Part 18 (2/2)

Even to have the barley-meal out of it, you rinding But essentially, we have lost our delight in Skill; in thatto o[187] I tried to express, under the head of ideas of power The entire sense of that, we have lost, because we ourselves do not take pains enough to do right, and have no conception of what the right costs; so that all the joy and reverence we ought to feel in looking at a strong man's work have ceased in us We keep the at a honeycomb or a bird's-nest; we understand that these differ, by divinity of skill, from a lump of wax or a cluster of sticks But a picture, which is athan a honeycomb or a bird's-nest,--have we not known people, and sensible people too, who expected to be taught to produce that, in six lessons?

Well, you must have the skill, you hest moral element; and then, lastly, you must have the verity or utility, which is not the moral, but the vital element; and this desire for verity and use is the one aireat schools, and in the reat masters, without any exception They will permit theliness;--but they will never permit themselves in uselessness or in unveracity

And farther, as their skill increases, and as their grace, so much more their desire for truth It is impossible to find the three motives in fairer balance and har you his skill; and those of you who succeed in learning what painters' work really is, will one day rejoice also, even to laughter--that highest laughter which springs of pure delight, in watching the fortitude and the fire of a hand which strikes forth its will upon the canvas as easily as the wind strikes it on the sea

He rejoices in all abstract beauty and rhythive you a colour that is not lovely, nor a shade that is unnecessary, nor a line that is ungraceful But all his power and all his invention are held by him subordinate,--and the more obediently because of their nobleness,-to his true leading purpose of setting before you such likeness of the living presence of an English gentle looked upon for ever

But farther, you reht would shock you a little, that you ht remember it--my statement, that art had never done iven the likeness of a noble hu Not only so, but it very seldom does so reat schools are all portraits, or groups of portraits, often of very simple and nowise noble persons You inative pictures; you arlanded like flowers; you ht and shade as of a tempest, and colour, as of the rainbow; but all that is child's play to the great th is tried to the utht out so thoroughly, as in painting one man or wohest soul, but often only a thwarted one that was capable of height; or perhaps not even that, but faultful and poor, yet seen through, to the poor best of it, by the ht So that in order to put before you in your Standard series the best art possible, I aest men, to take the portraits, before I take the idealisreat compositions themselves has depended on portraiture; and the study necessary to enable you to understand invention will also convince you that thethan the form of man, animated by faithful life Every attempt to refine or exalt such healthy humanity has weakened or caricatured it; or else consists only in giving it, to please our fancy, the wings of birds, or the eyes of antelopes Whatever is truly great in either Greek or Christian art, is also restrictedly human; and even the raptures of the redeeate of Angelico's Paradise, were seen first in the terrestrial, yet most pure, mirth of Florentine maidens

I aravely questionable to those of nizant of the phases of Greek art; for they know that thefrom abstract forressive course of Greek art was in subduing eneral laws; it reached absolute truth of generic human form, and if its ethical force had remained, would have advanced into healthy portraiture But at the e the national life ended in Greece; and portraiture, there, ion, and flattery to her tyrants And her skill perished, not because she becaht, but because she becah, it seems tofact; let me now finally, and with all distinctness possible to me, state to you its main business of all;--its service in the actual uses of daily life

You are surprised, perhaps, to hear me call this itsbrightness to picture is htness to life more And remember, were it as patterns only, you cannot, without the realities, have the pictures

_You cannot have a landscape by Turner without a country for him to paint; you cannot have a portrait by titian, without a man to be pourtrayed_ I need not prove that to you, I suppose, in these short teret no soul to believe that the beginning of art _is in getting our country clean, and our people beautiful_ I have been ten years trying to get this very plain certainty--I do not say believed--but even thought of, as anything but a et your country clean, and your people lovely;--I assure you that is a necessary work of art to begin with!

There has indeed been art in countries where people lived in dirt to serve God, but never in countries where they lived in dirt to serve the devil There has indeed been art where the people were not all lovely,--where even their lips were thick--and their skins black, because the sun had looked upon them;[189] but never in a country where the people were pale with miserable toil and deadly shade, and where the lips of youth, instead of being full with blood, were pinched by famine, or warped with poison And now, therefore, note this well, the gist of all these long prefatory talks I said that the two great moral instincts were those of Order and Kindness Now, all the arts are founded on agriculture by the hand, and on the graces and kindness of feeding, and dressing, and lodging your people Greek art begins in the gardens of Alcinous--perfect order, leeks in beds, and fountains in pipes[190] And Christian art, as it arose out of chivalry, was only possible so far as chivalry coht personal training of their people; it perished utterly when those kings and knights became [Greek: daemoboroi], devourers of the people And it will becoain only, when, literally, the sword is beaten into the ploughshare,[191] when your St George of England shall justify his name,[192] and Christian art shall be known as its Master was, in breaking of bread[193]

Now look at the working out of this broad principle in hest to lowest, health of art has first depended on reference to industrial use There is first the need of cup and platter, especially of cup; for you can put your meat on the Harpies',[194] or any other, tables; but you must have your cup to drink from And to hold it conveniently, you must put a handle to it; and to fill it when it is ee pitcher of some sort; and to carry the pitcher you may most advisably have two handles Modify the for to the various require easily out, or of keeping for years the perfu from fountains; of sacrificial libation, of Pan-athenaic treasure of oil, and sepulchral treasure of ashes,--and you have a resultant series of beautiful form and decoration, froems and crystal, in which series, but especially in the more simple conditions of it, are developed the most beautiful lines and most perfect types of severe coain, that you o to the well or spring; you need a fence round the well; you need so the strea

For the conveyance of the current to any distance you must build either enclosed or open aqueduct; and in the hot square of the city where you set it free, you find it good for health and pleasantness to let it leap into a fountain On these several needs you have a school of sculpture founded; in the decoration of the walls of wells in level countries, and of the sources of springs in mountainous ones, and chiefly of all, where the women of household or market meet at the city fountain

There is, however, a farther reason for the use of art here than in any other material service, so far as we may, by art, express our reverence or thankfulness Whenever a nation is in its right ift of rain froladness;[195] and all the entle and perennial in the flowing of springs It literally is not possible that any fruitful power of the Muses should be put forth upon a people which disdains their Helicon; still less is it possible that any Christian nation should grow up ”tanquanum quod plantatunize the lessontold of the places where Rebekah was met;--where Rachel,--where Zipporah,--and she as asked for water under Mount Gerizi to draith[197]

And truly, when our lade of wood green through the drought of summer, far from cities, then, it is best let them stay in their own happy peace; but if near towns, and liable therefore to be defiled by coe, we could not use the loveliest artand its first pools with preciousto be esteemed more important, as a means of healthy education, than the care to keep the streareat a distance as possible, pure, full of fish, and easily accessible to children

There used to be, thirty years ago, a little rivulet of the Wandel, about an inch deep, which ran over the carriage-road and under a footbridge just under the last chalk hill near Croydon Alas! o on for ever It has long since been bricked over by the parish authorities; but there was more education in that streaet out of a thousand pounds spent yearly in the parish schools, even though you were to spend every farthing of it in teaching the nature of oxygen and hydrogen, and the names, and rate per minute, of all the rivers in Asia and Aist of this ain in England, all we poor artists are ready to do the best we can, to show you how pretty a line may be that is twisted first to one side, and then to the other; and how a plain household-blue will ot out of the spaniel's colours of black and tan But I tell you beforehand, all that we can do will be utterly useless, unless you teach your peasant to say grace, not only beforeprovided him with Greek cups and platters, provide hi that is not poisoned to put into them

There cannot be any need that I should trace for you the conditions of art that are directly founded on serviceableness of dress, and of armour; but it is my duty to affir, for the poor, wholeso schools of art in England , for the poor, decency and wholesoood in substance, fitted for their daily work, beconity And this order and dignity ht them by the women of the upper andas they are so wrong in this matter us to endure the squalor of the poor, while they theaily And on the proper pride and comfort of both poor and rich in dress, must be founded the true arts of dress; carried on by masters of manufacture no less careful of the perfectness and beauty of their tissues, and of all that in substance and in design can be bestowed upon them, than ever the armourers of Milan and Damascus were careful of their steel

Then, in the third place, having recovered some wholesome habits of life as to food and dress, weI said just now that the best architecture was but a glorified roof Think of it The dome of the Vatican, the porches of Rheims or Chartres, the vaults and arches of their aisles, the canopy of the to froly covered from heat and rain

More than that--as I have tried all through _The Stones of Venice_ to show--the lovely forms of these were every one of the, and only after their invention erandest scale I think you cannot but have noticed here in Oxford, as elsewhere, that our modern architects never seem to knohat to do with their roofs Be assured, until the roofs are right, nothing else will be; and there are just tays of keeping theht Never build them of iron, but only of wood or stone; and secondly, take care that in every town the little roofs are built before the large ones, and that everybody ants one has got one And we must try also to make everybody want one That is to say, at some not very advanced period of life, men should desire to have a home, which they do not wish to quit any more, suited to their habits of life, and likely to be more and more suitable to them until their death And -places built as strongly as possible, and furnished and decorated daintily, and set in pleasant places, in bright light, and good air, being able to choose for themselves that at least as well as ss And when the houses are grouped together in cities, men must have so much civic fellowshi+p as to subject their architecture to a comathered group of huhtful one, on the face of the earth Not yiven to sentireat practical sense, told me, by accident, and wholly without reference to the subject now before us, that he never could enter London froht of the blocks of houses which the railroad intersected in the suburbs should unfit him, by the horror of it, for his day's work

Now, it is not possible--and I repeat to you, only in more deliberate assertion, what I wrote just twenty-two years ago in the last chapter of the _Seven Laht morality, happiness, or art, in any country where the cities are thus built, or thus, let ulated; spots of a dreadfulby patches and blotches over the country they consuulated, into for out the scu eruption of shaarlands of gardens full of blossouided streams

[187] In _Modern Painters_, vol 1

[188] The quotation is froment (now in the Accade of Solomon_ i, 6

[190] Cf _Classical Landscape_, pp 92-93

[191] _Isaiah_, ii, 4; _Micah_ iv, 3; _Joel_ iii, 10