Part 20 (1/2)

Why has it been made round? For two structural reasons: first, that the greatest holding surface may be gathered into the smallest s.p.a.ce; and secondly, that in being pushed past other things on the table, it may come into least contact with them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 1.]

Next, why has it a rim? For two other structural reasons; first, that it is convenient to put salt or mustard upon; but secondly and chiefly, that the plate may be easily laid hold of. The rim is the simplest form of continuous handle.

Farther, to keep it from soiling the cloth, it will be wise to put this ridge beneath, round the bottom; for as the rim is the simplest possible form of continuous handle, so this is the simplest form of continuous leg. And we get the section given beneath the figure for the essential one of a rightly made platter.

10. Thus far our art has been strictly utilitarian having respect to conditions of collision, of carriage, and of support. But now, on the surface of our piece of pottery, here are various bands and spots of colour which are presumably set there to make it pleasanter to the eye.

Six of the spots, seen closely, you discover are intended to represent flowers. These then have as distinctly a graphic purpose as the other properties of the plate have an architectural one, and the first critical question we have to ask about them is, whether they are like roses or not. I will antic.i.p.ate what I have to say in subsequent lectures so far as to a.s.sure you that, if they are to be like roses at all, the liker they can be, the better. Do not suppose, as many people will tell you, that because this is a common manufactured article, your roses on it are the better for being ill-painted, or half-painted. If they had been painted by the same hand that did this peach, the plate would have been all the better for it; but, as it chanced, there was no hand such as William Hunt's to paint them, and their graphic power is not distinguished. In any case, however, that graphic power must have been subordinate to their effect as pink spots, while the band of green-blue round the plate's edge, and the spots of gold, pretend to no graphic power at all, but are meaningless s.p.a.ces of colour or metal.

Still less have they any mechanical office: they add nowise to the serviceableness of the plate; and their agreeableness, if they possess any, depends, therefore, neither on any imitative, nor any structural, character; but on some inherent pleasantness in themselves, either of mere colours to the eye (as of taste to the tongue), or in the placing of those colours in relations which obey some mental principle of order, or physical principle of harmony.

11. These abstract relations and inherent pleasantnesses, whether in s.p.a.ce, number, or time, and whether of colours or sounds, form what we may properly term the musical or harmonic element in every art; and the study of them is an entirely separate science. It is the branch of art-philosophy to which the word ”aesthetics” should be strictly limited, being the inquiry into the nature of things that in themselves are pleasant to the human senses or instincts, though they represent nothing, and serve for nothing, their only service _being_ their pleasantness. Thus it is the province of aesthetics to tell you, (if you did not know it before,) that the taste and colour of a peach are pleasant, and to ascertain, if it be ascertainable, (and you have any curiosity to know,) why they are so.

12. The information would, I presume, to most of you, be gratuitous. If it were not, and you chanced to be in a sick state of body in which you disliked peaches, it would be, for the time, to you false information, and, so far as it was true of other people, to you useless. Nearly the whole study of aesthetics is in like manner either gratuitous or useless.

Either you like the right things without being recommended to do so, or if you dislike them, your mind cannot be changed by lectures on the laws of taste. You recollect the story of Thackeray, provoked, as he was helping himself to strawberries, by a young c.o.xcomb's telling him that ”he never took fruit or sweets.” ”That” replied, or is said to have replied, Thackeray, ”is because you are a sot, and a glutton.” And the whole science of aesthetics is, in the depth of it, expressed by one pa.s.sage of Goethe's in the end of the 2nd part of Faust;--the notable one that follows the song of the Lemures, when the angels enter to dispute with the fiends for the soul of Faust. They enter singing--”Pardon to sinners and life to the dust.” Mephistopheles hears them first, and exclaims to his troop, ”Discord I hear, and filthy jingling”--”Mistone h.o.r.e ich; garstiges Geklimper.” This, you see, is the extreme of bad taste in music. Presently the angelic host begin strewing roses, which discomfits the diabolic crowd altogether.

Mephistopheles in vain calls to them--”What do you duck and shrink for--is that proper h.e.l.lish behaviour? Stand fast, and let them strew”--”Was duckt und zuckt ihr; ist das h.e.l.len-brauch? So haltet stand, und la.s.st sie streuen.” There you have, also, the extreme of bad taste in sight and smell. And in the whole pa.s.sage is a brief embodiment for you of the ultimate fact that all aesthetics depend on the health of soul and body, and the proper exercise of both, not only through years, but generations. Only by harmony of both collateral and successive lives can the great doctrine of the Muses be received which enables men ”[Greek: chairein orthos],” ”to have pleasures rightly;” and there is no other definition of the beautiful, nor of any subject of delight to the aesthetic faculty, than that it is what one n.o.ble spirit has created, seen and felt by another of similar or equal n.o.bility. So much as there is in you of ox, or of swine, perceives no beauty, and creates none: what is human in you, in exact proportion to the perfectness of its humanity, can create it, and receive.

13. Returning now to the very elementary form in which the appeal to our aesthetic virtue is made in our breakfast-plate, you notice that there are two distinct kinds of pleasantness attempted. One by hues of colour; the other by proportions of s.p.a.ce. I have called these the musical elements of the arts relating to sight; and there are indeed two complete sciences, one of the combinations of colour, and the other of the combinations of line and form, which might each of them separately engage us in as intricate study as that of the science of music. But of the two, the science of colour is, in the Greek sense, the more musical, being one of the divisions of the Apolline power; and it is so practically educational, that if we are not using the faculty for colour to discipline nations, they will infallibly use it themselves as a means of corruption. Both music and colour are naturally influences of peace; but in the war trumpet, and the war s.h.i.+eld, in the battle song and battle standard, they have concentrated by beautiful imagination the cruel pa.s.sions of men; and there is nothing in all the Divina Commedia of history more grotesque, yet more frightful, than the fact that, from the almost fabulous period when the insanity and impiety of war wrote themselves in the symbols of the s.h.i.+elds of the Seven against Thebes, colours have been the sign and stimulus of the most furious and fatal pa.s.sions that have rent the nations: blue against green, in the decline of the Roman Empire; black against white, in that of Florence; red against white, in the wars of the Royal houses in England; and at this moment, red against white, in the contest of anarchy and loyalty, in all the world.

14. On the other hand, the directly ethical influence of colour in the sky, the trees, flowers, and coloured creatures round us, and in our own various arts ma.s.sed under the one name of painting, is so essential and constant that we cease to recognize it, because we are never long enough altogether deprived of it to feel our need; and the mental diseases induced by the influence of corrupt colour are as little suspected, or traced to their true source, as the bodily weaknesses resulting from atmospheric miasmata.

15. The second musical science which belongs peculiarly to sculpture (and to painting, so far as it represents form), consists in the disposition of beautiful ma.s.ses. That is to say, beautiful surfaces limited by beautiful lines. Beautiful _surfaces_, observe; and remember what is noted in my fourth lecture of the difference between a s.p.a.ce and a ma.s.s. If you have at any time examined carefully, or practised from, the drawings of sh.e.l.ls placed in your copying series, you cannot but have felt the difference in the grace between the aspects of the same line, when enclosing a rounded or unrounded s.p.a.ce. The exact science of sculpture is that of the relations between outline and the solid form it limits; and it does not matter whether that relation be indicated by drawing or carving, so long as the expression of solid form is the mental purpose; it is the science always of the beauty of relation in three dimensions. To take the simplest possible line of continuous limit--the circle: the flat disc enclosed by it may indeed be made an element of decoration, though a very meagre one but its relative ma.s.s, the ball, being gradated in three dimensions, is always delightful.

Here[110] is at once the simplest, and in mere patient mechanism, the most skilful, piece of sculpture I can possibly show you,--a piece of the purest rock-crystal, chiselled, (I believe, by mere toil of hand,) into a perfect sphere. Imitating nothing, constructing nothing; sculpture for sculpture's sake, of purest natural substance into simplest primary form.

16. Again. Out of the nacre of any mussel or oyster-sh.e.l.l you might cut, at your pleasure, any quant.i.ty of small flat circular discs of the prettiest colour and l.u.s.tre. To some extent, such tinsel or foil of sh.e.l.l _is_ used pleasantly for decoration. But the mussel or oyster becoming itself an unwilling modeller, agglutinates its juice into three dimensions, and the fact of the surface being now geometrically gradated, together with the savage instinct of attributing value to what is difficult to obtain, make the little boss so precious in men's sight that wise eagerness of search for the kingdom of heaven can be likened to their eagerness of search for _it_; and the gates of Paradise can be no otherwise rendered so fair to their poor intelligence, as by telling them that every several gate was of ”one pearl.”

17. But take note here. We have just seen that the sum of the perceptive faculty is expressed in those words of Aristotle's ”to take pleasure rightly” or straightly--[Greek: chairein orthos]. Now, it is not possible to do the direct opposite of that,--to take pleasure iniquitously or obliquely--[Greek: chairein adikos] or [Greek: skolios]--more than you do in enjoying a thing because your neighbour cannot get it. You may enjoy a thing legitimately because it is rare, and cannot be seen often, (as you do a fine aurora, or a sunset, or an unusually lovely flower); that is Nature's way of stimulating your attention. But if you enjoy it because your neighbour cannot have it--and, remember, all value attached to pearls more than gla.s.s beads, is merely and purely for that cause,--then you rejoice through the worst of idolatries, covetousness; and neither arithmetic, nor writing, nor any other so-called essential of education, is now so vitally necessary to the population of Europe, as such acquaintance with the principles of intrinsic value, as may result in the iconoclasm of jewellery; and in the clear understanding that we are not in that instinct, civilized, but yet remain wholly savage, so far as we care for display of this selfish kind.

You think, perhaps, I am quitting my subject, and proceeding, as it is too often with appearance of justice alleged against me, into irrelevant matter. Pardon me; the end, not only of these lectures, but of my whole professors.h.i.+p, would be accomplished,--and far more than that,--if only the English nation could be made to understand that the beauty which is indeed to be a joy for ever, must be a joy for all; and that though the idolatry may not have been wholly divine which sculptured G.o.ds, the idolatry is wholly diabolic, which, for vulgar display, sculptures diamonds.

18. To go back to the point under discussion. A pearl, or a gla.s.s bead, may owe its pleasantness in some degree to its l.u.s.tre as well as to its roundness. But a mere and simple ball of unpolished stone is enough for sculpturesque value. You may have noticed that the quatrefoil used in the Ducal Palace of Venice owes its complete loveliness in distant effect to the finis.h.i.+ng of its cusps. The extremity of the cusp is a mere ball of Istrian marble; and consider how subtle the faculty of sight must be, since it recognizes at any distance, and is gratified by, the mystery of the termination of cusp obtained by the gradated light on the ball.

In that Venetian tracery this simplest element of sculptured form is used sparingly, as the most precious that can be employed to finish the facade. But alike in our own, and the French, central Gothic, the ball-flower is lavished on every line--and in your St. Mary's spire, and the Salisbury spire, and the towers of Notre Dame of Paris, the rich pleasantness of decoration,--indeed, their so-called ”decorated style,”--consists only in being daintily beset with stone b.a.l.l.s. It is true the b.a.l.l.s are modified into dim likeness of flowers; but do you trace the resemblance to the rose in their distant, which is their intended effect?

19. But farther, let the ball have motion; then the form it generates will be that of a cylinder. You have, perhaps, thought that pure Early English Architecture depended for its charm on visibility of construction. It depends for its charm altogether on the abstract harmony of groups of cylinders,[111] arbitrarily bent into mouldings, and arbitrarily a.s.sociated as shafts, having no _real_ relation to construction whatsoever, and a theoretical relation so subtle that none of us had seen it, till Professor Willis worked it out for us.

20. And now, proceeding to a.n.a.lysis of higher sculpture, you may have observed the importance I have attached to the porch of San Zenone, at Verona, by making it, among your standards, the first of the group which is to ill.u.s.trate the system of sculpture and architecture founded on faith in a future life. That porch, fortunately represented in the photograph, from which Plate I. has been engraved, under a clear and pleasant light, furnishes you with examples of sculpture of every kind from the flattest incised bas-relief to solid statues, both in marble and bronze. And the two points I have been pressing upon you are conclusively exhibited here, namely,--(1). That sculpture is essentially the production of a pleasant bossiness or roundness of surface; (2) that the pleasantness of that bossy condition to the eye is irrespective of imitation on one side, and of structure on the other.

21. (1.) Sculpture is essentially the production of a pleasant bossiness or roundness of surface.

If you look from some distance at these two engravings of Greek coins, (place the book open so that you can see the opposite plate three or four yards off,) you will find the relief on each of them simplifies itself into a pearl-like portion of a sphere, with exquisitely gradated light on its surface. When you look at them nearer, you will see that each smaller portion into which they are divided--cheek, or brow, or leaf, or tress of hair--resolves itself also into a rounded or undulated surface, pleasant by gradation of light. Every several surface is delightful in itself, as a sh.e.l.l, or a tuft of rounded moss, or the bossy ma.s.ses of distant forest would be. That these intricately modulated ma.s.ses present some resemblance to a girl's face, such as the Syracusans imagined that of the water-G.o.ddess Arethusa, is entirely a secondary matter; the primary condition is that the ma.s.ses shall be beautifully rounded, and disposed with due discretion and order.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE I.--PORCH OF SAN ZENONE. VERONA.]

22. (2.) It is difficult for you, at first, to feel this order and beauty of surface, apart from the imitation. But you can see there is a pretty disposition of, and relation between, the projections of a fir-cone, though the studded spiral imitates nothing. Order exactly the same in kind, only much more complex; and an abstract beauty of surface rendered definite by increase and decline of light--(for every curve of surface has its own luminous law, and the light and shade on a parabolic solid differs, specifically, from that on an elliptical or spherical one)--it is the essential business of the sculptor to obtain; as it is the essential business of a painter to get good colour, whether he imitates anything or not. At a distance from the picture, or carving, where the things represented become absolutely unintelligible, we must yet be able to say, at a glance, ”That is good painting, or good carving.”