Part 16

This is its true sphere, and here lies its true honour and glory. When it intermeddles with other things,--from your Religion, Education, and Art, down to the number, and size, and metal of your buttons, it goes out of its line and fails; and I am convinced that with some benefits, specious and partial, our Government interference has, in the main and in the long run, done harm to the real interests of Art. Spontaneity, the law of free choice, is as much the life of Art as it is of marriage, and it is not less beyond the power of the State to choose the nation's pictures than to choose its wives. Indeed there is a great deal on the physiological side to be said for law interfering in the matter of matrimony. I would certainly make it against law, as it plainly is against nature, for cousins-german to marry; and if we could pair ourselves as we pair our live stock, and give ear to the teaching of an enlightened zoonomy, we might soon drive many of our feîlest diseases out of our breed; but the law of personality, of ultroneousness, of free will, that which in a great measure makes us what we are, steps in and forbids anything but the convincement and force of reason. Much in the same way, though it be a more trivial matter, pleasure, in order to please, must be that which you yourself choose. You cannot make an Esquimaux forswear train oil, and take to tea and toast like ourselves, still less to boiled rice like a Hindoo; neither can you all at once make a Gilmerton carter prefer Raphael and claret to a glass of raw whisky and the Terrific Register. Leviathan is not so tamed or taught. And our Chadwicks and Kay.e Shuttleworths and Coles--kings though they may be--enlightened, energetic, earnest, and as full of will as an egg is full of meat, cannot in a generation make the people of England as intelligent as themselves, or as fond and appreciative of the best Art as Mr. Ruskin. Hence all their plans are failing and must fail; and I cannot help thinking that in the case of Art the continuance of the Cole dynasty is not to be prayed for very much. As far as I can judge, it has done infinitely more harm than good. These men think they are doing a great work, £.nd, worse still, the country thinks so too, and helps them, whereas I believe they are retarding the only wholesome, though slow growth of knowledge and taste.

Take the Kensington Museum: the only thing there (I speak in all seriousness) worth any man spending an hour or a shilling upon, are the Sheepshank and Turner galleries; all those costly, tawdry, prodigious, and petty displays of arts and manufactures, I look upon as mere delusions and child's play. Take any one of them, say the series illustrating the cotton fabrics: you see the whole course of cotton from its Alpha to its Omega, in the neatest and prettiest way. What does that teach? what impression does that make upon any young.mind? Little beyond mere vapid wonder. The eye is opened, but not tilled; it is a stare, not a look.

If you want to move, and permanently rivet, a young mind with what is worth the knowing, with what is to deepen his sense of the powers of the human mind, and the resources of nature, and the grandeur of his country, take him to a cotton-mill. Let him hear and come under the power of that wonderful sound pervading the whole vast house, and filling the air with that diapason of regulated, harmonious energy. Let him enter it, and go round with a skilled workman, and then follow the Alpha through all its marvellous transformations to the Omega; do this, and you bring him out into the fresh air not only more knowing, but more wise. He has got a lesson. He has been impressed. The same with calico-printing, and pottery, and iron-founding, and, indeed, the whole round of that industry, which is our glory. Do you think a boy will get half the good from the fine series of ores and specimens of pig-iron, and all the steels he may see in cold-blood, and with his grandmother or his sweetheart beside him at Kensington, that he will from going into Dixon's foundry at Govan, and seeing the half-naked men toiling in that place of flame and energy and din--watching the mighty shears and the Nasmyth-hammers, and the molten iron kneaded like dough, and planed and shaved like wood: he gets the dead and dissected body in the one case; he sees and feels the living spirit and body working as one, in the other. And upon all this child's play, this mere make-believe, our good-natured nation is proud of spending some half-million of money. Then there is that impertinent, useless, and unjust system of establishing Government Schools of Design in so many of our towns, avowedly, and, I believe (though it is amazing that clever men should do such a foolish thing) honestly, for the good of the working classes, but actually and lamentably, and in every way harmfully, for the amusement and benefit of the wealthy classes, and to the ruin of the hardworking and legitimate local teachers.

I have not time or space, but if I had I could prove this, and show the curiously deep injuries this system is inflicting on true Art, and upon the freedom of industry.

In the same line, and to the same effect, are our Art-Unions and Associations for "the encouragement" of Art; some less bad than others, but all bad, because founded upon a wrong principle, and working to a wrong end. No man can choose a picture for another, any more than a wife or a waistcoat. It is part of our essential nature to choose these things for ourselves, and paradoxical as it may seem, the wife and the waistcoat and the work of Art our departmental wiseacres may least approve of, if chosen _suâ sponte_ by Giles or Roger, will not only give them more delectation, but do them more good, than one chosen by somebody else for him upon the finest of all possible principles. Besides this radical vice, these Art-Unions have the effect of encouraging, and actually bringing into professional existence, men who had much better be left to die out, or never be born; and it, as I well know, discourages, depreciates, and dishonours the best men, besides keeping the public, which is the only true and worthy patron, from doing its duty, and getting its due. Just take our Edinburgh Association, in many respects one of the best, having admirable and devoted men as its managers,--what is the chance that any of the thousand members, when he draws a prize, gets a picture he cares one straw for, or which will do his nature one particle of good? Why should we be treated in this matter as we are treated in no way else? Who thinks of telling us, or founding a Royal Association with all its officers, to tell us what novels or what poetry to read, or what music to listen to? Think of a Union for the encouragement of Poetry, where Mr. Tennyson would be obliged to put in his _In Mcmoriam_, or his _Idylls of the King_, along with the Lyrics and the Sonnets of we don't way who, into a common lottery, and be drawn for at an annual speechifying! All such associations go to encourage quantity rather than quality. Now, in the ideal and pleasurable arts quality is nearly everything. One Turner not only transcends ten thousand Claudes and Vanderveldes; he is in another sphere. You could not thus sum up his worth.

One of the most flagrant infractions of the primary laws of political economy, and one of the most curious illustrations of the fashionable fallacies as to Government encouragement to Art, is to be found in the revelations in the Report of the Select Committee on the South Kensington Museum. Mr. Lowe, and the majority of the Committee, gave it as their opinion, that Government should deal in photographs, and _undersell_ them (thereby ruining the regular trade), and all for the encouragement of Art, and the enlightenment of the public! Can there be anything more absurd than this, and at this time of day? and not only absurd and expensive, but mischievous. All this, you see, would be avoided, and society left to provide its own Art, as it provides its own beef and trowsers for itself; if men would hold with John Locke and Coventry Dick, and _Egomet_, that Government, the State, has simply nothing to do with these things, that hey are _ultra vires_ not less than religion, and, I am bold to add, education.

One other drawback to Art taking its place alongside its sisters--Poetry and Music--is the annual Exhibitions. Nothing more thoroughly barbarous and childish could be devised than this concentrating the mental activity of the nation in regard to the Art of the year upon one month. Fancy our being obliged to read all our novels, and all our poetry, and hear all our music in a segment of our year! Then there is the mixing up of all sorts of pictures--sacred and profane, gay and sombre, etc.--all huddled together, and the eye flitting from one to the other. *

* In our excellent National Gallery (Edinburgh), a copy of Titian's Ariadne in Naxos is hung immediately above Wilkie's sacred sketch of John Knox administering the Sacrament in Calder House!

Hence the temptation to paint down to the gaudiest pictures, instead of up or into the pure intensity of nature. Why should there not be some large public hall to which artists may send their pictures at any time when they are perfected? but, better still, let purchasers frequent the studios, as they did of old, full of love and knowledge. Why will we insist in pressing our Art and our taste, as we did long ago our religion and our God, upon our neighbours? Why not trust to time, and to cultivating our own tastes earnestly, thoroughly, humbly, and for ourselves, filling our houses with the best of everything, and making all welcome to see them, and believing that the grandchildren of those who come to see our Turners and Wilkies and Hogarths will be wiser and more refined than we? It is most lamentable to witness the loss of money, of energy, and in a measure of skill, and, above all, of time, on those engravings, which no one but a lodging-keeper frames, and those Parian statuettes and Etruscan pitchers and tazzas of all sorts, which no one thinks half so much of, or gets half so much real pleasure and good from, as from one of John Leech's woodcuts. One true way to encourage Art is to buy and enjoy Punch. There is more fun, more good drawing, more good sense, more beauty in John Leech's Punch pictures, than in all the Art-Union illustrations, engraving, statuettes, etc. etc., put together. Could that mighty Potentate have been got up, think you, by a committee of gentlemen, and those drawings educed by proffered prizes? No; they came out, and have flourished according to a law as natural and as effective as the law of seed-time and harvest; and Art, as a power to do good, will never reach its full perfection till it is allowed to walk at liberty, and follow the course of all other productions, that of supply and demand, individual demand and voluntary supply. It is not easy to tell how far back these well-meaning, zealous, deluded men who have managed these "encouragements," have put the progress of the nation in its powrer of knowing and feeling true Art.

One other heresy I must vent, and that is to protest against the doctrine that scientific knowledge is of much direct avail to the artist; it may enlarge his mind as a man, and sharpen and strengthen his nature, but the knowledge of anatomy is, I believe, more a snare than anything else to an artist as such. Art is the _tertium quid_ resulting from observation and imagination, with skill and love and downrightness as their executors; anything that interferes with the action of any of these, is killing to the soul of Art. Now, painting has to do simply and absolutely with the surfaces, with the appearances of things; it knows and cares nothing for what is beneath and beyond, though if it does its own part aright it indicates them. Phidias and the early Greeks, there is no reason to believe, ever dissected even a monkey, much less a man, and yet where is there such skin, and muscle, and substance, and breath of life? When Art became scientific, as among the Romans, and lost its heart in filling its head, see what became of it: anatomy offensively thrust in your face, and often bad anatomy; men skinned and galvanized, not men alive and in action. In the same way in landscape, do you think Turner would have painted the strata in an old quarry, or done Ben Cruachan more to the quick, had he known all about geology, gneiss, and greywacke, and the Silurian system? Turner might have been what is called a better-informed man, but we question if he would have been so good, not to say a better representer of the wonderful works of God, which were painted on his retina, and in his inner chamber--the true _Camera lucida_, the chamber of imagery leading from the other,--and felt to his finger-tips. No; science and poetry are to a nicety diametrically opposed, and he must be a Shakspere and a Newton, a Turner and a Faraday all in one, who can consort much with both without injury to each. It is not what a man has learned from others, not even what he thinks, but what he sees and feels, which makes him a painter.

The moral from all this is, love Art, and if you choose, practise Art. Purchase Art for itself alone, and in the main for yourself alone. If you so do, you will encourage Art to more purpose than if you spent thousands a year in Art-Unions, and in presenting the public with what pleased you; just as a man does most good by being good. Goldsmith puts it in his inimitable way--"I was ever of opinion that the honest man, who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single, and only talked of population."

I have said those things strongly, abruptly, and perhaps rudely; but my heart is in the matter. Art is part of my daily food, like the laughter of children, and the common air, the earth, the sky; it is an affection, not a passion to come and go like the gusty wind, nor a principle cold and dead; it penetrates my entire life, it is one of the surest and deepest pleasures, one of the refuges from "the nature of things," as Bacon would say, into that enchanted region, that "ampler æther," that "diviner air," where we get a glimpse not only of a Paradise that is past, but of a Paradise that is to come.

There is one man amongst us who has done more to breathe the breath of life into the literature and the p?iilosophy of Art, who has "encouraged" it ten thousand times more effectually than all our industrious Coles and anxious Art-Unions, and that is the author of Modern Painters. I do not know that there is anything in our literature, or in any literature, to compare with the effect of this one man's writings. He has by his sheer force of mind, and fervour of nature, the depth and exactness of his knowledge, and his amazing beauty and power of language, raised the subject of Art from being subordinate and technical, to the same level with Poetry and Philosophy. He has lived to see an entire change in the public mind and eye, and, what is better, in the public heart, on all that pertains to the literature and philosophy of representative genius. He combines its body, and its soul. Many before him wrote about its body, and some well; a few, as Charles Lamb and our great "Titmarsh," touched its soul: it was left to John Ruskin to do both. *

* This great writer was first acknowledged as such by our big quarterlies, in the North British Review, fourteen years ago, as follows:--

"This is a very extraordinary and a very delightful book, full of truth and goodness, of power and beauty. If genius may be considered (and it is as serviceable a definition as is current) that power by which one man produces for the use or the pleasure of his fellow-men, something at once new and true, then have we here its unmistakable and inestimable handiwork. Let our readers take our word for it, and read these volumes thoroughly, giving themselves up to the guidance of this most original thinker, and most attractive writer, and they will find not only that they are richer in true knowledge, and quickened in pure and heavenly affections, but they will open their eyes upon a new world-- walk under an ampler heaven, and breathe a diviner air. There are few things more delightful or more rare, than to feel such a kindling up of the whole faculties as is produced by such a work as this."

$DISTRAINING FOR RENT.

Of this picture it is not easy to speak. We do not at first care to say much about feelings such as it produces. It is, to our liking, Wilkie's most perfect picture. If they were all to be destroyed but one, we would keep this. His "Blind Man's Buff," his "Penny Wedding," his "Village Politicians," and many others, have more humour,--his "John Knox preaching," more energy,--his "John Knox at the Sacrament," more of heaven and victorious faith; but there is more of human nature, more of the human heart, in this, than in any of the others. It is full of

"The still, sad music of humanity

still and sad, but yet musical, by reason of its true ideality, the painter acting his part as reconciler of men to their circumstances. This is one great end of poetry and painting. Even when painful and terrible in their subjects, "they are of power, by raising pity and fear or terror, to purge the mind of suchlike passions,--that is, to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight or, in the words of Charles Lamb, "they dispose the mind to a meditative tenderness."

But to return to this most touching and impressive picture. What an immediate hold it took of us! How that sad family was in our mind for days after, and how we found ourselves wondering if nothing could be done for them! It is just about as difficult to bring the mind to criticise it, as it would be to occupy ourselves in thinking why and how we were affected, if we were ourselves to witness the scene in actual life. We would be otherwise occupied. Our eyes first fell on what is the immediate occasion of it all, the paper warrant; you feel its sharp parallelogram cutting your retina, it is the whitest, and therefore the first thing you see; and then on the husband. What utter sadness,--what a sober certainty of misery,--how uncomplaining, as if he could not speak, his firm mouth keeping it to himself! His eyes are all but shut,--how their expression is given, seems to us quite marvellous; and his attitude cast down, but not abject--bearing it like a man. How his fingers are painted, and his careless, miserable limbs, his thin cheek, with that small hungry hollow mark in its centre! What a dignity and beauty in his face! This is to us a finer head than the wonderful one in Retzsch's "Man playing at Chess with the Devil for his Soul," and this is not saying little. Reason and steady purpose are still uppermost.

Not so with his poor wife: her heart is fast failing; she is silent too; but she is fainting, and just about to slip off her chair in utter unconsciousness; her eyes are blind; the bitterness of death is gathering on her soul. She is forgetting her sucking child, as she is all outward things; it is rolling off her knee, and is caught by her motherly daughter; while her younger brother, whose expressive back is only seen, is pulling his father's coat, as if to say, "Look at mother!" Behind are two neighbours come in, and sympathizing both, but differently; the meek look of the one farthest away, what can be finer than that! The paleness of the fainting mother is rendered with perfect truth. What an eye the painter must have had!--how rapid, how true, how retentive of every impression! Behind these silent sufferers goes on the action of the story. The brother, a young, good-looking, fearless fellow, is shaking his fist and fixing his angry eyes on the constable, who returns the look as resolutely, but without anger. This figure of the constable is in many respects as astonishing as anything in the picture. He is "a man with a presence"--inexorable, prompt, not to be trifled with; but he is not, as many other artists would have made him, and wished us to call him, "the brutal Bailiff." He is doing his duty, as he is plainly saying, pointing to his warrant, and nothing more: he cannot help it, and the law must have its course. What a fine figure he is, the only one standing erect, and what rich colour in his waistcoat! Seated on the bed is the smart, indifferent clerk, with his pale, smug countenance. A man of business, and of nothing else, he seems to be running up the value of these bedclothes,--that bed, with its sad-coloured curtains, and all its memories of births and deaths. Behind is a man whose face we don't exactly make out: he has a sleepy, tipsy, altogether unknowable sort of expression. We don't think this a defect in the painter: it is the most likely thing in the world that such a person would be there.

Then comes the cobbler, straight from his stall, where, as from a throne, he dispenses his "think,"--and a strong think it is,--to all comers, upon all subjects. He has opinions of his own about most things, but chiefly upon civil, ecclesiastical, and marital jurisdiction, "with a power of law" in him. He is enjoining submission and composure upon all onlookers. His hands, how they speak! the one to the bailiff, deferential, confidential, gently deprecatory; the other, to the company in general, imperative, final, minatory. He is vindicating the law, and laying it down somewhat unseasonably, and is even hinting that they should rejoice at its arrangements. That brave old woman, inspired by anger, is bearing down upon both cobbler and bailiff, with occasional darts of her furious eye at the unconscious clerk. This woman's face is expressive beyond all description. Look at her fore-finger, as straight, as well-aimed, as unmistakably deadly in intention, as a sword, or rather pistol; and, could intensity of will have made a fire, we may reckon on its shot having been soon into the stately bailiff. But she has a sword in her tongue: how it is plying its work from behind these old straggling teeth!--no man can tame it; and her cruel, furious eyes, aiming every word, sending it home.

How well Shakspere describes this brilliant old lady! --"She is misusing him past the endurance of a block: an oak with but one green leaf would have answered her. She huddles jest upon jest, with such impossible conveyance, that he stands like a man at a mark, with a whole army shooting at him!"

What a contrast to her, the woman behind, "her face foul with weeping," crying her very eyes and soul out, like a child!

What a picture! so simple, so great, so full (to use a word of Wilkie's own) of intellectuality--and the result, though sad, salutary. How strange! We never saw these poor sufferers, and we know they have no actual existence; and yet our hearts go out to them,--we are moved by their simple sorrows. We shall never forget that enduring man and that fainting mother.

There is another personage yet to speak of. Some of our readers may never have seen him: we can assure them he has seen them. This is the dog,--the family dog,--the friend of them all, from baby upwards. We find him just where he should be, and at his own proper work. He is under his master's chair, and at his feet, looking out from between his legs. His master, as Burns has with wonderful meaning expressed it, is his god. "Man is the god of the dog." * How much may we learn from this!

*I am wrong in this. Bacon first uses this thought in his Essay on Atheism. Burns improves it.