The Life, Letters and Work of Frederic Leighton Volume II Part 37

A light has pa.s.sed that never shall pa.s.s away, A sun has set whose rays are unequalled of might; The loyal grace, the courtesy bright as day, The strong, sweet, radiant spirit of life and light, That shone and smiled and lightened in all men's sight, The kindly life whose tune was the tune of May, For us now dark, for love and for fame is bright.

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.[88]

[Ill.u.s.tration: MONUMENT IN ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL, ERECTED AS A MEMORIAL TO LORD LEIGHTON BY HIS FRIENDS AND ADMIRERS Sculptured by Thomas Brock, R.A.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: View of Inner Hall and Staircase of Leighton House, with reproduction of Mr. Thomas Brock's R.A. Diploma work, Bust of Lord Leighton, presented by Mr. Brock to the Leighton House Collection in 1898.

By permission of Mr. J. Harris Stone.]

FOOTNOTES:

[83] "Life and Letters of Robert Browning."

[84] Professor Giovanni Costa.

[85] It was during this last visit to Malinmore Leighton made those sketches of the sea thistle (see chapter iii. vol. i.), and also some last sketches in oil.

[86] Leighton had visited Mr. Pepys c.o.c.kerell and his family at Lindisfarne (Holy Island) more than once when going or returning from Scotland.

[87] Mr. Percy Fitzgerald wrote the following:--

"Being in the same club with Lord Leighton, I could note many instances of his good humour and sweetness of temper. I am happy to think, for it was a high compliment from him, that he made my acquaintance, not I his. He had always a pleasant word; as when, entering the writing-room with his hasty tramp, he looked over at me, seated at the window pencil in hand, and rushed over in his impetuous way: "Ah, one of _our_ trade, I see!" He was particularly interested in a museum or inst.i.tute at Camberwell, and one day thanked me most warmly for having gone down to lecture there, and that it was appreciated by the people, &c. This was good-natured.

"The day he received his t.i.tle, an old gentleman of the club, who did not know him, congratulated him as he pa.s.sed by in high-sounding Italian. He was delighted, and poured out a reply in the same tongue, adding some pleasant remark. This little incident quite ill.u.s.trates his _bonhomie_. It is just what d.i.c.kens would do. I gave him a copy of Sir Joshua's Discourses, a presentation one to Burke. It was fitting that the modern President should have it.

"How tragic were his last appearances at the Academy _soiree_! How jaded, shrunk and haggard looked the once handsome painter! He must have suffered cruelly, and at the end seemed worn out. There was something of a likeness to the lamented Irving, the same sweetness of manner, the same grace and romantic view of things. His dress was characteristic, somewhat showy, yet not scrupulously neat like a dandy.

His clothes, like Irving's, seemed old friends, and lay about him in roomy fas.h.i.+on. His somewhat unkempt beard left some traces on the lapels of his favourite snuff-coloured coat with the flowing tails. The blue or red silk, its ends flying free, was a note of colour. Three men of mark, and on some points resembling each other, had each this fancy for a somewhat theatrical attire.

"I noticed that a nervous guest innocently presented to the porter a ticket for some artistic _soiree_, which was declined, to the embarra.s.sment of the visitor. But Leighton promptly stepped forward, and kindly came to his rescue. It was curious that those three eminent artistic beings, d.i.c.kens, Leighton, and Irving, should have perished from outwearing their nervous systems, Leighton and Irving from heart-failure, d.i.c.kens from an overtaxed brain."

[88] "A Reminiscence," Leighton, 1896.

APPENDIX

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

_Delivered by_ SIR F. LEIGHTON, Bart., P.R.A., _at the Art Congress, held at Liverpool, December 3rd, 1888_.

I cannot but feel that to some of my hearers, and to not a few of those who do not hear me, but whom the words spoken in this place may chance to reach through the Press, some brief explanation is, at the outset, due as to my occupancy of this chair. To them it is known that weighty reasons have for many years compelled me to decline all requests--and those requests have been frequent, urgent, and most gratifying to me in form and spirit--that I should publicly address audiences, beyond the walls of Burlington House, on the subject which is to occupy this Congress, the subject of Art. It is not without some compunction that I have followed this course, but the exigencies, on the one hand, of the duties of my office, and, on the other, a firm purpose, which you will not, I hope, rebuke, to remain always and before all things a working artist, have left to my too limited strength and powers no alternative but that which I have adopted.

Nevertheless, I have felt justified in obeying the summons of the founders of this Congress--and for this reason that, while the far-reaching character of the effort here initiated, and my earnest desire to contribute, in however small a measure, to whatever of good may flow from it have seemed to make it inc.u.mbent on me to accept the duty of saying a few words on this occasion, its comprehensive and national character lifts it into a category wholly apart from and outside the sphere of purely local interests such as those which I had hitherto been invited to support.

I trust I shall be pardoned this short obtrusion of private considerations, and that you will see in it not a movement of egotism but the discharge of a simple debt of courtesy; which said, let me address myself to the task imposed upon me--the task of showing cause and need for the existence of the a.s.sociation which inaugurates to-day its public work, and of arousing, if it is in my power, your efficient sympathy in that work, that it may not remain barren and without fruit. But here I am at once conscious of a perplexity lurking in your minds. "Why," I hear you ask, "should an organisation have been called into life for the sole purpose of considering in public matters relating to the development and spread of art in this country? What hitherto unfulfilled ends do you seek to achieve? Do you aim at the wider extension of artistic education in this country? But vast sums from the public purse are annually devoted to its promotion; schools of art multiply, one might almost say swarm, over the face of the land. Or do you tax the great munic.i.p.al bodies of England with remissness on this score? But day by day efforts in this direction among the great provincial centres of trade and industry become more marked and effectual. No announcement more frequently meets our eyes than that of the opening, with due ceremony and circ.u.mstance, and seemingly with full recognition that the event is an important one, of s.p.a.cious public galleries for the annual exhibition, or for the permanent housing, of works of contemporary art. Or does art find private individuals lacking in that n.o.ble spirit which so often prompts Englishmen to devote to the enjoyment and profit of their fellow-citizens a large share of the wealth gained by them in the pursuit of their avocations? But a great gallery of art which rises hard by across the road would shame and silence any such a.s.sertion.

Or, again, can it be denied that what encouragement to artists is afforded by the purchase of innumerable pictures, at all events, was never more liberally meted out to them than within our generation, and does not the crowding of exhibitions, of which the name is legion, evince abundantly the responsive att.i.tude of the country, as far at least as one of the arts is concerned? Are not statues multiplying in our streets? Is not architecture, as an art, finding at this time increasing, if tardy, acceptance at the hands of private individuals?

Is not a wholesome sense dawning among us that even a private dwelling should not offend, nay, should conciliate, the eye of the pa.s.ser-by in our public thoroughfares? and lastly, has not a more than marked improvement taken place within our day in the character of all those intimate domestic surroundings which are the daily diet of our eyes, and should be daily their delight? Are these not facts patent to all, and do they not seem to cut from under your feet the ground on which you seek to stand?" Yes, all this and more may be said; and I should be blind as an observer--I should be ungrateful as one speaking in the name of artists--did I not recognise the force of these words which I have put into the mouth of an imaginary querist. I acknowledge with joy that there is in all these facts, and still more in their significance, much on which we may justly congratulate ourselves, much that points to a quickening consciousness, a stirring of slumbering aesthetic impulse, a receptive readiness, a growing malleability in the general temper, which promise well; and it is precisely such a condition of things which justifies our hope of good results from this Congress, and in it we find our best encouragement.

Well, what then is our charge in respect to the present relation of the country to art? What are the shortcomings for which we are here to seek a remedy? Our charge is that with the great majority of Englishmen the appreciation of art, as art, is blunt, is superficial, is desultory, is spasmodic; that our countrymen have no adequate perception of the place of art as an element of national greatness; that they do not count its achievements among the sources of their national pride; that they do not appreciate its vital importance in the present day to certain branches of national prosperity; that while what is excellent receives from them honour and recognition, what is ign.o.ble and hideous is not detested by them, is, indeed, accepted and borne with a dull, indifferent acquiescence; that the aesthetic consciousness is not with them a living force, impelling them towards the beautiful, and rebelling against the unsightly. We charge that while a desire to possess works of art, but especially pictures, is very widespread, it is in a large number, perhaps in a majority of cases, not the essential quality of art that has attracted the purchaser to his acquisition; not the emanation of beauty in any one of its innumerable forms, but something outside and wholly independent of art. In a word, there is, we charge, among the many in our country, little consciousness that every product of men's hands claiming to rank as a work of art, be it lofty in its uses and monumental, or lowly and dedicated to humble ends, be it a temple or a palace, the sacred home of prayer or a Sovereign's boasted seat, be it a statue or a picture, or any implement or utensil bearing the traces of an artist's thought and the imprint of an artist's finger--there is, I say, little adequate consciousness that each of these works is a work of art only on condition that, is a work of art exactly in proportion as, it contains within itself the precious spark from the Promethean rod, the divine fire-germ of living beauty; and that the presence of this divine germ enn.o.bles and lifts into one and the same family every creation which reveals it; for even as the life-sustaining fire which streams out in splendour from the sun's molten heart is one with the fire which lurks for our uses in the grey and homely flint, so the vital flame of beauty is one and the same, though kindled now to higher and now to humbler purpose, whether it be manifest in the creations of a Phidias or of a Michael Angelo, of an Ictinus or of some nameless builder of a sublime cathedral; in a jewel designed by Holbein or a lamp from Pompeii, a sword-hilt from Toledo, a caprice in ivory from j.a.pan or the enamelled frontlet of an Egyptian queen. We say, further, that the absence of this perception is fraught with infinite mischief, direct and indirect, to the development of art among us, tending, as it does, to divorce from it whole cla.s.ses of industrial production, and incalculably narrowing the field of the influence of beauty in our lives. And with the absence of this true aesthetic instinct, we find not unnaturally the absence of any national consciousness that the sense of what is beautiful, and the manifestation of that sense through the language of art, adorn and exalt a people in the face of the world and before the tribunal of history; a national consciousness which should become a national conscience--a sense, that is, of public duty and of a collective responsibility in regard to this loveliest flower of civilisation.

Well, it is in the belief that the consciousness of which I have spoken is rather dormant with us than absent, waiting to be aroused rather than wholly wanting, that the founders of this a.s.sociation have initiated the movement which has brought you together, and laid upon me the ungracious task to which I am now addressing myself--a task I have accepted in the hope that, at least, some good to others may come out of the wreck and ruin of any character for courtesy which may hitherto have been conceded to me.

But let us now look closer into my indictment; and let us, first, for a moment, and by way of getting at a standard, turn our thoughts to one or two of those races among which art has reached its highest level and round whose memory art has shed an inextinguishable splendour. Let us first consider the Greek race in the day of its greatest achievements and the most perfect balance of its transcendent gifts. What is it that impresses us most in the contemplation of the artistic activity of this race? It is, first, that the stirring aesthetic instinct, the impulse towards and absolute need of beauty, was universal with it, and lay, a living force, at the root of its emotional being; and, secondly, that the Greeks were conscious of this impulse as of a just source of pride and a sign of their supremacy among the nations. So saturated were they with it that whatever left their hands bore its stamp. Whatever of Greek work has been preserved to us, temple or statue, vessel or implement, is marked with the same attributes of stately and rhythmic beauty; in all their creations, from the highest to the lowest, one spirit lives, and whatever be the rank of each of these creations in the hierarchy of works of art, in one thing they are even-born and kin--in the spirit of loveliness. And of the dignity of this artistic instinct, which they regarded as their birthright, they were, as I have said, proudly conscious. Would you have an instance of this high consciousness? Here is one. At the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian war the Athenians having, according to ancestral custom, decreed a public funeral to those who had fallen in battle, Pericles, the son of Xanthippus, was chosen by them to speak the praises of the dead. It is a famous speech, that in which he obeyed their injunction, and it opens with a lofty eulogy of the Republic for which the heroes whom they mourned had fallen. In this magnificent song of praise he enumerates the virtues of the Athenians; he shows them heroic, wise, just, tolerant, _lovers of beauty_, philosophers--in all things foremost amongst men. Mark this!

At a celebration of the most moving solemnity--in a breathing s.p.a.ce between two acts of a gigantic international struggle for hegemony--you have here a great statesman enumerating the t.i.tles of his fellow-citizens to heads.h.i.+p among the nations, and placing not at the end of his panegyric and as an oratorical embellishment, but in its very heart and centre, these words: "We love the beautiful."

But we may gain, perhaps, a yet more vivid sense of the extent to which the artistic impulse possessed and filled this people in the fascinating epitome of Grecian handicraft which is presented to us in Pompeii, or rather in the Museo n.a.z.ionale at Naples. Here you have the work, not of Athenian Greeks, of the Periclean or of the Alexandrian age, but the work of provincial Greeks inhabiting a watering-place of no very great importance, in the first century of our era; a period as far removed from the days of the Parthenon sculptures as we are from the days of the Canterbury Tales. And what a display it is! How full of interest! Here we are admitted into the most intimate privacy of a mult.i.tude of Pompeian houses--the kitchens, the pantries, the cellars of the contemporaries of the Plinies have here no secret for us; indeed, for aught we know, more than one of those dinners of which that delicate _bon vivant_, the nephew of the naturalist, was so appreciative a judge may have been cooked in one of these very ranges, one of these ladles may have skimmed his soup, his quails may have been roasted on yonder spit. Nothing is wanting that goes to make the complete armament of a kitchen--stoves, cauldrons, vessels of every kind, lamps of every shape, forks, spoons, ladles of every dimension.

And in all this ma.s.s of manifold material perhaps the most marked characteristic is not the high level of executive merit it reveals, high as that level is, but the amazing wealth of _idea_, the marvellous intellectual activity brought to bear on what we now call objects of industrial art--whatever that may mean--in this outpost of Greek civilisation. These acc.u.mulated appliances of the kitchen and the pantry form a museum of art--a museum of art of inexhaustible fascination; and not only does this vast collection of necessary things contain nothing ugly, but it displays, as I have just said, an amazing wealth of ideas; each bowl, each lamp, each spoon almost, is an individual work of art, a separate and distinct conception, a special birth of the joy of creation in a genuine artist. But, above all, let us bear this fact in mind--_the absence there of any ugly thing_; for the instinct of what is beautiful not only delights and seeks to express itself in lovely work, but forbids and banishes whatever is graceless and unsightly.

As next to the Greeks, and as almost their equals in this craving for the beautiful, the Italians will occur to you. And here it may be well to note, in a parenthesis, that a vivid sense of abstract beauty in line and form does not necessarily carry with it a keen perception of shapliness in the human frame. This curious fact we see strikingly ill.u.s.trated in a race which possesses the artistic instinct in certain of its developments in a greater degree than any other in our time--I mean the j.a.panese. With them the sense of decorative distribution and of subtle loveliness of form and colour is absolutely universal, and expresses itself in every most ordinary appliance of daily life, overflowing, indeed, into every toy or trifle that may amuse an idle moment; and yet majesty and beauty in the human form are as absent from their works as from their persons. Be this said without prejudice to the fact that in the movement imparted by them to the figures in their designs there is often much of daintiness and dignity, the outcome of that keen perception of beauty of line in the abstract which we have seen to be dominant in them. I need not follow further this, I think, interesting train of thought, but the digression seemed to me useful, not as ill.u.s.trating the fact that beauty is not to be regarded only in connection with the human form, which is a mere truism, but as showing that the abstract sense of it, in certain aspects, may possess and penetrate a race in which the perception of comeliness in the human body is almost entirely absent; and I meet by it also, in antic.i.p.ation, certain objections that may suggest themselves to you in connection with the Italians, as far, at least, as the Tuscans are concerned; for in them, too, we find occasionally, side by side with an unsurpa.s.sed sense of the expressiveness of line and form, a defective perception of beauty in the human frame--witness the ungainly angularities, for instance, of a Verrocchio, a Gozzoli, a Signorelli.

The thirst for the artistically delightful was the mark in Italy of no particular cla.s.s; it was common to all, high and low, to the Pontiff on his throne, to the trader behind his counter, to the people in the market-place. And here, again, observe that this desire was not alone for the adornment of walls and public places with painting and statuary--though every wall in every church or public building was, in fact, enriched by the hand of painters and of sculptors--but it embraced every humbler form of artistic expression, and was, indeed, especially directed to one which has in our time touched, here and there, a melancholy depth--the craft of the goldsmith. I said "humbler form" of art for lack of a better word; for a craft cannot fitly be called humble which has occupied and delighted men of the very highest gifts. Did not the mind that conceived the "Perseus" of the Loggia dei Lanzi pour out some of its richest fancies in a jewelled salt-cellar for the table of a Pope? Did not the sublimest genius that ever shone upon the world of art receive its first guidance in the workshop of a jeweller--a jeweller who was himself a painter also of high renown?

For was it not that painter-goldsmith whose hands adorned with n.o.ble frescoes the famous choir of Sta. Maria Novella?

Now, to a cultured audience such as that which I am here addressing, these facts are familiar and trite, so trite and so familiar that it may, perhaps, be doubted whether their true significance has ever stood quite clearly before your minds, and whether you have fully grasped the solidarity of the arts--if I may use an outlandish expression--which at one time prevailed. Let us in imagination transfer the last quoted fact into contemporary life. Let us suppose that the munic.i.p.ality of a great English city, proud of its annals and of its culture, determined to decorate with paintings in some comprehensive manner the walls of a great public building; and suppose, further, that an artist, admittedly of the first rank, were to answer to its call from the workshop--and I say advisedly from the workshop, for it is there, and not on an armchair in the office, that the head of the house would have been found in the old day--suppose, I say, that such an artist came forth from some great firm of jewellers, in Bond Street for instance, we should have, on the artistic side, the exact parallel of the case of the Dominicans of Sta. Maria Nuova and Domenico, the son of Thomas the garland-maker of Florence. Meanwhile, striking as is this instance of the unity of art in long past days, it is but just to add, and I rejoice to be able here to do so, that signs are not wanting on the side of our own artists of a strong tendency towards a return to closer bonds between its various branches, in which direction, indeed, a movement has been for some years increasingly marked and practical; and it is with a glad outlook into the future, and with a sense of breathing a wider air, that I place by the side of the cases which I have just mentioned--cases which were, in their time, of natural and frequent occurrence--one which is of yesterday. The chief magistrate of an important provincial centre of English industry, the Mayor of Preston, wears at this time a chain of office which is a beautiful work of art, and this chain was not only designed but wrought throughout by the sculptor who modelled the stately commemorative statue of the Queen that adorns the County Square of Winchester, the artist who presides over the section of sculpture in this Congress, my young friend and colleague, Mr. Alfred Gilbert.

I have pointed to the Italians and the Greeks as culminating instances of people filled with a love of beauty and achieving the highest excellence in its embodiment, and I have named the j.a.panese as manifesting the aesthetic temper in a high degree of sensitiveness, but within certain limitations. It is not necessary to remind you that I might extend this list, if with some qualification, and that the same lesson--the lesson that the nations which love beauty seek it in the humblest as well as the highest things--is taught us by others than those I have mentioned. Whosoever, for instance, has wondered at the work of Persian looms, or felt the fascination of the ma.n.u.scripts illuminated by the artists of Iran, or noted the unfailing grace of subtle line revealed in their metal-work, will feel that for this race also the merit of a work of art did not reside in its category, but in the degree to which it manifested the spirit which alone could enn.o.ble it, the spirit of beauty. And if, further, this dominant instinct of the beautiful is not in our own time found in any Western race in its fullest force, and among one Eastern people, with, as we saw, important limitations, there is yet one modern nation in our own hemisphere in which the thirst for artistic excellence is widespread to a degree unknown elsewhere in Europe; a people with whom the sense of the dignity of artistic achievement, as an element of national greatness, an element which it is the duty of its Government to foster and to further, and to proclaim before the world, is keen and constant; I mean, of course, your brilliant neighbours, the people of France. Here, then, are standards to which we may appeal to see how far, all allowance being made for many signs of improvement in things concerning art, we yet fall short, as a nation, of the ideal which we should have before us.

Let me now revert to my indictment. I said that the sense of abstract beauty with the ma.s.s of our countrymen--and once again I must be understood not to ignore, but only to leave out of view for the moment, the considerable and growing number of those in whom this sense is astir and active--with the ma.s.s, I repeat, of our countrymen, the perception of beauty is blunt, and the desire for it sluggish and superficial; with them the beautiful is, indeed, sometimes a source of vague, half-conscious satisfaction, especially when it appeals to them conjointly with other incitements to emotion, but their perception of it is pa.s.sive, and does not pa.s.s into active desire; it accepts, it does not demand; it is uncertain of itself, for it lacks definiteness of intuition, and having no definite intuition, it is necessarily uncritical. This weakness, among the many, of the critical faculty in aesthetic matters, and the curious bluntness of their perceptions, is seen not in connection with the plastic arts only, but over the whole artistic field, in the domains of music and the drama, as in that of painting and sculpture. Who, for instance, where a body of English men and women has been gathered together in a concert room, has not, at one moment, heard a storm of applause go up to meet some matchless executant of n.o.ble music, and then, five minutes later, watched in wonder and dismay the same crepitation of eager hands proclaiming an equal satisfaction with the efforts of some feeblest servant of Apollo? Or have you not often, in your theatres, blushed to see the lowest buffoonery received with exuberant delight by an audience--and a cultivated audience--which had just before not seemed insensible to some fine piece of histrionic art? And what could proclaim the lack of true, spontaneous instinct in more startling fas.h.i.+on than the notorious fact that the most thrilling touch of pathos in the performance of an actor reputed to be comic will be infallibly received with a t.i.tter by a British audience, which has paid to laugh and come to the play focussed for the funny?

Now this little glimpse into the att.i.tude of the public in regard to other arts than ours has its bearing upon our present subject. This same feebleness of the critical sense which arises out of the indefiniteness--to say the best of it--of the inner standard of artistic excellence, is not unnaturally accompanied by and fosters an apathy in regard to that excellence, and an att.i.tude of callous acquiescence in the unsightly, which are inexpressibly mischievous; for you cannot too strongly print this on your minds, that what you demand that will you get, and according to what you accept will be that which is provided for you. Let an atmosphere be generated among you in which the appet.i.te for what is beautiful and n.o.ble is whetted and becomes imperative, in which whatever is ugly and vulgar shall be repugnant and hateful to the beholder, and a.s.suredly what is beautiful and n.o.ble will, in due time, be furnished to you, and in steadily increasing excellence, satisfying your taste, and at the same time further purifying it and heightening its sensitiveness.

The enemy, then, is this indifference in the presence of the ugly; it is only by the victory over this apathy that you can rise to better things, it is only by the rooting out and extermination of what is ugly that you can bring about conditions in which beauty shall be a power among you. Now, this callous tolerance of the unsightly, although it is, I am grateful to think, yielding by degrees to a healthier feeling, is still strangely prevalent and widespread among us, and its deadening influence is seen in the too frequent absence of any articulate protest of public opinion against the disfigurement of our towns.

Let me give you an instance of this indifference. Our country is happy in possessing a collection of paintings by the old masters of exceptional interest and splendour, a collection which, thanks to the taste and highly trained discernment of its present accomplished head, Sir Frederick Burton, is, with what speed the short-sighted policy of successive Governments permits, rising steadily to a foremost place among the famous galleries in the world. Some years ago, the building destined to receive it being found no longer adequate, it became necessary to provide, by some means, ampler s.p.a.ce for the display of the national treasure. It was resolved that another edifice should take the place of that designed by Wilkins, an edifice which, be it said in pa.s.sing, has been made the b.u.t.t of curiously unmerited ridicule in the world of connoisseurs.h.i.+p, and which, apart from certain very obvious blemishes, it has always seemed to me to be much easier to deride than to better. A compet.i.tion was opened, and designs were demanded for a s.p.a.cious building, equal to present and future needs, and worthy of the magnificence of the collection it was to house. It is hardly necessary to say that we have here no concern whatever with the controversy which arose over these designs. My concern is with its final outcome, which is this: the original building has remained unaltered as to its exterior; but on the rear of one of its flanks loom now into view, first, an appendage in an entirely different style of architecture, and further on, an excrescence of no style of architecture at all; the one an Italian tower, the other a flat cone of gla.s.s, surmounted by a ventilator--a structure of the warehouse type--the whole resulting in a jarring jumble and an aspect of chaotic incongruity which would be ludicrous if it were not distressing; and we enjoy, further, this instructive phenomenon that a public opinion which sensitively shrank from the blemishes of the original edifice has accepted its retention, with all those blemishes unmodified, _plus_ an appendage which adds to the whole the worst almost of all sins architectural--a lack of unity of conception. Now, I have never to my knowledge heard one single word of articulate public reprobation levelled at this now irremediable blot on what we complacently call the finest site in the world; and yet I cannot find it in me to believe that many have not, like myself, groaned in spirit before a spectacle so deplorable--a spectacle which, indeed, is only conceivable within these islands. I think that a good deal is summed up in this episode, and I need not, for my present purpose, seek another in the domain of architecture.

In regard to sculpture, the public apathy and blindness are yet more depressing and complete, and ill.u.s.trate the deadness of the many to the perception of the essential qualities of art. To the overwhelming majority of Englishmen sculpture means simply the perpetuation of the form of Mr. So-and-So in marble, bronze, or terra-cotta--this, and no more. That marble, bronze, or terra-cotta may, under cunning hands, become vehicles, for those who have eyes to see, of emotions, aesthetic and poetic, not less lofty than those which are stirred in us by the verse of a Dante or a Milton, or by strains of n.o.blest music, of this the consciousness is for practical purposes non-existent. For sculpture, for an art through which alone the name of Greece would have been famous for all time, there is, outside portraiture, even now, under conditions admittedly improved, little or no field in this country. Portrait-statues galore bristle, indeed, within our streets; but the notion of setting up in public places pieces of monumental sculpture solely for adornment and dignity, or of monuments that shall remind us of deeds in which our country or our town has earned fame and deserved grat.i.tude, and incite the young to emulation of those deeds, or that shall be the allegorised expression of any great idea--and yet our race has had great ideas, and clothed them in deeds as great--hardly ever, it would seem, enters the heads of a people whose aspirations are surely not less n.o.ble or less high than those of other nations. Nay, even a monument commemorative of the great public services of some individual man which shall be a monument _to_ him rather than exclusively an image _of_ him, a monument of which his effigy shall form a part, but of which the main feature shall be the embodiment or ill.u.s.tration, in forms of art, of the virtues that have earned for him the homage of his countrymen--even this is suggested in vain.

And if we are tolerant of treason against fitness in architecture, what shall we say of our tolerance in regard to its sculptural adornments? What shall we say of the complacent acceptance, above and about windows and doorways in clubs, offices, barracks, and the like buildings, of carven wonders such as no other civilised community would accept in silence? Though I fear I must here, with all deference, add that my brethren, the architects, who suffer their work to be so defaced, are themselves not wholly blameless; and indeed, it is a truth in the a.s.sertion of which the most enlightened workmen in every branch of art will stand by me, that among ourselves also the sense of the kins.h.i.+p of the arts is too often a mere theory, received, no doubt, with respect as an abstract proposition, but not perceptibly colouring our practical activity.

In sculpture the inertness of demand and tolerance of inferior supply is due mainly to the want, to which I have alluded, of a sense of and a joy in the purely aesthetic quality in artistic production, an insensibility to the power inherent in form, by its own virtue, of producing the emotion and exciting the imagination, a power on which the dignity of this pure and severe art does or should mainly rest.

In the appreciation of painting, which on various grounds appeals as an art to a far wider public than either architecture or sculpture, the same shortcomings are evident, though in a less degree, and with less mischievous results; for the witchery of colour, at least, is felt and appreciated, more or less consciously, by a very large number of people. The inadequacy of the general standard of artistic insight is here seen in the fact that to a great mult.i.tude of persons the attractiveness of a painted canvas is in proportion to the amount of literary element which it carries, not in proportion to the degree of aesthetic emotion stirred by it, or of appeal to the imagination contained in it--persons, those, who regard a picture as a compound of anecdote and mechanism, and with whom looking at it would seem to mean only another form of reading. Time after time, in listening to the description--the enthusiastic description--of a picture, we become aware that the points emphasised by the speaker are such as did not specially call for treatment in art at all, were often not fitted for expression through form or colour, their natural vehicle being not paint but ink, which is the proper and appointed conveyor of abstract thoughts and concrete narrative. I have heard pictures extolled as works of genius simply because they expressed, not because they n.o.bly clothed in forms of art, ideas not beyond the reach of the average penny-a-liner.

Now I know that in what I am here saying I skirt the burning ground of controversy long and hotly waged--skirt it only, for that controversy touches but the borders of my subject, and I shall of course not pursue it here. I will, nevertheless, to avoid misrepresentation in either sense, state, as briefly as I can, one or two definite principles on which it appears to me safe to stand. It is given to form and to colour to elicit in men powerful and exquisite emotions, emotions covering a very wide range of sensibility, and to which they alone have the key. The chords within us which vibrate to these emotions are the instrument on which art plays, and a work of art deserves that name, as I have said, in proportion as, and in the extent to which, it sets those chords in motion. The power and solemnity of a simple appeal of form as such is seen in a n.o.ble building of imposing ma.s.s and stately outlines. When, however, form in arts is connected with the human frame, and when combinations of human forms are among the materials with which a beautiful design is built up, then another element is added to the sum of our sensations--an element due to the absorbing interest of man in all that belongs to his kind; and the emotion primarily produced by the force of a purely aesthetic appeal is enhanced and heightened by elements of a more intimate and universal order, one more nearly touching our affections, but not, therefore, necessarily of a higher order. Thus the episode, for instance, of Paolo and Francesca, clothed in the rare, grave melody of Dante's verse, entrances us with its pathos; but our emotion, intensely human as it is, is not therefore of a higher kind than that which holds us as we listen to sounds sublimely woven by some great musician; nor are the impressions received in watching from the floor of some great Christian church the gathering of the gloom within a dome's receding curves of less n.o.ble order than those aroused by a supreme work of sculpture or a painting--by, say, the "Notte" of Michael Angelo or the "Monna Lisa" of Lionardo; and yet in both of these last the chord of human sympathy is strongly swept, though in different ways--in the "Notte" by the poetic and pathetic suggestiveness of certain forms and movements of the human body; in the "Monna Lisa" by a more definitely personal charm and feminine sorcery which haunts about her shadowy eyes, and the subtle curling of her mysterious lips.

I say, then, that in a work of art the elements of emotion based on human sympathies are not of a loftier order than those arising out of abstract sublimity or loveliness of form, but that the presence of these elements in such a work, while not raising it as an artistic creation, does impart to it an added power of appeal, and that, therefore, a work in which these elements are combined will be with the great majority of mankind a more potent engine of delight than one which should rest exclusively on abstract qualities. And it follows, therefore, that while a work of art earns its t.i.tle to that name on condition only, once again I say, of the purely aesthetic element being present in it, and will rank as such in exact proportion to the degree in which this element prevails in it; and while, further, this element, carrying with it, as it does, imaginative suggestiveness of the highest order and of the widest scope, is all-sufficient in those branches of art in which the human form plays no part, the element which is inseparable in a work of art from the introduction of human beings is one which it is not possible for us to ignore in our appreciation of that work as a source and vehicle of emotion.

Every attempt at succinct exposition of a complex question risks being unsatisfactory and obscure, and I am painfully alive to the inadequacy of what I have just said. I trust, however, that I have conveyed my meaning, if roughly, yet sufficiently to s.h.i.+eld me from misconception in regard to the special emphasis I am laying on the importance of a proper estimation of the essentially aesthetic quality in a work of art, an importance which I urge upon you, not so much here on account of the effect its absence may have exercised on the development of painting, as on account of the significant fact that its want--the lack of a perception that certain qualities are the very essence of art, and link into one great family every work of the hands of men in which they are found--has led with us to a disastrous divorce between what is considered as art proper and the arts which are called industrial. I say advisedly "disastrous," for the lowering among us in the present day of the status of forms of art, in the service of which such men as Albert Durer, for example, and Holbein (men, by-the-by, of kindred blood with ourselves), Cellini and Lionardo, were glad to labour and create--and that not as a concession, but in the joyful exercise of their fullest powers--is one of its results, and carrying with it, as is natural, a lowering of standard in these arts, has generated the marvellous notion, not expressed in words, but too largely acted on, that art in any serious sense is not to be looked for at all in certain places--where, in truth, alas! neither is it often found--and led to the holding aloof to a great extent, until comparatively recent years, of much of the best talent from very delightful forms of artistic creation; and this notion has led further to the virtual banishment from certain provinces of designing of the human figure, or where it is not banished, to its defacement, too often, in the hands of the untrained or the inept.

We are to a wonderful degree creatures of habit, our thoughts are p.r.o.ne to run--or shall I say rather to stagnate?--within grooves; and if we are a people of many and great endowments, a swift and free play of thought is, as we have been forcibly told by a voice that we shall hear no more, and can ill miss, not a distinguis.h.i.+ng feature among us.

Is it not an amazing thing, for example, that human shapes, which in clay or plaster would be ignominiously excluded from a second-rate exhibition, are not only accepted, but displayed with a chuckle of elated pride, when cast in the precious metals, flanked, say by a palm-tree, borne aloft on a rock, and presented in the guise of a piece of ornamental plate? But is this even rare? Is it not of constant occurrence? Do you demur? Well, let me ask you a plain question: Of all the nymphs and G.o.ddesses, the satyrs, and the tritons, that disport themselves on the ceremonial goldsmithery of the United Kingdom, how many if cast in vulgar plaster, and not in glittering gold, would pa.s.s muster before the jury of an average exhibition? And if few, I ask why is this so? In the name of Cellini--nay, in the name of common sense, why? And is it on account of the low ebb of figure modelling for decorative purposes that on our carved furniture--what we mysteriously describe as "art furniture"--the human form is hardly ever seen? Then why is the best talent not enlisted in this work? Certain it is that the absence of living forms imparts to much of the furniture now made in England, unsurpa.s.sed as it is in regard to delicacy and finish of handiwork, and frequently elegant in design, a certain look of slightness and flimsy, faddy dilettantism which prevent it from taking that rank in the province of applied art in which it might and should aspire.

But I have, I fear, already unduly drawn upon your patience, and I must bring to a close these too disjointed prefatory words, leaving it to the accomplished gentlemen who head the various sections of this Congress to amplify and enrich as they will out of the wide fund of their knowledge and experience the bald outline I have sketched before you. They, in their turn, taking up, no doubt, our common parable, will emphasise and press on you the fact that by cultivating its aesthetic sense in a more comprehensive and harmoniously consistent spirit than hitherto, and with a clearer vision of the nature of all art and a more catholic receptiveness as to its charms, and by stimulating in a right direction the abundant productive energy which lies to its hand, this nation will not only be adding infinitely to the adornment and dignity of its public and private life, not only providing for itself an increasing and manifold source of delight and renovating repose, mental and spiritual, in a day in which such resting and regenerating elements are more and more called for by our jaded nervous systems, and more and more needed for our intellectual equilibrium, but will be dealing with a subject which is every day becoming more and more important in relation to certain sides of the waning material prosperity of the country. For, as they will no doubt remind you, the industrial compet.i.tion between this and other countries--a compet.i.tion, keen and eager, which means to certain industries almost a race for life--runs, in many cases, no longer exclusively or mainly on the lines of excellence of material and solidity of workmans.h.i.+p, but greatly nowadays on the lines of artistic charm and beauty of design. This, to you, vital fact is one which they will, I am convinced, not suffer to fall into the background.