On the Old Road Volume I Part 21

[77] _Art Journal_, vol. v., pp. 9, 10. January 1866.--ED.

[78] Routledge, 1864. The engraving is all by Dalziel. I do not ask the reader's pardon for speaking of myself, with reference to the point at issue. It is perhaps quite as modest to relate personal experience as to offer personal opinion; and the accurate statement of such experience is, in questions of this sort, the only contribution at present possible towards their solution.

CHAPTER VIII.[79]

92. In pursuing the question put at the close of the last paper, it must be observed that there are essentially two conditions under which we have to examine the difference between the effects of public and private Art on national prosperity. The first in immediate influence is their Economical function, the second their Ethical. We have first to consider what cla.s.s of persons they in each case support; and, secondly, what cla.s.ses they teach or please.

Looking over the list of the gift-books of this year, perhaps the first circ.u.mstance which would naturally strike us would be the number of persons living by this industry; and, in any consideration of the probable effects of a transference of the public attention to other kinds of work, we ought first to contemplate the result on the interests of the workman. The guinea spent on one of our ordinary ill.u.s.trated gift-books is divided among--

1. A number of second-rate or third-rate artists, producing designs as fast as they can, and realizing them up to the standard required by the public of that year. Men of consummate power may sometimes put their hands to the business; but exceptionally.

2. Engravers, trained to mechanical imitation of this second or third-rate work; of these engravers the inferior cla.s.ses are usually much overworked.

3. Printers, paper-makers, ornamental binders, and other craftsmen.

4. Publishers and booksellers.

93. Let us suppose the book can be remuneratively produced if there is a sale of five thousand copies. Then 5000, contributed for it by the public, are divided among the different workers; it does not matter what actual rate of division we a.s.sume, for the mere object of comparison with other modes of employing the money; but let us say these 5000 are divided among five hundred persons, giving on an average 10 to each.

And let us suppose these 10 to be a fortnight's maintenance to each.

Then, to maintain them through the year, twenty-five such books must be published; or to keep certainly within the mark of the probable cost of our autumnal gift-books, suppose 100,000 are spent by the public, with resultant supply of 100,000 households with one ill.u.s.trated book, of second or third-rate quality each (there being twenty different books thus supplied), and resultant maintenance of five hundred persons for the year, at severe work of a second or third-rate order, mostly mechanical.

94. Now, if the mind of the nation, instead of private, be set on public work, there is of course no expense incurred for multiplication, or mechanical copying of any kind, or for retail dealing. The 5000, instead of being given for five thousand _copies_ of the work, and divided among five hundred persons, are given for one original work, and given to one person. This one person will of course employ a.s.sistants; but these will be chosen by himself, and will form a superior cla.s.s of men, out of whom the future leading artists of the time will rise in succession. The broad difference will therefore be, that, in the one case, 5000 are divided among five hundred persons of different cla.s.ses, doing second-rate or wholly mechanical work; and in the other case, the same sum is divided among a few chosen persons of the best material of mind producible by the state at the given epoch. It may seem an unfair a.s.sumption that work for the public will be more honestly and earnestly done than that for private possession. But every motive that can touch either conscience or ambition is brought to bear upon the artist who is employed on a public service, and only a few such motives in other modes of occupation. The greater permanence, scale, dignity of office, and fuller display of Art in a National building, combine to call forth the energies of the artist; and if a man will not do his best under such circ.u.mstances, there is no "best" in him.

95. It might also at first seem an unwarrantable a.s.sumption that fewer persons would be employed in the private than in the national work, since, at least in architecture, quite as many subordinate craftsmen are employed as in the production of a book. It is, however, necessary, for the purpose of clearly seeing the effect of the two forms of occupation, that we should oppose them where their contrast is most complete; and that we should compare, not merely bookbinding with bricklaying, but the presentation of Art in books, necessarily involving much subordinate employment, with its presentation in statues or wall-pictures, involving only the labor of the artist and of his immediate a.s.sistants. In the one case, then, I repeat, the sum set aside by the public for Art-purposes is divided among many persons, very indiscriminately chosen; in the other among few carefully chosen. But it does not, for that reason, support fewer persons. The few artists live on their larger incomes,[80]

by expenditure among various tradesmen, who in no wise produce Art, but the means of pleasant life; so that the real economical question is, not how many men shall we maintain, but at what work shall they be kept?--shall they every one be set to produce Art for us, in which case they must all live poorly, and produce bad Art; or out of the whole number shall ten be chosen who can and will produce n.o.ble Art; and shall the others be employed in providing the means of pleasant life for these chosen ten? Will you have, that is to say, four hundred and ninety tradesmen, butchers, carpet-weavers, carpenters, and the like, and ten fine artists, or will you, under the vain hope of finding, for each of them within your realm, "five hundred good as he," have your full complement of bad draughtsmen, and retail distributors of their bad work?

96. It will be seen in a moment that this is no question of economy merely; but, as all economical questions become, when set on their true foundation, a dilemma relating to modes of discipline and education. It is only one instance of the perpetually recurring offer to our choice--shall we have one man educated perfectly, and others trained only to serve him, or shall we have all educated equally ill?--Which, when the outcries of mere tyranny and pride-defiant on one side, and of mere envy and pride-concupiscent on the other, excited by the peril and promise of a changeful time, shall be a little abated, will be found to be, in brief terms, the one social question of the day.

Without attempting an answer which would lead us far from the business in hand, I pa.s.s to the Ethical part of the inquiry; to examine, namely, the effect of this cheaply diffused Art on the public mind.

97. The first great principle we have to hold by in dealing with the matter is, that the end of Art is NOT to _amuse_; and that all Art which proposes amus.e.m.e.nt as its end, or which is sought for that end, must be of an inferior, and is probably of a harmful, cla.s.s.

The end of Art is as serious as that of all other beautiful things--of the blue sky and the green gra.s.s, and the clouds and the dew. They are either useless, or they are of much deeper function than giving amus.e.m.e.nt. Whatever delight we take in them, be it less or more, is not the delight we take in play, or receive from momentary surprise. It might be a matter of some metaphysical difficulty to define the two kinds of pleasure, but it is perfectly easy for any of us to feel that there _is_ generic difference between the delight we have in seeing a comedy and in watching a sunrise. Not but that there is a kind of Divina Commedia,--a dramatic change and power,--in all beautiful things: the joy of surprise and incident mingles in music, painting, architecture, and natural beauty itself, in an enn.o.bled and enduring manner, with the perfectness of eternal hue and form. But whenever the desire of change becomes princ.i.p.al; whenever we care only for new tunes, and new pictures, and new scenes, all power of enjoying Nature or Art is so far perished from us: and a child's love of toys has taken its place. The continual advertis.e.m.e.nt of new music (as if novelty were its virtue) signifies, in the inner fact of it, that no one now cares for music. The continual desire for new exhibitions means that we do not care for pictures; the continual demand for new books means that n.o.body cares to read.

98. Not that it would necessarily, and at all times, mean this; for in a living school of Art there will always be an exceeding thirst for, and eager watching of freshly-developed thought. But it specially and sternly means this, when the interest is merely in the novelty; and great work in our possession is forgotten, while mean work, because strange and of some personal interest, is annually made the subject of eager observation and discussion. As long as (for one of many instances of such neglect) two great pictures of Tintoret's lie rolled up in an outhouse at Venice, all the exhibitions and schools in Europe mean nothing but promotion of costly commerce. Through that, we might indeed arrive at better things; but there is no proof, in the eager talk of the public about Art, that we _are_ arriving at them. Portraiture of the said public's many faces, and tickling of its twice as many eyes, by changeful phantasm, are all that the patron-mult.i.tudes of the present day in reality seek; and this may be supplied to them in multiplying excess forever, yet no steps made to the formation of a school of Art now, or to the understanding of any that have hitherto existed.

99. It is the carrying of this annual Exhibition into the recesses of home which is especially to be dreaded in the multiplication of inferior Art for private possession. Public amus.e.m.e.nt or excitement may often be quite wholesomely sought, in gay spectacles, or enthusiastic festivals; but we must be careful to the uttermost how we allow the desire for any kind of excitement to mingle among the peaceful continuities of home happiness. The one stern condition of that happiness is that our possessions should be no more than we can thoroughly use; and that to this use they should be practically and continually put. Calculate the hours which, during the possible duration of life, can, under the most favorable circ.u.mstances, be employed in reading, and the number of books which it is possible to read in that utmost s.p.a.ce of time;--it will be soon seen what a limited library is all that we need, and how careful we ought to be in choosing its volumes. Similarly, the time which most people have at their command for any observation of Art is not more than would be required for the just understanding of the works of one great master. How are we to estimate the futility of wasting this fragment of time on works from which nothing can be learned? For the only real pleasure, and the richest of all amus.e.m.e.nts, to be derived from either reading or looking, are in the steady progress of the mind and heart, which day by day are more deeply satisfied, and yet more divinely athirst.

100. As far as I know the homes of England of the present day, they show a grievous tendency to fall, in these important respects, into the two great cla.s.ses of over-furnished and unfurnished:--of those in which the Greek marble in its niche, and the precious shelf-loads of the luxurious library, leave the inmates nevertheless dependent for all their true pastime on horse, gun, and croquet-ground;--and those in which Art, honored only by the presence of a couple of engravings from Landseer, and literature, represented by a few magazines and annuals arranged in a star on the drawing-room table, are felt to be entirely foreign to the daily business of life, and entirely unnecessary to its domestic pleasures.

101. The introduction of furniture of Art into households of this latter cla.s.s is now taking place rapidly; and, of course, by the usual system of the ingenious English practical mind, will take place under the general law of supply and demand; that is to say, that whatever a cla.s.s of consumers, entirely unacquainted with the different qualities of the article they are buying, choose to ask for, will be duly supplied to them by the trade. I observe that this beautiful system is gradually extending lower and lower in education; and that children, like grown-up persons, are more and more able to obtain their toys without any reference to what is useful or useless, or right or wrong; but on the great horseleech's law of "demand and supply." And, indeed, I write these papers, knowing well how effectless all speculations on abstract proprieties or possibilities must be in the present ravening state of national desire for excitement; but the tracing of moral or of mathematical law brings its own quiet reward; though it may be, for the time, impossible to apply either to use.

The power of the new influences which have been brought to bear on the middle-cla.s.s mind, with respect to Art, may be sufficiently seen in the great rise in the price of pictures which has taken place (princ.i.p.ally during the last twenty years) owing to the interest occasioned by national exhibitions, coupled with facilities of carriage, stimulating the activity of dealers, and the collateral discovery by mercantile men that pictures are not a bad investment.

102. The following copy of a doc.u.ment in my own possession will give us a sufficiently accurate standard of Art-price at the date of it:--

"London, June 11th, 1814.

"Received of Mr. Cooke the sum of twenty-two pounds ten shillings for three drawings, viz., Lyme, Land's End, and Poole.

"22, 10s.

"J. M. W. TURNER."

It would be a very pleasant surprise to me if any _one_ of these three (southern coast) drawings, for which the artist received seven guineas each (the odd nine shillings being, I suppose, for the great resource of tale-tellers about Turner--"coach-hire") were now offered to me by any dealer for a hundred. The rise is somewhat greater in the instance of Turner than of any other unpopular[81] artist; but it is at least three hundred per cent. on all work by artists of established reputation, whether the public can themselves see anything in it, or not. A certain quant.i.ty of intelligent interest mixes, of course, with the mere fever of desire for novelty; and the excellent book ill.u.s.trations, which are the special subjects of our inquiry, are peculiarly adapted to meet this; for there are at least twenty people who know a good engraving or wood-cut, for one who knows a good picture. The best book ill.u.s.trations fall into three main cla.s.ses: fine line engravings (always grave in purpose), typically represented by Goodall's ill.u.s.trations to Rogers's poems;--fine wood-cuts, or etchings, grave in purpose, such as those by Dalziel, from Thomson and Gilbert;--and fine wood-cuts, or etchings, for purpose of caricature, such as Leech's and Tenniel's in _Punch_. Each of these have a possibly instructive power special to them, which we will endeavor severally to examine in the next chapter.

FOOTNOTES:

[79] _Art Journal_, vol. v., pp. 33-4. February 1866,--ED.

[80] It may be, they would not ask larger incomes in a time of highest national life; and that then the n.o.ble art would be far cheaper to the nation than the ign.o.ble. But I speak of existing circ.u.mstances.

[81] I have never found more than two people (students excepted) in the room occupied by Turner's drawings at Kensington, and one of the two, if there _are_ two, always looks as if he had got in by mistake.

CHAPTER IX.[82]

103. I purpose in this chapter, as intimated in the last, to sketch briefly what I believe to be the real uses and powers of the three kinds of engraving, by black line; either for book ill.u.s.tration, or general public instruction by distribution of multiplied copies. After thus stating what seems to me the proper purpose of each kind of work, I may, perhaps, be able to trace some advisable limitations of its technical methods.

I. And first, of pure line engraving.

This is the only means by which entire refinement of intellectual representation can be given to the public. Photographs have an inimitable mechanical refinement, and their legal evidence is of great use if you know how to cross-examine them. They are popularly supposed to be "true," and, at the worst, they are so, in the sense in which an echo is true to a conversation of which it omits the most important syllables and reduplicates the rest. But this truth of mere transcript has nothing to do with Art properly so called; and will never supersede it. Delicate art of design, or of selected truth, can only be presented to the general public by true line engraving. It will be enough for my purpose to instance three books in which its power has been sincerely used. I am more in fields than libraries, and have never cared to look much into book ill.u.s.trations; there are, therefore, of course, numbers of well-ill.u.s.trated works of which I know nothing: but the three I should myself name as typical of good use of the method, are I. Rogers's Poems, II. the Leipsic edition of Heyne's Virgil (1800), and III. the great "Description de l'Egypte."

104. The vignettes in the first named volumes (considering the Italy and Poems as one book) I believe to be as skillful and tender as any hand work, of the kind, ever done; they are also wholly free from affectation of overwrought fineness, on the one side, and from hasty or cheap expediencies on the other; and they were produced, under the direction and influence of a gentleman and a scholar. Mult.i.tudes of works, imitative of these, and far more attractive, have been produced since; but none of any sterling quality: the good books were (I was told) a loss to their publisher, and the money spent since in the same manner has been wholly thrown away. Yet these volumes are enough to show what lovely service line engraving might be put upon, if the general taste were advanced enough to desire it. Their vignettes from Stothard, however conventional, show in the grace and tenderness of their living subjects how types of innocent beauty, as pure as Angelico's, and far lovelier, might indeed be given from modern English life, to exalt the conception of youthful dignity and sweetness in every household. I know nothing among the phenomena of the present age more sorrowful than that the beauty of our youth should remain wholly unrepresented in Fine Art, because unfelt by ourselves; and that the only vestiges of a likeness to it should be in some of the more subtle pa.s.sages of caricatures, popular (and justly popular) as much because they were the only attainable reflection of the prettiness, as because they were the only sympathizing records of the humors, of English girls and boys. Of our oil portraits of them, in which their beauty is always conceived as consisting in a fixed simper--feet not more than two inches long, and accessory grounds, pony, and groom--our sentence need not be "_guarda e pa.s.sa_," but "_pa.s.sa_" only. Yet one oil picture has been painted, and so far as I know, one only, representing the deeper loveliness of English youth--the portraits of the three children of the Dean of Christ Church, by the son of the great portrait painter, who has recorded whatever is tender and beautiful in the faces of the aged men of England, bequeathing, as it seems, the beauty of their children to the genius of his child.

105. The second book which I named, Heyne's Virgil, shows, though unequally and insufficiently, what might be done by line engraving to give vital image of cla.s.sical design, and symbol of cla.s.sical thought.

It is profoundly to be regretted that none of these old and well-ill.u.s.trated cla.s.sics can be put frankly into the hands of youth; while all books lately published for general service, pretending to cla.s.sical ill.u.s.tration, are, in point of Art, absolutely dead and harmful rubbish. I cannot but think that the production of well-ill.u.s.trated cla.s.sics would at least leave free of money-scathe, and in great honor, any publisher who undertook it; and although schoolboys in general might not care for any such help, to one, here and there, it would make all the difference between loving his work and hating it. For myself, I am quite certain that a single vignette, like that of the fountain of Arethusa in Heyne, would have set me on an eager quest, which would have saved me years of sluggish and fruitless labor.

106. It is the more strange, and the more to be regretted, that no such worthy applications of line engraving are now made, because, merely to gratify a fantastic pride, works are often undertaken in which, for want of well-educated draughtsmen, the mechanical skill of the engraver has been wholly wasted, and nothing produced useful, except for common reference. In the great work published by the Dilettanti Society, for instance, the engravers have been set to imitate, at endless cost of sickly fineness in dotted and hatched execution, drawings in which the light and shade is always forced and vulgar, if not utterly false.

Constantly (as in the 37th plate of the first volume), waving hair casts a straight shadow, not only on the forehead, but even on the ripples of other curls emerging beneath it: while the publication of plate 41, as a representation of the most beautiful statue in the British Museum, may well arouse any artist's wonder what kind of "diletto" in antiquity it might be, from which the Society a.s.sumed its name.

107. The third book above named as a typical example of right work in line, the "Description de l'Egypte," is one of the greatest monuments of calm human industry, honestly and delicately applied, which exist in the world. The front of Rouen Cathedral, or the most richly-wrought illuminated missal, as pieces of resolute industry, are mere child's play compared to any group of the plates of natural history in this book. Of unemotional, but devotedly earnest and rigidly faithful labor, I know no other such example. The lithographs to Aga.s.siz's "poissons fossiles" are good in their kind, but it is a far lower and easier kind, and the popularly visible result is in larger proportion to the skill; whereas none but workmen can know the magnificent devotion of unpretending and observant toil, involved in even a single figure of an insect or a starfish on these unapproachable plates. Apply such skill to the simple presentation of the natural history of every English county, and make the books portable in size, and I cannot conceive any other book-gift to our youth so precious.

108. II. Wood-cutting and etching for serious purpose.

The tendency of wood-cutting in England has been to imitate the fineness and manner of engraving. This is a false tendency; and so far as the productions obtained under its influence have been successful, they are to be considered only as an inferior kind of engraving, under the last head. But the real power of wood-cutting is, with little labor, to express in clear delineation the most impressive essential qualities of form and light and shade, in objects which owe their interest not to grace, but to power and character. It can never express beauty of the subtlest kind, and is not in any way available on a large scale; but used rightly, on its own ground, it is the _most purely intellectual_ of all Art; sculpture, even of the highest order, being slightly sensual and imitative; while fine wood-cutting is entirely abstract, thoughtful, and pa.s.sionate. The best wood-cuts that I know in the whole range of Art are those of Durer's "Life of the Virgin;" after these come the other works of Durer, slightly inferior from a more complex and wiry treatment of line. I have never seen any other work in wood deserving to be named with his; but the best vignettes of Bewick approach Durer in execution of plumage, as nearly as a clown's work can approach a gentleman's.

109. Some very brilliant execution on an inferior system--less false, however, than the modern English one--has been exhibited by the French; and if we accept its false conditions, nothing can surpa.s.s the cleverness of our own school of Dalziel, or even of the average wood-cutting in our daily journals, which however, as aforesaid, is only to be reckoned an inferior method of engraving. These meet the demand of the imperfectly-educated public in every kind; and it would be absurd to urge any change in the method, as long as the public remain in the same state of knowledge or temper. But, allowing for the time during which these ill.u.s.trated papers have now been bringing whatever information and example of Art they could to the million, it seems likely that the said million will remain in the same stage of knowledge yet for some time.

Perhaps the horse is an animal as antagonistic to Art in England, as he was in harmony with it in Greece; still, allowing for the general intelligence of the London bred lower cla.s.ses, I was surprised by a paragraph in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, quoting the _Star_ of November 6th of last year, in its report upon the use made of ill.u.s.trated papers by the omnibus stablemen,--to the following effect:--