CHAUTAUQUA LIBRARY..... GARNET SERIES. 
 
 ART 
 
 AND 
 
 THE FORMATION OF TASTE. 
 
 Six ^Lectures 
 
 BY LUCY CRANE. 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS DRAWN BY THOMAS AND 
 WALTER CRANE, 
 
 AND 
 
 AN INTRODUCTION BY CHARLES G. WHITING, 
 
 SPRINGFIELD (MASS.) REPUBUCAK. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 CHAUTAUQUA PRESS, 
 
 117 FRANKLIN STREET. 
 1887.
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1885, 
 BY RAND, AVERY, & CO.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THERE is a certain vogue of Art in these days, that 
 in some respects is different from any that has been 
 known in other ages of the world. In Greece the 
 love of beauty, and the skill in dealing with beauty in 
 the forms of all the arts, was so general that we may 
 accept it as scarcely an exaggeration, that the fishers 
 who dried their nets on the shores at the Piraeus were 
 as good critics of a statue or a poem as our best- 
 educated people are now ; and in fact, in aesthetics they 
 were most thoroughly educated. In the great renas- 
 cence of Italy and France, the spring of it was wealth ; 
 and its influences and benefits were for moneyed men, 
 for princes and bishops and the rest. Art is again 
 coming to be general and popular, coming so by 
 means of a diffusion of knowledge which makes the 
 beautiful an object of desire as a fashion ; so that art 
 is not yet at its stature of greatness with us, but is 
 dwarfed to the level of the popular capacity, and 
 
 must wait until we the people, who are taking the 
 
 iii 
 
 2066110
 
 iv PREFACE, 
 
 world into our hands, shall have grown to an intelligent 
 appreciation of what the beautiful is, and why it is, 
 and with what purposes it should be sought, and how 
 its true place in our lives and in the order of the 
 universe shall be discovered and attained. 
 
 There is no lack of talk about Art; but there is 
 little that is said, after all, that is based on the princi- 
 ples that underlie art as well as every thing that pertains 
 to our life, and there is too much about the narrow, 
 technical, and temporary details and fashions. These 
 unpretentious lectures of Lucy Crane offer the truest 
 and healthiest introduction to Art on the indispensable 
 basis of principle. The lovely nature, both sweet and 
 strong, of their author, informs her gracious and intel- 
 ligent instruction with a fine charm ; and she leads her 
 disciple, by a hand as firm as it is gentle, to the safe and 
 true ground of taste and judgment. After the reader 
 has reached that ground, the most eloquent treatises 
 on china-painting, water-colors in twelve lessons, or, 
 in short, all technical matters, may safely be taken up ; 
 for these lectures will prove a protection against doing 
 these things badly, as they are done and must be done 
 by those who undertake them without culture of their 
 higher perceptions. 
 
 Lucy Crane taught in sympathy with the best teach- 
 ing of Ruskin, and more consistently than he. When 
 the student has become acquainted with the best ex- 
 amples of art, and with the essentials of its presence,
 
 PREFACE. V 
 
 he will do well to read as much of John Ruskin's work 
 as he can ; for then his temperamental caprices and 
 extravagances will not confuse the mind, and the pro- 
 found beauty and nobility of his gospel of art, which 
 is also one of life, will impress the soul. But Miss 
 Crane also teaches the best, the virtues of honor and 
 reality, of fitness and thoroughness ; and she applies 
 it to every thing. She does not say exactly that one 
 
 should 
 
 " Give to barrows, pots, and pans, 
 Grace and glitter of romance ; " 
 
 but she shows that the commonest utensil may have 
 these foundations of excellence, and having them it 
 will also have a true and worthy measure of beauty ; 
 Art being so far an assistant and adorner of use as 
 it shows sympathy with it, and no farther. There are 
 illustrations of this that will occur to every reader 
 when he begins to open his eyes to the common things 
 around him ; and, as Miss Crane says, Art adds a new 
 interest to daily life, by teaching our eyes to observe 
 common things- no less faithfully than uncommon ones. 
 Miss Crane finds nearly her worst example of unfit- 
 ness in design in an American toilet-jug ; and this is 
 almost the sole instance of the British insular spirit in 
 the book, since it is certain that no nation has a mo- 
 nopoly of vulgarity in such matters, and British designs 
 are apt to be the clumsiest that are seen in the inter- 
 national expositions. Of teaching ill adapted to Ameri-
 
 Vi PREFACE. 
 
 can life, there is scarcely a trace in this book. Indeed, 
 the Cranes are of the people, and have done their 
 beautiful work for the people. 
 
 It is the highest praise for such a book as this, that, 
 while it is within the comprehension and lends itself 
 to the practical service of all, it does so without once 
 losing sight, or suffering us to lose sight, of the prime 
 and perpetual necessity of truth in Art. It gives the 
 impression of kinship with great souls, as the life of 
 Michael Angelo or of Beethoven does. Like them, 
 it shows that all that is worthy and enduring springs 
 from the eternal verities, as Carlyle called them. Con- 
 sider for a little what Art is, and what its meanings. 
 We are not thinking now of the toys of an hour, or 
 the fashions of the day ; not of the pretty trivialities of 
 ornament, or the skill of graceful design, but of Art 
 in its high sense, as an interpreter of Nature, and a 
 link in the divine relationship of man. The comple- 
 ment of Science, which pursues the true, and of Phi- 
 losophy, which reaches after the good, Art fulfils this 
 trinity with the beautiful ; and these three are one. 
 There is a debasement of Art which descends to ugli- 
 ness, just as there are philosophies of evil : but this is 
 the work of false conception ; for in Art, as in every 
 thing else, the loss of truth is the loss of goodness and 
 the loss of beauty. Art, therefore, must be at one with 
 Nature ; they being, says Sir Thomas Browne, " both 
 the servants ot His providence. Art is the perfection
 
 PREFACE. Vll 
 
 of Nature. Were the world now as it was the sixth 
 day, there were yet a chaos. Nature hath made one 
 world, and Art another. In belief, all things are arti- 
 ficial, for Nature is the Art of God." The mission of 
 Art is no less noble than this. And what an honorable 
 and holy burden is thus laid upon the artist ! Like the 
 poet, he is one of the mediators of the divine mes- 
 sages. 
 
 Nature being the Art of God, if we search for and 
 find its interior charm, we shall thence be able to 
 divine the charm of its image, human Art, which must 
 be like it. Is it not that there is something behind, of 
 which it is the mere symbol and representative ? The 
 surface of nature is illusion. For, look upon the earth, 
 its grateful green fields and royal forests, its wonder- 
 ful flowers and leaves, its birds and myriad things of 
 life, its generous streams and its majestic hills : it is 
 beautiful to us, as it has been to untold generations 
 before us, and will be for untold generations more ; 
 and yet it is transient even to us, as preachers and 
 singers have said ever since man has thought. The 
 human form, most beautiful and wonderful of objects, 
 is a mere semblance, a pinch of dust, a drop or two 
 of water : it is not real. And the crowded heavens 
 that are awful above us, for remember, that, as 
 Young says, "A fixed star is as much within the 
 bounds of Nature as a flower of the field, though less 
 obvious and of far greater dignity," we know that
 
 Vlil PREFACE. 
 
 they shall one day shrivel as a scroll, and be swept 
 away. It is the underlying consciousness of the tran- 
 sitory and illusory in Nature, that gives to its beauty 
 the perplexing sense of something hidden and secret, 
 that draws its lover to pursue it forever, never satis- 
 fying, but more and more attracting. 
 
 It is this mystery that pervades the highest Art, and 
 marks the presence of the immortal purpose; it is 
 the soul of beauty, which is the breath of divine life 
 breathed into the human handiwork, expressing and 
 exalting that mystery of the real behind the illusory, 
 the eternal behind the transient. The art that does 
 not help on the higher way is false art ; for no tech- 
 nical power, however marvellous, can atone for de- 
 fault of the inspiration of that divine beauty for which 
 arts exist, the goal of their perfection, 
 
 That master-light, the secret truth of things, 
 Which is the body of the Infinite God. 
 
 CHARLES GOODRICH WHITING 
 SPRINGFIELD, June 25, 1885.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 I. INTRODUCTORY i 
 
 II. DECORATIVE ART FORM 35 
 
 III. DECORATIVE ART COLOR, DRESS, AND 
 
 NEEDLEWORK 66 
 
 IV. FINE ARTS I02 
 
 V. FINE ART SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE, 134 
 
 VI. FINE ART PAINTING 164
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 PAGE DRAWN BY 
 
 i. PREHISTORIC BONE DRAWING. . . . Walter Crane. 
 13. PART OF PARTHENON FRIEZE. ... " " 
 35. OBJECTS OF METAL, GLASS, AND POT- 
 TERY Thomas Crane. 
 
 66. PATTERN FOR CHAIR-BACK " " 
 
 102. GROUP FROM RAPHAEL'S DISPUTE OF 
 
 THE SACRAMENT Walter Crane. 
 
 127. VENUS OF MELOS " " 
 
 134. TEMPLE OF POSEIDON " u 
 
 164. LEONARDO'S LAST SUPPER * " 
 
 179. MICHAEL ANGELO'S CREATION ... " ".
 
 LECTURES ON ART 
 
 FORMATION OF TASTE. 
 
 I. 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 disappoint- 
 ments ; for the lavish use of the word " Art " in these 
 days has given rise to such a number of false impres- 
 sions, that the word seems to need defining afresh, 
 its functions and proper application to need marking 
 out all over again, that we may know to what we 
 are committing ourselves when we talk of " art-deco-
 
 2 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 ration," " art-colors," " art-fabrics," " art-needlework," 
 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 expressing 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 " color " 
 and "art-color" is a quite unreasonable one, and 
 based on false ideas. Ifl*a color is of such a nature as 
 to be inadmissible in Art, it is no color at all, prop- 
 erly speaking : it is a stain, a dye, a pigment. It is 
 easy to trace these expressions back to their origin. 
 They were invented by shopkeepers, to characterize 
 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, however, 
 no sort of lasting satisfaction in merely following 
 blindly the fashion of the day, whether it be in house- 
 decoration, or in coloring, or in dress, or in pictures ;
 
 INTROD UC TOR Y. 3 
 
 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 last- 
 ing, living, and in a sense immortal : 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 some- 
 thing 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 printing, 
 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 labor 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 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 consider it to-day. We have to consider
 
 4 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 every thing 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 cultivate it in an ex- 
 traordinary 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 capa- 
 ble 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, color ; 
 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 recognize, 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 intellectual side of our 
 nature. There can be no degradation, no intemper- 
 ance, in the cultivation, the indulgence, of the artistic
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 5 
 
 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 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 composition and perspective, or for a statue to obey 
 every rule of anatomy, or for a building to have every 
 proportional and geometric perfection. 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 which nourishes the intellect 
 in delighting the senses, and, through them, the heart. 
 At the head of these greater arts, the fine arts prop- 
 erly 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 some- 
 thing is usually the basis of our knowledge of those 
 arts themselves. Our admiration of the music of
 
 6 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 Handel, and Bach, and Beethoven, grows deeper as 
 our theoretical understanding and practical experience 
 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 
 Shakspeare 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 Michael Angelo, Leonardo 
 and Raphael and Titian, so that they may be some- 
 thing 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 
 embroiderer, and many others, arts which lend 
 beauty of form and pattern and color to the com- 
 mon 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 every 
 thing must have a beginning; and it is this little
 
 INTROD UCTOR Y. / 
 
 beginning that I want to make 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 infi- 
 nite diversity, from the pattern on the doorknob 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 necessary 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, man has to defend him- 
 self against Nature and against his own kind, against 
 weather, scarcity, sickness, and times of war : so he 
 must provide for himself food, clothing, shelter, weap- 
 ons. 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 pro- 
 vided than the rest of the animals.
 
 8 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 We have been told of bees, and ants, and beavers, 
 and the like, that have reached, or almost reached, 
 this point, this stage of proficiency in the arts of 
 pure use and necessity; 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 ne- 
 cessities and inclinations of man go on ever develop- 
 ing and multiplying. And then there comes a time 
 when, having supplied his bodily necessities, 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 decora- 
 tive. "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 imitations 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 delight in beauty ; and 
 so he gradually creates a new and wonderful thing, 
 the artistic sense.
 
 IN TROD UC TOR Y. 9 
 
 There have been ages of which there is no histori- 
 cal record other than geology 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, laboriously 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 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. This thing is prehistoric : it has served 
 some primitive man as his earliest tool or weapon, be- 
 fore he had sufficient knowledge or skill to invent or 
 imagine any thing better. Such things are found in 
 Britain, in Asia, in the arctic regions, and among the 
 ancient lake and cave dwellings, this the rudiment- 
 ary phase of the art of man.
 
 IO LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 And next, as an example of the second, the decora- 
 tive stage, is a vase found in Cyprus, of ancient rough- 
 clay pottery. It has reddish-brown concentric lines, 
 resembling very closely the sort of ornament still be- 
 stowed 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, hav- 
 ing been invented in very early times, was adhered to 
 for centuries with but little change. It exemplifies the 
 need and taste for ornament, at a time, and in a state 
 of civilization, when appliances and tools were rude, 
 and skill in dealing with them had not advanced 
 very far. Still here is the ornament, the desire for 
 beauty. 
 
 Both of these stages, the highly civilized nations of 
 the past as well as of the present day have gone 
 through, and left far behind. For, no sooner has deco- 
 rative art been invented, than more advanced necessi- 
 ties arise, mental sensibilities grow, and need to be 
 gratified. Man learns to look before and after, con- 
 cerning the things of the mind, as well as those of 
 the body. Memory, imagination, 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 what- 
 ever, but needs and pleasures of the intellect and the 
 heart. This stage must be 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 conceived or pro-
 
 IN TROD UC TOR Y. II 
 
 duced ; 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 assem- 
 bly. 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 the splen- 
 did 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 Athe- 
 nian art, is my example of the third stage. I shall 
 have to consider more particularly, in my fifth lecture,
 
 12 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 ex- 
 celled in any future age of the world. 
 
 I have now roughly sketched the three 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 orna- 
 menting the objects formed by these arts ; and how, 
 rising higher yet, came the desire for embodying 
 loftier thoughts in things more beautiful still, the 
 statue, the picture, the noble building. If all this is 
 made clear to you, you will see the scope of my sub- 
 ject, 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 consider those decorative 
 arts, that, still resting on use and necessity, seek to 
 add beauty to the things of common life, such as the 
 painting of the vase, the modelling of the glass vessel, 
 and the coloring and pattern of wearing-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, 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
 
 IN TROD UC TOR Y. 15 
 
 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 sculpture in the fifth century before 
 Christ, the great period of Italian painting in the fif- 
 teenth 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 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 con- 
 trivances 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, ma- 
 nipulated 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.
 
 1 6 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 labor or 
 training ; and, look where we will in this country and 
 in these times, we can see nothing untouched but the 
 sky and the sea ; and perhaps we must not even ex- 
 cept 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 manu- 
 facture too ! 
 
 And, in these manifold labors 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 gar- 
 dening, in carpentery : so that, at need, some of us 
 could play the part of Robinson Crusoe not quite 
 ungracefully. Practice in these things helps to edu- 
 cate 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 competence of judgment 
 is not without importance for my present purpose, 
 as I shall show you presently.
 
 INTROD UCTOR Y. I / 
 
 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) orna- 
 ment. But suppose that man, in thus putting 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 mechani- 
 cal 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 look like 
 wood, and wood look like stone ; till we gaze round 
 us, and wonder if any thing 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 every-day 
 life, a wide subject, a great industry ; both a great 
 part of the history of the world, and a most helpful
 
 1 8 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 instrument to the study of that history. A very great 
 industry indeed, comprising the trades of house- 
 building, painting, joinery and carpentery, 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 any thing that they use, and that 
 we fashion, but it has always been thought to be unfin- 
 ished till it has had some touch or other of decoration 
 about it. True 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 deco- 
 ration, 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 every thing 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 eventfulness 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 interwoven, those strange 
 forms invented, that men have so long delighted in, 
 forms and intricacies that do not necessarily imitate
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 19 
 
 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 looks as natural, nay as 
 lovely, as the green field, the river-bank, or the moun- 
 tain 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 per- 
 force make, that is the other use of it." 
 
 We have, indeed, only to look round us for a mo- 
 ment in order to verify this ; to become aware, that, as 
 every material substance 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 accustomed to noticing this decoration, 
 is, for my purpose, a step in the right direction. For 
 instance, no door, even of the very humblest, is satis- 
 fied with being merely a means of ingress and egress : 
 it must seek to please the 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 var- 
 nished, 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
 
 2O LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 lost the pleasure. The railway carriage, too, has its 
 mouldings and groovings and gildings, its' bits of 
 colored 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 tedi- 
 ous 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 ascertain for ourselves, by continued observation, 
 that there is no object, for whatever use intended, but 
 has something bestowed on it, either color 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 civilization, we often see ornament 
 distinctly hindering use. See to what a pass civiliza- 
 tion has brought our fire-irons, things of every-day 
 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 unreasonable notions of ele- 
 gance ; they began to be made of burnished steel and 
 lacquer-work, of a lustre easily tarnished, and labori- 
 ously renewed ; and finally they left off work- alto- 
 gether, being too fine for it, and were obliged to be
 
 INTRODUCTOR Y. 2 I 
 
 provided with a humble deputy to do it for them. Of 
 the same kind are candlesticks, that must be pre- 
 served 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 orna- 
 ment as that is clear waste and folly, and wrong from 
 the very beginning. The instinct for ornament in 
 earlier stages of civilization is never found to lead to 
 such a sacrifice. The savage does not so over-deco- 
 rate his paddle, his knife, his tomahawk, as to render 
 it useless ; and a real and capable workman or work- 
 woman has the same true instinct. And, to recur to 
 what I said just now, here should come in the prac- 
 tical 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-basket with its tinselled 
 implements ; a practised writer objects to a gilded and 
 elaborate inkstand, and a gimcrack penholder ; and a 
 really clever amateur cook is not over-anxious about 
 the trimming of her apron, so that it is of stout mate- 
 rial, and the shape that will best protect her dress. 
 To expend labor in disguising use and falsifying mate- 
 rial, shows an utter misconception of art, and igno- 
 rance 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 any
 
 22 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 thing of the nature of a picture or statue. The idea 
 has somehow arisen, that a thing, if called an orna- 
 ment, however useless, cumbrous, 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 exami- 
 nation it is not so. It condemns groups of wax flowers 
 under glass shades ; it condemns vast crochet anti- 
 macassars ; it condemns glass fuchsias at the end of 
 curtain-poles ; it condemns huge china pugs and par- 
 rots ; 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 originally 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 appear- 
 ance, no matter how much painting and gilding or 
 carving they had received, or how much skill of hand 
 had been expended on them. 
 
 In former times, or earlier stages of civilization, that 
 axiom, " Nothing is ornamental unless it is also at the 
 same time really useful," was never lost sight of; but 
 there was no necessity to put it into words, it was acted 
 upon unconsciously. Regard was had to the appro-
 
 INTROD UC TOR Y, 2$ 
 
 priateness 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 colors and exag- 
 gerated 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 spontaneous : still people expected to 
 have it, and to make it. So patterns and mouldings 
 and carvings have been borrowed and copied and re- 
 produced 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 hori- 
 zontal and perpendicular lines arranged so as to 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 mus- 
 lin curtain, worked in shaded wools on a tablecloth, 
 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 understanding the 
 original motive, or not caring to apply it properly.
 
 24 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 Now to inquire into the reason of all this. 
 
 We are accustomed to recognize the necessity for 
 intelligence and knowledge in every other department 
 of life but that which belongs to beauty of decoration, 
 of form and color : 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 left to form itself. Choice in form or color is usually 
 quite unguided by any principle, and is by many sup- 
 posed to be unworthy of serious thought. We do not 
 ask the bookseller 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 uncon- 
 trolled 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 pro- 
 duce 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, sur- 
 rounded by evidences of vulgarity and bad taste at 
 which they would be horrified if they had ever learned 
 to appreciate them. 
 
 It is instructive, in this connection, to remark the 
 tastes of children and uneducated people. Theii
 
 INTROD UC TOR Y. 2$ 
 
 senses, being immature and undeveloped, require to 
 be strongly appealed to in order to receive an impres- 
 sion. They like a multitude of gaudy colors, glitter 
 of tinsel and gaslight, loud and clanging sounds ; and 
 to these the uneducated vulgar add a taste for power- 
 ful flavors, strong odors, unrestrained emotions, 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 culti- 
 vated people, tastes analogous to these. Over-trimmed 
 and befringed and gilded furniture, intense and ill- 
 combined coloring, violent and ungraceful form, and 
 accumulations of useless costly trifles, all these and 
 more are to be found in many a household, and in 
 sfiops 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. 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 cultured per- 
 sons, of whom Mr. William Morris was one, and Mr. 
 Burne Jones another, turned their minds to the con- 
 sideration of how to improve the construction and 
 furnishing and decoration of dwelling-houses. First 
 they set to work with their own hands, and made draw- 
 ings 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
 
 26 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 and strange beauty were produced, as well as copies 
 and adaptations of good work of past time, they be- 
 came 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 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-decoration," 
 "art-colors," and so forth, and all those other use- 
 less terms. 
 
 But it is not the terms alone that I consider to be in 
 fault : it is the blind adoption 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 sesthetically minded people, who 
 are described as living only for Art, and expressing 
 themselves in a highly foolish, affected, and melan- 
 choly manner. Many people think that " high Art," 
 as they call it, is inseparably associated with affecta- 
 tion, and melancholy, and dull colors, and general 
 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,
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 2/ 
 
 of cheerfulness and brightness, of comfort, cleanliness, 
 and hospitality, and is a help to good and healthy liv- 
 ing, and not a hinderance 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 tilings ; that while twenty 
 years ago it was almost impossible to get a well-shaped 
 article of furniture, or a stuff, or a wall-paper, of grace- 
 ful pattern and harmonious color, 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 be- 
 tween good workmanship and bad, delicate ornament 
 and coarse, good color and inharmonious and tawdry 
 color. This knowledge, widely spread among the cul- 
 tivated classes, would cause the decline and gradual 
 disappearance of bad art ; if for 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 accustomed to employ our 
 own individual skill, taste, and patience. 
 
 I have heard in my time of such arts as decalco- 
 manie, potichomanie, vitromanie ; of leather-work imi- 
 tating 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 em- 
 bodiments of bad taste are, however, somewhat out of
 
 .28 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 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 rea- 
 sonable 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 
 its worst features ; at the same time, avoiding 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
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 2Q 
 
 of our true inheritance ; and I think we all know some- 
 thing 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 indis- 
 pensable ; no system of education would be complete 
 without them. Not so with the rest, painting and 
 sculpture and architecture. The real study of these 
 tilings is not considered an indispensable part of edu- 
 cation. School routine generally includes a little draw- 
 ing, 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 painting 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 incompatible and incongruous things. In all 
 other human productions, an enlightened and reason- 
 able 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 judgment about these things is to learn, by the
 
 30 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 
 Shakspeare, Milton, and Dante, pretend to judge of 
 the poets of our day ? What sort of a musical critic 
 would he be who was unacquainted with Handel and 
 Bach and Beethoven? So neither can there be real 
 criticism and enjoyment 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 few peo- 
 ple, 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
 
 INTROD UC TOR Y. 3 1 
 
 of public and private buildings, should be a source of 
 healthfulness to the mind and body too, the general 
 ignorance 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 construction, 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 prin- 
 ciples of 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 pretension 
 will be lifeless and melancholy, we shall allow our 
 sense of beauty to dwindle from scarcity of nourish- 
 ment, and art will decline more and more until it be- 
 comes 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 understand 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 intelligence as one
 
 32 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 should call it, which began without a date, at least 
 so long ago as those strange and masterly scratchings 
 on mammoth-bones, 1 and the like, found but the other 
 day in the drift, that this art of unconscious intelli- 
 gence is all but dead ; but what little of it is left lin- 
 gers among half-civilized nations, and is grown coarser, 
 feebler, less intelligent, year by year. . . . This they 
 must recognize, 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 deformity in the com- 
 mon 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 intelli- 
 gence," as Mr. Morris calls it, and it is now only by 
 pains and study that we can 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 un- 
 worthy. " 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 
 
 1 See heading of this chapter.
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 33 
 
 road, every new experience is a lesson, a confirma- 
 tion. 
 
 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 edu- 
 cated and refined pleasure, it is true, but of no practi- 
 cal 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 some- 
 thing by studying it. 
 
 Then, as I have tried to show you, our lives in every 
 direction, every occupation, are filled with the pres- 
 ence and influence of art. And as, every day of our 
 lives, we are called upon to exercise a choice, or to 
 express an opinion bearing on the subject, does it not 
 become a sort of moral obligation to exercise a wise 
 choice, to express &just opinion? and, since there is a 
 good and bad, a true and false, in art, to learn to distin- 
 guish 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, architecture.
 
 34 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 Then, let me remind you of a few points of generrfv 
 application. 
 
 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 exercis- 
 ing 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 any thing I may seem to leave obscure 
 or otherwise unsatisfactory ; and I hope very much to 
 have some questions, if not objections, 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 beau- 
 tiful picture, and, if possible, to speak a few sensible 
 words. The first two should be easy enough here, 
 and in the world of to-day ; and I, for one, should like 
 to be allowed to think I had fulfilled the last require- 
 ment 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.
 
 II. 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 intelligence of man together," the 
 intention of which is to supply his wants and necessi- 
 ties ; 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 expression 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 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 every- 
 day use by which we are surrounded, productions 
 of the arts of pottery, glass-making, metal, stone, and 
 
 35
 
 36 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 " manu- 
 facture" 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 labor, 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 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 craftsmanship and work of the fin- 
 gers, 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 recognize, the very 
 shopkeepers recognize, 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
 
 DECORATIVE ART FORM. 3/ 
 
 
 
 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 hand-carving over machine-carving, 
 of hand-painting over machine color-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 weav- 
 ing ; and though I do certainly think these are more 
 interesting now, and were more thought of in their 
 own day, than the power-loom weaving and cheaply 
 printed books of this, yet I know that the world can- 
 not stand still, and that there is much advantage in 
 the cheapness 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 of which quantity is not required, wood-carv- 
 ing, 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-
 
 38 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 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 per- 
 fect 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 capa- 
 bilities for the arts, and know something of the delicacy 
 of hand, the accuracy of eye, the trained understand- 
 ing and insight, that go to invent, arrange, and carry 
 out satisfactorily 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
 
 DECORATIVE ART FORM. 39 
 
 should consent not to have them at all, rather than 
 take imitations in machine-work, just as, rather than 
 wear sham jeweller}', we would go without it altogether. 
 I do not mean to say that 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 mantlepiece manufacturer. Lines 
 may be too sharp, and forms too distinct. This over- 
 finish is mainly due to division of labor. Division of 
 labor is good for pins, but bad for works of art. " The 
 ornament " (I quote from a long- since- printed maga- 
 zine-article) " which begins with the mere draughts- 
 man, and ends with the mere salesman, deteriorates at 
 every stage, in its change of hands, from the original 
 design." According to the ordinary system of pro- 
 ducing jewellery, the design has been made by one 
 man, the dies sunk by another, the striking-up by a 
 third, some foliage and filagree work added by a fourth, 
 and some shallow, scratchy engraving to complete the 
 pattern by a fifth ; and it becomes what the accom- 
 plished 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,
 
 4O LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 pos- 
 sible to deal directly with the workman, particularly 
 about country neighborhoods, in such things as car- 
 penter'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 obliging shop man 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 
 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 opportunities of ad- 
 miring 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 Jap- 
 anese sense of color (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 ser- 
 viceable, constructions. Sir Edward Reed, in his 
 book on Japan, puts his ringer on the inner cause of 
 this excellence. He says, " I have watched the poor 
 artisan laboring at his work with an earnestness and
 
 DECORATIVE ART FORM. 41 
 
 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 
 pains-taking labor. No thought of 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 every thing that 
 pertains to Art, that the artist workman should take 
 delight in his work. About how many of the com- 
 mon decorations of a room can this be said? 
 
 When I observe the thousands of nameless trifles 
 that crowd the shops where they sell " fancy articles," 
 especially about Christmas 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, penwipers that refuse to 
 wipe your pen, baskets that will hold nothing, be- 
 sides 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 intelligent 
 human creatures to get their living by making them. 
 Any thing worth calling a living, they cannot possibly 
 get. The things grow cheaper, year by year, and that 
 can be 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 al \vays wanting novelty in these 
 things, we do indeed obey some better instinct. It is
 
 42 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 necessity 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-color. They received for each group fourpence 
 each, and would do two or three in an evening. 
 These were returned to the manufacturer, who sur- 
 rounded them with a gilt or lacquered frame; and 
 they were 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 arti- 
 cle, merely because it catches our fancy? Let us 
 consider if there is good work in it, honest material,
 
 DECORATIVE ART FORM. 43 
 
 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 
 labor ; in short, of making 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 ornament 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 in- 
 tended ? 
 
 Does it declare its use or office, and seem fit for it ? 
 
 Let us examine a little into the application of each 
 separate requirement. The first, you see, condemns 
 all imitations of a substance, especially when the ob- 
 ject is not likely to have been made of that substance. 
 Such are doors painted in bronze, sham jewellery, paper 
 flowers, glass colored 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
 
 44 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 pretends to be something else than it appears, and 
 that the deception should be pointed out to us as a 
 recommendation. The advertisement that assures us 
 that Paris diamonds and Abyssinian jewellery cannot 
 be distinguished from the real thing ; the shopkeeper 
 who tells us that some stuff of mixed material has 
 quite the appearance 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 espe- 
 cial article we want ought to be made of, and to see 
 that we get it ; silk honestly silk, and woollen honestly 
 woollen, and cotton honestly cotton, and linen really 
 and truly linen; and when the manufacturers find 
 what is expected of them, they will supply it accord- 
 ingly. It must have been inappropriate and perish- 
 able material that first put it into the careful house- 
 wife's mind to provide an extra case or cover for 
 various household objects, oilcloth or drugget to 
 cover the stair-carpeting, holland covers for the fur- 
 niture, and antimacassars over them again ; oilcloth 
 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 mate- 
 rials 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 up 
 when they were really shabby rather than while they
 
 DECORATIVE ART FORM. 45 
 
 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 card-board 
 cases for match-boxes, and such like, it seems to ex- 
 press a 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 " horti- 
 cultural 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 admira- 
 bleness 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 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 differ- 
 ent functions of each room in mind, and furnishing
 
 46 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 them in accordance 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? 
 Wheelbarrows and buckets, rink-skates and perambu- 
 lators, used for similiar purposes, are really less con- 
 venient than a small dish or bowl really designed for 
 use, without any ulterior notion of ingenuity or con- 
 ceit. A tea-kettle in the form of a drum, with the 
 sticks for handles ; a toast-rack formed of wreaths of 
 ivy (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 cur- 
 tains, are examples 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 constructed 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 appli- 
 cation 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 con-
 
 DECORATIVE ART FORM. 47 
 
 venient when made of glass, of a simple oblong shape, 
 so as not to be easily upset, that the spoon may com- 
 fortably rest in it, and the salt be easily renewed ; and 
 there are many modifications of form, and even color, 
 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 pre- 
 tentious conceit, why any thing more should be wanted. 
 It cannot be a very lasting pleasure to shake pepper 
 out of an owl's head, or help yourself to butter out of 
 a beehive ; but it is a lasting pleasure to have a thor- 
 oughly useful and soundly constructed thing made out 
 of a right and good material, appearing in its appro- 
 priate 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 household 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 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, or from leather those of wood, or from wood 
 those of stone. Each, having its separate and appro- 
 priate use and place, is capable of receiving a separate
 
 48 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 and appropriate beauty. Just a few words on each in 
 its turn. 
 
 The principal articles of furniture in our rooms 
 tables, sideboards, pianos, wardrobes, etc. are usually 
 made of some wood, though solid and durable enough 
 for the purpose, yet considered to be in itself of insuf- 
 ficient 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, wal- 
 nut, or mahogany, as the case may be. I think this 
 process of veneering must be allowed as an exception 
 to our first requirement, that a thing should seem to 
 be made of that material of which it really is made. 
 The wood is laid on by a recognized process, which 
 deceives nobody ; it economizes valuable material, and 
 the result is agreeable to the eye. The thick coat of 
 French polish, however, which is finally laid on it, is 
 to be condemned ; its unnatural lustre interferes with 
 the color 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. Gild- 
 ing, 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.
 
 DECORATIVE ART FORM. 49 
 
 The better the imitation, the greater waste of the 
 painter's time and powers. The appearance is in- 
 tended to deceive, but 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 wainscot- 
 in j, turning and carving, used to be much more com- 
 mon than they are now ; and in houses of a hundred 
 years ago, there was much to interest, where now all is 
 dull enough what panelling there is being most com- 
 monly 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 cur- 
 tain-poles, when they are meant to be visible, too 
 large and ponderous, fro:n 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
 
 50 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 satis- 
 faction. 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 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 con- 
 struction, high polish, coarse carving, imitative paint- 
 ing, 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 t 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 afK
 
 DECORATIVE ART FORM. 5 1 
 
 plied just as easily as whitening or black-lead. As all 
 the interest and home feelings of a house 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 carefully. 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 ornamented with 
 figures and devices of wrought metal. As coal became 
 more commonly used, being found capable of con- 
 taining 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 fin- 
 ishing them at the top remained, and still remain, 
 having grown bigger and bigger, absorbing heat, inter- 
 fering with the arrangement of the fire, a perfect 
 monument of stupidity and superfluousness. 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 any thing 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. la 
 summer great and wonderful efforts are in these days 
 made to do away with that blackness. I cannot thijok
 
 52 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 comfort- 
 able 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 
 colored 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," 
 
 "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 consideration 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
 
 DECORATIVE ART FORM. 53 
 
 too, the general effect is so much the better, as the 
 eye is 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 re- 
 member, 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 incrusted with orna- 
 ment, only betokening a restless desire of the silver- 
 smith to show off his dexterity, and extort admiration 
 and surprise at any cost. In the sixteenth century, 
 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 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 teapots with coarse chasing, the candelabra and 
 pergnes, all ferns and palm-trees, and camels, and 
 figures in the style of advertisements of the insurance 
 offices. Metal-work is indeed a study and an interest
 
 54 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 sug- 
 gests 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 capability of being twisted or 
 blown or moulded into a multitude of delicate forms, 
 it early occurred to the manufacturing mind, that if 
 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 en- 
 hance its brilliancy. And, being one of the most fra- 
 gile 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 coloring matter, and then 
 painted and gilded ! Since, at its strongest, glass can 
 never be any thing 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, sometimes 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.
 
 DECORATIVE ART FORM. 55 
 
 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 be- 
 fore the Christian era, to the finest Oriental and Sevres 
 of to-day. 
 
 The first thing tc be desired in pottery is beauty of 
 form, combined with a perfect adaptation to use. 
 Then, whatever adornment of pattern and color be 
 added, it must in no way interfere with the effect of 
 that form, or divert the attention from it. The deco- 
 ration, the pattern upon it, should bey&z/.- any appear- 
 ance of projection, where none exists in reality, is 
 wrong. Landscapes and groups of flowers in shading 
 and perspective 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 colored in one agreeable tint throughout, and, 
 if painted, the pattern should be laid on it flatly and 
 symmetrically, and without shadow. The search for 
 novelty has produced in our day many strange things 
 in the potter's art. It is not uncommon to see toilet- 
 ware fashioned and colored to imitate rustic wood- 
 work; 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 de-
 
 56 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 scription, 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 toi- 
 let 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 carelessly knotted string; the 
 leather-color of the bag and the scattered gold favor 
 the conceit (!) of the pitcher issuing 'from a bag of 
 the precious metal." I am glad to be assured that 
 this is decidedly American ; and really, bad as Eng- 
 lish 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 fea- 
 ture in modern decoration, has much to excuse it 
 within due limits. I have never been able to see the 
 fitness of hanging 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 color 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 distin- 
 guish between poor imitations, and original and good 
 objects, in pottery; between Chinese and Japanese, 
 between early and late work in both, and among the 
 most marked English kinds, Wedgwood, Worcester, 
 Chelsea, Derby, and so on, so as to choose the most 
 decorative. As to the shapes of the various manufac- 
 tures, if they are good, they will certainly tell you at a
 
 DECORATIVE ART FORM. $? 
 
 glance for what purpose they were originally intend- 
 ed, 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 within 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 glass of the household was arranged. This 
 was, I suppose, by way of returning to the simplicity 
 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 posses- 
 sions 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 apt to be carried 
 away, and, out of disgust at the falseness and arti- 
 ficiality of later civilization, 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 refinement have led us into by com- 
 parison with the simpler old fashion, we may correct 
 them, not losing what we have gained, but merely 
 putting it to a better use. All manufactures and pro- 
 cesses have reached in these days a mechanical per- 
 fection hitherto undreamed of; and, in our pride in
 
 58 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 this perfection, qualities of appropriateness, delicacy, 
 beauty, are often lost sight of. 
 
 The texture of a carpet is often exquisite in soft- 
 ness, 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 of pride in mechanical perfec- 
 tion, overcoming original pleasure in beauty, is to be 
 found in almost every thing ; so that, even in music, a 
 singer's power of faultlessly executing bravura passages 
 and shakes, of dwelling on a note for an unprece- 
 dented 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 instru- 
 ment, and the most impossible, these things are more 
 admired than the uttering, with sympathetic expres- 
 sion, 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 re- 
 marks 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 
 indeed 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 find it is generally thought that such 
 ideas as these of mine are meant to bring about whole-
 
 DECORATIVE ART FORM. 59 
 
 sale destruction of household goods, and immediate 
 purchase of new ones of a different kind. Nothing 
 would be farther from my wishes. The greatest sacri- 
 fice 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 cer- 
 tain charm and harmony of effect, and the comfort 
 and hospitality of a home. Houses have their char- 
 acter, 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 advantage. 
 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
 
 6O LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 have to inhabit is a more or less ill or well constructed 
 specimen of the ordinary builder's house, intended to 
 provide its in-d\vellers with a certain amount of shelter, 
 comfort, convenience ; as little of these as is decently 
 necessary; and as much of pretension, ostentation, 
 insecure workmanship, and inadequate material, as 
 can be got into the contract. So our efforts to make 
 these houses more beautiful and inhabitable are hin- 
 dered 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 polishing 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 cease- 
 less labor 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 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
 
 DECORATIVE ART FORM. 6 1 
 
 and centre-pieces of the ceiling, looking like the orna- 
 ments of a wedding-cake ; the clumsily formed and 
 obtrusive marble mantlepieces, lending a gloom as of 
 tombstones to the room ; and the ill-contrived and 
 extravagant fire-grate. All this is very discouraging, 
 and is apt to lead to improvements 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 days is the general 
 admiration and devotion to Science. "Men run to 
 and fro, and knowledge is increased." I know that 
 we owe a great debt to Science ; but there is one good 
 office 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 manufacturing 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
 
 62 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 country is blackened as by some great conflagration. 
 The smoke, and gases, and noisome vapors, 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 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, mock- 
 ingly called aesthetic, 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 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
 
 DECORATIVE ART FORM, 63 
 
 have nothing to fear from this ridicule. 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 principles and just reasons 
 will certainly last, and serve as a good foundation for a 
 wider and better diffused kuowledge 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 
 coloring is than glaring metallic dyes ; how much more 
 delightful and serviceable are softly falling and cling- 
 ing 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 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 posses- 
 sion 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 authoritative teaching
 
 64 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 on the subject ; and this must be ray apology for so 
 constantly quoting from Mr. Morris and Mr. Ruskin. 
 We indeed owe every thing 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 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 excellence 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 ; especially so, as being the results of actual 
 practice and experience. And only practice and ex- 
 perience can thoroughly teach us what we want to 
 know hi such matters. In these rapid, and, I fear, 
 very disjointed remarks, though I may have chanced
 
 DECORATIVE ART FORM. 65 
 
 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 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."
 
 III. DECORATIVE ART COLOR, 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 color is of so fluctuating, 
 so variable, so indefinite a nature, the words I use in 
 speaking 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 color-sense : we find that pleasure in 
 all the most beautiful things of Nature, the sky, 
 the sea, the fields, the woods, the flowers, the birds, the 
 insects ; and in the things of Art, color is the most 
 valuable quality in paintings ; and in decoration, while 
 harmonious coloring may in some degree atone for 
 faulty design, a good design may be spoilt by dis- 
 cordant coloring. 
 
 66
 
 DECORATIVE ART COLOR, ETC. 6? 
 
 You will see what I mean by the difficulties of the 
 subject, when I remind you that no two people see 
 color alike witness the eternal disputes about match- 
 ing; that a color may seem one thing when placed 
 by itself, and be quite different beside other colors ; 
 that colors alter with the ever-shifting quality of the 
 atmosphere ; that sunlight, moonlight, candle - light, 
 lamp-light, gas-light, electric-light, with their thou- 
 sand degrees of purity and intensity, make colors seen 
 by them partake of their variations ; that, when two 
 people differ about the proper name or nature of a 
 color, neither can be proved to be wrong ; that most 
 people, except a very few with a highly cultivated nat- 
 ural gift, are in some degree color-blind else how do 
 we account for the common differences of opinion that 
 are always arising, one person calling a color green 
 while another calls it blue, one speaking of a tint as 
 red when another would call it brown, one saying a 
 color is purple which another would call dark blue ? 
 Every assertion respecting the form of a thing is ca- 
 pable of proof or disproof: a square object can be 
 mathematically 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 color : there is no 
 absolute standard, no fixed means of judgment ; all is 
 approximative merely. It is a scientific fact, that each 
 color 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
 
 68 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 seem to help us much. I believe there are tables 
 for the examination of the color-sense, but I cannot 
 suppose the knowledge so gained would be readily 
 available in ordinary matters. 
 
 It is not easy to avoid the conclusion that most 
 people are insensible to delicate variations of color. 
 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 colors but one 
 name. 
 
 Again : snow, chalk, ivory, lilies, orange- flowers, 
 ermine, swan's-down, are all called white ; but what 
 differences among them ! Their differences are differ- 
 ences of texture and substance ; white being no color, 
 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 whiteness of chalk by the reflection of light 
 from opaque calcareous particles, the result of each,
 
 DECORATIVE ART COLOR, ETC. 69 
 
 and its effect on the eye, being very different. So with 
 the rest. 
 
 I suppose that young children notice colors as soon 
 as they notice anything that is not good to eat. Bright 
 colors, 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 colored shells, and feathers, and the petals of 
 flowers. The monkey, who plucks the splendid trop- 
 ical flower only to tear it to pieces, and reaches out 
 his long amis to clutch at the bright trailing feathers 
 of an unsuspecting bird, or darts after a brilliant but- 
 terfly, is really showing an aesthetic appreciation of 
 color, and delight in it for its own sake. Such is the 
 liking for brilliancy in undeveloped natures. It is said 
 that red most strongly attracts the uneducated sense, 
 and that it needs high training and refinement to prop- 
 erly 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 decora- 
 tion ; and children, in whom the color-sense is un- 
 developed, make up bunches of flowers without any 
 leaves. 
 
 It certainly takes a highly cultivated sense to appre- 
 ciate the more delicate hues and combinations. But, 
 before we proceed to these, some sort of classification 
 of the ordinary colors must be made. In the prismatic 
 spectrum, the original type of color, or the rainbow, 
 are found what are called the three primary colors, 
 yellow, red, blue. Between these, and composed of
 
 70 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 them, are the three secondary colors, orange, made 
 of yellow and red ; purple, of red and blue ; green, of 
 blue and yellow. Of the three primary colors, in vari- 
 ous proportions, every hue in nature is composed, 
 black, in which all colors are 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 varia- 
 tions may be considered infinite. Some scientific cal- 
 culation numbers thirty thousand, 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 color 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 colors ; but we do not admire it for its 
 coldness, but for its purity. Blue is the only color 
 that can be obtained in a perfectly pure form, ultra- 
 marine, the type of purity, the color of the Virgin 
 Mary. 
 
 Now, as blue is called cold, so is yellow said to be 
 warm. It is the color of the intensest heat we can 
 imagine, white-heat ; and, as blue cools and chills, 
 yellow warms any color with which it is mixed. Ivory- 
 white, cream-white, may be called warm white ; and, 
 of course, stuffs of such tints harmonize much better
 
 DECORATIVE ART COLOR, ETC. Jl 
 
 with the warm tones of hair and complexion than the 
 snow and ice-cold stuffs of a few years ago. Rich ma- 
 terials, 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 becom- 
 ing than a magenta-red, which has some proportion 
 of blue in it. And lastly, red, being neutral, is in- 
 capable of imparting either cold or warm effects to 
 a color 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 color, a change from coldness and 
 rawness to tone and warmth. And if we compare the 
 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 difference between their effect 
 on the color-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 colors, to say that they are gloomy, dismal, and 
 uabecoming. If this is true of any particular shade, 
 the fact would merely go to prove that it is not a color 
 properly so called, but some muddy confusion of tints, 
 mistaken for an artistic color for want of a right appre- 
 hension ; and it owes its existence to a foregone con- 
 clusion that every thing heavy and dull must be artistic. 
 People often nowadays, growing tired of their white-
 
 72 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 and-gold drawing-rooms, in which, though the coloring 
 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 cockroach color, under the impression 
 he is doing it in true high Art style. Indeed, the An- 
 daman Islander, with his red ochre and white chalk, 
 has a much better and more refined perception. Sup- 
 pose, however, we see if we can reach a higher stand- 
 ard than that, by considering first the effects of color 
 in Nature, before thinking of color in Art. 
 
 The defenders of bright aniline dyes say, that since 
 there is brilliant color in Nature, in flowers, in the 
 sunset, in birds, in tropical foliage, 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 pldce, all brilliant combined natural effects 
 of color 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 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 ;
 
 DECORATIVE ART COLOR, ETC. 73 
 
 suppose we hung our rooms with them : they would be 
 always appealing to the color-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 color evan- 
 escent, 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 im- 
 perceptible soft tints of each, when they are blended 
 together on the wings, give a tremulously flashing 
 brightness that no evenly laid or stippled tint of ours 
 could produce. 
 
 So brilliancy of color 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, color, and 
 perfume, owes its glowing hues to the translucent 
 texture of its manifold petals, lying each over each in 
 loveliest curves and involutions, their transmitted color 
 growing fuller and fuller in exquisite gradations, for 
 their very shadows, are color, till the innermost folds
 
 74 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 bet- 
 ter than Solomon ; and we have a muslin rose made 
 with plenty 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 sunrise), besides 
 never remaining of the same hue for two minutes to- 
 gether, 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 color. 
 Evanescence, translucence, constant variation and ex- 
 treme delicacy of texture, these go to produce her 
 brilliant effects of color, 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 sacrificed, and the brightness, even if we do 
 in some measure succeed, must be in a degree faded 
 and sullied the first time the manufacture 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
 
 DECORATIVE ART COLOR, ETC. 75 
 
 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 color, as being in goods of our own 
 manufacture unserviceable, unlasting (the dye injuring 
 the solid qualities of the fabric), fatiguing to the eye, 
 needing frequent renewal, and of doubtful beauty from 
 the first. 
 
 When the mode of extracting dyes from coal-tar was 
 invented, the common admiration for gaudy colors was 
 raised to its utmost by the intensity, the hard, un- 
 gradated, glaring, metallic brilliancy, of the magentas, 
 the mauves, the emerald greens, the unmitigated blues, 
 that were then produced : it was as if they had thrown 
 people off their balance as regards color, and had 
 aroused all the worst tastes of our nature. I find that 
 they bore, besides those I have mentioned, the eupho- 
 nious 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 in- 
 tense forced brilliancy without a little artificial height- 
 ening 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 re-appear. They 
 were bad enough in rich material ; the silky shimmer
 
 76 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 and soft folds mitigated their glare : but I cannot re- 
 member 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 pallor 
 mauve stuffs feebly relapsed after a little wear. 
 
 These aniline colors 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 affin- 
 ity with the natural tints of complexion and hair, so 
 they offend against every principle of harmony. In na- 
 ture, " all this innumerous-colored scene of things," 
 colors are never raw : there is always some admix- 
 ture, softening, gradating. If, as we have seen, natural 
 colors 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 
 melting, dewy tints of the sky, the tender bloom of 
 fruit, the exquisite texture of flowers, are impossible 
 to be imitated by any processes of ours, let us ac- 
 knowledge 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, principles of harmony in color. We have only 
 to think what harmony means in music, to understand 
 what the expression is intended to convey when it is 
 applied to color. It consists, in music, of the unity, 
 connection, similarity, and agreement of tones, so as 
 to produce beautiful effects, sometimes soothing, some- 
 times exhilarating, always fresh and various, their com-
 
 DECORATIVE ART COLOR, ETC. 77 
 
 binations being, within certain restrictions, practically 
 unlimited. So precisely with color-harmony. 
 
 The principles which will be found safe guides both 
 in house decoration and dress may be arranged under 
 five heads, analogy, contrast, variety, delicacy, rej- 
 petition. 
 
 X To explain what I mean by harmony of analogy, I 
 ! will suppose a lady of fair complexion and delicate 
 coloring 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 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 para- 
 sol, and the gloves, the pink should be repeated, per- 
 haps of a slightly fuller piak, 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 mantle- 
 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 blend- 
 ing of all these tints together. 
 
 Thus, by beginning with some color 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.
 
 78 LECTURES O.V ART. 
 
 / Harmony by contrast is on a different principle. 
 ,'We must suppose a brilliant complexion, and dark hair 
 and eyes, or brown eyes and red-gold hair. The natu- 
 ral coloring already offers strong contrasts, so pale, soft, 
 and subdued tints seem out of place and ineffective. 
 Cardinal-red, gold, cream-color, and black, would per 
 haps suit the dark hair and eyes ; and blue and flesh- 
 colored brocade of Louis Quinze might suit the red- 
 gold hair and brown eyes. It seems to me a sure rule, 
 that persons whose natural coloring is in a low key, 
 one tint nearly assimilating with another, should wear 
 soft tones of color in dress, also nearly assimilating 
 with each other ; and where the natural coloring offers 
 strong contrasts, the coloring of the dress should be 
 full and strong also. I cannot think that strong con- 
 trast can ever be good in the coloring of a room, 
 where, it seems to me, repose and softened light are 
 always needed. Here is an arrangement of contrast 
 in coloring, however, which still seems simple and 
 harmonious : two full blues, two rather greener ones, 
 and two shades of a flesh-color-like pink. This color- 
 ing 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-honored fashion, nor is there 
 sometimes in the manifestations of the new. I saw 
 a drawing-room the other day with a peacock-feather-
 
 DECORATIVE ART COLOR, ETC. 79 
 
 patterned wall-paper, dado and woodwork of peacock 
 blue, and curtains and chair-coverings of peacock- 
 patterned chintz exactly matching the wall-paper. The 
 result was flat and monotonous, in my opinion. Both 
 these are instances 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 cur- 
 tains, of a mixed red and yellow the yellow a little 
 pinkish ; the chairs plain red ; and the carpet brown 
 and yellow and red and a little green. A great deal 
 of pleasure can be felt in the variety of these tints, 
 which nevertheless produce a unity of effect when re- 
 garded 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 embroidered, but only in portions, that the 
 design may show all the more richly. 
 
 To come to the next point, delicacy. By deli- 
 cacy, I do not necessarily mean paleness : delicacy of 
 effect is gained by suiting exactly the color to the 
 material. To muslin and such-like flimsy substances, 
 full bright tints are most unsuitable : pale, tender hues, 
 and light tracery of pattern, belong to them ; still deli- 
 cacy in these does not involve insipidity, which pov- 
 erty of tone and design would cause. For richer stuffs, 
 in silk and satin and velvet, fuller hues are quite suit- 
 able : the shimmer, the shifting of lights and shadows, 
 the bloom of the texture, modifies the effect of a full 
 color which in a dull and common stuff would be flat
 
 80 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 exam- 
 ple of Nature, who so carefully softens tints and out- 
 lines, for example, where the hair begins on the 
 temples and the eyebrows, and the coloring of cheek 
 and lip. We instinctively avoid clothing an infant in 
 dark and hard colors ; it would seem unsuitable and 
 discordant. Do not let us treat ourselves so very 
 much worse. 
 
 The senses do not recognize a weak impression 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 flavor in a dish, 
 such as garlic or onions, overpowers every other it may 
 possess : so strong colors in dress and room-decora- 
 tion catch the eye, and fill it to the exclusion of every 
 softer and more delicate one. 
 
 The fourth principle is repetition. Never have a 
 color 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 color 
 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 color- 
 analogy or a color-contrast, and observing delicacy,
 
 DECORATIVE ART COLOR, ETC. 8 1 
 
 variety, and repetition, can harmonious arrangement 
 of color be brought together and applied. " It is the 
 best possible sign of a color," 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 sim- 
 ple 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 pure blue." A color may be very agree- 
 able 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 coloring. 
 
 The worst color-discord is said to be purple and 
 green. Yet you will say, Ho.v 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 u:;ual tone 
 of quality is the most unbecoming color to nearly all 
 complexions : it makes sallow ones appear almost or- 
 ange, 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 sup- 
 pose none of them would be suitable for room-dec- 
 oration. What among them might be agreeable in 
 daylight, would be of a very dull brown at night.
 
 82 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 Purple is certainly the most difficult color : its more 
 beautiful hues tend to red rather than blue. 
 
 Green has been said to be a color that is appre- 
 ciated only 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 mis- 
 takes that always creep in when society is betome 
 artificial ; and there are signs at the present moment 
 that, in aesthetic coloring, we are declining into a 
 " green and yellow melancholy." 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 in- 
 cline to yellow rather than to blue. A pea-green 
 could never be becoming : its best and most charac- 
 teristic shade is not at all bright, but inclines to a 
 brownish hue. A green always becomes more agree- 
 able by candle-light, which adds a further proportion 
 of yellow to it. I find, in a color-treatise published 
 some twenty years ago, a recommendation to wear 
 green with red hair, by way of diminishing its intens- 
 ity. 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 color, and 
 cannot very agreeably be mixed with any thing 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
 
 DECORATIVE ART COLOR, ETC. 83 
 
 pure : it is too cold and hard. Red is the color that 
 first attracts the untrained sense, and its different tones 
 seem to be the most numerous of all. There is ordi- 
 narily only a very small proportion of red in a land- 
 scape ; 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 Devonshire 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 color 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 artificial 
 sunlight into them. It cannot be used, however, in 
 masses, but must be broken and mingled with other 
 colors. 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 com- 
 bination. 
 
 Many ladies in the present day choose black for 
 their ordinary wear, as being the most convenient and 
 comfortable way of solving the question of color. But 
 it is not a solution : it is an evasion. As such, it has 
 its advantages ; it absorbs color and reduces form, 
 and is unremarkable and economical. Black is the 
 extinction of color, and it absorbs some proportion of 
 every color near which it is placed. A black gown
 
 84 LECTURES OAT ART. 
 
 and bonnet make a pale face. look more pale, and 
 lower a high color. Colors 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 color by absorbing some of it 
 into itself, white strengthens and heightens the effect 
 of color placed near it, as it takes away from that 
 color 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 are not 
 many tints," says Mr. Morris, " fit to color a wall with. 
 Here is a short list : a solid red, not very deep, but 
 rather describable as a full pink, and toned both with 
 yellow and blue a very fine color, 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 
 color to hit; and a color between these two last 
 call it pale copper-color. All these three you must 
 be careful over, for if you get them rnuddy or dirty 
 you are lost." And on ending these remarks on color, 
 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 coloring, to one or
 
 DECORATIVE ART COLOR, ETC. 8$ 
 
 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 coloring, that produced by the deep, 
 intense aniline dyes ; cold, flat, ungradated, aiming at 
 brilliancy alone, without tone or harmony. 
 
 Second, the mock-aesthetic coloring, 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 coloring, properly so called ; in producing 
 which vegetable dyes only are used. I can only say 
 that good coloring is essentially clean and clear and 
 cheerful, like a healthy complexion, having tone and 
 harmony ; and I feel that I cannot too strongly insist 
 on the difference between this and much that is con- 
 sidered 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 ; but it is only possible at present to indi- 
 cate slightly and rapidly the place they fill in the gen- 
 eral 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
 
 86 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 said of the excellent woman, " She maketh herself 
 coverings of tapestry : her clothing is silk and purple." 
 
 Periods of beautiful and dignified costume have 
 also been periods of fine embroidery, 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 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 any thing else ; and we read of the 
 fine Hnen in which Joseph was arrayed by the hands 
 of Pharaoh. 
 
 So does needlework become an art from the mo- 
 ment 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.
 
 DECORATIVE ART COLOR, ETC. 8/ 
 
 Both these arts, in their various departments 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 
 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 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 reason- 
 able requirements, habits, customs, hours, these are
 
 88 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 gar- 
 ments of the last few years has had this advantage, 
 that it has offered plenty of freedom for individual 
 taste, whenever people were willing to take advantage 
 of that freedom, besides possessing in itself many ele- 
 ments 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 and stiffened them 
 with wire cages ; and in later years, not content with 
 scantier and more graceful drapery, expressing the 
 harmonious 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 combi- 
 nation 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 detri- 
 ment 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 ques- 
 tion ourselves. All kinds of things added on after 
 the dress itself is assumed should be looked on with
 
 DECORATIVE ART COLOR, ETC. 89 
 
 suspicion. A modern writer estimates the number of 
 articles of clothing and adornment that a 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. Brt I think that now more simplicity 
 prevails. 
 
 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, 
 subsided, only again to re-appear, 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 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 gentle undu- 
 lating 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 con-
 
 90 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 tour 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 endeavor 
 to alter them ; as the change would, in all probability, 
 be equally distant from Nature. The only circumstance 
 against which indignation may reasonably be moved 
 is where the operation is painful, or destructive to 
 health, such as some of the practices 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 anatomy took 
 an opportunity of proving a few days since in this 
 Academy." 
 
 This was spoken by Sir Joshua on Dec. 10, 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. Rus- 
 kin, "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 beautiful ; and had it not been for
 
 DECORATIVE ART COLOR, ETC. QI 
 
 the lovely and fantastic dressing of the thirteenth to 
 the sixteenth centuries, neither French nor Florentine 
 nor Venetian art could have risen to any thing like 
 the rank it reached. Still, even then, the best dress- 
 ing 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 color, than on gorgeousness of clasp or 
 embroidery. 
 
 " The splendor 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 honorable- 
 ness, 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 honor ; ' consider what nobleness 
 of expression 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 magnifi- 
 cence which in daily life we disregard. ... I do not 
 merely mean magnificence : the most splendid time
 
 92 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 was not the best time. It was still in the thirteenth 
 century, when simplicity and gorgeousness 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, flowing and falling over 
 his form in lapping waves of gloomy strength, was 
 worn under full robes of one color in the ground, his 
 crest quartered on them, and their borders enriched 
 with subtle illumination. The women wore 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 armor gradually 
 introduced more fantastic types, the nobleness of 
 the form was lost beneath the steel ; the gradually 
 increasing luxury and vanity of the age strove for con- 
 tinual excitement in more quaint and extravagant de- 
 vices ; and, in the fifteenth century, dress reached its 
 point of utmost splendor and fancy, being in many 
 cases still exquisitely graceful, but now, in its morbid 
 magnificence, devoid of all wholesome influence 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
 
 DECORATIVE ART COLOR, ETC. 93 
 
 it. 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 estab- 
 lished rule ; the difficulty of getting original ideas sat- 
 isfactorily 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 moderately fashionable attire to gradually 
 lead the way to improvement. 
 
 As to form of garments, speaking generally, soft, 
 long, flowing lines must always be the most graceful : 
 they add to the apparent height when it is desirable 
 to do so, while lines and folds across the figure shorten 
 it. Any tightness across any part of the form is a dis- 
 cord, 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 constructed of bits of silk and 
 cord laid on, bows of ribbon never meant to tie, im-
 
 94 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 movable 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 harmonizes 
 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 
 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 improvement of the general 
 effect. There is such a pleasing description in Rich- 
 ardson'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 admirer, "was 
 a Brussels lace mob peculiarly adapted to the charm- 
 ing turn of her features ; a sky-blue ribbon illustrated 
 that. . . . Her morning-gown was a pale primrose- 
 colored 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
 
 DECORATIVE ART COLOR, ETC. 95 
 
 same as her mob ; her apron, 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 refine- 
 ment, of judgment, 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 embroidery, art-needle- 
 work, as we call it. 
 
 It is many years since the samplers of our grand- 
 mothers 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, 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 labor 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
 
 96 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 drawn and colored 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, m 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, 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 accessible, 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 embroidery being flat, no effort 
 should be made to cause the design upon it to appear 
 to project, to stand out from it. It is quite easy by 
 dexterous shading to produce an appearance of this 
 sort ; but, as it interferes with every other artistic quali- 
 ty of design and color, it is perfectly inadmissible. It 
 interferes, because, when the eye is caught by strong 
 shading and high relief, it can see nothing else; no
 
 DECORATIVE ART COLOR, ETC. 97 
 
 suitable beauty of coloring 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 favorite 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 suc- 
 cessfully 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 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 be- 
 fore, 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
 
 98 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 and shaded, so as to produce the appearance of a 
 painting, the less suitable is it for a cushion or a foot- 
 stool 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 con- 
 veniently 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 more important effects 
 in the room. The crewel-work that first became gen- 
 eral 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 color 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 compass, 
 such coarse and unfinished-looking productions are 
 out of place. The drawing-room antimacassars should 
 be of finer linen, edged with lace. The design may be 
 slight, and yet delicate and graceful. The most lasting, 
 and on the whole the most appropriate and pleasing 
 effect, is gained by working the entire pattern in one- 
 colored silk or fine crewel, say blue or gold-color on a 
 white ground. These will wash and wear, and look 
 delicate and harmonious to the last.
 
 DECORATIVE ART COLOR, ETC. 99 
 
 But the time would fail me even to touch upon the 
 many articles that may be fitly beautified by embroid- 
 ery, and the various kinds of embroider)' 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 originate for themselves patterns 
 and colors 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 moderate 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 interesting for historical 
 reasons, and for its quaint archaic simplicity ; the older 
 tapestry may be useful for study, as having many beau- 
 ties in its mode of representing decorative foliage and 
 flowers, but it is not suitable for imitation and repro- 
 duction 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 seventeenth 
 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 atten- 
 tion. In this style are massive quilts of the seven- 
 teenth century, with bold flower patterns overlaying
 
 IOO LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 an elaborately quilted ground. There is also coarser 
 work of the same century 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 considered ; so that 
 reproduction of some of their patterns and colors 
 would accompany appropriately some of the Queen 
 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 color and design than the deco- 
 rative works of India. But, as Mr. Ruskin points out, 
 " it has one curious character distinguishing it from all 
 other art of equal merit in design : // never represents 
 a natural fact." It either forms its compositions out 
 of meaningless fragments of color and flowings 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 colored with an unerring instinct, as 
 true as the Indian, only with such different aims. I 
 have a few specimens here of Indian work, and some 
 also of Turkish, Cretan, Maltese, which are kindred to 
 it in spirit and intention ; never representing Nature 
 literally, but changing, arranging, conventionalizing.
 
 DECORATIVE ART COLOR, ETC. IOI 
 
 In the Chinese mandarin's robe, the work approxi- 
 mates more to the Japanese method, boldly carrying 
 out a brilliant scheme of color, and following 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. An historical survey of the arts of dress 
 and needlework, for instance, with some study of de- 
 sign and detail, would be, I think, not without interest 
 and profit. I trust, whatever else I have failed in ex- 
 pressing, that this at least is clear, that any serious 
 consideration of any part of the 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 labor ; that the work must 
 be sincere and good to be successful, and that will 
 tend to make the decoration appropriate and beauti- 
 ful. 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 re- 
 quirements of material use.
 
 IV. FINE ARTS. 
 
 IN attempting a description of the Fine Arts, their 
 proper aim and various modes of expressing that aim, 
 I must begin by reminding you of what I said in the 
 first lecture. Taking the definition of Art in its widest 
 sense, " human labor 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 un- 
 helped by the soul to fulfil all human necessities 
 apart from considerations of beauty. 
 
 Secondly, The arts of decoration; in which man, 
 by adorning and enriching the productions of the arts 
 of pure use, ministers 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
 
 FINE ARTS. IO3 
 
 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 those, 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 " Renais- 
 sance in Italy," " that the arts in their origin are de- 
 pendent on religion. Art aims at expressing an ideal, 
 and this ideal is the transfiguration of human elements 
 into something nobler, felt and apprehended by the 
 imagination. Such an ideal, such an all-embracing 
 glorification of humanity, only exists for simple minds 
 and unsophisticated 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 three thousand years back. In that space of 
 time, races of men and animals have become extinct ;
 
 IO4 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 whole systems of science and cycles of learning have 
 been superseded and forgotten ; religions, govern- 
 ments, kingdoms, laws, and politics have crumbled 
 and disappeared : but these ancient fragments of arch- 
 itecture, 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 
 instincts 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 colors, 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 univer- 
 sal formula," but to consider the generally accepted 
 opinion of mankind at large, and to 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
 
 FINE ARTS. 105 
 
 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 Shak- 
 speare is more appreciated, more admired, more stud- 
 ied, 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 playwright of some vivacity. 
 His plays kept the stage, it is true ; but up to the pres- 
 ent century they were largely remodelled, corrected, 
 and cut down by any ignorant manager who had occa- 
 sion for them, and even literary men of repute re-wrote 
 and modified and " improved " them. But all the 
 while Shakspeare's hold on the hearts of his country- 
 men grew and grew; his works became known, ad- 
 mired, discussed, translated in Germany, in France, 
 a whole Shakspearian literature has grown up both 
 there and here, and so dear and familiar have his 
 writings become, that wherever the Englishman wan- 
 ders, in whatever remote and unfriended region, his 
 Shakspeare 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 certainly the most popular and familiar, 
 of the fine arts. In the same way a similar pre-emi- 
 nence being given by the universal vote to great 
 creators in other arts, such as Raphael in painting, 
 Pheidias in sculpture, Handel in music, their rep- 
 utation waxes more and more as the years roll on,
 
 106 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 their claims to excellence growing ever more fully un- 
 derstood. 
 
 So do the best and greatest survive, and not only 
 withstand all shocks of time and change, but seem to 
 grow the greater for them, because of their strength 
 of unconquerable beauty. " No art that has been 
 considered 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 mid- 
 dling, but only one about the best or the worst. The 
 world may differ as to the exact degree of merit pos- 
 sessed 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 analyze them, to try to find out what 
 it is in the thing that so moves us. In a natural scene, 
 it may be sense of space, beauty of color, impression 
 of peace and repose at the end of a day. In a per- 
 son, it may be consistently elevated conduct or aims, 
 or cheerfulness of spirit, or grace of demeanor, or 
 frequent changes of expression, or delicate features 
 and coloring. At all events, there is some quality,
 
 FINE ARTS. lO/ 
 
 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 questionings, 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 important, 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 tempera- 
 ment, the power of being deeply moved by the pres- 
 ence of beautiful objects. He will remember 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 ex- 
 plained ; and when we have said that some forms and 
 colors 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 disagreeable. But he who 
 inquires as closely as possible into his sensations of 
 pleasure or aversion with regard to matters of art,
 
 IO8 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 and cultivates his faculties to the utmost, is a person 
 of taste. 
 
 The generally accepted type of beauty in natural 
 things alone has varied much in the different periods 
 of the world, and among different races of men. Dif- 
 ferent qualities, both of mind and of body, are admired 
 at different stages of civilization. 
 
 Personal bravery, for instance, a man's first and 
 most necessary endowment in times of perpetual war- 
 fare, 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 pos- 
 sesses it or not. Bodily qualifications, too, have their 
 various estimates. Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson says, 
 in his "Travels in the Cevennes," 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 civilization, admire a diminutive 
 and distorted foot; the English and French, at the 
 centre of Western civilization, admire a diminutive 
 and distorted waist ; a certain race of Indians culti- 
 vate 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 differ- 
 ences of opinion in matters of more delicate variation 
 in colors and shapes.
 
 FINE ARTS. 109 
 
 It has been said that no race 01 man bred in wild 
 country ever enjoys landscape. It is a pleasure that 
 belongs to modern times, to highly civilized 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 sav- 
 age, is quite insensible to the charm of a beautiful 
 landscape. 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 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 color, 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 something of wildness, of desola- 
 tion ; and of an English inland home, 
 
 " Gray twilight poured 
 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
 
 IIO LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 definite hand than that 
 of the " great artist Memory." We write our descrip- 
 tion, 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 incli- 
 nation 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 
 appreciation 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, 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 expressed admira- 
 tion of nature, there is a great deal of ignorance and
 
 FINE ARTS. Ill 
 
 want of observation regarding its external facts. 
 " Men," says Ruskin, "' pre-occupied with business or 
 care, receive from nature merely the inevitable sensa- 
 tions of blueness, redness, light, darkness, 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 feeling these produce 
 in people's minds is translated by them wrongly as 
 blueness and clearness. 
 
 There is occasional incapacity in the eye for distin- 
 guishing and receiving pleasure from forms and colors, 
 as there is occasional incapacity in the ear for distin- 
 guishing 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 enjoyments 
 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,
 
 112 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 become keener and quicker nay, are often called 
 into existence by such cultivation of the ear and 
 the eye ; and so with the corresponding sensations 
 of pleasure in correctness, in tunefulness, in grace, in 
 harmony 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 color in it 
 that else we should never have discovered ; and if by 
 such cultivation of the eye we learn to see truly the 
 facts of nature, we shall by the same means find our- 
 selves greatly assisted in understanding the aims of 
 Art, less familiar and more intangible as they are ; and 
 bringng mental qualifications to the aid of the senses, 
 powers of reflection, memory, imagination, we 
 shall be properly equipped for the judgment and 
 appreciation of the fine arts. 
 
 The fine arts fall naturally into two groups. One 
 group consisting of those arts whose productions cor- 
 respond to real objects, they may be called imitative 
 arts, poetry, painting, sculpture. The second group 
 consisting of those which belong in part to science, 
 as having mathematical relations, these are music 
 and architecture. 
 
 Poetry and music only belong to my subject by way 
 of illustration : they, being built up of sounds, not 
 sights, of words and notes, not form and color, appeal 
 to a set of outward perceptions different from those to 
 which the plastic arts as painting, sculpture, and 
 architecture have been called appeal. Still, as I 
 believe, the essence, the soul, of all of these, is the
 
 FINE ARTS. 113 
 
 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 perhaps help 
 us to realize better the analogy that really exists 
 among the arts, and the identity of the spirit ani- 
 mating 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 
 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 de- 
 tails, strategical dispositions, and statistics generally ; 
 so that, if we want a satisfactory account from an 
 historical or a military point of view, we must turn to 
 a different chronicler. Not that the poetical view is 
 false, but it is different: the rush of melodiously for- 
 cible words paint the glow, the ardor of combat, the 
 glory of victor}', that are certainly part of the truth, 
 but the part that belongs to the imagination; and 
 that part the sober chronicler leaves alone, busying 
 himself with making 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 :
 
 114 LECTURES ON ART, 
 
 "Many a time has banished Norfolk fought 
 For Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field, 
 Streaming the ensign of the Christian Cross 
 Against black Pagans, Turks, and Saracens ; 
 And, toiled 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 unto his captain Christ, 
 Under whose colors he had fought so long." 
 
 Think how this would stand in a biographical dic- 
 tionary, 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 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 mechani- 
 cal part, a technical knowledge, belonging to each of 
 the fine arts ; but the possession of them alone does
 
 FINE ARTS. 115 
 
 not constitute the artist. The rules of versification, 
 and knowledge of the sounds and quantities of sylla- 
 bles and the correct use and management of words 
 these are the mechanical parts of poetry. With these 
 the poet works, as the painter with laws of perspec- 
 tive, rules of anatomy, and acquaintance with the 
 nature and effect of colors : as the sculptor by the 
 rules of anatomy too, and skill of hand, and knowl- 
 edge 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 incommunicable gift ot 
 genius as well. 
 
 Skill in words alone, without genius, produces long, 
 dry descriptions, moral dissertations, and detailed his- 
 tories, only differing from prose by being cut into 
 lengths and having a certain number of rhyming syl- 
 lables. Such are Philips's epic poem "Cider-Making," 
 or Armstrong's on the " Art of Preserving Health." 
 
 " I low 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 painting, this 
 same uninspired industry or skill produces literal rep- 
 resentations 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.
 
 Il6 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 understand what belongs to 
 the great in other arts. 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 architect, 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. Shakespeare, Raphael, Pheidias, 
 each had for his original subjects and models only 
 literal circumstances, 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 Day," the monster at Temple 
 Bar, deliver no message of beauty; they have none 
 to deliver. They would have been much more wel- 
 come and appropriate in the form of a doctor's pre- 
 scription, a caricature in Punch, or a macadamized
 
 FINE ARTS. II/ 
 
 road, than in their usurping of the forms of fine art 
 without its spirit. 
 
 I have said that these three arts poetry, paint- 
 ing, 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 admi- 
 ration we feel for them, that the imitation 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 lan- 
 guage, for jingle of rhymes, for clever reproduction in 
 words of natural sounds. And there the admiration 
 must end : 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
 
 Il8 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 Parrha- 
 sius, the rival of Zeuxis, who was asked to withdraw 
 the curtain and show his picture, when the curtain 
 turned out to be the picture itself, and Zeuxis acknowl- 
 edged himself surpassed, since he had only deceived 
 birds, but Parrhasius, men. These stories, childish as 
 they seem, go to prove that close imitation of Nature, 
 were it the legitimate object in painting, is only possi- 
 ble 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 pas- 
 ture. 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 sur- 
 prise can never be repeated : it is a juggling trick 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
 
 FINE ARTS. 119 
 
 have actually taken place : these might be raw mate- 
 rial 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 color; but with 
 that deficiency, as we are 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 selection, 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, 
 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 embodi- 
 ment of them. Just as we expect the poet to discover 
 and express for us thoughts and feeling and ideas that 
 we should not have discovered or expressed for our- 
 selves, so we should expect 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 reproduction. I 
 do not say that a painting should not be natural, but 
 that it should not seek to directly imitate Nature. 
 " Realization to the mind does not necessitate decep-
 
 120 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 tion to the eye." We should be made by the painter 
 to realize 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," says Mr. Ruskin, " may be likened to a glass 
 indeed, but to a transparent glass of sweet and strange 
 color, that gives new tones to what we see through it, 
 and of strength and clearness to let us se 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 painting. Details fitly represented and ac- 
 cepted in painting seem mean or superfluous in sculp- 
 ture. The most ordinary worker in stone must feel 
 this. The stone is so severe, so lasting, so uncom- 
 promising, 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; won- 
 derful skill, all worse than wasted, for who would really 
 think a veil more interesting than a face ? The sculp- 
 tor must have had nothing to express, to communi- 
 cate, 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
 
 FINE ARTS. 121 
 
 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 harmonize with the form and organization, and, 
 with grace of arrangement, clinging to it, and receiv- 
 ing 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, re- 
 joicing 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 architecture ; 
 music being based on the science of harmony, and 
 architecture on the mathematical and mechanical sci- 
 ences. Music, composed and produced in accordance 
 with the fixed relations between musical sounds, ap- 
 peals entirely, while poetry only appeals partly, to the 
 ear : it expresses what cannot be expressed by words 
 or color or form. In attempting to describe the sort 
 of pleasure one feels in listening to a Beethoven sym- 
 phony, 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
 
 122 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 notes are heard. Successive sounds, which we call 
 melody, gather definiteness of meaning from the words 
 to which they are often joined ; but the simultaneous 
 sounds of harmony alone never give up their secret, 
 even though we know every contrivance by which they 
 belong to each other and to their place. A certain 
 amount of imitation of natural sounds seems to belong 
 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 Beethoven'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 magnificently and poetically sug- 
 gestive, 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 together, and a 
 confused rumble of sound is 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
 
 FINE ARTS. 123 
 
 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, me- 
 chanic, 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 distinctively mark the artist are 
 those of sympathy and imagination. . . . We all have 
 a general and sufficient idea of imagination, and of its 
 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 recognize it, 
 acknowledging it to be a greater power than manipula- 
 tion, or calculation, or observation, or any other human 
 faculty. 
 
 " If we see an old woman," he says, " spinning 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 calcu- 
 lation ; 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
 
 124 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 does his 
 working-drawing well, we praise him for his manipula- 
 tion ; 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 be- 
 side all this, else we cannot praise him for his imagina- 
 tion, or 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 propor- 
 tion 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 fitness, being the natural 
 outcome and flower of the higher instincts of man, yet 
 there have been times in his history when, the condi- 
 tions and surroundings being surpassingly favorable to 
 its growth, some one of the arts has reached appar- 
 ently the highest pitch of perfection, and must remain
 
 FINE ARTS. 125 
 
 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 pur- 
 poses." So there have been Egyptian, Greek, Gothic, 
 and other styles in architecture. In like manner there 
 have been different great schools of poetry, theGreek 
 tragedy, the Elizabethan drama, the Augustan age, and 
 many others. But, unlike architecture and poetry, 
 painting, sculpture, and music have each had but one 
 great period. Sculpture takes the earliest place, and 
 attains its highest perfection in Greece during the age 
 of Pheidias. Next, at a wide interval, comes the great 
 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 possession of the best, both in crea- 
 tion and execution. 
 
 " No great school," says Mr. Ruskin, " ever yet ex- 
 isted 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 per- 
 fect 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
 
 126 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 influ- 
 ence those workers, and inspire them with his own 
 ideas, compelling them, as it were, to work in accord- 
 ance with his spirit." 
 
 So at the head of the Athenian school stood Phei- 
 dias ; 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 charac- 
 ter 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 color 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 acquaint- 
 ance 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 them in mind, 
 and to associate each of them with one of three works 
 of art which doubtless you have all either seen or con- 
 tinually heard of, the "Venus" of Melos, belonging 
 to the Athenian school of Pheidias ; Raphael's " Dis-
 
 UalM-VEN VS CaR--WlNGLEsy.VICTOR.Yj 
 or MEUOS-
 
 FINE ARTS. 129 
 
 pute of the Sacrament," ' of the Florentine school ; 
 and Titian's " Flora," of the Venetian school. 
 
 And first the " Venus." A 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 comprehend what sculpture at its best really is. A 
 divine grace and radiance seemed to shine forth from 
 this beautiful woman. Though the sphere 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 person- 
 ality. To my mind, she is the Dea certe, the real 
 goddess, the true Venus of the 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 falseness, something of 
 frailty : this alone is the perfect goddess. 
 
 Now to come to the example of the Florentine 
 school, the " Dispute concerning the Sacrament," 
 by Raphael. 
 
 It was about the middle of the year 1508 that Ra- 
 phael received from Pope Julius II. a commission to 
 adorn the splendid rooms of the Vatican with paint- 
 ings. 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 
 
 1 See p. xo3.
 
 I3O LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 countenance a 
 divine mildness and mercy ; by his side are the Ma- 
 donna, 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 Godhead 
 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 dis- 
 played 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 sup- 
 posed to have at such a time, enthusiasm, exalted be- 
 lief, concentrated thought, careful investigation, fervent 
 devotion, dispute, and doubt. " This picture," says 
 Mr. Ruskm, " 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 pre-Raphaelitcs 
 will admit it. Well, there you have the truth 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, what-
 
 FINE ARTS. 131 
 
 soever is truly thoughtful, affectionate, 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 cen- 
 tral truth, the open expression of the living human 
 soul." 
 
 I can say very little about my third example, the 
 " Flora " of Titian, of the Venetian school, whose aim 
 was the representation of color and shade, for the 
 very reason that these qualities cannot fitly be repro- 
 duced in a photograph or engraving. Perhaps some 
 of my hearers may be so fortunate as to have seen the 
 original in the Uffizi Gallery at Florence ; and nothing 
 but a sight of the original can give a just idea of the 
 glory of the coloring, the tender glow of the 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 characteristics of this Venetian school, and 
 the reasons 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 instru- 
 ment 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
 
 132 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 by inquiring into the reasons of the general verdict of 
 mankind about the great masterpieces of art, and also 
 studying and cultivating our own sensations with regard 
 to them. 
 
 I will remind you that the fine arts are 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, paint- 
 ing, 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, " Realization to the mind does not necessitate 
 deception to the eye." 
 
 Of the arts thus classified, only painting, sculpture, 
 architecture, belong to my present subject. They 
 appeal, through the eye, exclusively 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 characterized the three 
 great schools of perfect Art : 
 
 The Athenian school of sculpture. 
 
 The Florentine school of expression in painting. 
 
 The Venetian school of color and light and shade in 
 painting. 
 
 These will be my subject on the next two occasions. 
 
 By fixing these in the mind, and associating with 
 them these three works of world-wide renown, a sort 
 of framework will be formed, into which may be fitted
 
 FINE ARTS. 133 
 
 whatever is gained by later knowledge and experience 
 and observation. At first it is very possible that we 
 may feel ourselves slow to perceive what are the tran- 
 scendent 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 per- 
 ish with it, as we learn to love Shakspeare and Bee- 
 thoven. 
 
 " 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'crcast, 
 They alway must be with us, or we die."
 
 . 
 
 TEMPLE.OFPOSEJDON 
 
 -q 
 
 V. FINE ART SCULPTURE AND ARCHI- 
 TECTURE. 
 
 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 of 
 knowledge and interest in these things, in the minds 
 of those in whom it is not already made ; to construct 
 '34
 
 SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 1 35 
 
 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, inanimate substances I have 
 just named, producing buildings and monuments, 
 things still inorganic and inanimate, sculpture, deal- 
 ing with the same substances, produces images of or- 
 ganic, animate form ; the one, by statues, groups, and 
 reliefs, lending her aid to the other by filling, adorn- 
 ing, and enriching pediment and arch, niche and 
 column. 
 
 As I have said, architecture has had several styles 
 and periods of excellence : sculpture only one, and 
 that one the school of Athens under Pheidias. The 
 arts, however, 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 perfection. In this respect Egyptian art 
 differs in a marked manner from the art of other na- 
 tions of which we can trace the origin. The general 
 rule is, that, as a nation rises into greater freedom and
 
 136 LECTURES OAT ART. 
 
 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 fourteenth 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 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 labor which I have before noticed to 
 be destnictive to any art of a high kind prevailed in 
 Egyptian art. In the production of their wall-paint- 
 ings which have come down to us, and from which 
 we learn many curious and useful things, one man pre- 
 pared the surface, a second drew the outline, a third 
 hollowed the outlines for the sunk relief, a fourth laid 
 on the color. 
 
 Then, too, in Egypt, the artist was looked on as an 
 artisan, and was classed in the lowest rank. No one, 
 from natural inclination or especial impulse, selected 
 Art as his pursuit; but the son followed, as in all
 
 SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 137 
 
 crafts and professions, the mode of life of his father, 
 and set his foot in the tracks of his predecessor, 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 admir- 
 able powers of design, gifts of color, perfection of 
 workmanship, the art of these nations has been so 
 bound down by restrictions, and trammelled by slavish 
 conditions, that it could never attain to any true de- 
 velopment, 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 pro- 
 duction, 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 pagoda, are familiar to 
 all of us ; for they remained 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, 
 expression. 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,
 
 138 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 beautiful type of the human 
 face divine ? 
 
 And when we look round for this type, it is the 
 Greek face that attracts our admiration 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 mathemati- 
 cal or mechanical proportions exclusively. The Greek 
 apprehends 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 in- 
 capable 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, any thing but 
 carry water, or the bowman any thing but hold his bow 
 extended 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 with its more real anatomy, becomes 
 full also of human soul. . . In the works of the
 
 SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 139 
 
 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 reproduc- 
 tion 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 perfect 
 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 civili- 
 zation of the Greeks, something of their habits of life, 
 and ways of thinking and feeling. For, in explaining 
 to ourselves, realizing, understanding, something of one 
 great period of Art undeniably 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 pro- 
 ductions, 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
 
 I4O LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 degree ; and, happy in the conscious possession 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. 
 
 "By no people," says Winckelmann, "has beauty 
 been so highly esteemed as by the Greeks. The 
 priests of a youthful Jupiter at /Egae, of the Isme- 
 nian Apollo, of the priest who at Tanagra led the 
 procession of Mercury, bearing a lamb upon his shoul- 
 ders, 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 su- 
 preme beauty ever before their eyes. Beauty even 
 gave a right to fame, and we find in Greek histories 
 the most beautiful people distinguished. There were 
 established contests for beauty by Cypselus, king of 
 Arcadia, by the river Alpheiis ; and at Sparta, and at 
 Lesbos in the temple of Juno, and among the Parrhavii,
 
 SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 14! 
 
 there were contests for beauty among women." So 
 in those times were natural advantages more honored 
 than learning. The civilized 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 manner nearly always accompany 
 them. The reason of this may be found in the com- 
 parative 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 severest homilies of the 
 moralist of childhood are directed against pride of 
 person and appearance : 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, beautiful bodies : any thing 
 morbid or overwrought was impossible to them. And
 
 142 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 quali- 
 ties they most valued were propriety, grace, modesty, 
 reverence to the aged : they disliked any undignified 
 disturbance of manner, any excitement about trifles, 
 over-haste to tell news, undue eagerness or curiosity, 
 impatience to open a letter, quick walking, crossed 
 legs, any hasty, sudden, 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 craftsmanship and beauty. 
 Mr. Pater makes us remark how in Homer there is a 
 constant pre-occupation with the beauty of the com- 
 mon 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 car- 
 pentery, 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 color and texture of woven 
 stuff are carefully noted, the fineness, closeness, soft- 
 ness, pliancy, gloss, the whiteness or nectar-like tints
 
 SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 143 
 
 in which the weaver delights to work ; to weave the 
 sea-purple threads is the appropriate 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. 
 Hephsestos (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 requirements ; there was no ostentation, no ex- 
 travagance, no undue luxury, no vulgarity ; 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, con- 
 sisted of a longer or shorter under-garment, the " chi- 
 ton," like a sleeveless shirt, and worn without a 
 girdle, and a mantle-like upper garment, the " hima- 
 tion," 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 gar- 
 ment did not depend on the tailor or the dressmaker ; 
 but every man and woman arranged his or her own
 
 144 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 garment in the way most suited to individual character 
 and taste, so that it became of itself a form of expres- 
 sion. 
 
 The national 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 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 an 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 honored 
 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 of 
 Socrates. An artist might become a lawgiver if he
 
 SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 145 
 
 desired, or he might be chosen to command an army, 
 and his statue had the especial honor of being placed 
 near to those of the gods : his reputation was not de- 
 pendent 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 entertained 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 journeys, 
 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 be- 
 lieved 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 suf- 
 fering, 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
 
 146 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 of the gods by monstrous deformity of the general 
 type, in the clear, pure myths of the Greeks, all misty 
 immensity vanished, and man created the gods after 
 his own image. Although whole stages of childlike 
 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 monstrous 
 creations of the East is still preserved, as in the hun- 
 dred-breasted Artemis of the Ephesians or the four- 
 armed Apollo of the I^acedoemonians, 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 
 sculptures of the Parthenon. A cleaf view of the best 
 work of the best time will be better grasped and re- 
 tamed 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 died about the age 
 of sixty-eight. One of his earlier works was a colossal 
 statue of Athene, something like seventy feet high : it 
 stood on the Acropolis at Athens, and could be seen
 
 SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE, 147 
 
 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 chrys- 
 elephantine statue of the Olympian Zeus. Still it is 
 in the Parthenon, the splendid temple for Athene's 
 feasts, that his genius, and its influence over those 
 who worked with him, shone at its greatest : probably 
 the whole design of the temple, as well as its sculptural 
 decorations, was planned and executed under his super- 
 intendence. 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 sculptures were the frieze that covered the upper 
 part of the wall within the colonnade, and the pedi- 
 ments eastern and western. In later times the Parthe- 
 non from a Pagan temple 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 suffered from the explosion 
 of a shell in a powder-magazine contained within the 
 building 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 me- 
 mentos of their brainless excursions. In the years 
 1801-3 tne sculptures of the Parthenon then remaining 
 were removed to England by the Earl of Elgin, pur-
 
 148 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 chased from him by the Government, and placed in 
 the British Museum. Lord Byron, in his " Childe 
 Harold," bitterly laments what he calls 
 
 " the modern Pict's ignoble boast, 
 To rive what Goth, and Turk, and Time hath spared." 
 
 But I, for one, see no reason but to rejoice that these 
 sublime and perfectly beautiful works are within our 
 reach, so that we may enjoy them at our leisure, with- 
 out the labor and distractions of travelling. I can 
 only wish that the world in general were not so con- 
 tent with knowing them by hearsay only, instead of 
 using their privileges. 
 
 The subject of the eastern pediment of the Par- 
 thenon 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 for- 
 ward, 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 cos- 
 tume clings closely to the form, and over the lower 
 half of the body is thrown a mantle of thicker sub- 
 stance. The forms of these women are large and 
 robust, but at the same time supple and graceful, and 
 expressing perfect maturity of womanhood. Now, in 
 a few words to describe the frieze which ran along the 
 sides of the temple within the colonnade, that world-
 
 SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 149 
 
 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 Athens. A sol- 
 emn sacrifice, equestrian and gymnastic contests, and 
 the Pyrrhic dance, were all included in the ceremo- 
 nial ; 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 Par- 
 thenon. In this procession all that was best and greatest 
 in Athens appeared; the gentle graces of maiden- 
 hood ; the fresh strength of beautiful youths, trained 
 in the gymnasia ; the dignity of older men, and magis- 
 trates 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 pro- 
 cession 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 charm- 
 ing, modest figures, in festive garments of delicate 
 texture, with a simple and serious air, as if absorbed 
 in the ceremony; then come sacrificial animals, fol- 
 lowing quietly, standing and struggling, bearers of sac- 
 rificial gifts, flute-players and musicians, warriors in 
 chariots of four horses ; then detached horsemen ; and 
 lastly, youths in the prime of strength and beauty, 
 preparing for the procession, bridling and curbing 
 their steeds, the matchless horses of the Parthenon.
 
 I5O LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 Thus did Pheidias' representation of the Panathenaic 
 procession include all that was fairest, greatest, best, 
 in Athens ; and so may we take it as a type, an epi- 
 tome, 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 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 Propylaea. 
 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 farther to the right, with 
 its forest of pillars and richly sculptured pediments ; 
 while to the left could be seen a portion of the Erech- 
 theium, 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 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 pro- 
 duced did not last long : it ceased with the beginning
 
 SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. I$I 
 
 of the Peloponnesian War. Great names and great 
 works, it is true, followed ; but the period I have de- 
 scribed remained ever after unapproached in its per- 
 fection. 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 sculpture ; and, 
 although they impress us greatly by their power of 
 dramatic expression and their wonderful living vigor, 
 they have not the earlier serenity, majesty, and repose 
 that make the figures of Pheidias so perfectly de- 
 lightful 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 con- 
 trast between 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 civilization ; the Roman, after conquest, 
 polity. The civilization of the Greek tended to simpli- 
 city; that of the Roman, to costliness 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 ^Eneid : 
 " Rome has somewhat better to do namely, law and 
 dominion.'*
 
 152 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 And so it was that the Romans became the pupils 
 of the Greeks in poetry, in Art, in all expression of in- 
 tellectual 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 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 perfec- 
 tion, applied first to aqueducts, bridges, viaducts, 
 and then to splendid public buildings 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 sub- 
 jugation of the Greeks by the Romans, the conquered 
 had been the masters of the conquerors in every thing 
 belonging to taste and Art. 
 
 So, after Greece became in name as well as in fact 
 a Roman province, a new school of Athenian sculpture 
 arose in Rome : this was in the early days of the em- 
 pire. To this later school belong the Medicean 
 Venus, the Farnese Hercules, and the Apollo Belve- 
 dere. These, until modern discoveries and taste de-
 
 SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 153 
 
 cided 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 simplicity, the charm of uncon- 
 scious beauty. 
 
 More essentially Roman than these are the innumer- 
 able 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 a 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. 
 So it followed that their architecture, though possess- 
 ing great qualities of solidity, strength, and richness 
 of execution, of material ; their sculpture, though pos- 
 sessing accuracy, fidelity, 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 Ro- 
 man. 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.
 
 154 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 And now I must take a great leap. I must pass 
 over the early years of the Christian Church. Chris- 
 tianity, fettered by the forms of antique life at enmity 
 with its spirit, abhorring its superstition and idolatry, 
 rejected and dreaded the art of the sculptor and his 
 graven image. The necessity for providing buildings 
 worthy for Christian worship led at first to the adapta- 
 tion, for that purpose, of Roman temples and basilicas, 
 with their rows of columns and rounded arches ; and 
 as the seat of empire was transferred from Rome to 
 Byzantium, architecture that architecture that had 
 been Greek then put on different features, and be- 
 came Byzantine Romanesque. The first ten centuries 
 A.D. were centuries of destruction, of struggle, the 
 old spirit contending with the new, till, when at last 
 the victory of Christianity over Paganism was com- 
 plete, 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 characterizing these 
 three great architectural styles, the Greek, the Ro- 
 manesque, 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 these m your 
 minds by associating them with the characteristics of 
 three buildings. 
 
 First, as belonging to the Greek architecture of the 
 lintel (horizontal lines resting on columns), I should
 
 SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 15$ 
 
 name the Parthenon, originally perhaps the most per- 
 fect example, but too shattered now for any complete 
 observation : instead of this, here is the temple of Po- 
 seidon at Psestum ' in Lower Italy, which belongs to the 
 same period as all the other best Greek art, the fifth 
 century B.C. This, one of the best-preserved monu- 
 ments of so great an antiquity, stands in solemn isola- 
 tion 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 im- 
 presses 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 where 
 the support meets the burden ; in front, the pediment 
 with its now vanished sculptures. This is the archi- 
 tecture of the lintel. 
 
 Second, as an example of the Romanesque architec- 
 ture rounded arch and cupola there is St. Mark's 
 at Venice. 
 
 " St. Mark," says an old chronicler, " having 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, 
 
 1 See heading of chapter.
 
 1 56 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 * 
 
 snatched into ecstasy, heard the voice of an angel say- 
 ing 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 
 hundred years later. I will quote a few words from 
 Mr. Ruskin's description of it : "A multitude of pil- 
 lars and white domes clustered into a long, low pyramid 
 of colored 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 alabastc? ; 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 continuous chain of language 
 and of life, angels and the signs of heaven, and the 
 labors 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 architecture of 
 the pointed arch and perpendicular lines we will take 
 the Cathedral of Amiens. When to the Romanesque 
 epoch of architecture, of which the type is the
 
 SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 157 
 
 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 invention could have produced. 
 And since that style has come to be honored 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 cen- 
 turies 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 foun- 
 dation ; stands in perfect strength with the least possi- 
 ble substance in its bars ; connects niche with niche, 
 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 calculated profusion, the living elements of 
 its sculpture, sculpture in the quatrefoils, sculpture 
 in the brackets, sculpture in the gargoyles, sculpture in 
 the niches, sculpture in the ridges and hollows of its 
 mouldings ; 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 de- 
 light in the things he thought of as he carved, the 
 builder began to pride himself in his own workman- 
 ship, and how he should win the praise of men for the 
 cleverness of his carving, and what wonderful impossi-
 
 158 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 ble things he could contrive to do. "And the ca- 
 tastrophe " (our teacher goes on) " was instant and 
 irrevocable. Architecture became in France a mere 
 web of waving lines ; in England, a mere grating of 
 perpendicular ones. Redundance was substituted for 
 invention, and geometry for passion ; the 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 print- 
 ing, the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks, and 
 the discovery of America. The first, by increasing the 
 general spread of knowledge and thought ; the second, 
 by carrying a stream of Greek culture to the West ; the 
 third, by enlarging 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 enthusi- 
 asm for classic forms, the revival of the study of Nature 
 in the Greek spirit, 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
 
 SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 1 59 
 
 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 splendor 
 by the later civilization ; and I must omit any mention 
 of the Gothic revival in our own century. My more 
 immediate 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 splendor, 
 then in part subsiding, only to re-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 treatment 
 of many modern painters, such as Sir Frederick Leigh- 
 ton 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
 
 160 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 confu- 
 sion of dressmakers. In London and at Oxford, the 
 Greek drama has been played, both in Greek and in 
 English ; some of our children's favorite story-books 
 are the Greek fairy-tales of gods and heroes. And 
 one thing more, which must not be missed in reckoning 
 up our debts to the Greeks : as the marvellous beau- 
 ties of God's work in Nature have been revealed to us 
 through the language 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 conclusion, 
 about the state of the arts of sculpture and architec- 
 ture at the present day. 
 
 "Sculpture," said Sir Frederick Leighton in his 
 speech at the last Academy dinner (1881), " is shaking 
 off its sleep, and striving 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 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, as- 
 sisted by Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, these
 
 SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. l6l 
 
 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 wonder 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 any thing 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 try- 
 ing 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 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 uninterest- 
 ing) ; but ordinary obvious mending would almost 
 always have kept them standing, pieces of nature and 
 of history. But of late years a great uprising of eccle- 
 siastical zeal, coinciding with a great increase of study 
 and consequently of knowledge of mediaeval architec- 
 ture, has driven people into spending their money on 
 these buildings, not merely with the purpose of repair- 
 ing them, of keeping "them safe, clean, and wind and 
 water tight, but also of ' restoring ' them to some ideal 
 state of perfection ; sweeping away, if possible, all signs 
 of what has befallen them at least since the Reforma-
 
 1 62 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 tion, 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 point of 
 view, this restoration must be as impossible to bring 
 about as the attempt at it is destructive to the build- 
 ings so dealt with. I scarcely like to think what a great 
 part of them have been made nearly useless to stu- 
 dents of Art and history. Unless you knew a great 
 deal about architecture, you perhaps would scarce un- 
 derstand 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 reck- 
 lessly with valuable and national monuments, which 
 when once gone can never be replaced by any splen- 
 dor of modern Art, is doing a very sorry service to the 
 state." 
 
 Perhaps it may be said that house-architecture 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, attracting the 
 eye by their brightness of color and cheerful irregular- 
 ity, in contrast to 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 unmistak-
 
 SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE. 163 
 
 ably paint ; no cast-iron ornament, but \vxn&-ivrought 
 ornament 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 conven- 
 ience, we shall have an ideal dwelling-house, a home 
 of cheerfulness, 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 costli- 
 ness and little grandeur. But the ho??ie, that, at least, 
 it seems within our power to make solid and beautiful 
 and comfortable, ^-something 
 
 " not too bright or good 
 For human nature's daily food." 
 
 And with this, for the present at least, we must be 
 satisfied.
 
 LEONARDO-DA- VINCI 
 
 VI. FINE ART PAINTING. 
 
 IT may be said, on reviewing the ground that we 
 have already traversed, that Art is a universal lan- 
 guage, 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 civilization. 
 And this metaphor the likening of Art to a lan- 
 guage may be carried far in many directions, but it 
 is in one alone that 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 subject and the idea are great and 
 elevated, but also the form, the workmanship, are in 
 themselves a perfect expression of the soul, the genius, 
 164
 
 FINE ART PAINTING. 165 
 
 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, Shakspeare 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 sculp- 
 ture and architecture ; 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 the natural 
 outcome of that age and period, still there have been 
 times when one of the great arts has reached a per- 
 fection 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 class- 
 ics of Art. For these do exist, undoubted, acknowl-
 
 1 66 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 edged, though as is too often the fate of such things 
 neglected and misunderstood by the generality of 
 people, who are accustomed to limit their knowledge 
 and study of Art to the picture exhibitions of the 
 year, and the current criticism on those, without hav- 
 ing prepared themselves in the least degree by the 
 study of the great paintings that hang all the year 
 round in the National Gallery or of the great sculp- 
 tures that stand all the year round in the British Mu- 
 seum. 
 
 It is as if we should limit our studies in music to 
 Gounod, to Sullivan, to Offenbach, and refuse to know 
 any thing about Handel and Beethoven. It is as if 
 we should eschew Shakspeare, and read nothing but 
 Dickens and Ouida. I do not mean to set apart these 
 as bad and unworthy, in contradistinction to the oth- 
 ers ; 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 appre- 
 ciate them at their just value. 
 
 The reproach attending the too great neglect and 
 ignorance of the great national collections of Art be- 
 longs more particularly 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 facilitated in these days by good 
 copies and reproductions of great originals, and by 
 rapidity and ease of travelling, so that the originals
 
 FINE ART PAINTING. 
 
 themselves are brought so much the nearer to us. I 
 dare say I am not wrong in attributing to the gen- 
 erality of people some confusion of ideas as to the 
 old masters (as some one says, often secretly identi- 
 fied with the brown masters), or the degree of merit 
 possessed by each. If people have a tolerably 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 people come back from Italy wearied with 
 the acres of canvases 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 quar- 
 ter of the fifteenth century, and the first thirty or forty 
 years of the sixteenth century, and contains all that 
 perfect painting that we call the work of the old mas- 
 ters. 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
 
 l68 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 of irrev- 
 erence, 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 musi- 
 cian, the architect, the sculptor, the painter. He must 
 have ideas that we could not for ourselves conceive ; 
 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 : first, 
 they expressed clearly their intellectual purpose ; and 
 secondly, 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 pointing out that Raphael's 
 " Dispute of the Sacrament " is an example of the great 
 Florentine school of expression, and Titian's " Flora " 
 an example of the great Venetian school of color; 
 but in the National Gallery there are two pictures, 
 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 expression, 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
 
 FINE ART PAINTING. 169 
 
 characteristic mystery of expression ; still, the very 
 spirit of a grave, sweet mood of childhood is in the 
 infant Christ as he seems to give his innocent bene- 
 diction 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 Leonardo. For the back- 
 ground 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 color 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 re- 
 vealed to me the wonderful delight that it is possible 
 to receive from a picture that is at once perfect in 
 color, in design, in sentiment. I should think myself 
 happy if I could do something to persuade any one
 
 I/O LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 who has not yet enjoyed the great beauty of this pic- 
 ture 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 criti- 
 cisms 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 appre- 
 ciate 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 in them, and the feebleness 
 and poverty of the color, at least it would be well to 
 exactly inquire what you do feel about them, and of 
 what the vast gulf of difference between these and 
 those consists. To those who cannot feel it, it is in- 
 deed 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 excel- 
 lence of painting at the period of the Renaissance. 
 
 And as to the history of painting generally. As 
 far as our present purpose is concerned, we must pass
 
 FINE ART PAINTING. I? I 
 
 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, though by it certain religious types were created, 
 since scarcely deviated from ; we must pass over the 
 Byzantine mosaics and frescos; 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 incompleteness 
 of resources, of stretching out and reaching towards 
 perfection. The Renaissance came at last suddenly, 
 after centuries 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 glori- 
 ous era, and re-create the arts of poetry and of paint- 
 ing. After them quickly crowd in the other great 
 workers in the arts : Brunelleschi designs beautiful 
 architecture at Florence ; Ghiberti casts his 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
 
 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 Renaissance 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 them- 
 selves felt, prompting those who experience this desire, 
 to seek first one and then another means of intellect- 
 ual or imaginative 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." 
 
 The conditions under which the great Art of the fif- 
 teenth 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 teach- 
 ing of the Middle Ages, was revived ; the pre-occupa- 
 tion with the beauty of the common things of life, and 
 the liking for polish of manner, and dignity of bearing, 
 re-appeared : only all these things were accompanied 
 by magnificence and profusion, luxury and splendor, 
 greater than the world has known before or since. 
 We have, in Geprge Eliot's " Romola," a picture of
 
 FINE ART PAINTING. l?$ 
 
 Florentine life at the beginning of the sixteenth cen- 
 tury, 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 sim- 
 plicity ; 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 expres- 
 sion. 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 pityingly 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 physi- 
 cal 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 engineering,
 
 174 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 that he was not master of, as well as of every one 
 of the higher arts of human expression, poetry and 
 painting and sculpture, architecture and music. And 
 in him all this versatility of universal genius begets a 
 mysterious element of mockery, of restlessness, of cu- 
 riosity, leading him to seek after all kinds of remote 
 knowledge ; to portray strange subtleties of expression, 
 the unearthly, 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 fascinating. No one who has looked 
 at the pictures in the Louvre can have failed to be at- 
 tracted, puzzled, fascinated, by " La Gioconda," that 
 strange woman's face with its mysterious expression of 
 mockery and of wisdom ; a face not beautiful accord- 
 ing to any modern acknowledged type of beauty, and 
 yet possessing 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 renowned of his works. All that 
 remains of it is on the walls of the refectory of 
 the Dominican Church at Milan, whither Leonardo 
 had gone in 1483 at the invitation of Ludovico Sfor^a. 
 Photographs show 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 
 
 1 See heading of chapter.
 
 FINE ART PAINTING. 175 
 
 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 fortunes being far the best. The 
 death, in childbirth, of the Duchess Beatrice, was fol- 
 lowed in Ludovico by one of those paroxysms of reli- 
 gions feeling which in him were constitutional. The 
 low, gloomy Dominican Church of St. Mary of the 
 Graces had been the favorite shrine of Beatrice. She 
 had spent her last days there, full of sinister presenti- 
 ments ; 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 hun- 
 dred anecdotes were told about it, his re-touchings 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 com- 
 ing the whole length of Milan to give a single touch. 
 He painted it, not in fresco, where all must be im- 
 promptu, but in oils ; the new method which he had 
 been one of the first to welcome, because it allowed 
 of so many after- thoughts, so refined a working-out of 
 perfection. It turned out that on a plastered wall no 
 piocess 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 conventional associations. Strange, after
 
 IJ6 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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 afternoons, this figure is 
 but the faintest, most spectral of them all." So 
 says Mr. Pater ; but faint and spectral as it is, it is 
 the outward 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 asso- 
 ciated inseparably with the clear oval countenance, 
 the long hair parted in the middle, the expression 
 of sweet and pensive benignity. Besides the imper- 
 fection of the methods of the painter, and the damp- 
 ness 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
 
 FINE ART FAINTING. 
 
 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." 
 
 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 
 monopolize 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 criticised 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, 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 ges- 
 tures of life, but only the austere truths of human
 
 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 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, " sim- 
 ple persons, 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 unlike them in a total 
 absence of that balance and completeness which ex- 
 presses so well the sentiment of a self-contained, inde- 
 pendent life. In that languid figure, there is something 
 rough and Satyr-like, something akin to the rough 
 hillside on which it lies. His whole form is gathered 
 into an expression 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 prophesied 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 appre- 
 hension than that of the other two of the Florentine
 
 FINE ART PAINTING. l8l 
 
 school. His colossal Titanic works are sometimes 
 half-formed in their grandeur, as if his world were in 
 the very process of creation. The splendor 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 honor 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 
 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 Flor- 
 ence that he learned all that it behooved him to learn 
 from Leonardo and Michael Angelo : his genius had 
 its own path to tread. His life and his character from
 
 1 82 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 the first seem to have had a serenity, a harmony, a 
 happiness, that were denied to the others. In a vir- 
 tuous and refined home, governed by tender and in- 
 telligent 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 crea- 
 tive energy of Michael Angelo, nor the subtilty or the 
 fascination of Leonardo ; but a sensibility, a charm, a 
 felicity, of his own, a kind of happy intelligence of 
 temperament that communicated itself to his works. 
 The small pictures, two of them Madonnas, in the 
 National Gallery, express perfectly these characteris- 
 tics ; 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 Sacrament " 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 ex- 
 ecuted 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 Kensington 
 Museum. " The Miraculous Draught of Fishes," " The
 
 FINE ART PAINTING. 183 
 
 Consignment of the Keys to Peter," " The Curing of 
 the Lame Man," " The Death of Ananias," " The Ston- 
 ing 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 subjects ; and all of them are 
 familiar to every one in the numerous engravings, draw- 
 ings, lithographs, photographs. Let me take this op- 
 portunity of saying, that it is a good thing to learn 
 to distinguish between a photograph from a drawing 
 or engraving, and a photograph 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 color, to the artist's work, and should always 
 be chosen in preference to the other kinds. A little 
 careful observation will soon make the difference clear : 
 compare the little highly finished " Last Supper " with 
 the one from the original. If we have learned to 
 value a master's work, 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,
 
 1 84 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 visiting 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 painting, at the head of 
 which stand the great names of Titian and Giorgione, 
 Tintoret, and Paul Veronese. Color was the great 
 element of their power in painting, and on this point 
 it is not easy to say much. Form and expression may 
 more easily be discussed and described. And here I 
 may perhaps pause to say, that form or expression and 
 color are seldom, if ever, found united in highest ex- 
 cellence in a work of art. If a masterpiece of Athe- 
 nian sculpture were to be colored, it would lose instead 
 of gain by the addition. " The use of color in sculp- 
 ture," says Mr. Pater, " is but an unskilful contrivance 
 to effect by borrowing from another art what the 
 nobler sculpture effected by strictly appropriate means. 
 To get not color, but the equivalent of color, to se- 
 cure the expression and the play of life," this is the 
 problem of sculpture, whose aims therefore are per- 
 fectly distinct from those of painting ; so, only with 
 a less strongly marked difference, do the two great 
 schools of painting stand apart. The Florentine, hav- 
 ing for its first object expression of character and emo- 
 tion, does not excel in splendid effects of light and 
 shade and color ; while the Venetian, aiming first at
 
 FINE ART PAINTING. 185 
 
 those latter qualities, has small range of character and 
 subject, and little variety of emotion and expression ; 
 so that it is easy to keep the two schools distinct in 
 the mind, and easy to perceive their different charac- 
 teristics. 
 
 The Venetians found the elements of their glowing 
 effects of color in the realities of their every-day life, 
 an enchanted life of wealth, profusion, and pageantry. 
 A glittering vision of the most glorious earthly splen- 
 dor rises in the mind as we think of the Venice of 
 those days, the sixteenth-century 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 pa- 
 geants, and feasts, and music ; famed for her carved 
 and painted marriage coffers, her mirrors, her bro- 
 cades 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 colors, and in stone of agate, carnelian, ame- 
 thyst, and many-hued marble ; cabinets of ebony, 
 alabaster, or ivory, with gold and silver figures inlaid 
 with carnelian, 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 coloring no doubt 
 in some respects dimmed by time, but also ripened and 
 mellowed. A great tranquillity, majesty, dignity, fill 
 their canvases, and sink deep into the mind as we
 
 186 LECTURES OA r ART. 
 
 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 " St. Hel- 
 ena." 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 color 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 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 in Italy, 
 bids us mark the character of each. " Leonardo," he 
 says, " is the wizard or diviner : to him the Renais- 
 sance offers her mystery and lends her magic. Raphael 
 is the Phoebean singer: to "him the Renaissance re- 
 veals her joy, and dowers him with the gift of melody. 
 Michael Angelo is the prophet and sibylline 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 Venetian 
 masters lent their splendor of color, their love of phys- 
 ical 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.
 
 FINE ART PAINTING. 1 87 
 
 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. Correggio is the last of the great 
 Italian painters ; and even in him there is something 
 of sentimentality, of conscious charm, something of 
 that decadence with which the names of the Caracci, 
 Guiclo 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 opportunity that offers of 
 seeing any of their works, especially our own posses- 
 sions 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 includes 
 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.
 
 1 88 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 A. Symonds (the third volume is devoted to the Fine 
 Arts) ; a little handbook of " Classic and Italian Paint- 
 ing," edited by Mr. Poynter, R.A., is an excellent 
 introduction 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, obliged to give 
 up for the present any attempt to speak of the Eng- 
 lish masters, of Hogarth, of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 
 of Gainsborough, of Richard Wilson, of Turner. There 
 has been no English school, properly so called. De- 
 tached 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 expressed opinion regarding the art of paint- 
 ing, 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 and pains and observation. Once
 
 FINE ART PAINTING. 189 
 
 started on the right road, every piece of new experi- 
 ence is certain to be a confirmation of all that has 
 gone before. I repeat, that, in every department of 
 human industry, we must recognize that it is not 
 enough to know what we like, but what is worth lik- 
 ing ; and, above all things, this is necessary to a right 
 enjoyment of painting. 
 
 I suppose that no house, from the poorest to the 
 richest, but has something on its walls in the sem- 
 blance of a picture ; but not all the people who pos- 
 sess 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 as- 
 sociations, for its real or supposed 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 remained 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 pic- 
 ture 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
 
 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 two, weathering the cold blast of criticism, or basking 
 in the sunshine of public favor, 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 ori- 
 ginators : 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 
 brought no show of pictures : it would seem like an 
 interruption of the course of nature. They are a ne- 
 cessity of social life, a safe theme for discussion, a 
 fruitful subject of small-talk. And these assemblages 
 of pictures but for about a score or two which do 
 possess some originality of treatment or some remark- 
 able 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 man- 
 ner, 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 cot- 
 tage interiors ; scenes of domestic happiness or afflic- 
 tion ? 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 of Welsh 
 or Scotch or Swiss scenery, so many yards of satin
 
 FINE ART PAINTING. 191 
 
 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 furniture 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 standard, that of the picture-dealer, and 
 treated as articles of commerce. They are not pictures 
 in the sense that Raphael's " Sacrament " 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 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 grace- 
 ful subject if the artist had set himself to discover, to 
 express, the interesting side of her character and the 
 subtler graces of her demeanor, 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,
 
 I Q2 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 that is more interesting than the shininess of his coat, 
 his inkstand, his arm-chair. Very likely it is a good 
 likeness as regards shape and size of features, but the 
 painter should do something more. Sir Joshua Rey- 
 nolds seems to have had the power of discovering in 
 faces and figures that often, no doubt, seemed suf- 
 ficiently commonplace to the rest of the world some 
 nobility of expression, some grace of form or tender- 
 ness of coloring ; 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 colored 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 idealizing, some trans- 
 forming power. The same with landscape. The true 
 painter, in choosing a natural scene for his subject, 
 does not seek to get every thing that he sees into his
 
 FINE ART PAINTING. 193 
 
 picture, 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 complex and crowded, so 
 full of infinite details of form and tint, that it would 
 be a lifelong and fruitless labor for a painter to set 
 himself to reproduce even a very small part. 
 
 This should not be difficult for any one to under- 
 stand 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 some- 
 thing 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 color 
 and light and shade, relieved against other masses of 
 color 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 net 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, color, projection, space ; our difficulties 
 are multiplied a thousand-fold ; we very soon find that 
 some details, some irregularities of form and surface, 
 some lights, some shadows, must be left out they 
 are too infinite and crowded for us ; we begin to feel
 
 194 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 that the thing for us to study is the inmost character 
 of the object we are drawing, and our business must 
 be to express that, leaving many details alone. So 
 must it be on a larger scale : the artist must penetrate 
 the innermost spirit of the person or scene he paints, 
 and show it to us no longer obscured by the common- 
 ness of the detail of every-day life and appearance ; 
 but this is asking a great deal. And the painter's aim, 
 his thought, his motive, must be distinct and clear in 
 his own mind, in order to appeal to ours ; and, be- 
 sides this, great technical knowledge 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 favorable soil for the growth 
 of Art. Science, commerce, literature, flourish ; but 
 Art, considered 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 pictures. Little beauty of form or 
 color can be found in groups or assemblages of ordi- 
 nary English people. We have no leisure to cultivate 
 such things ; we are too full of cares, of pleasures ; we 
 are forever 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 expressed in the 
 costume of the day, of men and women too : it is too 
 tight-fitting, too crowded with mean detail. Think 
 how the golden copes, the jewelled mitres, the armor 
 of steel inlaid with gold and silver, and plumed and 
 crested headgear, of a former age, compare in pic-
 
 FINE ART PAINTING 1 95 
 
 torial 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 
 hinderance 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 pic- 
 torial aspects ; the painter has no thought to express, 
 no beauty to reveal, only a little sentimentality, a 
 little feeble moralizing. Still, there are English painters 
 of the present time, of much higher aims, whose works 
 range from poetical interpretation of nature in land- 
 scape, from noble portraiture, up to paintings of a 
 higher order, still aiming at ideal beauty, and appeal- 
 ing almost exclusively 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 photographs 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 color, and 
 poetic idea and feeling, of exquisite and noble form 
 and execution he may be reckoned as their true
 
 196 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 descendant ; and I venture to say, that, the more the 
 masters of acknowledged great periods are studied, 
 the more will be the works of Burne- Jones be appre- 
 ciated and admired. 
 
 Two of these photographs are taken from a series 
 of pictures whose subject is "The Sleeping Beauty." 
 The first one, which I 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 mu- 
 sicians ; and the musical instruments lie waiting, too, 
 for their recall to life and sound ; and, behind 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 
 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
 
 FINE ART PAINTING. 197 
 
 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 expec- 
 tancy 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 color (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 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 impris- 
 oned 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
 
 198 LECTURES ON ART. 
 
 great subject has suffered at my hands, in being con- 
 tracted 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 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 civilization, every condition in life. 
 
 It is true that this growth is sometimes stunted and 
 meagre, and the general influences 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 creation 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, for us, have been 
 accomplished in vain.
 
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