beautiful effects, 
 sometimes soothing, sometimes exhilarating, 
 always fresh and various, their combinations 
 being, within certain restrictions, practically 
 unlimited. So precisely with colour-har- 
 mony. 
 
 The principles which will be found safe 
 guides both in house -decoration and dress 
 may be arranged under five heads — Analogy, 
 Contrast, Variety, Delicacy, Repetition. 
 
 To explain what I mean by Harmony of 
 Analogy, I will suppose a lady of fair com- 
 plexion and delicate colouring to be seeking 
 harmonious tints for an entire costume. 
 Her hair is light brown, so she may choose 
 a darker fuller brown for the dress ; her 
 complexion will bear a delicate pink, so 
 
 the brown of her dress must incline more to 
 I 
 
114 LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 dove than to russet, and in the brown 
 bonnet that matches her dress there may be 
 a delicate pink feather and lining ; and in 
 the lining of her parasol, and the gloves, the 
 pink should be repeated, perhaps of a 
 slightly fuller pink, but still not deeper than 
 the pink of the under side of a mushroom. 
 
 I have seen a drawing-room furnished in 
 similar tones, only with a somewhat wider 
 range. The brown was a little warmer, and 
 in stamped velvet for the chair-coverings ; 
 some of the cushions and the mantel-border 
 embroidered with wild roses and yellow 
 centres ; the walls pink, of two shades ; 
 the curtains of brown figured silk lined with 
 pink ; and the carpet a blending of all these 
 tints together. 
 
 Thus, by beginning with some colour 
 having natural fitness to recommend it, and 
 using one or two of its modifying tints 
 taken separately, by the union of the whole 
 we get a harmony of analogy. 
 
 Harmony by contrast is on a different 
 principle ; we must suppose a brilliant com- 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, ETC. 115 
 
 plexion, and dark hair and eyes, or brown 
 eyes and red-gold hair. The natural colour- 
 ing already offers strong contrasts, so pale, 
 soft, and subdued tints seem out of place 
 and ineffective. Cardinal red, gold, cream 
 colour, and black, would perhaps suit the 
 dark hair and eyes ; and blue and flesh 
 coloured brocade of Louis Quinze might 
 suit the red-gold hair and brown eyes. It 
 seems to me a sure rule that persons whose 
 natural colouring is in a low key, one tint 
 nearly assimilating with another, should wear 
 soft tones of colour in dress, also nearly as- 
 similating with each other ; and where the 
 natural colouring offers strong contrasts, the 
 colouring of the dress should be full and 
 strong also. I cannot think that strong 
 contrast can ever be good in the colouring 
 of a room, where it seems to me repose 
 and softened light are always needed. Here 
 is an arrangement of contrast in colouring, 
 however, which still seems simple and har- 
 monious. Two full blues, two rather greener 
 ones, and two shades of a flesh -colour- 
 
ii6 LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 like pink. This colouring may be seen in 
 brocades of the time of Louis Quinze. 
 
 The next principle I would suggest is 
 variety. It is an immemorial custom that 
 dining-room curtains should be red, with leather 
 chairs, red tablecloth, and Turkey carpet in 
 which red prevails. There is not much 
 variety in this time-honoured fashion ; nor 
 is there sometimes in the manifestations of 
 the new. I saw a drawing-room the other 
 day with a peacock feather patterned wall- 
 paper, dado and wood work of peacock blue, 
 and curtains and chair-coverings of peacock 
 patterned chintz, exactly matching the wall 
 paper. The result was flat and monoton- 
 ous, in my opinion. Both these are in- 
 stances of want of variety. I would never 
 recommend chairs to be covered with stuff 
 like the curtains, or the walls to be like 
 either. The walls of the dining-room may 
 be a brownish yellow ; the curtains of a 
 mixed red and yellow — the yellow a little 
 pinkish ; and the chairs plain red, and the 
 carpet brown and yellow and red, and a 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, ETC. 117 
 
 little green. A great deal of pleasure can be 
 felt in the variety of these tints, which, 
 nevertheless, produce a unity of effect when 
 regarded as a whole. It is a good rule, if 
 the walls have a pattern on them, that the 
 curtains should be plain, and vice versa ; so 
 a dress should not be entirely figured or em- 
 broidered, but only in portions, that the 
 design may show all the more richly. 
 
 To come to the next point — delicacy — 
 by delicacy I do not necessarily mean pale- 
 ness ; delicacy of effect is gained by suiting 
 exactly the colour to the material. To 
 muslin and such like filmy substances full 
 bright tints are most unsuitable ; pale tender 
 hues, and light tracery of pattern belong to 
 them ; still, delicacy in these does not in- 
 volve insipidity, which poverty of tone and 
 design would cause. For richer stuffs, in 
 silk and satin and velvet, fuller hues are 
 quite suitable. The shimmer, the shifting 
 of lights and shadows, the bloom of the 
 texture, modifies the effect of a full colour, 
 which in a dull and common stuff would be 
 
ii8 LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 flat and heavy. This principle should lead 
 us not to offend the delicate tints of flesh 
 and hair by surrounding them with coarse 
 hues and hard masses, but to blend and 
 tone down all our adornments according to 
 the example of Nature, who so carefully 
 softens tints and outlines — for example, 
 where the hair begins on the temples and 
 the eyebrows, and the colouring of cheek 
 and lip. We instinctively avoid clothing an 
 infant in dark and hard colours ; it would 
 seem unsuitable and discordant. Do not let 
 let us treat ourselves so very much worse. 
 
 The senses do not recognise a weak im- 
 pression at the same time as a stronger one. 
 We cannot listen properly to music going 
 on in a room when people are talking and 
 laughing loudly. A strong flavour in a dish, 
 such as garlic or onions, overpowers every 
 other it may possess ; so strong colours in 
 dress and room-decoration catch the eye, 
 and fill it to the exclusion of every, softer 
 and more delicate one. 
 
 The fourth principle is repetition. Never 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART—COLOUR, ETC. 119 
 
 have a colour concentrated in one spot, but 
 take care to repeat it in others. If you 
 have blue and white chintz in one corner of 
 your room, put some in another corner to 
 balance it. If you have a pink feather in 
 your bonnet, wear pink gloves or a pink 
 parasol. To isolate a colour is to draw the 
 eye to that particular point, and to keep it 
 there, instead of gently leading it on from 
 one to another. 
 
 In these ways, therefore — by using either 
 a colour-analogy, or a colour-contrast, and 
 observing delicacy, variety, and repetition, 
 can harmonious arrangement of colour be 
 brought together and applied. " It is the 
 best possible sign of a colour," says Mr. 
 Ruskin, "when nobody who sees it knows 
 what to call it, or how to give an idea of it 
 to anybody else. Even among simple' hues 
 the most valuable are those which cannot be 
 defined ; the most precious purples will look 
 brown beside pure purple ; and the most 
 precious greens will be called blue if seen 
 beside pure green, and green if seen beside 
 
120 LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 pure blue." A colour may be very agreeable 
 in its real nature, but lose all its pleasing 
 qualities when wrongly combined. Harmony 
 not only brings agreeable tones together, but 
 establishes an affinity between them, both 
 in music and in colouring. 
 
 The worst colour discord is said to be 
 purple and green. Yet you will say, how 
 lovely the violet is, half hidden in its green 
 leaves ; — and so it is, but its effect is beyond 
 our imitation ; it is dependent on tone, and 
 texture, and quality, too shifting and delicate 
 for our processes to follow. Violet of the 
 usual tone of quality is the most unbe- 
 coming colour to nearly all complexions ; it 
 makes sallow ones appear almost orange, and 
 fair ones yellowish green. But there are 
 many kinds of purple, — redder or bluer, — 
 there are lilac, lavender, peach -blossom, 
 plum, amethyst, puce, mulberry, down to 
 slate and French gray. Out of these 
 some tints might be chosen and worn, 
 but I suppose none of them would be suit- 
 able for room -decoration. What among 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, ETC. 121 
 
 them might be agreeable in daylight would 
 be of a very dull brown at night. Purple 
 is certainly the most difficult colour. Its 
 more beautiful hues tend to red rather than 
 blue. 
 
 Green has been said to be a colour that 
 is only appreciated by cultivated faculties ; 
 it has its dangers as well as its attractions. 
 The introduction of great quantities of green 
 is also said to be one of the mistakes that 
 always creeps in when society is become 
 artificial ; and there are signs at the present 
 moment that in aesthetic colouring we are 
 declining into a "green and yellow melan- 
 choly still it is reposeful and soothing to 
 the eye, and out of all its various hues some 
 are very lovely ; bird's egg green, grass- 
 green, sea-green, tea -green, myrtle, olive. 
 Green should incline to yellow rather than 
 to blue. A pea -green could never be be- 
 coming ; its best and most characteristic 
 shade is not at all bright, but inclines to a 
 brownish hue. A green always becomes 
 more agreeable by candlelight, which adds 
 
122 LECTURES ON ART. [in. 
 
 a further proportion of yellow to it. I find 
 in a colour treatise published some twenty- 
 years ago, a recommendation to wear green 
 with red hair, by way of diminishing its 
 intensity. Red hair is now such a fortunate 
 possession, that this piece of advice seems 
 highly unnecessary ; and we would rather 
 wish to heighten than diminish the effect. 
 Some kinds of blue will do this. I always 
 feel that blue stands better by itself than 
 any colour, and cannot very agreeably be 
 mixed with anything but white. Used in a 
 room, its tone should approach green, and 
 in dress it should always be modified by 
 gray or yellow in some proportion, and 
 never used pure ; it is too cold and hard. 
 Red is the colour that first attracts the 
 untrained sense, and its different tones 
 seem to be the most numerous of all. 
 There is ordinarily only a very small pro- 
 portion of red in a landscape, so, to supply 
 the want, the common device of the painter 
 of rustic scenes is to introduce an old 
 woman with a red cloak. Only in Devon- 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, ETC. 123 
 
 shire and Somersetshire are reds plentiful 
 in nature, and there the red-tiled roofs, the red 
 cattle, the red sandstone cliffs, the red earth, 
 please the original hereditary taste. In 
 dress dark shades of red will bring out 
 whatever red there may be in the hair ; a 
 brick-red lends a little glow to fair pale 
 complexions. 
 
 Yellow is a colour of which, I am 
 inclined to think, the best effects are 
 neglected ; it ought to be more used in 
 town houses, so as to bring a little arti- 
 ficial sunlight into them. It cannot be 
 used, however, in masses, but must be 
 broken and mingled with other colours. 
 Yellow and white are as agreeable in their 
 way as blue and white. Mixed shades of 
 yellow and white and a little myrtle green 
 form a pleasing combination. 
 
 Many ladies in the present day choose 
 black for their ordinary wear as being the 
 most convenient and comfortable way of solv- 
 ing the question of colour, but it is not a 
 solution, it is an evasion ; as such, it has its 
 
124 LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 advantages ; it absorbs colour, and reduces 
 form, and is unremarkable and economical. 
 Black is the extinction of colour, and it 
 absorbs some proportion of every colour near 
 which it is placed. A black gown and 
 bonnet make a pale face look more pale, and 
 lower a high colour. Colours in embroidery 
 on a black ground are less brilliant than they 
 would be on any other. I should banish 
 black altogether from room -decoration, 
 except in the form of slender lines, such as 
 chair-rails, slim table-legs, and narrow 
 picture-frames. 
 
 While black weakens colour by absorb- 
 ing some of it into itself, white strengthens 
 and heightens the effect of colour placed 
 near it, as it takes away from that colour 
 the white light which enfeebled it. Clear 
 soft white, which produces the effect of gray, 
 brings out the delicate freshness of youthful 
 tints ; and so it finds its most agreeable 
 use in the dress of infants, and also of 
 young girls on not the least interesting and 
 important occasions of their lives. "There 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, ETC. 125 
 
 are not many tints/' says Mr. Morris, " fit to 
 colour a wall with. Here is a short list : 
 a solid red not very deep, but rather describ- 
 able as a full pink, and toned both with 
 yellow and blue, a very fine colour if you 
 can hit it ; a light orangy pink, to be used 
 rather sparingly, a pale golden tint, i.e.^ a 
 yellowish brown, a very difficult colour to 
 hit ; and a colour between these two last, 
 call it pale copper colour. All these three 
 you must be careful over, for if you get. 
 them muddy or dirty you are lost." And on 
 ending these remarks on colour, which merely 
 form the first half of my present lecture, and 
 which pretend to be no more than suggestions 
 towards an appreciation of it, I wish to point 
 out the differences between three orders of col- 
 ouring,toone or other of which every hue, every 
 dye, every stain used in these days belongs. 
 
 First, there is what I may be perhaps 
 allowed to call Philistine colouring — that 
 produced by the deep intense aniline dyes, 
 cold, flat, ungradated, aiming at brilliancy 
 alone, without tone or harmony. 
 
126 LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 Second, the mock -aesthetic colouring, 
 which, aiming not at Art, but at artisticalness, 
 if I may coin such a word, is all deadness, 
 darkness, dulness — and is also without tone 
 and harmony. 
 
 The third kind is less easy to describe : 
 it is the only true colouring properly so 
 called, in producing which vegetable dyes 
 only are used. I can only say that good 
 colouring is essentially clean, and clear, and 
 cheerful, like a healthy complexion, having 
 tone and harmony ; and I feel I cannot too 
 strongly insist on the difference between 
 this and much that is considered aesthetic 
 and artistic. 
 
 When the eye has once learned to 
 appreciate the differences between these 
 three classes, I am bold to say there can be 
 no question as to where the choice will be 
 fixed. 
 
 And now let me pass to the few words 
 about the Arts of Dress and Needlework 
 that I have time for. They might easily 
 occupy a course of lectures of themselves ; 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, ETC. 127 
 
 but it is only possible at present to indicate 
 slightly and rapidly the place they fill in 
 the general group of the Decorative Arts. 
 The two Arts of Dress and Needlework 
 have been closely connected from a very 
 early time, even from when the wise man 
 said of the excellent woman, " She maketh 
 herself coverings of tapestry, her clothing is 
 silk and purple." 
 
 Periods of beautiful and dignified cos- 
 tume have also been periods of fine em- 
 broidery, one art leading to and helping on 
 the production of the other. Nor are they 
 without their influence on other arts besides. 
 In times when the general type of the 
 human form is a poorly developed one, and 
 distorted and trammelled by fashion, there 
 can be no great school of sculpture ; so 
 without fine and simple and rich dressing 
 and stuffs and embroidery, there will be the 
 less prospect of a great school of painting. 
 It was the perfect physical development of 
 the Greeks that helped to educate the school 
 of Pheidias, and it was the beautiful 
 
128 LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 costume of the Italians in the fifteenth 
 century that helped to educate and form the 
 Venetian and Florentine schools of painting. 
 
 That dress becomes an Art from the 
 moment it ceases to be merely a covering 
 and a protection from weather, — need not 
 be doubted. We often read of the dress of 
 savages, which consists frequently more of 
 decoration than of anything else ; and we 
 read of the fine linen in which Joseph was 
 arrayed by the hands of Pharaoh. 
 
 So does needlework become an Art from 
 the moment that it is more than merely a 
 drawing of the edges of skins together with 
 a fish-bone needle, which was probably the 
 earliest kind of sewing ; and in the fifteenth 
 century before Christ we read of embroidery 
 in blue and in purple, in scarlet and in fine 
 linen. 
 
 Both these Arts in their various depart- 
 ments and branches fill in some way or 
 other so large a part in the lives of women 
 now, and have done so in all past time, that 
 it cannot but be well to learn to think 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, ETC. 129 
 
 clearly and reasonably of them — practising 
 the Art of Needlework with pleasure and 
 intelligence, fulfilling the requirements both 
 of beauty and use, and in the Art of Dress, 
 which we must all of us practise whether we 
 will or no, still fulfilling the same require- 
 ments, conforming to fashion to a certain 
 extent, but not blindfold and with too great 
 confidence, always reserving the right of 
 private judgment, and with it the charm of 
 individuality — style in its true sense. The 
 greatest objection to the despotism of 
 fashion is the uniformity it leads to. It is 
 surprising how willing people are to forsake 
 their own rights in this matter, and seriously 
 aim at looking like every one else ; the 
 fringe of hair worn, however becoming it 
 may be to some young faces, however 
 piquant in effect it may sometimes be in 
 itself, has the tendency to make every 
 young lady look alike, and destroy the 
 effect of individual attractions. There are 
 no doubt good principles, good customs, 
 
 lying at the root of some of the prevailing 
 K 
 
130 LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 fashions of the day, which those who decry 
 them are apt to ignore ; as, for instance, 
 when a fashion for short dresses lasts for 
 any length of time, we may be sure that a 
 healthy custom of walking much in the open 
 air prevails among women. 
 
 Those parts of the fashions that originate 
 in reasonable requirements, habits, customs, 
 hours, — these are always rightly to be 
 followed ; but those other parts that have 
 their origin in a mere thirst for novelty or 
 love of display, should be looked at with 
 suspicion, and not too hastily adopted. The 
 fashion of the garments of the last few years 
 has had this advantage, that it has offered 
 plenty of freedom for individual taste, when- 
 ever people were willing to take advantage 
 of that freedom, besides possessing in itself 
 many elements of grace and comfort, of 
 beauty and use. But there always seems to 
 be the danger of spoiling a good idea in 
 costume by exaggeration. Not content, a 
 few years ago, with the stateliness and 
 dignity of ample flowing skirts, we distended 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, ETC. 131 
 
 and stiffened them with wire cages ; and in 
 later years, not content with scantier and 
 more graceful drapery, expressing the har- 
 monious lines of the figure, we bound our 
 dresses tightly round us, almost abolishing 
 falling folds, and scarcely allowing ourselves 
 room to move. I suppose that the height 
 of the fashion now is a happy combination 
 of both the tightness and the crinoline. 
 Some fashionable milliner invents a bead 
 trimming, and we clothe ourselves in beads 
 from head to foot. Some fashionable lady, 
 with a brilliantly clear complexion, finds 
 black lace becoming, and instantly white 
 frills, collars, and cuffs vanish from the scene, 
 to the detriment of many a less dazzling 
 bloom. There are also useless and ugly 
 superfluities attending the fashion of the 
 day, respecting which we should do well to 
 question ourselves. All kinds of things 
 added on after the dress itself is assumed 
 should be looked on with suspicion. A 
 modern writer estimates the number of 
 articles of clothing and adornment that a 
 
132 LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 woman has on by the time she is fully 
 dressed at forty-nine. Out of these surely 
 some may be superfluous. A year or two 
 ago I used frequently to notice that a young 
 lady would wear round her neck, in morning 
 dress, a collar, a lace tie, a tight velvet, a 
 ribbon, a brooch, and a chain and locket, 
 — that would make seven out of forty-nine. 
 But I think that now more simplicity pre- 
 vails. 
 
 And before I leave this part of the 
 subject, I must ask you to bear with me if I 
 join my feeble protest to the many powerful 
 and able ones raised against a fashion — an 
 epidemic, rather — which has arisen, sub- 
 sided, only again to reappear at different 
 periods of modern history. I have reason 
 to think that it is raging at present with 
 some severity ; and its victims are supposed, 
 not without reason, to yearly swell the bills 
 of mortality. I mean the epidemic of 
 tight-lacing. Those who wilfully incur the 
 consequences of this practice must have 
 strangely incredulous minds ; they disbelieve 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, ETC. 133 
 
 all doctors, as a matter of course, and, what 
 is more to my purpose, they disbelieve 
 artists ; and the verdict of all the ages as to 
 the beauty of antique statues has, for them, 
 been given in Vain. The Venus of Melos 
 and all the goddesses of Olympus are to 
 them as nothing. Instead of a gently 
 undulating line from the shoulder to the hip, 
 they prefer a sudden sharp bend like the 
 narrow part of an hour-glass. In times 
 when figures of the hour-glass contour are 
 admired, there can be no good sculpture ; 
 for there is scarcely any natural beauty of 
 figure, or ease and grace of movement, left 
 for the artist to admire, to learn and study 
 from. 
 
 In a discourse delivered, more than a 
 hundred years ago, by Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 to the students of the Royal Academy, he 
 says, after some allusions to the taste of that 
 day in dress : " All these fashions are very 
 innocent ; neither worth disquisition, nor 
 any endeavour to alter them ; as the change 
 would, in all probability, be equally distant 
 
134 LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 from Nature. The only circumstance against 
 which indignation may reasonably be moved 
 is where the operation is painful, or destruc- 
 tive to health, such as some of the prac- 
 tices at Otaheite, and the strait-lacing of 
 the English ladies, — of the last of which 
 practices, how destructive it must be to 
 health and long life the Professor of Ana- 
 tomy took an opportunity of proving a few 
 days since in this Academy." 
 
 This was spoken by Sir Joshua on 
 December lo, 1776. It is sad to think 
 that so many of the English ladies are still 
 unconvinced, though many professors of 
 anatomy since that day have said the 
 same thing. 
 
 " I believe true nobleness in dress," says 
 Mr. Ruskin, " to be an important means of 
 education, as it certainly is a necessity to 
 any nation which wishes to possess living 
 art, concerned with portraiture of human 
 nature. No good historical painting ever 
 yet existed, or ever can exist, where the 
 dresses of the people of the time are not 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, ETC. 135 
 
 beautiful ; and had it not been for the 
 lovely and fantastic dressing of the thirteenth 
 to the sixteenth centuries, neither French 
 nor Florentine nor Venetian art could have 
 risen to anything like the rank it reached. 
 Still, even then, the best dressing was never 
 the costliest ; and its effect depended much 
 more on its beautiful — and, in early times, 
 modest — arrangement, and on the simple and 
 lovely masses of its colour, than on gor- 
 geousness of clasp or embroidery. 
 
 " The splendour and fantasy even of dress, 
 which in these days we pretend to despise, 
 or in which if we even indulge it is only for 
 the sake of vanity, and therefore to our infinite 
 harm, were in those early days studied for 
 love of their true beauty and honourableness, 
 and became one of the main helps to dignity 
 of character and courtesy of bearing. Look 
 back to what we have been told of the dress 
 of the early Venetians, that it was so invented 
 * that in clothing themselves with it they 
 might clothe themselves also with modesty 
 and honour consider what nobleness of ex- 
 
136 LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 pression . there is in the dress of any of the 
 portrait figures of the great times ; nay, what 
 perfect beauty, and more than beauty, there 
 is in the folding of the robe round the 
 imagined form even of the saint or of the 
 angel ; and then consider whether the grace 
 of vesture be indeed a thing to be despised. 
 We cannot despise it if we would, and in all 
 our highest poetry and happiest thought we 
 cling to the magnificence which in daily life 
 we disregard. ... I do not merely mean 
 magnificence ; the most splendid time was 
 not the best time. It was still in the thir- 
 teenth century, when simplicity and gorgeous- 
 ness were justly mingled, and the leathern 
 girdle and the clasp of bone were worn, as 
 well as the embroidered mantle, that the 
 manner of dress seems to have been the 
 noblest. The chain mail of the knight, flow- 
 ing and falling over his form in lapping waves 
 of gloomy strength, was worn under full 
 robes of one colour in the ground, his crest 
 quartered on them, and their borders enriched 
 with subtle illumination. The women wore 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, ETC. 137 
 
 first a dress close to the form in like manner, 
 and their long and flowing robes veiling them 
 up to the neck, and delicately embroidered 
 round the hem, the sleeves, and the girdle. 
 The use of plate armour gradually introduced 
 more fantastic types, — the nobleness of the 
 form was lost beneath the steel ; the gradu- 
 ally increasing luxury and vanity of the age 
 strove for continual excitement in more quaint 
 and extravagant devices ; and, in the fifteenth 
 century, dress reached its point of utmost 
 splendour and fancy, being in many cases still 
 exquisitely graceful, but now, in its morbid 
 magnificence, devoid of all wholesome influ- 
 ence on manners. From this point, like 
 architecture, it was rapidly degraded, and 
 sank through the buff coat and lace collar 
 and jack boot, to the bag-wig, tailed coat, and 
 high-heeled shoe, and so to what it is now." 
 
 I suppose Mr. Ruskin would not allow 
 us to think that there is any good thing in 
 modern dress ; but, rather than sink into utter 
 depression and hopelessness, let us consider 
 what good there is and seek to increase it 
 
138 LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 I know that in these days some intelligent 
 ladies have learned the art of dressmaking 
 on purpose to modify and improve the form 
 and construction of our garments, and I am 
 in hopes that the reform may be complete 
 and lasting. Few women who have work to 
 do in life, their living to make, or families to 
 care for, can take the trouble to set fashion at 
 defiance and wear a self-devised costume, — 
 the opposition to established rule ; the diffi- 
 culty of getting original ideas satisfactorily 
 carried out ; the becoming an object of special 
 remark and comment to one's friends and the 
 general public ; these things seem to hinder 
 such an enterprise, and make one feel that 
 more is lost than gained by the attempt. All 
 that, I think, we can clearly see our way to is, 
 by observing reason and simplicity in moder- 
 ately fashionable attire to gradually lead the 
 way to improvement. 
 
 As to form of garments, speaking gener- 
 ally, soft, long, flowing lines must always be 
 the most graceful : they add to the apparent 
 height when it is desirable to do so, while 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, ETC. 139 
 
 lines and folds across the figure shorten it. 
 Any tightness across any part of the form is 
 a discord, and must destroy the gracefulness 
 of the whole. Any shape that seems to fetter 
 and confine, and any that really does so, is 
 defective ; if a garment interferes with freedom 
 of action there must be something wrong with 
 it. And as to the laying on of trimming, 
 rows and rows of buttons never meant to 
 button, sham button - holes actually con- 
 structed of bits of silk and cord laid on, 
 bows of ribbon never meant to tie, immov- 
 able lattice -work of cords or laces, sham 
 pockets where none exist in reality, — there 
 can be no possible use or beauty in these. 
 If the material of a gown is rich and soft, 
 and if it is well cut and fits well, every piece 
 of superadded trimming goes to spoil the 
 effect. I except, of course, lace, which softens 
 and harmonises the general effect, and fringe, 
 when its origin is not too hopelessly lost 
 sight of, — that it was first the fraying out and 
 knotting of the edge of the stuff in certain 
 quantity. And if the material is plain and 
 
140 LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 ordinary, and intended for ordinary occasions, 
 there is all the greater reason to keep the 
 dress simple, and to avoid an elaborate and 
 over-studied appearance. A rigid inquiry as 
 to the use and beauty of every piece of added 
 trimming and adornment we often mechani- 
 cally wear, would lead, I am sure, to many 
 details being discarded, to the manifest im- 
 provement of the general effect. There is 
 such a pleasing description in Richardson's 
 Clarissa of his heroine that I cannot help 
 quoting it as a specimen of charming costume. 
 It belongs to the first half of the eighteenth 
 century, a time when much beautiful and 
 delicate embroidery was produced. 
 
 " Her head-dress," says Lovelace, her ad- 
 mirer, " was a Brussels lace mob peculiarly 
 adapted to the charming turn of her features, 
 a sky-blue ribbon illustrated that. . . . Her 
 morning gown was a pale primrose-coloured 
 paduasoy, the cuffs and robings curiously em- 
 broidered with a pattern of roses and leaves ; 
 a pair of diamond snaps in her ears ; her 
 ruffles were the same as her mob ; her apron, 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, ETC. 141 
 
 flowered lawn ; her petticoat, white satin 
 quilted ; blue satin her shoes, without lace, — 
 for what need has the prettiest foot in the 
 world for ornament ? — neat buckles in them ; 
 and on her charming arms a pair of velvet 
 cuffs (?) She is sweetly dressed," Lovelace 
 adds ; " and there is such a native elegance in 
 this lady that her person adorns what she 
 wears more than dress can adorn her." This 
 is the Art of Dress carried to a very fine 
 perfection, but we may be quite sure that 
 there are, in every period, people, — both 
 men and women, — of refinement, of judg- 
 ment, of personal charm, of good taste, who 
 can make the fashion of any day seem 
 becoming and graceful. 
 
 And now to make the very few remarks 
 that I have time for on the subject of Em- 
 broidery — Art Needlework, as we call it. 
 
 It is many years since the samplers of 
 our grandmothers gave place to the Berlin- 
 wool fancy-work of our earlier days, and again 
 we are witnesses to another change. An art 
 of greater pretensions than either has arisen, 
 
142 LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 and we are bound in practising it to see that 
 its pretensions are genuine and genuinely 
 carried out. If we consider our needlework 
 to be an art, we must take care that it fulfils 
 the first conditions of a work of art — namely, 
 that it should be conceived, arranged, and 
 carried out by one and the same person. 
 Division of labour is good for getting through 
 the drudgery of manufacture, but bad for 
 works of art. This is the first defect of the 
 Berlin-wool work : the pattern was drawn and 
 coloured by one person, the materials chosen 
 by a second, the pattern worked by a third, 
 and very often grounded by a fourth. People 
 took so little interest in their work, and were 
 so lazy about it, that the very canvas had to 
 be woven in tiny squares so that the stitches 
 might be all of the same length and save all 
 trouble of judging. Nothing could be of 
 any beauty done in so mechanical a way. 
 Now in Art Needlework that is really 
 worthy the name, the materials should be 
 chosen, the dimensions fixed, the pattern 
 designed or at least selected and arranged, 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, ETC. 143 
 
 and the work executed by one and the 
 same person. 
 
 After all, to any one possessed of any 
 power of drawing, the notion of designing 
 the pattern need not seem so very formidable. 
 A plant or flower drawn as if it were pressed 
 flat, as dried flowers are, and arranged, added 
 to^ taken away from, so as to fill a required 
 space, will be good practice as a beginning, 
 especially joined with some study of any 
 good examples of design that may be ac- 
 cessible, and a careful observance of some 
 chief characteristic of the chosen flower. I 
 said drawn as if pressed flat ; this is of first 
 necessity. The surface decorated by em- 
 broidery being flat, no effort should be made 
 to cause the design upon it to appear to pro- 
 ject — to stand out from it. It is quite easy 
 by dexterous shading to produce an appear- 
 ance of this sort, but, as it interferes with 
 every other artistic quality of design and 
 colour, it is perfectly inadmissible. It inter- 
 feres, because, when the eye is caught by 
 strong shading and high relief, it can see 
 
144 LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 nothing else ; no suitable beauty of colouring 
 can be had when so many shades are required ; 
 and any grace of design is lost because of 
 the strongly standing-out forms, by means 
 of which one sense is contradicted by another 
 — the sight says the thing is round, the touch 
 says it is flat. A favourite pattern of this 
 kind was a succession of shaded cubes which 
 actually for a moment deceived the eye ; 
 this was appropriately destined for a cushion, 
 and was realistic enough, I should think, to 
 effectually spoil the comfort of an after- 
 dinner nap ; one might with equal good taste 
 and appropriateness depict a row of cannon- 
 balls or cotton-reels. The dangerous ease with 
 which this appearance was produced and the 
 sort of satisfaction there was in it, like that 
 there is in successfully performing some 
 small conjuring trick, were the reasons of its 
 popularity. People say some such thing as 
 this : " If we represent flowers we imitate 
 nature, and must have shading ; see such and 
 such a group, it is like a picture." To which 
 I reply, " That is precisely what it ought not 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART-~COLOUR, ETC. 145 
 
 to be." We do not keep pictures tumbling 
 
 about the room and use them for cushions 
 
 or footstools, for obvious reasons. 
 
 Those objects intended for use must, as I 
 
 said before, have decoration upon them in 
 
 accordance with their use^ place^ and material 
 
 I do not say that there should be no shading 
 
 in the sense of variation of tone, but that 
 
 there should be no effects of light and shade 
 
 — no appearance of projection ; flat surfaces 
 
 should have flat decoration upon them. The 
 
 more skilfully a group of natural objects, say 
 
 of flowers, is worked and shaded, so as to 
 
 produce the appearance of a painting, the less 
 
 suitable is it for a cushion or a footstool or 
 
 for any other common household use. The 
 
 most common objects now seen worked in 
 
 crewels are antimacassars or chair-backs, as 
 
 they are more conveniently called These 
 
 have a distinct use belonging to them, and, 
 
 in order to fulfil it properly, they should not 
 
 be too elaborately or richly worked, as they 
 
 require frequent washing, and moreover such 
 
 slight things ought not to draw the eye from 
 L 
 
146 LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 more important effects in the room. The 
 crewel-work that first became general found 
 its chief attraction, strange to say, in its ex- 
 cessive and barbarous coarseness ; people 
 seemed to have taken down the crash roller 
 towel from behind the kitchen door, made 
 sprawling lines and blots of dark and dull 
 colour upon it, and then laid it out in the 
 drawing-room for the general admiration. 
 Now it seems to me that in the drawing- 
 room — the most ornamental room in the 
 house — used only for rest and amusement 
 and society, where we place the richest stuffs 
 and most decorative objects within our com- 
 pass, such coarse and unfinished-looking pro- 
 ductions are out of place. The drawing- 
 room antimacassars should be of a finer sort 
 of linen, edged with lace. The design may 
 be slight and yet delicate and graceful. The 
 most lasting, and on the whole the most ap- 
 propriate and pleasing effect, is gained by 
 working the entire pattern in one-coloured 
 silk or fine crewel, say blue or gold colour 
 on a white ground. These will wash and 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, ETC. 147 
 
 wear, and look delicate and harmonious to 
 the last. 
 
 But the time would fail me even to touch 
 upon the many articles that may be fitly 
 beautified by embroidery, and the various 
 kinds of embroidery that are suited to each. 
 I hope you will take the trouble to look at 
 the two or three specimens of modern needle- 
 work, for the designing and working of most 
 of which I am responsible. They may serve 
 as hints to those who are beginning to ori- 
 ginate for themselves patterns and colours 
 and styles. As regards the design, it is 
 often expedient to adapt and modify the 
 lines of some ancient pattern that one may 
 come across, which it would seem to be a 
 more rewarding occupation to reproduce 
 than to spend time over constructing an 
 original design that might be but of moder- 
 ate merit. I would not be understood to 
 insist on the beauty of a piece of work 
 merely because it is old ; some of the most 
 ancient that still survives — the Bayeux 
 tapestry, for instance — can only be interest- 
 
148 LECTURES ON ART. [m. 
 
 ing for historical reasons, and for its quaint 
 archaic simplicity ; the older tapestry may 
 be useful for study, as having many beauties 
 in its mode of representing decorative foliage 
 and flowers, but it is not suitable for imita- 
 tion and reproduction by modern needles. 
 " Better models," I now quote from Miss 
 Glaister's book on Art Embroidery, " may 
 be found in the freer work of the seven- 
 teenth and eighteenth centuries and of the 
 early part of the present century. All 
 embroidery on linen grounds, whether in 
 silks or worsteds, is well worthy of attention. 
 In this style are massive quilts of the seven- 
 teenth century, with bold flower patterns 
 overlaying an elaborately quilted ground. 
 There is also coarser work of the same cen- 
 tury in crewel worsteds ; some of these are 
 very handsome and well designed." The 
 curtains and hangings of Queen Anne's time 
 are of excellent design, grave, and well con- 
 sidered ; so that reproduction of some of 
 their patterns and colours would accom- 
 pany appropriately some of the Queen 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, ETC. 149 
 
 Anne fittings and furniture of the modern 
 revival. 
 
 At the present time few houses, I should 
 think, can be without some specimens of 
 Oriental embroidery, whether Indian or 
 Japanese. There can be no more admirable 
 models of colour and design than the de- 
 corative works of India. But, as Mr. Ruskin 
 points out, " it has one curious character dis- 
 tinguishing it from all other art of equal 
 merit in design — it never represents a natural 
 factr It either forms its compositions out 
 of meaningless fragments of colour and Sow- 
 ings of line, or, if it represents any living 
 creature, it represents that creature under 
 some distorted and monstrous form. Quite 
 different is the spirit and intention of 
 Japanese art, which, with wonderful force 
 and life, like Nature's own, reproduces some 
 of her loveliest works, — the blossoming tree, 
 the poise and flight of birds, the swirl of 
 running water, the level lines of cloud ; all 
 are drawn and coloured with an unerring 
 instinct, as true as the Indian, only with 
 
ISO LECTURES ON ART. [iii. 
 
 such different aims. I have a few speci- 
 mens here of Indian work, and some also of 
 Turkish, Cretan, Maltese, which are kindred 
 to it in spirit and intention, never represent- 
 ing Nature literally, but changing, arranging, 
 conventionalising. In the Chinese Man- 
 darin's robe, the work approximates more 
 to the Japanese method, boldly carrying 
 out a brilliant scheme of colour, and follow- 
 ing the forms and the growth of Nature 
 with but little of decorative stiffness. 
 
 In bringing my sketch of the Decorative 
 Arts to a close, I cannot but regret that I 
 have been compelled to make that sketch so 
 meagre and broken ; but I am tempted to 
 hope that I may have at some future time 
 an opportunity of going more widely and 
 deeply into the subject. A historical sur- 
 vey of the Arts of Dress and Needlework, 
 for instance, with some study of design and 
 detail, would be, I think, not without interest 
 and profit. I trust, whatever else I have failed 
 in expressing, that this at least is clear, — that 
 any serious consideration of any part of the 
 
III.] DECORATIVE ART— COLOUR, ETC. 151 
 
 Decorative Arts can only lead by one path 
 to one conclusion ; that the decoration of 
 workmanship is but the expression of man's 
 pleasure in successful labour ; that the work 
 must be sincere and good to be successful, 
 and that will tend to make the decoration 
 appropriate and beautiful. Hitherto, we 
 have considered those arts that minister to 
 the body — to its uses and necessities. I 
 shall now seek to turn your attention to 
 those Arts that minister to the mind alone — 
 the Fine Arts, in which ideas of beauty 
 become dissevered from the requirements of 
 material use. 
 
IV.— FINE ARTS. 
 
 In attempting a description of the Fine Arts, 
 their proper aim and various modes of ex- 
 pressing that aim, I must begin by remind- 
 ing you of what I said in the first lecture. 
 Taking the definition of Art in its widest 
 sense — " Human labour regulated by human 
 design " — I pointed out how, by three stages, 
 we reach the subject of to-day. 
 
 First. — The Arts of Pure Use ; in which 
 the invention of man, aided by the limbs and 
 fingers, works — unhelped by the soul — to 
 fulfil all human necessities apart from con- 
 siderations of beauty. 
 
IV.] FINE ARTS. 153 
 
 Secondly. — The Arts of Decoration ; in 
 which man, by adorning and enriching the 
 productions of the Arts of Pure Use, minis- 
 ters to a new sense — the sense of Beauty, 
 the Artistic sense, Taste, whatever we may 
 choose to call it. 
 
 Thirdly. — The Fine Arts ; which appeal 
 entirely to that new sense and exist for 
 beauty alone. And these last, the Fine Arts, 
 are our subject here to-day, — Poetry, Painting, 
 Sculpture, Music, Architecture. These are, 
 as I have said, the very head and crown of 
 all that man has ever achieved ; take away 
 these and there is little left but mere animal 
 life ; without these, science would lack her 
 inspiration, the life of man its best gifts, and 
 Religion herself would miss some valuable 
 means of appealing to the heart and to the 
 soul. It has always been found," says Mr. 
 Symonds in his Renaissance in Italy:, " that 
 the arts in their origin are dependent on re- 
 ligion. Art aims at expressing an ideal, and 
 this ideal is the transfiguration of human 
 elements into something nobler, felt and 
 
154 LECTURES ON ART. [iv. 
 
 apprehended by the imagination. Such an 
 ideal, such an all-embracing glorification of 
 humanity, only exists for simple and un- 
 sophisticated societies in the form of religion." 
 
 And thus the productions of the Fine 
 Arts have been among the most lasting and 
 stable things in the world's history. " The 
 human race," Emerson says, " takes charge 
 of them that they shall not perish." The 
 carved mammoth bones, the pyramids, the 
 ancient Celtic stones, the Indian rock-temples, 
 the buried store of ancient art that the earth 
 still yields to modern diggers in Greece and 
 Asia Minor, the older Greek marbles, and 
 the grim remains of a sculpture earlier and 
 ruder still, and old Homeric myths and stories 
 and hymns older than they, — none of these 
 things date later than 3000 years back. In 
 that space of time races of men and animals 
 have become extinct ; whole systems of science 
 and cycles of learning have been superseded 
 and forgotten ; religions, governments, king- 
 doms, laws and politics, have crumbled and 
 disappeared ; but these ancient fragments of 
 
IV.] FINE ARTS. 155 
 
 architecture, sculpture, poetry, still survive 
 and fill the mind with vague imaginings of 
 that ancient world of which we are still a 
 part, inasmuch as we still possess those in- 
 stincts — we may call them immortal — which 
 lead us, though in such different ways, to 
 practise and study those same great arts, as 
 being embodiments of the highest conception 
 of beauty, spiritual and material, of which 
 human nature is capable. 
 
 Now to ask what that beauty is, is to ask a 
 very difficult question. " It is a thing by 
 itself," says Mr. Ruskin, " not dependent on 
 truth, or usefulness, or custom, or association 
 of ideas, though it is certainly connected with 
 all of them." " The sense of beauty," says 
 Mr. Darwin, " in its simplest form is nothing 
 more than the reception of a peculiar kind 
 of pleasure from certain colours, forms, and 
 sounds." All this does not help us much, and 
 it is of no use, I think, to try and answer the 
 question in the abstract, " to find a universal 
 formula," but to consider the generally ac- 
 cepted opinion of mankind at large, and to 
 
156 LECTURES ON ART. [iv. 
 
 consult our own individual feelings as to the 
 effect produced on the mind by an object 
 beautiful or the reverse. There can be no 
 universal formula. 
 
 In some things we instinctively take the 
 opinion of the majority. By this I do not 
 mean the opinion of any living majority 
 existing at this moment, but the opinion and 
 belief that has come down to us through the 
 generations, gathering strength as it comes. 
 
 For instance, there can be no doubt that 
 Shakespeare is more appreciated, more ad- 
 mired, more studied in these days than he 
 was in his own time (some two centuries and 
 a half ago), or than he has been in any of 
 the intermediate years between then and now. 
 In his lifetime the great world seems to have 
 regarded him merely as an actor and play- 
 wright of some vivacity ; his plays kept the 
 stage, it is true, but up to the present century 
 they were largely remodelled, corrected, and 
 cut down by any ignorant manager who had 
 occasion for them, and even literary men of 
 repute rewrote and modified and " improved" 
 
IV.] FINE ARTS. 157 
 
 them. But all the while Shakespeare's hold 
 on the hearts of his countrymen grew and 
 grew ; his works became known, admired, 
 discussed, translated in Germany, in France 
 — a whole Shakespearian literature has grown 
 up both there and here — and so dear and 
 familiar have his writings become, that where- 
 ever the Englishman wanders, in whatever 
 remote and unfriended region, his Shakespeare 
 and his Bible go with him. 
 
 This is what I mean by the opinion of 
 the majority, in this instance applied to 
 Poetry, perhaps the most ancient, and cer- 
 tainly the most popular and familiar of the 
 Fine Arts. In the same way a similar pre- 
 eminence being given by the universal vote 
 to great creators in other arts, such as 
 Raphael in Painting, Pheidias in Sculpture, 
 Handel in Music, — their reputation waxes 
 more and more as the years roll on, their 
 claims to excellence growing ever more fully 
 understood. 
 
 So do the best and greatest survive, and 
 not only withstand all shocks of time and 
 
158 LECTURES ON ART. [iv. 
 
 change, but seem to grow the greater for 
 them, because of their strength of unconquer- 
 able beauty. " No art that has been con- 
 sidered admirable for ages can be worthless ; 
 all erroneous opinion is inconstant, and all 
 ungrounded opinion transitory." There is a 
 vast variety of opinion in the world respecting 
 works of art that are but middlings but only 
 one about the best or the worst. The world 
 may differ as to the exact degree of merit 
 possessed by Landseer's lions in Trafalgar 
 Square, but it has only one opinion about 
 the Venus of Melos, and only one about the 
 Temple Bar griffin. 
 
 So much for generally accepted opinion as 
 regards the beauty of works of art : now to 
 come to our own personal individual opinion 
 or feeling. We all know what it is to be 
 impressed, to be struck, to be carried out of 
 ourselves by the beauty of a person, of a 
 natural scene, of a character in a book or in 
 actual life. If we take any real interest in 
 our own sensations we shall be tempted to 
 analyse them, to try to find out what it is in 
 
IV.] FINE ARTS. 159 
 
 the thing that so moves us. In a natural 
 scene it may be sense of space, beauty of 
 colour, impression of peace and repose at the 
 end of a day. In a person it may be con- 
 sistently elevated conduct or aims, or cheer- 
 fulness of spirit, or grace of demeanour, or 
 frequent changes of expression, or delicate 
 features and colouring. At all events there 
 is some quality, some virtue, in that person 
 or scene which produces that pleasurable 
 impression, of which the origin may be found 
 if we inquire closely enough. As we make, 
 and respond to, the self-addressed question- 
 ings, we find our sensibilities, our perceptions, 
 growing keener and deeper, our experience 
 of life wider and more delightful. And by 
 means of this kind can we learn a true 
 appreciation of the excellent in works of 
 Art : their greatness cannot be expected to 
 descend to us, — we must rise to it. A part 
 only of a great work may please us at first ; 
 if this is dwelt on and studied by degrees we 
 shall find ourselves capable of appreciating 
 the whole. Mr. Pater says, "What is im- 
 
i6o LECTURES ON ART. [iv. 
 
 portant, then, is not that the critic" (or the 
 person of taste, we may say) " should possess 
 a correct abstract definition of beauty for the 
 intellect, but a certain kind of temperament 
 — the power of being deeply moved by the 
 presence of beautiful objects. He will re- 
 member always that beauty exists in many 
 forms. To him all periods, types, schools of 
 taste, are in themselves equal. In all ages 
 there have been some excellent workmen, 
 and some excellent work done." Beauty is 
 not to be explained ; and when we have said 
 that some forms and colours are agreeable, 
 while others are disagreeable, we have said 
 all we can. As to explaining the reason why 
 they are so, that is impossible : we cannot 
 explain the reason why the taste of sugar is 
 agreeable and the taste of bitter aloes dis- 
 agreeable. But he who inquires as closely 
 as possible into his sensations of pleasure or 
 aversion with regard to matters of art, and 
 cultivates his faculties to the utmost, is a 
 person of taste. 
 
 The generally accepted type of beauty in 
 
IV.] FINE ARTS. i6l 
 
 natural things alone has varied much in the 
 different periods of the world, and among 
 different races of men. Different qualities, 
 both of mind and of body, are admired at 
 different stages of civilisation. 
 
 Personal bravery, for instance — a man's 
 first and most necessary endowment in times 
 of perpetual warfare — becomes, in times like 
 ours, the one for which there is least occasion, 
 and we may know a man from his childhood 
 without being aware whether he possesses it 
 or not. Bodily qualifications, too, have their 
 various estimates. Mr. Robert Louis Steven- 
 son says, in his Travels m the CevenneSy that 
 one morning, seeing his landlady combing 
 out her daughter's hair, he made her his 
 compliments upon its beauty. " Oh, no," 
 said the mother, " it is not so beautiful as it 
 ought to be. Look, it is too fine." The 
 Chinese, at the centre of Eastern civilisation, 
 admire a diminutive and distorted foot ; the 
 English and French, at the centre of Western 
 civilisation, admire a diminutive and distorted 
 
 waist ; a certain race of Indians cultivate 
 M 
 
I62 LECTURES ON ART. [iv. 
 
 from infancy a flattened and elongated head ; 
 — it is all, as we say, a matter of taste. Still 
 the more reasonable and enlightened minds 
 of modern times may be supposed to have 
 reached a definite standard in such things as 
 these ; while there may still be differences of 
 opinion in matters of more delicate variation 
 in colours and shapes. 
 
 It has been said that no race of man bred 
 in wild country ever enjoys landscape. It is 
 a pleasure that belongs to modern times, to 
 highly civilised nations, and to cultivated 
 minds. A comparison of ancient with modern 
 literature has been made, to prove that among 
 the ancients the feeling for natural scenery 
 was vague and dim. Hence it follows that 
 the art of landscape-painting is of modern 
 origin. An untutored, undeveloped nature 
 like that of the child or the savage is quite 
 insensible to the charm of a beautiful land- 
 scape. In the first place they have no 
 perception of the relations of space, — as the 
 child cries for the moon, having no idea that 
 it is more inaccessible than any other round 
 
IV.] FINE ARTS. 163 
 
 ball. But among ourselves in modern days 
 what taste, what enjoyment is so universal as 
 that which the beauty of Nature inspires. 
 
 Scenes of the English coast, cliff and 
 headland and bay, multiform in shape and 
 colour, with the mystery of the sea about and 
 within them ; the beauty and terror of Alpine 
 heights and mountains of snow and fire ; of 
 long sandy flats, with only a sluggish canal- 
 boat and lazily-moving horses to break the 
 straight lines ; of the moorland full of the 
 sense of light and air and space, with some- 
 thing of wildness of desolation ; and of an 
 English inland home. 
 
 ** Gray twilight pour'd 
 
 On dewy pastures, dewy trees 
 Softer than sleep — all things in order stored 
 A haunt of ancient peace." 
 
 Such pictures as these, laid up in the memory, 
 to last long after the delightful experience of 
 the moment is past, we feel to be among the 
 best gifts of life. 
 
 And when we are among such scenes 
 as these, we long to fix them by some more 
 
i64 LECTURES ON ART. [iv. 
 
 definite hand than that of the " great artist, 
 Memory." We write our description, we 
 turn our sonnet, we take out our sketching 
 materials. So at the sight of a beautiful 
 person there is always some one found to 
 remark, " He or she ought to be painted." 
 This is the universal natural instinct ; we 
 perceive, appreciate, and admire the beauty 
 of a person, a natural scene, a character, a 
 noble action, and we long to give expression 
 to our sense of that beauty, to make it our 
 own by fixing it in some permanent form, 
 to turn it into a picture, a statue, a poem. 
 ''All men have an irrepressible inclination 
 for works of art." Seeing, then, that we are 
 possessed of these impulses, let us take care 
 they find a fitting direction, not necessarily 
 in the production of works of art, for the 
 special gifts are rare, but in the appreciatio7i 
 of them. "It is in the power of every one, 
 with care and time, to form a just judgment 
 of the relative merits of works of art. To 
 arrive at this no peculiar powers of mind are 
 required, no sympathy with particular feelings. 
 
IV.] FINE ARTS. 165 
 
 nothing which every one of ordinary intellect 
 does not in some degree possess, — powers, 
 namely, of observation and intelligence, which 
 by cultivation may be brought to a high 
 degree of perfection and acuteness." 
 
 In spite of the almost universally -ex- 
 pressed admiration of Nature, there is a great 
 deal of ignorance and want of observation 
 regarding its external facts. " Men," says 
 Ruskin, " preoccupied with business or care, 
 receive from Nature merely the inevitable 
 sensations of blueness, redness, light, dark- 
 ness, etc." He also brings forward as a proof 
 of the common want of observation, that 
 people usually speak of the Italian sky as 
 being blue and clear, whereas in reality it is 
 duller and grayer than ours, and distinguished 
 only by repose, tone, warmth ; and the feel- 
 ing these produce in people's minds is trans- 
 lated by them wrongly as blueness and clear- 
 ness. 
 
 There is occasional incapacity in the eye 
 for distinguishing and receiving pleasure from 
 forms and colours, as there is occasional in- 
 
i66 LECTURES ON ART. [iv. 
 
 capacity in the ear for distinguishing and 
 appreciating notes and musical sounds. So 
 that it follows as a matter of course that in 
 order to the complete enjoyment of works of 
 art the bodily senses should not only be in 
 good order, but sharpened and refined by 
 cultivation. That much may be done in this 
 direction is clear to every one who has prac- 
 tised with any degree of intelligence the Arts 
 of Music and Drawing, the best things that 
 appeal to the senses of sight and hearing ; 
 and as these senses are capable of a higher 
 pleasure than the other senses, so no one 
 can be accused of intemperance in the enjoy- 
 ments belonging to them. Sensitiveness to 
 a wrong note, to a badly-tuned instrument, 
 an ill -interpreted passage, as well as quick 
 perception of a crooked line, a clumsy curve, 
 and bad perspective, — this sensitiveness, this 
 perception, by the practice of music and 
 drawing, become keener and quicker — nay, 
 are often called into existence — by such culti- 
 vation of the ear and the eye ; and so with 
 the corresponding sensations of pleasure in 
 
IV.] FINE ARTS. 167 
 
 correctness, in tunefulness, in grace, in har- 
 mony. Again, in drawing any object, indeed, 
 we often feel that we are really seeing it for 
 the first time, and that there are qualities of 
 form and colour in it that else we should 
 never have discovered ; and if by such culti- 
 vation of the eye we learn to see truly the 
 facts of Nature, we shall by the same means 
 find ourselves greatly assisted in understand- 
 ing the aims of Art, less familiar and more 
 intangible as they are ; and bringing mental 
 qualifications to the aid of the senses — 
 powers of reflection, memory, imagination — 
 we shall be properly equipped for the judg- 
 ment and appreciation of the Fine Arts. 
 
 The Fine Arts fall naturally into two 
 groups. One group consisting of those Arts 
 whose productions correspond to real objects, 
 they may be called Imitative Arts — Poetry, 
 Painting, Sculpture. The second group con- 
 sisting of those which belong in part to 
 science, as having mathematical relations, — 
 these are Music and Architecture. 
 
 Poetry and Music only belong to my 
 
i68 LECTURES ON ART. [iv. j 
 
 subject by way of illustration ; they, being 
 built up of sounds, not sights, of words and 
 notes, not form and colour, appeal to a set 
 of outward perceptions different from those to 
 which the Plastic Arts, — as Painting, Sculp- 
 ture, and Architecture have been called — ap- 
 peal. Still, as I believe, the essence, the soul, 
 of all of these is the same. Writers have 
 amused themselves with fanciful definitions, 
 such as calling Painting a dumb poem, and 
 Poetry a speaking picture, Architecture frozen 
 music, and the like. Such sayings may per- 
 haps help us to realise better the analogy 
 that really exists among the Arts and the 
 identity of the spirit animating them all ; but 
 each of them has, none the less, its especial 
 province, and cannot justly encroach upon or 
 usurp the function of any other. 
 
 Now, as to the first group the Arts that 
 correspond to real objects — Poetry, Painting, 
 Sculpture. Let us consider for a moment 
 Poetry. The materials of Poetry are words ; 
 and by means of these she deals with man 
 and the material world, with natural outward 
 
IV.] FINE ARTS. 169 
 
 beauty, and with human thoughts, feelings, 
 emotions, and in so doing has to reject the 
 commonplace, the ignoble, the trite, the 
 prosaic. Poetry, in describing "the clang 
 of arms, the battle roar," leaves out details, 
 strategical dispositions, and statistics gener- 
 ally, so that, if we want a satisfactory account 
 from an historical or military point of view, 
 we must turn to a different chronicler ; not 
 that the poetical view is false^ but it is differ- 
 ent : the rush of melodiously forcible words 
 paint the glow, the ardour of combat, the 
 glory of victory, that are certainly part of 
 the truth, but the part that belongs to the 
 imagination ; and that part the sober chron- 
 icler leaves alone, busying himself with mak- 
 ing out the lesser details, the actual facts, — 
 veracity, not beauty, being his aim. Let 
 me give an example of what I mean ; it 
 shall be from Shakespeare : — 
 
 " Many a time has banish'd Norfolk fought 
 For Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field, 
 Streaming the ensign of the Christian Cross 
 Against black Pagans, Turks, and Saracens ; 
 
I70 LECTURES ON ART. [iv. 
 
 And, toil'd with works of war, retired himself 
 To Italy ; and there at Venice gave 
 His body to that pleasant country's earth 
 And his pure soul into his captain Christ 
 Under whose colours he had fought so long." 
 
 Think how this would stand in a bio- 
 graphical dictionary, or a dry paragraph of 
 history. " The Duke of Norfolk, banished by 
 King Richard II. in such a year, joined the 
 crusades, and, after so many years of hard 
 fighting, retired to Venice, where he died in 
 such a year at a certain specified age." But 
 the way in which the poet tells the story, 
 presenting only the poetical side of it, is at 
 once felt to be more delightful, more valuable 
 than the other, though dates and figures are 
 left out. This is the Fine Art of Poetry, 
 which, in dealing with real objects, actual 
 circumstances, with a fine instinct rejects the 
 prosaic, and, fixing in the mind the ideal 
 spiritual side of things, gives us an impression, 
 shows us a view that we should never have 
 felt or seen for ourselves, but which, when 
 made to see or feel, we perfectly understand 
 
IV.] FINE ARTS. 171 
 
 and delight in. Or, if we have something of 
 the poetical imagination, it is the gift of 
 expression that is wanting ; and it is the gift 
 of expression in various forms that makes 
 the poet, the painter, the sculptor. There is 
 a mechanical part, a technical knowledge, 
 belonging to each of the Fine Arts ; but the 
 possession of them alone, does not constitute 
 the artist. The rules of versification, and 
 knowledge of the sounds and quantities of 
 syllables, and the correct use and manage- 
 ment of words, — these are the mechanical 
 parts of poetry ; with these the poet works, as 
 the painter with laws of perspective, rules of 
 anatomy, and acquaintance with the nature 
 and effect of colours ; as the sculptor by 
 the rules of anatomy too, and skill of . hand, 
 and knowledge of the working of clay and 
 stone and marble. These things are the 
 technical, the mechanical side of Art, and 
 though perfection in them is necessary, yet 
 it is not enough to make the poet, the 
 painter, the sculptor ; he must have the in- 
 communicable gift of genius as well. 
 
172 
 
 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 [IV. 
 
 Skill in words alone, without genius, pro- 
 duces long dry descriptions, moral disserta- 
 tions, and detailed histories, only differing from 
 prose by being cut into lengths and having 
 a certain number of rhyming syllables. Such 
 are Phillip's epic poem {Cider- Making) or 
 Armstrong's on the Art of Preserving Health. 
 
 How best the fickle fabric to support 
 Of mortal man ; in healthful body how 
 A healthful mind the longest to maintain." 
 
 This sounds sufficiently prosaic. In paint- 
 ing, this same uninspired industry or skill 
 produces literal representations of actual 
 scenes and persons, in which every detail 
 of feature and dress is exactly reproduced, 
 but no new ideas are suggested, — fruit with 
 quite a real bloom, and flies and dewdrops 
 ready to fly or fall ; and in Sculpture it 
 results in imitations of veils over faces, of 
 buttons, of tassels, lace and frills, and the 
 texture of hair and drapery. 
 
 The more we study great poetry and 
 penetrate its spirit the better shall we under- 
 stand what belongs to the great in other arts. 
 
IV.] FINE ARTS. 173 
 
 It has over and over been observed that it is 
 an apparent accident which decides a natural 
 genius whether to become a poet, a painter, 
 or a sculptor, and there are many instances 
 in which excellence in all has been united. 
 Michael Angelo was all these, and Leonardo 
 was a poet, a musician, a sculptor, an archi- 
 tect, as well as a painter. And often in our 
 own time, one has occasion to observe that 
 the best artists in any one of the Arts have 
 the greatest understanding of, and insight into, 
 all the rest. One creative spirit, one lofty 
 range of imagination, thought, and feeling, 
 animates them all, — it is only the mode of 
 expression that varies. Each different mode 
 of expression demands, of course, different 
 subjects and different treatment, but the 
 spirit, the inspiration, are the same. Shake- 
 speare, Raphael, Pheidias, — each had for his 
 original subjects and models only literal cir- 
 cumstances, actual people ; and each in his 
 several manner delivered his message of 
 beauty to the world. The medical poem I 
 quoted above, the picture of the "Derby 
 
174 LECTURES ON ART. [iv. 
 
 Day," the Monster at Temple Bar, deliver no 
 message of beauty; they have none to deliver. 
 They would have been much more welcome 
 and appropriate in the form of a doctor's 
 prescription, a caricature in Punchy or a 
 macadamised road, than in their usurping of 
 the forms of Fine Art without its spirit 
 
 I have said that these three Arts — Poetry, 
 Painting, Sculpture — correspond to real 
 objects, and thus may be called Imitative 
 Arts. Their object is indeed the imitation of 
 Nature, but not the exact imitation. In each 
 of these three, clever direct imitations have 
 been produced ; but we can tell by the kind 
 of admiration we feel for them that the imi- 
 tation is not work of a high kind. Southey's 
 Falls at Lodore, Poe's Bells^ are instances 
 that occur to me in poetry. At the first 
 reading they draw attention, they excite curi- 
 osity and surprise, and indeed admiration ; 
 but for what qualities ? — for ingenuity, for 
 command of language, for jingle of rhymes, 
 for clever reproduction in words of natural 
 sounds ; and there the admiration must end. 
 
IV.] FINE ARTS. 175 
 
 It is short-lived ; it has no lasting food to 
 subsist upon. I do not say that these 
 instances are bad and ought not to have 
 existed, but that they are not poetry in any 
 high sense, and I mention them to help me 
 to define the great and the little in other arts. 
 
 It is generally considered the highest and 
 indeed the only legitimate praise that can be 
 bestowed on a painting, to say that it is 
 exactly like Nature. And in ancient times 
 before the Art of Painting, properly so called, 
 was understood and practised, an idea seems 
 to have prevailed that the best picture was 
 the one that most completely deceived the 
 senses. Witness the stories that have come 
 down to us of the painters of the fifth century 
 before Christ : of Zeuxis, who painted a boy 
 carrying a basket of fruit, the fruit being so 
 well imitated that the birds came and pecked 
 at it ; and when the public applauded, the 
 painter said,. " Had the boy been as well 
 painted as the fruit, the birds would not 
 have dared to touch it of Parrhasius, the 
 rival of Zeuxis, who was asked to withdraw 
 
176 LECTURES ON ART. [iv. 
 
 the curtain and show his picture, when the 
 curtain turned out to be the picture itself, 
 and Zeuxis acknowledged himself surpassed, 
 since he had only deceived birds, but Par- 
 rhasius, men. These stories, childish as 
 they seem, go to prove that close imita- 
 tion of Nature, were it the legitimate object 
 in Painting, is only possible with regard to 
 small and insignificant things. Fruit may 
 be closely imitated, but not a tree ; flowers 
 may be so painted as to deceive the eye and 
 make one think for a moment that they are 
 real ; not so a pasture. Cut-glass may be 
 imitated, but not a rainbow ; a dew-drop, but 
 not a waterfall ; a curtain, but not the sky ; 
 an insect, but not the sacred human form. 
 Art in its highest form expresses nothing 
 mean, nothing transitory. For one moment 
 we are pleased when we see a fly on a picture, 
 and then find that it is a painted one, and 
 that we cannot brush it away ; but the little 
 pleasure is gone in a moment, not so the fly, 
 which remains to become a weariness. The 
 small surprise can never be repeated ; it is 
 
IV.] FINE ARTS. 177 
 
 a juggling tnck that has been explained. 
 If in poetry or fiction (which is a kind of 
 poetry) we wanted the same close following 
 of Nature which most people demand in a 
 picture, we should choose verbatim reports 
 of moving scenes that have actually taken 
 place ; these might be raw material for the 
 poet's imagination to work on, but they could 
 not be poetry till he transformed them, 
 adding some things and leaving out others. 
 A photograph in like manner is a closer 
 following of Nature than any picture can be 
 (save in respect of colour ; but with that 
 deficiency, as we aire now told, science is 
 prepared to do away) ; and the photographic 
 view or portrait contains the elements, the 
 material of a picture ; but for want of selec- 
 tion, combination, composition, and above all, 
 for want of a human mind and soul acting on 
 the materials, it is not a picture. In the 
 same way a cast of the human form or of 
 any part of it, is, and must be, absolutely, 
 almost unpleasantly, truthful ; but in a piece 
 
 of sculpture we want something more, and 
 N 
 
178 LECTURES ON ART. [iv. 
 
 I may say, something less — we want no 
 clumsiness, no harshness, no angularity, no 
 awkwardness ; but grace, strength, beauty. 
 The elements of these are in the human form ; 
 it is the sculptor's art to find them out, to draw 
 them forth, and to show us an embodiment 
 of them. Just as we expect the poet to dis- 
 cover and express for us thoughts and feelings 
 and ideas that we should not have discovered 
 nor expressed for ourselves, so we should ex- 
 pect the painter to select, to bring together 
 in a picture, beauties and hidden effects we 
 are not ourselves capable of seeing in Nature. 
 A picture should be a revelation, not a repro- 
 duction. I do not say that a painting should 
 not be natural, but that it should not seek to 
 directly imitate Nature. " Realisation to the 
 mind does not necessitate deception to the 
 eye." We should be made by the painter 
 to realise vividly the scenes, the persons, he 
 depicts. But a literal representation, were it 
 possible, is not desirable — a looking-glass 
 would do as much for us, and we want the 
 artist to do something more. " His picture," 
 
IV.] FINE ARTS. 179 
 
 says Mr. Ruskin, " may be likened to a glass 
 indeed, but to a transparent glass of sweet 
 and strange colour, that gives new tones to 
 what we see through it, and of strength and 
 clearness to let us see more than we could 
 ourselves, and bring Nature up to us and near 
 to us." 
 
 In pictures we have what is like the form 
 of man, but in Sculpture we have the form 
 itself ; yet, as an Art, it seems more ideal, 
 more removed from ordinary life than Paint- 
 ing. Details fitly represented and accepted in 
 Painting seem mean or superfluous in Sculp- 
 ture. The most ordinary worker in stone 
 must feel this — the stone is so severe, so last- 
 ing, so uncompromising, that a carver in it 
 must indeed be strongly determined to be 
 wrong who produces a "Veiled Vestal," — that 
 kneeling figure, swathed face, and all that 
 I can remember at the '62 Exhibition, so 
 deftly carved that it looked almost like a 
 real veil, — wonderful skill all worse than 
 wasted, for who would really think a veil 
 more interesting than a face. The sculptor 
 
i8o LECTURES ON ART. [iv. 
 
 must have had nothing to express, to com- 
 municate, but an idea of his own cleverness, 
 — that was his notion of a message of beauty. 
 If this sort of thing is wanted, we can have 
 it all, and more, at Madame Tussaud's. The 
 true task of Sculpture is to present the form 
 of man in full natural beauty, and this can 
 be done only by showing that form unclothed ; 
 or, if drapery is used, it is not to conceal the 
 body or to disfigure its outline and structure, 
 but in its folds to harmonise with the form 
 and organisation, and, with grace of arrange- 
 ment, clinging to it, and receiving right 
 direction, just as in music the instrumental 
 accompaniment follows the voice. Finally, 
 to quote from Mr. Pater, " The base of all 
 artistic genius is the power of conceiving 
 humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, — 
 of putting a happy world of its own creation 
 in place of the meaner world of common 
 days." Art is Art," says Goethe, " precisely, 
 because it is not Nature." 
 
 To come to the second group — those arts 
 that belong in part to science — Music and 
 
IV.] FINE ARTS. i8i 
 
 Architecture ; Music being based on the 
 science of harmony, and Architecture on 
 the mathematical and mechanical sciences. 
 Music composed and produced in accordance 
 with the fixed relations between musical 
 sounds, appeals entirely, while Poetry only 
 appeals partly, to the ear ; it expresses what 
 cannot be expressed by words, or colour, or 
 form. In attempting to describe the sort of 
 pleasure one feels in listening to a Beethoven 
 symphony, for instance, one is at a loss for 
 words ; the memory, the imagination, seem 
 to be reached by some dim unfrequented 
 road. We seem to remember a mysterious 
 something, to imagine something formless, 
 delicious, intangible ; the music ceases, the 
 sensation is gone, and can only be recovered 
 the next time the notes are heard. Succes- 
 sive sounds, which we call melody, gather 
 definiteness of meaning from the words to 
 which they are often joined ; but the simul- 
 taneous sounds of harmony alone never give 
 up their secret, even though we know every 
 contrivance by which they belong to each 
 
i82 LECTURES ON ART. [iv. 
 
 other and to their place. A certain amount 
 of imitation of natural sounds seems to be- 
 long to music in some of her more definite 
 moods ; but, as in the other arts, it can only 
 be appropriate when the subject is mean and 
 trivial. The purely imitative parts of Beet- 
 hoven's Pastoral Symphony can never be the 
 most admirable, nor can that composition take 
 the highest place among the master's writings. 
 I will quote a passage from a well-known 
 critic concerning this work : " At the end 
 of the second movement, Beethoven allowed 
 himself most unwisely, and merely to please 
 a lady admirer, to add a passage of direct 
 imitation of the nightingale, quail, and cuckoo, 
 not originally contemplated, and which is a 
 blot on an exquisite composition ; and in the 
 storm movement, parts of which are magni- 
 ficently and poetically suggestive, he has 
 written in one place a series of rapid groups 
 of four notes for the double basses against five 
 for the violoncello (to be played in the same 
 time) ; so that no two notes are sounded to- 
 gether, and a confused rumble of sound is 
 
IV.] FINE ARTS. 183 
 
 produced. The passage passes quickly over 
 in performance ; and those who do not know 
 of the device would perhaps not notice it, 
 but it is a most dangerous precedent, and a 
 method of treatment which most distinctly 
 is not music." We instinctively feel that 
 music is greatest when least translatable, 
 and when she appeals to moods rather than 
 ideas, and suggests rather than asserts them. 
 
 Architecture, the other art belonging to 
 this second group — the art of designing and 
 executing buildings of all sorts — is, like Music, 
 a science as well as an art ; and the artist in 
 it, besides possessing the gift of genius, must 
 be something of a mathematician, mechanic, 
 chemist, philosopher as well, and Mr. Ruskin 
 would have him to be a painter and sculptor 
 too. 
 
 He says (and I think his observations 
 will help to illustrate something of what I 
 have been saying) : " The gifts which distinct- 
 ively mark the artist are those of sympathy 
 and imagination. . . . We all have a general 
 and sufficient idea of imagination and of its 
 
i84 LECTURES ON ART. [iv. 
 
 work with our hands and in our hearts ; we 
 understand it, I suppose, as the imaging or 
 picturing of new things in our thoughts, and 
 we always have an involuntary respect for 
 this power, wherever we can recognise it, 
 acknowledging it to be a greater power than 
 manipulation, or calculation, or observation, 
 or any other human faculty. 
 
 " If we see an old woman," he says, " spin- 
 ning at the fireside, and distributing her thread 
 dexterously from the distaff, we respect her for 
 her manipulation ; if we ask her how much she 
 expects to make in a year, and she answers 
 quickly, we respect her for her calculation ; 
 if she is watching at the same time that none 
 of her grandchildren fall into the fire, we 
 respect her for her observation ; yet, for 
 all this, she may still be a commonplace old 
 woman enough. But if she is all the time 
 telling her grandchildren a fairy tale out of 
 her head, we praise her for her imagination, 
 and say she must be rather a remarkable 
 old woman." 
 
 Precisely, in like manner, if an architect 
 
IV.] FINE ARTS. 185 
 
 does his working-drawing well, we praise him 
 for his manipulation ; if he keeps closely 
 within his contract, we praise him for his 
 honest arithmetic ; if he looks well to the 
 laying of his beams, so that nobody shall 
 drop through the floor, we praise him for his 
 observation. But he must somehow tell us 
 a fairy tale out of his head beside all this, 
 else we cannot praise him for his imagination, 
 nor speak of him as we did of the old woman, 
 as being in any wise out of the common 
 way, a rather remarkable architect. 
 
 A mere builder with a due understanding 
 of proportion could plan and carry out a 
 sufficiently large and commodious house, 
 church, public hall, to contain the family, 
 the congregation, the assemblage of persons. 
 But from the days of the Tower of Babel, 
 men have wanted more — some sense of 
 beauty, of sublimity, which no mere builder 
 could bring about. And this is the Fine Art 
 of Architecture. 
 
 Now though, as I believe, the Art of 
 every period has its peculiar beauty and 
 
1 86 LECTURES ON ART. [iv. 
 
 fitness, being the natural outcome and flower 
 of the higher instincts of man, yet there have 
 been times in his history when the conditions 
 and surroundings being surpassingly favour- 
 able to the growth, some one of the arts has 
 reached apparently the highest pitch of per- 
 fection, and must remain an example and a 
 study to all succeeding ages. There have 
 been in the world's lifetime several blossoming 
 times of Architecture and of Poetry. " The 
 essence of a style in Architecture, properly 
 so called, is that it should be practised for 
 ages and applied to all purposes." So there 
 have been Egyptian, Greek, Gothic, and 
 other styles in Architecture. In like manner 
 there have been different great schools of 
 Poetry — the Greek tragedy, the Elizabethan 
 drama, the Augustan age, and many others. 
 But, unlike Architecture and Poetry, Paint- 
 ing, Sculpture, and Music have each had 
 but one great period. Sculpture takes the 
 earliest place, and attains its highest perfec- 
 tion in Greece during the age of Pheidias. 
 Next, at a wide interval, comes the great 
 
IV.] FINE ARTS. 187 
 
 period of Painting in Italy in the fifteenth and 
 sixteenth centuries. And from that moment 
 the Art of Music begins to gather importance, 
 until in these days we find ourselves in pos- 
 session of the best, both in creation and 
 execution. 
 
 "No great school," says Mr. Ruskin, 
 " ever yet existed which had not for primal 
 aim the representation of some natural fact, 
 as truly as possible. There have only yet 
 appeared in the world three schools of perfect 
 Art — schools, that is to say, which did their 
 work as well as it seems possible to do it." 
 These are the Athenian School of Sculpture 
 of the fifth century B.C. and the Florentine 
 and Venetian Schools of Painting, nearly 
 contemporaneous with each other during part 
 of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries after 
 Christ. The word School of Art in this sense 
 must be taken to mean a body of workers 
 with one original genius, or perhaps more than 
 one, at their head — a genius so vigorous, so 
 full of strength and originality, as to influence 
 those workers and inspire them with his own 
 
1 88 LECTURES ON ART. [iv. 
 
 ideas, compelling them, as it were, to work 
 in accordance with his spirit." 
 
 So at the head of the Athenian School 
 stood Pheidias, and his aim and that of his 
 fellow-workers was the perfect representation 
 of the human body in Sculpture. 
 
 At the head of the Florentine School we 
 may place either Raphael, or Michael Angelo, 
 or Leonardo, and their aim was the perfect 
 expression of human character and emotion 
 in Painting. 
 
 At the head of the Venetian School stand 
 Titian and Paul Veronese, and their object 
 was the representation in Painting of the 
 effects of colour and shade on all things, 
 chiefly on the human form. 
 
 A vivid idea, a fixed notion, of these three 
 schools and their characteristics must always be 
 a valuable basis on which to build a better and 
 larger acquaintance with the masterpieces of 
 Painting and Sculpture ; and to present that 
 idea, that notion, as clearly and plainly as I can, 
 will be my object in the next two lectures. 
 
 For the present I will ask you to bear 
 
To face page i88. 
 
IV.] FINE ARTS. 189 
 
 them in mind, and to associate each of them 
 with one of the three works of Art I have 
 here to show you in photographs, — works of 
 Art which doubtless you have all either seen 
 or continually heard of, — the " Venus " of 
 Melos, belonging to the Athenian School of 
 Pheidias ; Raphael's " Dispute of the Sacra- 
 ment " of the Florentine School ; and Titian's 
 " Flora " of the Venetian School.-^ 
 
 And first the " Venus." The photograph 
 gives, of course, a very inadequate idea of the 
 sculpture, of which the original is in the 
 Louvre. I remember well when I saw it for 
 the first time. I seemed all at once to com- 
 prehend what Sculpture at its best really is. 
 A divine grace and radiance seemed to shine 
 forth from this beautiful woman ; though 
 the spear on which she is supposed to have 
 rested, and her lovely arms with which she 
 held it, are gone, one feels one's self still in the 
 presence of a charming, dignified, sweet per- 
 sonality. To my mind she is the Dea certCy 
 the real goddess, the true Venus of the 
 
 ^ See pages 152, 196. 
 
190 LECTURES ON ART. [iv. 
 
 highest pagan ideal ; others, such as the 
 Medicean Venus at Florence, and her of the 
 Capitoline collection at Rome, the Venus of 
 the Vatican — these may be almost faultlessly 
 fair, but in them there is something of false- 
 ness, something of frailty : this alone is the 
 perfect goddess. 
 
 Now, to come to the example of the Floren- 
 tine School, — the " Dispute concerning the 
 Sacrament," by Raphael. 
 
 It was about the middle of the year i 508 
 that Raphael received from Pope Julius II. 
 a commission to adorn the splendid rooms of 
 the Vatican with paintings. Three of these 
 rooms and a great hall were painted by him 
 on their walls and vaulted ceilings. The 
 paintings on the four walls of the first room 
 were to have for subjects, Theology, Poetry, 
 Philosophy, and Jurisprudence, — the chief 
 ideas of the intellectual powers of that day. 
 This, the so-called "Dispute of the Sacrament," 
 is the Theology. Above the glory of the 
 triumphant Church sits Christ, its builder and 
 maker, enthroned on clouds, and on His coun- 
 
IV.] FINE ARTS. 191 
 
 tenance a divine mildness and mercy ; by 
 His side are the Madonna, and John the 
 Baptist pointing to Him as the Redeemer of 
 the world ; below is the Holy Spirit in the 
 likeness of a dove ; and above all is the God- 
 head Himself in a glory of angels ; on both 
 sides seated on clouds are the godly men of 
 old — the prophets, priests, kings, apostles of 
 the Bible story. Below, grouped on both 
 sides of an altar, on which are displayed the 
 monstrance and the consecrated host, are the 
 Fathers of the Church, bishops and teachers ; 
 and in their faces and figures are expressed, 
 with complete truth, every variation of feeling 
 that each might be supposed to have at such 
 a time — enthusiasm, exalted belief, concen- 
 trated thought, careful investigation, fervent 
 devotion, dispute, and doubt. " This picture," 
 says Mr. Ruskin, "will be a type accepted 
 by everybody, and will involve no possibly 
 questionable points ; the Germans will admit 
 it ; the English academicians will admit it ; 
 and the English purists and prae-Raphaelites 
 will admit it. Well, there you have the truth 
 
192 LECTURES ON ART. [iv. 
 
 of human expression proposed as an aim. 
 That is the way people look when they feel 
 this or that, when they have this or that 
 other mental character. Are they devotional, 
 thoughtful, affectionate, indignant, or inspired? 
 Are they prophets, saints, priests, or kings ? — 
 then, whatsoever is truly thoughtful, affec- 
 tionate, priestly, kingly — that the Florentine 
 School tried to discern and show ; that they 
 have discerned and shown ; and all their 
 greatness is first fastened in their aim at this 
 central truth — the open expression of the 
 living human soul." 
 
 I can say very little about my third ex- 
 ample — the "Flora" of Titian, of the Vene- 
 tian School, whose aim was the representation 
 of colour and shade — for the very reason that 
 these qualities cannot fitly be reproduced in 
 a photograph or engraving. Perhaps some 
 of my hearers may be so fortunate as to 
 have seen the original in the Ufifizzi Gallery 
 at Florence ; and nothing but a sight of 
 the original can give a just idea of the glory 
 of the colouring, the tender glow of the 
 
IV.] FINE ARTS. 193 
 
 lights, and the melting depth of the shades. 
 We can only see from the photograph that 
 this is a master portrait of a beautiful woman, 
 with a kind of freedom and nobility in her 
 face and figure ; whatever Titian chose to 
 paint he treated in this large and healthful 
 style. In my lecture on Painting, I shall try 
 to describe at greater length the character- 
 istics of this Venetian School and the rea- 
 sons of its greatness. 
 
 And now to recapitulate. I have sought 
 to show you that the aim of the Fine Arts 
 is Beauty alone — beauty, physical, intellectual, 
 spiritual ; that they aim at no direct material 
 utility, though, as a moral instrument of 
 elevating, purifying, enlightening power, they 
 have a great influence in the world. And 
 the search after and understanding of Beauty 
 is to be promoted by inquiring into the 
 reasons of the general verdict of mankind 
 about the great masterpieces of Art, and 
 also studying and cultivating our own sensa- 
 tions with regard to them. 
 
 I will remind you that the Fine Arts are 
 o 
 
194 LECTURES ON ART. [iv. 
 
 separated into two groups : those that belong 
 to Science as well as to Art — Music and 
 Architecture ; and those whose object is the 
 imitation of Nature alone — Poetry, Painting, 
 Sculpture. And it is to be remembered 
 about these last that though their object is 
 imitation, it is not exact imitation ; and it is 
 well to keep in memory this saying, " Reali- 
 sation to the mind does not necessitate de- 
 ception to the eye." 
 
 Of the Arts thus classified, only Painting, 
 Sculpture, Architecture, belong to my present 
 subject ; they appeal, through the eye, exclu- 
 sively to the sense of beauty ; and any 
 practical knowledge of any part of these three 
 is a great assistance to the enjoyment of the 
 great works that have been produced by 
 painters, sculptors, architects. 
 
 And, lastly, I have briefly characterised 
 the three great schools of perfect Art : — 
 
 The Athenian School of Sculpture. 
 
 The Florentine School of expression in 
 Painting. 
 
 The Venetian School of colour and light 
 and shade in Painting. 
 
IV.] 
 
 FINE ARTS. 
 
 195 
 
 These will be my subject on the next two 
 occasions. 
 
 By fixing these in the mind and associ- 
 ating with them these three works of world- 
 wide renown, a sort of framework will be 
 formed into which may be fitted whatever is 
 gained by later knowledge and experience 
 and observation. At first Jt is very possible 
 that we may feel ourselves slow to perceive 
 what are the transcendent beauties of these 
 things which all the world has praised ever 
 since they were made ; but one learns to love 
 them by degrees, and to value them far more 
 highly than the transitory Art of the day that 
 will perish with it, as we learn to love Shake- 
 speare and Beethoven. 
 
 Nor do we merely feel these essences 
 For one short hour ; no, even as the trees 
 That whisper round a temple become soon 
 Dear as the temple's self, so does the moon, 
 The passion poesy, glories infinite, 
 Haunt us till they become a cheering light 
 Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast. 
 That, whether there be shine, or gloom o'ercast. 
 They alway must be with us, or we die." 
 
v. — FINE ART— SCULPTURE AND 
 ARCHITECTURE. 
 
 I HAVE placed Sculpture and Architecture 
 together in this Lecture, because, as they are 
 more dependent on each other than is the 
 case with any other two of the remaining 
 Arts, a sketch, indicating the chief periods 
 and characteristics of both, can be made 
 more comprehensive than by treating them 
 separately. I am only too sensible how 
 meagre such a sketch must needs be. I can 
 only recur to my former words, and repeat 
 that my aim is merely to make a beginning 
 
198 LECTURES ON ART. [v. 
 
 of knowledge and interest in these things in 
 the minds of those in whom it is not already- 
 made ; to construct a framework, however 
 slight, into which those who are beginning to 
 care for and to study Art may fit what they 
 learn and observe. 
 
 The same material is common to both 
 Sculpture and Architecture, — stone, clay, 
 wood, and various metals being used in both. 
 Both are subject to the same laws of gravity ; 
 the works of both require a fixed point where 
 they can stand securely on the ground above 
 which they rise. The difference between 
 the two is the subject of their works. While 
 Architecture deals with the inorganic inani- 
 mate substances I have just named, producing 
 buildings and monuments, — things still inor- 
 ganic and inanimate, — Sculpture, dealing 
 with the same substances, produces images 
 of organic animate form ; the one, by 
 statues, groups, and reliefs, lending her aid 
 to the other by filling, adorning, and enrich- 
 ing pediment and arch, niche and column. 
 
 As I have said. Architecture has had 
 
v.] SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 199 
 
 several styles and periods of excellence : 
 Sculpture only one, and that one the School 
 of Athens under Pheidias. The Arts, how- 
 ever, of Sculpture and Architecture, and in 
 fact of Painting too, were practised and 
 carried to great excellence in much earlier 
 times among the Egyptians. The beginnings 
 of their Art are lost in the mists of antiquity ; 
 and the earlier its date, the greater its per- 
 fection. In this respect Egyptian Art differs 
 in a marked manner from the Art of other 
 nations of which we can trace the origin. 
 The general rule is, that as a nation rises 
 into greater freedom and power, the Arts 
 rise with it, and that the time when their 
 highest perfection is reached seems to be 
 the signal for the nation's fall in power, 
 and with that fall their Art is dragged down 
 and debased. But in Egypt, in the 14th 
 century before Christ, the pyramids of 
 Memphis were raised, rocky tombs were 
 hollowed out, obelisks were erected, and the 
 far-famed Sphinx - Colossus — the mystic 
 combination of a human head with the body 
 
200 LECTURES ON ART. [v 
 
 of a mighty lion — was sculptured ; and these 
 things are the highest manifestations of 
 Egyptian Art. Since then, through the 
 succeeding centuries, no alteration took place 
 in its types, as long as Art was practised at 
 all ; all was fixed and unchangeable. The 
 reason of this unchanging type is to be found 
 in the complete subjection of the people, and 
 therefore of the artist, the worker, to one 
 despotic rule — that of the kings and priests, 
 who themselves were subjected to immutable 
 laws, working ever in the same direction. 
 That division of labour which I have before 
 noticed to be destructive to any Art of a 
 high kind prevailed in Egyptian Art. In the 
 production of their wall-paintings, which have 
 come down to us, and from which we learn 
 many curious and useful things, one man 
 prepared the surface, a second drew the out- 
 line, a third hollowed the outlines for the 
 sunk relief, a fourth laid on the colour. 
 
 Then too, in Egypt, the artist was looked 
 on as an artisan, and was classed in the 
 lowest rank. No one, from natural inclina- 
 
v.] SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 201 
 
 tion or especial impulse, selected Art as his 
 pursuit; but the son followed, as in all crafts 
 and professions, the mode of life of his father, 
 and set his foot in the tracks of his predeces- 
 sor, so that no one can be said to have left 
 a footprint that could strictly be called his 
 own. In this respect the same may be said 
 of other Eastern nations ; it is the same 
 with Assyria, it is the same with India, it is 
 the same with China. Although manifesting 
 admirable powers of design, gifts of colour, 
 perfection of workmanship, the Art of these 
 nations has been so bound down by restric- 
 tions and trammelled by slavish conditions 
 that it could never attain to any true develop- 
 ment, any positive history. The activity of 
 the imagination was checked — quenched — 
 and so the result was a certain rigidity, 
 formality, uniformity ; it was reserved for a 
 real, living, breathing genius of production — 
 the Greek — soon to break away from all this 
 and leave it far behind. The fixed type of 
 the Egyptian pyramid and the lotus-flower 
 decoration, the Assyrian bull and the Chinese 
 
202 LECTURES ON ART. [v. 
 
 pagoda, are familiar to all of us, for they re- 
 mained so long the same, being reproduced 
 over and over again for generations. And 
 when we consider the representations of 
 the human form that these nations have 
 produced, we shall still see the same fixed 
 type, the same want of life, motion, expres- 
 sion. Think of the Egyptian warriors, 
 water-carriers, slaves, attendants, priests, 
 kings, all with flat skulls, low and receding 
 brows, oval and oblique eyes, full lips, and the 
 same satisfied shallow expression. So may 
 we recall the stout squat figures on Assyrian 
 monuments, and the faces with large curved 
 nose, large eyes, full lips, and elaborately 
 curled beard, face after face the same ; and 
 in Chinese vase and rice-paper paintings, 
 the heads, with flat noses, high cheek-bones, 
 and little eyes, eternally the same. Shall 
 we consider either of these — the Egyptian, 
 the Assyrian, the Chinese — a worthy or beau- 
 tiful type of the human face divine ? 
 
 And when we look round for this type 
 it is the Greek face that attracts our admira- 
 
v.] SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 203 
 
 tion and satisfies our judgment ; the sweet 
 oval of the face, the straight, delicate nose, 
 the delicately arched brows, the clearly cut 
 chin and mouth, — these go to make up the 
 true type of beauty. " In representing the 
 human figure," says Mr. Pater, " Egyptian 
 Art had held by mathematical or mechanical 
 proportions exclusively. The Greek appre- 
 hends of it, as the main truth, that it is a 
 living organism, with freedom of movement ; 
 and hence the infinite possibilities of motion, 
 and of expression by motion, with which the 
 imagination credits the higher sort of Greek 
 Sculpture ; while the figures of Egyptian Art, 
 graceful as they often are, seem absolutely 
 incapable of any motion or gesture, other 
 than the one actually designed." The water- 
 carrier looks as if he had never done, and 
 could never do, anything but carry water, or 
 the bowman anything but hold his bow ex- 
 tended in act to shoot ; so fixed and without 
 play of life is the figure, as if it had been cut 
 out of cardboard. " The work of the Greek 
 sculptor" (I return to Mr. Pater), "together 
 
204 LECTURES ON ART. [v. 
 
 with its more real anatomy, becomes full also 
 of human soul. ... In the works of the 
 Asiatic tradition, in the marbles of Nineveh 
 for instance, and in the early Greek Art, so 
 far as we can see, which derives from it, the 
 form of man is inadequate, and below the 
 measure of perfection attained there in the 
 representation of the lower forms of life ; 
 just as in the little reflective Art of Japan, so 
 lovely in its reproduction of flower or bird, 
 the human form comes almost as a caricature, 
 or is at least untouched by any higher ideal. 
 To that Asiatic tradition, then, with its per- 
 fect craftsmanship, its consummate skill in 
 design, its power of hand, the Dorian, the 
 European, the true Hellenic influence brought 
 a revelation of the mind and body of man." 
 
 I propose to-day to lay before you the 
 causes and conditions of the Greek perfection 
 in Art, and to glance, though it must be but 
 slightly and briefly, at the civilisation of the 
 Greeks, something of their habits of life and 
 ways of thinking and feeling. For, in ex- 
 plaining to ourselves, realising, understanding 
 
v.] SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 205 
 
 something of one great period of Art un- 
 deniably foremost, according to the verdict 
 of all the ages, we shall have a standard of 
 perfection to which at least one range of 
 notions about Art may be referred ; and from 
 the general principles of taste governing that 
 group of the best human productions, we 
 may gain light on all the rest. 
 
 Now the Greeks, more than any other 
 nation of the world, were pre-eminently a 
 nation of taste ; they had a genius for beauty. 
 The first cause of the Greek understanding 
 and love of beauty is found in the physical 
 beauty they, as a race, possessed in a high 
 degree ; and, happy in the conscious posses- 
 sion of the gift, they cultivated and valued 
 it to its fullest extent. The four wishes of 
 the ancient Greek, quoted by Plato, were : — ist. 
 To be healthy ; 2d, To be beautiful ; 3d, To 
 be rich honestly ; 4th, To be gay and merry 
 with one's friends. And indeed we may say 
 that any person in whom these four wishes 
 were fulfilled would be likely to have a very 
 pleasant time of it. 
 
2o6 LECTURES ON ART. [v. 
 
 " By no people," says Winckelmann, " has 
 beauty been so highly esteemed as by the 
 Greeks. The priests of a youthful Jupiter at 
 -^gae, — of the Ismenian Apollo, of the priest 
 who, at Tanagra, led the procession of Mer- 
 cury, bearing a lamb upon his shoulders, — 
 were always youths to whom the prize of 
 beauty had been awarded. The citizens of 
 Egesta in Sicily (Greek colonists) erected a 
 monument to a certain Philip — who was not 
 their fellow -citizen, but of Croton — for his 
 distinguished beauty, and the people made 
 offerings to it. And as beauty was so longed 
 for and prized by the Greeks, every beautiful 
 person sought to become known to the whole 
 people by this distinction, and above all to 
 approve himself to the artists, because they 
 awarded the prize ; and this was for the 
 artists an opportunity of having supreme 
 beauty ever before their eyes. Beauty even 
 gave a right to fame ; and we find in Greek 
 histories the most beautiful people distin- 
 guished. There were established contests 
 for beauty by Cypselus, King of Arcadia, by 
 
v.] SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 207 
 
 the river Alpheus ; and at Sparta, and at 
 Lesbos in the temple of Juno, and among 
 the Parrhavii, there were contests for beauty 
 among women." So in those times were 
 natural advantages more honoured than 
 learning. The civilised world had not yet 
 learned, moralists and poets had not yet 
 invented, the sentiment, the warning : — 
 
 Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good ; 
 A shining gloss that fadeth suddenly ; 
 A flower that dies when first it 'gins to bud ; 
 A brittle glass that's broken presently ; 
 
 A doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower 
 Lost, faded, broken, dead within an hour." 
 
 Now, when in our times a man or woman 
 possesses great natural advantages, a certain 
 self-consciousness and artificiality of rnanner 
 nearly always accompanies them ; the reason 
 of this may be found in the comparative 
 rareness of the gift ; it seems to be such a 
 difficult one to carry about gracefully. People 
 seem often too proud ; or else are they rather 
 ashamed of being beautiful ? For the sever- 
 est homilies of the moralist of childhood are 
 
2o8 LECTURES ON ART. [v. 
 
 directed against pride of person and appear- 
 ance ; we try to withhold as long as possible 
 from the young any knowledge of their own 
 charms, esteeming that knowledge to be a 
 dangerous thing, and the gift of beauty itself 
 of very doubtful value. The Greeks had a 
 very different estimate, as we have seen. As 
 it has been said, it was given to them to do 
 nothing too much. They seem to have had 
 perfectly healthy, simple, in some respects 
 childlike minds, in perfectly healthy, beauti- 
 ful bodies ; anything morbid or over-wrought 
 was impossible to them. And so a sweet 
 serenity, a constant cheerfulness, was their 
 habitual tone of mind. With them the object 
 of Art, according to Pericles, was " to chase 
 sadness from life!' We find that in conduct 
 and manners the qualities they most valued 
 were propriety, grace, modesty, reverence to 
 the aged ; they disliked any undignified dis- 
 turbance of manner, any excitement about 
 trifles, over-haste to tell news, undue eager- 
 ness or curiosity, impatience to open a letter, 
 quick walking, crossed legs, any hasty, sudden, 
 
v.] SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 209 
 
 exaggerated action. The result of all this 
 was simplicity, order, calmness — in fine, taste 
 in all they said or did ; and so it followed 
 that the productions of the common Arts 
 were simple and elegant, of perfect craftsman- 
 ship and beauty. Mr. Pater makes us re- 
 mark how in Homer there is a constant pre- 
 occupation with the beauty of the common 
 things of life. " We seem to pass in reading 
 him," he says, " through the treasures of some 
 royal collection ; in him the presentation of 
 almost every aspect of life is beautified by 
 the work of cunning hands. The thrones, 
 coffers, couches, of curious carpentry, are 
 studded with bossy ornaments of precious 
 metals effectively disposed, or inlaid with 
 stained ivory, or blue cyanus, or amber, or 
 pale amber like gold ; the surfaces of the 
 stone conduits, the public washing troughs, 
 the ramparts on which the weary soldiers 
 rest themselves when returned to Troy, are 
 fair and smooth ; all the fine qualities in 
 colour and texture of woven stuff are care- 
 fully noted ; the fineness, closeness, softness, 
 P 
 
210 LECTURES ON ART. [v. 
 
 pliancy, gloss, the whiteness or nectar- like 
 tints in which the weaver delights to work ; 
 to weave the sea-purple threads is the appro- 
 priate function of queens and noble women. 
 . . . The numerous sorts of cups are bossed 
 with golden studs, or have handles wrought 
 with figures of doves for instance. The great 
 brazen caldrons bear an epithet that means 
 flowery. The trappings of the horses, the 
 various parts of the chariots, are formed of 
 various metals. The women's ornaments 
 and the instruments of their toilet are de- 
 scribed ; the golden vials for unguents ; Use 
 and Beauty are still undivided \ all that men's 
 hands are set to make has still a fascination 
 alike for workman and spectators." So great 
 a love for these things had they, that they 
 made their very gods help to make them. 
 Hephaestos (Vulcan) was a worker in metals ; 
 Pallas Athene was skilled in spinning and 
 weaving. And all these things ministered 
 to none but simple and healthy require- 
 ments ; there was no ostentation, no ex- 
 travagance, no undue luxury, no vulgarity ; 
 
v.] SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 211 
 
 great men lived in small houses, and in them 
 there was plain living and high thinking. 
 
 Their dress, simple and natural like all 
 the rest, consisted of a longer or shorter 
 under-garment, the " chiton " — like a sleeve- 
 less shirt, and worn without a girdle, — and a 
 mantle -like upper garment, the " himation," 
 which was only a large four-square, thrown 
 over the shoulder of the left arm, and drawn 
 either above or below the right arm. Hence 
 the style of the garment did not depend on 
 the tailor or the dressmaker, but every man 
 and woman arranged his or her own garment 
 in the way most suited to individual character 
 and taste ; so that it became of itself a form 
 of expression. 
 
 The natural unity that existed among the 
 Greeks, in spite of their political diversity, 
 has been accounted for by their common 
 language, their common religion, and the 
 games that were open to all, and offered a 
 universal motive and place of assemblage for 
 the whole of the Greeks. The gymnasia, — 
 places of physical training for these games 
 
212 LECTURES ON ART. [v. 
 
 existed all over Greece ; in them the youths 
 practised and perfected their bodily powers, 
 in attempting to rival the strength, the fleet- 
 ness, the beauty of the gods themselves ; thus 
 the artists frequenting the gymnasia had 
 always under their eyes beautiful attitudes 
 and forms. And as a result of this, and of 
 all I have been describing, it followed that 
 the Greek ideal should express itself pre- 
 eminently in sculpture. To the athlete once 
 crowned in the games a statue was raised ; to 
 him who was crowned twice, a second statue 
 — a portrait of himself In Athens a statue 
 was what a title or order of merit is with 
 us. Cities rivalled each other in the beauty 
 of their statues, and of these the best were 
 of the gods and heroes and were placed in 
 the temples. Every city seems to have had 
 a population of statues as well as of living 
 people ; so it followed that the artist was a 
 highly honoured person. While the Greeks 
 felt a kind of contempt for an author, they 
 had the greatest respect for an artist. " The 
 artist is the only^wise man" was a saying 
 
v.] SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 213 
 
 of Socrates. An artist might become a law- 
 giver if he desired, or he might be chosen to 
 command an army, and his statue had the 
 especial honour of being placed near to those 
 of the gods : his reputation was not depend- 
 ent on fashion, or the fancies of patrons, 
 but on the formally delivered judgment of 
 the wisest men. 
 
 When Polygnotus, in the fifth century 
 B.C., painted a public edifice in Athens, the 
 Amphictyons ordered that he should be en- 
 tertained at the public expense throughout 
 Greece. In contrast to this, let me tell you 
 of something that happened in our own day. 
 Some years ago Mr. Watts the R.A. offered, 
 to the Directors of the London and North- 
 western Railway Company, to paint the 
 central hall of the Euston Station free of 
 any charge, and they refused. I suppose 
 they thought that the public were in danger 
 of being so interested in the paintings as to 
 forget to take their tickets, or might even 
 be tempted by them to stay in London, 
 and not go on their North -Western jour- 
 
214 LECTURES ON ART. [v. 
 
 neys, — which, of course, would never do 
 at all ! 
 
 Well, but with the Greeks : so near, in 
 their eyes, seemed the artistic gift to the 
 divine, that they believed their first statues 
 to have fallen from heaven. " Hence," says 
 Dr. Lubke, " Greek art originated with the 
 images of the gods. Homer had glorified 
 the national conceptions in his verse, and 
 had represented the gods, in perfect human 
 form, as acting and suffering, gracious or 
 angry, endowed with all human passions. 
 If the East had filled its mythology with 
 gloomy and fearful legends, and profound or 
 fantastic subtleties, and therefore could only 
 portray the forms of the gods by monstrous 
 deformity of the general type, in the clear 
 pure myths of the Greeks, all misty immen- 
 sity vanished, and man created the gods 
 after his own image. Although whole stages 
 of child-like helplessness had to be passed 
 through, in which man only succeeded in 
 forming a puppet-like idol ; although, in the 
 earliest Greek divinities, much of the mon- 
 
v.] SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 215 
 
 strous creations of the East is still preserved, 
 as in the hundred-breasted Artemis of the 
 Ephesians or the four-armed Apollo of the 
 Lacedaemonians ; still the Greek mind, in the 
 end, discovered the right way of investing its 
 gods with the sublimity and beauty of the 
 human form. This way was the observation 
 and apprehension of nature." 
 
 Instead of troubling you, as my space 
 and time are so limited, with what would be 
 a mere string of the names of sculptors and 
 their works, I will only dwell on the name 
 of Pheidias and his masterpieces, — the sculp- 
 tures of the Parthenon. A clear view of 
 the best work of the best time will be better 
 grasped and retained than a more meagre 
 general account. 
 
 After the victories over the Persians, the 
 Greek national character seems to have 
 reached its highest point of development, 
 and in Athens all its best was concentrated, 
 both of literature and of art ; and at the 
 head of all that was greatest in art stood 
 Pheidias. He was born in 500 B.C. and he 
 
2i6 LECTURES ON ART. [v. 
 
 died about the age of sixty-eight. One of his 
 earher works was a colossal statue of Athene, 
 something like seventy feet high ; it stood on 
 the Acropolis at Athens, and could be seen by 
 shipmen far out on the open sea. Then he 
 made the Athene of the Parthenon of gold 
 and ivory — it was completed in 437 B.C.; and 
 again, in the evening of his days, he executed 
 another gold - and - ivory chryselephantine 
 statue of the Olympian Zeus. Still it is in 
 the Parthenon, the splendid temple for 
 Athene's feasts, that his genius and its influ- 
 ence over those who worked with him shone 
 at its greatest : probably the whole design of 
 the temple, as well as its sculptural decora- 
 tions, was planned and executed under his 
 superintendence. The building contained 
 the gold-and-ivory statue of Athene : it was 
 of the Doric order of architecture. The most 
 beautiful and noteworthy parts of its sculp- 
 tures were — the frieze that covered the upper 
 part of the wall within the colonnade, and 
 the pediments eastern and western. In later 
 times the Parthenon from a pagan temple 
 
v.] SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 217. 
 
 became a Christian Church, and again, in 
 the fifteenth century, was converted into a 
 Turkish mosque. 
 
 In the struggles between the Turks and 
 Venetians in the seventeenth century it suf- 
 fered from the explosion of a shell in a 
 powder-magazine contained within the build- 
 ing itself ; and from that date downwards it 
 was exposed to constant injury. Some of 
 these priceless sculptures were made into 
 lime, some were built by fragments into 
 walls, and, worst of all, some were mutilated 
 by travellers breaking off pieces as mementos 
 of their brainless excursions. In the years 
 1 80 1 -3 the sculptures of the Parthenon then 
 remaining were removed to England by the 
 Earl of Elgin, purchased from him by the 
 Government, and placed in the British 
 Museum. Lord Byron in his Childe Harold 
 bitterly laments what he calls 
 
 the modern Picts' ignoble boast, 
 
 To rive what Goth, and Turk, and Time have spared." 
 
 But I, for one, see no reason but to rejoice 
 
2i8 LECTURES ON ART. [v. 
 
 that these sublime and perfectly beautiful 
 works are within our reach, so that we may 
 enjoy them at our leisure without the labour 
 and distractions of travelling. I can only 
 wish that the world in general were not so 
 content with knowing them by hearsay only, 
 instead of using their privileges. 
 
 The subject of the eastern pediment of 
 the Parthenon had relation to the birth of 
 Athene from the brain of Zeus. These figures 
 have been variously supposed to be two of the 
 Fates, or else the daughters of Cecrops. The 
 attitude of one of them seems to express a 
 readiness to spring up, the body bent forward 
 and the feet drawn back — a contrast to the 
 tranquil posture of the reclining figure who 
 has not yet heard the tidings. The " chiton " 
 — the shirt-like garment I mentioned as part 
 of the Greek costume — clings closely to the 
 form, and over the lower half of the body 
 is thrown a mantle of thicker substance. 
 The forms of these women are large and 
 robust, but at the same time supple and 
 graceful and expressing perfect maturity of 
 
v.] SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 219 
 
 womanhood. Now, in a few words to describe 
 the frieze which ran along the sides of the 
 temple within the colonnade — that world- 
 famed frieze of the Parthenon — the student's 
 first and the artist's last and highest theme 
 of praise. Its subject is the celebration of 
 the Panathenaic festival. This festival took 
 place every year in Athene. A solemn 
 sacrifice, equestrian and gymnastic contests, 
 and the Pyrrhic dance were all included in 
 the ceremonial, but its principal feature was 
 the offering of a new veil — peplos — to the 
 goddess on her birthday ; this was conveyed 
 in solemn procession to her temple, the 
 Parthenon. In this procession all that was 
 best and greatest in Athens appeared. The 
 gentle graces of maidenhood ; the fresh 
 strength of beautiful youths trained in the 
 gymnasia ; the dignity of older men, and 
 magistrates chosen by the people ; warriors, 
 rulers, priests; nay, the very gods themselves, 
 who sit in well-ranged groups — Zeus, Hera, 
 Demeter, Athene — awaiting the presentation 
 of the peplos. The end of the procession 
 
220 LECTURES ON ART. [v. 
 
 has just reached the temple : first, a group 
 of archons and heralds quietly awaiting the 
 rest ; then a troop of Athenian maidens, 
 singly or in groups, with jars and other vessels 
 in their hands, — they are charming modest 
 figures, in festive garments of delicate texture, 
 with a simple and serious air as if absorbed 
 in the ceremony ; then come sacrificial animals, 
 following quietly, standing and struggling 
 bearers of sacrificial gifts, flute-players and 
 musicians, warriors in chariots of four horses ; 
 then detached horsemen ; and lastly, youths 
 in the prime of strength and beauty, prepar- 
 ing for the procession, bridling and curbing 
 their steeds — the matchless horses of the 
 Parthenon. Thus did Pheidias's representa- 
 tion of the Panathenaic procession include 
 all that was fairest, greatest, best in Athens ; 
 and so may we take it as a type, an 
 epitome, of Greek life at its fullest and 
 highest. 
 
 And so it was to the temple that the 
 Greeks gave their best in sculpture : it was 
 to the temple, too, that their best architecture 
 
v.] SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 221 
 
 was given. The design of private dwellings 
 was quite insignificant. All the greatest of 
 both these arts in Greece belongs to the 
 period immediately following the Persian 
 war. 
 
 On the Acropolis of Athens, at that time, 
 stood what we cannot but imagine to have 
 been the most beautiful group of buildings 
 the world has ever seen. — A broad winding 
 way, and broad terraced flights of steps, led 
 up to the splendid gate of the Propylsea ; on 
 the right, the slender and graceful temple of 
 the wingless Victory, — wingless, because she 
 was never to leave Athens more ; over the 
 roof of the central building towered the 
 colossal brazen Athene by the hand of 
 Pheidias ; then the temple of the goddess 
 herself, the Parthenon, rose further to the 
 right, with its forest of pillars and richly- 
 sculptured pediments ; while to the left could 
 be seen a portion of the Erechtheium, the 
 temple for the true worship of Athene, while 
 the Parthenon was the temple for her feasts. 
 These things were the glory of Athens at 
 
222 LECTURES ON ART. [v. 
 
 her greatest and worthiest period of freedom 
 of art 
 
 The time at which such perfect examples 
 of the Arts of Sculpture and Architecture 
 were to be produced, did not last long ; it 
 ceased with the beginning of the Pelopon- 
 nesian War. Great names and great works, 
 it is true, followed ; but the period I have 
 described remained ever after unapproached 
 in its perfection. The group of Niobe and 
 her children, of Laocoon and his sons 
 strangled by serpents, the Dying Gaul 
 (usually wrongly called a Gladiator), — these 
 belong to the next period of Greek Sculp- 
 ture ; and, although they impress us greatly 
 by their power of dramatic expression and 
 their wonderful living vigour, they have not 
 the earlier serenity, majesty, and repose that 
 make the figures of Pheidias so perfectly 
 delightful and satisfying. 
 
 Next in the list of masters of the world 
 come the Romans. The Greeks, we may 
 say, governed the world by beauty, the 
 Romans by polity. This contrast between 
 
v.] SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 223 
 
 the Greek and the Roman spirit is to be 
 observed in every department of life. 
 
 The Greek spirit tended to the ideal, the 
 Roman to the real ; the Greek motive was 
 beauty and grace — the Roman, law and 
 dominion ; the Greek sought after art and 
 civilisation — the Roman after conquest, 
 polity ; the civilisation of the Greek tended 
 to simplicity, that of the Roman to costli- 
 ness and luxury ; the Greek poetry tended 
 to the dramatic or epic — the Roman to the 
 satiric or didactic ; the Greek games were 
 peaceful contests of strength, skill, fleetness — 
 the Roman games were the bloody strife of 
 the gladiator. " Let others study Art," says 
 Virgil in the ^neid ; " Rome has somewhat 
 better to do — namely, Law and Dominion." 
 
 And so it was that the Romans became 
 the pupils of the Greeks in poetry, in art, 
 in all expression of intellectual life, even in 
 the embodiment of their religion. " Art was 
 with them — not the hearty delight of the 
 people ; not the requisite of the national 
 faith ; not the emanation of an imagination 
 
224 LECTURES ON ART. [v. 
 
 excited by the poet's ideal of the gods ; but 
 an article of luxury belonging to the rich and 
 powerful, the handmaid of authority, ready 
 to adorn life, to ennoble power, and to attract 
 the cultivated taste of the few. Architecture, 
 indeed, seemed to bear closer affinity to the 
 Roman character than the rest of the arts, 
 as it belonged to the practical necessities of 
 life ; so under their hands rose the rounded 
 arch — first borrowed from the Etruscans, and 
 brought by the Romans to greater artistic 
 perfection — applied first to aqueducts, bridges, 
 viaducts, and then to splendid public build- 
 ings and monuments, such as the Arches of 
 Titus and of Constantine, the Coliseum, the 
 Pantheon, the Baths of Caracalla, and many 
 others. 
 
 From the time — and even before it — of the 
 subjugation of the Greeks by the Romans, 
 the conquered had been the masters of the 
 conquerors in everything belonging to taste 
 and art. 
 
 So, after Greece became in name as well 
 as in fact a Roman province, a new school 
 
v.] SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 225 
 
 of Athenian Sculpture arose in Rome ; this 
 was in the early days of the empire. To 
 this later school belong the Medicean Venus, 
 the Farnese Hercules, and the Apollo Belvi- 
 dere. These, until modern discoveries and 
 taste decided the superiority of the work of 
 Pheidias and his time, were long held to bear 
 the palm of excellence ; they are extremely 
 perfect and finished in execution, soft, and 
 delicate, and graceful, but are lacking in the 
 purity, the elevation of the earlier school, and, 
 placed side by side with them, they seem 
 to strive after effect, and are wanting in sim- 
 plicity — the charm of unconscious beauty. 
 
 More essentially Roman than these are 
 the innumerable portrait-statues and busts 
 that have come down to us. A Roman city 
 was said to have more statues than living 
 people in it. In short, Art was used among 
 the Romans to perpetuate the memory of 
 her victories, to commemorate an individual 
 or family name, to enhance the costliness 
 and luxury of life ; not for the sake of 
 Beauty, for the love of Art for its own sake. 
 Q 
 
226 LECTURES ON ART. [v. 
 
 So it followed that their Architecture, though 
 possessing great qualities of solidity, strength, 
 and richness, of execution, of material ; their 
 Sculpture, though possessing accuracy, fidel- 
 ity, reality, — were yet lacking in the higher 
 ideal qualities of the Greek. 
 
 Something I should say of the Pompeiian 
 remains, which are a blending of the later 
 Greek with the Roman. From them we find 
 that house-construction and decoration were 
 very rich and elaborate in the first century 
 A.D. ; and so we gain a just idea of the 
 Roman home and its arrangements at that 
 epoch, and add another point of difference 
 between them and the Greeks, who, as I said, 
 cared nothing for pride of appearance in their 
 dwellings. 
 
 And now I must take a great leap. I 
 must pass over the early years of the Chris- 
 tian Church. Christianity, fettered by the 
 forms of antique life, at enmity with its spirit, 
 abhorring its superstition and idolatry, re- 
 jected and dreaded the art of the sculptor 
 and his graven image. The necessity for 
 
v.] SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 227 
 
 providing buildings worthy for Christian 
 worship led at first to the adaptation, for 
 that purpose, of Roman temples and basilicas, 
 with their rows of columns and rounded 
 arches ; and as the seat of empire was trans- 
 ferred from Rome to Byzantium, architec- 
 ture- — that architecture that had been Greek 
 — then put on different features, and became 
 Byzantine Romanesque. The first ten cen- 
 turies A.D. were centuries of destruction, of 
 struggle, — the old spirit contending with the 
 new, — till, when at last the victory of Chris- 
 tianity over Paganism was complete, arose 
 that wonderful work of man, the expression 
 of the Christian love and hope and faith — 
 the Gothic Architecture of the Middle Ages. 
 
 And here, by way of roughly character- 
 ising these three great architectural styles — 
 the Greek, the Romanesque, the Gothic — I 
 will borrow Mr. Ruskin's definitions, and will 
 call the first the architecture of the lintel; the 
 second, the architecture of the rounded arch 
 and cupola ; the third, the architecture of the 
 pointed arch. And I will ask you to fix 
 
228 LECTURES ON ART. [v. 
 
 these in your minds by associating them 
 with the characteristics of three buildings. 
 
 First, as belonging to the Greek architec- 
 ture of the lintel (horizontal lines resting on 
 columns) I should name the Parthenon, 
 originally, perhaps, the most perfect example, 
 but too shattered now for any complete 
 observation : instead of this, here is the 
 temple of Poseidon at Psestum^ in Lower 
 Italy, which belongs to the same period as 
 all the other best Greek art — the fifth cen- 
 tury B.C. This, one of the best preserved 
 monuments of so great an antiquity, stands 
 in solemn isolation on the site of a once 
 flourishing city of Magna Grecia. I have 
 been told by travellers of the way in which, 
 more than any other antique building, it 
 impresses the imagination by its grandeur, 
 as if it had been raised by the hands of gods 
 and heroes, and not by such men as are 
 common at this day. Its columns, channelled 
 by flutings, bear up the mighty beams of the 
 architrave, the capitals marking the place 
 
 ^ See heading of chapter. 
 
v.] SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 229 
 
 where the support meets the burden ; in front, 
 the pediment with its now vanished sculp- 
 tures. This is the Architecture of the Lintel. 
 
 Second, as an example of the Romanesque 
 Architecture — rounded arch and cupola, — 
 here is St. Mark's at Venice. 
 
 " St. Mark," says an old chronicler, " hav- 
 ing seen the people of Aquileia well grounded 
 in religion, and being called to Rome by St. 
 Peter, before setting off, took with him the 
 holy bishop Hermagorus, and went in a small 
 boat to the marshes of Venice. There were 
 at that time some houses built upon a certain 
 high bank called Rialto, and the boat being 
 driven by the wind was anchored in a marshy 
 place, when St. Mark, snatched into ecstasy, 
 heard the voice of an angel saying to him, 
 * Peace be to thee, Mark ; here shall thy 
 body rest.'" And here was to be Venice 
 and the Church of St. Mark, her patron saint. 
 The earlier building was destroyed, and the 
 main portion of the present church belongs 
 to the eleventh century, though additions 
 and alterations went on for two or three 
 
230 LECTURES ON ART. [v. 
 
 hundred years later. I will quote a few 
 words from Mr. Ruskin's description of it : 
 ''A multitude of pillars and white domes 
 clustered into a long low pyramid of coloured 
 light, — a treasure -heap, it seems, partly of 
 gold and partly of opal and mother-of-pearl, 
 hollowed beneath into five great vaulted 
 porches, ceiled with fair mosaic and beset 
 with sculpture of alabaster, clear as amber 
 and delicate as ivory . . . and round the 
 walls of the porches there are set pillars of 
 variegated stones, jasper and porphyry and 
 deep-green serpentine, spotted with flakes of 
 snow . . . their capitals rich with interwoven 
 tracery, rooted knots of herbage, and drifting 
 leaves of acanthus and vine, mystical signs, 
 all beginning and ending in the cross ; and 
 above them, in the broad archivolts, a con- 
 tinuous chain of language and of life — angels 
 and the signs of heaven, and the labours of 
 men . . . and above these, another range of 
 glittering pinnacles, mixed with white arches 
 edged with scarlet flowers." 
 
 Third, as an example of the Gothic 
 
To face page 230, 
 
v.] SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 231 
 
 architecture of the pointed arch and perpen- 
 dicular lines we will take the Cathedral of 
 Amiens.^ When to the Romanesque epoch 
 of architecture — of which the type is the 
 rounded arch — the new style with its pointed 
 arch first succeeded, its builders were called 
 Gothic by way of reproach ; for it was thought 
 a rude innovation, such as only barbarian in- 
 vention could have produced. And since that 
 style has come to be honoured as it deserves, 
 it is still called Gothic, simply because no 
 better name has been found for it. I will 
 not attempt at the present time any detailed 
 description of its characteristics, varying as 
 they did in different centuries and countries, 
 but simply point to Amiens as a crowning 
 example of the culminating power of Gothic 
 architecture in the thirteenth century. " This 
 last place of good Gothic," says Mr. Ruskin, 
 " has no room to spare. It rises as high as 
 it can on narrowest foundation ; stands in 
 perfect strength with the least possible sub- 
 stance in its bars ; connects niche with niche 
 
 ^ See tailpiece. 
 
232 LECTURES ON ART. [v. 
 
 and line with line in an exquisite harmony, 
 from which no stone can be removed, and to 
 which you can add not a pinnacle ; and yet 
 introduces, in rich though now more calcu- 
 lated profusion, the living elements of its 
 sculpture : sculpture in the quatrefoils — 
 sculpture in the brackets — sculpture in the 
 gargoyles — sculpture in the niches — sculp- 
 ture in the ridges and hollows of its mould- 
 ings ; not a shadow without a meaning, and 
 not a line without life." Then came a change, 
 and Gothic art became gradually debased. 
 Instead of taking delight in the things he 
 thought of as he carved, the builder began to 
 pride himself in his own workmanship, and 
 how he should win the praise of men for the 
 cleverness of his carving, and what wonderful 
 impossible things he could contrive to do. 
 " And the catastrophe " (our teacher goes on) 
 "was instant and irrevocable. Architecture 
 became in France a mere web of waving 
 lines — in England, a mere grating of perpen- 
 dicular ones. Redundance was substituted 
 for invention, and geometry for passion ; the 
 
v.] SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 233 
 
 Gothic art became a mere expression of 
 wanton expenditure and vulgar mathematics, 
 and was swept away — as it then deserved to 
 be swept away — by the severer pride and 
 purer learning of the schools founded on 
 classical tradition." 
 
 For then came the Renaissance — the new 
 birth of antique philosophy and art. I need 
 scarcely remind you of the three events that 
 are said in the history books to have brought 
 about this great and notable change in the 
 world's affairs, — the invention of printing, the 
 conquest of Constantinople by the Turks, and 
 the discovery of America. The first, by in- 
 creasing the general spread of knowledge and 
 thought ; the second, by carrying a stream of 
 Greek culture to the west; the third, by enlarg- 
 ing the ideas and imaginations of men ; led to 
 great revolutions in politics, social matters, art, 
 religion, and brought about new ideas of state 
 and polity — the Reformation, the Renaissance. 
 
 The revised study of antiquity led to 
 great enthusiasm for classic forms, the revival 
 of the study of Nature in the Greek spirit, 
 
234 LECTURES ON ART. [v. 
 
 and a renewal of that kind of human power 
 and genius that goes to produce Fine Art ; 
 but that power and genius took now a 
 different form — from sculpture it passed into 
 painting. What else I have to say about 
 the Renaissance will find a more appropriate 
 place in my next lecture. I have space to 
 tell of none of the glories of this reflection 
 of the old Greek ideas, expanded into 
 greater splendour by the later civilisation ; 
 and I must omit any mention of the Gothic 
 revival in our own century. My more im- 
 mediate object to-day is to point out what a 
 living influence the Greek has been always, 
 and still is, in the world. After its own 
 greatest period of freedom and perfection, 
 the Greek spirit passed, as we have seen, into 
 the Roman world, keeping alive the tradi- 
 tions of Art in Rome, in Byzantium, in the 
 Christian Church. In the last the flame 
 burned but feebly for a time in hidden 
 corners, with scholars and students ; but at 
 the Renaissance it flamed up in great splen- 
 dour — then in part subsiding, only to re- 
 
v.] SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 235 
 
 appear with a newer and clearer lustre in a 
 new Renaissance of these days. Let us 
 think in what quite obvious ways that Greek 
 influence still shows itself. The Greek is 
 still the standard of personal beauty, the 
 type of all that is greatest in one great 
 school of architecture, — still the standard of 
 unapproached excellence in sculpture. We 
 see Greek influence in the subject and treat- 
 ment of many modern painters, such as Sir 
 Frederick Leighton and Mr. Albert Moore. 
 Greek literature and art were never so deeply 
 or so widely studied as at the present time, 
 so that the Greeks are really nearer to us by 
 our better understanding and knowledge of 
 them than many a nation of more modern 
 times, and it has been said that a highly 
 cultivated man of the present day would 
 find himself very much at home in the 
 Athens of Pericles. Moreover, the fancy has 
 taken certain people to give evening parties 
 at which it was de rigueur to wear Greek 
 costume — patterns for which were sent out 
 with the invitations, to the great confusion 
 
236 LECTURES ON ART. [v. 
 
 of dressmakers. In London and at Oxford 
 the Greek drama has been played both in 
 Greek and in English ; some of our children's 
 favourite story-books are the Greek fairy- 
 tales of gods and heroes ; and one thing 
 more, which must not be missed in reckon- 
 ing up our debts to the Greeks, — as the 
 marvellous beauties of God's work in Nature 
 have been revealed to us through the lan- 
 guage of Greek Art, so His gift of the books 
 of the New Testament was given to us in 
 the Greek language of letters. 
 
 Some few words I would wish to say in con- 
 clusion about the state of the Arts of Sculp- 
 ture and Architecture at the present day. 
 
 " Sculpture," said Sir Frederick Leighton 
 in his speech at the last Academy dinner 
 (1881), "is shaking off its sleep, and striv- 
 ing for a new day of life and a few of the 
 works then exhibited seemed to confirm his 
 words to some extent. Nevertheless, the 
 works of modern sculpture that we in London 
 are most familiar with — that are standing 
 ever before our eyes, and form the entire 
 
v.] SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 237 
 
 experience of the vast majority of people in 
 Sculpture : the Trafalgar Square lions, all 
 four exactly alike ; the Temple Bar griffin ; 
 the golden image of Prince Albert sitting 
 looking at the Albert Hall, assisted by 
 Europe, Asia, Africa, and America ; these 
 bring to the mind few ideas or associations 
 other than ridiculous ones. Some few real 
 sculptors there are, no doubt, but none whose 
 works are so well known as these. What won- 
 der if men of taste turn away their eyes from 
 them, and go on studying Greek art instead ! 
 
 And as to Architecture. Some of the 
 best work of the day is done, — not in doing 
 anything towards the creation of a new 
 style, but in making careful and learned 
 reproductions of old ones ; while the worst 
 work is by way of restoring the church work 
 of better days than these, often doing it 
 terrible damage in trying to effect the 
 impossible task — that of bringing back its 
 original character and conditions. " Thus 
 the matter stands," says Mr. Morris, "these 
 old buildings have been altered and added 
 
238 LECTURES ON ART. [v. 
 
 to century after century, often beautifully, 
 always historically ; their very value, a great 
 part of it, lay in that ; they have suffered, 
 too, almost always from neglect, often from 
 violence (that latter also a piece of history 
 often far from uninteresting) ; but ordin- 
 ary obvious mending would almost always 
 have kept them standing, pieces of nature 
 and of history. But of late years a great 
 uprising of ecclesiastical zeal, coinciding with 
 a great increase of study and consequently 
 of knowledge of mediaeval architecture, has 
 driven people into spending their money on 
 these buildings, not merely with the purpose 
 of repairing them, of keeping them safe, 
 clean, and wind and water-tight, but also of 
 * restoring ' them to some ideal state of per- 
 fection ; sweeping away, if possible, all signs 
 of what has befallen them at least since the 
 Reformation, and often since dates much 
 earlier. This has sometimes been done with 
 much disregard of art, and entirely from 
 ecclesiastical zeal, but oftener it has been 
 well meant enough as regards art. From my 
 
v.] SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 239 
 
 point of view this restoration must be as im- 
 possible to bring about as the attempt at it 
 is destructive to the buildings so dealt with : 
 I scarcely like to think what a great part 
 of them have been made nearly useless to 
 students of art and history ; unless you knew 
 a great deal about architecture you per- 
 haps would scarce understand what terrible 
 damage has been done by that dangerous 
 ' little knowledge ' in this matter ; but this I 
 think is easy to be understood — that to deal 
 recklessly with valuable and national monu- 
 ments, which when once gone can never be 
 replaced by any splendour of modern art, is 
 doing a very sorry service to the State." 
 
 Perhaps it may be said that house-archi- 
 tecture is the thing in which we are really 
 beginning to excel ; not the architecture of 
 stucco-fronted terraces, or seven or eight or 
 nine storied flats, but of those gable-roofed, 
 casemented, red-brick houses that are now 
 often to be seen in town and country, attract- 
 ing the eye by their brightness of colour 
 and cheerful irregularity, in contrast to 
 
240 LECTURES ON ART. [v. 
 
 the ordinary builder's type — a square box 
 with holes in it. These Queen Anne or 
 Early English houses — whatever they may 
 happen to be called, if they are constructed on 
 a sound good design, and of good and lasting 
 workmanship, — wood seen to be wood, brick 
 openly brick, and paint unmistakably paint ; 
 no cast-iron ornament, but hand wrought orna- 
 ment if it is had at all ; no huge expanses of 
 plate -glass, but little well-set panes ; if to 
 all these are added every modern appliance 
 for health and convenience, we shall have an 
 ideal dwelling-house — a home of cheerful- 
 ness, comfort, hospitality, — and this is much 
 nearer of attainment by people of moderate 
 means than it seemed a few years ago. 
 
 For our churches it seems we can do no 
 better than follow the patterns set us in ages 
 of more faith than the present ; in public 
 buildings, there is much costliness and little 
 grandeur ; but the home, — that, at least, it 
 seems within our power to make solid and 
 beautiful and comfortable — a something 
 
 not too bright or good 
 For human nature's daily food." 
 
v.] SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 241 
 
 And with this, for the present at least, 
 we must be satisfied. 
 
 d 'C/urn eoMw or-nm ens-] 
 
 R 
 
VI.— FINE ART— PAINTING. 
 
 It may be said, on reviewing the ground 
 that we have already traversed, that Art is a 
 universal language, intelligible to the whole 
 world alike, of which the rudiments at least 
 were possessed by man in the very earliest 
 stages of his existence, and are so still by 
 him in the lowest existing conditions of 
 civilisation. And this metaphor, the likening 
 of Art to a language, may be carried far in 
 many directions, but it is in one alone that 
 
VI.] FINE ART— PAINTING. 243 
 
 I would lead your thoughts to-day. It is 
 this : — 
 
 The literature of all fully - developed 
 languages has its Classics — masterpieces and 
 models of style, in which not only the sub- 
 ject and the idea are great and elevated, but 
 also the form, the workmanship, are in them- 
 selves a perfect expression of the soul, the 
 genius of the language ; and these remain 
 ever after for the admiration, the study, the 
 imitation of succeeding writers and readers 
 of that language. Such are our English 
 Classics — Shakespeare and Milton, Addison 
 and Charles Lamb, and many another. So 
 there are Classics of the language of Art. 
 
 I attempted in the last lecture to describe 
 some of the excellent beauties of the best 
 Greek period — the great time of antique 
 classic perfection of sculpture and architec- 
 ture ; and to-day I would wish to direct your 
 attention to the Old Masters and their works 
 — the Classics of Painting. I have already 
 pointed out that though the Art of every age 
 and period has its appropriate value, and is 
 
244 LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 the natural outcome of that age and period, 
 still there have been times when one of the 
 great Arts has reached a perfection never 
 attained before or since. And what the age 
 of Pericles was for the Art of Sculpture, the 
 age of Lorenzo de Medici was for the Art 
 of Painting. 
 
 And — to return to our metaphor — as the 
 literary education of an Englishman both 
 begins and ends with the study of what are 
 called the classics, — par excellence those of 
 the tongues of antiquity, as well as those of 
 his native tongue; and he is provided with 
 a sound knowledge, from the beginning of 
 what in literature is of pure style, and in 
 good taste, so that he is (or ought to be) 
 incapable of admiring and enjoying base, or 
 trifling, or vulgar writing ; so the artistic 
 education should begin and end with the 
 classics of Art, for these do exist, undoubted, 
 acknowledged, though — as is too often the 
 fate of such things — neglected and misunder- 
 stood by the generality of people, who are 
 accustomed to limit their knowledge and 
 
VI.] FINE ART— PAINTING. 245 
 
 study of Art to the picture-exhibitions of the 
 year, and the current criticism on those, 
 without having prepared themselves in the 
 least degree by the study of the great paint- 
 ings that hang all the year round in the 
 National Gallery, or of the great sculptures 
 that stand all the year round in the British 
 Museum. 
 
 It is as if we should limit our studies in 
 Music to Gounod, to Sullivan, to Offenbach, 
 and refuse to know anything about Handel 
 and Beethoven ; it is as if we should eschew 
 Shakespeare and read nothing but Dickens 
 and Ouida. I do not mean to set apart 
 these as bad and unworthy in contra-distinc- 
 tion to the others, but I mean to say that 
 until we know how to enjoy something of 
 the great men and their works — the classics 
 — we shall have no means, no criterion, to 
 enable us to properly judge of the rest, and 
 appreciate them at their just value. 
 
 The reproach attending the too great 
 neglect and ignorance of the great national 
 collections of Art belongs more particu- 
 
246 LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 larly to those of us who live in and near 
 London. 
 
 Yet some part of it belongs to all who 
 pretend to care for the subject of Art, that 
 study, as well as every other, being so facili- 
 tated in these days by good copies and 
 reproductions of great originals, and by 
 rapidity and ease of travelling, so that the 
 originals themselves are brought so much the 
 nearer to us. I daresay I am not wrong in 
 attributing to the generality of people some 
 confusion of ideas as to the Old Masters (as 
 some one says, often secretly identified with 
 the Brown Masters), or the degree of merit 
 possessed by each. If people have a toler- 
 ably just range of notions respecting Raphael, 
 Michael Angelo, Titian, Leonardo, I believe 
 there is rarely any honest admiration at all 
 corresponding to these notions. The fact is, 
 that it is impossible for the untrained eye 
 and mind to admire the works of these men 
 all at once. It is as if you should set a 
 child who had only just learned to read, to 
 admire Hamlet. And this is why so many 
 
VI.] FINE ART—PAINTING. 247 
 
 people come back from Italy wearied with 
 the acres of canvasses they have glanced at, 
 not knowing what to look for or how to look 
 at it. It is often more possible for a sincere 
 beginner in Art to enjoy the works of Bellini, 
 Botticelli, Fra Angelico, than those of the 
 greatest men of all ; but this is being on the 
 right track ; a genuine feeling and liking for 
 these forerunners, and secondary names, is 
 sure to lead in the end to the more extended 
 knowledge and understanding that the first 
 and greatest require. 
 
 The great period of painting includes the 
 last quarter of the fifteenth century and the 
 thirty or forty first years of the sixteenth cen- 
 tury, and contains all that perfect painting 
 that we call the work of the Old Masters. 
 This is the sentence that is painted in letters 
 of gold round the Central Hall at the National 
 Gallery — " The works of those who have 
 stood the test of ages have a claim to that 
 respect and veneration to which no modern 
 can pretend." It is a saying of Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds, and it is a good motto, in this age 
 
248 LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 of irreverence, for those who are beginning 
 a study of these works. Let me collect a 
 few other ideas that are also necessary for 
 the purpose. I have before pointed out that 
 to each of the Fine Arts there is a technical, 
 a mechanical part, perfection in which is 
 necessary, but not all that is necessary, to 
 make the poet, the musician, the architect, 
 the sculptor, the painter. He must have 
 ideas that we could not for ourselves con- 
 ceive, and he must express them in such a 
 way as to make us see them clearly and 
 delight in them ; and this it is that the truly 
 great among the Old Masters did — ist, They 
 expressed clearly their intellectual purpose; 
 and 2dly, They had a perfect mastery over 
 the material, the technical part of their Art, 
 and in these two things their greatness 
 consists. 
 
 You will remember my showing you 
 the two photographs from the pictures of 
 Raphael's " Dispute of the Sacrament"^ and 
 Titian's " Flora," and my pointing out that the 
 
 ^ Heading and tailpiece, chap. v. 
 
VI.] FINE ART— PAINTING. 249 
 
 first is an example of the great Florentine 
 school of expression, and the last an example 
 of the great Venetian school of colour ; but 
 these are, after all, only photographs — mere 
 shadows of the paintings themselves. In 
 the National Gallery there are two others, 
 equally representative of the two great schools, 
 which, being nearer at hand than the others 
 in Continental collections, may be more easily 
 seen and studied. 
 
 Belonging to the Florentine school of ex- 
 pression we have the " Virgin of the Rocks " 
 by Leonardo da Vinci ; it is a newly-acquired 
 possession, and, as it seems to me, a most 
 perfect one. It has some of the painter's 
 characteristic mystery of expression ; still the 
 very spirit of a grave sweet mood of child- 
 hood is in the infant Christ as He seems to 
 give His innocent benediction to the little 
 kneeling St. John, and the mother's serene 
 abstraction in her children is in the Virgin's 
 face. In the foreground, spring flowers — 
 narcissus and cyclamen — painted with that 
 curious felicity that belonged to the hand of 
 
250 LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 Leonardo. For the background we have a 
 glimpse of a strange land of hollow rocks, 
 and of steep cliffs rising perpendicular from 
 clear still water. It is the landscape," says 
 Mr. Pater, " not of dreams, or of fancy, but 
 of places far withdrawn and hours selected 
 from a thousand with a miracle of finesse. 
 Through his strange veil of sight, things 
 reach him so ; in no ordinary night or day, 
 but as in faint light of eclipse, or in some 
 brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, or 
 through deep water." Here is a painter 
 who can indeed do what Goethe required. 
 " Make me feel," he says, " what I have not 
 yet felt, — make me think what I have not yet 
 thought ; then I will praise you," 
 
 For the Venetian school of colour let us 
 take, as the crowning example in the National 
 Gallery, Titian's " Bacchus and Ariadne," 
 and let me say that for me it will always 
 be the ideal painting — as the Venus of 
 Melos is the ideal sculpture — the one that 
 first revealed to me the wonderful delight 
 that it is possible to receive from a picture 
 
VI.] FINE ART— PAINTING. 251 
 
 that is at once perfect in colour, in design, 
 in sentiment. I should think myself happy 
 if I could do something to persuade any one 
 who has not yet enjoyed the great beauty of 
 this picture to go and look at it, and feel 
 once for all what the art of painting at its 
 best can do. Once feel this, and you know 
 more than all the treatises, and criticisms, and 
 lectures on Art in the world can teach you. 
 
 In one of the other rooms in the National 
 Gallery are two pictures by modern hands 
 which are a great contrast to these. It is 
 from no wish to run down, to depreciate the 
 work of our own time, or to go about to 
 exalt ancient art at the expense of modern, 
 but to enforce a general universal truth, that 
 I would ask you — after honestly trying to see 
 for yourselves and appreciate something of 
 the beauty of the Titian and the Leonardo — 
 to go to the other end of the gallery and 
 look at Mr. Maclise's " Play-Scene in Hamlet,'' 
 and Mr. Frith's " Derby Day," and if you do 
 not feel the triviality, the staginess, of the 
 ideas expressed and personages represented 
 
252 LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 in them, and the feebleness and poverty of 
 the colour, at least it would be well to ex- 
 actly inquire what you do feel about them, 
 and of what the vast gulf of difference be- 
 tween these and those consists. To those 
 who cannot feel it, it is indeed useless to 
 speak of the Old Masters. 
 
 But leaving any further mention of the 
 rest of the treasures contained in the national 
 collection, let us take a more general view 
 of the subject, and try and inquire into the 
 causes and the nature of the excellence of 
 painting at the period of the Renaissance. 
 
 And as to the history of painting gener- 
 ally. As far as our present purpose is con- 
 cerned, we must pass over whatever is said 
 of the excellence of the painters of antiquity 
 of the time of Alexander the Great and of a 
 time still earlier, because, whatever has been 
 recorded in their praise by ancient writers, 
 there is no really substantial witness of their 
 excellence, at least as compared with the 
 later period of which I am speaking to-day ; 
 we must pass over early Christian art, 
 
VI.] FINE ART— PAINTING. 253 
 
 though by it certain religious types were 
 created, since scarcely deviated from ; we 
 must pass over the Byzantine mosaics and 
 frescoes, and finally in the thirteenth century 
 we come to the name of Cimabue, the original 
 founder of the Florentine school. 
 
 Following him come Giotto, and Orgagna, 
 in the fourteenth century ; Masaccio, Lippi, 
 Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Perugino, Francia, 
 Signorelli, in the fifteenth century. These 
 men were forerunners of the great time, 
 working through the years that preceded it, 
 — years of preparation, of struggle with in- 
 completeness of resources, of stretching out 
 and reaching towards perfection. The Re- 
 naissance came at last suddenly, after cen- 
 turies of ignorance, of barbarism, of sterile 
 effort ; it burst forth almost without a dawn, 
 glorious as a summer^s day. Dante and 
 Giotto open that glorious era, and re-create 
 the arts of Poetry and of Painting. After 
 them quickly crowd in the other great workers 
 in the arts : Brunelleschi designs beautiful 
 architecture at Florence ; G*hiberti casts his 
 
254 LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 great bronze gates — and, too, at the same 
 time, Columbus discovers a new world ; 
 Copernicus demonstrates the laws of the 
 universe ; Guttenberg invents the art of 
 printing ; and Luther and Savonarola work 
 their great work of Reformation ; and finally, 
 Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Raphael, 
 come also, to adorn, with their transcendent 
 works, this great blossoming epoch of human 
 genius and force. 
 
 " For us," says Mr. Pater, " the Renais- 
 sance is the name of a many-sided but yet 
 united movement, in which the love of the 
 things of the intellect and the imagination 
 for their own sake, the desire for a more 
 comely and liberal way of conceiving life, 
 make themselves felt, prompting those who 
 experience this desire, to seek first one and 
 then another means of intellectual or imagin- 
 ative enjoyment, and directing them not 
 merely to the discovery of old and forgotten 
 sources of this enjoyment, but to divine new 
 sources of it, new experiences, new subjects 
 of beauty, new forms of art.'* 
 
VI.] FINE ART— PAINTING. 255 
 
 The conditions under which the great 
 art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries 
 was produced, are not quite dissimilar to 
 those of the Greek period. The Renaissance, 
 in calling men to the study of the Greek 
 mind, taught them at the same time Greek 
 tastes and ways of thinking and feeling. 
 The care for physical beauty which had been 
 deadened by the ascetic teaching of the 
 Middle Ages was revived, the preoccupation 
 with the beauty of the common things of 
 life, and the liking for polish of manner and 
 dignity of bearing, reappeared ; only all 
 these things were accompanied by magni- 
 ficence and profusion, luxury and splen- 
 dour, greater than the world has known 
 before or since. We have, in George Eliot's 
 Rontola, a picture of Florentine life at the 
 beginning of the sixteenth century, when 
 classical learning and splendid living seem 
 to have been the rule under the Medici ; 
 but under its superficial vanity and caprice 
 there seems to have lain a certain old-world 
 modesty, and seriousness, and simplicity ; 
 
256 LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 and beyond the care for outward beauty was 
 a still greater care for the unseen beauty — 
 of the mind, the intellect, the heart ; and so 
 it came about that the Florentine was the 
 school of Truth of mental expression. I 
 may mention, that of Piero di Cosimo, the 
 painter who is so vividly described in Romola^ 
 there is one example in the National Gallery, 
 "The Death of Procris," — a satyr stoops pity- 
 ingly over the girl's fallen figure, and touches 
 her shoulder with a pathetic compassion in 
 his rough woodland face. This touch of 
 feeling marks the painter as a true worker 
 in the school of expression, being, as he was, 
 a contemporary of the three great Masters 
 in that school — Leonardo, Michael Angelo, 
 Raphael. 
 
 Let me sketch for you, however slightly, 
 a rapid portrait of each of these three. 
 
 To all who care for the art, and indeed 
 the general history of the time, Leonardo da 
 Vinci must be one of the most interesting 
 figures of the whole brilliant group of gifted 
 men of that day. He possessed every 
 
VI.] FINE ART— PAINTING. 257 
 
 physical endowment of strength and beauty, 
 every mental perfection of power and insight 
 and imagination ; there seems to have been 
 no part of the intellectual learning of the 
 time that he did not explore, no part of the 
 arts of mechanism, of decoration, of engineer- 
 ing, that he was not master of, as well as 
 of every one of the higher arts of human 
 expression — poetry and painting and sculp- 
 ture, architecture and music. And in him 
 all this versatility of universal genius begets 
 a mysterious element of mockery, of restless- 
 ness, of curiosity, leading him to seek after 
 all kinds of remote knowledge to portray 
 strange subtleties of expression, — the un- 
 earthly, the terrible, the grotesque ; to be for 
 ever trying some new method of arriving at 
 perfection, and this element it is which makes 
 him and his work so interesting, so fascinat- 
 ing. No one who has looked at the pictures 
 in the Louvre can have failed to be attracted, 
 puzzled, fascinated by " La Gioconda " — that 
 strange woman's face with its mysterious 
 
 expression of mockery and of wisdom — a 
 s 
 
258 LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 face not beautiful according to any modern 
 acknowledged type of beauty, and yet pos- 
 sessing a quality with as strong an influence. 
 This was the type that attracted Leonardo — 
 power and subtlety of expression rather than 
 fixed standard of beauty. It was at Milan 
 he painted the " Last Supper/'^ the most re- 
 nowned of his works. All that remains of it 
 is on the walls of the refectory of the Do- 
 minican Church at Milan ; whither Leonardo 
 had gone in 1483 at the invitation of 
 Ludovico Sforza. The large photograph 
 shows you its present state, and, even thus 
 defaced, it is better to learn what we can 
 from what is left of the master's actual work 
 than to accept the smooth insipidities of the 
 engraved or lithographed restoration that is 
 common. Our Royal Academy possesses the 
 best copy of the picture, done from the 
 original by a contemporary hand. " About 
 the 'Last Supper,' its decay and restorations," 
 says Mr. Pater, "a whole literature has 
 risen up, Goethe's pensive sketch of its sad 
 
 ^ See heading of chapter. 
 
VI.] FINE ART— PAINTING. 259 
 
 fortunes being far the best. The death, in 
 child-birth, of the Duchess Beatrice was 
 followed in Ludovico by one of those parox- 
 ysms of religious feeling which in him were 
 constitutional. The low gloomy Dominican 
 Church of Saint Mary of the Graces had 
 been the favourite shrine of Beatrice. She 
 had spent her last days there, full of sinister 
 presentiments ; at last it had been almost 
 necessary to remove her from it by force ; 
 and now it was here that mass was said a 
 hundred times a day for her repose. On the 
 damp wall of the refectory, oozing with 
 mineral salts, Leonardo painted the " Last 
 Supper." A hundred anecdotes were told 
 about it, his retouchings and delays. They 
 show him refusing to work except at the 
 moment of invention, scornful of whoever 
 thought that art was a work of mere industry 
 and rule, often coming the whole length of 
 Milan to give a single touch. He painted it, 
 not in fresco, where all must be i7iipromptUy 
 but in oils, the new method which he had 
 been one of the first to welcome, because it 
 
26o LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 allowed of so many afterthoughts, so refined 
 a working out of perfection. It turned out 
 that on a plastered wall no process could 
 have been less durable. 
 
 "Within fifty years it had fallen into 
 decay. . . It was another effort to set a 
 given subject out of the range of its conven- 
 tional associations. Strange, after all the 
 misrepresentations of the Middle Ages was 
 the effort to see it, not as the pale host of 
 the altar, but as one taking leave of his 
 friends. Five years afterwards, the young 
 Raphael, at Florence, painted it with sweet 
 and solemn effect in the refectory of Saint 
 Onofrid, but still with all the mystical 
 unreality of the school of Perugino. Vasari 
 pretends that the central head was never 
 finished ; but finished or unfinished, or owing 
 part of its effect to a mellowing decay, this 
 central head does but consummate the senti- 
 ment of the whole company — ghosts through 
 which you see the wall, faint as the shadows 
 of the leaves upon the wall on autumn after- 
 noons, this figure is but the faintest, most 
 
VI.] FINE ART— PAINTING. 261 
 
 spectral of them all." So says Mr. Pater ; 
 but faint and spectral as it is, it is the out- 
 ward type of Christ, fixed for us by Leonardo, 
 as it has been presented to us by all the 
 succeeding generations ; so that our mental 
 image of Him is associated inseparably with 
 the clear oval countenance, the long hair 
 parted in the middle, the expression of 
 sweet and pensive benignity. Besides the 
 imperfection of the methods of the painter, 
 and the dampness of the walls, the picture 
 has suffered every kind of misfortune and 
 indignity : it has been restored ; the monks 
 cut a door through the lower part of it ; the 
 imperial arms were nailed on it close to the 
 central figure ; and Austrian and French 
 soldiers in turn vied with each other in 
 desecrating the place, and destroying its 
 chief treasure. 
 
 " Leonardo's life has three divisions, — 
 thirty years at Florence, nearly twenty at 
 Milan, then nineteen years of wandering, till 
 he sinks to rest under the protection of 
 Francis I. at the Chateau de Clou." 
 
262 LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 And now let me say a few words about 
 Michael Angelo, a genius of more power, but 
 of less familiar sweetness. Less sympathetic, 
 and more rugged and difficult, are his works 
 than those of either Raphael or Leonardo. 
 Architect, sculptor, poet, and painter, — a man 
 with four souls, as said a writer of his time, 
 — Michael Angelo is the central figure of the 
 first half of the sixteenth century, and seems 
 almost to monopolise its creative power. A 
 story is told of his early youth, that one 
 winter night when the snow lay in the court 
 of the Pitti palace, Piero de Medici caused 
 him to mould out of the snow a statue of a 
 Faun (that woodland creature of the antique 
 fancy — half-man, half-goat) and then criti- 
 cised it by observing that the head had too 
 young an air for the faun who was supposed 
 to have ranged the woods for centuries. 
 With a touch, Michael Angelo hollowed a 
 tooth from its jaw, giving at once the look 
 of age that was wanted. " Something," 
 says Mr. Pater, "of the wasting of that 
 snow-image lurks about all his sculpture — 
 
VI.] FINE ART— PAINTING. 263 
 
 a certain incompleteness, as if the half-hewn 
 form had never quite emerged from the 
 rough -hewn stone/' And in his painting 
 there is something of the same quality ; in 
 it there are no lovely natural objects like 
 Leonardo's, but only blank ranges of rock, 
 and dim vegetable forms as blank as they ; 
 no lovely draperies, or comely gestures of 
 life, but only the austere truths of human 
 nature, — "simple persons," as he replied in 
 his rough way to the querulous criticism of 
 Julius II. that there was no gold on the 
 figures of the Sistine Chapel, " simple per- 
 sons, who wore no gold on their garments." 
 " You should put a little gold on them," said 
 the Pope ; " my chapel will look very poor," 
 But Michael Angelo answered, " The people 
 I have painted there were poor." This, the 
 painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, 
 was his great work ; the long central surface 
 contains the great scenes of Genesis from 
 the Creation to the Deluge. 
 
 " Fair as the young men of the Elgin 
 marbles, the Adam of the Sistine Chapel is 
 
264 LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 unlike them in a total absence of that balance 
 and completeness which expresses so well 
 the sentiment of a self-contained indepen- 
 dent life. In that languid figure there is 
 something rough and satyr-like, something 
 akin to the rough hill-side on which it lies. 
 His whole form is gathered into an expres- 
 sion of mere expectation and reception ; he 
 has hardly strength enough to lift his finger 
 to touch the finger of the Creator ; yet a 
 touch of the finger-tips will suffice." 
 
 In the triangular compartments of the 
 vault were the Prophets and the Sibyls, and 
 those different voices of the past who pro- 
 phesied of the coming of Messiah, and in 
 the corners the stories of the four great 
 deliverances of Israel. We have no finished 
 picture of Michael Angelo's in the National 
 Gallery, and altogether his work seems more 
 removed and difficult of apprehension than 
 that of the other two of the Florentine 
 school. His colossal Titanic works are 
 sometimes half-formed in their grandeur, as 
 if his world were in the very process of 
 
VI.] FINE ART— PAINTING. 265 
 
 creation. The splendour and terror of his 
 conceptions seemed to heighten and deepen 
 as his age advanced. He was sixty when 
 he painted his terrible picture of the " Last 
 Judgment," and, in 1546, he undertook to 
 finish the rebuilding of St. Peter's at Rome, 
 and made the design for the dome which 
 overshadows in its grandeur the Eternal 
 City, at the age of seventy-two, and " for 
 nothing," as he said, " but the honour of 
 God." The colossal figures of David and of 
 Moses, and the figures on the tombs of the 
 Medici at Florence, these are the greatest 
 of his works; the "Pieta" at Rome, carved at 
 the age of twenty-one, — a dead Christ lying 
 across his mother's knees, — speaks all the 
 professed religious feeling that pervaded his 
 mind and work from first to last. 
 
 Very different from the severe and stern 
 genius of Michael Angelo, was the graceful 
 and gentle one of Raphael, who of the three 
 great Florentines is the one most familiar to 
 us all, and his works most widely understood 
 and admired ; he was the latest born and 
 
266 LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 youngest of the three. Though his first 
 master was Perugino, the Umbrian, and 
 though his first and last years were spent 
 at Rome, — his greatest works being to be 
 seen there, — yet it is to Florence that 
 Raphael truly belongs. It was during two 
 residences in Florence that he learned all 
 that it behoved him to learn from Leo- 
 nardo and Michael Angelo ; his genius had 
 its own path to tread. His life and his 
 character from the first seem to have had 
 a serenity, a harmony, a happiness that 
 was denied to the others. In a virtuous 
 and refined home governed by tender and 
 intelligent parents, and guided in habits of 
 truth and of industry, Raphael grew up ; and 
 it is no doubt to these early influences that 
 the peculiar sweetness and purity of his work 
 are owing. He had not the creative energy 
 of Michael Angelo, nor the subtlety or the 
 fascination of Leonardo, but a sensibility, a 
 charm, a felicity of his own, — a kind of 
 happy intelligence of temperament that com- 
 municated itself to his works. The small 
 
VI.] FINE ART—PAINTING. 267 
 
 pictures, two of them Madonnas, in the 
 National Gallery, express perfectly these 
 characteristics, and so do the well-known 
 often-reproduced "Madonna " of the Dresden 
 Gallery, the " Holy Family " of the Louvre, 
 and many others. I have in a former lecture 
 mentioned the paintings of the Vatican, 
 which he was commissioned to do by Pope 
 Julius II., of which the "Dispute of the Sacra- 
 ment " is one. In the National Gallery we 
 have Raphael's portrait of Pope Julius, — the 
 irascible old man is painted with a noble and 
 pathetic simplicity. Julius's successor, Leo 
 X., was even more urgent in the tasks he gave 
 the artist, and the ten cartoons for tapestries 
 were executed at his bidding. The tapestries 
 were woven at Arras in Flanders after his 
 designs, and were intended for the walls of 
 the Sistine Chapel ; they are now in the 
 Vatican. We possess seven of the original 
 cartoons, which are now at the South Ken- 
 sington Museum. The Miraculous Draught 
 of Fishes, The Consignment of the Keys to 
 Peter, The Curing of the Lame Man, The 
 
268 LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 Death of Ananias, The Stoning of Stephen, 
 The Conversion of St. Paul, The Punishment 
 of Elymas the Sorcerer, The Preaching of 
 St. Paul at Athens, The Preaching of St. 
 Paul at Lystra, and Paul a prisoner at 
 Philippi. These are the ten original sub- 
 jects, and all of them are familiar to every 
 one in the numerous engravings, drawings, 
 lithographs, photographs. Let me take this 
 opportunity of saying that it is a good thing 
 to learn to distinguish between a photograph 
 from a drawing or engraving, and a photo- 
 graph taken directly from the picture itself ; 
 the former having no value save as an easy 
 reproduction of a copy — the translation of a 
 translation ; the photograph taken directly 
 from a picture being the nearest practicable 
 approach, save in respect of colour, to the 
 artist's work, and should always be chosen in 
 preference to the other kinds. A little 
 careful observation will soon make the differ- 
 ence clear (compare the little highly-finished 
 ''Last Supper" with the one from the original). 
 If we have learned to value a Master's work, 
 
VI.] 
 
 FINE ART— PAINTING. 
 
 269 
 
 we shall like it best as it really is, however 
 unfinished or injured ; and not want to go 
 to the clever engraver or French lithographer 
 to make it all smooth and clean for us. 
 
 In Florence, in 1504, Michael Angelo 
 competed with Leonardo in a design for the 
 decoration of the walls of the great council- 
 chamber. And Michael Angelo was twenty- 
 seven years old, Leonardo more than fifty, 
 when Raphael, then nineteen years old, visit- 
 ing Florence for the first time, came and 
 watched them as they worked. And so do 
 the three great names of the Florentine school 
 come together in history ; and so together 
 should they be remembered, with all else 
 about their lives and minds and works that 
 I must leave here untold. 
 
 Now, to dwell for a short time on the 
 characteristics of the Venetian school of paint- 
 ing, at the head of whicA stand the great 
 names of Titian and Giorgione, Tintoret, 
 and Paul Veronese. Colour was the great 
 element of their power in painting, and on 
 this point it is not easy to say much. Form 
 
270 LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 and expression may more easily be dis- 
 cussed and described, and here I may per- 
 haps pause to say that form or expression 
 and colour are seldom, if ever, found united 
 in highest excellence in a work of art. 
 If a masterpiece of Athenian sculpture were 
 to be coloured, it would lose instead of gain 
 by the addition. " The use of colour in 
 sculpture," says Mr. Pater, "is but an un- 
 skilful contrivance to effect by borrowing 
 from another art what the nobler sculp- 
 ture effected by strictly appropriate means. 
 To get not colour but the equivalent of 
 colour, to secure the expression and the play 
 of life," — this is the problem of sculpture, 
 whose aims therefore are perfectly distinct 
 from those of "painting ; so, only with a less 
 strongly marked difference, do the two great 
 schools of painting stand apart. The Floren- 
 tine, having for its first object expression of 
 character and emotion, does not excel in 
 splendid effects of light and shade and colour ; 
 while the Venetian, aiming first at those latter 
 qualities, has small range of character and 
 
VI.] FINE ART— PAINTING. 271 
 
 subject, and little variety of emotion and ex- 
 pression ; so that it is easy to keep the two 
 schools distinct in the mind, and easy to 
 perceive their different characteristics. 
 
 The Venetians found the elements of their 
 glowing effects of colour in the realities of 
 their everyday life — an enchanted life of 
 wealth, profusion, and pageantry. A glitter- 
 ing vision of the most glorious earthly 
 splendour rises in the mind as we think of 
 the Venice of those days, the sixteenth cen- 
 tury Venice, the centre of Italian wealth and 
 culture, the seat of the greatest maritime 
 power in the world, the storehouse of all 
 that was rich and precious from the eastern 
 and western hemispheres. Venice, — her 
 people excelling in pageants, and feasts, and 
 music ; famed for her carved and painted 
 marriage coffers, her mirrors, her brocades — 
 scarlet and purple and crimson, like the dyes 
 of ancient Tyre ; for the richest of point 
 lace ; for stamped and gilded leather ; for 
 mosaics, in wood of different colours, and in 
 stone of agate, cornelian, amethyst, and many- 
 
272 LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 hued marble ; cabinets of ebony, alabaster, 
 or ivory, with gold and silver figures inlaid 
 with cornelian, jasper, heliotrope, lapis-lazuli, 
 and agate. All this seems a gorgeous and 
 fitting setting for those glowing gems of 
 painting that the Venetians have left to us, 
 the glory of their colouring no doubt in some 
 respects dimmed by time, but also ripened 
 and mellowed. A great tranquillity, majesty, 
 dignity, fill their canvasses and sink deep 
 into the mind as we gaze at them. Such is 
 the " Bacchus and Ariadne" of Titian which I 
 have already described, and such is Veronese's 
 " Family of Darius," and the " Saint Helena." 
 These are in the National Gallery. And such 
 also is Veronese's " Marriage in Cana " at the 
 Louvre. " There," says Mr. Ruskin, " you have 
 the most perfect representation possible of 
 colour and light and shade, as they affect the 
 external aspect of the human form and its 
 immediate accessories — architecture, furniture, 
 and dress. This external aspect of noblest 
 nature was the first aim of the Venetians, 
 and all their greatness depended on their 
 
VI.] FINE ART— PAINTING. 273 
 
 resolution to achieve and their patience in 
 achieving it." 
 
 And in these schools and the works of 
 these masters is expressed the fulness of the 
 Renaissance spirit. Mr. Symonds, in his 
 History of the Renaissance ifi Italy^ bids us 
 mark the character of each. " Leonardo," 
 he says, " is the wizard or diviner ; to him 
 the Renaissance offers her mystery and lends 
 her magic. Raphael is the Phoebean singer ; 
 to him the Renaissance reveals her joy, and 
 dowers him with the gift of melody. Michael 
 Angelo is the prophet and sybylline seer ; 
 to him the Renaissance discloses the travail 
 of her spirit ; him she indues with power ; 
 he wrests her secret, — voyaging, like an 
 ideal Columbus, the vast abyss of thought, 
 alone." And to the Renaissance the Vene- 
 tian masters lent their splendour of colour, 
 their love of physical beauty, and of all 
 costly and beautiful things of the world. 
 So in all these magnificent conditions the 
 great period of painting culminated and was 
 made perfect. 
 
 T 
 
274 LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 I can say no word of what then followed ; 
 it seems better at this time to think only of 
 the best work and of the best men. Cor- 
 reggio is the last of the great Italian painters, 
 and even in him there is something of senti- 
 mentality, of conscious charm, — something of 
 that decadence with which the names of the 
 Carracci, Guido Reni, Salvator Rosa, and 
 many another must be associated. To other 
 countries or other times belong Velasquez, 
 Vandyck, Rubens, Claude, and Rembrandt, 
 of the first rank, or nearly the first rank ; each 
 in his different way. And the Dutch and 
 the French schools, too, have their peculiar 
 excellence ; but this is all I have attempted 
 to do. To distinguish as clearly as possible 
 the two great schools — the Florentine and 
 the Venetian ; to sketch something of the 
 character of the aims and tendencies of the 
 three great Florentine Masters — Leonardo, 
 Michael Angelo, and Raphael. 
 
 It is by some little preparation of this 
 kind that one may be led to enjoy any op- 
 portunity that offers of seeing any of their 
 
VI.] FINE ART— PAINTING. 275 
 
 works, especially our own possessions in 
 the National Gallery, — possessions in which, 
 though they are called national, we cannot 
 truly be said to have a share, unless we 
 understand something, not only of their 
 various homes and periods, but also of the 
 more universal kingdom of Art which in- 
 cludes them all. 
 
 May I recommend a few books on this 
 especial branch of my subject to any of my 
 hearers interested in following it up ? 
 
 The History of the Renaissance in Italy, 
 by J. A. Symonds. (The third volume is 
 devoted to the Fine Arts.) A little hand- 
 book of Classic afid Italian Painting , edited 
 by Mr. Poynter, R.A., is an excellent intro- 
 duction to the subject; Studies in the Renais- 
 sance, by Mr. Pater, is a most delightful 
 book for the more advanced student; and a 
 sketch by M. Clement of the lives of the 
 three great Florentines, contains all that is 
 certainly known of their lives, and is full of 
 interest and charm. 
 
 I find myself, much against my will, 
 
276 LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 obliged to give up for the present any at- 
 tempt to speak of the English Masters — of 
 Hogarth, of Sir Joshua Reynolds, of Gains- 
 borough, of Richard Wilson, of Turner. 
 There has been no English school, properly 
 so called. Detached great names we have 
 had, such as those I have just mentioned, but 
 no school ; so that the history of painting in 
 England would merely mean a study of each 
 of these men taken separately, and their 
 works, and for this there is no time. I will 
 now only attempt a few general remarks on 
 the prevailing feeling and commonly ex- 
 pressed opinion regarding the art of painting, 
 and its productions at the present day. 
 
 As I have said before, we are all ready, 
 at any time and at the shortest notice, to 
 form an opinion and deliver a judgment, a 
 criticism, respecting a picture, without greatly 
 caring whether that judgment, that opinion, 
 is a right and just one. I have already 
 warned you that the power of arriving at a 
 just judgment, a right taste in art is not born 
 with us ; but it must be acquired by study, 
 
VI.] FINE ART— PAINTING. 277 
 
 and pains, and observation. Once started on 
 the right road, every piece of new experience 
 is certain to be a confirmation of all that has 
 gone before. I repeat that, in every depart- 
 ment of human industry, we must recognise 
 that it is not enough to know what we like, 
 but what is worth liking ; and, above all 
 things, this is necessary to a right enjoy- 
 ment of painting. 
 
 I suppose that no house, from the poorest 
 to the richest, but has something on its walls 
 in the semblance of a picture ; but not all the 
 people who possess that something — very 
 few of them, I am afraid — have ever thought 
 much about why they have it, whether they 
 like it, what it expresses to them, what ideas 
 it suggests, what qualities it possesses. A 
 picture may be treasured for its commercial 
 value, for its associations, for its real or sup- 
 posed resemblance to a beloved person or 
 place, for its representation of a dramatic 
 scene or incident out of a book or in real 
 life ; or it may have been handed down for a 
 family generation or two, and may have re- 
 
278 LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 mained in sight from earliest childhood, so 
 that it is as familiar as the wall on which it 
 hangs, and suggests as few ideas : we should 
 miss it if it were gone, but that is all. A 
 picture ought to do more than this. We may 
 have any or all these reasons for liking it, 
 and yet it may possess no artistic quality 
 whatever. 
 
 Every year, with the flowers of spring, 
 bloom some hundreds, nay, thousands of 
 pictures, in the London exhibitions ; in other 
 places they appear later in the summer or 
 the autumn. They flourish for a month or 
 two, weathering the cold blast of criticism, 
 or basking in the sunshine of public favour, 
 or withering under the general neglect. At 
 the end of the season they are gathered by 
 purchasers to be transplanted into private 
 collections, or they return into the hands of 
 their originators ; in any case, for the most 
 part, they disappear, forgotten by the world 
 at large, and their successors year after year 
 bloom and pass away in like manner. Every 
 one would feel a strange want if the season 
 
VI.] FINE ART— PAINTING. 279 
 
 brought no show of pictures ; it would seem 
 like an interruption of the course of nature. 
 They are a necessity of social life, a safe 
 theme for discussion, a fruitful subject of 
 small -talk. And these assemblages of pic- 
 tures — but for about a score or two, which 
 do possess some originality of treatment or 
 some remarkable power of execution — might 
 consist of the very same pictures year after 
 year, such is the similarity of their subject, 
 the constant repetition of the same manner, 
 the same ideal. Who does not know of old 
 the portrait of a lady in red velvet or white 
 satin, on a terrace; the official gentleman with 
 his arm-chair and inkstand ; the flower-pieces ; 
 the fruit-pieces ; the cottage interiors ; scenes 
 of domestic happiness or affliction } There 
 must be a large demand for these things, or 
 there could not be so abundant a supply. 
 In all of them the artist, it seems to me, 
 makes himself into a sort of shopman. The 
 public wants these articles, and he supplies 
 them accordingly : every year, so many 
 baskets of fruit and flowers, so many acres 
 
28o LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 of Welsh or Scotch or Swiss scenery, so 
 many yards of satin and lace, so much 
 fashionable attire, and so much sentiment 
 and domestic affection. 
 
 If people must have these things to cover 
 their walls with, simply as part of the furni- 
 ture of a room, let them by all means ; but 
 they are not worthy the name of pictures, 
 and should be judged of by a different stan- 
 dard — that of the picture-dealer — and treated 
 as articles of commerce. They are not 
 pictures in the sense that Raphael's " Sacra- 
 ment" or Titian's "Flora" are pictures. The 
 painters of them stoop to supply the wants 
 of the age ; the true artist raises the age up 
 to his level. He shows us different aspects 
 of persons and things, new facts about them, 
 new ideas ; he makes us see what we have 
 never seen before, feel what we have never 
 felt before. If any picture we know has 
 done something of this kind for us, we may 
 be sure that it is a real work of art. 
 
 It is not that the subjects of such pictures 
 as I have described are in fault, but the 
 
VI.] FINE ART— PAINTING. 281 
 
 ideas^ or rather want of ideas, expressed in 
 them. That very portrait of a lady, with 
 meaningless simpering face and over -gor- 
 geous attire, might have been an interesting 
 and graceful subject if the artist had set 
 himself to discover, to express the interest- 
 ing side of her character and the subtler 
 graces of her demeanour, instead of caring 
 so much about her jewels and her velvet 
 gown, as to make them the most prominent 
 things ; it seems, too, as if the lady must 
 have cared about them unduly too. 
 
 So with the portrait of a gentleman. There 
 must be something in his character, his 
 powers, his brains, that is more interesting 
 than the shininess of his coat, his inkstand, 
 his arm-chair. Very likely it is a good like- 
 ness as regards shape and size of features ; 
 but the painter should do something more. 
 Sir Joshua Reynolds seems to have had the 
 power of discovering in faces and figures — that 
 often, no doubt, seemed sufficiently common- 
 place to the rest of the world — some nobility 
 of expression, some grace of form or tender- 
 
282 LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 ness of colouring ; so that in all his portraits 
 the subject has the air of being somebody, 
 distinguished by some gifts of mind or person 
 that the painter knew how to seize and avail 
 himself of, — at the same time, we may be sure, 
 passing over defects, and ignoring the dis- 
 agreeable and the positively unbeautiful. 
 For these reasons have his pictures been 
 treasured and handed down, their beauties 
 explained, commented upon, and praised 
 afresh by each succeeding generation of the 
 family to whom the original subject belonged ; 
 so that it has become a distinction highly 
 prized, a kind of patent of gentility (in a 
 good sense), to have a Sir Joshua in the 
 family. This is what the art of portrait- 
 painting may be, and what in one or two 
 modern painters' hands it still is. A coloured 
 photograph is just as valuable as the average 
 portrait. Of course it is faithful, but we 
 want something more ; we want to be made 
 to feel the application of the human mind to 
 the subject ; we want some idealising, some 
 transforming power. The same with land- 
 
VI.] FINE ART— PAINTING. 283 
 
 scape. The true painter, in choosing a 
 natural scene for his subject, does not seek 
 to get everything that he sees into his pic- 
 ture, but to get what makes the beauty of 
 that scene, and to leave out what does not. 
 There is often something jarring, something 
 incongruous, in a real scene or that would 
 be so if it were put into the picture. 
 
 In a landscape, or in some accidental 
 grouping of real figures. Nature is so com- 
 plex, and crowded, so full of infinite details 
 of form and tint, that it would be a life-long 
 and fruitless labour for a painter to set him- 
 self to reproduce even a very small part. 
 
 This should not be difficult for any one to 
 understand who has practised in any degree 
 the art of drawing. I do not mean copying 
 other drawings, — that is merely, as Hogarth 
 said, " pouring water from one vessel into 
 another," — but really drawing something from 
 nature, say, a flowering branch. The very 
 outline itself is a bold stretch of imagination. 
 There is no outline in Nature. There are 
 masses of colour and light and shade relieved 
 
284 LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 against other masses of colour and light and 
 shade, and the outline is a device for defining 
 the exact point where they begin and end. 
 And, beside the outline, there is much more : 
 when we think we have it correctly, — and 
 that is not easy, for people are so apt to 
 draw a thing as they think it ought to be, 
 not what it really is, — then come light and 
 shade, colour, projection, space ; our diffi- 
 culties are multiplied a thousand-fold ; we 
 very soon find that some details, some irregu- 
 larities of form and surface, some lights, 
 some shadows must be left out, — they are too 
 infinite and crowded for us ; we begin to 
 feel that the thing for us to study is the 
 inmost character of the object we are draw- 
 ing, and our business must be to express 
 that, leaving many details alone. So must 
 it be on a larger scale : the artist must pene- 
 trate the innermost spirit of the person or 
 scene he paints, and show it to us no longer 
 obscured by the commonness of the detail 
 of every-day life and appearance — but this 
 is asking a great deal ; — and the painter's aim. 
 
VI.] FINE ART— PAINTING. 285 
 
 his thought, his motive must be distinct and 
 clear in his own mind, in order to appeal to 
 ours ; and, besides this, great technical know- 
 ledge and mastery are needed in order to 
 paint the simplest subject worthily. 
 
 It is impossible to refuse to see that the 
 England of to-day does not afford a favour- 
 able soil for the growth of Art. Science, 
 Commerce, Literature, flourish ; but Art, con- 
 sidered in its relation to the world at large, 
 languishes. All the social or public scenes 
 of modern life lend themselves more readily 
 to caricature than as subjects for great pic- 
 tures. Little beauty of form or colour can 
 be found in groups or assemblages of ordin- 
 ary English people ; we have no leisure to 
 cultivate such things ; we are too full of 
 cares, of pleasures ; we are for ever busied in 
 the making of money, or else the spending 
 of it ; there is too much to do, too much 
 luxury, too little simplicity. This is ex- 
 pressed in the costume of the day, of men 
 and women too ; it is too tight -fitting, too 
 crowded with mean detail. Think how the 
 
286 LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 golden copes, the jewelled mitres, the armour 
 of steel inlaid with gold and silver, and 
 plumed and crested headgear of a former 
 age, compare in pictorial effect with the 
 black-silk gown, the lawn sleeves, the padded 
 coat and chimney-pot hat of this. The 
 degeneracy of costume in modern times, is 
 a great hindrance to all but exceptionally 
 gifted painters. Pictures of incidents of 
 modern life, in which the figures are clothed 
 in the height of this year's fashion, are sure 
 to look quite out of date and dowdy in a 
 year or two. Compositions representing 
 weddings, and picnics, and such-like scenes, 
 in which the chimney-pot hat flourishes in 
 great perfection, are to be found in every 
 exhibition. The life they depict has no 
 pictorial aspects; the painter has no thought 
 to express, no beauty to reveal, — only a 
 little sentimentality, a little feeble moralising. 
 Still there are English painters of the present 
 time, of much higher aims, whose works 
 range from poetical interpretation of Nature 
 in landscape, from noble portraiture up to 
 
VI.] FINE ART— PAINTING. 287 
 
 paintings of a higher order, still aiming at 
 ideal beauty, and appealing almost exclus- 
 ively to poetical ideas. It is not possible 
 for me now to enumerate these artists, or to 
 describe their pictures ; they can be easily 
 singled out by those who truly care for art 
 in its highest sense. 
 
 I will ask you to look at a few photo- 
 graphs from the works of Mr. Burne-Jones. 
 I know I am expressing not merely my own 
 feeling, but the highest deliberate judgment 
 of the time, when I say that here is a painter 
 who really treads in the same glorious path 
 as the great Masters, and — having splendid 
 gifts of colour, and poetic idea and feeling, 
 of exquisite and noble form and execution — 
 he may be reckoned as their true descen- 
 dant ; and I venture to say that the more the 
 Masters of acknowledged great periods are 
 studied, the more will the works of Burne- 
 Jones be appreciated and admired. 
 
 Two of these photographs are taken from 
 a series of pictures whose subject is "The 
 Sleeping Beauty.'' The first one, which I 
 
288 LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 am sorry not to have been able to procure, 
 shows the hedge of strong thorns through 
 which the first adventurers could not pierce, 
 because the man and the hour had not yet 
 arrived ; and there lie their dead and ghastly 
 forms, huddled together, caught in the cruel 
 hedge, all wreck and despair ; but, when the 
 hundred years are over, the thorn blossoms 
 at last, and breaks into constellations of fair 
 wild roses. 
 
 In the first of those before us, we see, 
 enthroned on the carpeted dais, the aged 
 king, his head sunk on his breast, bowed 
 down by the weight of the one hundred 
 years of slumber ; and, as Tennyson says, 
 " His beard has grown into his lap " His 
 chief minister of state lies next him, and 
 then the singers and attendant musicians ; 
 and the musical instruments lie waiting, too, 
 for their recall to life and sound. And, be- 
 hind all this, still the strong fence of thorn 
 thrusting forcibly its strong arms in among 
 the sleepers, and beginning to enclose the 
 king's throne itself. And then we come 
 
VI.] FINE ART— PAINTING. 289 
 
 into the presence of the princess ; she lies on 
 
 a long low couch, surrounded by a closer 
 
 growth of leaf and blossom, so that the 
 
 thorny fence is scarcely seen, and round her 
 
 head and feet, and in her hand, grow the 
 
 roses, and in the interstices of the pavement 
 
 spring delicate columbines, ready for the foot 
 
 of the prince ; here the attendant maidens 
 
 too, weighed down by slumber, await the 
 
 waking hour ; but there is expectancy in the 
 
 air — the sleeping girl is almost ready to turn 
 
 and lift her head, and stir the delicate folds 
 
 of the drapery that have lain still for so long. 
 
 — Tennyson's little poem, when I looked at 
 
 it again, intending to quote from it, has a 
 
 slighter meaning than all this ; we have here 
 
 ideas nearer to the soul of beauty, blending 
 
 the charm of story and sentiment (the 
 
 medium of the art of poetry) with the charm 
 
 of line and colour (the medium of the art 
 
 of painting). — And here we have a figure 
 
 of Temperance standing with pure white feet, 
 
 pouring water on the hot unruly flame. The 
 
 eddying curves of her drapery, blown by the 
 U 
 
290 LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 wind from the fire, are so exquisitely drawn, 
 that there is almost a breath of motion in 
 them. 
 
 And here, lastly, is Hope — a fair maiden 
 imprisoned in an upper chamber of a strong 
 tower. Behind the iron grating we can see 
 the cold blank walls and friendless aspect of 
 the great world ; but still Hope lives and 
 blooms in her prison. She holds in her 
 right hand a bough of apple -blossom, rich 
 in promise of the fruit that is to come. 
 Above her is a dim veil or curtain suspended, 
 through which her other hand is barely seen, 
 reaching into the future as she gazes up. 
 So let us fitly end with Hope. 
 
 And now I have come to the end, not, 
 indeed, of all I have to say, but of all that 
 at this time I can ask you to listen to. I 
 am afraid — I know — that my great subject 
 has suffered at my hands, in being contracted 
 into too small a space, and it is only too 
 likely that it has suffered in other ways as 
 well. There is one idea that I hope I have 
 kept fully in view in all that I have said from 
 
VI.] FINE ART— PAINTING. 291 
 
 the beginning, — that art is not a thing having 
 a separate existence ; it is not merely a 
 costly exotic, only cultivated by the wealthy 
 few and intended to please a narrow circle 
 of highly refined people ; not this, but a 
 blossoming of the universal nature of man, 
 a natural outcome of every age, every stage 
 of civilisation, every condition in life. 
 
 It is true that this growth is sometimes 
 stunted and meagre, and the general influ- 
 ences abroad in the world may be adverse 
 to it ; but there is no doubt that it will again 
 rise and flourish, for it is rooted in the love 
 of Beauty — that Beauty that is in all the 
 best things of life, all things of Divine crea- 
 tion and of the divinity working in man ; 
 so that art seems to have, in its essence, 
 something Divine, something immortal ; and, 
 unless we will give some portion of our 
 time and of our powers to acquiring a 
 knowledge of and interest in these things, 
 a great part of the good things of life will 
 be lost to us, and some of the most glorious 
 and delightful work of man's hand, will, 
 
292 LECTURES ON ART. [vi. 
 
 for US, have been accomplished in vain. 
 
I 
 
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