Part 9

Some of the best work done at South Kensington is the copying of rare and beautiful specimens of ancient majolica and other wares. The Rothschilds and other collectors gladly lend their choicest possessions for this purpose, and the copies are of high value to this and other museums. It is wonderful to observe with what refinement of taste and with what sympathy some of the pupils enter into the subtle secrets of the old masters of decorative work. The illustration of the Henri Deux salt-cellar was made for me by Mr. William Broad, while a pupil at South Kensington, from a work sent in by him to the Examiners. The reproduction of Cherpentier’s rich and delicate colors in this young artist’s original work was exceedingly fine. His design of the top of the salt-cellar is given on the following page.

It is quite certain that a peculiar excellence has been given to the work of this institution by the atmosphere of general culture surrounding it. Each pupil works amidst the splendors of ancient art, amidst the shades of the great, and each lives in the presence of men who to-day best represent the accumulated knowledge of the world. The spirit tells more than the letter of instruction. Moreover, no art is here studied in isolation: each is studied along with literature and science; and, what is of great importance to thoroughness, all the arts are studied in connection with their own history. Through the literary works of such archæologists as William B. Scott, the ever-careful teaching of Thomas Armstrong and Mr. Sparkes, and the practical labors of such experts as Mr. Moody and Mr. Bowler, the pupil may study, by theory and experiment, the evolution by which his task has come to him, when and how great successes were attained, and so inherit the vital spirit which of old quickened the flowers of beauty by which he or she is at every moment surrounded. The pupil will realize here the immortality of good work. He will see that an old blacksmith, ordered to make iron grilles for Hampton Court garden, put such heart and soul into his work that his four pieces must now be brought hither as a monument of which Thor might be proud. Never was more beauty wrought in iron than this by Huntington Shaw, of Nottingham, anno 1695. Under his hand rose, shamrock, and thistle have grown on the metal so tenderly that it would seem a breath might stir them, while from the Irish harp in the centre one might almost listen for Æolian strains. But that was done in a day when to work for a king was felt to be working for God. And all through this museum shines the great fact that the best work was never done merely for money, but for the altar, for love and loyalty. It is a Museum of Civilization, where each work is a heart. There sat a man doing his very best to advance the whole world; there marched a brave invader of Chaos and Disorder; a reason worked through him like that which turns a bit of mud into a lily. It is a supreme joy to trace these footprints of the universal Reason. A flute-key that wins one more soft note from the air; a pot flushed with some more intimate touch of the sunlight; an ornament which detaches a pure form from its perishable body--such things as these exhibit somewhat finer than themselves, namely, man elect still to carry on the ancient art which adorned the earth with grass and violet, and framed the star-gemmed sky and the spotted snake. The student shall also learn here the solidarity of genius. In distant regions of the world these men worked at their several tasks, sundered by land and sea, but here they are seen to have been members of one sacred guild, like that described of old: “They helped every one his neighbor; and every one said to his brother, Be of good courage. So the carpenter encouraged the goldsmith, and he that smootheth with the hammer him that smote the anvil, saying, It is ready for the soldering: and he fastened it with nails, that it should not be moved.” From manifold regions of the world, through ages linked each to each by natural piety, their works have come here to unite in one mystical symphony of excellence. By the spirit that worked through them they are made members one of another. Some little time ago the Professor of Political Economy at Oxford formed a class of youths of both sexes, and said to them one day: “There are two great distinctions between man and the lower animals; one of them is the root of labor, the other is the root of civilization. What are they?” The first was soon explained; the root of labor is that the animal has only to seek his food to find it prepared for him, and his clothing is made for him by nature, whereas man must cook and modify his food, and make his clothing. The second puzzled all in the class except one young maid, who said: “The root of civilization is progressive desire. Give an animal all that satisfies its present want--good shelter and food enough--it will never be restless, nor show a further want; but satisfy man in any moment, he will want something better the next. This craving for the better and the best leads on to civilization.” But it is the combination of these various lines of improvement which finally creates a civilization. Savages improve on their own roads, but the Kaffir never borrows for his own hut any advantage belonging to the hut of the Zulu, not more than the bee borrows for its cell a hint from the bird’s nest. The savage has the root but not the flower of civilization. But then each civilization in turn is to a great extent special; the human race has a wider life, into which all separate streams of blood are poured, and all arts blend. By a higher law of evolution man’s moral and intellectual powers are selected from the isolated tribes and nations through which they have for ages been distributed. In this our museum men are taken as varied pigments to make the study of Man.

“Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul, Whose nature is its own divine control, Where all things flow to all.... Man, oh, not men! A chain of linked thought, Of love and might, to be divided not.”

Of all countries America is that to which mankind must look for the fulfilment of those aspirations which are the creative force, carving on the world the ideals of poetry and art. Each fine work will reflect the culture of the race. Emerson has reminded us that for the best achievement we must have instead of the Working-man the Man working, and it were a pity if the great man’s countrymen should not realize that whole work must be done by the whole man. In walking through the school at South Kensington once, I met a young lady who had passed several years in the schools at Philadelphia and the Cooper Institute, but had never found what she required for her training until she came here. The picture on her easel proved her to be an accomplished artist, and her experience appears to me worth mentioning. The school at Philadelphia, she said, was the best she had known anything of in the United States, but when she was there it lacked trained teachers. The teachers were artists in all but the art of teaching. She believed, however, that the Philadelphia school, if associated with a good collection, would turn out well. But of the Cooper Institute she was not so hopeful. It was rather too philanthropic to be a good school of art. The great aim was to qualify the pupils--girls particularly--to make money. The pupils are urged on to the paying work rather than to that which is excellent. It must be understood that these criticisms are here detached from this lady’s pleasant plaudits to things in America other than its schools of design, her experience of which was that one with a high standard had no means of attaining it, while the other, with more resources, had a low standard and aim. This lady’s experience has been several times confirmed by American artists with whom I have walked through the South Kensington Museum. One of the most eminent of them said: “What a revolution it would cause in American art to have some such museum as this in each large city! It would in each case draw around it an art community, and send out widening waves of taste and love of beauty through the country.”

These expressions, however, were used ten years ago, and it may be hoped that to those now in the American institutions mentioned that may appear a dim past. Within that period my own visits to the chief schools of high art in New York have convinced me that their teaching is of the highest character, while the resources for culture of decorative art are slight.

If there be among the readers hereof one of those sensitive patriots who resent the idea of borrowing any ideas or methods from the Old World more modern than the Decalogue, I would submit even to him whether it be not less humiliating to import European experience than to export American brains. It is no dishonor for America to claim her inheritance from the past; it is no degradation to recognize what has been done as done, and not needing to be done over again; but it may well be pondered by the patriotic whether the Coming Artist will go abroad, or whether he shall find in his own country the resources essential to his culture and his finest fruit.

DECORATIVE ART AND ARCHITECTURE IN ENGLAND.

DECORATIVE ART AND ARCHITECTURE IN ENGLAND.

Michael Angelo was once commissioned to lead in the destruction of the beautiful villas around Florence. He of all men! The expelled Medici, now of papal dignity, were menacing the city. The first thought of the great artist was to save the Campanile, and he covered that noble work of Giotto with protecting wool-sacks. But the suburban villas must not stand to give aid to the enemy, and at word of command he started out, and for once the track of the great artist was indicated in the destruction instead of in the creation of beautiful things. But he came upon one house whose wall was covered with a beautiful fresco, and he had not the heart to destroy it; the soul of the artist held back the hand of the patriot, and in the field of desolation one mansion remained standing alone--saved by the protecting genius of Beauty.

It is but one incident in the long history of the career of Use and Beauty through the world, hand in hand, undivorceable. All our science is engaged in spelling out their story. Every spot of color on bird or insect it finds to be the trace of a utility. What weary struggles carried on through ages to mimic blossom and leaf, and so hide from pursuing foes! The same force works on when the art of man enters the arena for new creation. The thin and feeble blossom of the brier passes through all the phases of culture until it becomes the full rose of the horticulturist, like unto some little maiden’s face for size and lustre, all by merest mercenary influence. Our fairest flowers have migrated from East to West, cherished and preserved for highest use as oracles and symbols of successive goddesses and saints, transplanted from temple courts to flourish under the holier chrism of convent gardens. Despite his proverb, man has painted the lily and adorned the rose, until we may almost say with the Persian Nizámi, “Every flower growing in the many-colored garden of the earth is a drop of blood from the heart of a man.” Out of a dry and hard necessity comes still the beauty of the world. Behind our tinted Salviati glass, our painted Sèvres china and Minton majolica and shining silver plate, are the long rows of pallid faces inhaling poison in stifling rooms, breathing death that they may live. Sad experience is the prelude to each charming symphony. The noblest statues and paintings which the world cherishes were wrought in a “sad sincerity;” in the divine depths of sorrow were found the quarries from which emerged the Apollo Belvidere and the Laokoon; the blood of great hearts supplied the chief pigment of the Dresden Madonna and the Transfiguration; and the magnificent frescoes of Italian churches were born of the hopes and fears of millions, for whom they meant not picturesque beauty, but a world’s redemption. Man in his best epochs of art has thus carried on the ancient creative power of Nature, giving her potential germs and forms a new blossoming under the heat of his never-ending battle of life. And where it is not thus impelled by nor surrendered to this utilitarian, this most real, force, what does Art amount to? Mere copying of works which denote that force in the past; mere Art Ritualism, crying to other ages, Give us of your oil, for our lamps are gone out!

If Michael Angelo could to-day be set on a work of general demolition in London, one may fear it would hardly require patriotism to encourage his zeal. Would he, in what the London _Times_ once called “this our ugly but not altogether uncomfortable metropolis,” have reached a single building which would have made him pause? Here and there he might meet one of those ancient mansions whose bricks have hardened into one solid stone that will stand, as Carlyle once said, “till Gabriel’s trump blows it down;” but of the miles of modern houses in which--to remember the Chelsea sage again--“every brick is a lie,” one may fancy that but few would be saved by any genius of Beauty.

And yet this is, after all, not so certain. That an artist filled with iconoclastic rage might quickly despatch most of the mansions and many of the churches of English suburbs, erected specially for beauty and effect, is quite probable; but there are a number of buildings built without reference to beauty which might perhaps have made Michael Angelo pause with a feeling not unrelated to admiration. If any one will stand beside the Thames River near Charing Cross and gaze for a while on the tremendous sections of the railway bridge there, at its huge iron supports and girders--if he will then go up on it and realize its vast breadth, see four trains passing each other, with room enough between, and room enough for the men and women moving to and fro on their own side-path--he will surely bear away an impression of grandeur. Nay, there will blend with it an impression of beauty also: there is no arch, no slightest foliation or other prettiness, not even a relief to the iron hue save the gilded heads of certain enormous rivets and the gilded monograms of the railway company fixed on the supports of the triple gas-lamps; the bridge is not even straight; and yet beauty there is, and it arises from two sources. The first is the beauty of adequacy for a purpose, involving at once strength and proportion, suggesting what the Greeks may have meant when, in their myth, they wedded Aphrodite to Hephaistos. The second is a beauty almost indescribable in physical terms, but resembling the simplicity which expresses character--the subtle charm playing unconsciously through eye and voice of even a homely man, who in word and act is content with the simple truth. In fact, the beauty of this Charing Cross bridge, which has least aimed at architectural effect among those spanning the Thames, is closely related to its ugliness. If any one find this assertion paradoxical, he shall at least find it not doubtful if he can and will do three things--read Oersted’s chapter on “Ugliness in Nature,” observe carefully Turner’s “Rain, Wind, and Speed” (a railway train thundering over a viaduct through English rain and fog), and finally give twenty minutes to the bridge in question, especially taking care to pass beneath it on one of the small iron steamers (water omnibuses) that ply the river. When afterward he shall see the many ornaments of the present copied from the utilities of the past--the towers, steeples, cupolas, crenelles--and remember that they were constructed originally for landmarks, cross-bows, and the watches of war, he will acquire an imaginative respect for this unpretending product of the Iron Age. The same simple grandeur invests old Newgate Prison--perfect reality, entire adequacy for its purpose, a relation of every part to the end for which it was built, like the harmonies that make the lion. Did man forbear, it were by no means inconceivable that when Macaulay’s artistic New Zealander came he might sit upon a broken column of St. Paul’s to sketch the still strong, gray fortress of Newgate!

He who explores the cities of England to discover that kind of beauty in architecture which is familiar in other lands will not find it. In a late satire on the royal family published in London, _The Silliad_, the Queen is represented as reproaching her eldest son with not taking more after his father, and interesting himself in the industrial affairs of the country. The poor Prince of Wales can only reply, “I’ve not a model-farming soul.” And a somewhat similar answer is all that England can return to the immeasurable scoldings poured out upon her because she cannot do the work of the old Italian and Dutch masters. But the time was when England had a reputation such as no other country possessed for just one thing--genuineness of work. It was almost proverbial in Europe to say that you could get pretty things in every capital on the Continent, but if you wanted a thing which would do what it professed to do--the knife that would cut, the carriage that would bear and wear--you must go to England for it. Nay, I remember in my boyhood in Virginia that the belief in the solid character of everything English was such, that even articles which could by no possible means have come from England were yet called “English” to enhance their value; not merely watches made in New England, but I have known American fanciers commend a bird unknown to England by calling it the “English mocking-bird!” All this was a droll re-appearance of the reputation which Eastern gold once had in England, the word “sterling” being a relic of “Easterling,” as applied to the British pound of silver when represented in gold. But the most enthusiastic Briton must admit that the virtue of the “English” label has followed that of the “Easterling,” and is now a mere survival. The absence of prettiness remains, but the old compensation of genuineness can no longer be claimed, or certainly not in the same general way. The genuine and thorough thing is now exceptional enough to strike one as almost ornamental. But still the word “solidity” has a meaning in Great Britain, and whenever Englishmen undertake to have anything done, their first effort is to have it substantial and useful. They may not get it, but that is what they pay for, and a real demand is likely in the long-run to overtake its real supply. It has already to some extent overtaken it, and that not alone in the great viaducts and railway bridges which the age of steam has called about it.

An age of municipal and civic development has found for the buildings it requires a representative architect in Mr. Waterhouse, who has erected most of the magnificent town-halls and court-houses of the great provincial cities. These vast, and in a certain sense beautiful, buildings are the only ones that can compare with the old cathedrals and castles of England, built with as serious a purpose as theirs, and with as physiognomical a relation to the age that produced them. Mr. Waterhouse takes the Gothic style for his basis, just as a pomoculturist might take a russet as the basis of the apple he means to produce, and, like him, modifies only in obedience to the fundamental law of the style he has selected. His Gothic building has in it nothing capricious or eccentric. So genuinely as, under change of conditions and needs, the bent and bound boughs were copied in the first pointed stone arch, even so, by lawful adaptation, may the window point become more obtuse or the lancets more luminous; but the lesson of this style, which, above all others, has no part or trait not traceable to a use, is never lost, and the Gothic of Mr. Waterhouse is the natural evolution of that found in Westminster Abbey. In one of his buildings, and one of the best structures in the world, the Manchester Assize Court, I could discover but two things which appeared to me without special use or meaning. These were two small figures, a snail and a frog, carved in granite, sitting in the angles of a wall on each side of the main door-way. Of course these may not be mere _jeux_; they may have some connection with a previous bit of eccentricity in an older building (such as it is often desirable to copy and preserve for archaeological reasons); but these two forms, each about as large as one’s two fists, were the only things in the vast building which appeared “not to the point.” In going over this building I speedily found that it would not do to pass anything, as the most casual-seeming bit of ornament was apt to possess a root in history. Thus the superstructure of the great portico at the entrance is supported by detached shafts of solid granite two feet in diameter, which stretch out into foliage as they meet the low roof; but on examination it is discovered that, framed in this foliage, are finely carved and most appropriate representations of ancient modes of punishment--persons undergoing the pillory or some ordeal, broken on the wheel, wearing the mask, or bridle, for scolds, and the rest. On the outside wall the decoration of the upper edge of a large corbel is twined about the words, “He shall judge thy people with righteousness, and thy poor with judgment.” Over a gate leading to the judges’ residence the tympanum of the gable is adorned with a fine mezzo-relievo of the Judgment of Solomon. On each side of the grand entrance are carved two chained dogs, imposing enough to be mythologically descended from Cerberus and Orthros themselves. There are but two figures on the outer walls, one of “Justice,” another of “Mercy.” The building is a parallelogram in form, with a frontage of 335 feet. Within is a grand hall 100 feet long, 50 feet wide, 75 feet high, with an open timber roof of eight carved bays, the principals having moulded brackets and ribs forming pointed arches, and the spandrels filled in with elegant tracery. Carved figures hold the chandeliers. Around this hall, which is for state receptions and banquets, run in ancient letters the words of the Great Charter: “Nullus liber homo capiatur vel imprisonetur aut disseisiatur de aliquo libero tenemento suo vel libertatibus vel liberis consuetudinibus suis, aut utlagetur aut exulet aut aliquo modo destruatur, nec super eum ibimus nec super eum mittemus, nisi per legale judicium parium suorum vel per legem terræ. Nulli vendemus nulli negabimus aut differemus rectum vel judiciam.” This makes about as beautiful a cornice edging as can well be imagined. The last sentence is repeated on a stained window at the end of the hall:

To none will we sell To none will we deny To none will we delay Right or Justice.

The subject of the window illustrates the history of the Great Charter--King John in the centre, and Archbishop Langton and Chief Baron Robert Fitzwalter on either side. There are three miles of corridors, all with a dado of tiles more than a yard deep, of a rich brown tint, and capped with a scroll made of lighter colors. On the whole, I can hardly express adequately my admiration of this superb building, the total cost of which was £130,000.