Part 15 (2/2)

234 Take up, for an average specimen of modern illustrated works, the volu 'Barnaby Rudge'

You have in that book an entirely profitless and monstrous story, in which the principal characters are a coxcouard, a foolish tavern-keeper, a mean old maid, and a conceited apprentice,--mixed up with a certain quantity of ordinary operatic pastoral stuff, about a pretty Dolly in ribbons, a lover with a wooden leg, and an heroic locksood, or life, in the filthy mass of the story,[BM] observe that the author must filch the wreck of those old ti vestige, whenever it is possible You cannot have your Dolly Varden brought up behind the counter of a railway station; nor your jolly locksham brass-foundry

And of these ly ones illustrated The cheap popular art cannot draw for you beauty, sense, or honesty; and for Dolly Varden, or the locksnettes in vain But every species of distorted folly and vice,--the idiot, the blackguard, the coxcoraded woe, with clu to render its dullness tolerable by insisting on defect,--if perchance a penny or two more may be coined out of the cockney reader's itch for loathsoher effort, the 'Cornhill Magazine'

for this nette of Venice for an illuminated letter That is what your decorative art has becoton! The letter to be produced is a T There is a gondola in the front of the design, with the canopy slipped back to the stern like a saddle over a horse's tail There is another in the ondolier emaciated into an oar, at the stern; then there is a Church of the Salute, and a Ducal Palace,--in which I beg you to observe all the felicity and dexterity of ; finally, over the Ducal Palace there is so, I know not in the least whatout of a balloon, which is the ornan, there is an engraving of two young ladies and a parasol, between two trunks of trees The white face and black feet of the principal young lady, being the points of the design, are done with as much care,--not with as much dexterity,--as an ordinary sketch of Du Maurier's in Punch The young lady's dress, the next attraction, is done in cheap white and black cutting, with considerably less skill than that of any ordinary tailor's orlady, and the landscape, take your lass, and look at the hacked wood that forms the entire shaded surface--one mass of idiotic scrabble, without the rele leaf, flower, or clod of earth It is such landscape as the public sees out of its railroadat sixty h for such a public

236 Then turn to the last--the poetical plate, p 122: ”Lifts her--lays her doith care” Look at the gentle the advance, over a hillock of hay, of the reposing figure in the black-sided tub Take your lass to _that_, and look what a dainty female arm and hand your modern scientific and anatomical schools of art have provided you with! Look at the tender horizontal flux of the sea round the pro of the linear light on the divine horizon, above the ravenous sea-gull

Here is Developino's horizon, and Dante's daybreaks! Truly, here it seeuance Per troppa etate divenivan rance”

237 I have chosen no gross or mean instances of modern work It is one of the saddest points connected with the ner of this last plate is a person of consuernaut, and broken on it These woodcuts, for 'Barnaby Rudge' and the 'Cornhill Magazine,' are favorably representative of the entire illustrative art industry of the hastly service of catching the last glealish s itself about the black world it has withered under its breath, in one eternal grind and shriek,--gobbling,--staring,--chattering,--giggling,--trae of national honor and do hoof of it; incapable of reading, of hearing, of thinking, of looking,--capable only of greed for money, lust for food, pride of dress, and the prurient itch of momentary curiosity for the politics last announced by the newsion last rolled by the chemist into electuary for the dead

238 In thenew stiross--of this tyrannous mob, we may count as lost, beyond any hope, the artists who are dull, docile, or distressed enough to submit to its demands; and wethe docile, many of the best intellects we possess The feho have sense and strength to assert their own place and supreed disease by their isolation, like Turner and Blake; the one abandoning the design of his 'Liber Studiorulect, carrying it forward to what it is,--; the other producing, with one onlyfor his life's work but coarsely iridescent sketches of eniglish engraving industry during the last hundred and fifty years, I find that practically at this le_ piece of true, sweet, and comprehensible art, to place for instruction in any children's school! I can get, for ten pounds apiece, well-engraved portraits of Sir Joshua's beauties showing graceful liet--dirt-cheap--any quantity of Dutch flats, ditches, and hedges, enlivened by cows chewing the cud, and dogs behaving indecently; I can get heaps upon heaps of teed as for academical competition, round seaports, with curled-up shi+ps that only touch the water with the et, at the price of lu whips and falling over hurdles; and, in suburban shops, a dolorous variety of ed ht with the Bible on a table, and baby's shoes on a chair

Also, of cheap prints, painted red and blue, of Christ blessing little children, of Joseph and his brethren, the infant Sah to make every child in these islands think of the Bible as a somewhat dull story-book, allowed on Sunday;--but of trained, wise, and worthy art, applied to gentle purposes of instruction, no single example can be found in the shops of the British printseller or bookseller And after every dilettante tongue in European society has filled drawing-roo the divinity of Raphael and Michael Angelo, for these last hundred years, I cannot at this instant, for the first school which I have soood print of Raphael's Madonna of the tribune, or an ordinarily intelligible view of the side and dome of St Peter's!

240 And there are simply no words for the mixed absurdity and wickedness of the present popular dehfares Abroad, in the shops of the Rue de Rivoli, brightest and most central of Parisian streets, the putrescent reilded pedlars' ware of nativity and crucifixion into such honorable corners as it can find a the more costly and studious illuh, in Pall Mall, and the Strand, the large-ined Landseer,--Stanfield,--or Turner-proofs, in a few stately s, still represent, uncared-for by the people, or inaccessible to thelish school noholly perished,--these are too surely superseded, in the s that stop the crowd, by the thrilling attraction hich Dore, Geroround, and the arena; or by the ible truth hich the apothecary-artist stereographs the stripped actress, and the railway mound

241 Under these conditions, as I have now repeatedly asserted, no professorshi+p, nor school, of art can be of the least use to the general public No race can understand a visionary landscape, which blasts its real mountains into ruin, and blackens its river-beds with foam of poison Nor is it of the least use to exhibit ideal Diana at Kensington, while substantial Phryne may be worshi+ped in the Strand The only recovery of our art-power possible,--nay, when once we know the fullof it, the only one desirable,--must result from the purification of the nation's heart, and chastisement of its life: utterly hopeless now, for our adult population, or in our large cities, and their neighborhood But, so far as any of the sacred influence of for, and so far as, in rural districts, the first elements of scholarly education can be ht ely impressed by the effect produced in a provincial seaport school for children, chiefly of fisher of a single figure froelico in the Accadeh, seen beside the original; I had only bought it from the poor Italian copyist for charity: but, to the children, it was like an actual glimpse of heaven; they rejoiced in it with pure joy, and their mistress thanked ood books Of such copies, the grace-giving industry of young girls, noorse than lost in the spurious charities of the bazaar, or selfish ornaht, in a year's tiland; and a year's honest work of the engravers eht represent to our advanced students every frescoed legend of philosophy and morality extant in Christendom

242 For my own part, I have no purpose, in what remains to me of opportunity, either at Oxford or elsewhere, to address any farther course of instruction towards the develop the stream of the Teviot as black as ink, and a putrid carcass of a sheep lying in the dry channel of the Jed, under Jedburgh Abbey, (the entire strength of the sule mill,) I know, finally, what value the British mind sets on the 'beauties of nature,' and shall attempt no farther the excitement of its enthusiasm in that direction I shall indeed endeavor to carry out, with Mr Ward's help,the real character of Turner's work known, to the persons who, forined half theBut I know perfectly that to the general people, trained in the n, in houses, mills, and machinery, _all_ beautiful form and color is as invisible as the seventh heaven It is not a question of appreciation at all; the thing is physically invisible to the a steath I have to convince those, a our artists of the second order, who are wise and h not to think theelo, that in the present state of art they only waste their powers in endeavoring to produce original pictures of huar, and modern peasant life too unhappy, to furnish subjects of noble study; while, even were it otherwise, the ns by painters of second-rate power is noof reater personal happiness, and incalculably greater advantage to others, devote the of the works of nity of this self-sacrifice would soon be acknowledged with sincere respect; for copies produced bywith such motive would differ no less fro of hly trained executant differs froe in the tone of public feeling, produced by fareat than in theirbeen accustomed only to hear black Christys, blind fiddlers, and hoarse beggars scrape or howl about their streets, they were perentle orchestral rendering of the work of the highest classical htly appreciated the results of the labor of the Arundel Society in this direction Although, fro a member of its council, my action has been hitherto rather of check than help, because I thought inals, than of their unquestionable superiority to anything the public could otherwise obtain

I was practically convinced of their extre at the house of a friend in which the Arundel engravings were the principal decoration; and where I learned more of Masaccio frous, than in the Brancacci chapel itself; for the daily coht me subtleties in its composition which had escaped me in the multitudinous interest of visits to the actual fresco

But the work of the Society has been sorely hindered hitherto, because it has had at con schools of color, and accustomed to meet no more accurate requisitions than those of the fashi+onable traveler I have always hoped for, and trust at last to obtain, co-operation with our toomore brilliant color faculty; and the perreat ruins of the noble past, undesecrated by the tri of modern emendation

245 Finally, I hope to direct so, even when love of the picturesque has passed away, to encourage the accurate delineation and engraving of historical monuments, as a direct function of our schools of art All that I have generally to suggest on this matter has been already stated with sufficient clearness in the first of'Eleive in writing as to methods of work for such purpose

The publication of these has been hindered, for at least a year, by the abuses introduced by the s I find the men won't use any ink but what pleases them; nor print but hat pressure pleases theet the foreht, the e it the moment he leaves the room, and threaten to throw up the job when they are detected All this, I have long knoell, is a matter of course, in the outcome of modern principles of trade; but it has rendered it hitherto impossible for me to produce illustrations, which have been ready, as far as my work or that of my own assistants is concerned, for a year and a half Any one interested in hearing of our progress--or arrest, may write to my Turner copyist, Mr Ward:[BO] and, in the ns for art education best by enerally known; and by deter, when they travel, to spend what suraphy, but in the encouragehtsalleries_ of Europe

ARTICLE II

DETACHED NOTES

I

_On the series of Sibyl engravings attributed to Botticelli_

246 Since I wrote the earlier lectures in this volume, I have beenenough before, by seeing some better (so-called) iht and shade which did not improve them

I do not choose to waste time or space in discussion, till I know ood friend Mr Reid of the British Museum to find out for ive, for frontispiece to this Appendix, the engraving of Joshua referred to in the text, which however beautiful in thought, is an example of the inferior execution and more elaborate shade which puzzle es of the plates chosen for exahly fine they are, in their existing state, and exe place I hope to give complete--or at least satisfactory account