Part 7

We have hitherto, according to promise, been considering the beauty of flowers as detached from all surrounding facts, and isolated from all other parts of the plant. But, in fact, this beauty of the inflorescence of plants is only one phenomenon of a much larger class. The petals and sepals are only leaves; and it is difficult to argue about the character of the flower-leaves and omit from thought the stalk and root-leaves; and these leaves continually possess a wealth of beauty both of form and colour for which no intelligible utility has ever been suggested. The use made of conspicuous leaves in the modern style of bedding-out and the cultivation in hot-houses of what are called foliage plants, will recall this to every one. In many cases the stems of plants, often the veins of the leaves, and often the backs of the leaves, are the homes of distinct and beautiful colouring, for which, so far as I know, no account can be given on the score of use. To enlarge our view yet a little more, the brilliant colours of the fungi and of the lichens, mosses, and sea-weeds, and, lastly, the outburst of varied colours in the autumn--the crimson of the bramble, the browns of the oaks, the red of the maple, the gold of the elm, "the sunshine of the withering fern"--all these present themselves to us as so closely akin to the painted beauty of flowers that we cannot think of the one without the other; and we may well hesitate to accept as satisfactory a theory which can offer no explanation of phenomena so closely akin to those of flowers, except, forsooth, that they are merely accidental. Once again, to widen the range of our mental vision, the beauty of the vegetable world is but a part of that great and complex mass of beauty from which we agreed to segregate it; and viewed as part of that, it must have the same explanation applied to it as the other beautiful phenomena of the world.

It is worth while to remember that Beauty is no outcome of a long period of evolution; it is no late event in the geologic history of the world. The lowest forms of organic life no less than the highest are clad in beauty. Many beings that are "simple structureless protoplasm"--to use the language of Professor Allman as President of the British Association this year--"fashion for themselves an outer membraneous or calcareous case, often of symmetrical form and elaborate ornamentation, or construct a silicious skeleton of radiating spicula or crystal-clear concentric spheres of exquisite symmetry and beauty."[22]

So, too, in the Silurian period, the corals and other marine structures were, no doubt, endowed with every grace which could please the eye of man, if he had been there. Beauty is the invariable companion of Nature. It is difficult, therefore, to account for it as a result of evolution; and, as for the theory that it was made for man's delectation only, a single diatom or a single fossil from a Silurian bed is enough to put the whole vain egotism to flight.

What are the results fairly deducible from these observations? They seem to be the following:--

1. That conspicuousness is _a_ step towards fertilization in one mode, and might, therefore, well be used by an artist loving at once beauty and fertility.

2. That there is no such preponderating advantage in beauty as should convert the ugly anemophilous flowers into the brilliant entomophilous flowers.

3. That in an infinite number of cases beauty exists, but without any relation to the mode of fertilization.

4. That it is maintained in many cases where the uglier and less beautiful plant is more useful, as in the case of the violet.

5. That even where conspicuousness is useful, it furnishes no complete account of the whole beauty of the flower.

Let us apply these facts to the two rival theories. If, on the one hand, nothing has become beautiful but through the utility of beauty, beauty will be found where it is useful and nowhere else. But we have found beauty without finding utility; so that theory, on our present knowledge, is inadmissible.

If, on the other hand, there be an artificer in Nature who loves at once utility and beauty, he may use the one sometimes as a mean to the other, or he may use beauty without utility; and the presence of beauty without utility is intelligible.

And here I conclude. I see in Nature both utility and beauty; but I am not convinced that the one is solely dependent on the other. I find a grace and a glory (even in the flowers of plants) which, on the utilitarian theory, is not accounted for, is a residual phenomenon; and that in such enormous proportions that the phenomenon explained bears no perceptible proportion to the phenomenon left unexplained. Whether this be so or not, it appears to me, for the reasons I have already given, that we may still entertain the same notions about the beauty of the world as before. Our souls may still rejoice in beauty as of old. To some of us this glorious frame has not appeared a dead mechanic mass, but a living whole, instinct with spiritual life; and in the beauty which we see around us in Nature's face, we have felt the smile of a spiritual Being, as we feel the smile of our friend adding light and lustre to his countenance. I still indulge this fancy, or, if you will, this superstition. Still, as of old, I feel (to use the familiar language of our great poet of Nature)--

"A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth: of all the mighty world, Of eye, and ear."

EDW. FRY.

[Footnote 1: Wisdom, xiii. 3-5.]

[Footnote 2: P. 200.]

[Footnote 3: "Origin of Species" (4th Ed.), p. 239.]

[Footnote 4: Wallace, "Tropical Nature," p. 232.]

[Footnote 5: _Ibid._ p. 232.]

[Footnote 6: _Ibid._ p. 237.]

[Footnote 7: "Flowers and their Unbidden Guests," by Kerner, translated by Ogle. Prefatory Letter.]

[Footnote 8: Henslow, "On Self-Fertilization." Trans. Linn. Society, 2nd series, "Botany," i. p. 325. _Query_: Is not this the case with the _Tacsonia_ of our greenhouses?]

[Footnote 9: Henslow, _ubi sup._ 329.]

[Footnote 10: Kerner, p. 11. These statements appear to me, though made by a very accomplished observer, to require verification. My own observations on the _Colchicum_ (which have been only very imperfect) would have led me to incline to a different conclusion.]

[Footnote 11: Kerner, p. 12.]

[Footnote 12: Lubbock's "Wild Flowers in Relation to Insects," p. 56.]

[Footnote 13: Lindley, "Veg. King." 436.]

[Footnote 14: "Ueber die Bestaubungsvorrichtungen bei den Fumariaceen," in Pringsheim's "Jahrbuch," vol. vii. part iv. p. 423. 1870.]

[Footnote 15: Link, "Report on Progress of Botany during 1841," translated by Lankester (Ray Society, 1845), p. 65.]

[Footnote 16: Meehan, "On Fertilization by Insect Agency." _Gardeners' Chronicle_, 11 Sept. 1875.]

[Footnote 17: For the whole subject of these most curious flowers, see Mr. Darwin's book "On the Different Forms of Flowers;" Rev. G. Henslow, Tr. Linn. Society, "Botany," 2nd series, vol. i. p. 317; Mr. Bennett, Journal of Linn. Society, "Botany," xiii. p. 147, xvii. p. 269.]

[Footnote 18: Bennett, Journal of Linn. Society, "Botany," xiii. p. 147.]

[Footnote 19: Meehan, "On Fertilization," _ubi supra_.]

[Footnote 20: Mr. Bennett, "On Cleistogamous Flowers," Linn. Society's Journal, "Botany," xvii. p. 278, has shown that the latter is probably the correct view.]

[Footnote 21: _Nature_, ix. 461.]

[Footnote 22: _Nature_, xx. p. 386.]

WHERE ARE WE IN ART?

"No doubt education is a fine thing!" said I, meditatively, laying down my thirteenth newspaper. It was a rainy November day, and the reading-room was nearly empty. I had been told the great fact over and over again in some form or other in all the "Dailies" and "Weeklies." It had been repeated in every variety of tone in the little pile of "Monthlies" at my elbow, of which I had skimmed the cream (no one in these days can be expected to go through the labour of a whole article)! The "Quarterlies," in more ponderous fashion, had reiterated the sentiment. We had got hold of the right thing; all that was wanted was more and more of the same. Let everybody be served alike; what is meat for the gander is meat also for the goose, repeated the advocates of women's education, magniloquently (though not exactly in those words). Let everybody learn the same thing that I am learning! How much better and wiser we are than our forefathers! How beautiful for us to be able to say, as in the old story of the French Minister of Instruction when he pulls out his watch, "It is ten o'clock; all the children in the schools in England are doing their sums. It is half-past eleven, they are all writing their copies!"

"What everybody says must be true," thought I; "the schoolmaster has got the better of the world, and rules the roast despotically; but then how great is the result!" I repeated, with pride.

Such perfection was rather oppressive, and I could not help yawning a little as I went upstairs, looking round as I went. The decorations of the club were wonderfully fine, no doubt, but perhaps an Italian of the "Cinque-cento" would not have thought them quite successful. Probably, however, he would have been wrong. He was certainly much less "instructed" in art than we are. I strolled to the window, and looked out at a stucco palace on either hand and over the way, with pillars and pilasters added _ad libitum_, and a glimpse of a long wall with oblong openings cut in it, stretching the whole length of the street. One of the abominable regiments of black statues which disfigure London stood near the corner, the nicely-finished buttons of whose paletôt, and the creases of whose boots (the originals of which must have been made by Hoby), had often been my wonder, if not admiration.

"Yes, there certainly is a lost art or two, which have somehow made their escape from this best of all worlds, in spite of our drilling and double-distilled training," I sighed.

There was a portfolio of photographs lying on the table, which I turned over abstractedly. The Venus de Milo, and the Theseus of the Parthenon; the Raphael frescoes of the great council of the gods in the Farnesina Palace at Rome; a street in Venice; Durham Cathedral; the decorations of the Certosa at Pavia; some specimens of old Japanese porcelain; some coloured patterns of Persian shawls and prayer-rugs and of Indian inlaid work. Each of them was good and appropriate of its kind, expressing a national or individual taste and feeling, or, best of all, a belief. And none of them were the results of education, but of a kind of instinct of art which no instruction hitherto has been able to give, of which it seems even sometimes to deprive a race, as a savage generally loses his accurate perception of details and his power of memory and artistic perceptions, with his delicacy of hearing and smell, as a consequence of so-called civilization.

The Hindoo arranges colours for a fabric with the same certainty of intuition that a bird weaves his nest, or a spider its web. His blues and greens are as harmonious in their combinations as those of Nature herself; while the "educated" Englishman is now introducing every species of atrocity in form and colour wherever he goes, ruining the beautiful native manufactures by instructions from his superior "standpoint;" forcing the workers to commit every blunder which he does himself at home, in order to adapt their fabrics to the abominable taste of the middle classes in England. Even the missionaries, male and female, cannot hold their hands, and teach the children in schools and hareems crochet and cross-stitch of the worst designs and colours, instead of the exquisite native embroidery of the past. Arsenic greens, magenta and gas-tar dyes, are introduced by order of the merchants into carpets and cashmere shawls; vile colours and forms in pottery and bad lacquer-work are growing up, by command, in China and Japan. There seems to be no check or stay to the irruption of bad taste which is swamping the whole world by our influence. The Japanese have even been recommended to make a Museum of their own beautiful old productions quickly, or the very memory of their existence, and of the manner in which they were made, would be lost.

It is commonly supposed that the taste of the French is better than our own, and the pretty, the bizarre, the becoming, may indeed be said to belong to their domain; but high art is not their vocation. A certain harmony is obtained by quenching colour, as in the "Soupir étouffé," the "Bismarck malade," the "rose dégradée," the "Celadon" of the Sèvres china, all eighth and tenth degrees of dilution; but pure colour, like that of Persia and of the East generally, they never now dare to dip their hands into. The gorgeous effects of their own old painted glass, the "rose windows" of the churches at Rouen and in many other towns of Normandy, are far beyond their present reach.

The stained glass of all countries in Europe, indeed, belonging to the good times, is a feast of colour which none of the modern work can approach. There is a "Last Judgment," said to be from designs by Albert Dürer, which was taken in a sea-fight on its road to Spain, and put up in a little church at Fairford, in Gloucestershire, which dazzles us with its splendour; and the scraps which are still to be found all over England in village churches (many of which are now believed to be of home manufacture) are as beautiful as the great Flemish windows thirty feet high. At the present day the pigments used, we are told, are finer; the glass is infinitely better rolled, all the manufacturing processes have made wonderful progress, as we proudly declare; only the results of it are utterly and simply detestable--the colours of the great modern windows in Cologne Cathedral and Westminster Abbey set one's very teeth on edge--the temptation to use a stone (if it had come under one's hand) would be frightfully great in front of that at the east end of Ripon.

There lies before me an old Persian rug, all out of shape and twisted in the weaving, but full of subtle quantities in colour, perfect in the proportions of its vivid brilliancy, and a grand new Axminster carpet alongside, of faultless construction, with a design as hideous as its colours are harsh.

It is not only now with productions destined for the English market, but the degradation of art is beginning to spread all over the world--the standards of "instructed" European taste are vitiating the very well-springs of beautiful old work. The "mantilla" of Seville, and the "tovaglia" of the Roman peasant, are supplanted by frightful bonnets; the striking old costumes are disappearing alike in Brittany and in Algiers; in Athens and in Turkey they are giving way to the abominations of Parisian toilettes for the women, while the chimney-pot hat is taking the place of the turban and the kalpac for the men.

The picturesque quaintness of the narrow Egyptian streets dies away, as under a frost, under the hand of Western architects; the delicate pierced woodwork of their projecting balconies is changed for flat windows with red and green "jalousies;" and the Khedive builds minarets, it is true, but like enlarged Mordan pencil-cases. The harmony of the lines in an ancient Arabian fountain or mosque at Cairo, the interlacing patterns of fretwork in the Saracenic buildings at Grenada, are marvellous in their exquisite variety; yet the secret of their construction in their own land is nearly gone, the very tradition of the old work seems to have perished in the race--they cannot even imitate their own old creations. "Oh for a touch of a vanished hand!" we say over the ruined tombs of the Memlook Sultans in their desolate beauty, standing lonely in the desert near Cairo, or the wonderful mosques of the deserted city of Beejapore in the Bombay Presidency, whose photographs have lately been printed.

Each nation in the old time had an expression of its thoughts in the buildings in which it housed its gods, its government, and its individuals, which was as distinctive as its language: a tongue, indeed, in stone, in colour and in form, as plain as, indeed plainer than, ever words could frame.

The Egyptian, with the flat square lines of the gigantic slabs placed across the forests of enormous rounded pillars closely packed, the avenues of sphinxes and obelisks leading up (never at right angles, curiously to our sense of conformity) to the temples--solemn, heavy, magnificent, mysterious--with a sentiment of dignified repose, though little of beauty or proportion, but full of symbolism and suggestion and grandeur.

The exquisite Greek buildings, where proportion was almost like music in its scientific harmony of parts, so exact, so modulated, so severe, so lovely--with sculpture forming an almost necessary portion of the architectural design when at its highest point of excellence.

The Saracenic, with its simple grace of construction and delicate detail of ornament, with holy words and combinations of lines in place of natural forms, and soaring beauty of domes, and pierced marble work.

The Middle Age Italian, with its inlaid and decorated façades and wealth of columns, and traceries of gay-coloured stones, and contrasts of brilliant light and dark shadows in the deep-set windows and doors,--bright and lovely like Giotto's Campanile at Florence, rising like a flower over the city, or great churches like those of Orvieto and St. Mark's,[1] with their rich profusion of mosaic and carved stone and quaint modifications of brickwork.

Or the buildings of the Gothic nations (our own included), which often, like those at Mont St. Michel, seem to have so grown out of the situation--where the Art is so interwoven with Nature, that it is hardly possible to discover where one begins and the other ends. There is something also of the manner in which Nature works, in the feeling with which the curves interlace, seeming almost to grow into each other, in a Gothic cathedral. In the perspectives of heavy round arches of Winchester and Durham, in the upward soaring of the Salisbury spire, there is the same impression--they seem to have "come" so. It is like a living organism, the parts of which are as natural and necessary to the whole as is the growth of a tree: like the recipe of old for a poet, they seem to have been "born, not made."

All these different races invented for themselves what is called a "style;" that is to say, an original manner, peculiar and adapted to their special idiosyncrasies, of fulfilling those wants which every nation, as soon as it emerges from the savage state, must feel and provide for in some fashion.

Even to descend to very inferior work--there is character and expression in the old King William houses on the river-bank at Chelsea, in the pretty little Queen Anne Square in Westminster; it is too neat and pretty to be high art, with its unobtrusive moulded brick, its shallow projections, and the carved shells over the doorways; but it is not unlike the poetry of Pope in the delicate finish and adaptation of its parts, while no one can deny that it has an individuality which the smart new houses in Grosvenor Place are totally without, where costly granite and excellent stone seem to have been employed to show the moral lesson that the best materials are of little service unless mixed "with brains, sir," as Opie advised. Every capital of the columns is carved by hand, but of the poorest design and all alike--it is hardly possible to conceive the poverty of invention involved in making every house and every ornament an exact copy of its neighbour, in a situation which invited picturesque treatment--after too, it had been shown at the Oxford Museum that carving was done both quicker and better when the workers exerted their minds in such inventions as they possessed (and some of their renderings of natural forms were beautiful) than when they merely followed a stereotyped pattern.

At present we can as soon invent a new style for ourselves as a new animal; we copy, we combine--that is, under the Georgian era we added a Mahometan cupola to Roman columns in the Regent's Park; or, still later, we made one pediment serve for the whole side of a Belgravian square--_i.e._, a form intended for a nicely-calculated angle over the front of a temple with a particular number of columns, is stretched as on a rack over the roofs of an acre of houses; or we build a portico designed as a shelter against the cloudless sunshine of the Greek climate to darken a sunless English dwelling-house. Our last achievement has been to make a "pasticcio" of the high "mansarde" Parisian roofs, with hideous little debased Italian porticoes, a quarter of a mile of which may be seen in the Grosvenor Gardens district.

Also we can patch and imitate--that is, rebuild a sham antique--from which, however ingeniously done, the ineffable charm of the original has escaped like a gas. Why the portico of the capital at Washington, or the monument on the Calton Hill at Edinburgh, whose columns are said to be "an exact copy of those at Athens," are so utterly uninteresting, it would take too long to explain; but no one will deny that they are mere lumps of dead stone, while the Parthenon itself, ruined and defaced, wrecked and ill-used, still stands like a glorious poem in marble, which no evil treatment can deprive of its charm. There is mind and soul worked into the material, and somehow inextricably entangled into it, which no copy, however exact, can in the least reproduce.

No doubt we have improved in our street architecture; there are isolated specimens of red brick, a shop-front in South Audley Street, and one in New Bond Street, several excellent buildings in the city, &c, &c, legitimate adaptations of gables, dormers, and windows, exceedingly good of their kind; but these are not original creations, only developments of what already exists.

There is one point in which our present shallow, unintelligent education has wrought irreparable mischief. We have learnt so much of respect for art as to desire to preserve the works of our forefathers, but not so far as to find out how this is to be done. We set to work to "restore" them. Every inch of the surface of an old church is historical as to the manner of the handiwork of the men of the twelfth, thirteenth, or whatever may be the century, and we proceed to put a new face on it, which, at the best, must certainly be that of the nineteenth century; we find a defaced portrait statue on an altar-tomb (as in a church in Devonshire), and we insert a smooth mask out of our own heads; we find an Early English tower with walls fourteen feet thick, and think a vestry would be "nicer" in its place, and the tower is therefore pulled down and rebuilt at the other end of the nave (as in a church in Bucks); or a curious monument to the fifth son of Edward III., or a couple of kneeling figures, clad in ruffs and farthingales, of an old rector and his wife, are within the communion rails (as in two other churches in Bucks); the incumbents do not approve of tombs in such "sacred places," and, regardless of the curious historical fact shown by the very position itself in pre-Reformation days, they are ruthlessly rooted up, and in the latter case a flaming brass to the rector's own family substituted.